Chapter 26

26

In third grade, our class spent a week making flower bouquets for our mothers, buttons glued to the inside of pink and yellow muffin cups, stems made of chenille pipe cleaners. We stuck them on thick construction paper and used our best cursive writing to copy the poem from the blackboard: Roses are red, Violets are blue, You’re the best mom there is, and I love you! I was the last one to finish. I couldn’t remember making a craft for her before, not one as nice as this. The teacher took it from my hands and whispered to me, “It’s beautiful, Blythe. She’s going to love it.”

The teacher sent us each home with an invitation to a tea party. I threw mine in the garbage when I left school that day—I didn’t want to invite my mother. Or more specifically, I didn’t want to invite her in case she didn’t want to come. I was nine, but I had already learned how to manage my own disappointment. On the morning of the party, as I ate breakfast alone in the kitchen while my mother slept in as usual, I rehearsed what I’d say to everyone when I got to school: my mother was ill, she had food poisoning. She couldn’t come to the tea.

That afternoon we decorated the classroom with tissue-paper flowers before the mothers arrived. I was standing on a chair with a tack in my hand reaching for the bulletin board when I heard:

“Am I early?”

I nearly fell off the chair. My mother. The teacher greeted her kindly and said not to worry, she was just the first to arrive. That she was glad to see her feeling better. My mother seemed not to pick up on my lie—she looked too nervous. She waved quickly from the doorway. She was wearing something I had never seen her in before, a pretty peach suit and pearl earrings that couldn’t have been real. I wasn’t used to seeing her look so soft, so feminine. My heart pounded in my chest. She came. Somehow she found out and she came.

She asked me to show her around the classroom while we waited for the tea to begin. I pointed out the weather station and the counter beads and the multiplication times tables. She laughed as I explained how to do it in the simplest way I could, as though she’d never seen numbers before. As the other mothers came through the door, their children running to them, my mother looked up at each woman and studied her—her outfit, her hair, the jewelry she wore. I sensed even then that my mother felt self-conscious and this shocked me—she never seemed to care what the other mothers thought. She never seemed to care what anyone thought.

Mrs. Ellington came in the door next and Thomas called to her. He was carefully setting up the teacups and saucers the teacher had brought from home. Mrs. Ellington waved to him, but first walked over to where I stood with my mother on the other side of the room. She held her hand out to my mother.

“Cecilia, it’s so nice to see you again. That color is lovely on you.” My mother took her hand and then Mrs. Ellington leaned in, a sort of touch on the cheek that I’d seen other women do with each other, but never my own mother. I wondered what she smelled like to Mrs. Ellington.

“You, too.” My mother smiled. “And thank you. For this.” She lifted her chin toward the room, full of miniature tables with doilies and plates of crumpets. Mrs. Ellington brushed her hand through the air as though it were nothing. As though they liked each other. I had never heard them speak that many words to each other before.

“Your mom is so pretty, Blythe,” one of the girls whispered to me.

“She looks like an actress,” said another. I looked at my mother again and imagined what they could see, without the burden of everything I knew about her. I could tell by the way she tapped her foot that she wanted a cigarette. I wondered where her outfit had come from—was it in her closet? Did she buy it just for today? I watched my friends watching her as they sat next to their ordinary-looking mothers. For the first time in my life I was proud of her. She looked special. She was trying. For me.

The teacher handed out the flowers we’d made and the women fawned over our hard work. I held mine out to my mother and she read the poem under her breath. I’d never said anything like those words to her before. We both knew she wasn’t the best mother. We both knew she wasn’t even close.

“Do you like it?”

“I do. Thank you.” She looked away and placed it on the table. “I’ll have some water. Blythe, can you pour me some?”

But I wanted her to feel like a better mother than she was. I needed her to be a better mother than she was. I picked up the poem again and read it to her aloud, my voice shaking against the noise in the room.

“Roses are red, violets are blue, you’re the best mom there is”—I paused and swallowed—“and I love you.”

She didn’t lift her eyes from the poem. She took it back from my hands.

“Five more minutes, class!”

“I’ll see you at home, all right?” She touched the top of my head, picked up her purse, and left. I saw Mrs. Ellington’s eyes follow her out of the room.

“So? Tell me all about the Mother’s Day tea.”

Mashed potatoes thumped onto his plate and my mother didn’t say a word. He turned to me and lifted his eyebrows. “How was it, Blythe?”

“Good.” I sipped my milk. She slid the hot casserole dish onto the table, straight from the oven, and dropped a spoon beside it.

“Jesus, the wood.” My father jumped up to grab a kitchen towel and burned his fingers lifting up the edge of the casserole dish to slip it underneath. He glared at my mother, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“I made Mom some flowers out of paper.”

“That’s nice. Where is it, Cecilia?” He filled his mouth with potatoes and turned to her. “Let me see.”

My mother looked up from the sink. “Where’s what?”

“The thing she made you. For Mother’s Day.”

My mother shook her head, confused, as though I’d never given her anything. “I don’t know, I don’t know where I put it.”

“It must be somewhere. Check your purse.”

“No, I don’t know where it is.” She looked at me and shook her head again. “I don’t know what happened to it.” She lit a cigarette and turned on the tap to fill the sink for the dishes. She never ate with us. I never saw her eat at all.

My heart sank. It had been too much—I’d said too much.

“Never mind, Dad.”

“No. No, if you made your mother something nice, we’ll find it. We’ll put it on the fridge.”

“Seb.”

“Go find it, Cecilia.”

She threw the dishcloth at his face. The smack made me jump and I dropped my fork on the floor. My father sat there with the wet cloth hanging from him, his eyes closed. He put down his knife and fork and squeezed his fists so his knuckles were the color of the potatoes. I wanted him to yell with the same rage that brewed inside of her constantly. He was so still that I wondered if he was still breathing.

“I went, didn’t I? To the fucking tea? I was there. I sat at the little table and played along. What more do you want from me?” She grabbed her cigarettes and left for the porch. My father took the cloth off his head and folded it on the table. He picked up his fork and looked at me.

“Eat.”