Living in the Shadow of a Beautiful Mother
IT ISN’T SO MUCH HER BEAUTY AS IT IS HER PERFECTION. IT IS always the classic moment with my mother; the exact right amount of perfume, the perfect nail color, the simple perfect bracelet, the ladylike hemlines. Of course, there was nothing left for me to do but rebel. To this date, at age fifty-six, mind you, nothing pleases me more than to be able to put on an obscenely short micro-mini and wear it out to breakfast on Sunday morning. What is a woman that old doing in a skirt that short? I imagine people saying.
I know my mother will hear about it, sooner or later, down in Jackson, Mississippi, where she is still wielding unquestioned editorial power over the hemlines and haircuts of my nine nieces, two sisters-in-law, three ex-sisters-in-law, and countless great-granddaughters and cousins. “I saw a picture of Ellen in People Magazine wearing some weird denim vest,” one of her bridge partners will surely tell her. “I guess she’s never going to cut her hair.”
The women in my family bring everything they buy to my mother’s house to model for her and await her judgment. She doesn’t even buy all those clothes for them anymore. Still, they await her approval like runway models getting the nod from Calvin. They do this with good reason. My mother is a fashion genius, descended from a long line of fabulous seamstresses. The foot-pedal sewing machines hum in her brain. She has an unerring eye for cut and style and color, and, like a good editor, she never tells a lie, even to spare the wearer’s feelings. “That color isn’t good for you,” she will say. Or, “that makes your hips look big.” Or, “you can do better than that, my darling. Take that back to the store.” It isn’t easy to win her approval. As I said, she stops at the classic moment.
Even though I live four hundred miles away, I am still not free from the compulsion to win her approval. When it comes to a big occasion, a public appearance in a town where I have friends, or, sometimes, just to report on a successful shopping expedition, I find myself calling to talk to her about clothes. I will describe the dress or outfit that I bought and answer questions about shoes, accessories, handbags, scarves, hose, jewelry, hemlines. “Don’t get it too short,” she will say several times, no matter how much I prevaricate on the answer. “Not above the knee. Don’t get it too short. It’s so common, honey.”
As I said, she is descended from a long line of seamstresses and she can envision cut and style and line and color. She can envision hems. Her great-grandmother, who lived in perfect health until I was four, was a milliner from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. This woman came down the Monongahela and Ohio and Mississippi rivers after the Civil War and, with her husband and their companions, settled the little town of Mayersville, Mississippi. She brought with her patterns and knowledge of fashion and passed it on to her three daughters, who passed it on to my mother, who has tried to teach it to me.
Of course, the clothes and hats and hairdos and buttons and rick-rack and lace are all great fun, greatly beautiful, and undeniably an art form, but it would be a mistake to think they constitute the thing that was beautiful about these women or the thing that made them loved. The clothes were “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”
When we see something that is truly beautiful we know the maker created it out of love and we return that love. We know this because it is the way we operate ourselves. When we are happy and at peace with ourselves we create beauty. It is that impetus or inspiration that the viewer or watcher responds to. When we see a fabulous garden we share in the moments of inspiration and planning and creation. The same is true when we see a beautiful woman all dressed up with her makeup on and her hair done. The closer the inspiration was to pure happiness or joy, the closer the result will be to beauty. “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare,” Edna Millay wrote. “Fortunate they who though once only and then but far away, have heard her massive sandal set on stone.”
The thing that people find beautiful about my mother is her excitement and energy and grace, her awe, her love of flowers and children and small birds, her sense of order, the delicacy of her language, the kindness and thoughtfulness of her ways. “All along it was indwelling,” another poet, Denise Levertov, wrote. “A gold ring lost in the house.”
My mother doesn’t buy expensive clothes. She thinks it is terrible to spend large sums of money on herself when there are all those young women in the family to buy things for. She likes to shop carefully. She likes to pore over catalogs in the evenings, waiting to spot the exactly perfect dress. Then she will order it and hem it and look marvelous in it. It will be very simple, with simple classic lines and she will search around her perfectly ordered closet and find the exact right shoes and scarf and earrings to wear with it. She doesn’t make mistakes. I have never known her to buy anything she didn’t actually wear. But then she wears her best clothes all day long. She puts them on in the morning and wears them out into the garden and to the grocery store and just to sit in the den and talk to little children. “All along it was indwelling. A gold ring lost in the house.”
Great beauty always begins with great physical health. My mother got that in the genes from those same long-lived seamstresses and she takes care of her inheritance. At eighty-three she is still in perfect health and still perfectly beautiful. The natural beauty is there, of course, the high cheekbones, the gorgeous legs, the long graceful arms and hands. She was always a dancer and she moves with a dancer’s grace. My father first saw her dancing in a Charleston contest. He watched from the back of the auditorium, then went to work to make friends with her brother. Some weeks later he was brought to her house to be introduced. It was sixty-four years later, on a rainy night in Jackson, Mississippi, when my mother finally heard this story. My mother, my father, my son and myself were on our way to a seven o’clock screening of Crocodile Dundee. “Dundee,” my father said. “That’s the name of the town where we lived the first year we were married.”
“How did you meet Grandmother?” my son asked.
“I saw her dancing in a Charleston contest,” Daddy answered. “I said to a friend, who’s that girl?”
“That’s Aurora Alford,” he said. “Floyd Alford’s sister from the delta.”
“You never told me that,” my mother put in. “You saw me before Floyd brought you home?”
“Of course I did,” my father answered. “Why do you think I was there?”
Great beauty has its drawbacks, of course. Even the most beautiful among us fear the ravages of time. The last person I would ever have been able to imagine giving in to that was my mother. Yet even our mothers turn out to be human. (Feet of clay, I had a character say in a book. It’s a clay universe, another character answers.)
It is like the memory of a bad dream when I recall the time my mother went to get a facelift. This was twenty years ago when facelifts were still fairly unusual things to do. Her sisters were elated. They felt they had sent a scout to the cutting edge of the beauty business. But I was in a funk. There was my mother, my ground of being, propped up on the pillows in her pressure bandages. Her beautiful sisters were all around her, worshipping at her daring. “She did it,” they kept saying. “She really did it. Can you believe she did it?”
“No,” I said, getting furious. “Beauty is one thing. Elective surgery is another.” I dropped my flowers at her feet and stormed out of the room and I didn’t see her again until the bandages were off and she was almost healed. “How could you do that?” I said when I saw her. “How could a woman your age be that crazy?”
Now, years later, I am the age she was then and I wonder if my anger was at the danger I thought she had put herself in or simply that I knew no matter how much I wanted to, I would never have the courage to let someone cut into me that close to my eyes or my brain.
Of course she looked absolutely marvelous after the stitches healed. She looked ten years younger and never seemed to miss the time or money she had spent. I’m still jealous of this facelift business. Even if I wanted to do it, and if I had the courage, I would not be able to. My psychoanalyst won’t let me. He’s a hard man. No drinking, no smoking, no facelifts, no breast implants, if you want access to that office. He’s not as beautiful as my mother, but he’s a lot fiercer and even more protective.
Being raised by a woman who worships beauty has other drawbacks besides the obvious one of not being able to measure up to the standard. Every Halloween of my life I have had to be a beautiful princess. I cannot imagine going to a costume party as a witch or a goblin or a joke. My mother always started weeks ahead making my Halloween costumes. I would be a beautiful antebellum princess or a beautiful princess out of King Arthur’s court, with a conical hat and tulle floating down and a blue silk dress with a train. Or I would be a beautiful Oriental princess or a flower girl or a junior bridesmaid or a bride.
Recently I was down on the Mississippi coast with my grandchildren on Halloween. My daughter-in-law, whose ancestors were scientists and artists in New Jersey, had dressed up my granddaughter as a pumpkin. I was shocked. Imagine a little girl not being a beautiful princess? A whole new world of possibilities opened before my eyes and I sat around all evening pondering the limiting aspects of perfectionism and beauty.
I remember a role I had in a fifth-grade play. The play was called Fire Hazards and was produced under the auspices of the fire department. I was chosen to play “Spontaneous Combustion.” All was going well until they told me I had to wear rags and sit in a garbage can on the stage. I quit the production. It was impossible for me to sit on a stage in such a guise.
I remembered the long mornings I would spend with my little friends Jean Finney and Donna Brummette playing dress-up with my mother’s old clothes. “Who is the most beautiful girl in the world?” I would demand. “You are, Ellen,” Donna and Jean would reply. Sometimes Donna would refuse to say it. Then I would sit on her until she did.
I even had to have beautiful dolls. Sometimes the dolls were beautifully dressed. If they weren’t, my mother would get out her sewing machine and begin to make clothes for them. Unfortunately, I liked naked dolls. The minute a doll arrived I would take off her clothes and put her to bed. “Stay there until I get back,” I would say. “I’ll be back in a little while.” I had a row of doll beds on the back porch piled up with naked dolls. My mother loves to tell the story of the day the Episcopal minister came to call and I took him out on the porch and introduced him to all my naked children. I never have been able to see the humor in that story, although I suppose the point is that the minister, like any good Anglican of that time, wanted the savages to be fully clad.
Another story my mother loves to tell is about the Christmas of 1943, right in the middle of the Second World War, when everything was rationed and people made their Christmas presents. My mother and two of her younger friends had spent a month making a chest of doll clothes to accompany a beautiful black-haired doll an older friend was giving me. There were evening dresses and silk nightgowns and even a coat with a real fur collar and cuffs. Christmas came and there was my doll with her unbelievable wardrobe. They had also found somewhere a toy washing machine and painted and fixed it up for me. It had a real hose and could be filled with real water.
At two o’clock that afternoon my mother found me out on the back porch in the freezing cold weather happily stuffing the last article of doll’s clothes into the washing machine. The beautiful doll lay on the floor, asleep and naked, and the fabulous handmade wardrobe was now a wad of ivory soap and water. “I wept,” she says, when she tells the story. “It was right in the middle of the war.”
When I am thinking deeply and philosophically about beauty I try to ponder the question of illusion. My mother’s beauty is not illusory but the enhancement of it certainly is. And the true downside of this endless search for and insistence upon beauty is that it has taught me to judge things by appearances. I was thinking of this the other night. It was eleven o’clock and I had turned on the television to see if the world was still at peace before I went to bed for the night. I was switching channels and came upon a strange and interesting program I have seen by accident several times. A program on PBS called Thinking Aloud. It is a program of interviews with philosophers and gurus. The host had just introduced the night’s guest, an unattractive man with bad teeth and an awkward ungainly body. Ichabod Crane, I remember thinking. What a strange-looking man. Then the man began to speak. He had just come from spending years in a Zen monastery and had returned to the world to try to teach people to love themselves and one another. He spoke movingly of the possibilities for understanding, the hope that the human race would evolve into more profound and loving creatures. I was spellbound. For the next thirty minutes I barely moved as I listened to this lovely man talk about human dreams. I completely forgot his teeth or the structure of his face or his ungainly posture. He had captured my imagination at a level that was beyond appearances. He had given me the idea that mankind could become more gentle, that happiness and understanding were possible goals for an individual or the race.
The best beauty tip I ever received was from a gorgeous aging model in Dallas. How do you do it? I had asked her. How do you stay so gorgeous, year after year? It’s all illusion, she said. Never forget that. Create an illusion and the rest will follow.
An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace? Of course. The illusion carries the light of the inspiration into the physical world. If your boyfriend is coming over at six o’clock and you think you aren’t pretty enough to make him love you, here is what you should do. Light candles, straighten up the house, put on music, put flowers on the table, roll up your hair and put on makeup and the prettiest, most colorful clothes that you have. Overdo it. Do every charming thing you can imagine. Not for the boyfriend and not even for yourself, really, but for the sake of beauty itself, the charming and illusory muse.
I would like to end this story with an interview I conducted with the daughter of the most beautiful woman in the town where I live. This woman is so lovely I put her photograph on the cover of one of my books. “How does it feel to live with a woman as beautiful as your mother?” I asked her thirteen-year-old daughter, Annabelle.
“Well, she’s always complaining that she’s fat.”
“Right,” I said. “Go on.”
“She’s always saying she’s getting wrinkled and old, but I don’t see any wrinkles. Of course she doesn’t dance anymore and I guess that makes her feel old.”
“Go on. What else?”
“Strange people come up to me and say, oh, you’re Gay’s daughter. It’s so weird. It’s like they don’t even know my name.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, she’s got more clothes than anyone I’ve ever seen, but she always says she doesn’t have anything to wear.”
“You don’t have to be beautiful for that.”
“It’s more like she doesn’t realize it. Like she doesn’t even care.”
“Oh, Annabelle,” I answered. “Thank you for that. That’s the key, isn’t it? The thing that makes great beauties truly beautiful. I called up my mother yesterday and told her I was going to write an article about living in the shadow of a beautiful mother and you know what she said? She said, ‘Well, I don’t know who that could be.’ She really meant it. She really doesn’t know how much we love to look at her.”
This is the woman who let me get a permanent wave when I was five years old. There was a girl in my kindergarten class whose mother owned a beauty parlor and she had a permanent wave. I was so jealous of her curly hair I could hardly sleep at night. I began to campaign, to beg, cry, whine, pout, plead, hide behind the sofa, cajole. My mother, who is a pushover in the child discipline department, caved in quickly and the next Saturday morning I was delivered to the beauty salon and set up underneath the permanent wave machine to get my curls. The beauty parlor was next door to my father’s office, in a wooden building with a boardwalk built up over the dirt street. This was 1940 and we were living in Mound City, Illinois, where my father was working for the Corps of Engineers building levees on the Mississippi River.
My mother kissed me goodbye and went off to do errands. The beauty parlor operator gave me a Coke to drink and began to apply huge steel rollers to my hair. Operator had real meaning in those days, as the permanent wave machine was a huge apparatus that had to be constantly monitored so that it wouldn’t “frizz” the hair. The operator had rolled the left side of my head when I began to panic. All of a sudden I realized that I couldn’t move. I was caught, trapped, held, in the steel embrace. A dozen steel hands had me by the hair. I began to scream at the top of my lungs. I screamed louder and louder. “Take it off,” I was screaming. “Stop doing this to me. Let me go.”
My father was next door in his office and heard my screams and came tearing through the screen doors to save me. “Get that child out of there,” he was screaming. “Who would do such a thing to a little girl?” Ten minutes later I was sitting in his lap in his big office chair, my head against his chest, my hand on his arm, and he was giving me sips of water from a little triangular-shaped paper cup. Best of all, he was mad at my mother. “Goddammit, Bodie,” he said, when she finally appeared and heard the story. “I can’t believe anyone could be that dumb. Spending hard-earned money to torture a little girl.” I smiled and turned my face deeper into his soft white shirt. “You are right,” my mother might have answered if she had known what I know now. “Distorting her sense of reality, not to mention half of her hair is permed and the other half is not.”
Fifty years later the karma caught up with me. It was another Saturday morning and my daughter-in-law called me from the coast. “Guess what?” she said. “Your granddaughter talked me into letting her pierce her ears.”
“Oh, no,” I answered. “I can’t stand it. She’s only six years old.”
“She wore me down. She begged and begged. She drove me crazy.”
“Why did you tell me this? This is more than I want to know.”
“Guess what she had put in?”
“I can’t imagine. Do I really have to know?”
“Hearts with diamonds in the middle.”
“You could have spared me that,” I answered. “I could have lived without that knowledge.”