About My Mother

by Peggy Rowe

  Then my casual friend and I would wander through the pasture where my four-legged family munched lazily on fall grass. He would see how gentle they were and insist on taking a ride.

  “Oh!”

  I could hear the disapproval in my mother’s voice as I came down the stairs.

  “You should wear a skirt for your date. Your pink outfit’s in the closet. You look nice in pink.”

  “It’s not a date, remember? And we’ll probably ride afterwards.” I had requested a casual lunch in our cozy, knotty pine kitchen, but my parents had stayed in their church clothes and the dining room table was set with Mom’s Noritake china and Stieff Rose silverware.

  “I begged her not to get fancy,” I told Dad.

  “Oh, you know how your mother likes to ‘put on the dog.’ Let her have her fun.”

  Naturally, I had withheld certain details about John—like his parents’ divorce, as well as other aspects of a dysfunctional home life. I’d have to guide the conversation carefully.

  My parents were gracious hosts that Sunday afternoon, and talk flowed pleasantly. Until Mom got down to brass tacks.

  “Peggy tells us your parents live out of town, John.”

  “Well, my mother and her husband and his children live in Florida, but my father and his wife and their three sons are in Aberdeen. The five children from our original family in Cecil County have left home. They’re all married except for me.”

  Mom had long since stopped chewing, and her eyebrows were nowhere in sight.

  “Here, John, have some more pot roast,” I said, my words coming at roughly the same tempo as my heartbeat. “You won’t get anything like this in the cafeteria.”

  But Mom had picked up the scent. And I knew she wouldn’t give up until she had run it to ground. “I . . . I guess you don’t see much of your mother,” she began, before John interrupted.

  “This is delicious, Mrs. Knobel. The cafeteria serves SOS on Sundays.”

  “SOS?” she asked.

  I jumped in quickly before John could elaborate. “Just because I’m not wearing an apron doesn’t mean I didn’t cook this meal,” I told him.

  “Did you?”

  Dad choked and reached for his iced tea.

  “Well, no, but I’m capable of preparing a meal.”

  This time my father’s eyebrows mimicked my mother’s. “If you like sandwiches,” I confessed.

  “Have you ever ridden a horse, John?” Dad asked, when his coughing had subsided and his breathing returned to normal.

  “No sir. I’ve never cared for horses. I doubt that I ever will.” His statement was accompanied by emphatic headshaking indicating end of subject!

  Dead silence. I looked down at my plate. I’d hardly eaten a bite, and John, with his left hand resting comfortably on the napkin in his lap, was finishing second helpings. Desperate to change the subject, I went with something safe.

  “Did I mention that John is a history major?”

  “Oh, really?” Mom’s voice dripped with sarcasm and had a triumphant tone. “History is Peggy’s least favorite subject. She barely passed last semester.”

  John’s jaw dropped, and he turned to me in disbelief that anyone in her right mind could possibly not love history.

  My stomach felt like Grandma Daisy’s butter churn, and I was suddenly exhausted, as though I had run a marathon. What had I been thinking? Like the day I had run from Miss Blevins’s classroom, I found myself without a plan. I returned John’s stare and nodded my head emphatically.

  “It’s true,” I said. “I’ve never cared for history. And I’m pretty sure I never will!”

  Despite the disastrous conversation at lunch, our first non-date had broken the ice. When John left, I walked him to his car.

  “By the way,” I said, “Early American history is okay, I guess.”

  There was a hint of a smile as he turned the key. “And for the record, sandwiches are okay.”

  It was probably best that John had avoided my horses that day. He might have behaved like most boys inexperienced in horse etiquette and said stupid things like, “Hi-yo, Silver!” or “Giddy-up!” or “How do I make it rear up like Trigger?” Some behaviors are just too egregious to overlook.

  I hadn’t expected my mother to embrace John unconditionally, but I had hoped she would be positive. Sadly, she showed only disdain for my friend and was barely polite when he picked me up for a real date, and then another.

  There was a hint of desperation in her litany of disparaging comments to me that was out of character.

  “He comes from a broken home, Peggy! That damages a person! He isn’t happy. He never smiles! You two are exactly the same height. You can’t wear high heels. You won’t be stylish!”

  When I came in from riding, she pounced with the force of Hurricane Hazel, which had caused Stemmers Run to overflow its banks four years earlier and deposited a dead pig onto our lawn.

  “John doesn’t like horses! You have nothing in common!”

  The day she resorted to, “John drives like an old man,” I knew that she was running out of ammunition. Mom was always on the warpath about people speeding in the narrow driveway that hugged the house as it wound around to Dad’s shop. More than once, she had thrown down her tea towel and charged after a vehicle to admonish the driver, usually one of Dad’s younger employees. John, ever cautious, crawled along the driveway at a snail’s pace.

  He felt the sting of her disapproval.

  “I’m not coming to your house anymore,” he told me one night as we sat in the car after seeing a movie. “I know when I’m not wanted.” The song “Two Different Worlds” was playing on the radio.

  “You’re wrong. You know how mothers can be.”

  “She doesn’t like me. That’s not going to change.”

  “I’ll talk with her.”

  “Don’t bother. Maybe she’s right. Like the song says, we’re from two different worlds.”

  Weeks passed, and other than an occasional sighting on campus, I didn’t see or hear from John, and I was furious with my mother. She’d spent years complaining that I was too focused on horses when I should be socializing, going to dances, dating. And now that I was doing just that, she wasn’t satisfied.

  Open rebellion, the path my peers would have chosen, had never occurred to me before, but I was angry and, for the first time ever, stood up to my mother. Sort of.

  “You know, it isn’t John’s fault that his parents are divorced or that he’s not built like Wilt Chamberlain.”

  Mom’s eyebrows shot up, and her jaw dropped.

  “Besides, I’m not interested in any boy who laughs all the time. I guess you want me to date somebody who . . . who drives like a maniac!”

  “Don’t be silly! Your father and I just don’t think he’s suitable. He’s six years older than you, and you said yourself he has been on his own for ten years. He was in the army, for goodness sake. You’ve never even been away from home!”

  “I have so! Have you forgotten that I was a camp counselor last summer?”

  It was a weak argument, and we both knew it. I had been as homesick as I was on the first day of school. It was the longest eight weeks of my life, and I’d begged my parents to drive the twenty-five miles to bring me home on my day off each week. Not only had I missed my horses, truth was, at the age of nineteen when most girls dreamt of being on their own, I had missed my home and my parents. I complained that my mother was bossy and domineering, yet I didn’t want to be away from her.

  But that was before I met John. I was a different person now and felt as though I had crossed a line. I wondered if things would ever be the same between my mother and me.

  A week before my summer retail job at Hutzler’s department store was to begin, I still hadn’t heard from John. At school, he barely acknowledged me, and at home, I treated my mother with the same detachment.

  When Aunt Mary called and invited me to Virginia for a week, Mom encouraged me to go. I was shocked.

&nb
sp; The youngest of my aunts, Mary was a free spirit. So much so that it was hard to believe she and my mother were sisters. When Mom spoke of her, it was often with a tone of disapproval.

  When my aunt began asking me questions about John, I put two and two together. She had been given an assignment—to take my mind off an unsuitable suitor.

  Despite my anger and resentment, it was a good week. I enjoyed my young cousins and aunt who believed that having fun should take precedence over work. They lived above my uncle’s country store, and there was little that was regimented or even organized about Aunt Mary’s life. It was like visiting another planet. I loved how her refrigerator was jammed with duplicates and triplicates of identical items from the store below. I loved how opening cabinet doors unleashed an avalanche. Aunt Mary never once said, “There’s a place for everything and everything in its place!”

  Most of all, I loved how clean laundry was thrown into a large closet and the ironing was done on a need-to-wear basis. At home, the sun didn’t rise if the washing wasn’t done on Mondays and the ironing on Tuesdays.

  There was a goodwill about Aunt Mary and a welcome sense of freedom in her home. I envied my cousins. Aunt Mary was excited about the blind date she had arranged for the third night of my visit and insisted that I should be smoking a cigarette when he “set eyes on me” for the first time.

  “Believe me, Peggy, you will look so sophisticated with a cigarette in your hand. Here, let me to show you.” She chuckled and looked at me over her glasses. “Now don’t you dare tell Thelma!”

  I was rusty. It had been years since my rebellious days on Leslie Avenue. The filtered Winston was a vast improvement over Dad’s Lucky Strikes. Aunt Mary draped my arm seductively over the back of the sofa and arranged my fingers just so.

  When my young cousins giggled, she looked at them. “All right, you little fart blossoms, behave yourselves.”

  We hit it off, the recent college graduate and I. There was a bike ride, a swim party, and a Saturday night dance at the beach. He was nice and fun.

  But he wasn’t John. Still, when I left, future visits were planned—not quite what my mother had in mind.

  At home, I missed John every day. Not even the horses helped. Over the coming months, Mom became impatient with my frequent weekend trips to Virginia on a Greyhound bus. Sometimes I caught her staring at me.

  Serves you right, I thought. Your little scheme backfired, didn’t it?

  And then one afternoon, after I had traveled to Virginia two weekends in a row, a miracle happened.

  “I was thinking,” my mother said. “Maybe we weren’t being fair to John. We’re just worried that you don’t have anything in common and he doesn’t seem like a very happy person. And he’s so serious.”

  “Oh, I can make him happy; I know I can. He was smiling way more than when we first met.”

  “But can he make you happy?”

  “He already does. I hate high heels!” I almost told her about that day in physical science class shortly after we’d met. He sat directly behind me, and instead of pulling my hair like Tom Sawyer, he suddenly tilted my chair back until my head almost touched the floor. I screamed, and everyone laughed, including the professor, who was a friend of John’s. It was uncharacteristically playful for him, and I was smitten. But I couldn’t tell my mother that. It sounded silly, so I went with, “There must be something you like about him.”

  She was quiet for a few seconds. “Well, he does have impeccable table manners.” Then, almost smiling, she said, “And he seems to be a sensible driver.”

  I wanted to hug her, but, of course, we didn’t do such things.

  That Christmas we were engaged—a serious Army veteran who read history textbooks for pleasure and drove like an old man, and a cheerful young woman who pitched manure and galloped bareback across the countryside. Once when we were kissing goodnight, John suddenly reared back.

  “Hold on a second! Am I kissing lips that kiss a horse?”

  “It’s all right,” I assured him. “Jet and I have an understanding.”

  John worked for my father that summer as an electrician’s helper. Late one Friday afternoon as he and the other workers were returning to the shop, I rushed out the back door.

  “Oh no you don’t, missy,” my mother called after me. “You’re not going out there and parade in front of those men!”

  “What? I’m just going to say hi to John.”

  “It wouldn’t be proper! John is at work. You’ll see him later.”

  It wasn’t surprising that she would use the word proper. She had always weighed behavior on a Victorian scale of propriety.

  Now what kind of a twenty-one-year-old woman lets herself be bullied by her mother? I asked myself. I could have rebelled, but things had been so peaceful, I didn’t dare rock the boat.

  The closest we ever came to a mother–daughter talk was one winter evening in 1960, after my engagement had been announced in the Society section of The Baltimore Sun. I was sitting at the bathroom mirror wrapping my hair around curlers and admiring the sparkle of my new diamond ring when my mother came in and rearranged things on the vanity. When she began clearing her throat as though she were about to address the monthly meeting of the Overlea Lioness Club, I knew something was up.

  Oh please! I thought. Not the talk!

  “I don’t approve of long engagements,” she blurted, lining up the hand mirror with the comb and brush. “Things can happen . . .”

  “Don’t worry, Mom. We won’t do anything foolish. I promise.”

  “Ha! That’s easy for you to say, but men are interested in only one thing.”

  Surely, she wasn’t talking about my sainted father. Our eyes met in the mirror and her eyebrows shot upwards, as though affirming some universal truth.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, wiping invisible spots from the mirror with her apron. “But it’s true! Things happen. Things you haven’t planned on that will change your life forever!” She sniffed and walked from the bathroom before I could begin asking questions— questions that she wouldn’t want to answer.

  That’s when I first suspected. She wasn’t talking about John and me. Could it be? Was it possible there’d been a time when my proper mother had not been quite so proper after all? How I longed to hear the story, but, of course, that was as close as she ever came to confiding in me. Heart-to-heart talks, especially about intimacy, were not in my mother’s makeup. Besides, to do so would have betrayed my father. Perhaps a youthful indiscretion had helped to make him the non-judgmental, accepting man we all loved.

  My mother’s talk, which had been more revealing than she imagined, had been accomplished without once using the word sex.

  The things my mother warned me about didn’t happen, but not because of the talk. Truth be known, I was willing—anxious even—to be promiscuous, but my honorable fiancé would not betray the respect and affection he felt for his future father-in-law.

  Maybe one day I would tell my mother that John was probably the most proper person in our family, though I suspect she already knew.

  When it came to organization, my mother was the equivalent of perfect pitch. A professional wedding planner could not have been more proficient. I might have been a necessary piece of the puzzle, but details like music, flowers, clothes, and a reception didn’t interest me.

  Guests described our candlelight service as tasteful and elegant, just as Janet’s had been four years earlier. She was my beautiful matron of honor, and John’s brother, his handsome best man. Naturally, my four-year-old nephew, Stephen, stole the show as he carried our wedding rings down the aisle on a satin pillow and then sat on the carpeted steps to the choir loft twirling the pillow and looking bored.

  Ours was a typical church auditorium reception—church ladies serving tea sandwiches and cake with nuts and mints. As the organist played my mother’s favorite tunes on the piano, Mom smiled nostalgically, perhaps remembering an Elkton Wedding Chapel and a hotdog stand twenty
-six years earlier.

  For years to come, John’s aunts and uncles would refer to our November wedding as the “dry reception.” My mother was not in the least concerned about their stricken looks when they discovered that the fruit punch was just that—fruit punch. Billy Graham and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir could have officiated, and my in-laws would still have recalled only that there was not a drop of booze in the hall.

  Before we left on our traditional Niagara Falls honeymoon, my mother took my new husband aside and spoke confidentially. I was curious and wondered if she was divulging what I had shared with her that afternoon as she fastened the dozens of buttons at the back of my satin wedding gown. It was an uncharacteristically intimate conversation for us.

  “I got my period this morning,” I told her.

  I knew immediately that I’d made a mistake. I felt her stiffen, and as her eyebrows shot up, I was eight years old again and feeling her disappointment in me for leaping over the birdbath.

  “Peggy! This is your honeymoon! You should have planned better!” I had failed at my only responsibility of the day. Her familiar flash of anger and disappointment was short-lived, and seconds later she stepped back and glowed.

  “Oh, honey, you look so beautiful.”

  “Well, are you going to tell me what my mother said to you?” I asked my husband when we were finally on the road.

  He smiled. “It was very sweet, actually. She asked me to be patient with you. Her exact words were, ‘I’m afraid Peggy doesn’t know much about housekeeping.’ ”