What My Mother Gave Me by Elizabeth Benedict Read Free Book Online

drawer to drawer, I’ve saved one gift she gave me to remind myself of that.
    My mother was a beautiful woman and loved beautiful clothes. She had a whole bureau dedicated to her collection of cashmere sweaters in deep, soft colors—butter yellow, forest green, periwinkle—and her two closets were full of treasures: Viyella dressing gowns (what other mother had more than one bathrobe?), Lilly Pulitzer sack dresses, straight skirts made of good wool, fully lined, and bearing labels from elegant department stores that no longer exist—Martin’s, Peck and Peck, Bonwit Teller. My father loved to see my mother dressed up, but the money she spent on clothes drove him wild with rage. I used to hear him shouting in their bedroom when my mother’s college friend Hope, who was a buyer at Altman’s, would send over outfits “on approval.”
    I wasn’t sure which side of their money quarrel I was on. I idolized my father, the communist lawyer with his parade of impecunious clients—the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the dissidents from the painters’ union, the mentally ill woman trying to get her son back from the social workers. But my mother worked, too, even in the 1950s. What’s more, by the time I was nine or ten, she earned more than my father, selling brownstones in Brooklyn Heights, where we lived, which was just beginning its gentrification. She didn’t like it much—she had wanted to be a journalist, a field virtually closed to women back then. But she was proud of herself for doing well. “I’m a real estate salesman,” she would say—not a saleswoman, a sales man . Still, nobody said she was noble or heroic, which was the family myth about my father—or maybe just the myth my mother and I believed in.
    In a way, my parents were a secular version of an old-style Jewish marriage. Instead of a wife peddling goods from a pushcart to support her husband, the Talmudic scholar, my mother, the capitalist, supported my father, the communist, though the rewards of being the breadwinner didn’t apply to her. She still had to run the house, do the shopping, cook the food. Obviously, my father was the important one, in her eyes and also in mine. He was the person who thought about big things, like civil liberties and Stalin, and who looked so elegant in his seersucker suit. Still, I wondered as I got older, shouldn’t my mother be allowed to have some fun with the money that was so hard for her to earn?
    Because of these conflicts, I had trouble with the idea of spending money on myself when I was a teenager. I knew that if I asked for something, my mother would give it to me. But what if my parents couldn’t afford it, like the clothes from Hope? And shouldn’t I be less materialistic, anyway, like my father? After all, did communists get their bedrooms redecorated with a canopied bed, an antique secretary desk, and unicorn-printed wallpaper, which was something my mother had arranged for me with a decorator friend of hers, despite the inevitable fights with my father? “I want. Her. To have. Th at desk,” I can still hear her insisting, emphasizing every word. And I have it to this day, in my study, catty-corner to my real desk. Poor fragile, lovely thing, how can I ever give it away?
    When my bedroom was finished, it was all too much. It felt obscurely shameful, a mark of privilege, of being spoiled and overprotected, too much like the princess in whose lap the unicorn rested its head. Th e truth was I loved girly things—my Villager shirtwaist printed with tiny flowers, my cousin Wendy’s lavender bedroom (more tiny flowers), even the unicorn wallpaper—but I could see that they led in the wrong direction. Rosa Luxemburg was just a name to me, but whatever she had done to become a world-historical person, I knew she hadn’t done it wearing dresses with little flowers.
    By the time I was in high school, my mother had