Everything My Mother Taught Me

by Alice Hoffman

There are those who insist that mothers are born with love for their children and place them before all other things, including their own needs and desires. This was not the case with us.

I had been named after a soap she’d once seen in a fancy shop, Adeline Lilac Soap, made in Paris. My mother said naming me so had been a mistake because now I thought I was better than she. She said it like a curse. Actually, she was correct, but there was a reason for this. She had ruined my father’s life, and mine, and she didn’t seem to notice. She was the sort of person who saw only herself and her shadow, and the rest of us disappeared in the bright sunlight.

My father became ill and was unable to work. He was kindhearted and trusting, two qualities I did not inherit. He was patient as well, another trait I could not claim for myself. He’d been to sea when he was young and had collected shells from the shores of India and Africa. When he fell ill, he began to create a sai...

I would always discover her in the tavern down the street with other men. She acted as though I were a stranger when I appeared. “Did you want something?” she would ask. Yes, I felt like saying. A mother.

Once home, she’d stop me before we went in the door. “Don’t you tell your father a thing,” she’d warn me. “It would kill him. You’d do better if you kept your mouth shut.”

He told me I was the light of his life and that I must look after my mother when he was gone. Afterward, I sat beside him and wept. I knew that anything that might be good in my life had left along with his spirit.

Perhaps he was a fool, because even after all she’d done, he was most likely still in love with her on the day he died. He never did finish his valentine made of seashells.

She had told me often enough to keep my mouth shut, and now I did exactly that. I abolished all language on the day of my father’s funeral.

My mother’s job took us to an island in Essex County, forty miles north of Boston, at the tip of Cape Ann. Thacher Island was made up of fifty acres of rocks, a place consumed by woe from the start. In 1635, Anthony Thacher and his beloved wife were the only ones to survive a shipwreck when a storm came up and sank the Watch and Wait as it traveled from Ipswich to Marblehead. The tragedy claimed twenty-one souls, including their own four children, along with seven of their nieces and nephews. What can you expect to build on such sorrow? Only more sorrow to come. By the time we arrived, in 1908, there weren’t many who would bind their lives to such a remote and desolate place.

Snowdrifts could be eight feet high, a luminous mixture of water from both the sea and the sky, so salty and heavy it was nearly impossible to shovel the paths. Ice had to be chipped off the windows of the lighthouse so that the lanterns could be seen out at sea, a job that would freeze a man’s hands in under twenty minutes.

The water was so cold, even in the summertime, it would probably freeze a person’s blood before they drowned.

When men were interested, they had a faraway look, as if they were trying to figure out their attraction. Was it a dream, or was it real? Did they want a woman, body and soul, or was it only the body that appealed to them? Sometimes it took them a while to figure it out, sometimes only minutes.

You could grow to love something so strong and elemental, but you’d have to value the beauty of it more than you did your own life.

Julia also kept an eye on me. She had seen my mother slap me when I refused to kill a chicken for supper, for it was not in my nature to do such a thing. Frankly, I’d rather starve than murder the patient hen that followed me through the grass.

Julia found me crying out by the coop, holding the poor startled hen in my lap.

Julia knelt beside me. “I’ll take care of it,” she told me. She brought the hen into the barn, then brought its lifeless body to my mother so that she could pluck its feathers. “You’re the housekeeper,” I heard her say. “This is your duty to perform. If we’re to have a chicken dinner, you wring its neck.” I quickly came to prefer Julia to my mother. I think she knew this, because whenever I came to her kitchen door to bring Billy Goat back from a day at the shore, she would give me a slice of pie. “If you have any difficulties,” she advised, “just come to me.” From then on, I was her accomplice.

I felt a sort of joy I’d never felt before. I was so unaccustomed to such emotions it took some time before I realized I was happy.

My mother and the lighthouse keeper wrote to each other in the black book Julia had given her to plan menus. That was my mother’s way. Give her a gift and she’d grab hold with two hands and take it as she pleased. Their plans had nothing to do with recipes. They wrote about what their lives would be like if they could be together, and they made fun of Julia, calling her a cow and a dolt, amused that she had no idea of what was happening right under her nose. The book was kept hidden in the barn.