Still Trying to Get Comfortable
Before I learned to walk or talk,
I knew when all was well. It had to do with
certain smells: The best was aromatic pipe
tobacco—that meant Dad was home, content,
and settled in. I wouldn’t have to turn my face
away when Mama picked me up and held
me. Other times I did; the nauseous odor of
her breath repelled me when she’d had too
many cigarettes and too much wine.
There were reliable well-being and a
tasty lunch and hugs and kisses in the
smell of just-pressed shirts. I
could find Alma if I crept downstairs to where
we kept the mangle iron. (She bunched the
dampened sheets, all clean and white, into
the pillowcases, placed the bundle in the
freezer overnight, and said it made the
ironing go at twice the speed.)
If I smelled something in the oven in the
middle of the day, I thought that Alma might
be baking me a cake. It wouldn’t be my
mother’s flaky biscuits, not so early. Now I
know they were delicious; then I wanted
batter from the bowl to taste and frosting to
lick off my fingers.
inauspicious ones, which made me get a
stomachache. I felt the fisting of my gut begin
when certain of my mother’s friends came by
for lunch. These were the ones she drank
with sometimes in the afternoon. I must have
found it terribly confusing, since I loved these
women too—they were sophisticated,
beautiful, and no doubt bored, since they
were overeducated for their mommy jobs, or
so they thought. They should have
volunteered more.
the air grew thick with stale wine and fetid
smoke and no one noticed when I went to
bed without a word and if I cried nobody
heard, and so I learned to be afraid of other
things because I couldn’t bear for it to be my
mother’s irresponsibility I feared, and even
then I knew that it was more than that, a
gnawing at the core of sanity. The day would
come when I would love and trust her more
than anyone on earth, but not until I’d
suffered as she did and saw her as a daughter
sees a mother still, but through a mother’s
eyes. More than forgiven, she became my
inspiration and my anchor. I thank God for
that. But some things one cannot forget; a
child who hasn’t had her second birthday yet
should not have been expected to be wise.
afternoons, that dear good woman, who
had taken on the raising of her eight
or nine grandchildren, would put aside
her vacuuming and come into my room and
rock me in her arms and sing like a piano out
of tune, but she had such a soothing manner,
she was Mother Earth. I’m sure she weighed
two hundred pounds; I heard she wasn’t
even half that when she died.
One evening at the dinner table—I was still a
few months shy of four—our mother told us
Dr. Anderson had warned her, no
more alcohol. I cried for happiness. I
wish someone had said to me,
“Don’t count your chickens yet.”
A week raced by, and every night was better
than the one before, with games and books and
roasting marshmallows, The Shadow on the
radio. Ten days, two weeks had passed. I
finally let myself relax, an hour or so before
the sucker punch that caught me napping.
Pabst Blue Ribbon in a can—I saw it in her
hand as we were tidying the dining room,
and I began to protest,”Mom, the doctor
said—“ but then she brushed me off: “He
didn’t say I couldn’t have a little something
now and then,” defensively. I lost my
innocence, you might say, in a quarter-
minute’s condescension. I don’t think she ever
saw it as betrayal, even through the troubles
that still lay ahead. The gates clicked shut
that day. I’ve long since lost the switch.
Disappointment is a fact of life that proffers
lessons every child must learn eventually,
but not with such insidious brutality, not
a child of three, illusions dropping
like the tears she shed, and never, dear God,
never at her mama’s knee, with her the
not to do, my dears.”
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