My Friends’ Moms

When I was in elementary school one of my best friends lived across the street, which is to say also that my best friend’s mom lived across the street. She, the mom, taught us how to paint Bob Ross style, she read to us serially from the Little House on the Prairie books, she built us a sandbox, she let us run (or feel like we were running) the garage sale in which we sold her wedding dress and her antique dishware, and on a number of weekends she brought us along to go and visit her own mother, who lived in an unincorporated township called Pink, Oklahoma, where she, the mom’s mom, had what I recall as an oversized barn of sorts—today it would feel like high-end loft living, but at the time it had more of the joys of sleeping with goats. I didn’t quite understand it at the time, but I know now that the mother in Pink was not mentally well. Maybe she wasn’t too unwell, as she did babysit us sometimes, and feed us chicken with canned pineapple for dinner. This mom of my friend had an easy laugh and seemed always cheerful, and I have only one memory of her ever disciplining us, when we had once again covered up the floor heating vent with toys, which maybe was a fire risk, I’m not sure. Often she sang us songs on the guitar, especially “Grandma’s Feather Bed.” She taught us how to use calligraphy pens, she played the piano, she made us drink a full glass of milk with dinner, she led grace. I once walked in on her while she was connected to a breast pump and remain bothered by that visual to this day. She looked like she was having the life sucked out of her, or like she was a clone, recharging in private. Only decades later did I understand that I had seen something normal, ordinary. Behind my friend’s house was a small creek, which we could scramble down to, by descending about a thirty-foot incline, which the mom made easier by setting into the clay-laden soil half-logs that gave us somewhere to step. We liked watching the creek rise and flood. When the mom delivered her first baby, my friend’s little sister—my friend had been adopted as a baby from a difficult home, she had once even had a different first name, and now her middle name was Joy—life in that household got even better. When the baby’s diaper leaked onto my bare leg, her mom bathed me. Her bathroom had old-fashioned perfume bottles, colored glass with cloth-covered bulbs to squeeze for a spritz. (Such things in my house, superfluous things, baubles, were thrown out as clutter. We had a kitchen drawer under the phone, with a magic clutter of keychains and old watches and paper clips of different colors and staples for staplers we no longer had, and I remember once watching my mom pick out two small items of worth and then unseat the drawer to pour the rest out into a garbage bag. As an adult, I have done the same, maybe sadly.) In what became the baby’s bedroom, there was a painted portrait on the wall—in my memory it was painted by the mom, she was a wonderful painter, often working from old family photos—of a man in a brown suit; the painting was done in such a way that the man’s eyes seemed always to be looking right at you, wherever you were. In that same room there was a tin that seemed never to run out of toffees in shiny wrappers. Also there were baby wipes and two small prints of paintings of Jesus, and also one of those “Footprints in the Sand” poems. Beaded necklaces, hair clips, wrapping paper, gift tags, pastels, lace, the phone book of a nearby town. On Easter Sunday, my friend’s mom always made an Easter basket for me, too, with those plastic eggs opening onto jelly beans, temporary tattoos, silvered high-eared bunnies. And on May Day, my friend’s mom had us prepare baskets for others: we delivered them by ringing doorbells and then running away, that was the tradition, to leave the homemade goods-filled baskets anonymously on doorsteps. This seems an impossible memory to me now. Who can trust something that arrives, unordered, at the door? One of those baskets we gave to a neighbor who was an elderly French widow; I wonder now occasionally what that French woman was doing in Norman, Oklahoma, on her own; when she was ill, my friend’s mom took us to the hospital to visit her.