A Word of Our Own: Ch 6 My Mother’s Garden
"My enemy. My love. My mother...A shapeshifter changing the angle of support, of attack from one minute to the next. The voice of a ventriloquist—the world."
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A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home—Meditations on my homo female life.
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6. My Mother’s Garden
My enemy. My love. My mother. She who was monstrous. Was a fury, furious. Sometimes opened her mouth so wide and laughed so joyfully and uncontrollably I couldn’t help but laugh, too. We were in my bedroom once when she started. And she threw herself backwards on the bed to sit down weak with laughing, but landed hard, flipped, and found herself upside down on the floor. For a change, instead of getting enraged, she thought it was hilarious. I’ve never laughed so hard. I’ve never cried so much. She was the cruelest human I know. You’re fat. You’re stink. You’re no good like your father. She was a cheerleader. You can be anything you want. A shapeshifter changing the angle of support, of attack from one minute to the next. The voice of a ventriloquist—the world.
Now I have her body. I try to wear it with grace. The bony chest and negligible tits. Wide hips perfect for childbearing, or so her gynecologist praised, the sturdy thighs that she continually pinched to check for excess flab, but also wiggled for humorous effect. I have, as well, her dark shining eyes, her sagging cheeks, and thin lips that smile too much, and beg everyone to, “Like me, like me, like me.” It freaks me out sometimes, looking in the mirror and seeing her there, that small, thin woman as eager to please as she was to wound. I keep my own tongue in check. Am afraid of being her. Even my own past life is mysterious. It is tempting to plunder it, rather than descend slowly. Watch it like a flower—unfold.
For years I didn’t even know where she was born. Her marriage license says Henry County, Illinois. But her mother’s bible puts her in Marshall, “And Gran should know,” my cousin says. Henry was the town. Nowadays, it has 2273 inhabitants. I wonder if that’s where they’re from, the photos she gave me before she moved into the home. Or from Kentucky where she ended up. They’re dirty, faded things. Of fifty skinny, frightened schoolchildren squinting into the sun, or squinting at the photographer who was maybe the first stranger they’d seen. He documents the dirt they stand in with small bared feet. He catches their suspicion and fear. In another, there is a placid girl on a horse. “Mother,” my own has written.
The next shows a man with two pups. The next—men in their dustbowl suits with dustbowl faces standing around a grave. Another, two men in uniform in a field somewhere, with “Me and Curly” scrawled on the back. Husbands. Brothers. Machine-gun fodder. Feeding the grass which is the long hair on graves. One at least survives, my uncle Earl who becomes a tobacco farmer, and leaves me his fiddle, made fun of me for playing Mozart, instead of Turkey in the Straw, traded gunshots with a neighbor he hated like any Hatfield or McCoy. In the flesh, he has a thin, grey, leathery face, a bluegrass twang, sits with my grandad in the living room on a plastic-covered couch.
He glares at my two sisters, my two girl cousins, me, demands, “When are you girls gonna put on a skirt?” We think he’s joking, with his ruined, weathered, angular face. Give up our jeans? It’s the Nineteen Seventies. We giggle and snort. Know nothing of the power he had, and still did, sitting on that fucking couch. Once my grandmother told me, “I had an aunt… like you. She’d come and visit with her friend.” I’d pictured them sturdy farm women with thick gnarled hands and the housecoats my Nana always wore in tiny, timid flowery prints over her knee-high pantyhose. I think I’ve found her among five or six photos of smiling women who are not poor at all. Sometimes they are in flappers’ dresses. Sometimes in men’s suits grinning mischievously. I know now what they risked—a bloody nose from their fathers, brothers, a trip to court for even symbolically entering the province of men. On the back of one photo there is nothing but the number 12. I wonder if it is the year. There will be seventeen more, a young girl’s lifetime, before somebody will hand them a ballot and let them vote.
In France, they had a two century ban on women wearing trousers, though by the time it was repealed in 2013 it was (obviously) no longer enforced. Imposed on November 17, 1800, the 'Decree Concerning the Cross-Dressing of Women' said, "Any woman who wants to dress like a man must go to the Police for permission to do so". This was amended in 1892 and 1909 to allow women to wear trousers, "if the woman is holding bicycle handlebars or the reins of a horse."
I put them on my wall, these women, these joyful city slickers sprung from the pages of Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes. I’ve been staring at them since. Would my life have been different if I’d known about them? Would my mother’s? They never seemed quite real, the Janet Flanners, the Nathalie Barneys of the world. What has more weight? The flesh or the word? Which are not supposed to break bones. But even my mother in her nursing home knows about the bullied kids who kill themselves. Her face twists with jealousy that those… “whatever you call them,” are getting sympathy while she got none, teased her for her hillbilly family and bright red hair.
Even her brothers and sister joined in, “Carrot top, Satan spawn!” Mocked her, too, for wanting to go to college. Her husband sneering at her for wanting to paint. The laughter never stopped. When she wanted to be different. When she tried to be the same. She’d make some declaration at the dining table, and they’d smirk as they chewed their biscuits, chewed their ham. “That’s just Jean,” her brothers would say. Just. What a brutal word. As bloody as a punch.
She has started to weep there in the hallway that smells of disinfectant. “They were so mean.”
I joke they’d all be jealous of her red hair now. She still has plenty and at eighty-five it is still red, though faded. She smiles, and preens. “Everyone thinks I dye it.” Her pleasure is fleeting. She remembers she is ugly and stupid, Stupid Jean. Stupid. “What was I saying? I can’t remember. Who are you?” I don’t ask about my grandmother’s aunt. I think that my mother is still pretty, bruised as she is from falls. I remember how shocked I was years ago to discover that she wasn’t ugly as she claimed and I believed. That as a young woman, especially, she glowed. And not just in her wedding photos.
Who would have known, though? When she couldn’t believe it herself? Did others see it? My father must have—once.
I imagine the wedding ceremony, a mother-in-law’s lips pinched at her stepson’s choice of this working class, red-headed girl, though she had humble origins herself, a baker’s child. Mom’s Southern Baptist parents would have been weeping across the aisle, thrilled Jean wouldn’t be an old maid at 24, but why a mixed-marriage with a Catholic? Why use a priest? He joins her to this man. She has no idea what this means. Does he love her? Or is he just proud she laughs at all his jokes, and smiles adoringly? Has promised to obey?
There is a lacey white dress and bridesmaids. A reception with cake and photographs. A honeymoon at French Lick, Indiana which sounds like a condom brand, but means a place with salt deposits and bubbling mineral springs frequented by deer and other animals along with their human predators. Then the wedding night which she expected to take place to swelling orchestral music or the sound of a big band. I imagine what she got instead. What I was supposed to. This eager aging virgin in her flimsy negligée.
How long before she began to resent it, the thing she doodled before her wedding day, Mrs. Frank S. Cogswell, Jr.? Giving up her body and her name? By the time I was a toddler she’d done her tallies, counted the cost, remembered what it was like when she was just a daughter, a clerk-typist with money, with a name of her own. Jean. Emma Jean. Laura Emma Jean Pierce. Who helped out her parents, sure, but could go to parties, and lunches for other single women like her. Was painfully free.
“I never should have married, had you kids.” Sometimes she tried to turn back time. Invited friends over for luncheons, as she called them, or for bridge. Standing in the kitchen she smeared pimento cheese and Benedictine on bread. She made it herself, weeping as she grated onion and cucumber, then mixing with the Philadelphia cream cheese in its silver wrapper with just two drops of green food coloring that she let me add. There would have been congealed salads, too, made from women’s magazine recipes, and so of course were elegant by the standards of this secretary, this farmer’s, this factory workers’ kid. And the whole meal served up with coffee made in a percolator that would have been hiccupping away for hours.
Afterwards, when there was nothing left but crumbs, she’d look at fading pictures and remember, and try not to weep or to rage. She’d pray. Drink a cup of instant coffee standing over the sink in her yellow kitchen, and stare out the window at her youngest perched in the limb of that dang water maple. Thinking that one of these days she'd cut it down, cut them all down. All the trees did was make work in the autumn, dropping leaves, and all the rest of the time wrapping their roots around the sewage pipes. It had all been a horrible mistake, leaving her job and the camaraderie of the typing pool, getting married to some… man. Sequestered in the house with these babbling children. Forbidden to paint because she was no good. Forbidden to think. Allowed to shop and return and shop some more using a card with her husband’s name on it, clean a house he owned, raise the kids wearing his name, while he traveled for work, saw the world. While he had a job. Brought back trinkets for the children who loved him best. Because she was the meanie, the one who had to tell them, No, and spent long hours making their clothes in the basement with its linoleum tile floor and island of cupboards made of fake wood paneling with a work surface she’d lay her patterns on. Straight pins coming out of her mouth. Her eyes concentrating on that thin brown paper from McCall’s. Economizing.
Two spades. Three hearts. Three notrump. Four hearts. Pass.
And yet, and yet…
She’d praise God aloud. At least her life was better than that of her mother, a placid girl on a placid horse. Better than that of her grandmothers who were supposed to breed ’til they died on a bloody bed, and were replaced by another who would raise their brats, weed their gardens, cook and make preserves with their own swelling bellies, no rights, no voice, no education. Yes, her life was better than that. She’d worked in an office. And had a semester of college. Her hands were soft and white. The basement of her suburban house was stashed with Del Monte green beans, and Green Giant peas, and life-saving tins of Starfish tuna, and rows upon rows of Campbell’s soup. She had a brand new washing machine.
I was in the car when she told me she’d finally worked up the nerve to do it, get a divorce. I must have been thirteen or fourteen and we were driving to my violin lesson in St. Matthews. It was hot. And the car smelled of the heat. And her fear. The car smelled of burning dust. It seems impossible that 738 miles to the north there’s a vast revolution. Even across town. Women are angry, but joyful, too, proud. Here, there is nothing, but the burning car and her rage. Nowhere but the kitchen and its yellow wallpaper, yellow spun glass lamp. When she gets herself under control, she nods her head and says gratefully, “At least he never beat me.”
Stay tuned for…
Ch 7. Apprentice Victims
To read previous chapters, check out A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home.
xoxo K