FOR MANY YEARS my mother’s hair was lacquered blacker than it was when she was young. Once she was embarrassed when I came home from college a couple of days early and she hadn’t gotten to the salon and her roots were showing. Shame, that goes to the roots: my mother bore two congenitally ill, doomed sons. For her, muscular dystrophy was a mythic curse: only males are afflicted by it, and only females carry it. A genetic defect. I can imagine my mother washing her face in the morning, looking at herself in the mirror, protecting herself, vigilant against the gray or silk-white roots that prove the past, that say that time is once, once, once. For so many years she knew her sons would die before her that she had to deny time every day to be there for them, to feed them, wash them, bring them books, papers and pencils, change the channel, bring the pisspot. Michael screamed in the night most every night for five or six years, waking everyone. She slept in a chair downstairs so she could wake him faster from his nightmares. How could she possibly believe one lifetime is all there is? She went to the cemetery, often. She had kept them alive inside her once before. “We’ll be together again someday,” she would insist, holding up her index finger. “Nobody can say it’s not true.”
MY MOTHER ALWAYS corrected people who thought that Dolly was short for Dolores; then she’d tell a story. “When the nurse handed me to my mother, all wrapped up in a blanket, my mother bent over me and said, ‘Oh, you little doll…eeeee!’” She cried out in mock horror as if the little “doll” were so ugly as to produce the shrieked second syllable of her name.
My brother Joe took a Polaroid family picture the Christmas before my mother’s death. We passed it around and as we emerged, as if from a mist, my mother placed her thumb over her face and said, “Nice picture.”
When she was younger, my mother’s discomfort with herself might have been mistaken for vanity. I remember her sitting at the kitchen table in a white satin robe and slippers, smoking, rolling her hair into flat curls she fastened with bobby pins. The robe had an iridescent pattern that made me think it was made of very thinly sliced wood. I’d seen that same kind of pattern on the shiny chasuble our pastor, Father Walters, wore at Mass. I must have been about four years old. I was interested in people’s clothing. I thought people chose to do the things they did so they could wear the costume they wanted to wear. Firemen agreed to fight fires so they could wear firemen’s hats and boots. If you were happiest in a gray denim cap and red neckerchief, the thing to do was learn to drive a train.
I remember playing on the light-green linoleum of the kitchen floor, coloring and talking to my mother and sometimes to myself. She sat sideways at the table, leaning forward to pluck her eyebrows with tweezers, peering into a round mirror she held in her other hand. Sometimes her concentration was so fierce it was hard for me to penetrate her solitude. The mirror made things look bigger. The other end of the tweezers had a hole in it which she pressed against her forehead, her cheeks, her chin. It left red circles all over her face. She kept wiping the end of the tweezers on a tissue she held in her hand along with the mirror. It looked like she was hurting herself. A lipstick-tipped Chesterfield burned in a heavy glass ashtray.
“But what are blackheads?” I asked.
“They’re ugly, that’s what they are.” A drag on the Chesterfield. Squinting through smoke. Exasperation at the curl that had unwound from its bobby pin. “Leave me alone now. Draw me a nice picture or something.”
My memories of these kitchen evenings are vivid, and I suspect that there was a particular night of the week when my father took my brother Bob with him and left me with my mother and her magnifying mirror. Probably those times I spent alone with my father—walking uptown to look in the store windows, or walking through the cemetery with its urns and angels, squirrels and muzzled cannons—were nights when Bob stayed home and maybe wondered at my mother’s fierce impatience with herself. I don’t know.
I remember an earthquake no one else recalls. It was a summer night, moths bumping against the screen door, lightning bugs blinking in the yard. I was lying on the cool linoleum floor. I have a vague memory of having done something wrong. I had been crying, probably throwing a tantrum on the floor, when I felt the house begin to shake. The screen door opened and closed and a moth flew in, in just that space of time. There was a low rumbling and trembling. My father said something about an earthquake and went to call the Pennsylvania Power & Light Co. My mother, in her satin robe, held me on her slippery lap. Bob may have been there too. I don’t remember. No one else remembers any of this. Over the years, whenever I’d bring it up, my mother always said, “Get the hell out. An earthquake? You’re dreaming.”
MY MOTHER’S VOICE—her “Dutch” accent, is hard to render on the page. The pitch and lilt of the Pennsylvania Dutch accent is, I think now, beautiful for its tone of innocent questioning, the voice generally swelling once about mid-sentence before concluding like a question even when it isn’t. And for the integrity of its stubbornly German syntax. I didn’t always think so, however, and remembering the years I spent as a young man trying to shed that inflected speech, I am struck by how pervasive was my mother’s influence on me, not to mention the persistence of her shame. She was stuck between not wanting to talk “Dutchified” and not wanting to sound “citified,” which she was afraid would be construed as putting on airs.
My mother taught me to devalue her. Even that sentence—let it stand—blames her for everything, including the shame I feel for having been ashamed of her. I grew up watching which fork others were using, what they were wearing, what they were talking about, what they seemed to be thinking. They, whoever they happened to be, had the power to find us wanting. “I’m not going to take you anywhere anymore unless you learn how to behave.”
The only picture I have of my mother as a child has been literally defaced: she scratched out her face with something sharp and scribbled over it with a red crayon. I asked her about it once. She avoided telling me why she did it. “Boy, did I get a lickin’ for that,” was all she said.
Between 1970 and 1972, my mother lost her mother and two of her sons: first Mike, then Mammy Etta, then Bob. Careful to hide her bitterness, she went deep inside herself and stayed there, at the same time constructing some other person to present to us, someone who was cheerfully busy, brimming with jokes, gossip, idle chatter. It was as if she herself were absent, but had created some rough replica through which she attempted to go on with her life. I pretended not to see this, played along with it; I believe we all did. She’d tell the same jokes over and over, sometimes within the same conversation. She’d talk about the rising price of peas or lettuce, and if the conversation lagged, she’d repeat herself, sometimes in exactly the same words.
“I’d planned on making pork chops, but they were awfully high—last week they were two eighty-nine and now they’re up to three forty-nine. It’s just ridiculous.…Oh, Marietta told me a good one last week: this guy goes into a bar and…I’m going to put some onions in with the roast; you always liked that.…I can’t believe it, what they’re getting for pork chops.…”
Occasionally, however, she would hint at what was really going on inside her, but in a way that discouraged further conversation. Sometimes she talked about Henry, the grocer in our old neighborhood who’d committed suicide. She mentioned him many times and always asked if I remembered. Of course. He and my mother had a secret that intrigued and mystified me when I was a kid. I often went to the store for my mother after school, before I was allowed to play. Sometimes my mother instructed me to see Henry, no one else; I was to ask for “a box of jiggers.” There was something mysterious, perhaps forbidden, going on. When I asked Henry about it, he said, “Never you mind,” in a way that made my imagination flare and strain to think what they could be. He had to get them down from the highest shelf with a caliper on a long stick; it was a light blue box with a pink rose on it. By the second grade I could read enough to sound out the words and sometimes guess at the meanings. I knew what a napkin was, and sanitary meant something about dirt or toilets, I wasn’t sure. I had to know.
I got my candy money by collecting empty bottles around the neighborhood, two cents for the small ones and five cents for the big ones, and when I had enough I went to see Henry. I ran two blocks to a lot behind the Presbyterian church and tore open the box. They were white, with cotton squares like the bottom of jewelry boxes, sealed with a tissue like Kleenex, and with a little blue stripe down the middle. I thought they must be bandages. Not long after that, I found one in the garbage can, bloody, covered with flies. They were bandages. I had figured out the secret: My mother was hurt, wounded, but she was too brave to tell us.