my mother transformed. I came to know this changeover quite well, witnessing it on weekends and on days when she kept me home from school. It was like superimposing another being on my mother’s body.
With Dexedrine in her system, my mother became manic. She would do her hair and makeup, clean the kitchen, begin some craft projects, maybe start reading a book, and then decide to redecorate a room. She could read three newspapers, hang out several loads of laundry, and watch her soap operas while ironing baskets of clothes.
When I spent a day at home with her, my mother was full of ideas and projects. We played with makeup, sorted clothes, and sewed for my dolls. Sometimes we’d take the bus into downtown Pittsburgh to shop or see a movie—sometimes two—and have a ladies’ lunch at Kaufmann’s Department Store. I loved those days. She was fascinating, interesting, and fun.
But by nine o’clock at night, the Dexedrine would begin to wear off. On a good night, Larry and I would be in bed, but we’d hear my mother wandering through the house, winding down from her high-energy expenditures. She would watch television and talk to herself, and sometimes she’d cry. On bad nights, she would work herself into a rage.
When my mother began to rant about “he” and “him,” I knew Larry and I were probably safe for the night, and her anger was focused on my father. She felt abandoned when he was out of town. But if she was mumbling about those “ungrateful bastards,” then I knew Larry and I would need to right some perceived wrong. Often I would be dragged out of bed to clean the floor, sew on coat buttons that had been left dangling, or write a forgotten thank-you note.
There were also nights when my mother lost her grasp on reality. She might, on those nights, work herself into a fury and threaten to cut off my chubby brother’s “pig flesh” or bring scissors to cut up the clothes she determined I was not sufficiently grateful for.
There were some nights when she woke us to come sit with her. Those nights were less scary but more tiring. On those nights, my mother was lonely rather than angry, and she’d talk about her childhood. She’d cry about the cold house she came home to as a girl, and her grief at her own mother’s death when she was a young teenager. I didn’t understand “abandonment” or “delayed grief” then, but on those nights I did understand that I could hate a person and love her at the same time.
In those years my mother and I had a relationship that fit between 9:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. As a kid, I thought you could set a clock by it. But as an adult, I realized you could ruin a life by it. There was little conversation in our family about my mother’s addiction. We worked around her and suffered with it.
I made it to age eighteen and then moved out of the house. That same year my father died suddenly from a stroke, and six months later I married a man whom I barely knew. Looking back, I see the marriage as a straightforward escape. That husband was a man I had met at the Pittsburgh Explorers Club—a large group that made weekend trips to West Virginia and New York to hike, rock climb, and kayak. I dated him for two months, then we became engaged and married two months later. The marriage was over in less than a year.
Twenty years later, as I was sitting in a therapist’s office, I made the connection between that brief marriage and the death of my father. It took me that long to see what I had done. I now have deep respect for the power of denial.
My mother continued to take Dexedrine for two more years, and then one day, by accident or an act of grace, she went to a new doctor, and when he asked her about her medications she told him the truth. He took away her Dexedrine and started her on estrogen. In less than a month, she transformed: she gained weight, her moods and body softened, and she began to relax.
I wish I could tell you I felt happy for her, but I didn’t. My mother never acknowledged how she had behaved in those previous nightmarish years. At most, she would say, “Oh, that Dexedrine used to make me nervous.”
So this was my mother, Florence, who walked into Salzo’s Deli in downtown Pittsburgh on an idyllic spring day in 1984 and began to flirt with the handsome older man who was waiting for his lunch. She’d been helping out at my sister Gloria’s hair salon and was picking up their take-out food. The man was in Pittsburgh for a rare city day. He flirted back and said, “If you meet me here next Thursday, I’ll buy you lunch.”
My mother accepted his offer, and they met the next week. Over corned beef sandwiches and coleslaw, she told him she was a widow with five grown children and she loved movies and dancing even though her knees were bad. He told her he lived on a farm, had been married once, and had lived outside Pittsburgh for a long time. It was the first of many dates.
Later I realized how unusual that must have been for Donald, who rarely spoke to strangers. Florence was just the opposite; she was outgoing and loved to talk. A tiny woman, less than five feet tall, with dark hair and gray-blue eyes, my mother was handsome and energetic.
Donald was five feet, eight inches tall, with gray hair cut close on the sides and swept back on top. He had the erect posture that hinted at a military career, and he was lean. Donald looked like a man whose only mirror was probably a small square over the bathroom sink; he was clean-shaven and neat, but there was little style.
The first time I saw Donald he was dressed up. It was my niece’s birthday. We were all dressed casually, but Donald was wearing a business suit. I remember thinking, Well, he’s trying to make a nice impression. I was amused he was dressing up to meet his girlfriend’s family. But I did notice that his white shirt looked as if he had ironed it himself, and his tie was wide with an abstract design, the kind that fills the racks at thrift stores. His shoes were black military brogues, and they were spit-shined.
I made the correct guess that if this relationship continued, I’d see Donald in new clothes. My mother had strong ideas about how people should dress. I’d spent my first twenty years without ever wearing a garment—not even pajamas—with horizontal stripes. “You’re too short, and stripes make you look fat,” my mother would tell me. So I knew she would have a say in Donald’s attire.
As their relationship progressed, Donald’s wardrobe did change, but so did my mother’s. After she’d visited Donald’s farm a few times, my mother asked me where she could buy a “country jacket.” I laughed when she said she wanted something similar to the one I wore for backpacking. Next she wanted to know where to get boots that “are good for mud.” I gave her an L.L.Bean catalog, which would fit all her needs. My mother was happy, and I was happy for her.
My mother kept her city apartment in downtown Pittsburgh, and Donald had his country place about an hour away. He came into the city for movies, dinner, and opera. She spent weekends at his farm. They laughed a lot. When I came to visit once a month, they seemed happy and affectionate.
When I called her on Sunday mornings—now I was the one who had to call—she often said, “We’re still in bed,” and the lightness in her voice told me it was not only arthritis keeping Donald and Florence under the covers.
One day I asked cautiously, “You and Donald are having fun?”
“He has to do it every day,” she said matter-of-factly. I was speechless. I was in my thirties, and my mother’s sex life was better than mine.
“I never knew what it was like, you know,” she went on. “When I was married to your daddy, we were just making babies and fixing up that old house. I just never knew about this.”
Clearly my mother was finding the way of sex and the single girl as a sixty-nine-year-old gal. But her single status was short-lived.
