vest, and that year he was acting out Cabaret. My mother later said that show was “too old for me.” I just thought it was boring. I liked how flamboyant that boy was, though. He was a few years older than me. I would never do that sort of thing in front of other kids. Kids were mean.
Grown-ups were interesting, and they had better food. I hung around the punch and cookies and water chestnuts wrapped in bacon. I watched Diamond Jim and my mother and the other men and women as they conducted their party. I watched and stayed quiet, in order not to be sent away sooner than necessary.
My mother was pretty but not flashy. She was classy. That’s what people called her—a beautiful woman, classy. She didn’t wear low-cut dresses, even at the holiday party. Her hair was short and colored in such a way that no one knew it was colored. It just looked like it was always that way: perfect. My mother rarely looked nervous, even when she was. I learned how to look closely, pay attention to different tones in her voice. I learned how see her pleasure and her displeasure—the latter being more frequent, the older I became.
Diamond Jim was smiling big at all the women at that table as I watched from the punch bowl. He stood, and they were seated at the round, fold-up table that had been brought into the living room for the party. The ladies, in their high heels and fancy clothes, were seated—five of them—with one seat free at the table. When the men visited the table, they stood and chatted—brought a new cocktail to a lady if one was required. I could have been watching any of the men, as they interacted with my mother, but Diamond Jim was big, and he smiled so broadly, and he wore a diamond ring. He caught my eye.
He seemed to look longer at my mother than at the other women. It was that prolonged gaze—just a beat or two longer than truly polite. That stare might be affection, or it might contain a drop of hostility. It was hard to tell, as a kid. Diamond Jim put his arm around my mother and squeezed her to his hip at one point—it looked a bit rough, and she laughed and pushed him off, swatting him slightly. She was smiling, though, laughing. He just walked over and squeezed her, as if they’d made an arrangement that a squeeze would be a good idea when the urge overtook him. I was starting to discern that, in the ways of men and women, this meant an affection of some kind, maybe an attraction. But it also looked like an act of dominance, to be followed by the woman’s show of submission. No one acknowledged that part, though I thought it was pretty clear. All the little parts were pretty clear, but they happened too quickly to sort them out.
And my mother wanted affection from men—no, that wouldn’t be right to say. She wanted men to want to give her affection; she wanted to feel attractive. How did I know this? Certainly she never said it. No one would have said it. But I saw it, clear as day. I saw it in the contentment she seemed to feel as the object of a compliment. I saw it in the way she looked with disapproval at other women being the objects of affection, being thought attractive. I saw it in the way she spoke of how some women were desperate for attention. She wanted it too but would never admit to the wanting. “Look at the way she’s falling all over him. It shows no class,” my mother would say when a woman and a man were standing close, speaking intimately, in a way that seemed to show affection. She wanted affection—and it was a finite commodity—but she wanted to get it the right way, the classy way. It was so complicated—tough for a kid to understand.
When my mother married her second husband, I noticed her contentment at how often he called her “a pretty girl.” “Such a pretty girl.” His words were like a recording being played just barely louder than the growling hostility that rumbled beneath. When he looked at other women, my mother wondered why they didn’t know better—that if they acted that way, of course someone would look. When he looked at me just a beat or two too long, with the smile that seemed slightly like the bared teeth of a wild animal, she started to look at me as she had those women at the party. Why didn’t I know how to act? Why didn’t I cover up? Surely, I should know better. She started to wonder, how I got to be so different from her—such an exhibitionist, such a loud, defiant, willful child.
Didn’t she see that I was an observer? And, as such, I was a blank slate, a curious container for the stares of others. Didn’t she see that I was her daughter, her child, not more than eleven or twelve years old? She did not focus on me as a child, because I was not only that. I was also becoming a woman, a player in a competition for which no rules are spoken. We learn through reprimands and prizes. “You’re trying to seduce my husband, aren’t you?” she said to me once in private, quietly. And the absurdity of the statement rendered me guiltily mute.
But maybe I was—either trying or seducing—just by being female in the room with a man. Maybe she was right about me and everything I was, everything I could be. I tried on the possibility of becoming the tightly buttoned victim of stares I did not invite. But that seemed like a lie, and I’d also been taught not to lie. “Pretty is as pretty does.” That’s what my grandmother said, and there’s a virtue in keeping pretty. It’s so complicated. It’s so hard to figure out when you’re young.
And it’s still a puzzle throughout life too—one we never quite solve. There’s always a piece or two missing under the rug, a piece or two swallowed by the family pet. There’s always a willful sabotage—somehow, someone seated at the table is to blame. The men at the party never sat with the women. That much, I observed for certain. Maybe briefly, during the meal, they sat with their turkey and green beans, rolls perched on the edges of Styrofoam plates. But then they were up again, smoking on the porch, chatting with one another, on the sofa in front of the television. There’s a puzzle on the table we never quite solve.
At seventy-three, my mother started dating again. Her third husband dead, she was seeing someone who lavished her with compliments. She was still beautiful, still proper, still classy and well-dressed. This new male attention brought her contentment, but it also seemed to make her nervous—as nervous as I remembered her being when she was middle-aged and I began to look like a woman, still a child. She had become nervous again and seemed on the lookout always—on the lookout for someone’s wrongdoing, a misstep that would explain whatever misfortune she endured. When I was first about to meet her new beau, a man of eighty-nine years, clearly smitten with her, she examined my blouse, and her expression judged it untoward. She said, “You’re going to try to seduce him, aren’t you?” And this time, I was not mute with shock. I was surprised and wounded, thrown back into an earlier part of myself that was astonished by what I was beginning to discern as the rules of men and women. Even as an adult, long practiced at paying attention, watching out for my safety and choosing carefully who I would be, I was jarred by her question. My adult voice came forth with humor, even though this was not joke. “Oh, mother, that’s just what I’m going to do! How ridiculous.” And I laughed.
And then she laughed. She repeated the sentiment, “Yes, that would be ridiculous.”
4. Wanted: Fat Girl
Maybe I bumped her elbow. It could have been something as simple as that: the catalyst. And when she turned around to see me, her response was habitual—not calculated. She saw my face and then looked down my body and back up again with disdain, then disgust, and then she finished with a small laugh of gleeful pity. The entire assessment and pronouncement lasted a full second—not more than two.
Could I have imagined the disdain, or had there been some past interaction between us to prompt her disrespect? No, I am anonymous—and I have spent a lifetime cataloging glances such as these. I know the difference between a pullback that implies I’m taking too much space and a step-aside that extends respect for someone who needs to walk past. I’ve been thinner too, and I know that, for thin women, there are different glances (but that’s another story). Those who don’t experience them often dismiss the social sanctions that take place in mere moments. Perhaps they are imaginary, a symptom of paranoia. To those who know them, they are as real as the furniture.
To be fair, she had been drinking. It was late at night, and I was on her turf. That is,
