greater, to a world beyond Manchester, to some early fantasy that lingered still at the corners of her eyes. But when she signed up for classes—Mastering the Potter’s Wheel or Conversational French—it was hard to believe even then that she took them seriously. The only paying job she ever held when I was young was at the local bookstore over the holidays, when they took on extra staff—a couple of college kids and my mom—for the Christmas rush. She did it several years running and grew adept at making pretty packages, with perfect edges and curlicues of gilded ribbon.
She wasn’t, in any practical way, ambitious. The friends she had who were ambitious made their moves strategically, went to law school at night, or studied for the realtor’s exam, and then they took steps away from the hearth, out into the world. She both admired and resented them, the way plump women both admire and resent their successfully dieting friends, trying, all smiles, to force upon them a slab of chocolate cake. She didn’t keep close to the ones who went back to work, or who divorced and moved into the city: she celebrated them with lunches and sent them on their way, as if they were off on a dangerous mission from which safe return was—as indeed it was—impossible.
Do you remember the ladies’ lunches of those days? The table set first thing in the morning. Cold poached salmon and Waldorf salad, pitchers of iced tea, sweating bottles of white wine, everything served on the best china, and the ladies all still there in a blue fog of cigarette smoke when I came home from school, as though there were nothing, nothing to call them away. And the knowledge, which I had even then, that once they left the charmed circle, they were gone forever.
When I was about seven, in the week before Christmas—before, it must be said, the bookstore years; and it only now occurs to me that they were a direct result of this incident—my mother broke down in tears at the A&P, her face a map of blotches in the sallow supermarket light. I’d asked for something extra—a jar of chocolate Koogle, maybe, which the more indulgent mothers of the day allowed their children to take as school sandwiches, on white bread with butter: your dessert as a main course! The world gone haywire!—and her features crumpled.
“I’m so sorry,” she blathered, all moist and shamefully public, as I tried to push the cart along and her with it, and kept my eyes to the floor, “but there’s nothing for you or your brother. Nothing at all. I have nothing for you for Christmas. There’s just no money left.” She let out a small wail; I cringed. “I had to have the dishwasher fixed, and then that stone hit the windshield on the highway, and to replace the glass—it’s all so expensive and you see, you see, there’s nothing. And I can’t ask your father. I can’t ask him for more. So there’s nothing for you at all. I am so sorry.” My mother, you understand, lived on an allowance from my father—or a salary, if you prefer: he had a bank account and she had a bank account, and each month he transferred a fixed sum from his account to hers, and with this sum she managed the household. She had spent the housekeeping money on housekeeping, and there was nothing left over for gifts. Even though I was still small, I understood the basics of this arrangement.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, trying to console without causing further embarrassment. “I don’t care about presents.” Although I did care, and was disappointed, not least because I was still supposed to believe in Santa Claus, and this outburst seemed like the Wizard of Oz emerging from behind his curtain, an unconscionable breach of propriety and of our necessary hypocrisies. “Really,” I said again, “it doesn’t matter.”
And suddenly, then—inexplicably to me as I was, but in a way so obvious to me now—she turned viperish, rageful, a temper as shameful in the A&P as her earlier tears. “Don’t ever get yourself stuck like this,” she hissed. “Promise me? Promise me now?”
“I promise.”
“You need to have your own life, earn your own money, so you’re not scrounging around like a beggar, trying to put ten dollars together for your kids’ Christmas presents. Leeching off your father’s—or your husband’s—pathetic paycheck. Never. Never. Promise me?”