Chapter 47 Mother
Mother
Kate Shaw
My defense against Mother while she was living and now dead is to ban her from my thoughts.
Theresa Cotton is too confident to appreciate that childish option.
Brazen to ask me to stand up against my greatest adversary, the one who never buckled or backed down in our battles.
When I do, to this day I turn weak. The air around every experience where Mother-Daughter stood in the same space is spoiled like curdled milk. We never made a gentle memory.
The news of Mother’s death four years back came in the mail in a padded envelope.
I picked it up at the Rusty Nickel and guessed what it was from the return address of a law office.
It held a check for one hundred thousand dollars—a mere snippet of her wealth—and a pearl necklace in a padded jewelry case.
Could these be Mother’s Mikimoto pearls?
I remember how proud she was to own something so extraordinary.
As if her status was elevated when she wore them. To me they were a noose.
I deposited the money in the bank in Burnsville, but in rebellion I took the pearls to the edge of my creek and broke the string. They scattered in the icy waters to lie with the slugs and slime. I may have had a smug look on my face, but Mother had the last stab.
Later, I saw one of the pearls lodged in the rocks. The outer shell was splitting to expose a plastic bead. Mother hadn’t given me Mikimoto pearls or even cultured pearls. She gave me a strand of fake pearls. The remarkable thing was that her cruelty could still surprise me.
I don’t know how she died, but at that moment, I hoped it had been a slow death.
That she had lain helpless in her upholstered bed with walls papered in suffocating toile and heavy drapes snuffing out the light.
That she discovered the clangor was missing in the substantial handbell that always sat on the bedside table.
That its silence galled her to the point of apoplexy.
Maybe it was Peggy-the-Maid who tended Mother’s needs who did the devious deed, because Peggy wasn’t her real name. Peggy was what Mother called every hired woman who tended to her whims. I knew five Peggys who had never been called by their given name.
The true tragedy is that Mother’s entitlement never sweetened her days.
She was a parsimonious woman living a stingy life, a life that fell short of her vision of importance despite the obituary that took up three columns in the newspaper.
The obituary photo she had chosen to show the world was taken thirty years before when she looked like a movie star ingenue.
She thought she looked glamorous. I thought she looked desperate.
As her brainy, tall lesbian daughter, I embarrassed her and she embarrassed me.
We never respected each other. How old do I have to be before I give that respect to myself?
Can I see, at last, that Mother wasn’t anything like her precious Mikimoto pearls, where a seed of mother-of-pearl was painstakingly introduced as an irritant in an oyster.
Mother was merely the irritant. At her core, she was a common plastic bead.
I’m pulled from my toxic reverie feeling lighter, even liberated. I say, “Did I tell you she was dead?”
Theresa raises her glass of iced tea, and says, “Precisely.”