Prompt: Two People Having Lunch
(300 words or less)

I’d selected the restaurant not for the food, but for the atmosphere. My mother, I knew, would like this place because it was what she would call charming. “Charming” was my mother’s word. “Quaint” was another of her words that set my teeth on edge. My mother was deeply enamored of all things charming and quaint. Charming and quaint is often hokey and fake. For family vacations we went to places like Williamsburg, Virginia and Stockbridge, Massachusetts, re-creations of Colonial American towns where we saw how candles were made and horseshoes forged. We bore witness to reenactments of battles between redcoats and blue coats. This restaurant, which I chose, was decorated to look like an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, and it specialized in quiche Lorraine. “Specialized” was yet another of my mother’s words.

Even then, an adult, at least in the eyes of the law, I was desperate for my mother’s love. Later, after I was married, Albie had said to me, “You need to quit trying to get what will never happen.”

Having arrived at the charming restaurant a few minutes early, I sat at a window-side table where I studied the menu. When my mother got there, I stood up and kissed her on the cheek. Age had not diminished my mother’s beauty. Before sitting down, she set her pocketbook on the far end of the table where it rested against the window, where it was out of the way, but decidedly there, to be seen. I stared at the bag, and my mother said, “You should’ve seen Janet’s face when she saw it.” Janet, one of her closest friends, was comfortable. Comfortable or very comfortable or well-off or well-to-do were her euphemisms for rich. According to my mother, only vulgar people said rich. Her ideas about the behavior and the lexicon of fine people, such as herself, were fixed. “Fine” was yet another one of her words that pained me. Janet wasn’t rich rich, but she was very comfortable.

Cupping her hand around her mouth and leaning in closer to me, my mother had a secret she was anxious to share. “It’s a reproduction,” she said.

From two blocks away and at night, you’d spot that pocketbook as a knockoff. One of those achingly cheap knockoffs, the kind with tin hardware or crooked seams or the poop-brown leather embossed with LW instead of LV. “You’d never know it was a copy, would you?” my mother said, and she waited for me to agree.

The thing is, it’s not as if my mother had been longing for a Louis Vuitton pocketbook, but what she did want, what she ached for, was to give the impression that my father’s business was more successful than it was, that he was a big earner, a man much admired by his own standards of admiration, a man who could afford to buy his wife a Louis Vuitton pocketbook. Because my father believed that dignity was measured in dollars, my mother believed that her twenty-dollar knockoff Louis Vuitton pocketbook lent her husband stature on his terms, which also happened to be the terms of her friend Janet.

By this point in time, I had learned to say, “You’re right. No one would ever know.”

Long before this point in time, my mother was flipping through one of her magazines—Family Circle or Redbook, an issue dedicated to home decorating tips. In the section on Kitchens, she was overcome by the incomparable charm of an exposed brick wall. Even without an exposed brick wall, our kitchen was gagging on charm: yellow calico potholders trimmed with red bric-a-brac and matching dishtowels, ceramic salt and pepper shakers in the guise of Amish children, the radio fashioned as an old-time telephone, the sort with a hand-crank, and more decorative roosters than any kitchen should have to bear. Unfortunately our house had no brick wall to expose, and racing through the article for the information she was after, my mother learned that it would be prohibitively expensive to lay brick on sheetrock. However, the magazine, aware that the price tag for the incomparable charm of an exposed brick wall was steep, suggested to their readers the affordable alternative: a faux-brick veneer. Sheets of clay-red, brick-shaped molded polymer, the edges darkened as if weathered by time and smoke and soot, and it was as easy to install as it was to hang wallpaper.

All day, while my sisters and I were at school, she was at it, pausing only now and then to stretch and rub the small of her back. At ten minutes past three, when Nicole and Dawn got home, our mother was nearly done installing her faux-brick veneer. Nearly done, but not quite, and because she wanted her daughters to get the full effect that would be best appreciated when the job was completed, she called out, “Don’t come in.” Nicole and Dawn plopped down on the couch. A few minutes later, I arrived home—I was a dawdler—to find Nicole drawing a picture of a lake surrounded by mountains, a hawk flying overhead. Dawn, picking at the eczema on her elbow, without looking up, said, “Don’t go in the kitchen.”

Before I got the chance to ask why, our mother called out, “Okay, girls.” Like a game show hostess calling attention to the grand prize, she extended her arm with a flourish to usher us into the kitchen. “Ta-da,” she said, and then she asked, “Doesn’t it look exactly like real brick?”

Dawn nodded like a bobble-head and said, “It looks just like the fireplace where those ladies made candles,” and Nicole said, “It looks exactly like real brick to me,” and I said, “Are you blind?” I said, “It’s totally fake. Not in a million years would anyone think this is real brick.”

The same as after a sucker punch or the flash between an aneurysm and death, there was that split second of incomprehension followed by incredulity, and then our mother swiftly left the room. Swiftly, but not before I got a good look at the expression on her face. Dawn ran after her, calling out, “Mommy, no!” Nicole glared at me, and as if that weren’t enough unhappiness for one day, she asked, “And you wonder why no one in the family likes you?”

Until then, I had wondered no such thing; until then, I’d assumed they all liked me just fine, but once Nicole put it into words, spelled it out for me, it made sense; as much sense a nine-year-old girl could fathom of no one in the family likes you.