Showing Off

 My new left hip is only four hours old when the nurse comes into my room. "Wanna take your hip for a spin?" she asks, wheeling the walker up to the bed. I stand up and, feeling like the recipient of a New Testament miracle, take hold of my walker and walk. "You're doing great! Feel free to walk up and down the halls if you're up to it," she says, and returns to her station. 

Fiddling with the ties at my back, I adjust the XXL hospital gown to my actual dimensions, and go exploring. At the end of the hall, I stare out the huge window at the rain. Next door there is an empty room with chairs and sofas intended for visitors. As I leave, my walker bumps against the doorjamb. What am I doing with this annoying contraption?  I'm not even putting any weight on it. In fact, I can probably get around without it. 

I leave the walker in my room and take another stroll. This is much better! It leaves my hands free to keep the XXL gown from flapping open while I fantasize that my recovery is over and I am back to normal, even before the sun sets on my surgery day. Not the least of my joys is the look of amazement on the nurse's face when she comes to fetch me. "Wow, you're really killing it!" she says, adjusting the blood pressure cuff. 

I blush with pleasure, and imagine her back at her station saying to her fellow nurses, "That woman in 2116 is amazing. I've never seen anything like her in my life! Nobody has ever recovered from surgery this fast."

Now it is the dead of night, and two orthopedics residents appear at the foot of my bed. "Do you think you could try raising you leg a little?" one of them asks. I respond with a high kick worthy of the Rockettes. "How cool is that!" he whispers to his friend. They leave and I sink back into slumber, wreathed in smiles.  I'd forgotten how good it feels to impress people.

The night nurse comes by with some pills. "I hear you've been walking around without your walker," she says, handing me a glass of water. "That's just not safe. I must ask that you use your walker at all times while you're in the hospital." 

Alongside the show-off, there lives within me a deeply obedient and compliant child. It is now her turn to shine, so I use the walker for the remainder of my stay, even though that makes my excursions less exciting (fewer chances of impressing staff) and clouded by the fear of my gown falling open in the back.

But when the physical therapist comes in the morning to clear me to go home, I am back in show-off mode, demonstrating the flexions and abductions I've been practicing for months in preparation for surgery.

I am not without self-awareness, so throughout my time in the hospital I am conscious of this childlike compulsion to impress everyone I come across, from surgeons to orderlies. But why I might be doing this, I have no idea. Could it be that I believe that my performances will get me more attention, and better care? But that seems counterintuitive, as doctors and nurses would surely be more inclined to minister to me if I appeared feeble and needy. 

Or it might be that at my stage in life there is little opportunity for performance and the ensuing applause. Gone are the days when studying hard would get me an A, so now I aim for good grades from medical personnel. It may make me look ridiculous, but I can't help myself.

Or maybe it's simply in my genes. As my 94-year-old mother was dying of encephalitis, I sat by her bed reading her a Catalan poem about the afterlife that she and my father had always loved. But before I could finish she shook her head, waved the book aside, and said "Look! Look what I can do!" and underneath the bedsheet she raised her left leg, and then her right, a good two feet above the mattress.

Bedtime Rituals

Sometimes, when I can’t go to sleep at night, I repeat the prayer that my mother taught me when I could barely talk, “Guardian Angel, sweet companion, don’t forsake me….” As I begin to drop off, the toddler that I once was rises up within me, and I feel again in my tongue and palate the effort to form those words, as my mother slowly enunciates each phrase. 

Since my mother thought I might catch cold from the chilly floor tiles, I did not use to say this prayer on my knees, but flat on my back in bed, with the covers up to my chin and tightly tucked all around. A year or two later, my mother added a P.S. to the Guardian Angel prayer: “Dear Lord, please watch over everyone. Make sure Daddy has plenty of work, and make me a really good girl.” When she explained that I could hasten the arrival of a little brother or sister by praying hard for it, I added a P.P.S. and kept at it until I was sixteen, when that prayer was finally answered. 

But prayers were only part of the bedtime rituals. The sickly child of a hyper-vigilant mother, I slept in my parents’ bedroom until I was in second grade. Their bedroom was at one end of a long hallway, and the living room where my mother awaited my father’s arrival from his nightly rehearsals or performances was miles away at the other end. At bedtime, I hated to let her go. I dreaded the fading sound of her heels on the tiles as she walked away from me, and I was afraid of waking up alone in the dark with one of my eternal ailments. 

As she quietly made her way towards the door, I would ask for reassurance, “Where is my cold?” 

“On the North Pole,” she would answer. 

“Where is my earache?” 

“Oh, very, very far. In India, I think,” she would say, her hand on the doorknob. 

Then, just before she, like the sun, vanished until morning, I would ask, “And my fever, where is it?” 

“It’s not even on this earth. It’s on the moon!” and she would close the door, leaving me with only my Guardian Angel for company until she and my father tiptoed in hours later. 

I wonder, in retrospect, did my parents find my presence next to their bed an impediment to making love? They were too happy as a couple to have abstained all those years until I moved to my own bedroom, but on the other hand I never heard any sounds that struck me as unusual. They probably counted on my being a sound sleeper, like all children. I do remember hearing them whisper in the dark, and making whispering sounds myself (bsss…bsss…bsss) to alert them to my wakefulness. 

I assume that it was my mother and not my father who insisted on my sleeping in their bedroom until I was of school-age. Yes, I had lots of childhood illnesses, but except for the measles, none was life-threatening. What made her so anxious that she had to keep me with her even during the night? Shortly before she died she said to me, “those happy years when you were little and Daddy and I were young, I always felt that God was up in heaven, holding a big stick and getting ready to bring it down on our heads.” 

Those happy years were less than a decade after the Spanish Civil War, a period during which, living near the front lines and having to hide in ditches to escape bombardments, she had feared for her life every day. So it is no wonder that for her the sudden happiness of married love, relative security, and a child of her own felt like fragile gifts that could only survive because of her constant watchfulness. 

I don’t know whether our prayers, and my sleeping body at hand’s reach in the dark reassured her. I hope they did. But all these years later the Guardian Angel prayer, when I recite it like a mantra, continues to comfort the anxious child that lives within me.

My Mother, on Beauty

 When my mother turned seventy, she said, “The trick at my age is not to try to look forty. The trick is to be the best-looking seventy-year-old in the room.” When she turned eighty, she told me that she had scheduled a “make-over” for herself. I remember hiding a smile. My mother looked awfully good for her age, but a make-over at eighty? What was she hoping for? 

She was more intensely aware of people’s looks than anyone I’ve ever known. “Look at her with that long neck,” she would say, tilting her chin to point out some unsuspecting woman waiting for the bus. “She should at least wrap a scarf around it. And her poor husband with his little short arms—his hands barely hang below his belt!” And she would shake her head sadly, because there’s nothing that one can do about short arms. 

She focused on my appearance with particular vehemence, but even though I complained bitterly, I benefitted from her fixation. She had my teeth straightened, my eyes uncrossed, my flat feet corrected, my acne tamed. The year I turned twelve, she got me my first girdle, and sent me to have my braids cut off and my legs waxed. She worked tirelessly on my posture and facial expression (“Don’t sit there with your mouth open. It’s not an intelligent look.”) But though she wanted me to look as well as I possibly could at twelve, fourteen, or sixteen, she was adamant that I not look a minute older than her idea of what a twelve-, fourteen-, or sixteen-year-old should look like. Hence, no stockings or straight skirts before fourteen, no lipstick before sixteen. These were the fronts on which, since I cared more about lipstick than braces, we fought our fiercest battles. 

In the 1970s, when I was a grown woman with a husband, two children, goats, chickens, and a profession, she wrote me a letter expressing her concern that I might be in danger of looking “like one of those farm wives I saw when I last visited you. That would be a terrible thing! What would people think?” I might be cleaning out the chicken house, but that was no reason not to look soignée. 

She was unsparing of her own shortcomings in the looks department, but treated them with the insouciance of one who knows she is the only star in her husband’s firmament. “Your father must have loved me a lot,” she confided after she became a widow. “He was a leg man, but he married me even though my legs are less than perfect, as you know.” 

And I did know, because she would comment ruefully about her legs, which were slightly bowed; her hips, which were too wide; and “up here,” meaning her chest, which was too flat. But about her appearance from the neck up, I heard no complaints, and rightly so. She had a wide brow, thin, arched eyebrows above large eyes, a well-shaped nose, and a jaw-line that retained its definition her entire life.                                                                                                                                         

She kept her beauty rituals to a minimum: a slathering of Nivea at night, and in the daytime a little powder and lipstick, and maybe a discreet slash of eyeliner at the outer corner of her eyes. When she was going to the opera, she would curl her eyelashes, and follow this with an application of Rimmel, the ur-mascara that came as a solid black cake in a small flat box. You spat on the cake, rubbed the resulting paste with a little brush, and applied it to your lashes. Then you took a pin and carefully separated whatever clumps of mascara the brush had left behind. (Spitting on the Rimmel cake, along with that graceful backwards twist of the torso to check the straightness of stocking seams, seemed to me as a child to embody the essence of femininity.) 

Other than scraping it off her forehead—because she had somehow conceived the notion that a wide forehead was a sign of intelligence—she didn’t do much about her light-brown, curly hair, which she kept short. But this changed in the 1960s, when hair was expected to rise straight up from the scalp before curving smoothly downwards into a balloon shape. After watching me put my hair in jumbo rollers every night, she observed that in the morning it did form that coveted balloon. But she was too fond of her comfort to sleep on rollers, and she may also have wanted to spare my father the sight of her lumpy head next to him on the pillow. Instead, she recruited me as her hairdresser. After she washed her hair I would put it up in rollers, and fit the hood of the portable hairdryer over them. When the hair was bone-dry, I would take out the rollers and, very gently, because her scalp was sensitive and she would yelp if I tugged, tease, spray, and mold her hair into shape. 

In her eighties she was still, thanks to good hair and good bones, the best-looking eighty-year-old in the room, so when she announced her plans to get a make-over, I wondered what was going on. Shouldn’t she be satisfied that she didn’t look any worse? What could any process, short of extensive plastic surgery, do to improve an eighty-year-old face? I was in my fifties at the time, and as unable to put myself in her place as if I had been a teenager. 

I kept my doubts about the make-over to myself, and the next time we spoke on the phone I asked how it had gone. “It was a waste of time,” my mother said. “The woman kept repeating ‘We must bring out your features!’ as she put blush on my cheeks and darkened my eyebrows. I washed it all off when I got home. My features are all still there, thank God, and they don’t need bringing out.” 

The features that enchanted me as a child stayed reassuringly the same as she turned eighty-five and then ninety, delineating to the end what had always been for me the face of love.

Uniforms

To my first school, run by an order of German nuns in Barcelona, I wore a black- and-white houndstooth jumper and a long-sleeved white cotton blouse. In the classroom we wore a white coverall to catch the spatters from our dip pens as we practiced handwriting. And to protect our modesty while we did calisthenics in the garden, we wore bloomers under our skirts. 

My school in Quito, run by the Sisters of Mercy, required two uniforms, one for regular days—blue-and-white check with short sleeves and gathered skirt--and one for special occasions (el uniforme de fiestas). Since my parents’ original plan was to stay in Ecuador for only one year, my mother explained to the principal that it didn’t make sense to have two uniforms made. Would just the regular one suffice? The principal said it would. 

The problem was that the principal neglected to issue a school-wide edict declaring me exempt from the uniforme de fiestas. That fall, school had not been long in session before a special occasion arose in all its awesome grandeur: the feast of Our Lady of Mercy, patroness of the order. The day dawned light and clear over the Andes, as most days did in those pre-pollution times. The volcanoes ringing the city twinkled and sparkled under their eternal snows. In the school courtyard, my fellow students were assembled, and what had been a sea of light blue was now a sea of navy: el uniforme de fiestas. 

Even to my ten-year-old eyes the outfit looked weirdly old-fashioned: a scoop-necked wool dress with a white cotton “dickey,” it was belted at the waist and had wide sleeves gathered in folds at the wrist. The skirt, deeply pleated, fell to mid-calf. An absurd beret, also navy blue, crowned the effect. This being the 1950s, my classmates wore starched crinolines under the pleated skirt, which made it swing like a bell with every step, and patent leather Mary Janes. 

I entered the courtyard in my everyday uniform and the scuffed lace-up ankle boots designed to correct my supposedly flat feet. “Why aren’t you wearing your uniforme de fiestas?” whispered one of the girls in my class. 

“It’s because…My mother said…,” I mumbled. 

“La Mercedes won’t care what your mother said. She will be furious,” the girl warned me. 

La Mercedes, the vice-principal, was notorious for her temper. She soon spotted me as we lined up to enter the chapel, and wanted to know why I was disgracing the school on this, the most sacred of fiestas. I again stammered about my mother and the principal, and she frowned, shrugged, and sent me to the back of the line. 

That first year, I endured several more feast days in the wrong uniform, believing that in the summer I would go back to Barcelona where my non-controversial uniform and the German nuns were waiting for me. But several months after our arrival in Quito, the Ecuadorean government had mysteriously run out of money to pay my father’s string quartet their contracted salaries, and between endless promises that the money would come soon, and endless negotiations to get at least part of what was owed to us, we stayed in Quito almost four years. 

I was ten, then eleven, twelve, thirteen. Every fall the drama of the uniform was reenacted. Every time I showed up in ordinary blue when the school was in festival navy, nuns, lay teachers and students were outraged. “But why are you wearing the wrong uniform?” they would ask, as if it were my first offence. And every time I was at a loss for words. I understood that my mother, who on one occasion had had to borrow my allowance to buy groceries when the Government neglected to pay my father’s salary, could not afford to hire a seamstress to make me one of those awful navy outfits. But I also knew that, in that school, few things mattered as much as showing up in the right clothes for the right occasion. When nuns frowned and shook their heads and sent me to the back of the line, when my classmates asked why, why, why, I felt that I, and I alone, was responsible. 

Things got much better when I entered a Catholic high school in Birmingham, Alabama. Here, in the land of the free, there were no uniforms, and once I got my mother to understand that it was unacceptable to wear the same outfit to school  two days in a row (“But why? If it’s not really dirty…”), the clothing dramas temporarily abated. 

But in tenth grade, the school decided to institute uniforms. Perhaps some prophetic soul had seen miniskirts on the horizon and decided to take preemptive action. Whatever the reason, our mothers were instructed to go to Pizitz, Birmingham’s premier department store, to buy the uniform, which consisted of a plaid, pleated skirt and a short-sleeved white cotton blouse. My mother was fine with the skirt, but she saw no reason to buy the regulation white blouse, because she had a perfectly good white blouse hanging in her closet that she was sure would fit me. Never mind that her blouse was nylon rather than cotton, and had pearl rather than plain flat buttons. 

I warned her that it would never do. I argued and pleaded, but she was unmoved. I don’t believe that lack of money was my mother’s reason for her refusal to buy the uniform blouse--the Birmingham Symphony was a lot better about paying its musicians than the Ecuadorean government had been. Maybe she thought that two white blouses in a single household would be sheer American extravagance. Whatever the reason, she sent me to school in the nylon blouse. 

It did not take long for what I had foreseen to come about. I was summoned to the office. There I was interrogated by the principal’s secretary—mercifully not by the Monsignor himself, who perhaps thought it improper to concern himself with female attire—about my incorrect blouse. And suddenly, as I stood looking at my feet while she glared down at me, my brain was flooded with the clear understanding that this was not my problem. 

It was my mother’s problem, and it was the school’s problem, but it had nothing to do with me. It was not my job to reconcile two opposing sets of adult requirements. I was not morally responsible for their contradictory ideas of what was right. Let them fight it out among themselves, I said to myself, feeling a mixture of relief tinged with righteous fury. 

And so I looked the secretary in the eye and said, in a voice that trembled only slightly, “My mother has decided that this is the blouse she wants me to wear. Perhaps she cannot afford to buy another one. You could always call and ask her….” The secretary nodded and sent me back to class, and I never heard another word about uniforms again.

Fourth grade, in Barcelona, in the garden of the German school. I'm in the last row, next to Mater Leonarda

 

Artichoke on My Face

“And then God sent an angel to pick blackberries,” my mother says, tucking me in. “He chose the two biggest, darkest ones and gave them to you for eyes. Another angel brought two roses for your cheeks, and he then flew to one of heaven’s cherry trees and brought down the ripest cherry for your lips." 

My eyes are starting to close, but she goes on. “But then God sent a younger angel, one that didn’t have a lot of experience, to look for something to make your nose. And that silly angel went to the vegetable garden and picked an artichoke, and God plopped it in the middle of your face.” As I nod off the Catalan word for artichoke, carxofa, seems to perfectly recreate the sound and feel of God plopping the artichoke on my face. 

But I am no more worried about having a carxofa on my face than I am flattered by the blackberry and cherry clichés. What sticks in my mind is the miraculous care and attention—all because of my specialness--that my creation story presupposes on the part of God, the angels, and my mother. 

It is only when I am a few years older that I realize what the artichoke metaphor is all about: I have inherited the Benejam nose. According to my mother, that nose, which my father got, along with his musical talent, from his mother, is disproportionately broad. The Benejam nose sits in the middle of our faces like an artichoke among the fruits and blossoms of an otherwise pleasing still-life. 

I don’t perceive any meanness in my mother’s tone when she critiques the Benejam nose. Heaven knows she loves my father and me to death. I have to grow a little older before I realize that, coming from someone with a narrow, more classically correct nose, her talk about the noses of her beloveds carries a whiff of schadenfreude. 

Oddly enough, this does not give me a nose complex. Even at the nadir of my adolescence, when I deplore most aspects of my anatomy (too much hair, not thin enough, etc.), my nose ranks low among my concerns. Rather, in my longing to draw close to my father, I like to think that the resemblance of our noses is an outward sign of the deep bond between us.

If my mother does not stint her observations about my nose, she is equally unsparing of her own perceived shortcomings. The chief one among these, according to her, is her legs, which are slightly bowed—something I would never have noticed if she hadn’t brought it up. And she in turn heaps praise on my legs, which she says are straight and perfect as Greek columns. 

Neither my artichoke nose nor my columnar legs have much emotional impact on me as a child. What does put an indelible mark on my psyche is my mother’s preoccupation with physical beauty. Hearing her analyze other women’s appearance in clinical detail—eyes too small and close together, nice long neck, pity about those short arms—I learn to pay close attention to looks, mine and everyone else’s. 

Now I am in tenth grade, and my mother is concerned about my teeth. It seems that my jaws are too small, or my teeth too big, and she takes me to the orthodontist because, as she explains to a friend, “nobody is likely to marry this child for her money, so we need to make sure she looks as good as possible.” Braces are only the latest in her list of improvements, following years of orthotics for my supposedly flat feet, and surgery to correct my errant left eye. 

I am grateful to my mother for her proactive attitude towards my appearance. Thanks to her my eyes and teeth are reasonably straight, my feet well arched. But I’m glad that she left my carxofa nose alone. These days I am often startled, when passing in front of a mirror, by what looks like the ghost of my mother. When did I grow to be so like her? But if I stop and look closer, there in the middle of my face is my nose, in all its Benejam splendor, to remind me that I am also my father’s daughter.

Revelation

I am wandering around in our house in Quito—the one my mother chose because it has the best views of the surrounding volcanoes—looking for something to read. There wasn’t much room in the three suitcases that the airline allowed us when we left Barcelona, so this house is almost bare of books. It is almost bare of furniture, too, and in the kitchen there is only one big pot for boiling water (what comes out of the spigot is full of parasites that we’ve been told might kill us) and a frying pan for omelets. We believe that we’re here for only one year, so we’re sort of camping out. 

On the dining room table, among a stack of letters from Spain, I notice my mother’s passport. In the photo, my mother looks especially happy, because she is about to fly to the wilds of South America. (My mother is the most beautiful woman I know, as beautiful as the statues of the Virgin Mary that I see in church—not the ones where She’s holding her dead Son, but the ones where He’s still a baby.) 

Below the photo I read, Date of Birth: February 28, 1918. But this cannot be. We’re in 1955, which means that my mother is…thirty-seven years old! I repeat the math, just to make sure, and there it is again, that appalling, fateful number that tells me that my mother is extremely old, and will die soon. 

As I stand holding the passport, the room swims and darkens around me. A ghostly hand squeezes my ten-year-old insides, and my breath feels as tight as when I run in Quito’s 9,000 ft altitude. My father is upstairs, rehearsing Dvorak with his string quartet. My mother is taking a nap. I am alone with my terrible secret--because it is a secret, and must remain so. I cannot reveal to my mother that she is in imminent danger of dying of old age, because the knowledge might kill her on the spot. Let her spend her remaining days in blissful ignorance. I must deal with this horror alone. 

My mother, dead—I can no more imagine that than I can imagine my own non-existence. The sense that she is essential to my survival is as deeply rooted in me as if I were still in her womb. But yet here she is, an impossibly ancient woman of thirty-seven, with perhaps just a few years or even months left to live. 

What will happen to me when she dies? Although I know that my father is a few years older than she, the realization of her imminent mortality is too overwhelming, and leaves no space for wondering how long he will last, or what my life with him will be like. No, when my mother dies I will be left alone in this strange country of volcanoes and no seasons, left to find my way back to Spain somehow. 

If I had come across my mother’s passport in Barcelona, I would have had two sets of grandparents nearby, all of them older than thirty-seven, yet going about their business without so much as a cane to lean on. Or I might have confided in one of my mother’s sisters, who would have mocked me a little, and jollied me out of my fright. 

But all those people are far away now, across the Atlantic, and here I am face-to-face with my mother, carrying my dreadful knowledge. Our uninterrupted mother-daughter duet, now that the buffer of grandparents, aunts, and uncles is gone, is beginning to weigh on me. Without her in-laws to please, her parents to worry about, and her sisters to shop and argue with, my mother is free to concentrate on me: my posture (slouched); my hair (in my face); my smile, or lack of it. In our nearly empty Quito house, there is nowhere for me to hide. 

But in the secret recesses of my cells, the hormonal tides are rising. The feathers that will power my future lifelong flight away from my mother are beginning to sprout. This wordless sorrow at the thought of losing her, my utter inability to envision life without her presence, are the last fraying threads of the cord that has bound me to her from conception. 

For now, however, the rumbles of my oncoming puberty are too faint for me to hear. As for my mother, she is in her glory, surrounded by volcanoes, having adventures that she could not have imagined as a child in her Catalan village. Her husband adores her, and the Dvorak sounds divine. The Amazon beckons, with its orchids, ocelots, and head-hunting tribes, and the best is yet to come. After all, she’s only thirty-seven. 

The Mystery of the Unborn Calf

I was a backward child, wandering dreamily in a world filled with mysteries and miracles. At ten, even as my breasts were starting to develop, my mother had to sit me down and inform me that it was  parents who gave their children gifts on the feast of the Epiphany--not the Magi following the star on their camels. Prior to her revelation, I had felt no need to question the story. I had been taught that my guardian angel hovered over my right shoulder as I went about my day, and the Virgin Mary personally kept vigil over my bed at night, so why not flying camels and wandering stars? 

One day a couple of years later, informed by the maid who made my bed that overnight I had transitioned from niña to mujer, my mother called me into her room and handed me a box of sanitary napkins and a belt.

“What’s all this?” I asked, oblivious to the events of the night.

She explained the basics. Thinking that menstruation was an annoying but temporary manifestation of adolescence, like acne, I asked her when it would stop. My mother smiled. “Not until you are very old,” she said.

Along with the supplies, she handed me a Spanish translation of a booklet published by Modess. It had line drawings of cool-looking American girls in circle skirts and saddle shoes, and, less interesting, sketches of the organs that menstrual blood came from. The booklet did not explain what the bleeding was for, and it never occurred to me that it had anything to do with babies, much less with men. I did notice that some pages seemed to have been cut out of the booklet, but I didn’t ask.

Now that I would have to carry those bulky pads around with me, my mother decided that I needed a purse. We were living in Quito at the time, and you couldn’t simply walk into a store and buy one. Like furniture and clothing, purses had to be made to order. She took me to the man who made things out of leather, and they had a conversation about the design of the purse while I stood on one foot and then the other, daydreaming. They decided on one in the shape of a flattened flower pot.

As they discussed the kind of leather--cow, pig, alligator?-- to be used, the man said something that startled me out of my trance. “I have something that would be perfect for the child,” he said, spreading a skin on the counter. It was covered in short, fine, honey-colored fur. He ran his fingers over it and smiled at my mother. “It is unborn calf. Feel how soft…”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “That is impossible. How can you make a purse out of a calf that is not born, that doesn’t exist?”

“Hush!” my mother said.

"No, really," I persisted. "It's absurd!"

My mother gave the man a deposit for the purse and hustled me out of the store. At home she explained that before birth calves grew for several months inside mother cows, just as human babies grew inside their mothers. Again, she made no mention of bulls or men, and again I didn’t ask. After all, hadn’t Our Lord been "conceived of the Holy Spirit"? But that was not the main issue on my mind.

“It must hurt a lot when the baby comes out!” 

“Yes, of course,” my mother said. “Maybe that is why mothers love their children so much.”

I remember feeling skeptical about this. Why would one love something because it hurt? But of course many other painful things were supposed to be good or even holy--fasting before communion, giving one’s allowance to the poor, not to mention Our Lord’s death on the cross—so the pain of childbirth fit right in with my worldview.

Although I am sorry that I embarrassed my mother and the leather man that day, I nevertheless recall my preadolescent self with tolerance. My lack of curiosity about sex was not evidence of an impoverished mind. On the contrary, my mind was already so full of unfathomable things that there was no room for thinking about mundane stuff like where babies came from. Figuring out what  impelled Saint Eulalia at age thirteen to confront the Roman governor of Barcelona, an avid persecutor of Christians, who then proceeded to torture and kill her, was more engrossing than wondering how that calf got into the cow in the first place.

I wore the calf-skin purse for a long time, until the zipper broke. Another thing that I neglected to wonder about during those years is what had to happen to the cow in order for her unborn calf to be made into a purse. I regret that I came late to an awareness of the suffering of animals, but I am making up for it now.

Perfectibility

When we lived in Quito, I used to ride the school bus home for lunch. My mother would sit at the table and watch me eat.

“Sit up straight,” she would say, followed by:

“Don’t put your elbows on the table.

Chew your food well. Digestion begins in the mouth.

You’re slouching again.

Don’t scrape your knife on the plate.

And take the hair out of your eyes. I want to see your forehead.

Elbows!

Why are you hunched over?”

At this point, even the afternoon algebra class began to seem appealing. “I have to go now," I would say, getting up, "or I’ll miss my bus.”

“Put your chair back where you found it. Wipe your lips. Fold your napkin. María! (calling the maid) Take the child across the street. Her bus is almost here.” I was almost an inch taller than tiny Indian María, and I have to give her credit for keeping a straight face as she wiped her hands on her apron and walked me across the street.

As justified as my mother’s admonitions were, I did not take them with good grace. The brand-new hormones coursing through my veins, while giving me the external attributes of a woman, were doing nothing to turn me into a lady. Instead, for a last, blessed reprieve, I clung to my childish conviction that I was fine just the way I was.

But my mother was an optimist. No matter how much I resisted her, she was convinced that she would prevail. In fact, it was her duty to prevail. “Do you think I enjoy having to correct you so much?” she would say when I complained about her constant monitoring. “I do not! I would much rather be doing something else, like going for a walk, or reading a book.”  I was skeptical. I couldn’t believe that anybody could devote so much time and energy to something they didn’t enjoy at least a little.

“And your grumbling and protesting,” she went on, “do you think I enjoy that? Don’t you know how much more pleasant my life would be if I let you do as you please? But what would happen if I did? What sort of person would you become?” She would shake her head sadly, indicating that she didn’t have much faith in my future if I were left to my own resources. “No! I am your mother, and it is my sacred duty—sacred, do you hear?—to correct you when I see you doing something wrong. Even if it means that you love me less sometimes. I must put my own feelings aside and do what I know is right, no matter how much pain it brings me.”

This usually shut me up. How could I argue with her sacred duty? How could I complain when she, who loved me more than anything in the world, was willing to sacrifice herself in order to do the right thing? In her youth my mother had studied law, and she brought her best courtroom technique to these confrontations. Like an ill-prepared defense attorney, I capitulated before her prosecutorial skills.

But I had to do something to get her off my back, at least temporarily. If I couldn’t defeat her in argument, I might be able to negotiate with her. So I offered her a deal: I would accept her corrections without complaint every day of the week if she would agree, on Wednesdays at lunch, to let me eat without comment.

To my amazement, she gave in. When Wednesday came around, there was soup for lunch. I tucked my hair behind my ears, bent over the bowl and, as my mother watched in silent disbelief, lapped up the soup like a dog. The soup was hot, and it dribbled down my chin and onto my uniform blouse. There were chick peas and chunks of meat floating around, and it was hard to catch them without using a spoon. It felt disgusting, but I was intent on demonstrating to my mother that she had to respect our deal no matter what, and I persevered until the last drop was gone.

The next Wednesday, assuming that I had made my point, I intended to make full use of my silverware, and simply looked forward to a critique-free meal. But as soon as I picked up my fork my mother said, “I know it’s Wednesday, and I’m not supposed to say anything. But do you realize that your left elbow’s on the table?” I rolled my eyes, dropped the elbow, and continued eating. My mother cleared her throat. I looked up and she pointed silently at my napkin, which I had neglected to place on my lap. The next time she opened her mouth, before she could even speak, I sat up straight.

It was no use, and so I gave up my campaign. For the first time ever, I saw my mother not as someone who, along with my father, stood practically next to God in goodness and omnipotence, but as a woman who was helpless, because of some quirk of her psyche, to quell the urge to polish me until I gleamed like a mirror in which she could see herself.

Homesick

 While my mother, immobilized by vertigo, lay stretched like a corpse on the bed in our Manhattan hotel room, my father and I went to the top of the Empire State building. It was the spring of 1954, and we were on a two-day layover on the week-long airplane trip from Barcelona to Quito.

“Why is she sick?” I asked my father as we walked down Fifth Avenue.

“It’s because she’s sad that we left Barcelona,” he said.

Sad! What was there to be sad about? Weren’t we going on a fabulous adventure to South America, one even more thrilling than those of Hernán Cortés, Ponce de León and Francisco Pizarro? And hadn’t my mother, driven to distraction by the monotony of her housewifely existence, been the principal force behind my father’s acceptance of the Ecuadorian government’s invitation to found the country’s first string quartet? There was no room for emotional ambivalence in my ten-year-old heart. I couldn’t understand that my mother, who had wanted to go on this escapade as much as I had, could also feel regret at leaving her family behind.

For the next three years, while we lived in Quito, my mother oscillated between breathless excitement at the exoticism of it all--snow-capped volcanoes! endless jungles! head-hunting tribes!—and elaborate bouts of homesickness.

I never quite understood what was going on with her, but I sensed that the homesick role was hers to play. By contrast, I sought to distinguish myself by adopting a mask of stoicism. Tears and complaints were not for me--I wasn’t a baby anymore, nor was I sentimental, like a woman. I preferred to mimic my father, and leave the tragic persona to my mother.

And yet, how could I not have been homesick? But nobody asked if I was, and when confronted with my mother’s articulate depictions of her nostalgia, I assumed that mine, if it existed, couldn’t hold a candle to hers.

True, I was sheltered by my parents’ reassuring presence. But once the excitement of being in a foreign place wore off and life settled into a routine, how could I not miss the rhythms of my existence in Catalonia, where each month was marked by some festival, its ritual, and its accompanying dessert?

January was the month when the Three Kings brought me presents and we ate the marzipan-stuffed tortell de reis. February 12^th was the feast of Saint Eulalia, and my mother bought ensaïmadas from the bakery in my honor. On March 19^th, the feast of Saint Joseph, my aunts made crema catalana in celebration of my grandfather.  In April, for Easter, my godmother gave me the mona de Pasqua, a cake topped with chocolate eggs. In May, the month of Our Lady, we ate strawberries. And all summer-long, at my grandparents’ farm, we feasted on melons, peaches, and pears so ripe that their juices ran down my chin and soaked the front of my cotton dress.

All this was gone. And so was the tutelary presence of my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, who had revolved like planets around my sunny childhood, and whose affection, interest, and willingness to entertain me I had taken for granted, just as an infanta assumes the devotion of her courtiers. But that wasn’t all. In the constant hubbub of our extended family, the to-and-fro of visits and phone calls, the telling and retelling of stories, gossip, opinions, advice, and concerns, my relatives had absorbed some of my mother’s emotional energy and distracted her from her focus on me.

Now, without her sisters to argue and shop with, her parents to worry about, and her in-laws to visit, my mother’s attentive gaze, when she wasn’t soaking fruits in permanganate or boiling milk to kill the tropical parasites that threatened us daily, was directed at me. And what she saw was in need of improvement. My baby charms were fading fast, and I was morphing into an icon of preadolescent awkwardness. I was a work in progress, and my mother girded her loins for the challenges that lay ahead.

My mother and I in Quito, 1954

The Cassandra Lineage

Whenever my uncle led the aged, utterly mellow cart horse out of the barn to be harnessed, my mother’s mother would come out of the kitchen and stand watching, her hands on her hips.

“This horse,” she would say, shaking her head, “is going to kill somebody one of these days.”

Like my grandmother, my mother worried constantly about potential catastrophes. “When your father and I married, and then you were born,” she confided to me years later, “I was happier than I’d ever thought possible. But even in the middle of so much happiness, I always felt that God was somewhere up in the clouds, with a big stick in his hand, waiting to hit me on the head.”

More years have passed, and now that I am my grandmother’s age I too spend way too much time looking out for murderous cart horses and wincing in anticipation of the next blow to rain down from heaven.

My grandmother’s and my mother’s persistent intimations of disaster were rooted in their experience of the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 to 1939. My grandmother was in her late thirties then, and my mother in her teens. Since they lived on a farm, they did not starve. But my grandfather, the village vet, sometimes had to hide from the bands of anarchists wreaking havoc in the countryside, and the family would frequently leave their beds in the middle of the night and crouch in a ditch to escape from bombardments.

“We all wore a little stick tied to a string around our neck, so that when the bombs came we could bite down on it and the shock waves would not burst our eardrums,” my mother remembered. The terror of the anarchist raids; the nights spent cowering in the ditch to escape the bombings; and, at the end of the war, the fear of the retreating soldiers left a mark on her psyche that lasted the rest of her life.

It’s not hard to see how those three years of living in constant fear would lead to my mother and her mother’s hyper-vigilance; their feeling that, if they let down their guard for a single moment, disaster would strike; and their bone-deep conviction that life was, at bottom, a tragic affair, and that passing moments of happiness were simply accidental flashes in the enveloping darkness, and not to be relied on.

My first decade passed against a chorus of cautions and warnings.

“This child isn’t eating enough.”

“Look! She has a fever again!”

“She’s pale. She should spend more time outdoors.”

“Don’t let her out of the house in the middle of the day. She’ll get sunstroke!”

“Quick! Shut that window. She’s standing in a draft.”

“Take that book away from her. She’ll get indigestion if she reads after lunch.”

While my mother was alive, I put a lot of energy into countering her apprehensions. When I was a teenager and she had her second child, I watched her live in fear that my vigorous little sister would waste away, and I tried to convince her of the basic sturdiness of babies. When my own children were born and she warned me against germs and other potential threats, I showed off my casual trust in their aptitude for survival. When she tried to talk me out of moving to a rural part of Vermont where hospitals are few and far between, I ignored her and did just that.

But now that both my grandmother and my mother are gone, my ability to put on that tough-woman act has deserted me, and I often shudder at the prospect of imminent doom. I envision endless tragic scenarios, ranging from a flat tire on a deserted dirt road to civil strife, fires, floods, and the extinction of honeybees. It is as if the rose-colored glasses that we all need to wear in order to function in the world have been suddenly ripped off my face, and life appears in all its meaningless gloom.

Just as, when passing in front of a mirror I sometimes think I’m catching a glimpse of my mother, I find myself reenacting the Cassandra role that she and her mother played so faithfully. But why? I didn’t live through the war. I didn’t have to cower in ditches in the middle of the night, or hide from anarchists, like my mother and her family. I didn’t starve, like my father and his family.

How, then, did I become infected with the Cassandra virus?

For years I assumed that my predisposition to see the dark side of things was something I had inherited from my mother and her mother, like my brown eyes and curly hair. But studies of the descendants of survivors of the Holocaust and other traumatic events such as the American Civil War point to a different explanation.

Though still controversial, these studies suggest that the trauma undergone by individuals of one generation can change the way their genes are passed on and expressed in their offspring, even if the parents do not discuss their own traumatic experiences and the children lead normal lives. The most common manifestations of this trans-generational trauma are anxiety, depression, and lack of resilience.

I don’t remember my parents and grandparents discussing the war in front of me. There were passing references to my father having to stay hidden for three years to avoid execution, but he never talked about what it felt like as a twenty-two-year-old not to be able to go outside, or play the violin, or have enough to eat. Likewise, other than the story of the little sticks on a string, my mother did not say much about that time.

But whether unconsciously, through her own anxiety about my welfare, or through epigenetic transmission, she passed on to me Cassandra’s gift of foreseeing disaster, and I often tremble in anticipation of whatever blow the universe is about to deliver next.

There are many depictions of Cassandra in ancient Greek vases, and she is always shown with brown eyes and dark, curly hair.

The Face of Love

I don’t have the words yet to explain why what I want is so important, so I open my mouth wide and yell, and stamp my feet.

“Olé, olé!” my mother claps, “Are you a flamenco dancer?”

If I had been frustrated before, now I am enraged. How dare she? How dare she mock me when I am trying to communicate something crucial? I would like to fly across the room and bite her on the leg. But her ploy has worked, and I swallow my tantrum, lest she laugh at me again.

My aunt swears that she taught me to read when I was three, so this next scene must have happened around that time: I am in a store with my mother. A nice woman, dressed in black (women in black are everywhere in Barcelona in these days after the Spanish Civil War), strokes my cheek and, for some reason, asks me if I can read.

“Yes, I can,” I answer.

“No. You don’t know how to read yet,” my mother says.

“Yes! Yes! I can read!” I insist.

My mother pulls an envelope out of her purse and thrusts it in front of my face. “O.k., then, read this.”

The letters on the envelope are small, rounded, and crowded together--not at all like the big, clear letters of the alphabet that I have just begun to learn. The writing swims and blurs before my eyes, which are filling with tears. How can she humiliate me like this in front of a stranger? Isn’t she supposed to be on my side? And didn’t she just the other day, when I finally made it to the end of the alphabet, exclaim “What a big girl you are—you’re reading!” I feel betrayed and full of spite, and I would bite her if I could….

It seems odd that a little kid would have a fully developed sense of personal dignity, and would react with such force when it was attacked. Where did this come from? Was there an extra gene for dignity in my DNA? Or does the fact that those rages felt so primal mean that they were less about dignity than about survival as my own person?

In the coming years, I learned to divert my rages and do to myself what I would like to do to my mother. In my room, with the door closed, I would roll up my white uniform blouse and bite my forearm hard enough to leave tooth marks.

I don’t think that my mother, who was not a cruel woman, realized any of this. If she had been mean all the time, it would have been easier for me to take a stand, and simply hate her. But hers was the face of love in my life.

The happiest moments--happier even than the morning of January 6, when the Magi brought me gifts--were those occasions when, my father being away, she would let me share her bed and we would cuddle before I fell asleep enveloped in the smell of her skin.

To me she was more beautiful than any woman in all of Spain, possibly in the entire planet. I embarrassed her one day when, coming back from Mass, I confided that I’d been examining the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, demure in her white veil, blue sash, and mild expression, and concluded that my mother was every bit as beautiful as She.

But if in the daytime I found my mother as beautiful as the Virgin Mary, at night I had a recurring nightmare in which a green-faced witch, not unlike the one I’d seen in The Wizard of Oz, drew me irresistibly toward her.  The horror of the dream lay in my utter helplessness, in the knowledge that, no matter how hard I tried to oppose her, she could, by the sheer force of her personality, bend me to her will.

To my huge relief, just before I disappeared into the witch an angel who looked to be my own age appeared and whispered, “Stay with me, and you will be o.k.” I did, and we watched together as a gust of wind carried the witch away. I haven’t had that dream in a long, long time, but I remember with gratitude the heaven-sent angel of my childish rage, who, in the nick of time, flew down and returned me to myself.

The Miracle

“And please, God, send me a little brother or sister”: this was the coda that, as a child, I appended to my nightly prayers for years, with no luck. I prayed as I would have prayed for a dog or a kitten--something or someone that I could relate to on my own level, who would stand with me inside the circle of ever-watchful, concerned, loving adults. Someone, especially, who would distract my mother from her intense focus on me. A fellow soldier in the battle for a separate self.

My parents prayed too, but I'm not sure they did anything besides praying and exercising their “conjugal rights,” like consulting a specialist. Or did the fact that I slept in their room until I was in school keep that longed-for second child at bay?

Although openly affectionate with each other, my parents adhered to a Victorian standard of modesty. Until his final illness, I never saw my father even in his robe. When I was still sleeping in their room and he got up in the morning, he would say “Don’t look! I’m going to get dressed now.” By using the plural form of the verb, he was ensuring that I believed that my mother wasn’t allowed to see him naked either. At night, in the dark, I would sometimes hear them whispering, and for a joke I would make whispering noises back at them. But I don’t recall ever hearing anything remotely sexual.

Years passed, and I was exiled to the Murphy bed in my own bedroom down the hall, but still nothing happened sibling-wise. After a while I stopped asking my mother why my prayers went unanswered, but I never stopped praying—not through our four years in Ecuador or our move to Birmingham after that. Then, when we least expected it, my mother got pregnant.

We marveled and rejoiced and gave thanks, but, at four months, my mother miscarried. I remember my father, as he walked out the door to rush her to the hospital, turning to tell me not to look in the bucket that was left in the bathroom, which he had hurriedly covered with the lid of the old-fashioned washing machine tub. I obeyed, and while I was in school the next morning, he buried the baby, a boy, in the backyard.

We all gave up hope then. What, after all, were the chances of another pregnancy after fifteen years of sterility and a miscarriage? Apparently they were excellent because, the year after that, at age forty-two, my mother got pregnant again. We held our breath and prayed hard for nine months, and this time my sister, the long-awaited miracle, was born, and all was well.

I had just turned sixteen, and far from being embarrassed, as teenagers are said to be, by this scandalous evidence of sex among the elderly, I was thrilled. Even though she wasn’t the companion I had prayed for, I loved the strangeness of this new creature, and the disruption she created in the household. I peered at my sister with the same intense curiosity as I had watched the chickens and rabbits of my grandparents’ farm—why did she cry every evening when the sun went down? Were her early smiles the real thing? What made her clench her fists and pull up her knees when she cried?

I threw myself fervently into the diaper-changing and bottle-washing routines. I longed to feed the baby, but my mother jealously guarded that function.  I wondered at her anxiety that my sister, born at a vigorous seven pounds, would starve to death if she didn’t finish her bottle at every feeding. I was aghast when she pinched her tiny nose to force open her mouth so she could insert the nipple. Surely a baby knew when she’d had enough? It was my first consciously critical look at my mother’s parenting style.

“Weren’t you jealous?” people ask me when they hear the story. Alas, no. Jealousy would have implied a shift in my mother’s attention away from me. But my mother was perfectly capable of continuing to scrutinize my face, my posture, my dress, my sleep habits, my tone of voice, and the state of my soul while she held my sister in her arms. My sister and I were, in fact, two only children, and although my prayers had been answered in the literal sense—I now had a sibling—I was still without the fellow soldier I had longed for in the guerrilla wars against my mother.

But if I didn’t gain a comrade, I did reap other benefits from my sister’s late arrival. All the diaper-changing, bottle-washing, and babysitting I did from ages sixteen until my parents finally loosened their grip and let me leave for graduate school at twenty-one stood me in excellent stead when I had my own children in my mid-twenties.

For one thing, despite the prevailing ethos, I was determined to breast feed them, having had enough of washing and sterilizing bottles and mixing formula during my teenage years. For another, having carried a baby on my hip while I myself was still growing, I had somehow learned to trust that a healthy infant is a sturdy creature, not likely to keel over and expire without warning. Although I had my share of maternal anxieties, compared to the perennial jitters of the other young mothers around me, I felt relaxed and free to enjoy my babies.

My sister is closer in age to my daughters than to me. She and I grew up not only in different eras but in different countries and with different languages. But despite all those differences, when we speak she often shocks me by saying something that could only have come from the lips of one of my mother’s daughters.

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My Mother and the Can of Crisco

During our years in Quito, my mother learned to shop in the open-air markets where Indian women, wearing long braids and black fedoras, layers of petticoats, and, usually, a baby on their back, squatted on the sidewalk. On the ground in front of them lay the produce of the high Andes: mounds of potatoes, piles of onions and corn, and slabs of meat. It was all very real and natural, and crawling with flies.

Her first encounter with an American supermarket was, therefore, a shock.  Everything she could want—from food to cleaning products--was in one pristine, air-conditioned place, all of it canned or neatly wrapped in plastic or cellophane.

One aisle had a surprising array of toilet papers--some strong, some soft, and all in gentle pastels. This was not what my mother was used to: in Spain, the only brand had been a no-nonsense brown, with a picture of an elephant uprooting a tree on the wrapping, while in Ecuador public bathrooms were invariably stocked with squares of newspaper. She was especially taken with the selection of paper napkins, also in many colors. “So hygienic!” she said. “You can have a fresh one at each meal.”

After four years in Quito, where she had to buy her chickens on the hoof and boil every drop of the water and milk we drank, my mother was understandably fascinated with the prospect of ready-to-eat meals. And she wasn’t alone. In that innocent and trusting age, American women cheerfully filled their grocery carts with canned vegetables, meats, and desserts. Here were convenience, nutrition, and endless freshness, and all you needed was a can opener. What was not to like?

The problem for us was figuring out what was inside the cans. The pictures on the labels weren’t always helpful. What, for instance, was that pink cube called Spam? What were those squishy cylinders called marshmallows? The tuna cans had pictures of fish on the label, but as a good Mediterranean my mother wouldn’t think of buying fish that wasn’t practically still wiggling.

We wandered the aisles, feeling increasingly frustrated, when I spotted something that might do. “Look,” I said, “it says Chili Con Carne! Whatever chili is, it has meat. It’s probably o.k.” My mother put the can in her cart and we walked on.

Then, when we were about to give up and leave with an almost empty cart, my mother held up an enormous blue and white can. It had pictures of delicious foods on the label—chicken legs coated in crisp batter, and biscuits, cookies, and slices of pie. Surely, my mother thought, this was the ultimate expression of American practicality: an entire meal in a single can. We bought a can opener and headed home for our first American dinner.

In the kitchen, my mother emptied the chili into a frying pan. “What are all these beans doing mixed with the meat? Your father won’t be too happy,” she said. My father and his family had starved during the Spanish Civil War, and one day he and his brother had managed to steal a huge sack of dried beans, which the family ate for months. Beans were one of the few foods that my father objected to.

As the chili heated, my mother took a taste. “Mare de Déu!” she exclaimed. “This is awful. Here,try it.” I did, and spat it into the sink. The harsh flavor of chili, spicy and bitter, stuck to the back of my tongue.

“Maybe if we eat it with bread,” my mother said, opening a loaf of Wonder Bread and handing my father and me each a slice. But that soft, pliable, crustless square was unlike any bread we’d ever seen. My father took a bite and closed his eyes, chewing. “I feel like I’m eating a piece of towel,” he said.

Our first American meal wasn’t turning into a success. “Well, we can’t eat this. Let’s try the other can,” my mother said, guiltily scraping the chili into the trash.

It took her a while to work the opener all the way around the top, and when she lifted it she said “What is this? Come look!” My father and I ran into the kitchen. The can was filled to the rim with a solid white mass.

“Maybe the food is hidden underneath” my father suggested.

My mother got a wooden spoon and carefully, not wishing to disturb the fried chicken and biscuits and desserts, dug out a bit of the white goo. But there was more goo under that, so she kept digging and digging until finally it became clear that the chicken, etc. on the label had been a lie designed to entice people to buy a six-pound can of that weird white substance.

“It’s some kind of grease,” she said, rubbing a bit of the stuff between index and thumb. “What can Americans possibly do with it?”

My mother dined out on the Crisco story for years. I found it embarrassing and humiliating, and would leave the room whenever she told it. In a way, the Crisco episode mimicked my experience of the American dream: promises of abundant delights as shown in the movies and TV that, upon closer examination, revealed a strange and impenetrable mystery.

The Lipstick Wars

In the late 1950s, in my Catholic school in Birmingham, Alabama, girls wore their hair short, their skirts long and tight, and their lips coated with dark red lipstick.

I was o.k. on the hair and skirt fronts, and I even had a little orange scarf that tied around my neck, like everybody else. But none of this meant anything if my lips were bare. Lipstick was the magic wand that would camouflage my all-too-obvious foreigness, catapult me into American teenagerhood, and give me a chance of becoming at least slightly popular.

“I’m the only one in the entire school who doesn’t wear lipstick, besides the boys,” I complained to my mother.

“What about the nuns? Do they wear lipstick too?” she said, trying for irony.

 “Is that what you want me to become, a nun?” I answered. “Because that’s what will happen, if you force me to be different from everybody.”

“That’s enough!”my mother said.

I stomped off to my bedroom and sat biting my nails, dreaming of the boys I’d date and the dances I’d dance if only I were allowed to wear lipstick.

I endured ninth grade without lipstick or dates. Then, on my fifteenth birthday, a savior appeared in the form of Miss Harrington. Tall, thin, gray-haired and bespectacled, she was the very image of the spinster school teacher. She even lived with her mother. Miss Harrington taught Spanish at a public school, and she adored my parents, who were the only native Spanish speakers she had ever known.

Miss Harrington knew teenagers, and she understood the drive for affiliation that at that age rivals the sexual urge in intensity. So on October 3^rd, 1959 Miss Harrington showed up at our house, made a little speech in front of my parents about what a grown-up young lady I was becoming, and presented me with a tube of Tangee lipstick.

It was a deep red bordering on purple, a color that would make even a fifteen-year-old face look middle-aged. But hey, it was a lipstick, and I could always tame it by blotting. I thanked Miss Harrington, barely restraining myself from kissing her feet in gratitude, and, with a triumphant glance at my mother, ran to the bathroom to try it on.

When Miss Harrington left, my mother pointed at my purplish mouth and said, “Take it off.”

“But Miss Harrington gave it to me. She’s a teacher! She knows Americans, and she doesn’t think I should be different from everybody.”

“And why shouldn’t you be different from everybody? We are not Americans. We are Spaniards, and in Spain little girls don’t wear lipstick.”

Why, you ask, didn’t I simply pretend to throw away the purple lipstick, hide it in my book bag, and put it on the minute I got to school? Because I was a good girl, that’s why, and I believed that obedience to my parents was second only to obedience to God.

But nothing said that I had to obey gladly, and as I fumed and ground my teeth, I had an idea. My mother’s sister was a teacher in the German nuns’ school I’d attended in Barcelona. She would know what Spanish teenagers were wearing, and, as my aunt, she would have my moral welfare at heart. My mother would, I reasoned, have to abide by her verdict.

So I wrote my aunt a letter begging her to intercede on the lipstick question, and sent it off by airmail. It took a week to get there, and her response another week to arrive, but when it did it contained these magic words: “a bit of pink on the lips would not be unbecoming…”

My mother was sautéing garlic for a sofregit when I ran into the kitchen waving the letter in the air. “A bit of pink’s o.k., she says! She says the girls in her school are wearing it! So now I can too!” But my mother tightened her lips, shook her head, and went back to stirring her sauce.

I was in my forties before I became aware of the deep rivalry that existed between my mother and the elder of her two younger sisters, and to realize that my aunt was the last person on the planet whose advice my mother would have taken on matters concerning me.

That summer, we went to Spain. My mother’s sisters, seeing me shapeless, pimply, and awkward, took me in hand. One bought me a bottle of Depurativo Richilet, a potion designed to purify the blood and get rid of acne. The other sewed me a sleeveless dress, full-skirted and cinched at the waist,that made me feel almost beautiful.

One night, as I was leaving for a party wearing the new dress, my aunts beckoned me into their bedroom and put a tiny smear of pink on my lips. I could barely see it, but I knew it was there by its weird, sticky feel, and I felt glamorous as well as guilty. I was almost out the door when my mother saw me, turned me around, and pointed to the bathroom.

She finally gave in on the lipstick issue when I turned sixteen at the start of eleventh grade. She was forty-two years old and nine months pregnant with her second child, and I suspect that she was too tired to keep up the fight. But my lipstick adventures were not over.

My religion teacher that year was an older Irish priest, Father MacCauley, who taught a cerebral approach based on the theology of Thomas Aquinas. This made us feel grown-up and intellectual, and we would argue in the cafeteria about which was the most convincing of the five proofs of the existence of God, and whether birth control really was a sin against human nature.

In one of his more bizarre lectures, Father Mac announced that, whereas it was man’s essence to be rational, women were by nature incapable of rational action. (How he got away with such pronouncements when the majority of his colleagues were Benedictine nuns I have never understood.) The boys in the class hooted with delight when they heard this, but at the end of the hour we girls got together and formed a compact: we would come to school the next day without wearing lipstick! That would show them!

I don’t remember what effect our bare lips had on Father Mac’s theories, but when we walked into English class, Sister Mary Rose took one look at us and exclaimed “Is something wrong? Y’all look so pale!” A few minutes later, I was called to the office. It was my father on the phone, telling me that the baby had arrived, and it was a girl.

In retrospect, I don’t hold it against my mother for taking a stand on the lipstick question. Who among us parents hasn’t on occasion put our foot down unnecessarily?

What I do object to is her holding me hostage to her own issues as an immigrant. It was very well for her, at forty, to emphasize her Spanish identity, which, among other things, made her an exceedingly entertaining dinner guest. At fourteen and fifteen, however, my identity was as fluid as a bowl of unset Jello.

Yes, I was proud of being Spanish, and I enjoyed the attention that being the only foreign student in the school occasionally got me. But I also intuited, in a nebulous way, that clinging to my foreignness would never get me invitations to sleepovers, or that holy grail of adolescence, a date to the prom. The exotic—unless it’s carried by someone far bolder and more self-assured than I was—doesn’t hold much fascination for teenagers, who generally prefer conformity.

With one foot on either side of the Atlantic, trying to interpret America to my parents while striving to please them in all things, I didn’t have an easy time of it. But I don’t envy my mother her task, either, and I’m certainly glad that I didn’t have to rear my adolescent daughters in a foreign culture. Which is why I can confer on my now-deceased mother the absolution that compassionate adults sooner or later bestow on their parents: “She did the best she could.”

Walking Lessons

I got home from high school and found my mother walking up and down the hallway behind my toddling sister. My mother was stooped over, holding the baby’s hands to keep her upright. My sister had a determined look in her eyes, but my mother’s face was screwed up with pain. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m teaching her to walk, of course.”

At sixteen, I didn’t know much about babies, but we had studied evolution in school, and I thought that our ape-like ancestors must have transitioned to bipedal locomotion without special instruction.

“Don’t you think she could learn to walk on her own?” I said.

 “No, no. She’s too little! She would fall and break a tooth, or hurt her head. I have to do this, even if it breaks my back.” My mother let go of the baby’s hands and straightened up slowly. My sister sat down on the floor and howled.

“See what I mean? She never gets tired. What a child! I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” my mother sighed, resignedly pulling the baby upright and holding her hands.

Leading from the hip, my sister thrust one fat leg forward, wobbled, balanced, then stuck out the other leg. My mother followed, groaning. I went into my room to do homework and reflected, for the first time, on my mother’s hands-on mothering style.

I remembered being spoon-fed by her long after I could cut my own meat. By the time I could recite the multiplication tables she was still combing my hair, washing my face, tying my shoes, buttoning my coat up to my chin and reminding me not to take it off without first obtaining her permission.

She did all these things with a rueful smile that said, “Motherhood! Such a glorious but demanding vocation.” Labor, according to her, did not end with the  baby’s birth, but was only the prelude to a lifetime of effort and sacrifice on the mother’s part.

Now, watching her give my sister walking lessons with my critical adolescent eye, it occurred to me that her intense involvement with my sister and me may have had more to do with her tsunami-like life force and its search for an outlet than with our real needs.

The first girl from her village to attend university, she had studied classics and then law. But when she married she gave it all up to do...not much of anything.

With my father at work, a live-in maid to do the housework (we were by no means wealthy, but in Spain in those days you didn’t need to be to have a maid), and just one child to look after, she was starving for challenges—opinions to sway, people to lead, victories to savor.  And there I was in the next room, gnawing on the crib railing, waiting to be perfected.

It was probably in her DNA, because my mother’s mother was just as driven and intense. But she at least had a farm to run while my grandfather, a vet with no head for business, was off taking care of the village livestock. She had sharecroppers to supervise; wheat, oats, and olives to send to market; broody hens to coddle; rabbits to fatten, slaughter, and cook; and four children to raise.

But it looks like my grandmother too believed that babies would never learn to walk unless they had proper instruction. Here she is, in her farmyard outfit, ensuring that I will not have to spend my life in a wheelchair. She is holding me upright with a kitchen towel drawn up under my arms. This keeps her from having to stoop, a back-saving technology that my mother would have done well to adopt.

I look pleased to be standing on my own two legs. Probably, I’ll want to keep going long after my grandmother is ready to stop. I can see her now, rolling her eyes, proudly complaining to my mother, “Ai, Maria santissima! What are we going to do with this child? She’s worn me out. All she wants to do is walk!”