Caps and Sweaters!

"Caps and sweaters!" she yelled as Mother walked out the door, and obediently my Mother had returned to the closet, opened the door, and removed her new brown sweater and its matching cap.

Mother had received this package the day before in honor of her eighth birthday, from a pile she'd opened one at a time - carefully saving the newspaper wrapping to read later, when the adults got lost in their conversations - but the excitement she'd felt when seeing the presents waned as her pile grew smaller.  Socks.  Underwear.  And the sweater and cap, hand knit by Great Aunt Mathilde.

Mother had longed for a pretty pink sweater, like the ones she'd seen in her mother's Macy's catalog, like the ones the girls at school wore - in yellow, or a pretty shade of blue - all soft and store bought.  Momma recognized the brown yarn as soon as she opened the package, and had hoped her mother was too engrossed in conversation to notice, shoving the package underneath some already opened newspaper wrappings.

"Susan!  Hold that up so everyone can see it," Grandmother had bellowed. "Why, Tillie, where ever did you get that lovely yarn?"

But my mother's mother knew exactly where Great Aunt Mathilde had procured the yarn. "From that old natty afghan she dragged around for years" was the discussion after all the relatives had gone home that night.

"Mathilde's prized possession.  She won some sort of knitting award when she was young," Grandmother said.

Great Aunt Mathilde, in kindness and love - or was it just frugality - had carefully unraveled each stitch from her treasured blanket, rewound the yarn into a giant ball, and knit sweaters and matching caps for each of her grandnieces. Mother's sisters all received their brown sweaters and caps;  Mother had known they were coming.  She'd just hoped against hope, as she unwrapped the newspaper packaging - the latest fashions from Macy's taunting her from the advertisements - she could trust it.  Maybe Great Aunt Mathilde had finally run out of yarn.  Maybe the package really was from Macy's.

My mother had imagined herself wearing the cashmere sweater in soft pink, with its tiny pearl buttons all matching in a neat row.  She'd imagined the admiring stares from her classmates.  She'd imagined how her teacher - noticing the new sweater - would move her to the front of the class, and the girls would invite her to take a seat at their lunch table, or let her have a turn spinning the jump rope at recess.  All of these things would come true if only, when she reached her hand inside the package, they would feel  that pink sweater. Instead, Mother's hands felt the coarseness of wool.

"Goot for keeping you varm," Great Aunt Mathilde said when my mother obediently pulled the sweater back out from where she'd quickly shoved it, underneath the pile of unwrapped gifts - the hairbrush, the second pair of socks, and her own knitting needles.

                                                                         ***

This morning, when I got dressed, I picked out a turtleneck to match my skirt, pulled out my thickest tights, and did everything I could think of to dress warmly so I wouldn't need that extra layer.  And I've have made it out the door, too, if my sister hadn't blown my cover.

"Brrrr!" she'd said in an overly-loud voice, wearing her own version of the brown sweater and its matching cap.  "It's cold out here, today." 

Which was enough to wake Mother from her trance - starring at the latest ad from Macy's  - to call out,
"Caps and sweaters!"

Gooseberry Jelly

Jelly only comes from gooseberries in my great aunt Opal’s house. She doesn’t remember how she started making jelly, which is odd, because she doesn’t seem to forget much.

Like the time my grandmother cut her hair with “Mama’s pinking shears. She left a zigzagged pattern acrost my bangs,” she says and spits out the “t” in defiance. She also remembers exactly when the last time our father dragged us up here to visit his old hometown. “You weren’t much taller than this,” she indicates pointing to top of her apron strings.

It’s not really much of a hometown in my mind. Not at all what I’d expected when Dad started talking about taking us back to the tiny community in which he grew up, for his high school reunion. The town, once thriving, is now nothing more than a few houses, an old store Aunt Opal says some relative of mine used to own, and the cemetery we trampled through earlier this morning, swatting away the horseflies, and picking our way through the straggling gooseberry bushes, avoiding the sharp spines, to look at headstones cracked and lying on their sides, etched with old names like “Delilah” and “Truman”, names which taste sad on my tongue.

And now, Aunt Opal, who isn't really related in any way, although my Dad insists we call her “Aunt”, is opening a jar of gooseberry jelly for us to taste. She pulls it from a stack of glass jars filled with an odd assortment of things.

“Peaches,” she points. “Corn, and this here is Okra.”

 I’ve never seen such things. My fruits and vegetables come fresh from the grocery store my mother visits each week.

My mother stayed home on this trip.

“Not wanting to confront all the girls who were still sweet on your Daddy?” was Aunt Opal’s guess last night at supper. When we were climbing in bed, my brother suggested Mom didn’t want to stay in Aunt Opal’s old rambling house, with its sloped roof, and oven-like hallways, Daddy sleeping on the pull-out downstairs, with us kids crammed in the one bedroom, with the wall unit hanging from a window, the air blowing so strong our noses dripped with condensation in the morning.

But now, Aunt Opal wrings her hands together and casts dispersions upon my father for marrying a city girl - and a Jewish one at that – who evidently doesn't appreciate the benefits of saving a nickel, and preparing in the spring for the winter to come. She climbs up to the top shelf, her large frame swaying on the tiny step stool, and selects one of a whole host of jars filled with the tiny green marble-looking things. “Gooseberry jelly is the best thing for clearing away your sniffles.”

We try to shake her off and insist our sniffling is sweat dripping down our faces from running through the cemetery on the side yard, the one my sister can still see as she looks warily over my shoulder, out the screened door, hoping the ghosts of Truman and Delilah my brother swears he saw, didn’t follow us home.

“Truman raised your grandfather when his Momma died,” Aunt Opal will tell us later. “Took that poor boy in when no one else would.”

She will turn to nod knowingly at my father, “Why, we didn’t know where his daddy ran off to, and it turns out he was just acrost the border in Illinois the whole time.”  Illinois rhymes with noise when Aunt Opal speaks.

What we’ll be too young to recognize is that Aunt Opal, who seems older than dirt to us, is actually just a few years older than our own father. The stories she’ll tell us as we politely eat our bread with the gooseberry jelly spread thickly on top again for dessert, are just that - stories.

“Truman owned the store down there at the corner,” she says that night, and since there are only two paved roads in the whole town, we can guess she means the big half-collapsed structure on the other side of the road. Its long abandoned advertisement for "Gasoline $.05" made our eyes bulge when we’d pulled into town the day before.

“He was a tall man, and smart, too. Why he once ran for state senator. Can you imagine that? Someone from our town here going all the way to Washington, D.C.?” she shook her head in disbelief as if, it seemed to me, no one would want to ever leave, especially not for the big city.

But that might’ve just been my mother talking to me from the phone when we called later that evening to tell her about our day.

“Oh, you remember the Truman stories, right?” Mom's voice came across crackling from the distance, or maybe from the lightening storm she said they were having at home. “He’s the one who spent Grandpa’s inheritance on some foolish idea to run for President or something. Don’t let that batty old woman fill your heads with her crazy stories,” she said. “And for God’s sake, don’t eat anything from her shelves! There’s no telling how long she’s had that stuff there. She holds onto that stuff about like she holds onto her memories!”

Alton's Sweater

Cast off like the sweater I wore, the one with the cracked buttons he left on the chair at the foot of our bed to mend, the one I knit for him the year I discovered Joni Mitchell, my husband called me from his car Thursday night when I expected him to walk through the door any minute for dinner. In the kitchen at the stove I stood sautéing the risotto like it called for: I stirred the onions in butter until they were translucent. Then I added the risotto and stirred them around long enough for the kernels to get toasted. That’s when the phone rang.


“Hey,” he said. “I’ve got a meeting tonight. I won’t be home, until late.”

It was the last thing he said to me without his attorney.

“Do you want me to save you a plate of food?” is what he didn’t hear me ask when his line went dead. I waited a few minutes and stirred the risotto, measuring the broth in half cup increments, watching the kernels absorb it, thinking he would call me back, but he didn’t.

The courier delivered the divorce papers the next morning. That was a month ago. His number has been changed since then. I know, because when I hit “husband – cell” on my phone, someone new answers. I guess in a town of two million people, preserving old numbers is a thing of the past, like mending old sweaters. I thought, perhaps, they would save the number for him in case he came to his senses and needed it back, but the operator told me that isn’t how they do things now a days.

When I’d added all of the broth to the risotto, I stirred in the water from the reconstituted mushrooms I’d saved. I think it adds a nice rich touch to the dish. Then I added the mushrooms. Risotto isn’t a difficult dish to make, it just requires constant attention. This occurred to me recently, how very much like a marriage making risotto is. For a while, I was too busy stirring my family – being mother to our three children, keeping the house in order – and my husband, it turned out, needed his kernels toasted. Ha, that’s a funny pun. Too bad it’s my life I’m poking puns at.

If I could go back twenty years, I’d insist on finishing my degree first, before we got married. But twenty years ago, I was marrying for love, and that was going to be enough to carry us through. Finding myself in this mess of a life never occurred to me, then. I knew who I was, then. I was the beloved wife, then, but I soon became the beloved mother of three and my beloved husband became my partner and father, but not my love. Did it bother me? Sure, but I thought we’d have time – time at the end of our lives to reconnect, to get to know each other, again, as lovers and friends, once the children had grown.

On the morning after I served the mushroom risotto for dinner, carefully shaving the parmesan over our plates and then sprinkling them with the bit of chopped parsley I’d cut from the herb garden on the patio, that morning after I sat in the dining room by myself with my book for company since the children had all made plans for their Friday night, that morning when the courier rang the bell, rousing my youngest son from the stupor he was in lying on the sofa in front of the Xbox in the family room, when he answered the door and called “Mom, there’s some woman at the door who says she needs to see you.”, that morning, my time ran out.

None of my children had seemed concerned when they came home and the space where their father usually parked his car was empty. It happened often enough – an out of town business trip, or a late night meeting with a client that lasted so late, and happened so often, it just was easier for my husband to stay at the office – sleeping on the leather sofa we’d purchased for the corner window room he’d acquired when he finally made partner. It happened so often, as a matter of fact, none of the children were concerned to see his side of our bed empty when they came in to kiss me goodnight, nor were they surprised to see the dish of leftover risotto covered with saran wrap in the fridge.

When they were younger, and he’d come home for dinner so we could all eat as a family, he’d carefully wrap his own leftovers, and place them in the fridge with an “I spit on this! Dad” note taped to the top to protect his dish from growing boys who had hunger fits long before he’d return from his nightly meetings. The “I spit on this! Dad” note I put on top of his dish of risotto is still in there, right where I left it. I guess none of the kids had the nerve to throw it away, not after the way I reacted when I learned they’d all three known Dad wouldn’t be coming home that Friday night. They even knew about the apartment he’d rented months earlier, which – from the website – looks as if it would be a perfect place to keep his sofa.

I wonder if he has anyone to make him risotto, or if he needs anyone to darn his sweaters, or if he’s outgrown that need now.

Where I'm From (after Georgia Ella Lyon)

I am from the block house on the bumpy brick streets under the craggy oak trees with hanging moss.
I am from an era where they were called "Negros" and came - two by two - into our classrooms and onto our buses.
I am from long car rides to visit the relatives - every. single. holiday.
I am from the middle of the back seat, because my legs were the shortest.
I am from a mouthful of acorns.
I am from Ruth and Janet - women who dragged their menfolk to church on Sundays, but couldn't always make them stay.
I am from a house with old books on the shelves we never read, with new ones we checked out of the library each week and returned on time.
I am from a family of finishers - dinner, school, work, chores, marriages, books.
I am from long hot summer nights with no-see-ems instead of lightning bugs.
I am from fried chicken and mashed potatoes with milk gravy Sundays, and fried tongue on a kaiser Saturday nights.
I am from under the golden rain tree pulling weeds.
I am from Sunday afternoons after church and two donuts from Dunkin', spread out on the floor with the colored comics to read.
I am from the front seat in the camper keeping notes of our travels one state at a time.
I am from a pile of ironing done every Tuesday, wash done on Mondays.
I am from parents of the depression, who may or may not remember those days, who may or may not have let their fear of going without pervade their sense of blessing.
I am from under the covers with a dog to keep me warm.
I am from a house without cats - ever.
I am from the piano in the front room.
I am from guilt.
I am from innocence.
I am from Ron and Sue.
I am from immigrants and natives, from Jews and Protestants, from city-folk and country-people.
I am from a family of helpers.

That's where I'm from.