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

retreated into drinking, my father was keeping her company there, and I was a raging adolescent. My idea of fashion was to wear the same turtleneck for a week. So I don’t know how my mother and I came to be shopping together, and in Manhattan, too, at Fred Leighton’s high-end ethnic clothing store. She saw me hesitating over a very expensive lace Mexican blouse, picking it up, putting it down, walking away, coming back. It cost what seemed like the earth to me—maybe fifty dollars.
    â€œDo you like it, darling?” my mother asked.
    â€œIt’s gorgeous,” I said. It was a costume for the wallpaper unicorn princess, with alternating panels of cloth and lace, a scoop neck with lace standing up all around it, puffy elbow-length sleeves, and tiny mother-of-pearl buttons all down the back. “But it’s so expensive.”
    â€œYou should always get the things you really want,” she said, and she picked it up, marched to the cash register, and bought it.
    TH E ODD THING is that I wore the blouse only once or twice. It was too fancy for high school and much too virginal for college, and anyway, like so many things we fall in love with in the store, it didn’t fit right. In the mysterious way of clothes, even without my wearing it, even as it sat in one drawer after another, it somehow acquired holes and stains. To me it represents my mother’s unrealized life. Selling real estate had never been the plan: she was too unworldly and gentle for all that undercutting and competition and stress. She told me once that she had started drinking in order to deal with the anxiety of meeting with clients. Sometimes I think she would have been happy just sitting in the big yellow chair in the living room and listening to Bach, drinking coffee and clipping articles from the New York Times, going on the occasional peace demonstration, meeting her friends or my father for lunch on Montague Street. In a way she, not I, was the real unicorn princess, only instead of being sheltered from the world in a canopy bed, she had to do battle with it every day.
    But the blouse represents something happier, too, and that is my mother’s love. She wanted to do wonderful things for me, and sometimes she did—not over-the-top projects like the unicorn bedroom, but real things that helped me become myself. She never told me that I had to get married or have children, or gave me little life lessons about how to play dumb and lose gracefully to please boys. Instead, she read my poems, and when I fell in love with Latin in eighth grade and decided I wanted to learn ancient Greek, too, she found a classics major at Brooklyn College to come tutor me. She wanted to be close to me, but the drinking got in the way, and most of the time, I wouldn’t let her be close, because I didn’t want to end up like her. Not always, though. When I was thirteen, we went to Manhattan to see Th e Lovers of Teruel, a surrealist French dance film at the Paris Th eatre, and ended up staying for three showings, we loved it so much—or was it only I who loved it so much, and she stayed for me? Sometimes on school holidays, I would meet her for hot turkey sandwiches at Sakele’s, and something about our just being out of the house together, like a regular mother and daughter, would make my heart almost stop with happiness at the freedom and intimacy and fun of it. Sometimes I would come home after a sleepover at a friend’s house where there had been some family tsuris, and I would feel such a sense of peace just to sit with her and my father in the garden, having a cookout like normal people, talking about normal things like school, or what a bastard President Johnson was. I’m trying to say: there were moments that shone through.
    IF I DIDN’T keep that blouse, how would I remember them?

White Christmas
    ANN HOOD
    When I was nineteen, a junior in college, my mother gave me a very expensive, very ugly,