I was princess for a day. I had the dress to prove it. It was the last truly happy day of my childhood.
Chapter 8
Daisy Buchanan Graduates
June 1990
Taking a deep breath, I removed the white dress from the hanger. Then, taking a seat on my bed, still covered with the pink ruffled bedspread that had adorned it since I was four, I began the task of unfastening the buttons that lined the back of the garment—all eight of them.
“Mary!” called a voice from the foot of the stairs. “Mary Elizabeth, are you ready? We’re late!”
I didn’t know which to do first: sigh or roll my eyes. So I did my best to do both simultaneously. Of all the things Mom had to worry about, why oh why did she fixate on what she liked to call my “perpetual tardiness”? There were a million more important things she could be doing right now: straightening her own hair, straightening her own dress, straightening her whole damn house, but no, these days my mother was exclusively obsessed with how long it took me to get ready. She’d been this way for years, but especially since Anthony left for college.
In some ways, Mom and I, living as just a party of two, were tighter than ever. We dined together every night, sometimes hunkering down to watch China Beach and Cheers and reruns of Family Ties when my homework load wasn’t too overwhelming. On weekends, we’d go to the library or a movie together—when, that is, I wasn’t busy with some school activity. But all that together time wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Often we were at odds. Now my every move—how long I took to shower, how much time I took to curl my hair, how many minutes passed while I dressed for Sunday Mass—was the object of never-ending scrutiny and criticism.
“Mary!” she called again, louder this time.
“I’m. Coming!” I yelled in a halting response. “It’s my graduation, remember?”
I rolled my eyes again. It would be great if my mother would remember, for just a moment, that I was not only graduating from high school, but also graduating number one in my class. For most parents, the feat would be cause for celebration. For Anne Diener Pflum, it was not. It was cause, instead, for a lecture:
“Just remember, Mary, life is not about grades. It’s about how kind you are to others. It’s about how good and generous you can be. It’s about being humble. Humility is what would make me proud right now. Can you show me your humility?”
Sometimes it was hard to believe that Mom used to be a nun. Like when she mowed the lawn all by herself in that old pair of blue jeans and sat down afterward beneath the honey locust tree to knock back a can of beer. Or when she talked about the big crushes she had on Hollywood actors, Paul Newman chief among them.
But other times, like now, when she was freaking out about being late and when she was making a big deal about me just wanting to look nice, Mom’s former life as a sister became glaringly obvious. She may have left the convent years before, but the convent had never fully left her. Who, other than a recovering nun, would value humility more than her daughter’s perfect 4.0 grade point average, and punctuality more than the ability to make a fashion statement? Other mothers would have been bragging about a valedictorian daughter who neither smoked nor drank. Not my mom. She believed boasting about me would only make others feel bad. And always always always we had to put the feelings of others ahead of our own. We had to be humble. If it was Christ’s way, or St. Francis’s way, then—according to my mother—it had to be our way, too.
Stepping into the dress now, first with my left foot, then with my right, I returned to my happy place. My “Woo-hoo! I’m about to graduate from high school!!” place. The stiff white frock was just as pretty as I remembered. In fact, it was even prettier than when I’d first seen it, back in April. Short-sleeved, it featured a square neckline and a bodice of rich Belgian lace that swirled in a pretty pattern that resembled a snowflake. My favorite part about the dress was its lower half, specifically the cut of the pencil skirt. It came down just past my knees and featured a series of long white starchy pleats.
I loved the dress. It screamed Gatsby to me—as in The Great Gatsby. I’d read and reread the book throughout high school, longing for the book to swallow me whole into its pages so that I could become Gatsby’s neighbor or, better yet, his muse. In my mind, the dress was something Daisy Buchanan might wear, sprawled out on an enormous white couch, recovering from one party the night before, preparing for another one later in the day.
Looking at my reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of my bedroom door, I was reminded of the power of a perfect white dress: its ability to wipe a slate clean. In this case, the dress almost—yes, almost—managed to erase from my mind all those yucky memories from the weekend. Of the huge mess that spanned all three floors of the house.
The dress was so pure. If only life could be as unblemished. How delicious that would be—to feel as perfect on the inside as this dress appeared on the outside.
Today, hopefully, the dress would do the trick and no one would remember the imperfection that was Sunday. With any luck, they’d only focus upon the dress that was as picture-perfect as that 4.0 grade point average that had earned me the valedictorian title.
“For the last time, Mary Elizabeth!” Mom cried. “Are you coming or not?”
I didn’t answer her. Instead, I opened the door, reached for the manila folder that held the remarks I’d written in preparation for my role as tonight’s mistress of ceremonies, and exited the bedroom. For Daisy Buchanan, it was showtime.
The dress I wore the day I graduated from high school was purchased from the nicest department store within an hour’s drive of Beaver Dam: the Boston Store in Madison’s East Towne Mall. I found it in the junior department where I had made some of the more important purchases of my young life, including my prized collection of Esprit and Guess sweatshirts and the skirt and blouse I’d worn for my senior class portrait.
When I saw the starchy white dress with that slim pleated skirt, it was love at first sight. And I knew, as I stepped out of the dressing room, that my mother approved of the look as well.
Seated on a stool in front of a three-way mirror, she motioned for me to turn. She felt the fabric. And she nodded, just the way she had ten years before when I’d tried on my First Communion dress.
“Do you like it?” she asked.
“I love it!”
“Are you going to promise me you’ll wear it?”
“What else am I going to wear for graduation?” I laughed.
“Then it’s yours,” she said, digging into her wallet for the fading Boston Store credit card that saw more action than any of her other plastic.
Money was still tight in our house in 1990. But my mother’s teaching position at the Slinger-Allenton School District—a fifty-mile drive from Beaver Dam—had established a source of financial stability for my brother and me. The ramp up had been long. For a time after my father left, our household income was so low we were eating government-subsidized food. But bit by bit my mother climbed out of the financial pit, far enough, anyway, to allow for the occasional splurge like a glamorous white dress. It was the perfect piece of apparel for my big night. I wasn’t just graduating from high school. I was graduating number one in my class of more than two hundred—and was charged with sitting on the stage and making a speech.
For my entire high school career, my eyes had been firmly fixed upon commencement. I wanted to get to college just as fast as I could. College, I told myself, was where I would read all of those deep and complicated books and take all of those amazing writing classes I had long fantasized about. College was where I would find those sophisticated friends who liked to sit up late at night in dorm lounges and dimly lit cafés, discussing life, death, hopes, and the sort of weighty dreams that involved international travel and world peace. And college was where I was certain I would find that first boyfriend—maybe
even a future husband.
I had accomplished many things in high school. I was the editor of the school newspaper and a science fair champion. I was an accomplished first-chair clarinetist in both the band and the full orchestra. And like my mother and grandmother before me, I was fast becoming an accomplished writer. I wrote plays that were performed for the school and the community. I won writing contests and received scholarships to a host of colleges. I excelled at almost everything I set my sights upon. Except boys.
“I am never going to have a boyfriend,” I fretted to my mother one night as I sat writing copy for a press release for the junior prom I wasn’t going to attend. My classmates didn’t care that I didn’t have a date to the dance. They knew I could write and had tapped me to serve on the prom committee’s PR team.
Frustrated, I threw down my pen and paper. “I might as well go and join the convent now.”
My mother’s time in the convent, unearthed when Kim and I found those old photos when I was still in elementary school, had slowly but surely evolved into a topic of conversation, sometimes even into a lighthearted joke, between my mother and me.
“I wouldn’t recommend that,” my mother said, putting down the newspaper that she’d been buried in a moment before.
“Why not?”
“Because you like clothes too much.”
I had to laugh. It was true. But a moment after the laughter began, it was done and I was back on point.
“I’m serious, Mom. I’m going to die alone.”
She grew serious then, too.
“First of all, Mary, you are never alone. Secondly, consider who you’d be dating if you were dating someone seriously at Beaver Dam High School. Most of those boys you know don’t want what you want. Why are you interested at the age of seventeen in trying to be with someone for the sole sake of being with someone?
“Go out into the world and pursue your passion and he’ll be there. Somewhere along the road to your dreams, you’ll cross paths. I promise.”
I thought about the wisdom of her words for a minute. But just a minute. And then I went back to wanting a boyfriend.
At the time, I blamed the problem on being so tall (I had grown to five foot eleven) and on my very bad hair (I tried again and again throughout high school to get the “perfect perm”—as if there is such a thing—but my dirty-blond hair was a mess with a capital M). I realize now that as bad as my mullet-like “hairdo” was, my single status had just as much to do with how serious I was. I wasn’t that bubbly young teenager who bounded through the halls of the high school, her mind on the next football game or on whom to spend study hall sessions writing notes to. Instead, I was that girl who looked like she carried the weight of the world upon her shoulders because, in so many ways, I did.
The years after my father left to pursue his gay lifestyle had been an exercise in survival for all members of the household, most of all my mother. Two years, almost to the day, after my First Communion, my father sought and was granted first a divorce and then an annulment. The divorce meant my parents were no longer legally bound. The annulment meant that, in the eyes of the church, the marriage had never existed. With the annulment, my parents could continue to go to Mass and receive Communion. It also meant my brother and I were illegitimate, at least according to the Vatican.
My father celebrated the transition to official singlehood with a vacation in Florida. Anne Diener Pflum, by contrast, stayed home and embarked on a different kind of journey. She was on her way to another nervous breakdown.
The summer after the divorce was finalized, the depression that had long plagued my mother became so great that she checked herself into the mental-health wing of the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison.
I watched her pack the night before her departure, placing a robe and some curlers and a smattering of clothes into the same old olive-green pleather suitcase she’d been using since her wedding.
“I don’t want you to go,” I said, starting to cry. The weather was warm. The windows were open and I could hear crickets.
“It’s summer vacation. This is supposed to be the fun time of year. But this isn’t fun. This is so—so—”
I started to cry harder.
“So stupid.”
“I agree,” my mother said, her voice wooden. I would later learn that the woodenness had much to do with the arsenal of antidepressants she was taking that often rendered her numb. She dropped the pair of navy canvas sneakers she’d been holding into the suitcase and walked to me, pulling me into her arms.
“Sometimes we all have to do things we don’t want to do,” she said, stroking my hair. “And this is one of them.”
The stay was a long one—for her and for my brother and me. Since my mother had been our sole caregiver for the better part of three years, her departure left us feeling like unwanted orphans. My father rearranged his business schedule and came to stay with us for ten days in Beaver Dam. For several more days, we were separated and sent to stay with friends. I stayed with my classmate Jenny’s family. My brother stayed with his friend Jeff. Then we were shipped off to Indiana for a pair of weeks to stay with my father’s parents on their farm.
The term “nervous breakdown” was never used when my relatives discussed my mother in front of me, nor was “severe depression.” My father explained away my mother’s disappearance as an ordinary blip on the radar of our lives.
“Your mother isn’t feeling well,” he said nonchalantly, describing her symptoms as if they were akin to a cold. He was trying to serve us a dinner of scrambled eggs at the time. “She needs to rest.”
“When is she coming home?” I asked.
“Your mother will get home when she gets home.”
That was the answer he would continue to give me during my mother’s absence. But it wasn’t good enough for me. I missed my mom, needed my mom, cried for her at night. Unsure what was happening, or if anything would ever feel normal again, I started wetting the bed at the ancient age of nine. Worse than the bedwetting episodes were the recurring nightmares. Again and again I dreamed I was falling down several flights of stairs. In all the dreams, I was stuck in a terrifying free fall, looking back up at my childhood house, or at St. Peter’s Church, while my parents watched and did nothing to catch me.
I went to see my mother in the hospital several times that summer before my brother and I were shipped off to Indiana. I remember making my way up to the hospital wing and eyeing curiously the scary pair of electric doors that buzzed open only after a guard signed us in and pushed a button.
“Is Mom in jail?” I asked my father, as we passed through the doors and walked past a sign that commanded STOP! NO PATIENTS ALLOWED BEYOND THIS POINT WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION.
“No, they just don’t want patients to go out by themselves,” he explained, not looking at me. “It’s for their own good.”
The patients with whom my mother shared her new quarters were a curious crew. Some talked to themselves as they shuffled along the floor in slippers. A number of the women—who, my mother explained, suffered from severe cases of anorexia and bulimia—were so gaunt they reminded me of the photos I’d seen of Holocaust survivors in the collection of World War II books my brother kept in his bedroom. They had daily weigh-ins. One dark-haired woman was so determined to keep up her starvation plans that she tried to sneak a full bottle of Pert shampoo into her panties during one of the weigh-ins, so that she’d appear to be gaining weight when, in fact, she wasn’t. She was caught one day, just before my brother and I arrived for a visit. We looked on in horror as orderlies strapped her, cursing loudly, down in her bed to prepare her for a mandatory tube feeding. Just as memorable was a large male patient who didn’t know whether he wanted to be a man or a woman. The strange combination of his breasts and his facial hair left my brother and me as confused as he apparently was.
My m
other was almost always glad to see us. She’d light up when we entered her room, hug us to her, ask us about our summer routine: swimming with Kim and Kevin, t-ball games. But she was in a fragile place. Little things set her off. One day shortly before our visit, my father, not sure what to do with my long and tangled hair, had taken me to a hairdresser in Beaver Dam, who spent the better part of a half hour beautifully braiding my tresses into a look Princess Leia might have sported. I was ecstatic. I’d never felt so beautiful in my life. I thought my mother would be pleased. Instead, upon seeing me, she started to sob.
“Look at you,” she cried, touching my braided hair. “I can’t do that. I could never do that. You’re already better off without me.”
When my mother eventually came home to us, she was better for a while. But the next summer, she was back in the hospital.
The little self-confidence she had managed to retain in the wake of her breakup with the convent had been irrevocably knocked from her when my father left. Twice divorced, once from Christ and once from my father, her spirit had been badly shaken.
The broken spirit didn’t make her a bad mother. Quite the contrary. Even in the darkest of times, she was warm and affectionate, forever hugging us and snuggling with us as she tucked us in at night or helped us with school projects. No, the problem was that the only energy reserves she had managed to retain during the divorce, which were minimal, were poured into that mothering. Not just into clothing and feeding us, but also into all the other aspects of parenting: attending our band concerts and basketball games and committing to memory our favorite Strawberry Shortcake and Star Wars action figures and putting them on layaway at the local Shopko, where she dutifully made weekly deposits until the toys were ours.
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