Six

 Coming back to Maryland was hard.  I was excited to begin my junior year in high school, happy to see my friends and to catch up with them. 

I was also looking forward to having a sewing machine.  I made most of my clothes and wanted to get a head start on my fall wardrobe. 

“Honey, do you want to go shopping with me?”

“First I have to go to Blanks to get some fabric, then the department store. 

I smiled and replied, “Yea. Just give me a minute.”  Slipping back into the warmth of the familiar, I always enjoyed going shopping with my mother. 

            She drove to Blanks, a well known fabric store to buy yard goods.  Both of us  bought fabric.  Mom had seen a bolt of a wool harringbone gray tweed fabric she liked and the clerk was not particularly attentive to her. 

“That stupid woman,” Mom shouted.

“What a ditz.” 

Nearly everyone in the store heard her. I wanted to disappear. 

            “Mom, she is underpaid, probably has no husband and is supporting a young family,” I offered.

Mom shrugged her shoulders.  She paid for their fabric and we drove to Stewart’s, an upscale department store in Baltimore and bought some new outfits. On the way home from there, we continued their weekly tradition and stopped for libations at the local Rexall, which had a 1950s soda fountain.  It was near the Acme grocery store in Woodlawn. Mom always coffee.  I always ordered Coca Cola, a small one and ate my standard  pretzel stick with a little mustard on the top.  Mom read her books while I revelled in my new wardrobe folded neatly in the bag beside me.

            My mother was a contradiction. A determined spirit, with Margaret Mead orientation to life. She could do anything  - tune a car, wire a room, sew a dress.  She was a middle school science and math teacher/supervisor with a masters degree in  physics.  She only lacked three courses to matriculate for her doctorate.  She was also one of Baltimore’s first sex educators.

            Mom was a phenomenon in the 1960s, the first wave of feminists who were suddenly single.

I think she longed to be warm and close.  But her tongue caused a lot of separation.  I never knew which part of my mother would respond.  Margaret Mead, the mechanic, or a bitter divorced woman in her early forties.

            Mom, Nana and I sewed often. It was Nana, who taught Mom the art of needlecraft and how to sew.  My mother in turn taught me.  Needlework was not my favorite thing to do.  But Nana’s work was beautiful.  Mom didn’t like needlework but did beautiful hems.  Mine was always hurried. It is better now.

            Sewing started early for me.  Even at the age of ten Mom had me sewing crop tops.  I loved working in the basement, Mom in one room, and me in another, both completing projects and then sharing our stories about them once they were completed. 

“The zipper came out perfect. Here look, I did it!” I would exclaim. Mom, who always signed her name, “Mother” would smile.

“Well good.”

Suddenly Mom’s face turned toward me.  She was emotionless.

“Honey, you remember when your father’s U Haul backed into the driveway to take away all of his things, my history and my life?  I went into the bedroom and cried.

After he drove away, I got into the car and drove around and around crying, wondering how to go on, how to raise two teenage children alone.”

            I wanted to lighten the moment and ease my mother’s suffering.

            “Mom, do you remember all the stuff we endured on this street? Did you ever find out who the neighbor was at the block parties who drank everyone’s liquor?” she chuckled.

“No, but we sure fixed whoever it was,” Mom laughed back. 

“We took the label off one of the bottles, wrote the chemical formula for alcohol on it and from then on, this one was never touched,” Mom said.

“Evidently, the culprit didn’t know a thing about chemistry.”

We laughed until we cried.