For years, my mother kept hidden from me the fact that she had been the editor of her school newspaper and that she was a prize-winning debater and orator. But looking at her life, it’s clear that she would have been a wicked good journalist. She was a superb writer, a lightning-fast typist, and, most importantly, she had an insatiable sense of curiosity. She not only asked Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How—but also How Come, How Many, Since When, and Is That Really Possible?
And she knew what made for a good interview and what made for a bad one.
“Never ever ever ask anyone how they feel about something,” my mother lectured me, disgusted by a local television interview with a then Wisconsin governor. “The news isn’t about feelings. The news is about facts.”
Perhaps she reasoned that if she couldn’t become a journalist, her daughter could.
So when I came home to tell my mother about that second-grade class news project, she was just as excited about it as I was. And she was grateful to have found for me a role model.
Jessica, in part, prompted me to seek out every school newspaper job I could find in elementary school and high school. And Jessica inspired me to head to New York City’s Columbia University after high school. Jessica had spent time in Manhattan. I would, too.
Immediately, I threw myself headfirst into all the usual young journalist pursuits. I wrote and later served as an associate editor of the Columbia Daily Spectator. I spent summers interning for publications both big (a national magazine, Soap Opera Digest) and small (Beaver Dam’s daily newspaper, the Daily Citizen). By my junior year at Columbia, I scored my big break: a coveted internship at the CNN New York Bureau. In between classes, for three days a week, I worked at the bureau, logging tapes, answering phones, assisting correspondents, and going out on shoots. I loved every facet of it: the fast pace, the energy, the people, and, above all, the excitement. In 1993, in the wake of the Gulf War, CNN was still the only kid on the twenty-four-hour-news-channel block. It was young, it was new, it was exciting—and best of all, for someone as eager as me, it was full of opportunity.
Within a month of starting the internship, I was covering global hijackings and the first World Trade Center bombing. Within three, I was offered a job as a desk assistant at the bureau, working the coveted Monday-through-Friday six A.M. to two P.M. shift. Just twenty years old, I had managed to suitably impress CNN’s management team. And so they’d offered me the position, provided I could schedule a full load of senior-year classes around my forty-hour workweek.
I did so enthusiastically, writing term papers and studying for exams while hunched over teleprompters and in the back of satellite trucks. Miraculously, in spite of the demanding work schedule, I still managed to graduate summa cum laude without ever getting anything less than an A in any of my classes.
But dream job though it was, it should be noted that my position at CNN was much more than a career stepping-stone. My job at CNN was also a means of survival. Without it, there was no way I could have kept my head above water financially during those final critical years of college.
Columbia University had offered me a good financial aid package that enabled me to afford my education. My tuition and room and board were covered thanks to a series of grants and loans. But what the school’s financial aid package didn’t cover were all the little—and not so little—expenses of living in New York: off-campus meals, taxi rides, subway fares, cleaning supplies for my dorm suite, and, of course, clothes. My mother would have loved to send me money. But on her fixed income she had nothing to send.
To make ends meet, I did work-study jobs. I made some additional money babysitting and writing and selling freelance articles. But, for the most part, I was broke. So when CNN hired me, it fast became my financial savior, enabling me to purchase textbooks and toiletries. I could retire the embarrassment of shoes that had holes in their soles and buy a good winter coat. I was also able to invest in the occasional luxury, notably the black sleeveless cocktail dress from Bloomingdale’s that I wore to my senior formal.
The one thing I never managed to afford throughout college, with or without a CNN paycheck: plane tickets. And my mother couldn’t afford them either. That made for a particularly lonely existence when it came to Thanksgiving.
“It doesn’t make sense for you to come home at Thanksgiving when you’re just going to need to turn around and do it again for Christmas,” my mother told me each of my four years of college.
“But everyone else is going home for Thanksgiving,” I would cry, so homesick for my childhood cat, Blackie, and that pink ruffled bedspread of my childhood bedroom that I was sure I was going to die.
At this, my mother would sigh. A long, deep sigh.
“You of all people should know by now, Mary Elizabeth,” she would say at last, “that our family is not like everyone else’s. There will be other Thanksgivings.”
“But I’m sad, Mom,” I sniffled.
“I’m sad, too.”
Looking back, I realize her inability to somehow come up with the funding to fly me home for Thanksgiving had just as much to do with her growing depression as with her finances.
When I left for college in the fall of 1990, my mother was left with an empty nest, and something more: a feeling of abandonment.
It’s not that she wasn’t glad to see me reach for my dreams. She’d long been priming me for college, not-so-subtly warning me since childhood of what would happen if I didn’t go. But the realization of my dreams coincided with the death of some of hers. My father had left her. And now her children had, too. The house she’d once dreamed of filling with happy memories was now empty, and demons she’d been pushing to the side while I was growing up were now increasingly difficult to ignore.
I glimpsed her fear of the future the morning I left for college in August 1990. My father insisted that he drop me off at college alone, arguing that the drive with my things was going to be long and stressful enough without having the added stress of butting heads with my mother. Since my mother loathed driving and didn’t have a car big or reliable enough to haul my things cross-country, she reluctantly agreed.
I thought she was at peace with my decision until moments before I walked out of the house. That’s when, in the doorway that connected our dining room to our kitchen, she pulled me into her arms, sobbing.
“You’re my best friend, Mary,” she cried. “You may not have realized it all this time, dear daughter. But you’re my best friend. And I’m going to miss you more than you’ll ever know.”
I hugged her back, feeling her body shake in mine, hearing her cry into my ear. I cried alongside her. Never had I felt so much sadness and so much guilt as in those moments before I left. I had sometimes wondered if she would feel as if I were leaving her when I departed for school. And now I had my answer.
In those early months of college, my mother and I worked to bridge our new geographical gap with daily phone calls. Sometimes I called her multiple times a day. I told her everything: about my first college dates, about my first college roommates, about my fixation on writing the perfect college term papers. She was supportive for the most part. But sometimes mixed in with our conversations was a sense of growing distance—even a hint of childlike coldness.
That came out the time she called to tell me she’d gone on a trip to my favorite Wisconsin apple orchard.
I was green with envy. “You went to Tom Dooley’s without me?! Mom, I miss home so much!”
Her response was uncharacteristically frosty. “If you had chosen a school closer to home, you could join me on these outings. If you’d accepted that full scholarship to the University of Wisconsin, you’d be eating caramel apples with me right now. If you hadn’t wanted to go clear across the nation—”
“Mom, I got it,” I interrupted. “I got it!”
Her remarks made me second-gue
ss my decision, just as I think she wanted me to. It was her way of saying, “You made your bed when you chose a far-flung university over staying close to me. Now lie in that bed.”
And so it felt to me, when she wouldn’t find a way to fly me home for Thanksgiving, that she was making a similar point. Mixed in with her very legitimate cash-strapped excuse seemed to lurk the message, “You sealed your Thanksgiving fate when you chose to go to Columbia. Now deal with it.”
The inability to go home for Thanksgiving proved particularly devastating my freshman year of college. I distinctly remember sitting in calculus class the morning after my mother broke the news, a morose expression fixed upon my face. My calculus professor, a kind man, called me up to his desk as he dismissed the other students at the end of class.
“What’s wrong?” he asked after everyone had left.
My heart raced.
“Did I do something wrong?” I asked. As a scholarship student, I was forever worried about my grades.
“No—not the homework,” he quickly reassured me. “You. You look sad.”
Not sure what to say, I looked at my calculus book—a big thick green thing that, brand new, had cost me more than $100 at the bookstore. “My parents told me I can’t come home for Thanksgiving this year,” I confessed at last. “They say it’s too expensive.”
My professor looked at me with such a sweet expression upon his face. So sweet I was torn between wanting to die of embarrassment and wanting to fling my arms around him out of gratitude. “That’s very sad,” he said after a beat.
“It’s no big deal,” I said quickly, working to sound as nonchalant as possible.
He shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong. It is a big deal.”
With time, I learned to accept my Thanksgiving fate. The holiday became an exercise in improvisation. By my senior year, I was rolling with the punches, working the entire holiday at the CNN New York Bureau. I was happy to have a job, grateful to stay busy. Over a can of Diet Coke, I chatted with a pair of CNN staffers also working that day, lying through my teeth when they asked what I’d be doing with my family later. Then I headed home to an empty college dorm to call my mother, have a good cry, and order Chinese food.
My father’s reaction to my burgeoning career at CNN was relief. He was glad that I had found a calling—and, more importantly, that I seemed to have found an ongoing source of financial independence. My older brother, an anthropology major, had a less certain future. He had a longtime girlfriend, a young woman named Elise whom he’d met when he was a football player and she was a cheerleader at Lawrence University. But beyond Elise, my brother seemed uncertain as to what he wanted for his future, which worried my father—and his wallet—tremendously. In CNN, Dale Pflum saw an end to any financial obligation when it came to at least one of his children. It also gave him something more to talk about when he joined his growing circle of gay friends. By my college years, that circle stretched into Manhattan.
For my father and me, New York was something upon which we could agree. We both loved the city. And in the city, we managed to bond in a way we hadn’t been able to do since he lived at the house in Beaver Dam. It’s as if New York hit a sort of reset button in our relationship.
In New York, we dined out, frequently in the Village. Some nights we ate Chinese, other nights Indian. My father, more than my mother, enjoyed exploring all kinds of ethnic cuisine. In New York, we attended scores of Broadway and off-Broadway shows. One night it would be a musical like The Goodbye Girl, and the next it would be a play like The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me. And in New York, I increasingly accompanied him to gay bars.
Sometimes we went to a piano bar down in the West Village like Marie’s Crisis, where the men took turns belting out Broadway show tunes. Other times, we went to more refined bars on the Upper East Side, where most of the men wore blazers. The men he introduced me to at the bars seemed at once amused and intrigued to meet Dale’s college-age daughter. I was simply glad to be off campus for a spell, away from the pressure of the books and term papers.
Our relationship still had its ups and downs. But as my expectations of my father lowered—as I looked to him less for support and more for familiar company—we fell into a somewhat agreeable pattern of being able to sit through shows and bar outings together. More often than not, it was he who was confiding his hopes and dreams in me, instead of the other way around. And more often than not, I was listening to him prattle on about his love life, instead of the other way around.
Now broken up with Franz, he was single and looking again. Sometimes this resulted in funny episodes, like the time both of us insisted that a handsome Italian man strolling through the park had been checking each of us out.
“He was interested in me,” my father insisted. “Did you see him looking me over?”
“Dad, really, you need your eyes checked. He was looking at me!”
My mother’s reaction to my father’s love life remained what it had long been—resigned. While he continued to date and frequent clubs and bars, she hunkered down, concentrating on her young students, finding new graduate classes in which to enroll. In addition to helping the children with speech and language issues, she was now increasingly serving children on the autism spectrum. Some teachers were daunted, or saddened, by the autistic students, and shirked away from them. Not Anne Diener Pflum. She viewed autism as a challenge that she was determined to overcome.
“There’s just got to be a way of reaching these kids,” she would say determinedly. “I just know there is. And I’m going to find it.”
The key, of course, was love. She was known for giving to her young charges, and to their worried mothers, big, reassuring hugs and literature on the latest studies. She worked to find what made each of the children tick. Hot Wheels cars for one child, Ninja Turtles for another, sports stickers and baseball cards for a third. Then she used her own paychecks to buy the children special posters and items to reward them for mastering a particular concept, whether it was uttering a sound, making eye contact, or shaking a hand.
“Those kids need to feel safe somewhere,” she would tell me. “And if they’re not going to feel safe anyplace else, they’re going to feel safe with me in my classroom.”
With my brother and me gone, my mother’s young students had become the center of her universe. I admired her dedication, but worried she was lonely.
“Don’t you ever think about dating again?” I asked her one day.
My mother always told me when Anthony and I were young that she didn’t want to take any time away from our years at home by dating.
“I only have you two for a few precious years,” she’d say. “Dating can wait.”
I’d hoped that when I left for college, she’d try her hand at romance.
“I think about dating,” my mother said. “And then I think about how scary it is. I don’t know that I’m brave enough just yet. Give me time.”
There were small signs of hope. One afternoon during my senior year of college, she called to tell me she’d met an older gentleman at a Country Kitchen, enjoying his breakfast at a table adjacent to hers.
“He was so nice. So interesting. So smart!” she enthused, detailing their hour-long talk that included everything from Shakespeare to the Packers to their favorite philosophers.
“He gave me his card and told me to call him,” she said.
“And?” I asked, more excited for her than I think I’d been for my own recent dates.
“What do you think I should do?” she asked timidly.
“I think you should call him!” I cried. “Mom, what would you tell me to do?”
“I’d tell you to call him,” she acknowledged. “But I’m not you.”
Her tone was sad now.
“You’re doing things now that I’ll never do. You’re going places I’ll never go.”
“What’s it like to be taken to work in a stretch limo?” she asked, her voice full of wonder.
She also memorized with relish all the names and faces and voices of the correspondents I worked with, watching them with growing interest from her post in front of the television in the cluttered living room in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.
Jeanne Moos and Richard Roth were far and away my mother’s favorite CNN correspondents—Jeanne for her smart and observant scripts, which tickled the funny bone; and Richard, because, well, he was Richard. Tall and wiry with a big booming voice and just-starting-to-turn-gray hair, Richard was CNN’s onetime Rome bureau chief who’d done a tour of war correspondent duty in the Middle East during the Gulf War before being “crowned” CNN’s UN correspondent.
Richard had a keen sense of humor. And he was fiercely intelligent. Almost immediately, he took me under his wing, patiently teaching me how to crash a breaking news package, how to write a script laced with both intelligence and humor, and how being smart and being kind in the world of broadcast television don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Richard was the one to convince my bosses at the bureau to hire me in the first place. And Richard was the one to inform me that if I really wanted to jump-start my career, I needed to leave New York and try my hand at the CNN Center in Atlanta. When I eventually introduced my mother to Richard during one of her rare visits to New York my senior year of college, you would have thought she had met the pope.
White Dresses Page 19