1947

LAURA LIPPMAN

My mother at sixteen looks wiser than I am at sixty. Sophisticated and poised, too, in a way that I clearly never will be. Extremely thin, something else I will never be. Although I was a preemie, barely five pounds at birth, I gained weight rapidly; soon, my arms and legs were so deeply creased they looked like little pans of break-apart rolls ready for the oven. My grandmother counted the folds in my thighs and noticed that one side had more than the other. A doctor was consulted, and he said that one hip was slightly higher. “If she were a boy, I might correct it,” the doctor said, “but it’s fine for a girl to walk with a twitch.”

When my mother turned sixteen, World War II was not even two years in the past. She had spent part of the war on the coastal island of St. Simons, where her mother and aunt shared a house. They thought the children would be safer there than in Atlanta. My father lived on the Georgia mainland, in Brunswick; my mother went to school there, knew his cousins. But they would not meet for almost another decade, when he returned from the Korean War and enrolled in graduate school at Emory. My mother was a secretary to one of the deans, and when she announced her plans to marry Ted Lippman, her boss pulled my future father’s confidential record and said, “You can’t marry him. Look at this! And this! And this.”

I don’t know what details the dean shared with my mother, and she no longer remembers. She did, however, often tell me this: “I could have married richer men. But I never could have married a more interesting one.”

I took that as advice.