A friend of mine is digging through some of my CD’s. “Nana Mouskouri?” she says, giving me the hairy eyeball.
“Who’s that?” I ask. She holds up a CD with a picture of a woman with black hair and glasses and I suddenly recognize it. “Oh that,” I say.
~
Mom, her eyes twinkling, hands me a crinkling bag as soon as I walk through the door. I look at the plastic package labeled “Navajo-print Nylon Dress.” The Navajo print looks as if it was designed by someone in a third-world factory, who based it on a description given by a French tourist, who got it from an ironic Swede, who was described it by a blind American, who may have flown over Arizona in the 1940’s.
“Well, open it,” she says.
I hold it up to reveal all its ghastly glory. I look at my mom and raise an eyebrow.
“Well, what do you think? Do you like it?” She takes it from me and smooths it against her chest. “As soon as I saw it I thought of you,” she says.
I’m speechless as my brain tries to wrap itself around this admission. My mom saw this hideous, ghastly, pink and brown nylon horror and thought of me. Me? Her only daughter. The fruit of her loins. The girl who has worn a dress exactly two times in the past twenty-five years. The girl whose wardrobe consists of race shirts, old guard uniforms, and sweats. The girl who thinks washing her hair and putting on comfortable jeans might be a little over the top to go out on the town.
“You’re kidding, right?” I ask. I see her face fall and know that she is not kidding. “Mom,” I say gently. “In what universe did you think that this – and I use the term loosely – this dress, was perfect for me?”
“Try it on before you say anything,” she exclaims.
“Mom….”
“Try it on,” she says. “You know as well as I do that things sometimes can look better on.”
I take the dress from her and fold it before returning it to its plastic bag. “You’d better return it so you can get your money back,” I tell her and hand it back to her.
Her face is a mask of misery, which I do not fall for. I know full well that if I pretend to like it within days I will have a matching pant suit, a fake cashmere sweater with attached beads and feathers, a hat with a real horse’s tail, and a phone call from Sears saying that the black velvet painting of Indians dancing around a campfire with Barney, is in.
I cannot even hint I may like something I don’t. My mom was born lacking the gene which would have allowed her to “get the hint.” You cannot beat around the bush with her; if you tell her you think that a puce T-shirt with the pirouetting badgers on it is oh-kay, then, by gum, you’d better be prepared for the matching puce tablecloth. Just ask my daughter.
Along with missing the subtlety gene, my mom also came into this world without the sarcasm gene. I learned very quickly in life not to say things like, “Boy would you look at that pink and gold taffeta poodle skirt; it sure would go great with my baseball uniform.” Because days later I would be sure to open a present from her and hold up a pink sweatshirt with a gold poodle embroidered on the front, and the word Poodle crazy-glued to the back. Meanwhile she will beam with pride and tell me that she only paid $500 to have someone personally make it for me.
And as long as I’m on the topic, mom also buys into the premise that if a little is good, then a lot must be better. One year she discovered that cranberry juice was a good treatment for some medical issues. She probably drank hundreds of liters of the stuff for a solid year. Every two days she would down two four-liter jugs. And I can’t be sure, but based on the amount she went through, she may even have bathed in it. Then suddenly one day I am ordered to take all remaining bottles from the house. She tells me that she can’t stomach looking at the stuff, and never touches another drop for the rest of her life.
Then there is her music. When I was a teenager, after procuring a much-wanted album, I would play it over and over again for days. Ha! I was but an amateur when compared to my mom. Mom, in her seventies and eighties, took that practise to a whole new level. Zamfir, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, playing at decibel levels that could deafen a rock.
But then after a few months, guess who is the new owner of the collected works of a flute-playing genius, or of the compositions of chanting monks, or Charlotte Church, or Celine Dion…or…insert latest fad here. “Take this away,” she tells me. “If I hear one more flute melody I will start screaming.”
“You know, Mom, you don’t have to play this stuff non-stop for months on end,” I say to her. She looks at me blankly, not comprehending.
“But I like it,” she says, then pauses to reconsider. “But not now. Now you take it, you will like it.”
~
“The Grateful Dead, I get. The Rolling Stones, Meatloaf, Dr. Hook, ACDC, Styx, even the Beatles, but The Diamonds,” my friend says shaking her head.
Image Credit
“Cunning Hat” by anneheathen. Creative Commons Flickr. Some rights reserved.
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