lit a cigarette and leaned back in her chair. ‘This boy, did you like him?’
‘Yes, Mama.’ I smiled at her as I went to the refrigerator to take out the eggs. ‘I like him a lot. He’s different.’
Lifting down a bowl, I broke a couple of eggs into it and scrambled them. Mama had turned in her chair to watch me. Her hair was loose. Apparently she had washed it earlier and had not gone to tie it back yet. Like Megan, she had extraordinarily straight hair, and it lay across her shoulders, reflecting the glow of the kitchen light. Putting her cigarette into the ashtray, she pulled out one strand of hair and twisted it around her finger.
‘Guess what, Mama. Paul liked the turquoise shawl. He said how soft it was. He thought it was beautiful.’
Pleased, she smiled.
‘And guess what else? They have dogs. Two of them. Labradors. Named Fortnum and Mason. His mama lets them ride around in the backseat of her car when she goes to do the shopping.’
My mother laughed. She adored dogs. We’d had one once, a great hulking brute of a dog, a cross between a Dalmatian and a Newfoundland retriever. Mama had named him Piffi, which was a very unlikely name for that dog. He should have been called Brutus or Killer, or at the very least Rover. But in spite of his appearance, he had been gentle and good tempered. Megs used to ride on him, and I dressed him up in doll bonnets or tied yarn to his tail to make him look more like the pony I was longing for then. However, Piffi’s real allegiance had always been to Mama.
All the while I talked, I kept an eye on my father. I was concerned that if I let the conversation between Mama and me flag, he would pounce on me for having stayed out too late. I stalled as best I could, talking faster and faster, elaborating way beyond what I actually knew about Fortnum and Mason. But Dad said nothing. He sat with his newspaper and his coffee and a piece of toast Mama had gotten up and made for him while I was talking. When I couldn’t detect a flicker of life from behind the newspaper, I gave up and ate my breakfast.
I knew he knew I had come in late. Because it was my first date alone with a boy, Dad had sat me down for a thorough talk the night before. Unlike Mama, my father wasn’t the least concerned about Paul’s virginity. He made me Scotch tape a dime inside my shoe so that if I needed to call him to come get me, I’d be prepared. I knew it mattered to him and my lateness wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. Besides, he seldom went to bed before midnight anyway.
But my father said nothing. I could tell he was listening to my conversation with Mama, but he never came out from behind the sports section. My mother saved me. Delighted with all this talk of dogs, she began reminiscing about Piffi. We exchanged little memories about him, and Mama was laughing and illustrating her stories with animated gestures. Dad, I suspect, was reluctant to spoil her happy mood by getting mad at me.
The weather that Saturday was wretched. It rained in the morning, the drops half-frozen before they hit the ground. Around noon the sleet stopped and the sky hung low and swollen. When we had lived in Washington state, the snowdrops and crocuses would begin to show in late January, and I had always shared Mama’s deep relief at seeing them, even though the weather often persisted in being miserable. But here there was nothing to indicate that winter wouldn’t go on for ever. All I could see out the window was dead grass, bare trees and lead-grey sky.
After breakfast, Dad rummaged around the house in an attempt to assemble all the bits and pieces he needed to do the income taxes. It put him in a foul mood. He yanked out the junk drawer in the kitchen while I was doing the dishes and he rooted sullenly through the mess. Unable to locate all the prescription receipts, he hollered for my mother, and she came running. For some reason my father always assumed that Mama had done something with whatever he could not find in the house. Still unable to unearth what he wanted even with Mama’s help, he left the junk drawer sitting up on the counter, its contents strewn everywhere. Wiping the counters down with a dishrag, I paused, unsure if I should put the stuff away or leave it alone.
Mama seemed nearly as moody as my father. Wearing a pair of faded jeans and one of my old sweatshirts, she drifted around the house restlessly, hands in her back pockets. She was trying to help Dad find everything but she wasn’t much help, chiefly because doing the taxes put my father in such rotten humour that no one could have pleased him. So she shadowed him at a distance, hands still in her pockets, until he growled impatiently at her for always sticking things in strange places. Then I heard her mutter softly that she didn’t stick things in strange places, that if he would only file them away in his desk like she asked him to …But by that point Dad had disappeared somewhere else. So she wandered over and sat on the edge of the kitchen table and watched me struggling through college applications. Until my father hollered for her again.
Boredom, I think, had always been my mother’s principal foe. She needed more to keep her occupied than she could ever find around our house, especially now that neither Megan nor I were babies any longer. If she could have had a job of some kind or something similar, I think it might have helped. I had said this to my father on numerous occasions because, since he was working, I didn’t think he was as acutely aware as I was of how empty Mama’s days were. But he didn’t agree. In fact, he was flatly against her working. Mama was too unpredictable, he would always reply. What with her moods and her strong opinions and her idiosyncrasies, you couldn’t expect people to be very tolerant.
My mama had a lot of what Dad labelled ‘idosyncrasies’. Many of them were rather endearing behaviours, if no one you particularly wanted to impress was watching.
For instance, my mama talked to radiators. And to most other inanimate objects, if the occasion arose. In her mind everything had the possibility of being alive. ‘Well, you don’t really know, do you?’ she’d say to us when we laughed at her. ‘Would a stone know you’re alive? Well, then how can you know for sure that the stone’s not alive too and you just don’t perceive it? How do you know? It could be.’ And in her mind, it could. So it only stood to reason that you treated everything courteously, just in case. Our radiators, which were forever banging and clanging, were the recipients of three-quarters of Mama’s conversations on cold winter mornings, when Dad, Megs and I were still stumbling around bleary eyed. ‘You got air in your belly?’ she’d enquire politely of the one in the kitchen as we sat, eating jam and toast.
Some of her idiosyncrasies, however, were less charming. She had, for instance, a morbid fascination with food. Starchy things, like potatoes or pasta or rice, were her favourites, and many were the occasions that we would chance across her in the kitchen, eating a bowl of plain, cooked macaroni or a dish of cold, leftover potatoes. And my mother ate everything, including the fat off the meat, the skins off the potatoes, the liquid left in the vegetable bowl. Her idea of scraping dishes before washing was to eat whatever the rest of us had left and then wipe the plate clean with a piece of bread to get the last bit. The most distressing aspect of this inability to ignore food concerned things that fell on the floor. My mother would eat dropped food. She didn’t confine herself to retrieving those things that could be washed off, but also went after and ate such things as Jell-O or mashed potatoes or butter. Both Megan and I had always found this horribly embarrassing behaviour, and we were often reduced to bouts of berserk screaming when we demanded that she leave it alone and she in turn called us wasteful little louts. But we never broke her of the habit. She still did it every time something dropped. So we were forced to keep the kitchen floor literally clean enough to eat from and we prayed like zealots when we went to a restaurant that God might intervene before anything hit the ground.
And others of Mama’s idiosyncrasies were downright intolerable. Perhaps her most incorrigible habit had to do with her speech. My mother still spoke four languages and used three of them in daily conversation, yet out of all those words, she had never acquired a euphemistic vocabulary. Consequently, tact and diplomacy certainly were not Mama’s
