Mother Wore Pearls?

My father is gone and I’m in the same apartment with the same people but nothing is the same.  We carried on as usual. Whatever usual was for everyone at that time. It was close to the end of October and school was in session. My brother was off at college and my sisters returned to high school. Now we were an apartment filled with women, anxious and hormonal or both. And me, just trying to be a kid. A modern-day, Little Women tale, sans the glorious clothes, chatter, or camaraderie.  There were no deep discussions about the plans for our futures or new house rules, but there was a new pearl wearing sheriff in charge, my mother. Had she always worn pearls?  Was I completely blind to her subtle touches of class and femininity until now?  Had she always worn lipstick too? Not in a flashy “look at me” way. Just a subtle touch that I had been blind to. Hmm...All very curious. How did I not notice any of that before? I dug my extra wide feet firmly into childhood and daydreaming now more than ever.  I saw what grown-ups had to deal with and I wanted no part of that.  Uh Uh, no siree! 

     My mom is now my only source of love and affection. The same woman I had snubbed all the years my father was alive but now wanted nothing more than to be joined at the hip with her and for her to want to do the same. She had a new life to figure out, bills to pay, sadness & loneliness of her own to deal with and teenagers to top it all off.  She was kind and attentive in her way despite her world has just crashed and burned. She wasn’t piled in a heap in bed or yelling at us out of frustration. Her torment was personal and not dispersed amongst us, even though it permeated the air.  She had her own backpack filled with pain and not just from this new blow alone I had assumed.  I think she was no stranger to sadness, you could just tell behind her toothy smile.

    My mother was still foreign to me but I wanted to see what made my mother tick but mostly I wanted her to stay alive. I studied her like an animal in the wild. My own PBS special in my head, Mom in the wild of Newark, New Jersey.  I worried every day that at any point I could lose her and whether I knew her the way I wanted to or not, I know I definitely wanted her alive.   This feeling was a new weight to the invisible backpack that I was already carrying. One, because now I was the only kid in the neighborhood and school without a father. Like a scarlet letter, but I was marked invisibly. Real or imagined, I felt different. And two, for this new feeling, that at any moment I could lose my mother too. It’s hard to be young and carefree if fear and loss is your shadow everywhere you go. Maybe it’s just my nature or from circumstance but either way, it was real to me.

The months after my father’s death are a blur to me. Which seems like a good sign. Nothing bad to report, whew!  Pretty much the way my mother lived her life, never exciting or risky. Just getting through each day without a lot of drama or a tragedy was an A-okay day.  She still had the same amount of work or now, even more, to worry about than before. And lest not forget, she lost the love of her life which in itself could have crippled her because she was a hopeless romantic at heart.  Now she was alone as a woman and a parent, even though she was pretty much the only constant we had had in our lives all along. 

My sisters and brother and I had school to still attend, as usual, they may in fact even had jobs after school as well, which kept them out of that dreary apartment until supper time, and my mother still cooked and minded after us. She had to now survive emotionally and financially while maintaining some sense of stability for us all. I suspect she had been in charge of most things in general and financially even when my father was alive and she was no damsel in distress when it came to real life. He may have barked louder and ruled with a more violent hand as I’ve been told. A European man at the time and men, in general, were known to be unabashedly physical if their law was not obeyed, big or small. It may also have to do with the amount of alcohol consumed on any given night or just men thinking of women as their property. My father was the reckless one with money and life in general and she kept things as quiet as she could as if this was all part of the price you pay in marriage. 

None of these episodes were witnessed by me except for one. It wasn’t towards my mother though, it was my sister Emily, who was fourteen at the time.  Emily had the task of taking me and waiting for me at a Girl Scout get together down in the basement of Our Lady of Fatima Church, about six or seven blocks from our house. The majority of the parishioners there were people who emigrated from Portugal. I  wasn’t a full-fledged Girl Scout yet, I was what they called a Brownie, on the road to becoming a real Girl Scout. Emily walked me there and I could see her sitting in the back at the beginning but somewhere in the middle, I didn’t see her sitting there anymore which worried and distracted me from whatever I was there to do. Emily was like Houdini, or a card shark, she could make herself disappear or had a sleight of hand trick. Now you see her, now you don’t. So, there I saw her and now I don’t.

She couldn’t help herself. She was popular, chatty, and had to be where the action was and there was no action down in the basement of the church that afternoon. This meeting is finally over but no sign of Emily and I’m panicked and I’m also clueless on how to get home,  I hadn’t ever crossed the street on my own yet either.  I was six or seven at the time.  Even though I lived in a big bad city, I had no street smarts whatsoever, nor any interest in having them. I was the baby dang it, that’s my role here. And there is where I wanted to stay.  But the meeting is over and there’s no sign of Emily and I want to go home. Once someone saw I was by myself waiting and they were about to lock up,  I decided to walk up until a block or two near my house with another kid who was older.  Why they didn’t take me all the way to my house, knowing I was spooked is a mystery to me. But this is a city and these are city people, not sheltered or scaredy cats like me.  I had to cross over Elm  Street by myself but you might as well have asked me to swim the English Channel or swing from a trapeze because to me the task was daunting. I finally crossed and made my way down Pacific Street which connected right to Walnut Street to the apartment and the thumping of my heart finally began to subside. I’ve made it home in one piece! I mean there should have been a Russian judge, like in the Olympics, holding up the sign 10 for perfect execution of such a feat! 

However, my joy and relief were brief because once I walked in that door alone and I recounted the tale, my parents were not happy. I hadn’t been back in the apartment for more than a few minutes when Emily scurried into the apartment all flustered and asked, “why didn’t you wait for me?” I answered that  I didn’t see her there.  She began to explain but she didn’t get too much of an explanation out when my father began to smack her on the head and swing her about from her blouse like a ragdoll. She squirmed and squealed and it was terrifying to see. He finally let her loose and she was told a punishment that was probably ridiculous but my mother never intervened at any point, which struck me as odd. She was probably next, although I didn’t see. Because you know, it’s always a woman’s fault when the children misbehave, men were never at fault. Especially not this man, with an ego the size of the state of New Jersey.  He wasn’t going to take the blame for anything that went wrong with his children, he wasn’t there enough to participate. But who was going to say that to him? Not my mother and definitely not my brother or sisters. 

     My mother hadn’t gotten a job outside of the home just yet, which was a good thing for me. Meaning, she was there always, reliable, always. Something I had anxiety about before I knew what anxiety was. Will she take me to school? Will she be there to pick me up afterward? Simple as those things are, they were huge to a kid who feared loss and change and who knew what it felt like to get blindsided overnight. Poof! She too could be gone. 

     I suspect my grandmother had helped my mom out, either foregoing the rent due to her from the apartment she owned that we lived in or maybe she actually gave her some money to get by. But, I find the idea of my grandmother just handing over money so freely harder to believe.  She loved her daughter but I don’t think she was the kind of woman who babied any of her children as adults or even when they were children.  Maybe my brother and sisters chipped in, but I don’t see my mom being able to or expecting that of them. 

Maybe my Aunt Marie, my mom’s older sister helped. She seemed to visit more often or maybe it was just holidays. Maybe she was checking on her investment, making sure my mother wasn’t living in the lap of luxury on her dime.  Marie worked as a Realtor in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, a beautiful beach town, where she lived and owned a few properties. It was because of her we got to have those summer vacations at the Jersey Shore.

She was married to  Uncle Orlando. I couldn't say his name right to save my life. I called him, Calando. Why? Uncle and Orlando = Calando, at least that’s how I heard it.  Calando had an all-American look but he was Portuguese too. He was soft-spoken, with a distinctive voice and accent, more nasally and high pitched than any man I had heard up until that point. He was handsome-ish with dirty blonde hair, slanted almond-shaped eyes that disappeared when he smiled. He carried himself with elegance and class. He didn’t have the boisterous swagger of my father at all. He wasn’t really engaged with us when he visited, almost like he looked down his nose at us, like riff-raff. None of us could compare to his perfect daughter. 

Marie on the other hand, although nice enough with an infectious hardy laugh that made her belly move up and down, was more inquisitive when she visited. Marie and my mother didn’t look at all similar. Marie had a lighter complexion, eyes that smiled, smoother bob length brown hair, a more rounded nose, and a gap between her two front teeth.  She always wore her purse, London style, on the crook of her elbow, which I found fascinating. My mother wore her purses on her shoulder and the strap never stayed up because she was small shouldered. Her bra straps never seemed able to stay up either, they always slid down toward her upper arm peeking out of her dress sleeves at some point during any given day. Purses in general fascinated me, with fancy clasps that snapped close. The sound of a clasp closing or opening was like music to me.  The mystery of what a purse might contain intrigued me too. 

Marie seemed larger than my mother in height and width. I could never really make out her figure though because she never wore pants either, just like my mother. She wore sensible low heel shoes and support hose like my mom and grandmother. Varicose veins were apparently suffered by all the women in my mother’s family. My aunt never came empty-handed when they visited, always bringing some Portuguese cakes or pastries from Pitta’s, our local  Portuguese bakery.  On her visits to our apartment, she had lightning rounds with my brother and sisters on what their grades were in school and what they were studying. It was no fun at all for them and they dreaded and resented it. It was almost a little mean spirited. I don’t remember her ever grilling me, maybe she thought I was too young to get a worthwhile answer. After all, what was I studying at the time? Penmanship and how to tell time? And thank God she didn’t grill me. Numbers and I have a love-hate relationship. Numbers would love me to learn how to tell time and simple arithmetic and I hated numbers for making me try!  

Marie’s questioning of my siblings was almost like she was trying to one-up my mother. Marie and “Calando” had a daughter, Laurie, who is about thirteen now, a year younger than my sister Nana.  Laurie never grew up in Newark at all and was raised in Point Pleasant.  She was to me, the quintessential surfer girl with her long blonde hair and overall slim body, and her skin glowed like someone who actually was outdoorsy.  Unlike my mother’s brood, looking like tunnel dwellers. Although she paid me no mind, I thought she was cool looking, different. She was a teenager after all, and I had some experience with two teenage sisters ignoring me.   Laurie grew up differently although maybe not better, in a beach town with a more American neighborhood. She was the only child and got all of her parents’ attention and she knew how to get what she wanted yet she never seemed satisfied. She had a piano in her living room and had private lessons. Everything was handed to her and she didn’t care or maybe there was too much attention or pressure to be the perfect kid.

Meanwhile, we’re looking at her like she’s the lucky one but maybe she thought we were lucky because we had each other?   But Marie’s lightning rounds didn’t break my mother’s bunch. My brother and sisters were just as smart or actually smarter than Laurie, with their Newark public school education and our meager economic status.  They too played instruments without the private lessons and were well rounded socially as well as in school. There were no duds in this group, me included. My mother has subtly, without fanfare, so far raised well-rounded humans, cultured without ever venturing out to other places. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it”, my mother said. So, Nah, there is no way my mother would have ever accepted charity from her older sister or anyone.