An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [45]
“Spell ‘poinsettia,’” Mother would throw out at me, smiling with pleasure. “Spell ‘sherbet.’” The idea was not to make us whizzes, but, quite the contrary, to remind us—and I, especially, needed reminding—that we didn’t know it all just yet.
“There’s a deer standing in the front hall,” she told me one quiet evening in the country.
“Really?”
“No. I just wanted to tell you something once without your saying, ‘I know.’”
Supermarkets in the middle 1950s began luring, or bothering, customers by giving out Top Value Stamps or Green Stamps. When, shopping with Mother, we got to the head of the checkout line, the checker, always a young man, asked, “Save stamps?”
“No,” Mother replied genially, week after week, “I build model airplanes.” I believe she originated this line. It took me years to determine where the joke lay.
Anyone who met her verbal challenges she adored. She had surgery on one of her eyes. On the operating table, just before she conked out, she appealed feelingly to the surgeon, saying, as she had been planning to say for weeks, “Will I be able to play the piano?” “Not on me,” the surgeon said. “You won’t pull that old one on me.”
It was, indeed, an old one. The surgeon was supposed to answer, “Yes, my dear, brave woman, you will be able to play the piano after this operation,” to which Mother intended to reply, “Oh, good, I’ve always wanted to play the piano.” This pat scenario bored her; she loved having it interrupted. It must have galled her that usually her acquaintances were so predictably unalert; it must have galled her that, for the length of her life, she could surprise everyone so continually, so easily, when she had been the same all along. At any rate, she loved anyone who, as she put it, saw it coming, and called her on it.
She regarded the instructions on bureaucratic forms as straight lines. “Do you advocate the overthrow of the United States government by force or violence?” After some thought she wrote, “Force.” She regarded children, even babies, as straight men. When Molly learned to crawl, Mother delighted in buying her gowns with drawstrings at the bottom, like Swee’pea’s, because, as she explained energetically, you could easily step on the drawstring without the baby’s noticing, so that she crawled and crawled and crawled and never got anywhere except into a small ball at the gown’s top.
When we children were young, she mothered us tenderly and dependably; as we got older, she resumed her career of anarchism. She collared us into her gags. If she answered the phone on a wrong number, she told the caller, “Just a minute,” and dragged the receiver to Amy or me, saying, “Here, take this, your name is Cecile,” or, worse, just, “It’s for you.” You had to think on your feet. But did you want to perform well as Cecile, or did you want to take pity on the wretched caller?
During a family trip to the Highland Park Zoo, Mother and I were alone for a minute. She approached a young couple holding hands on a bench by the seals, and addressed the young man in dripping tones: “Where have you been? Still got those baby-blue eyes; always did slay me. And this”—a swift nod at the dumbstruck young woman, who had removed her hand from the man’s—“must be the one you were telling me about. She’s not so bad, really, as you used to make out. But listen, you know how I miss you, you know where to reach me, same old place. And there’s Ann over there—see how she’s grown? See the blue eyes?”
And off she sashayed, taking me firmly by the hand, and leading us around briskly past the monkey house and away. She cocked an ear back, and both of us heard the desperate man begin, in a high-pitched wail, “I swear, I never saw her before in my life….”
On a long, sloping beach by the ocean, she lay stretched out sunning with Father and friends, until the conversation gradually grew tedious, when without forethought she gave a little push with her heel and rolled away. People were stunned. She rolled deadpan and apparently effortlessly, arms and legs extended and tidy, down the beach