my heart when you came into the world, but filled my world as well.
Lessons from the Staircase
An Introduction to Life
Lying facedown on the top stairs, I could hear them. Smell their perfumes, a random mingling of different florals sprayed with the heavy-handed intentions of being noticed.
Their laughter was high, almost operatic, and with it the accompanying percussion of tinkling glasses filled with gin or vodka for tonics and Bloody Marys.
Cigarette smoke, like the funnels of tornados, rose up the stairs and into my nose, but I didn’t care.
I wanted to see them, smell them, hear them. Be them.
The bridge ladies. Mama’s bridge club.
I must have been twelve or thirteen, lying against the stairs, peeping. The blood filled my inclined head as I listened to their stories and heard the shuffling of cards, collapsing into hands softened with lotions and ending in long tapered nails polished in corals and reds.
They were glamorous. And old. To me they seem old, but they couldn’t have been more than thirty-five or forty. They wore enough lipstick to leave prints on their glasses, and cake eyeliner rimmed their lids. Most styled their hair like Jackie Kennedy and Marlo Thomas from That Girl.
They talked about who was having nervous breakdowns and whose husbands were cheating. They talked about exercises and clothes, their children and other people, but always said the required “Bless her heart” and “God love her” if their words weren’t particularly kind.
One of their favorite phrases, which my mother uttered often and would affect me for a lifetime, was about people “going to pot.”
“Pauline Bingham just up and let herself go to pot,” my mother might say and all would nod knowingly and click their tongues, sip their Bloody Marys, and be happy it wasn’t them. “Just flat-out let herself go.”
“Pure T pot,” another would add, the cards fluttering like wings as she dealt.
“Lot of married women do that,” Mama often said, her hands usually fiddling in the bowl of chocolate-covered nuts. “I always try to put on lipstick and comb my hair before Sam comes home. I may get wrinkled and old, but I can at least make an effort.”
“Peg, you look great,” they’d say, because my mother really did. She was tall and thin, had wonderful high cheekbones and facial planes that only improved with age. She moisturized her soft olive skin and applied Vaseline under her eyes to prevent lines. Three days a week she took exercise classes in a spare room at the First Methodist Church, forgetting for that hour she was Baptist to the core.
Mama always told us whatever we did, “Don’t let yourselves go.” Getting married, she admonished, is not a free ride to the pig trough.
Her second biggest piece of advice was to “work on your minds.”
“Beautiful women are a dime a dozen. You’ve got to be much more than that.”
The rules were simple. Work on your minds. Think of others. Don’t let yourself go. Don’t go to pot. Don’t smoke pot. And stay a virgin as long as possible.
Some of these we fulfilled. Others we did not.
Throughout the years Mama has always been a huge part of my life and my greatest influence. She is nutty and dignified, gracious and hilarious. Her mind works in ways that never cease to surprise, except in her unfailing and unconditional kindness.
Many of these stories contain her adventures and capers. And others contain mine or those of friends and family. It is my great hope that within these pages—this collection of stories taking readers on a carousel ride infused with lights and the music of laughter, the tears of love and even loss—you will find pieces of yourselves and those you cherish.
And that you will laugh like Mama’s bridge ladies, a feeling all of us needs as we proceed through an up-and-down world without guarantees. We may be getting older, but it is possible to do so without going utterly mad and straight to pot.
It is possible, just as it was with Mama’s bridge ladies, to grow older with grace and leave our own imprints on the lives we touch.
The Other Taco Bell Dog
My son has asthma directly related to cats, which means my family has always resorted to the crappy pets. Fish, hamsters, crabs, sea monkeys, Triops eggs that hatched into prehistoric and evil-looking tadpoles that grew huge and died belly up and bloated.
All of these starter pets croaked after just a short time. The hamster had a heart attack and we found it stretched out clutching its chest in rigor mortis, yellowed teeth long and jutting. I double-covered it in Reynolds Wrap, put it in a shoe box with a couple of toys, and buried it as deep as I could dig. The next day, the neighbor’s dog ate it.
“Is that baked potato Hammy?” my son asked. He had watched the burial preparations, including placing the rodent in his Reebok coffin. “Why does the dog have Hammy in his mouth?”
“That’s not Hammy, son. Lots of people have cookouts and throw the potatoes out into their yards for the squirrels.”
“With tinfoil on them?”
What can a mother say?
It was time to get a dog. A real pet. Only problem was my husband, Tidy Stu, hates dogs and kept telling us if we brought one into the house, he would up and bolt.
I obeyed for many years, but when my boy turned nine and my daughter was three and a half I decided the family needed a dog, an animal that would return affection, unlike hermit crabs and plenty of husbands.
Because of his job, Tidy is gone most weekends and we’re home alone, the kids and I. A dog would be great. Part of the whole American family picture. Two kids, a minivan, an SUV, and a dog.
Giving it about three hours’ worth of thought on a Saturday, I drove north toward Tennessee and bought a Jack Russell terrier. I didn’t do a bit of research on the breed, like normal responsible pet owners would. I simply wrote the check and took the wild and wiggling thing home.
It peed and pooped everywhere. It jumped higher than acrobats and would bite holes in our clothing while we were wearing them. One day the tiny thing dug up four fully mature rhododendrons that Tidy Stu had spent years tending and coaxing into huge flowering bushes.
Needless to say, he was miffed. “Either find it a home, or I’m leaving.”
“How ’bout I find you a home?” I said under my breath.
I mulled it over, and in the end, caved and found it a good home. The kids and I grieved. So we bought another hamster, which died two weeks later from a festering condition called wet tail, which gave my husband more fodder for his raunchy sex advances that get him nowhere.
“Here, Mama,” my poor son said. “Here’s the Reynolds Wrap.”
Well, that did it. Giving a child’s dog away just because it shredded bushes and clothing and made stinky pie on the carpet was pure mean. The nerve of some men. I’d show him who was Mother of the
