Wahl Flowers
I
When I think about the mother of my childhood I’m first aware of the
smell of turpentine mixed with oil paint. I can see her standing at
that old maroon easel, flicking her eyes towards a group of flowers
askew in a vase. She steps back, lifting her left hand with her thumb
upright against the brush, measuring the view and then measuring the
canvas. Then she leans to the canvas, dabbing at something not yet
right.
This smell of turps and paint quickens me as chocolate chip cookies must do to others. It’s the smell of Mother, home, and hearth. The easel and palate squeezed into my parent’s bedroom were my rocking chair. So it’s no wonder that I consider the many paintings she’s left behind as valuable as my Father’s financial harvest. As I sit on my couch or walk through the rooms of my house I ponder the canvasses and delicately sketched nudes. I search these pictures for clues to my mother’s personality, wondering about spots that seem incomplete and awestruck by her ability with a piece of Conte’ crayon.
When Mom was a child her father called her Little Miss Marker. This may have been a tag for Shirley Temple, but it was grandfather’s way of teasing her about the constant drawing. Sketching was her means of escape from the boredom of the New Jersey farm and the fear of her alcoholic father. When she drew or painted she shut out the world and belonged to paint and charcoal.
Of course, that didn’t make her much of a mother. Before the dementia closed off her memory she confessed that she had never experienced that passion of motherhood most of us feel for our children. Perhaps it was because women spent many days in the hospital in 1944, even after a normal birth. Others handled and fed your baby, whom you rarely saw. She returned to that tiny apartment with a live-in nurse who took over for a month. By the time she was caring for me alone the bonding period had passed. My mother fed me properly, sewed charming dresses, equipped me with toys, and asked me to amuse myself so that she could paint. By the age of five I was quite independent, free to get into trouble or learn about the world on my own.
Someone meeting my mother in 1950 would have found a bright-eyed, petite lady with dark, curly hair, a tiny waist, and dainty features. They wouldn’t have known that her tidy figure would lead to a lifetime of shrimp and salad. Mom rarely topped one hundred pounds, but this diminutive person was as determined and forceful as she was little. Always she was a powerful force in my life. Eventually I realized that although I’d failed to please her in any way, my life seem to be devoted to trying.
Our memories of childhood exist in flashes. The striped rug in the hall way where I took my first steps. The day I walked home in snow above to my waist and despite great effort, arrived with urine soaked leggings. The birthday surprise party when I was ten, where I was truly surprised. Our narrow kitchen was fitted with a low shelf that served as a breakfast nook. On a shelf above were the Betty Crocker and Mystery Chef cook books along with the Bakelite radio that played Our Miss Brooks and Our Gal Sunday. Mom saved the coupons from cake mixes and cereal boxes to get our every day silver plated flatware. Sixty years later I would sort through these old cook books, give away the plate and radio, and curl up to digest huge books of Cézanne and Matisse. The actual things of our past can hound us in old age along with our misdeeds and omissions.
They say that if you keep your clothes long enough they’ll come back into style. This would have been true of my bell bottomed pants and angel blouses. It seems to be true for decorating as well. Mom employed the colors and shapes of 1950’s Modern, painting the walls with gray paint left from wartime battleships. Against this gloom sat furniture covered in chartreuse green and pillows in bright orange. The simple cherry table she enameled in black. Her taste in table settings ran to the square-shaped --- the everyday being thick square, forest green Melamine with the fancy china square and gray. Mother never really decorated a house. All the pieces were a backdrop for the paintings. No upholstery ever had patterns, just plain color. Carpets, too, were in solids and, after tiring of the gray, all walls were always white, wherever she lived. When you removed the art from my Mother’s house the soul went too.
There were five homes in my parents’ lives. In 1939 they moved into a small apartment in a village of apartments. There they spent the war years with mother painting in the bedroom and studying at an art institute school. They became friends with other residents and maintained these friendships long after leaving, many to death. By the time I was six they yearned for a real home and the Sunday amusement was touring model homes. In 1955 they settled on one, a huge modern space with windows lining opposite walls. A wretched mistake, this house was soon sold and replaced with a tiny sturdy brick place whose chief attraction was the splendid school I attended for my last 7 years of public education. Then in about 1970 my father bought the house of his dreams --- without consulting my Mother. By then I was raising a family in California and my only sense of this time for them was that they were drinking a great deal and having large parties. While that house was truly a masterpiece, eventually my Mother won over and they exchanged it for a large, but blocky place with a beautiful view. After that it was a nursing home. So behold the passage of seventy years, each with joys and sorrows, one passing more quickly than the last, and leading, regardless of success or failure, contribution or depletion, inevitably to the same, dismal result of death.
My mother now lives in a puzzle missing too many pieces. Each day is rigidly the same, yet she can’t remember where she is or when she came there. Sometimes she refuses to eat, which worries the staff. What amazes me are the bridges a mind builds for all that missing information. She always has a story to make sense. My father, now deceased, is always just “out”. He’ll soon be back and then they’ll go on to the next hotel. The ancient memories are tidily mixed amongst the present. She saw her mother yesterday at lunch. The farm is just around the corner. She’s in New Jersey now.
Mother’s visual memory is far better than the non-visual. I suppose that’s why the walls of Sunset Gardens are filled with romantic prints of early twentieth century women in their long dresses, puffy hair, and pigeon breasts. Glen Miller (whom I love) and Guy Lombardo (whom I hate) filter through the aural clutter of a room filled with fumbling ancients. If I show my Mom a photo of one of her paintings, like a dear friend, she recognizes it. But if I mention Annie’s name, 70 years her closest friend, she says “I didn’t know her.”
Periodically the lawyer will vulture in. When he talks about Barbara Mom grimaces and says “She’s not smart. She not good with money.” But when I tap her shoulder to get her attention she says “Barbara. How nice of you to come visit!” Her droopy face brightens and I’m her long lost friend, the only old friend amongst her home of strangers. The Barbara of her memory is eighteen with much to learn. The sixty-four year old Barbara has been helpful and frequent. She’s always happy to see that one.
The wilt and death will continue at Sunset Gardens. Her unit (quaintly called Reminiscence) contains about twenty people most of whom can’t hold a conversation. Some yell chronically, some mutter and drool. They are experts at unknown languages. In Reminiscence you must hold onto your things. A casually dropped purse or jacket may never surface again. In my mother’s room I find items I’ve never taken to her. Hummel knock-offs, a box of fossilizing Whitman’s chocolates, and a red glove have arrived in the second drawer of the bureau, yet she complains incessantly about thieving hands that take her stuff. Occasionally another resident will wander in while I visit, sit on the bed, and demand that she leave her own room.
Reminiscence is locked. The secret to the 4 digit code is that none of the residents can remember it long enough to get out. I distract her like a toddler drawn to candy with some small purpose so that I can slink away. Now she stands at the door, waving and sometimes crying as I leave.
“I’ll see you soon” I say.
“When?”, says Mom.
“Tomorrow” I say, since she has no measure for time.
The neurologist tells me I may expect her not to know me if I stay away too long. “When you have your surgery” says Dr. Melleman “don’t visit for about six weeks.” (Like a nursery school, a nursing home incubates viruses.) “But expect that she may not know you when you return.” I drag my feet in returning hoping the doctor’s prediction will come true. If she doesn’t know me will I become good all the time? I want her to forget who I am and lose her taste for speech. I wish her trembling and cloudiness. I baulk when they try to reduce the volume of drugs that keep her passive, no longer verbally combative. I despise myself for such thoughts, but then I add to the list, blending present and past into one, noxious slurry.
Before I found Sunset Gardens she spent a month alone in that big house. For the first five days I moved in, small dogs and all, to give her company and watch her. Finally she asked me to leave.
“I can’t entertain with you here. I need that basement room with the couch and chairs.”
“Who comes to see you?” I asked.
“Mother was here yesterday and tomorrow Annie and Lillian will come to lunch.”
All of this was delusion and proof of her dementia.
As her only relative I was responsible for bills and organization of finances. “You’re stealing from me. You are not to go into Robert’s office nor touch his books” she yelled. I screamed back and then realized, through my fear and annoyance, that she didn’t know my father would never return to that big house. Leaving, I returned at times she was gardening or asleep to continue my obligations.
The dementia had stolen my mother’s sense of organization. As I helped her in the kitchen I found drawers and cupboards with strange mixes of items. A closet might have 10 wine glasses, a stack of unopened mail, two paperbacks, a few forks, and a several bras. As my father began his third week of hospitalization I arrived to find ten suitcases arranged around on the floors, most lying open. One might contain forks, tablecloths, skirts and two books. The others were being loaded similarly, prepared for a trip of fantasy with odd items.
“My husband! He was supposed to come home for lunch. Where is he?”
“He’s in the hospital” I replied.
“Who’s in the hospital?”
“Robert, your husband, is in the hospital” I bounced to her.
“Who’s husband?”
A bit irritated I said “Yours.”
“My what?”
“Your husband, Robert, is in the hospital and we need to visit him.” I said, digging for patience.
“Oh.” Mom took a thoughtful pause. “Well, I waited for Robert to come home to lunch and he never showed up. I just had to go ahead and eat without him.”
And so it went with conversations spiraling in on themselves, getting nowhere with great confusion on Mom’s part and growing irritation on mine.
Within a few weeks the calls from the neighbors began.
“Your mother has locked herself out of the house. She is clutching her purse but has no key. She came to my door crying.”
After calls on three successive days I tempted her with a drive in the country, lifted her into my truck, and drove the forty minutes to my own home. There I entertained her with wine and cheese. She got sleepy and I tucked her into my bed. Then I picked up the phone.
Using one of those shiny catalogs listing types of care in each facility, I called fifteen nursing homes. “Memory care” was what they called the dementia unit. Finally Sunset Gardens assured me that they not only had a space but I could bring her over immediately. As we walked in I was shaking and Mom, nonchalant. Two young women met us. Bright and cheery, one took my mother’s hand and led her away. With the other I signed papers. Old people wandered and fidgeted around us. On her leg they taped an alarm triggered at the door.
For the first month my mother wandered Sunset in her red trench coat dragging a suitcase. The alarm rang frequently. I took the suitcases home so she carried a box with her. I took the boxes and she packed her things into a trash can and carried that around. When Dad, out of the hospital, joined her, l this behavior stopped. By the time he died her mind didn’t know there was any other world.
Grandma’s partiality for the boy child hung in Mother’s mind, thick and ugly. But she never made the link to her disappointment that I was born female. Exiting my mother’s womb as a girl was the biggest mistake of my life. For a month I had no name. They had planned to call me Joseph. Finally they settled on Barbara, rejecting Roberta. With Barbara they could still call me Bobby, my father’s childhood nick name. All my efforts to redeem my female status fell to naught. My grades were rarely good enough. When they were the reward was reduced by their limited expectations. I was taught housekeeping and typing to get me by.
Mother and I were folding napkins at Brighton Gardens. Her method was laborious so I taught her to do it quickly. “I didn’t think you could do something like that” she snipped. “You never were good for much.”
I think most of us dislike one of our parents. There’s one we can never please. Had I been a doctor I would have been the wrong sort or should have been a lawyer. The school I’d attended wouldn’t have been as good as someone else’s. My home wouldn’t have been large enough, my child not as bright, my husband not as stellar.
After all their things had been moved I began to sort the papers. In one file I found eulogies each had written about the other. Mother’s was in five handwritten pages, Dad’s typed to about ten. Nowhere in either of those tomes was my existence name ever mentioned. I read through their childhood years, the struggle for education, the depression and the war. Mother painted, Dad became successful, and still there was no Barbara. Near the end of his writings Dad had penciled “Barbara” at the edge. That was as close as I got to existing. Curiously there’s a great freedom in this invisibility. If I was a mere responsibility to them, I could rewrite my life to suit myself. No longer did I owe them even the attempt to please. My role had become their role with me --- to honor my responsibility and lead my life as I wished. It was the illumination of a new freedom.
I used to worry about what people were thinking of me. Mom said “No one is thinking about you at all. They’re all too busy thinking about themselves.”
Art is what it is. It’s not something defined in books or by committees and organizations. It’s subjective. If it’s art to you, it’s art.
Never buy chicken in the spring.
Always stand up when you’re introduced a woman visibly older than yourself.
The only two things you should ever buy before you have the cash are a car and a house. All other items you should do without until you can afford them.
You clean your hairbrush by soaking it in ammonia.
Shop around a lot. Get the best bargain. This applies to both tangibles and mates.
There are worse things than being alone.
You can love a rich man as easily as you can love a poor man. (But she never taught me how to find a rich man.)
The best way to decorate is to put all the permanent things in neutral colors. Then bring in the color with the things you can change.
Save your money.
Magenta, mustard, and burgundy look really good together. So do turquoise and orange.
The next depression is a sure thing. We just never know when.
You should wear pink when you’re old. It makes your skin look better.
Feed a cold and starve a fever.
The art crones, a group of middle aged women who shared a rented studio, sat each noon with their lunches and cigarettes, chatting about husbands, kids, and art, and bemoaning their limited success in the shows. Mom and most of her mates had entered dozens of respected art shows at museums and universities. They were usually accepted but rarely, almost never, won anything. Winners of these shows were invariably male. The women had found themselves in the very male world of post World War II, more expert with brushes than pots and pans, but stifled by the domination of roosters.
I suspect it was my mother who hatched the idea. She was cynical, with her father’s yen for a practical joke. The ladies would have been haranguing about the unfairness of being a female artist. Mom would have said: “Why don’t we do a little experiment. Why don’t we put together a group of works and enter as a man.” I can see Lillian waving her cigarette skyward in jubilation, Annie cackling, and Mom taking another sip of cheap, white wine. It would require unrecognizable art work, a phony man’s name, and a fellow to walk the pieces into the show.
On a large canvas my mother collaged and painted, the focal point being a large photo ripped from Life magazine of a monkey with his mouth open. On the monkey’s tongue she pasted an aspirin then named the piece “Monkey Do”. Lillian, partial to sculpture, developed the idea of mounting and stiffening one of her daughter’s bountiful bras. Sprayed with bronze paint, it appeared cast --- and hilarious. She named it “Blossoming Youth”. Dori had been doing a poster stenciling project and it had resulted in a blotter with letters and words, randomly angled and brilliantly colored. The result had some interesting potential, so framed it became “Pandemonium”.
My mother, I’m sure, was the one who concocted the name of the surrogate artist. She sourly commented that the graffiti found on the wall of the art school toilet would win a show if drawn by a man --- John wall art --- so they named their artist Jon Wahl. Hiring a male accomplice to deliver the pieces, they entered the art show at the local museum.
Once they had won --- first, second, honorable mention, and grand prize --- once they had enjoyed their private guffaws and tipped the Champaign flutes --- then the cat crawled out of the bag. To the newspaper interviews summoning John Wahl arrived three women, laughing, middle finger figuratively raised, telling all. Photos were taken, articles and columns were written, and the women had their moments of fame. In the museum, “Jon Wahl” was given a private show. But the point having been made, the situation reverted to “normal” and males continued to dominate the art shows.
Though I’ve spent most of a lifetime attempting to understand my mother’s inattention and scorn for me I also have to admit that she left some powerful lessons behind her. Now she languishes in a nursing home, returned to an infantile innocence. I now see her mistakes reflected in the ones I made with my own daughters and this leads me to be grateful for what she did give me. I know how to hunt for the ugly underside of life and how to point with delight at the emperor’s nakedness. My eyes are more inclusive and less critical than they might have been. I’ve a keen love of color. My finances are sound. And I can type. How many daughters of distracted mothers can count so much value from that relationship?
This smell of turps and paint quickens me as chocolate chip cookies must do to others. It’s the smell of Mother, home, and hearth. The easel and palate squeezed into my parent’s bedroom were my rocking chair. So it’s no wonder that I consider the many paintings she’s left behind as valuable as my Father’s financial harvest. As I sit on my couch or walk through the rooms of my house I ponder the canvasses and delicately sketched nudes. I search these pictures for clues to my mother’s personality, wondering about spots that seem incomplete and awestruck by her ability with a piece of Conte’ crayon.
When Mom was a child her father called her Little Miss Marker. This may have been a tag for Shirley Temple, but it was grandfather’s way of teasing her about the constant drawing. Sketching was her means of escape from the boredom of the New Jersey farm and the fear of her alcoholic father. When she drew or painted she shut out the world and belonged to paint and charcoal.
Of course, that didn’t make her much of a mother. Before the dementia closed off her memory she confessed that she had never experienced that passion of motherhood most of us feel for our children. Perhaps it was because women spent many days in the hospital in 1944, even after a normal birth. Others handled and fed your baby, whom you rarely saw. She returned to that tiny apartment with a live-in nurse who took over for a month. By the time she was caring for me alone the bonding period had passed. My mother fed me properly, sewed charming dresses, equipped me with toys, and asked me to amuse myself so that she could paint. By the age of five I was quite independent, free to get into trouble or learn about the world on my own.
Someone meeting my mother in 1950 would have found a bright-eyed, petite lady with dark, curly hair, a tiny waist, and dainty features. They wouldn’t have known that her tidy figure would lead to a lifetime of shrimp and salad. Mom rarely topped one hundred pounds, but this diminutive person was as determined and forceful as she was little. Always she was a powerful force in my life. Eventually I realized that although I’d failed to please her in any way, my life seem to be devoted to trying.
Our memories of childhood exist in flashes. The striped rug in the hall way where I took my first steps. The day I walked home in snow above to my waist and despite great effort, arrived with urine soaked leggings. The birthday surprise party when I was ten, where I was truly surprised. Our narrow kitchen was fitted with a low shelf that served as a breakfast nook. On a shelf above were the Betty Crocker and Mystery Chef cook books along with the Bakelite radio that played Our Miss Brooks and Our Gal Sunday. Mom saved the coupons from cake mixes and cereal boxes to get our every day silver plated flatware. Sixty years later I would sort through these old cook books, give away the plate and radio, and curl up to digest huge books of Cézanne and Matisse. The actual things of our past can hound us in old age along with our misdeeds and omissions.
They say that if you keep your clothes long enough they’ll come back into style. This would have been true of my bell bottomed pants and angel blouses. It seems to be true for decorating as well. Mom employed the colors and shapes of 1950’s Modern, painting the walls with gray paint left from wartime battleships. Against this gloom sat furniture covered in chartreuse green and pillows in bright orange. The simple cherry table she enameled in black. Her taste in table settings ran to the square-shaped --- the everyday being thick square, forest green Melamine with the fancy china square and gray. Mother never really decorated a house. All the pieces were a backdrop for the paintings. No upholstery ever had patterns, just plain color. Carpets, too, were in solids and, after tiring of the gray, all walls were always white, wherever she lived. When you removed the art from my Mother’s house the soul went too.
There were five homes in my parents’ lives. In 1939 they moved into a small apartment in a village of apartments. There they spent the war years with mother painting in the bedroom and studying at an art institute school. They became friends with other residents and maintained these friendships long after leaving, many to death. By the time I was six they yearned for a real home and the Sunday amusement was touring model homes. In 1955 they settled on one, a huge modern space with windows lining opposite walls. A wretched mistake, this house was soon sold and replaced with a tiny sturdy brick place whose chief attraction was the splendid school I attended for my last 7 years of public education. Then in about 1970 my father bought the house of his dreams --- without consulting my Mother. By then I was raising a family in California and my only sense of this time for them was that they were drinking a great deal and having large parties. While that house was truly a masterpiece, eventually my Mother won over and they exchanged it for a large, but blocky place with a beautiful view. After that it was a nursing home. So behold the passage of seventy years, each with joys and sorrows, one passing more quickly than the last, and leading, regardless of success or failure, contribution or depletion, inevitably to the same, dismal result of death.
My mother now lives in a puzzle missing too many pieces. Each day is rigidly the same, yet she can’t remember where she is or when she came there. Sometimes she refuses to eat, which worries the staff. What amazes me are the bridges a mind builds for all that missing information. She always has a story to make sense. My father, now deceased, is always just “out”. He’ll soon be back and then they’ll go on to the next hotel. The ancient memories are tidily mixed amongst the present. She saw her mother yesterday at lunch. The farm is just around the corner. She’s in New Jersey now.
Mother’s visual memory is far better than the non-visual. I suppose that’s why the walls of Sunset Gardens are filled with romantic prints of early twentieth century women in their long dresses, puffy hair, and pigeon breasts. Glen Miller (whom I love) and Guy Lombardo (whom I hate) filter through the aural clutter of a room filled with fumbling ancients. If I show my Mom a photo of one of her paintings, like a dear friend, she recognizes it. But if I mention Annie’s name, 70 years her closest friend, she says “I didn’t know her.”
Periodically the lawyer will vulture in. When he talks about Barbara Mom grimaces and says “She’s not smart. She not good with money.” But when I tap her shoulder to get her attention she says “Barbara. How nice of you to come visit!” Her droopy face brightens and I’m her long lost friend, the only old friend amongst her home of strangers. The Barbara of her memory is eighteen with much to learn. The sixty-four year old Barbara has been helpful and frequent. She’s always happy to see that one.
The wilt and death will continue at Sunset Gardens. Her unit (quaintly called Reminiscence) contains about twenty people most of whom can’t hold a conversation. Some yell chronically, some mutter and drool. They are experts at unknown languages. In Reminiscence you must hold onto your things. A casually dropped purse or jacket may never surface again. In my mother’s room I find items I’ve never taken to her. Hummel knock-offs, a box of fossilizing Whitman’s chocolates, and a red glove have arrived in the second drawer of the bureau, yet she complains incessantly about thieving hands that take her stuff. Occasionally another resident will wander in while I visit, sit on the bed, and demand that she leave her own room.
Reminiscence is locked. The secret to the 4 digit code is that none of the residents can remember it long enough to get out. I distract her like a toddler drawn to candy with some small purpose so that I can slink away. Now she stands at the door, waving and sometimes crying as I leave.
“I’ll see you soon” I say.
“When?”, says Mom.
“Tomorrow” I say, since she has no measure for time.
The neurologist tells me I may expect her not to know me if I stay away too long. “When you have your surgery” says Dr. Melleman “don’t visit for about six weeks.” (Like a nursery school, a nursing home incubates viruses.) “But expect that she may not know you when you return.” I drag my feet in returning hoping the doctor’s prediction will come true. If she doesn’t know me will I become good all the time? I want her to forget who I am and lose her taste for speech. I wish her trembling and cloudiness. I baulk when they try to reduce the volume of drugs that keep her passive, no longer verbally combative. I despise myself for such thoughts, but then I add to the list, blending present and past into one, noxious slurry.
Before I found Sunset Gardens she spent a month alone in that big house. For the first five days I moved in, small dogs and all, to give her company and watch her. Finally she asked me to leave.
“I can’t entertain with you here. I need that basement room with the couch and chairs.”
“Who comes to see you?” I asked.
“Mother was here yesterday and tomorrow Annie and Lillian will come to lunch.”
All of this was delusion and proof of her dementia.
As her only relative I was responsible for bills and organization of finances. “You’re stealing from me. You are not to go into Robert’s office nor touch his books” she yelled. I screamed back and then realized, through my fear and annoyance, that she didn’t know my father would never return to that big house. Leaving, I returned at times she was gardening or asleep to continue my obligations.
The dementia had stolen my mother’s sense of organization. As I helped her in the kitchen I found drawers and cupboards with strange mixes of items. A closet might have 10 wine glasses, a stack of unopened mail, two paperbacks, a few forks, and a several bras. As my father began his third week of hospitalization I arrived to find ten suitcases arranged around on the floors, most lying open. One might contain forks, tablecloths, skirts and two books. The others were being loaded similarly, prepared for a trip of fantasy with odd items.
“My husband! He was supposed to come home for lunch. Where is he?”
“He’s in the hospital” I replied.
“Who’s in the hospital?”
“Robert, your husband, is in the hospital” I bounced to her.
“Who’s husband?”
A bit irritated I said “Yours.”
“My what?”
“Your husband, Robert, is in the hospital and we need to visit him.” I said, digging for patience.
“Oh.” Mom took a thoughtful pause. “Well, I waited for Robert to come home to lunch and he never showed up. I just had to go ahead and eat without him.”
And so it went with conversations spiraling in on themselves, getting nowhere with great confusion on Mom’s part and growing irritation on mine.
Within a few weeks the calls from the neighbors began.
“Your mother has locked herself out of the house. She is clutching her purse but has no key. She came to my door crying.”
After calls on three successive days I tempted her with a drive in the country, lifted her into my truck, and drove the forty minutes to my own home. There I entertained her with wine and cheese. She got sleepy and I tucked her into my bed. Then I picked up the phone.
Using one of those shiny catalogs listing types of care in each facility, I called fifteen nursing homes. “Memory care” was what they called the dementia unit. Finally Sunset Gardens assured me that they not only had a space but I could bring her over immediately. As we walked in I was shaking and Mom, nonchalant. Two young women met us. Bright and cheery, one took my mother’s hand and led her away. With the other I signed papers. Old people wandered and fidgeted around us. On her leg they taped an alarm triggered at the door.
For the first month my mother wandered Sunset in her red trench coat dragging a suitcase. The alarm rang frequently. I took the suitcases home so she carried a box with her. I took the boxes and she packed her things into a trash can and carried that around. When Dad, out of the hospital, joined her, l this behavior stopped. By the time he died her mind didn’t know there was any other world.
II
“Let
me tell you.” Mother started one of her more insistent tales. ‘My
mother once said to me “If Bill had been born first I never would have
had you.”’ Grandma’s partiality for the boy child hung in Mother’s mind, thick and ugly. But she never made the link to her disappointment that I was born female. Exiting my mother’s womb as a girl was the biggest mistake of my life. For a month I had no name. They had planned to call me Joseph. Finally they settled on Barbara, rejecting Roberta. With Barbara they could still call me Bobby, my father’s childhood nick name. All my efforts to redeem my female status fell to naught. My grades were rarely good enough. When they were the reward was reduced by their limited expectations. I was taught housekeeping and typing to get me by.
Mother and I were folding napkins at Brighton Gardens. Her method was laborious so I taught her to do it quickly. “I didn’t think you could do something like that” she snipped. “You never were good for much.”
I think most of us dislike one of our parents. There’s one we can never please. Had I been a doctor I would have been the wrong sort or should have been a lawyer. The school I’d attended wouldn’t have been as good as someone else’s. My home wouldn’t have been large enough, my child not as bright, my husband not as stellar.
After all their things had been moved I began to sort the papers. In one file I found eulogies each had written about the other. Mother’s was in five handwritten pages, Dad’s typed to about ten. Nowhere in either of those tomes was my existence name ever mentioned. I read through their childhood years, the struggle for education, the depression and the war. Mother painted, Dad became successful, and still there was no Barbara. Near the end of his writings Dad had penciled “Barbara” at the edge. That was as close as I got to existing. Curiously there’s a great freedom in this invisibility. If I was a mere responsibility to them, I could rewrite my life to suit myself. No longer did I owe them even the attempt to please. My role had become their role with me --- to honor my responsibility and lead my life as I wished. It was the illumination of a new freedom.
III
Here’s a list of the things my mother taught me:I used to worry about what people were thinking of me. Mom said “No one is thinking about you at all. They’re all too busy thinking about themselves.”
Art is what it is. It’s not something defined in books or by committees and organizations. It’s subjective. If it’s art to you, it’s art.
Never buy chicken in the spring.
Always stand up when you’re introduced a woman visibly older than yourself.
The only two things you should ever buy before you have the cash are a car and a house. All other items you should do without until you can afford them.
You clean your hairbrush by soaking it in ammonia.
Shop around a lot. Get the best bargain. This applies to both tangibles and mates.
There are worse things than being alone.
You can love a rich man as easily as you can love a poor man. (But she never taught me how to find a rich man.)
The best way to decorate is to put all the permanent things in neutral colors. Then bring in the color with the things you can change.
Save your money.
Magenta, mustard, and burgundy look really good together. So do turquoise and orange.
The next depression is a sure thing. We just never know when.
You should wear pink when you’re old. It makes your skin look better.
Feed a cold and starve a fever.
IIII
The
pinnacle of my mother’s art career was the Jon Wahl adventure. I’m
certain she didn’t see it that way, but it was an education in reality
for both of us. To that point we had a belief in the fairness of the
world, although hers was beginning to waver which spawned the exhibit.The art crones, a group of middle aged women who shared a rented studio, sat each noon with their lunches and cigarettes, chatting about husbands, kids, and art, and bemoaning their limited success in the shows. Mom and most of her mates had entered dozens of respected art shows at museums and universities. They were usually accepted but rarely, almost never, won anything. Winners of these shows were invariably male. The women had found themselves in the very male world of post World War II, more expert with brushes than pots and pans, but stifled by the domination of roosters.
I suspect it was my mother who hatched the idea. She was cynical, with her father’s yen for a practical joke. The ladies would have been haranguing about the unfairness of being a female artist. Mom would have said: “Why don’t we do a little experiment. Why don’t we put together a group of works and enter as a man.” I can see Lillian waving her cigarette skyward in jubilation, Annie cackling, and Mom taking another sip of cheap, white wine. It would require unrecognizable art work, a phony man’s name, and a fellow to walk the pieces into the show.
On a large canvas my mother collaged and painted, the focal point being a large photo ripped from Life magazine of a monkey with his mouth open. On the monkey’s tongue she pasted an aspirin then named the piece “Monkey Do”. Lillian, partial to sculpture, developed the idea of mounting and stiffening one of her daughter’s bountiful bras. Sprayed with bronze paint, it appeared cast --- and hilarious. She named it “Blossoming Youth”. Dori had been doing a poster stenciling project and it had resulted in a blotter with letters and words, randomly angled and brilliantly colored. The result had some interesting potential, so framed it became “Pandemonium”.
My mother, I’m sure, was the one who concocted the name of the surrogate artist. She sourly commented that the graffiti found on the wall of the art school toilet would win a show if drawn by a man --- John wall art --- so they named their artist Jon Wahl. Hiring a male accomplice to deliver the pieces, they entered the art show at the local museum.
Once they had won --- first, second, honorable mention, and grand prize --- once they had enjoyed their private guffaws and tipped the Champaign flutes --- then the cat crawled out of the bag. To the newspaper interviews summoning John Wahl arrived three women, laughing, middle finger figuratively raised, telling all. Photos were taken, articles and columns were written, and the women had their moments of fame. In the museum, “Jon Wahl” was given a private show. But the point having been made, the situation reverted to “normal” and males continued to dominate the art shows.
Though I’ve spent most of a lifetime attempting to understand my mother’s inattention and scorn for me I also have to admit that she left some powerful lessons behind her. Now she languishes in a nursing home, returned to an infantile innocence. I now see her mistakes reflected in the ones I made with my own daughters and this leads me to be grateful for what she did give me. I know how to hunt for the ugly underside of life and how to point with delight at the emperor’s nakedness. My eyes are more inclusive and less critical than they might have been. I’ve a keen love of color. My finances are sound. And I can type. How many daughters of distracted mothers can count so much value from that relationship?
===========================================
Hard Times At The Holiday Bar
On any Sunday morning at 6:00AM on Highway 20 in Nice, California, you can see several men waiting. They aren’t waiting for mass at St. Brigid’s, or a hike in the manzanita strewn hills, nor are they waiting to rent a dinghy to catch catfish on the lake across the street. These bedraggled fellows are waiting for the Holiday Bar to open and provide them with their first drink of the day. When Jake unlocks the door they will climb up onto those scabby, wooden bar stools and ask for a snootful of whiskey and soda, or Wild Turkey, or whatever it is that each truly devoted drunk uses to start the day instead of bacon and eggs. Greeting them will be the fetidity of cigarettes and spilled cheap booze, and a jukebox loaded with down home, hard luck, sad looser, country songs.
Leticia never expected to work in such a dive, not a place with linoleum so worn the pattern was nearly gone, a joint with embossed metal ceilings so old they were rusted, and especially not in a place where the Saturday night fights were in the room, not on the TV. But there she was, joint owner of a single card table restricted to the game of lowball poker, in the back room of the Holiday Bar, adjacent to a malodorous, single toilet. At home were her two small children in the care of a nineteen year old with flossy hair, a toddler of her own, and the singular ability to make sourdough whole wheat bread so good that the first loaf disappeared before it cooled.
An unstable bench outside the bar was Leticia’s perch for a break. It was relief from the clatter and boasts of the chip bleeders who’d spend the night trying to outwit one another at cards. She’d headed there at 9:00PM, after shilling to fill the game. Two more guys with paychecks had arrived so she had stirred the chili pot, made more coffee, and walked past the pool table, and through the dirty old bar, to rest on the bench.
Snowbird was on the jukebox --- “And if I could you know that I would fly away with you”. She envied the brilliance of the song writer, a wit who’d strung a bunch of clichés into a top seller, and wondered at her own foolishness for turning a college degree into work that most trailer trash would reject. Nightly she cleaned ashtrays, mopped spilled beer, and played mommy to the weak players and wild cards who liked this game, thus creating her paltry living. She daydreamed about her small, blond daughters, missing their constant questions and their warm, savory hugs. Had her husband, Ronny, not bought the right to run the game, and cashed-out his Post Office job, she’d be making oatmeal cookies and reading Call of the Wild out loud. She also missed her small ranch at the end of the valley, her spinning wheel and loom, and all the other homey additions that had made her life so sweet. The Holiday Bar was a hell she resented. It was ugly, stinky, hard on the ears, and way too far from home. But there were children to feed, so she’d stand pat.
“Nice night,” Jim said as he came out of the door. He was the resident broom pusher and “gofer”.
“Yea,” responded Leticia, leaning to the right to see a bit of glittering lake. “Pretty loud in there,” she added.
Sitting on the bench he lit a Camel, spitting out the bits. Nondescript explained all of Jim --- khaki pants, grayed shirt, mouse brown hair that was neither too short nor too long, and simple conversation. He smelled of cheap dryer sheets, Bud, and smoke. His voice trailed a twang of
Oklahoma through to Bakersfield, still dusty from the mistakes of parents and grandparents. Leticia looked at his hands and then hers.
“I’d better get back in there,” she said to give her a bluff from conversation.
At about 11:00PM Meat came through the door, all two hundred fifty pounds, six foot two, able to shot-put-the-table-through-the-window of him.
“I’m ready,” Meat cawed and dropped two c-notes into a game with a ten dollar buy-in. “Deal me in, and her too,” he said, elbowing his sprite of a wife in the brown print dress. She giggled as they sat. Ronny smelled action and welcomed Meat with a crooked grin. The guy was good for at least four hundred, would lose it all, and stay jolly through the whole process. Plus he’d tell good stories. Meat was a tunnel hog working on those huge machines that grind through mountains to create holes for roads and trains. It was hard, dangerous work. Although he was broad, Meat wasn’t fat. He was muscled like a giant. Lots of guys couldn’t tell the difference, thus giving Meat an ace in barroom bets. His angle was to bet a drunk he could lift a heavy bar stool by the bottom of one leg with one hand. Meat would lie on the floor and raise the stool high, pocketing the ten or twenty that had been the bet.
In the card room the players called for set-ups, so Leticia went to the bar. She waited for Jake, the barkeep, to fill her tray with a bourbon and cream, a gin and tonic, four Buds and a Mich as she watched the line-up at the bar. The jukebox had gotten to Thank God and Greyhound You’re Gone, one of the few songs she could tolerate. A skinny military sort was talking too loudly down at the end of the bar and telling the short guy next to him that the “weed in Nam is the best in the world,” causing Jake to wince. Three seats closer a guy in a denim jacket had his head down on the bar, snoring.
“Why don’t you sing a few bars of I’ve Got to Get Out of This Place? “ Leticia said to Jake.
He snickered and Leticia followed singing, “if it’s the last thing I ever do”.
“That bad?” asked Jake. He’d been there for fifteen years.
Leticia finished, “Honey, there’s a better place for me and you.”
The tray filled and she thanked him adding, “Shit! Just give me a little air.”
Back at the card table Meat snuggled his wife as he dragged a pot on the table.
“I’m on a rush. Splice those cards, cut, burn one, and deal.” Meat grabbed his beer, tossed a nickel bill at Leticia, and fanned the hand close to his chest. Ronny leered and winked. As owner of the game he always loved a loser, but a happy loosey-goosey kept him chuckling. He knew the game would go through the night, fueled by cash and yarns from this great, jovial bear. He also knew that the two of them would return to the valley in the morning sufficiently bankrolled to stretch through a couple of weeks.
“Let the good times roll,” Ronny thought. “Let ‘em roll and roll.”
The chili was burning in the crock pot, so Leticia stirred it and served it in paper cups. One of the metal chairs had lost a screw and finally broke under the stress of the girth and mirth of Meat. The toilet went on the fritz and would probably keep running for a few hours until Jake could get back to fix it. And Leticia felt fat. She was fat, tired, and smelled of smoke and beer.
At about midnight Leticia took another break. By this time the jukebox was playing Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw. She figured that the besotted patrons likely missed the joke in the Jimmy Buffett song. “Your voice it sounds so wonderful, but yer face don't look too clear.” She liked this one, too, but hated most of the others. The Tammys and Georges and Hanks were trash singers to her, reminiscent of the 1950’s in her southern Ohio home. All of country music with it’s booze and trains and fucked up love affairs was bull-pucky. But the snob in Leticia warred with life’s necessities. “I’m just betting on the come,” she mused, “then I’ll get outta here.”
Exiting the bar, Leticia found a small boy of about eight sitting on the bench. Lowering herself next to him, she asked where his folks were, expecting to hear that they were inside partying.
“Dad’s in that, thar,” the boy said pointing to a tiny old trailer parked beside the bar.
“And your Mom?” asked Leticia hopefully.
The kid shook his head. “He’s thar with some lady.”
“Some lady!” Leticia thought cynically. “Who the heck’d leave a small kid in front of this dive on a busy road while he porked some floozy.” She missed her girls, hoped they were safe and asleep. The long blond braids, the missing teeth --- she was skipping part of their waning childhood while working in this midden.
Looking at him more carefully she saw a kid of about eight, thin, and sandy haired. His clothes were dirty and so was he, and there were no socks for his shoes. And then there were those sad eyes and the almost inaudible voice. Leticia’s mind rolled to her mother’s childhood stories about being left in a train station late into the night while her father drank. It was so traumatic that the old lady still wept at age eighty-five. “Those of us who had sweet childhoods don’t understand the experiences of those who haven’t,” she thought.
“What’s your name?” she asked, seeking some solace for this child. He was out here, lost like an exposed card in a pat hand, unexpectedly abandoned and in danger.
Speaking softly he twanged, “Joey.”
“Well, Joey, I guess he’ll be back soon. Meanwhile I’m going to get you something. I’ll be gone just a minute.” Then she walked up the street. A block away was an all night Quick Mart. She bought a pack of HoHos for herself and a chocolate cookie as big as a hub cap. Grabbing a napkin she hustled back to the bench.
“Here.” Leticia handed the cookie to the kid. His grim eyes belied his smile of thanks. She felt all-in and knew she couldn’t stay with this child. “Just remember,” she told him, “nobody is always a winner.” “Amarillo Slim said,” that she mused to herself. For a few minutes Leticia watched Joey nibble. He picked each chocolate chip out with a dirty finger and ate it slowly. It was a nice distraction, but she worried what would happen to him later, tomorrow, and for his whole life.
At this point the barkeep stuck his nose out and said, “Ronny needs help, he’s yellin’ for you.”
Leaning over Joey, she kissed his mussy hair.
“Don’t take any wooden nickels,” she said. He looked at her, puzzled.
Opening the bar door she walked into bedlam.
Meat was on a break from playing cards and baiting a lush on the barstool bet. Jake was grabbing a case of Miller’s from the cooler. The guy who’d been snoring was picking a fight with the military pot head. Loretta was singing Coalminer’s Daughter in her snuffley, bluegrass voice. Her husband stuck his head out of the card room saying, “Get in here. Sit in the game.”
“Fuck” Leticia whispered. “Where’s the exit from this bad dream?” She walked through to the card table, sat through the deal, and picked up the queen of hearts.
====================================================
On any Sunday morning at 6:00AM on Highway 20 in Nice, California, you can see several men waiting. They aren’t waiting for mass at St. Brigid’s, or a hike in the manzanita strewn hills, nor are they waiting to rent a dinghy to catch catfish on the lake across the street. These bedraggled fellows are waiting for the Holiday Bar to open and provide them with their first drink of the day. When Jake unlocks the door they will climb up onto those scabby, wooden bar stools and ask for a snootful of whiskey and soda, or Wild Turkey, or whatever it is that each truly devoted drunk uses to start the day instead of bacon and eggs. Greeting them will be the fetidity of cigarettes and spilled cheap booze, and a jukebox loaded with down home, hard luck, sad looser, country songs.
Leticia never expected to work in such a dive, not a place with linoleum so worn the pattern was nearly gone, a joint with embossed metal ceilings so old they were rusted, and especially not in a place where the Saturday night fights were in the room, not on the TV. But there she was, joint owner of a single card table restricted to the game of lowball poker, in the back room of the Holiday Bar, adjacent to a malodorous, single toilet. At home were her two small children in the care of a nineteen year old with flossy hair, a toddler of her own, and the singular ability to make sourdough whole wheat bread so good that the first loaf disappeared before it cooled.
An unstable bench outside the bar was Leticia’s perch for a break. It was relief from the clatter and boasts of the chip bleeders who’d spend the night trying to outwit one another at cards. She’d headed there at 9:00PM, after shilling to fill the game. Two more guys with paychecks had arrived so she had stirred the chili pot, made more coffee, and walked past the pool table, and through the dirty old bar, to rest on the bench.
Snowbird was on the jukebox --- “And if I could you know that I would fly away with you”. She envied the brilliance of the song writer, a wit who’d strung a bunch of clichés into a top seller, and wondered at her own foolishness for turning a college degree into work that most trailer trash would reject. Nightly she cleaned ashtrays, mopped spilled beer, and played mommy to the weak players and wild cards who liked this game, thus creating her paltry living. She daydreamed about her small, blond daughters, missing their constant questions and their warm, savory hugs. Had her husband, Ronny, not bought the right to run the game, and cashed-out his Post Office job, she’d be making oatmeal cookies and reading Call of the Wild out loud. She also missed her small ranch at the end of the valley, her spinning wheel and loom, and all the other homey additions that had made her life so sweet. The Holiday Bar was a hell she resented. It was ugly, stinky, hard on the ears, and way too far from home. But there were children to feed, so she’d stand pat.
“Nice night,” Jim said as he came out of the door. He was the resident broom pusher and “gofer”.
“Yea,” responded Leticia, leaning to the right to see a bit of glittering lake. “Pretty loud in there,” she added.
Sitting on the bench he lit a Camel, spitting out the bits. Nondescript explained all of Jim --- khaki pants, grayed shirt, mouse brown hair that was neither too short nor too long, and simple conversation. He smelled of cheap dryer sheets, Bud, and smoke. His voice trailed a twang of
Oklahoma through to Bakersfield, still dusty from the mistakes of parents and grandparents. Leticia looked at his hands and then hers.
“I’d better get back in there,” she said to give her a bluff from conversation.
At about 11:00PM Meat came through the door, all two hundred fifty pounds, six foot two, able to shot-put-the-table-through-the-window of him.
“I’m ready,” Meat cawed and dropped two c-notes into a game with a ten dollar buy-in. “Deal me in, and her too,” he said, elbowing his sprite of a wife in the brown print dress. She giggled as they sat. Ronny smelled action and welcomed Meat with a crooked grin. The guy was good for at least four hundred, would lose it all, and stay jolly through the whole process. Plus he’d tell good stories. Meat was a tunnel hog working on those huge machines that grind through mountains to create holes for roads and trains. It was hard, dangerous work. Although he was broad, Meat wasn’t fat. He was muscled like a giant. Lots of guys couldn’t tell the difference, thus giving Meat an ace in barroom bets. His angle was to bet a drunk he could lift a heavy bar stool by the bottom of one leg with one hand. Meat would lie on the floor and raise the stool high, pocketing the ten or twenty that had been the bet.
In the card room the players called for set-ups, so Leticia went to the bar. She waited for Jake, the barkeep, to fill her tray with a bourbon and cream, a gin and tonic, four Buds and a Mich as she watched the line-up at the bar. The jukebox had gotten to Thank God and Greyhound You’re Gone, one of the few songs she could tolerate. A skinny military sort was talking too loudly down at the end of the bar and telling the short guy next to him that the “weed in Nam is the best in the world,” causing Jake to wince. Three seats closer a guy in a denim jacket had his head down on the bar, snoring.
“Why don’t you sing a few bars of I’ve Got to Get Out of This Place? “ Leticia said to Jake.
He snickered and Leticia followed singing, “if it’s the last thing I ever do”.
“That bad?” asked Jake. He’d been there for fifteen years.
Leticia finished, “Honey, there’s a better place for me and you.”
The tray filled and she thanked him adding, “Shit! Just give me a little air.”
Back at the card table Meat snuggled his wife as he dragged a pot on the table.
“I’m on a rush. Splice those cards, cut, burn one, and deal.” Meat grabbed his beer, tossed a nickel bill at Leticia, and fanned the hand close to his chest. Ronny leered and winked. As owner of the game he always loved a loser, but a happy loosey-goosey kept him chuckling. He knew the game would go through the night, fueled by cash and yarns from this great, jovial bear. He also knew that the two of them would return to the valley in the morning sufficiently bankrolled to stretch through a couple of weeks.
“Let the good times roll,” Ronny thought. “Let ‘em roll and roll.”
The chili was burning in the crock pot, so Leticia stirred it and served it in paper cups. One of the metal chairs had lost a screw and finally broke under the stress of the girth and mirth of Meat. The toilet went on the fritz and would probably keep running for a few hours until Jake could get back to fix it. And Leticia felt fat. She was fat, tired, and smelled of smoke and beer.
At about midnight Leticia took another break. By this time the jukebox was playing Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw. She figured that the besotted patrons likely missed the joke in the Jimmy Buffett song. “Your voice it sounds so wonderful, but yer face don't look too clear.” She liked this one, too, but hated most of the others. The Tammys and Georges and Hanks were trash singers to her, reminiscent of the 1950’s in her southern Ohio home. All of country music with it’s booze and trains and fucked up love affairs was bull-pucky. But the snob in Leticia warred with life’s necessities. “I’m just betting on the come,” she mused, “then I’ll get outta here.”
Exiting the bar, Leticia found a small boy of about eight sitting on the bench. Lowering herself next to him, she asked where his folks were, expecting to hear that they were inside partying.
“Dad’s in that, thar,” the boy said pointing to a tiny old trailer parked beside the bar.
“And your Mom?” asked Leticia hopefully.
The kid shook his head. “He’s thar with some lady.”
“Some lady!” Leticia thought cynically. “Who the heck’d leave a small kid in front of this dive on a busy road while he porked some floozy.” She missed her girls, hoped they were safe and asleep. The long blond braids, the missing teeth --- she was skipping part of their waning childhood while working in this midden.
Looking at him more carefully she saw a kid of about eight, thin, and sandy haired. His clothes were dirty and so was he, and there were no socks for his shoes. And then there were those sad eyes and the almost inaudible voice. Leticia’s mind rolled to her mother’s childhood stories about being left in a train station late into the night while her father drank. It was so traumatic that the old lady still wept at age eighty-five. “Those of us who had sweet childhoods don’t understand the experiences of those who haven’t,” she thought.
“What’s your name?” she asked, seeking some solace for this child. He was out here, lost like an exposed card in a pat hand, unexpectedly abandoned and in danger.
Speaking softly he twanged, “Joey.”
“Well, Joey, I guess he’ll be back soon. Meanwhile I’m going to get you something. I’ll be gone just a minute.” Then she walked up the street. A block away was an all night Quick Mart. She bought a pack of HoHos for herself and a chocolate cookie as big as a hub cap. Grabbing a napkin she hustled back to the bench.
“Here.” Leticia handed the cookie to the kid. His grim eyes belied his smile of thanks. She felt all-in and knew she couldn’t stay with this child. “Just remember,” she told him, “nobody is always a winner.” “Amarillo Slim said,” that she mused to herself. For a few minutes Leticia watched Joey nibble. He picked each chocolate chip out with a dirty finger and ate it slowly. It was a nice distraction, but she worried what would happen to him later, tomorrow, and for his whole life.
At this point the barkeep stuck his nose out and said, “Ronny needs help, he’s yellin’ for you.”
Leaning over Joey, she kissed his mussy hair.
“Don’t take any wooden nickels,” she said. He looked at her, puzzled.
Opening the bar door she walked into bedlam.
Meat was on a break from playing cards and baiting a lush on the barstool bet. Jake was grabbing a case of Miller’s from the cooler. The guy who’d been snoring was picking a fight with the military pot head. Loretta was singing Coalminer’s Daughter in her snuffley, bluegrass voice. Her husband stuck his head out of the card room saying, “Get in here. Sit in the game.”
“Fuck” Leticia whispered. “Where’s the exit from this bad dream?” She walked through to the card table, sat through the deal, and picked up the queen of hearts.
====================================================
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