Painting by Charlie Baird |
The story’s not in what people say — it’s in what they don’t say. That’s what you listen for and write.— former editor
My mother left Memphis in 1988 to be near my brother’s family in Austin. She was 60 at the time and had lived in Memphis her whole life. She wanted a new identity after my father’s death the year before.
I’ve often wondered how much money she had after she sold the house she and Dad lived in for 30 years. I do know the car she arrived in, a mid-80s Oldsmobile Cutlass, was the same car she was driving 15 years later when she died. She prayed the car would last one day longer than she did, and the night before she died my niece saw the car abandoned on the side of the road, left by whomever mom sold it to. Realizing what that meant, I rushed back to my mother’s apartment, finding the hospice nurse already there.
Mom at age 46 |
I see now the move my mom made to a new city at that stage in her life was a journey of faith. She left friends, neighbors and the church community she’d help create to start over again. Whenever I need to move forward to some new place in my life, either geographically or emotionally, I remember this. My mother didn’t know what words to use to encourage me along the paths I needed to take, but her endurance and perseverance remain with me.
After she moved, she lived in a duplex a few streets from my brother and sister-in-law, who had two daughters ages five and nine at the time. In some ways, it worked well. She became part of the girls’ lives, started a new job and developed new friends. But she missed the friends she’d made as a hairdresser in Memphis.
The rituals of hairdressers die hard, and these women had worked in the same shop 35 years, raised children together, helped each other through disabilities, diseases, accidents and widowhood. I don’t believe any of them divorced. This was characteristic of women in my mom’s generation but was also due to lunches the women held at each others houses.
The lunch bunch reupholstered living room furniture, painted walls, shampooed carpets, polished silver, mowed and edged lawns before the lunches began. From inside my treehouse, I could hear them giggling and clinking glasses in the house as they ate the deviled eggs, sliced cheeses and scooped honeydew and watermelon balls my mother and I prepared before they arrived.
Georgia, Dot, Oresa, Mozelle, Mary Francis, Roxie, Rosie and Helen — I’m reminded of the honeysuckle vines that grew along a fence behind our house. The smell of the ladies’ hugs remained on me for hours after they left, as mom and I carefully washed the crystal and china and slipped the silver forks, knives and spoons back into their special compartments inside the velvet box.
On Wednesdays as mom and I drove home from Oresa’s pool, still in our swimming suits and still smelling of chlorine, she was always relaxed and happier.The women took from each other what they needed to move on, my mother’s determination, Oresa’s business savvy, Mozelle’s humor, Roxie’s candor, Mary Francis’ tact, the divinity in Dot’s face and the grace in Helen’s.
I don’t know what they talked about when the children were sent away, but I do know as the women sat beneath the table umbrellas, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, they began to resemble each other. Through the bawdy jokes and tears and baskets of flowers, they’d learned to listen to each other, not only what was said but what wasn’t said and what needed to be heard in the silence. Mom never found that again after she left Memphis.
Three of the women drove to Austin to visit mom after she moved away. Standing in her driveway, they noticed fig trees overloaded with ripe figs in a neighbor’s yard. Early the next morning, they woke, slipped into the yard, stole the figs and carefully returned to my mom’s house, stifling laughter all the way. In her kitchen, they meticulously sorted the figs into four sacks and tried not to eat any. Fig preserves were a specialty among the lunch bunch — figs, a fruit that symbolize fertility and the feminine world, women both as goddess and mother.
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