The Other Side of Beauty

When I started this blog just about a year ago, I pledged to write truthfully about things, even when it's scary.

It's scary now, as I try to push myself in a series of Brush Strokes/Keystrokes portraits of people. The first was of my mom, two nights ago. But I realized while driving around in the hideous icy weather today that I hold dark memories of her, too. Perhaps I've buried them. Perhaps I've sugar-coated them. Perhaps I wanted a storybook ending to my mother's untimely death from cancer. It felt, and feels, disloyal, somehow, to remember bad parts of our relationship. I did not want to lose my mother, so I guess I did not want to remember the imperfect times. As if  remembering those would taint my memory of her, a memory I had to cling to so that I could have the strength to move on. As if presenting someone's lovely college graduation photo is presenting the whole picture.

But then I thought--maybe burying these things is unhealthy. Maybe the truth does set us free.  Maybe I'll sit less with chocolate and graham crackers if I face the good, bad and ugly.

Every face in a portrait is not flawless. People have crooked noses, lumpy chins, evil eyebrows. Some are plain people, but their portraits are still celebrated. Do flaws add to or subtract from the overall image? The Mona Lisa is not perfect--is she?

Warning: This is stark.

It's not all pretty, it truly isn't. I remember a hot day when Mom was really, really mad at me. I was down the block at my cousins' house, and had Sis's hand-me-down black Barbie case with me. I was seven or younger, definitely a low single digit. I was wearing pink flowered culottes.

My mother was furious, I can't remember why, and chased me home to our house, rage on her face, one of us holding the case, but I can't remember which. Past the Connellys, the Wings, the Harrises, the Gilmartins, the Russels--11 houses in all. I know because I counted them, I liked to know how close I lived to my godmother and my cousins. I'm pretty sure she hit me with a strap when we got home. In her bedroom. I think she may have hit me on the way there, too, right in front of the neighbors' houses, though I didn't see any witnesses out on the street. I was scared.

She hit me other times, too, I think always with a belt.

What about that small drawer in the bottom of her dresser, her work life pre-kids distilled down into a collection of supplies--stapler, staple remover, paper clips? Did she regret what she left behind, working in a lab as chemist in the early 1950s, to raise four kids? While her husband stayed on at the company?

When I was little, I threw up a lot. I think I had a nervous stomach. I threw up on the first day of first grade, but still had to go to school. Once, I threw up 14 times in the middle of the night. I had a virus, and couldn't stop wretching in the small pink and black bathroom right across from my parents' bedroom. My mother did not stand with me, or behind me, or hold my hair back. She lay in bed next to my father, but she was awake. She told me not to drink water, or it would make me throw up more. I was so thirsty between throwing up, I was dying for water. I think I had a few sips from the bathroom cup, kept them down and finally fell asleep on the cracked black leather couch in the TV room next to the bathroom.

When my first boyfriend broke up with me, at 16, after a winter of letters mailed from Long Island, with his swimming medals enclosed, and a summer of my first kisses, she did not appear to understand why I was so brokenhearted. That was just puppy love, she said with a smile, as if brushing it off lightly would somehow make me feel better. I wish she had understood. It was a crossroads. What if she had talked to me about it? What if she had taken it seriously? What would be different now? Didn't she care to see me as I was?

At least once, but I think rarely, I was the mean one. It was that Cape Cod summer before she died--so I was 19. She wanted to use some of my sunscreen at Nauset Light Beach. I didn't want to share it because the bottle was almost empty. I regretted that pretty quickly. But then she wouldn't take it when I offered. This is a memory that still haunts me.

That's enough for now. This is hard. And the flip side of it all is that it makes me realize that my Dear Figgy has some very ugly memories of me, too. It's not all love. It's sometimes rage, disappointment, fear, denial.

It feels scary to click the orange PUBLISH POST button now. But here I go.

Good night.

Portrait of a Lady

Since my mother died young [at 56, when I was 20], she holds a certain mystique in Figgy's eyes. Just the other day, I was showing her my mom's 1945 Fordham yearbook in our breakfast nook. I wish I knew your mom. What was she like? Figgy asked. I tell her she was funny, that she made me and my friends laugh when she drove us around. But I couldn't think of what else to pull out of my timeworn carpetbag. Now I'm going to paint beyond that.

Brush Strokes, Keystrokes: Mom
It's the 1970s. She's driving me and my friends--maybe Maureen, Eileen, Debbie--around Dumont in a little green Datsun with a stick shift on the floor. She's taking us somewhere, or driving us home. She has on a skirt, and a brown suede jacket with front pockets. She doesn't carry a handbag, not unless she's going to a wedding or the opera or something. No, for driving around, she just takes a slim green change purse, to hold her license and a spare key.

You're as nutty as a fruitcake, she says merrily when I say something funny. She likes similes. If I get tan at the beach, it's You're as brown as a berry.

But I don't really know her, not deep down. I'm a teen, she's an adult. We are from different places and times. What I do know is what she loves, and I grow to love those things, too. Like heady pink peonies. Pretty perfume bottles. Music boxes. A gold charm bracelet. Pearls. Birds seen out the back window. Talks on the phone with friends. Reading. Good desserts. The ocean. The Cape.

Without ever saying anything like, Alice, look, the ocean is a gift you can always have, always find, I get that just by being with her. We spend three weeks on Cape Cod the summer before she dies. Three weeks! We are both excited about it. Dad can only stay a week due to work. Mom and I sleep late, walk to the beach, to Mass on Sundays. She plays cards some evenings with Rite and Bob. I mostly watch, though she tries to teach me bridge. We get groceries, and go to the post office to check for mail--she told some friends the address for general delivery. She does get some mail, which pleases her hugely.

We read. She loves to read. Not to me, not even when I was little, but by herself. She subscribes to The New Yorker. Buys season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera. Wants to be sure I am comfortable getting in and out of her city, New York, on my own. She doesn't want me to be afraid of the bus. She tells how she cried driving over the George Washington Bridge when she and Dad moved to New Jersey.

She's not effusive, not to me. She doesn't praise me much. But when she does, I cherish it.

Do you have mascara on? she asks when I'm sitting in the kitchen.
No. Why?
Look at that. Your eyelashes look so dark. It looks like you have mascara on!

She has many sides. She doesn't seem to like it in high school when I run cross-country and track, breaking the all-boys mold with some other girl trailblazers. Yet, yet--she has a golden basketball charm in her jewelry box. She played basketball, but on an all-girls team.

She is truthful. She doesn't lie. I know she loves me, but she doesn't really say so. I know she loves me because she has breakfast with me every day of high school. She scrambles eggs, but I don't like those, so she has me make a drink in the blender with milk, a raw egg and a teaspoon of vanilla extract. She worries that I need more iron.

Her cheeks are rosy. Irish rosy. She wears a little black mascara, and lipstick. She has pretty legs. She speaks her mind. She's devoted to her parents. She tries to get everyone together--her three younger brothers, and their families.

We buy a white dress for my prom. A gown! She gets the idea to sew some sky-blue satin ribbon on the bodice. Just a little bit--very delicate. It looks quite pretty. My date gets me a wrist corsage with white flowers and light blue ribbon.

She's here, she's gone. She knows me, she leaves me.

If I were an artist, with a palette, instead of a writer, with a keyboard, I might be using the colors pink and brown and turquoise and gold. Sky-blue, too.

I'm tired of thinking of details. It's hard to dig and dig and dig.

Sometimes, we just want to leave the stones unturned.