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My Mother: Gentle Hands and Foul Moods

Mom, Daddy, and me at my uncle’s house in Northern Virginia when I was about a year old.

My mother’s hands made my life. They churned our butter, kneaded our biscuit dough, checked my head for fevers, delicately plucked gravel from my knees, and when I had a cold, dabbed the medicinal reek of Vicks VapoRub on my chest from the cobalt-blue jar. At her side in church, I’d twirl her wedding rings around her finger and play with those soft hands. On long rides home from out of town in the farm pickup, I’d sprawl across her wide lap and doughy body. I lounged on her as if she were my couch.

Adria slowly made a bright home out of the weathered century-old place we got to live in when my father became manager of the farm. As Arthur Godfrey plucked his ukulele on the radio atop the fridge, she bleached cotton feed sacks in a big tub outside the open back door and sewed them into coarse, heavy bedsheets. She dyed some of those sacks red to fashion my red-and-white Mrs. Claus costume for the school pageant. I feared the other farm families like us in the audience would recognize the humble cloth and look down on me.

She’d often be reduced to dimes and nickels, but she was too proud to admit it. We’d hide in the bathroom and cup our hands over our ears as salesmen peddling brushes or vanilla extract pounded on our door.

My second-grade teacher sent word home that I couldn’t read the blackboard and was holding books inches from my face. The eye doctor prescribed glasses and a yolk-yellow liquid vitamin A in a dark-brown bottle. Every evening Mommy faithfully fed me a teaspoon. She and Daddy struggled to pay for it. I craved the stuff and can remember the taste even now. She kept it on the fridge’s top shelf, out of my reach, and policed that precious potion so as not to waste a drop.

She was my nurse and my guardian, my manners coach, my hairstylist. But only rarely my playmate. Except for my first rolls of a ball and for her storybook readings as I fell asleep, she never played with me. I was her beloved project. Her job was to feed, clothe, and protect me, not to entertain me. Her nervous, chicken-blinking blue eyes were forever turned in my direction.

* * *

IN THE BACKYARD one warm evening before supper, Daddy was helping me learn to walk along the top of the three-board fence that separated our yard from the cow pasture. I envied the nimble fence-walking of other kids. Daddy, once a daredevil boy, was lightly touching my outstretched hand as I stepped foot over shaky foot on the narrow board. “You’re doing good, Pie.” That was his nickname for me, short for Sweetie Pie. “Don’t be scared. You’re gettin’ it.”

Out the back door and down the steps Mommy flew. “Mary COD-ah! Get down from there right now! You’re gonna fall down and break your neck!” (She said that often.)

Daddy shook his head. “Swee-dart, you worry too much. She’ll be all right. Let the child play.” She’d squelched my other athletic efforts—tree climbing, balancing at the edge of brick walls, and pumping myself so high in my swing that I almost flew backwards over the tree branch that held it.

I crouched atop the fence, deciding whether to defy her. She’d shaken me up. I’d surely lose my balance now. Finally, I crawled down and slinked away, pouting. I never learned to walk a fence.

* * *

DREAD OF COMING disaster ruled my mother’s life. She never learned to drive, but from the passenger side of the truck, she squealed whenever Daddy approached an intersection or when vehicles shot past us. “Earl-LEE!” she’d scream my father’s name in a crescendoing screech. “Watch OUT!” Her right foot wore a hole through the truck’s floor mat from slamming into her imaginary brake. Each time before we went out, she’d park herself in front of her electric stove and intone, “Off-off-off-off-off,” pointing to each switched-off burner knob, plus the oven’s, to be sure.

In a crowd, Adria Bishop, at five foot eleven and nearing two hundred pounds, was almost always the biggest woman. She stood erect with long, spongy arms and legs. She was curvaceous, with a narrow waist. Warm when engaging with people, on guard and blinking the rest of the time, her expression oscillated between welcoming and forbidding. Her brown hair was thick, permed, and sprayed.

She hated her body and compared herself unfavorably to the highly polished rich women who lived all around us. She fetishized their sharply defined Achilles tendons and bony ankles; her own lower legs were thick and fleshy. She thought her breath was foul, so she sucked cloves. She asked me all my life, “Does my breath stink?” It never did. Her bodily fluids repulsed her, so even when she wasn’t having her period, she kept wads of toilet paper in her crotch. They would fall from her underwear and scatter along our floors, trailing her quiet shame. She found herself so odious that she feared her very biology might contaminate us.

For some reason, my mother needed for me to be very well behaved. At church, she held rule over the Women’s Circle like a stern, stiff-backed Puritan. There, she always wore her finest, putting on the most upright costume she could scratch together—a hat and a suit, if she could, with a broach at her high collar. At home, she could be jovial, bordering on bawdy, though when I was nine she warned me fiercely, “Don’t you ever let a boy put his thing in you.”

The tender side of her pitied the sparrows that stunned themselves by flying into her windows. She placed them high on a ledge, away from cats. But her moods could cloud easily. Often she’d stew all day over something, her face in a childish pout. If some woman irked her, say, by asking her to bring a pie to the church picnic when she’d just baked cookies for it, she took strong offense. “Tough tittie,” she’d grumble under her breath.

She cried a lot of angry tears throughout my childhood. Many times I’d find her weeping alone in the kitchen, her face red, puffy, scary mad. She and Daddy had just exchanged words; about what, I didn’t know.

I thought she was nuts. Her extremes made no sense. I had no idea how deeply tormented she was, or why.