A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [103]
Book Four
29
I DON’T WANT TO MAKE TOO MUCH of our mother by asserting that she was especially beautiful or especially distinguished by heritage or intelligence. The fact is that she fit in. She belonged to clubs, went to church, traded dress patterns with the other women. She kept the house clean and raised us the same way the neighbors were raising their children, which meant that she promoted my father’s authority and was not especially affectionate or curious about our feelings. She cared about what we did or failed to do—our homework, our chores, our share of the cooking and cleaning—and expected our feelings about these doings to rise and fall according to some sort of childhood barometer, irrelevant to her, having to do with “phases.”
We were given to know that the house belonged in every particular to her—that she was responsible for it, but also that damaging it was equal to damaging her. I remember once when Caroline was about three, she got hold of a lipstick and made large circular marks on the wall of the upstairs hallway. My mother was not forgiving of Caroline’s youth, nor did she blame herself for leaving the lipstick around. She spanked Caroline soundly, repeating over and over, “Must not touch Mommy’s things! Must not draw on Mommy’s wall! Caroline is a very bad girl!” Even our things were her things, and when we broke our toys or tore our clothes, we were punished. From our punishments, we were expected to learn, I suppose, to control ourselves. A careless act was as reprehensible as an act of intentional meanness or disobedience.
She had a history—she had gone to high school in Rochester, Minnesota, and one year of college in Cedar Falls—and for us this history was to be found in her closet. The closet was narrow and deep with an oval leaded window at the end. The closet pole ran lengthwise, and there was a single high shelf above the window. The wall that the closet shared with the closet in the adjoining room did not meet the ceiling for some reason, but was finished off with a gratuitous piece of oak trim. A pink shoebag hung from the door and slapped against it as the closet was opened. In each of the countless pockets of the shoebag rested a single shoe, heel outward. There were seven pairs of high heels that Rose and I counted each time we opened the closet. On the floor of the closet were two cylindrical hatboxes, and in these were eight or ten hats, some with flowers or fruit, most with half veils. Also in the hatboxes were four or five corsages with their pearl-tipped pins stuck into the satin-wrapped stems. We admired these, and picked them up and held them to our chests, always knowing that if we pricked ourselves with the pins, we had only ourselves to blame.
The fabric of the dresses was cool, and if you stood up underneath them, the crepey freshness of the skirts drifted across your face in a heady scent of dust and mothballs and cologne and bath powder. Although her present was measured out in aprons—she put a clean one on every day—her past included tight skirts and full skirts and gored skirts, peplum waists, kick pleats, arrowlike darts, welt pockets with six-inch-square handkerchiefs inside them, shoulder pads, Chinese collars, self-belts with self-buckles, covered buttons, a catalog of fashion that offered Rose and me as much fascination in its names as in its examples. The clothes in the closet, which were even then out of date—too narrow and high for the postwar “New Look”—intoxicated us with a sense of possibility, not for us, but for our mother, lost possibilities to be sure, but somehow still present when we entered the closet, closed the door, and sat down cross-legged in the mote-filled sunshine of the oval window. These were things of hers that our mother didn’t mind us playing with. We were out of her hair and we treated them carefully, as the holy relics they were. Now, when I seek to love my mother, I remember her closet and that indulgence of hers. Of course, of course, I also remember