“That’s lovely, my pet,” she would say absentmindedly.
“You didn’t even look at it!” I would whine.
“Yes, I did, my treasure. It’s very aesthetic.”
“I was watching! Your back was turned!”
“Who says you need eyes for seeing?”
To which I had no answer.
The percentage of husbands in our neighborhood who developed coughs or broke their ankles, or who, on the other hand, were promoted at their offices, was probably no higher than elsewhere, but my mother had a way of hinting at her own influence on these events, and I believed her despite the nagging doubts of common sense. I also resented her: she thought she was so clever! Nor would she tell me how she’d done it. “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she’d say.
“Nobody actually likes you,” I’d thrown at her during one of our standoffs. “The neighbors think you’re a loony.” I’d made this up, while suspecting it was probably true.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Don’t you care what they say about you?”
“Why would I care about the tittle-tattle of the uninformed? Ignorant gossip.”
“But doesn’t it hurt your feelings?” My own feelings were frequently hurt, especially when overhearing jokes about my mother in the high school girls’ washroom. Girls of that age can be quite sadistic.
“Hurt, fiddlesticks! I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction,” she’d said with a lift of her chin. “They may not like me, but they respect me. Respect is better than like.”
I disagreed. I didn’t care about being respected—that was a schoolteacher thing, like black lace-up shoes—but I very much wanted to be liked. My mother frequently said I’d have to give up that frivolous desire if I was going to amount to anything. She said that wanting to be liked was a weakness of character.
Now—now being the day of our fight over Brian—she finished grinding and scraped the contents of her mortar into a bowl. She stuck her finger into the mixture, licked it—so, not deadly poison after all—then wiped her hands on her flowered apron. She had a stash of such aprons, each with a seasonal theme—pumpkins, snowflakes—and at least five crisp, striped shirtwaist dresses.
Where had she acquired those flowered aprons and shirtwaist dresses and the string of real pearls? She wasn’t known to go shopping, not like other mothers. I never knew how she got anything. I’d learned to be careful what I myself wished for, because whatever it was might materialize, and not in a form that fulfilled my hopes. I already regretted the pink angora sweater with the rabbit-fur collar and pom-poms I’d received on my last birthday, despite having mooned over its image in a magazine for months. It made me look like a stuffed toy.
She covered the bowl of mushed-up garlic and parsley mixture with a little red plastic hat and set it aside. “Now,” she said, “you have my full attention. Who gets to say what’s good? I do. At the present moment, good is good for you, my treasure. Have you tidied your room?”
“No,” I said sulkily. “Why don’t you like Brian?”
“I have no objection to him as such. But the Universe doesn’t like him,” she said serenely. “She must have her reasons. Would you like a cookie, my pet?”
“The Universe isn’t a person!” I fumed. “It’s an it!” This had come up before.
“You’ll know better when you grow up,” she said. “And a glass of milk, for solid bones.”
I still believed that my mother had some influence over the Universe. I’d been brought up to believe it, and it’s hard to shake such ingrained mental patterns. “You’re so mean!” I said. I was, however, eating the cookie: oatmeal raisin, baked yesterday, one of her staples.
“The opposite of ‘mean’ is ‘doormat,’” she said. “When you’re tidying your room, don’t forget to collect the hair from your hairbrush and burn it. We wouldn’t want anyone malignant getting their claws on that.”
“Like who would bother?” I asked, in what I hoped was a contemptuous tone.
“Your gym teacher,” she said. “Miss Scace. She’s a mushroom collector, among other things—or she was in the old days. Some disguise! Gym teacher! As if I’d be fooled by that!” My mother wrinkled her nose. “It takes so much energy to keep her at bay. She flies around at night and looks in your window, though she can’t get in, I’ve seen to that. But she’s been poaching my mushrooms.”