Mama -- A Day in the Life

I stared at the faded green aloe vera plant, long and twisted as it reached for the highly filtered light coming through the sliding glass door of my grandmother’s breakfast room. The backyard beyond the door's algae spotted base, though lovingly landscaped with azaleas and ligustrums, was shady and dense beneath the canopy of east Texas piney woods. The sunlight and bright blue sky found only pinholes for entry through its canopy.

The overgrown plant crowded the big yellow pot where it had grown for what must be twenty years or more. (Does an aloe vera even live that long I wonder as I write the words?) The jelly filled cactus plant had been a necessary component of every kitchen my grandmother ever established. Good for minor burns, she always said, and surely enough, her granddaughter’s first kitchen, and those that came after, also required the spikey horned plant with its soothing balm to be growing in the kitchen window.

My grandmother now sat on her perch, her face between the folds of her newspaper with her long, thin Benson and Hedges cigarette placed neatly into the corner ridges of the gamboge-colored ashtray whose angles were wedged between the sections of the morning newspaper. The ashtray was an accessory made to match the ultra-modern look of the chartreuse wrought-iron framed furniture standing boldly aslant in trapezoid shapes throughout her custom-built kitchen and dining area. A soft thin stream of smoke was slowly curling and flowing up from the tray's cool ceramic base to find its spot in the yellowing ceiling.

How ironic, I thought it was that my grandmother, born in 1901 before even the invention of the automobile, refused to be associated with antiques of the past, choosing to surround herself, instead, with this ultra-modern look of the early sixties. How many times had I sat like this in her breakfast room, my forearms cooling on the smoked glass table, taking in this very same scene? It must in these twenty-five years or so of repetition, by now, be impressed upon the ethers.

Mama, the name she invented for her grandchildren to call her, had been a maid of the twenties—the Roaring Twenties. She was the oldest of five Cox children living outside a saw-mill town where farm yard pigs often wallowed or slept underneath the pinewood planks of their kitchen floor. She loved to tell the story about the time she baited her younger brothers and sister into bad trouble with their tight-minded Baptist father by finding just the moment when her mother had vacated the kitchen leaving the pears cooking down to syrup for the preserves she was making.

Seizing the moment of opportunity, she enticed her sibs into the kitchen with the promise of a fun and daring adventure then showed them how to use the big ladling spoon to hold the boiling syrup over a knothole in the pine floor and call the pigs. The pigs, greedy for table scraps would come grunting and snorting, expecting gifts from heaven to be dropped to them through the holes in the floor. Then Mama would coach her little tribe to pour the sticky hot syrup through the knotholes onto their eager, hungry faces, sending the poor creatures squealing and scrambling out from under the kitchen, shaking the house as they tumbled over each other. The kids, of course, would fall all over each other laughing and rolling in the kitchen floor and never notice she had sneaked out of the kitchen long before. The tale ends with the other four being caught and promptly punished for their cruel play with whacks from their father’s razor strap while my grandmother went scot-free.

Mama was quite the story teller. I guess it came from her Irish background—it ran in the family, so it seems. She loved being the center of attention, so she would tell a story, always with herself as the central character, the one who cleverly made the joke fall on someone else. Though there were times she would tell the story on herself if it made a better story, she was the chief instigator and the main benefactor of every tale. The telling was always rolling-in-the-floor funny at the time, but later it surfaced to me as a cruel style of humor, maybe a bit like the "Uncle Remus" or "Peter Rabbit" series.

She married an older man with an income at age sixteen, she said, to get away from the restraints of her strict “papa” who made dating and dancing forbidden, and straight on, began to live the high-life. She was a looker—blue violet eyes and thick dark hair with olive colored skin—she told us she came from “the black Irish”. She loved to dress in the styles of the movie stars and always told me it was just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one.

It wasn’t long before her husband became jealous and overly possessive. The stories she told me about his drunken fits of jealousy were a dramatic shift from those she used to entertain us at family gatherings. They separated during the Depression when my mother was five and though they made several attempts to reunite, when he died of a sudden heart attack seven years later, he left a widow. She had already found work for supporting herself and my mother as a secretary at one of the companies growing fast on the oil boom in a cow-town-become-oil-town in Texas. Here she met my wild-at-heart step-grandfather—the only one I ever knew—16 years younger than her.

My great aunt, her sister, used to say, “here comes the White Roach!” when he was coming up the walk to the front door. He’d made his first appearance "calling" on Mama in a white, Havana style suit which hung loosely over his tall, thin frame. His pasty white skin and slicked-back platinum blonde hair added to the ghostly insect illusion Aunt Mil was spinning. By the time I heard the story after a decade or more of family tellings, Mama (or even my grandfather) had managed to make it sound like he was an awkward albino boy coming to court my more refined and socially established grandmother. Their war-time marriage might have alienated her from her daughter except for the fact that my mother was fused fast to her mother’s hip, then, and for years to come.

Mama in her eighties was still a striking woman--though the deep blue violet eyes had faded, they still commanded attention when their icy blue focus was fixed to those of her listener. Her long thick black hair had thinned and was now covered with hair salon color that was befitting of her age—a warm, chestnut like color with tinges of gray, it was now short and permed to add back the body that the years had taken away. Though her once smooth olive skin now displayed a variety of moles, the regal way she held herself insisted they were marks of beauty.

Her five foot two and a half inch frame (which always seemed larger in the aura of her presence) was now rounded and her pear-shaped hips mimicked the jodhpurs she wore in pictures I’d seen of her as a young woman. Her belly was full like her breasts which hung braced against it when she hunched over in her reading posture, thin cigarette to her once full and red-lipsticked mouth. It was still easy to see the flare of her powerful appeal in the flash of her flirtatious smile.

Now peering over her newspaper at me, her eyes weary and jaw slack, she continued our earlier argument, once more trying to win me over through the force of her will (a willfulness for which she’d long been known, but which was today, clearly waning). Her tired words formed an ugly reality with which I was all too familiar, a reality born out of her own life and its long and painful relationship history. She wasn’t admitting what was clearly visible in the weakness of her posture and the tremulousness of her voice, and I wasn’t either. Perhaps registering the condition of this aging family matriarch was just too painful for us both to acknowledge.

In keeping with my own stubborn stance, I responded to the words themselves rather than acknowledging the gestalt from which they were spoken, making it easy for me to refute her rather weak argument. Instead of hearing the wisdom of her warning and trusting in the earnestness of her appeal above and beyond her history of attempts (with some success) at controlling and directing my life to her satisfaction, I chose to use my prime of life advantage to her advanced years in standing her down. She had no room to talk, I told myself--I could continue in this charade without shame.