. . .
My mother always drove fast, never stayed home. In the old days, we sped across the plains in our blue Impala, radio blaring DJ Johnny Rabbitt’s all-American voice on KXOK St. Louis. She took me to the county line where I waited for the bus to kindergarten. My mother—“too damn high strung,” my father said—stayed in the bathroom fussing with her hair and smoking Kent cigarettes until the very last minute. “I look like something the cat drug in,” she told herself, frowning into the mirror.
When she finally came out, I’d be sitting on the hood of the car, my Batman lunch box already empty except for wads of foil and a few hastily scraped carrots.
“I’m a nervous wreck,” I’d cry out. I was an only child, raised mostly among adults. I repeated what I heard and didn’t get half of what I was saying.
“Why are you just sitting there?” she’d yell as if I were the one delaying things.
Those mornings, heading to school, I learned to love pop music, a lifelong fixation. My mother and I sang along to “This Diamond Ring” by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” by the Righteous Brothers, and Petula Clark’s “Downtown.” Betty took her shoe off the foot she used for the gas pedal and almost floored it.
I like fast things, and the highway between Madison and Moberly will always be one of the places where I will see my mother, hair wrapped in rollers under a scarf, wearing a pair of sunglasses, taking me off into the big wide world.
“What are you looking at, little demon?” she would ask.
“Don’t bug me,” I’d say. “Mind your own business.”
“You are my business.”
“Betty,” my father often said, “no one would mistake that kid for anyone’s but yours.”
I was Betty’s boy.
This year, Betty had to give up her driver’s license after backing into a ditch. Now she must sit home, awaiting invitations. “They won’t even let me go to the grocery store,” she says. Her eyes are wistful and her fingers, with their chipped pink polish, are itchy for the feel of the car keys.
. . .
Suddenly, Betty yells out. “Oh God,” I think as I run to her, trip on a hair curler and barely escape ankle injury. “What is it?” I ask as I approach her door. “What is it?”
“Say,” she begins, “you didn’t get toilet paper.”
We go through enough toilet paper for an army. I think she is involved in some sort of art project. A kind of Christo thing.
“I’ll get some tomorrow,” I say.
“That suits me,” she answers, pausing before asking, “Did you make me a hair appointment?”
“I told them it was an emergency.”
It is 3 a.m. I steal a cigarette from my mother’s old, hidden cache and sit out on the step in front of our house in the dark. The mailbox made by my father is falling apart now. I would fix it, but am not handy. Nor do I assemble. A trip to Ikea is enough to unhinge me. I would prefer a spinal tap to putting together a coffee table.
I am running out of meals I know how to prepare. Tonight, feeling nostalgic, I rolled out tuna casserole made with Campbell’s Mushroom Soup and crushed potato chips.
“I didn’t know anyone still made this,” she said.
“I was trying to think outside the box . . . Mushrooms are vegetables. Or are they a fungus?”
“Be still.”
Mushrooms, I realized, are a fungus. I had served my mother a fungus casserole. With barbecue potato chips.
. . .
“There is no such thing as a perfect parent.” Betty always said that. But to me she was perfect. Especially when she thought she was not. In grade school, on holidays, the mothers brought refreshments. Popcorn balls—crunchy white confections with the popped kernels held together with sorghum—were my favorites. When it was her turn to bring treats, Betty asked what I wanted. I said, “Popcorn balls.” She said, “Oh brother,” and lit a cigarette.
The kitchen was not her natural habitat. Her tendency to never turn things off led to exploding percolators and smoky puffs from toasters. A few days after my popcorn-ball request, I found Betty in front of the oven in her hair rollers, which were held in place with pink picks that tended to turn up all around the house. The kitchen, never a page from Good Housekeeping, was strewn with bowls and baking sheets. Sticky lumps of popcorn and fallen curlers were everywhere. On a tray there was a strange grouping of misshapen popcorn balls.
When I said they were supposed to be all the same size, Betty appeared exasperated, harassed, so forlorn and disappointed. She had failed. Nothing was right. She thought she had to be some kind of model mother.
I reached for a ball and took a bite. “I think these are the best I’ve had,” I told her as I stuck some of the picks from her curlers into the balls so they would look a little snazzy.
“Why are you doing that?” she said. “Go outside and throw something.”