Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [23]
“You need to be especially careful with this one,” she would say, as I unwrapped the box. “That’s a hundred and thirty-five dollars’ worth of mohair.”
“Wow, it’s beautiful!” I would exclaim, trying my hardest to cover any honest emotion that might be sliding onto my face. Because the most difficult part of this ritual was that every year, without fail, my mother would miss the mark of my taste by such a wide margin that I thought she might know an alternate universe version of me who dressed in ethnic print skirts with gathered waists and blouses with Peter Pan collars festooned with appliqué ducks holding umbrellas.
I began to dread her gifts because from December 26 on they hung in my closet unworn, glaring and fuming, causing me shame for having squandered my mother’s time and money. There was also the looming fear that she would find a reason to go poking around in my closet someday and discover that all the clothes she had bought for me looked too pressed and untouched by the elements to have ever been worn.
Of course, the holidays always allowed our fraught relationship to blossom into a full-blown drama, courtesy of the potent combination of leisure time and forced festivity. But no such special occasion was needed for my mother and me to fill our time together with tension.
“These can’t be the only knives you have?” my mother might say on any visit, her irritation and disbelief joining forces to create the tone of voice I carried around in my head to berate myself with at all times. She had programmed me well. I knew instinctively what she would dislike, but that didn’t mean I could necessarily correct all her areas of complaint before her arrival. It was easier to predict what she wouldn’t like than to guess what she would.
So I was resigned to coping with every Christmas in as genial and low-key a way as possible. Then I had an idea.
It came to me in the middle of the night as I lay awake, a thirty-five-year-old woman fretting about what would happen if she didn’t get all-new place settings before dinner on D-day.
The following morning I phoned my mother and suggested that we try shopping for my Christmas gift together. I didn’t expect her to go for it. I was thrilled when she agreed.
Best of all, I already knew what I wanted: a black fitted blazer that I could wear with everything—a noncontroversial selection that couldn’t get shot down as a “ridiculous choice.” It would be stylish, versatile, and just expensive enough for my mother to be able to boast about how much she had spent on it. It would herald the end to my guilt about unworn presents. My mother would buy me something that I actually wanted! What an exhilarating idea!
On the appointed day, my mother and I walked around crowded department stores for hours on end as she waved hangers full of ethnic print skirts with gathered waists and blouses with Peter Pan collars at me as though she were some kind of naval officer on the brig, signaling to the rest of the team on the shore. Reluctant to fire the first shot, I made sure to smile and say, “Yes! Lovely!” or “Wow!!! Beautiful!” as she displayed each new ensemble.
But I stood my ground.
After dozens of inappropriate selections from my mother, I held up an example of what I had come here to find. “I could really use a new black blazer … like this!” I said, trying to seem jaunty and casual. My mother made one of her patented grim faces. Hers was the expression of a displeased banker in a Charles Dickens adaptation, accompanied by a curled-lip “yecccch” as she insisted that I at least try on the clothes she’d picked out first.
I played along, thinking to myself, as I viewed her selections, that if my goal was to look fifteen years older and thirty pounds heavier, these were definitely the outfits I would choose.
At the end of the day, as closing time was requiring us