—an excerpt—
I rarely saw my mother without a cigarette in her mouth or one burning down in an ashtray nearby. Sometimes both at the same time. She smoked while she cooked, while she cleaned, while she talked to us and while she watched TV. She smoked while knitting or crocheting or hanging laundry outside. On the phone. In the garden. There was an ashtray in the bathroom.
Years later I would do the same. Puff away all my sorrows. Pushing them away somewhere where I hoped no one could see them. Only vaguely aware of what I was doing. Only vaguely aware that I missed a mother I’d never gotten to know even while we were still living in the same house.
Bright red lipstick. Cigarettes. Ash trays. The clink clink, clink of crystal glasses. Parties. Liquor. Daddy on the floor in the kitchen. Mom stepping around him like he was a live grenade. Black taffeta skirts swirling. And smoking. Always smoking.
The parts of my mother that I loved the best were the ones she never showed me.
She was the girl who had posed as the Madonna for the stained-glass windows of Holy Rosary Catholic Church. She was once the lead actress in a university play and loved to tell us about the scene where she was supposed to light a cigarette, her hands trembling because her father was in the audience and he hated the idea of women smoking. She couldn’t do it and staring at the lighter just said, Oh, this old thing never worked anyway.
She was so animated when she told stories of the self we didn’t know and could never know. And each and every time I fell more in love with her.
She played hockey. And tennis. And golf. She was the youngest person to ever graduate from her university with a degree in Humanities at sixteen. And made a lot of friends.
Some of them were part of her bridge club and I’d see them every once in a while when it was her turn to have them over. When I got home from school they would be in the den, playing the last hand, veiled in smoke from cigarettes burning away in ashtrays on the card tables. They were all beautiful to me with their stylish clothes and expensive wedding and engagement rings on their fingers. I was too shy to stay long but loved to look in on them. I felt like it was a secret club and I’d hear my mother laughing and talking in ways she never did with us. I was in fact jealous of her friends who seemed to know her so much better than I did. I wanted to be just like them. And just like her.
