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

all-white outfit for Christmas. Pants. Jacket. Shirt. Lots of white on white patterns. Hideous. Th is was 1976, and Izod shirts in sherbet colors were all the rage. Pink and lime and lemon yellow, with that tiny alligator grinning out at the world. Beneath them we wore brightly striped turtlenecks without folding the necks down. Over them, a different sherbet-colored sweater. In my Dorothy Hamil haircut, I walked around in a blur of color. And into this, my mother brought white, an outfit that was slightly disco when preppy had taken over.
    Even worse than the trend faux pas was the way the outfit matched. With my dizzying array of colors, I worked hard to not match. In the morning I grabbed a turtleneck, whichever Izod shirt was clean, and threw a sweater over it all. Green, blue, pink, white, yellow, all thrown together. Th is haphazard dressing and combinations of colors suited me. Or rather, the girl I longed to be, the one who would lead an unconventional, mismatched life.
    But my mother, she loved for everything to match.
    I had been the only second grader who had matching shoes and purses for everything I wore. My mother would spend hours at the mall finding the exact shade of green accessories to compliment the stripe in a sweater, the socks that would reveal the identical color of my blouse when they peeked out from beneath a hem. And she didn’t stop at outfits, my mother matched everything.
    On many Saturday mornings, I would wake up to the sounds of boxes being dragged up from the basement, ladders squeaking open, and my mother ordering my father to put something higher or lower. Downstairs, bedlam.
    â€œIt’s Saint Patrick’s Day next week,” my mother would say.
    Or Easter or autumn or Flag Day. And with each of these, our entire house was converted into a theme park. Pots of shamrocks everywhere. Green curtains hung, a green and white tablecloth on the table. Porcelain leprechauns peered out from behind vases and lamps. No room was safe. Th e bathroom shower curtain had a shamrock pattern, the hand towels revealed rainbows with tiny pots of gold at the end. Green soap. Green candles. Silverware with green handles. Shamrock-printed paper napkins beside our green dishes. My parents even sipped their coffee out of green mugs.
    Th e next week, everything turned yellow. Instead of leprechauns, baby animals stared out at me. Daffodils sat where the shamrocks had been. Our breakfast table was ablaze with yellow. “Spring!” my mother announced over her lemon-colored coffee cup.
    Th en it was on to Easter and then Memorial Day and then end of school, summer, Fourth of July, an endless parade of occasions to match everything around us anew.
    I spent the summer I was fourteen stringing beads to make a curtain for my bedroom doorway. My father even indulged me by removing the actual door to let my creation hang there. Th at curtain kept the order outside my room from penetrating. Th e ever-revolving cast of throw rugs and pillows and curtains stayed out there. Behind my wall of beads, I taped political cartoons to the walls, burned cones of incense, and played Crosby, Stills and Nash albums loud. My mother wouldn’t let me use the Indian bedspread I had bought at a small shop in downtown Providence, insisting that I keep my matching sheets and comforter. All that gingham and the white, gold-trimmed matching French provincial furniture did not keep me from plugging in a lava lamp or painting the white lamp shades in imitation Peter Max. I was a rebel, wasn’t I?
    In my interior life, I was a folk singer, a poet, a war protestor. Th ere, I lived a messy life with lots of boyfriends whom I walked barefoot with along rocky beaches. I filled notebooks with these fantasies, writing them as haiku and sonnets and tragic short stories.
    â€œWhat are you doing up there?” my mother would call to me.
    I couldn’t answer her. Th ere were no words to describe this yearning that itched at me,