Glitter and Glue

by Kelly Corrigan

Tilt, I hear my mother say, which I believe refers to the message pinball machines flash when players lose control, but I can’t say for sure. Some of her expressions are hard to deconstruct. (I learned only recently that when she says Mikey! after the first bite of something good, she’s alluding to the old Life cereal commercial.)

Little Miss Smart-mouth, I hear my mom say.

Things happen when you leave the house. That’s my motto. I made it up on an Outward Bound trip after college.

“Who wants ice cream?” Ice cream? I hear my mother say. After that behavior?

Someone needs a little backbone, my mother whispers.

Martin announces he’s done. Finished, my mom corrects. Meat is done. Are you a slab of meat?

When I was growing up, my mom would have loved to call toast breakfast. She doesn’t go in for whole big productions. It just makes a mess, and Guess who cleans it up? But my dad, oblivious or determined—I could not say which—preferred a dinerlike experience.

In addition to the holy mess of it all, my mother opposed the grand breakfast on moral grounds. She was trying to raise kids who ate whatever was put in front of them, then here comes Mr. Wonderful with his magic spatula, taking orders.

Of John’s expedient breakfast, my mom would say Damn right.

Mr. Graham is young and tan and looks like he swam in the Pacific before school. If my mom saw Mr. Graham, she’d poke me and say, Get the net. (My mom started talking like this after her elbow surgery. She got it from her physical therapist, a bulky gal my mom said was a kill who told her to stay cool and cut me a break and suck it up.)

In the middle of my full-court press, as my mother would put it,

Eventually, Emma 2 takes Milly’s hand, and they head to class, slowly, hunched together like two grandmothers on a slick sidewalk.

I can’t believe John didn’t feel obliged to involve either one of them in the interview process, at least a sniff test, as my mother would call it.

On slow babysitting gigs in high school, I was what you’d call a classic snooper. One long night at Mrs. Battel’s, I went through her whole makeup bag, trying on all her lipsticks, then moving on to eyeliners and shadows. At the Perrys’, I discovered a stack of Playboys under the bathroom sink that made my hands sweat, along with an eye-popping hardback book featuring pencil sketches of people having sex in every conceivable position and location, including on a motorcycle. In my own house, when my parents went out, I opened all the drawers and cabinets in their bedroom, flipping through boxes of canceled checks, appointment books, manila envelopes marked Buick Roadmaster and Basement Leak, eager to place my family on some continuum. Were we broke? Did my parents have sexy secrets?

nobody’s damn business.

I had no sense of what my mom did when she wasn’t standing in front of me. I don’t know how fulfilled she was or wasn’t, whether the designs she had for her life were coming along nicely or growing more laughable every day. I’m not sure she even had designs for her life. But I can tell you this: If my mom wrote a book, it would not be about feeling OK or perfecting the sex act. Certainly not! My mom’s book would be called: Work Hard, Save Your Money, Go to Church.

absolutely marvelous.

Scribbling on furniture, I hear my mother say. What’s next? Painting the carpet?

in front of what my mom calls the idiot box.

Maybe the great service I can offer John is to take over the crap parts, the stuff my mom did—No no no and Eat your beans and Stop that right this minute—so he can be a beaming dad who tickles and brings home presents from gift shops and says, Come here, Lovey! Give your old man a hug.

she falls back on the couch like a thirteen-year-old whose mother just suggested, say, a nice pair of denim gauchos for the school dance.

we stop in a pharmacy to primp. Terra-cotta bronzing powder, purple eye shadow, a spritz of Calvin Klein Eternity. Once we’re properly tarted up, as my mother says,

“My dad didn’t go to bars, but he didn’t do much of the dirty work, either,” I say, stopping to look at the truth of that for the first time.

That schedule left all unpleasant tasks to my mom, who liked to point out, Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue. I never knew how their roles were distributed, whether they fell out naturally from the get-go or they evolved over time, one creating the other through negotiations and tiny adjustments along the way. I suppose early on she got a sense of what Greenie could handle, and what she could tolerate not being done her way, and compensated accordingly.

Milly reminds me of my mom, who likes to do things the way she does them, often ass-backwards. Oh, wait till you get old, my mother warns when I start to interfere. But it’s hard to watch someone struggle with a testy machine, a sticky door, a heavy suitcase, much less listen to them cough or cry. People want to help, and the more we’ve seen and heard and done, the more useful we are, and this is why even the tiniest show of stoicism, in little girls and grown women, makes me mad. It makes us useless to each other.

I don’t remember ever watching a movie in my mom’s lap. Snuggling is not her speed, and Tell me, who has time to sit?

Milly looks mutinous but pushing back would require engagement. As my mother liked to remind me after going fifteen rounds over mascara or red fingernail polish, You have to care to fight.

The letter ends with my mom’s strong suggestion that I lock my door at night.

The thing about mothers, I want to say, is that once the containment ends and one becomes two, you don’t always fit together so neatly. They don’t get you like you want them to, like you think they should, they could, if only they would pay closer attention. They agonize over all the wrong things, cycling through one inane idea after another: seat belts, flossing, the Golden Rule. The living mother-daughter relationship, you learn over and over again, is a constant choice between adaptation and acceptance. The only mothers who never embarrass, harass, dismiss, discount, deceive, distort, neglect, baffle, appall, inhibit, incite, insult, or age poorly are dead mothers, perfectly contained in photographs, pressed into two dimensions like a golden autumn leaf.

It’s all very romantic and nostalgic, and I love it straight off. But my mother? She doesn’t go for a lot of golden-light nonsense.

Or so I thought. What do I know? I know that my mother loves sauerkraut and anchovies and pearl onions. I know she prefers mashed potatoes from a box, and when she wants to, she can peel an orange in one go. I know she likes her first drink to be vodka—one full jigger, over ice, with a lemon rind—and then she downgrades to Chardonnay, which she pours into the same glass over the same ice with the same piece of lemon floating on top, one less dish to wash. I know her favorite movie is either Gone with the Wind or Pretty Woman, whichever comes to mind first. She considers house pets and clothes you can’t wash in a machine and changing lip colors with the seasons ridiculous. I know she doesn’t think fathers need to know every single thing about their children. She feels her best on her knees after Communion and thinks too many people treat church like a fashion show or a social outing, and she has no words for the Christmas and Easter Catholics except That’s between them and the good Lord above. I know she has an old silver rosary under her pillow, where she can find it in the night when she starts fretting about something that wouldn’t have a chance against her in the light of day, and next to her rosary is her huffa-puffa, for her asthma, which gets worse in the summer and when she worries. Maybe what I don’t know is that she secretly lives for a good love story. Maybe, like my dad says, she’s a romantic, something I’ve always dismissed as biased.

There was something scary to me about my mom’s dad; it could have been his FBI-type glasses or sharp nose or severe jawline. Whatever it was, TJ was not the type to pull pennies from behind your ear. He actually spanked me once. It hurt like hell, and I cried my eyes out, but he didn’t care. He thought I was overindulged, which was laughable, considering my mother’s opposition to everything from baked goods to sleepovers to pierced ears.

My mother, a godsend. Hard to imagine. My dad and I have relived the beats of this story many times since, even though my mom doesn’t like him filling my head with romance. She thinks his bang-o! version creates unrealistic expectations. Your father makes it sound like a Gidget movie, Kelly. Even if she was romantic once, a Baltimore miss who devoured My Ántonia and let herself be twirled on a dance floor by a stranger, those girlish days are gone. She was a mother now, my mother, and she didn’t trust the dreamy look in my eye, not one bit. Picking a husband was a serious matter best done with a cool head.

At the pub, everyone’s talking about Euro Disney, which opened this week. “I reckon that’s America’s biggest export—the big mouse,” our bartender says, tilting a pint glass under the tap. A guy with a shabby goatee drops the line that everyone’s quoting, that Euro Disney is “a cultural Chernobyl,” and I can tell by his tone that he thinks Americans are common philistines. “It’s basically intellectual pollution,” Goatee Boy says, looking at Tracy and me, waiting for a response. A jolt of patriotism kicks in, and I can’t let it lie, as my mother would advise. “I read in the paper that they hired like twelve thousand people,” I say. “And, seriously, how evil can it be? It’s roller coasters and cotton candy.”

Before this year, I’d barely considered what it meant to be an American, other than my mother’s dictate that good Americans buy U.S. products made on U.S. soil by U.S. workers. (For the bulk of my childhood, she piloted a wood-paneled Chevy wagon, flinging dirty looks at anyone behind the wheel of a Toyota or a Honda. Honestly, who do they think gets their money and what do they think they’re doing with it?)

“Sticks and stones, Kelly. We don’t worry about that sort of thing.”

Some foul-mouthed kid who didn’t like to be told to clean up his language or go home? Who wasn’t invited to stay for dinner after rolling his eyes at her? That kid and his graffiti tantrum didn’t bother my mother one iota. In a matter of days, the message was covered by a sloppy black rectangle, but when the sun angled in, you could still see our address. On bad days, when I’d had a blowup with my mother over cutting my hair in her bathroom and clogging her sink, or using a certain dismissive tone with her that she wouldn’t use to talk to a criminal, I’d think maybe Harry Morrison had it right. More often, I felt a strange, powerful mix of pity and chemical anger. It was my first taste of protective wrath, the kind that only mothers are said to possess.

My mom and I did not do this sort of thing. She had neither the inclination nor, as far as I know, the skill for hair design, and she was on high alert for vanity’s handmaidens: blow dryers, hot curlers, special bands and accessories.

Who will sit Milly down, as my mother did with me, and say, “I want you to know … well, I want to ask you … do you have any questions … about anything?” “Like what?” I asked. “Like,” she said, straightening pens and pencils on her desk, “like … where babies come from.” “Mom, I’m sixteen!” “I’m just asking—” She polished a letter opener on her sweater. “So … nothing at all?” I had noticed something in the Reilly master bathroom the last time I babysat. “Okay …” I hesitated. “Well, yeah, there is one thing.” “Oh?” She looked uneasy. “Yeah. What’s a douche?” “Oh, Kelly!” She shrieked like I’d put a centipede on her leg. “That is dis-GUS-ting!” “It is? Even Summer’s Eve?” I pictured the pretty lady on the box walking through a bright forest in a very clean sundress. “Blech.” She lowered her voice. “If you must know, a douche is something you squirt in your privates if they get dirty, which yours won’t, so let’s not get too involved in a discussion about douches. God almighty!” She turned her back to me. “And to think Susan Reilly is Catholic!”

Seeing her at ease fills my chest, like I’ve inhaled a hit of her mood. I’ve felt sorry for people before—I spent four years in college dorm rooms, trading sob stories over Domino’s and Diet Coke—but feeling another person’s joy like this is a new kind of empathy.

For better or worse, I’ve latched on to Milly’s ecosystem. What happens to her happens—in some weird refracted way that seems slightly dangerous—to me, too. And it occurs to me that maybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time wasn’t because she was doing so much but because she was feeling so much.

My mom, sounding like a proctor from a Dickens novel, asks how the children are. She doesn’t approve of “kids.” Kids are goats, Kelly. Are they goats?

My mom held a crowd with a bit about screwing out of wedlock. I couldn’t have been more disoriented. All my life my mother was my mother, nothing more. Not Greenie’s saving grace, not the funny woman in the office. But now I see there’s no such thing as a woman, one woman. There are dozens inside every one of them. I probably should’ve figured this out sooner, but what child can see the women inside her mom, what with all that Motherness blocking out everything else?

“Good,” he says with firm punctuation, reminding me of my mother saying, If you can’t say something nice, keep your fat mouth shut.

Parents around us refocus their kids’ attention from the long wait to the big payoff to come—Just a few more minutes! Look at that drop! Being a kid is all about learning to bide time, proving just how unnatural it is to delay gratification.

I decide, after standing there with the door open too long, like I think electricity grows on trees,

while I load the grocery bags into the back of the van, I catch sight of myself in the side mirror and realize that I don’t look so much like an independent woman as I do a barely distinguishable version of my mother on any given day of the seventies or eighties—snubbing sugar cereal, stockpiling hamburger meat, sorting through hair dyes, demanding eye contact, standing down the occasional adversary. Even more surprising is that the recognition of her in me does not give me pause. Here, in this moment, I find the likeness kind of exhilarating.

I’ve done a fine job these last two days, but the kids miss John all the same. Even if he sometimes seems lost or out of place, more like a stepfather than a father, the kids want him more than anyone. I guess that’s the thing about parents.

John is smart not to rely on me. This isn’t some lark. I’m driving around, playing the music too loud, ignoring the signs and shushing the warnings, with a man’s last and best treasure in the backseat. The teetering height of this truth, its shadow with no end, gives me vertigo.

John cuts his meat all at once, like my mother told me never to do,