“Hi, I’m picking up mail,” I say, setting my open passport on the American Express counter.
The clerk disappears. I smile at her colleague, who took care of me last week. I may be a bold girl, jumping continents, Paul Revering that Things happen when you leave the house, but I can’t wait for news from home, even the most ordinary stuff. Is Booker’s lacrosse team gelling? Did GT take that headhunting job? If so, what is headhunting?
The clerk finally returns with two letters: one from my grandmother, one from my mom.
“Nothing else?”
“Not today, Ms. Corrigan.”
My grandmother tells me that Slugger is still dating May, which hardly seems worth mentioning after almost three decades. The Orioles started playing in their new stadium. My parents came down for a lovely visit. Jesus loves me.
My mom, sounding like a proctor from a Dickens novel, asks how the children are. She doesn’t approve of “kids.” Kids are goats, Kelly. Are they goats? She gives me lots of updates, as requested. GT started a rock-and-roll band. Booker’s team is undefeated. She saw Amy at the Acme; she’s getting serious with a Penn grad named John. Charlie is still in Russia, doing some kind of banking thing. My mom loves Charlie because one time she watched while he wagged his finger at me and said, “Your mom … your mom is the rudder.”
I sit outside the American Express office with my letters on my lap. The lineage between my mother’s handwriting and her mother’s is clear, same Y and G and Q, just the way the nuns taught them. They vote for the same people, shop in the same department stores, serve the same hors d’oeuvres, and whisper the same prayers to the same God at night. They buy the same cigarettes, and when they light up they have the same detached expression, as if they could give up smoking at the snap of a finger. And they like a clean, well-behaved child who doesn’t touch the furniture after it’s been polished.
There are a few critical differences, my mom would rush to point out. Libby never drove a car. Not once. And unlike my mother, Libby had Josephine to clean and cook and do the laundry. Still, in matters that define, it’s a straight line from my grandmother to my mother.
The connections between my mom and me are more like the webs crisscrossing the Tanners’ driveway—flimsy and nearly invisible. In twenty-four years, there’s been one and only one person who thought our affinity was obvious: Sharon, the receptionist at my mother’s real estate office. Over my first Christmas break from college, my mom got me a job there answering phones. Six dollars an hour, five hours a day for two weeks—total gold mine.
“You must be Mary’s daughter,” said Sharon as I approached the front desk. “You look just like her!”
I don’t look anything like my mother. We have literally nothing in common.
When a man walked in, Sharon called out, “Jim! This is Mary’s daughter. Doesn’t she look just like her? Jim, look at her. Doesn’t she look just like Mary?” Jim was head down in a contract of some sort. “Your mother is the life of the office,” Sharon said to me, ignoring Jim ignoring her. “She’s hysterical.”
Hysterical? I’d started college four months ago. Could my mother have become hysterical in four months? Perhaps Sharon meant literally hysterical, as in unhinged. My dad had recently lost his job, and my mom was working again for the first time since her twenties. Maybe three college tuitions were making her hysterical. Or it might have been her empty nest. Maybe she was cracking under the invisible weight of new silence and empty space.
Eventually, Sharon gave me my instructions, and I settled in. But all day, all week, people kept stopping by my desk, interrupting my scrapbook project, to tell me about my mother.
“Oh, Mary, what a crack-up.”
“That Mary C., she makes sure we don’t take ourselves too seriously around here.”
“She’s a trip!”
Toward the end of the week, I was back in the break room buying a Diet Dr Pepper when I heard my mom say, “Yesterday at the brokers’ open, I heard a great joke.” I froze, like you would if you heard your mother flatulate or let out a peel of ecstasy behind a closed door. My mom didn’t do those things, nor did she tell jokes. As far as I knew, she didn’t know how.
“Well, one Christmas,” she started, pulling her audience in, “sweet Janie Smith was worrying about what to give the mailman for a gift … a plant? a batch of cookies? She checked with her husband, who said, ‘Screw him, give him a dollar.’ So, the next morning, when the mailman arrived, Janie answered the door in her raciest lady-wear”—Sharon clucked, Oh la la!—“and invited the mailman in. She took him by the hand and led him upstairs to the master bedroom, where she treated him to a first-class lay, after which, Janie cooked the mailman a mouthwatering platter of eggs Benedict. Before he left, she handed him a single dollar bill. The mailman, confused but polite, thanked her. As he walked to the door, he turned back and said, ‘Mrs. Smith, this has been a perfectly perfect morning—the lovemaking, the gourmet breakfast—but I gotta ask, what’s going on here?’ ” My mother delivered the punch line in the dippy voice of Janie Smith. “Well, when I asked my husband what to give you for Christmas, he said, ‘Screw him, give him a dollar!’ The eggs Benedict was my idea.”
The Realtors erupted. The joke landed. My mom held a crowd with a bit about screwing out of wedlock. I couldn’t have been more disoriented. All my life my mother was my mother, nothing more. Not Greenie’s saving grace, not the funny woman in the office.
But now I see there’s no such thing as a woman, one woman. There are dozens inside every one of them. I probably should’ve figured this out sooner, but what child can see the women inside her mom, what with all that Motherness blocking out everything else?