First Place Personal Essay

Mama Laundered Her Money
by
Joan Boyd Short

Mama laundered her money. Literally. She hated to handle dirty money from the bank, so she put the bills straight from the bank envelope into a sink full of Woolite. She hung them over the tub to dry on those lingerie lines with the little clear clothes pins attached, and then she sprayed them with fabric finish and ironed them stiff with a pressing cloth. 'Said you just never knew where that money had been, and besides, spraying and pressing made them slide in and out of her worn red leather billfold a lot easier.

Mama also dated her eggs-not the carton, each egg-with a black wax pencil she kept in the utility drawer next to the refrigerator. She liked to see them neatly arranged in the built-in egg holders in the door of the new Frigidaire my daddy bought her in 1961. In addition, he bought her one of the first automatic dishwashers to hit the market. Mama, of course, did not trust it one iota. She continued to fill the right sink with billowing soap suds and the left sink with steaming hot water, place her wedding rings in the little wooden ring holder Daddy had made her, don her bright yellow Playtex dishwashing gloves, and go to work on each glass, cup, plate, knife, spoon, fork, pot, and pan-in that exact order-with  a meticulousness that made her willful daughter wonder on more than one occasion why she had not decided to be a watchmaker instead of a secretary. Then, and only then, she opened the door of the shiny, new dishwasher,  carefully arranged all the dishes inside, and then settled herself at the kitchen table, listening anxiously during the cycle for auditory signs of breaking glass and flying kettle lids. After the first week, Daddy referred to it as Mama's sterilizer and felt guilty for the rest of their lives together that he had just created more work for her instead of less when he brought that Maytag into the house.

And then there were her garbage day ablutions. She froze the food scraps in a yellow and brown Mayfield's milk carton, waiting until the last minute to add them to the trash which she bagged up in brown paper grocery sacks. Said the garbage man's life was hard enough without having to smell her stinky food scraps!  She folded the tops of the sacks down and taped them with masking tape, and then tied the whole thing up with kitchen twine, just like you'd tie a bow on a birthday present. She thought that might make it easier to pick up out of the can, and the garbage men might not be so eager to dump her cans upside down and toss them in the front yard. We had the prettiest garbage cans in town.not a dent anywhere. After she sold the homeplace following my daddy's death in 1972, she continued to "prepare" the garbage for the big green Dempster Dumpsters at the far end of parking lot at the condo complex where she had moved. When we visited on trash day, she would ask Ron to take the garbage to the dumpster. He confided to me later that as soon as he was out of sight of her front door, he would punch the bag a couple of times so it would look more like garbage. Turns out the apartment complex manager had told him that Mama's garbage was always so neat, some of the trash men who were unfamiliar with that run were afraid it had been put in there by accident, and more than once they had set it out on the sidewalk next to the dumpster so nothing would happen to it.

Mama didn't cuss, didn't smoke, didn't drink, and didn't like dust one bit. What most people referred to as "dust bunnies," my mama called "slut's wool," and she went after it with a holy vengeance. When she went out, she  wore  white gloves and always carried one of my daddy's old golf towels in her handbag just in case she ever had a sudden nosebleed. She'd had a bad one once when she wasn't prepared, and she  wasn't gonna let that happen again. Besides, the towel gave her something to wrap her little bottle of Tobasco Sauce in. You just never knew when you might run across a bowl of fresh crowder peas-her favorite-or white beans or black-eyed peas and there you'd be without the proper seasoning.  As far as she was concerned, white gloves and Tobasco Sauce were the necessary accoutrements with which every Southern lady faced the  "slings and arrows" of daily survival in the world beyond her kitchen window. 

Mama was extremely modest. She kept a apricot colored wrap-around skirt in the basement on a clothes rack next to the washer and dryer, so she could put it on over her mid-thigh length blue housecleaning shorts when she walked into the backyard to hang up the daily wash. Freshly pressed and folded neatly, the skirt's only blemish  was the half-dollar- sized Clorox stain on the left side next to the pocket. She always put it on before emerging into the sunlight from the dark basement door  just in case Mr. Fortson, our next-door-neighbor, chose that very moment to mow the yard or Mr. Clonts, the egg man, dropped by with a fresh crate of greens or a basket full of purple hull peas for sale.

Mama was the best cook in the family, hands down, but she wasn't one of those "little bit of this" and "a pinch of that" kinds of cooks. Her dog-eared Better Homes and Garden Cookbook, filled to overflowing with recipes copied in her delicate, old-fashioned, scrolling hand or typed with lightning precision on her little Royal portable, was as much a part of meal preparation as the Jewel Tea coffee pot and the pork chop platter that had belonged to her great-grandmother.  "I've got enough to think about without trying to remember every detail of a recipe," she'd say, but, truth be told, most of the time the cookbook just sat there on the red formica counter next to the stainless steel canisters, opened to the right place but rarely glanced at, like an old friend, unobtrusive but always there for support. (It wasn't until years later that I realized keeping that cookbook nearby was just one more sign of her fragile ego and lack of confidence in her own God-given abilities.) Fried chicken was dipped in buttermilk, dredged in flour, chilled in the refrigerator for at least three hours, dipped again, and fried lovingly in the big iron skillet. Lovingly. She used words like that when she wrote out recipes for me-lots of adverbs like "slowly," "carefully," "tenderly," "gently."  The last three ingredients on my copy of her never-fail chocolate pie recipe, my daddy's favorite, are  "high, comfortable stool," "good book, preferably Jane Austen," and "patience."  Just thinking about her fried okra-and-potatoes makes my mouth water.

Come to think of it, the only time I ever saw my mama commit a breach of table manners was over fried okra-and-potatoes.  One evening when I was a sophomore in college I took Morris Effron, one of my best friends, out to my parents' house for dinner. He loved my mother's cooking, but he had never had her okra-and-potatoes.  That was my favorite dish, and I had been preparing him all day for what I promised would be his best meal ever.  Mom had made meatloaf, fresh corn, black-eyed peas, fresh sliced tomatoes, homemade rolls, and a heaping platter of the piece d'resistance: fried okra and potatoes. Morris had his fork piled with okra almost to his mouth when Mama suddenly jumped out of her chair, grabbed his fork out of his hand, and said, "Oh, Morris, I'm so sorry, but you can't eat that. It has bacon grease on it."  My daddy, Morris, and I sat in stunned silence. Morris, who was half Jewish by birth but had never even seen the inside of a synagogue, was the first to recover and respond. He laughed 'til the tears rolled out of the corners of his eyes, hugged my mama and then said: "Miz Boyd, I'm sure my great-aunt Myra, rest her soul, blesses you from her grave for your concern, but at this moment, it's clear to me that I would risk everlasting damnation for this plate of okra and potatoes."

Mama was afraid.  She was afraid of driving the car, misspelling words, heights, spiders, most dogs, the sight of blood, thunder storms, elevators, wild horses,  tractor trailers, hurting someone's feelings, being alone, snakes, crickets in the bathtub, her husband's frail health, her son's intelligence, her daughter's willfulness, and the wrath of God. During our childhood, if my brother or I were away from the house and could hear a siren from any direction on the nearby highway, we had to run for a phone to call Mama and let her know: "It's not me!"  One day in the third grade I cried inconsolably because an ambulance went wailing by right in front of our little school, and Mrs. Murphy wouldn't let me go to the office to call Mama. And I can't count the number of hot, muggy summer afternoons we spent huddled in the basement between my daddy's drill press and the model railroad layout, waiting out one of  those violent Southern thunderstorms and praying that we were temporarily safe from lethal lightning strikes and falling chimneys.

Mom referred to her overweening anxiety as "the Brooks madness," Brooks being her maiden name.  Her brothers remember their father as a kind, strong, hardworking man of great faith. She and her sisters remember him as dark, rigid, puritanical, and inflexible. Mom's brothers excelled in school and went off to fight in World War II. They sent postcards from exotic places and both eventually came home safely, married happily, built lovely homes in the suburbs, and raised bright, lively children.  Mom and her two younger sisters  went to business school, and  within months of their eighteenth birthdays, married badly to escape my grandfather's iron hand.  These  unions were filled with tragedy, hardship, and heartbreak.  Mama was the oldest, and in what would become the best kept secret in the family, Mama's first marriage lasted ten fearful years and ended in divorce-unheard of among God-fearing folk in the deep South in 1935. The stress and stigma of the divorce caused her to have a nervous breakdown, and she did not rise from her bed for three months, nursed back to health by her own mother's gentle care-and ranted over by her father.  Less than a year after she regained her health, she met and married my father, her protector and her life-long loving companion. No minister on either side of the Tennessee-Georgia line would perform the ceremony. They had to go to a justice of the peace down around Ringgold. My grandmother went with them. My grandfather stayed home.

Mama and Daddy were married for thirty-five years before his rheumatic heart just stopped beating one October evening in l972. Mama never moved beyond her grief, nor beyond her greatest fear-that she had doomed my father for eternity by allowing him to marry her, a previously married woman.  In the iron bound book by which she was raised, she had made him a partner to adultery. Her intellect fought that notion. Her heart was harder to convince.

As a matter of fact, so fearful was she of the judgment passed on her that she could not find a way to tell me, her willful daughter, of that first marriage until the spring after my father had died. I was in my mid-twenties and living on my own. My brother , who could read at age four, discovered the secret when he found the name in the front of  my grandmother's Bible and asked about it point blank. My grandmother told him it was the name of someone who had hurt my mother very much and that he must never mention it. So convinced was he by my grandmother's intensity that he never spoke of it again. His curiosity took him back a few days later to check the Bible, but the name had been blotted out beyond all recognition. At my father's urging, Mama had tried many times to tell me as I was growing up, but she said that every time she would manage to gather her courage,  I would tear in from a youth revival at our little rural Methodist church filled with fundamentalist fervor and sanctimonious zeal-all fueled, I am sure, by unchecked teenage lust for one of the cute guys on the "Witness Team," fresh out of Emory and Henry College for the summer.  She  was afraid of my rejection and, I am sure,  of the puritanical genes she feared she had passed along to me from her father's side of the family.

I was actually twenty-seven years old when she finally told me. I was on my way to Chattanooga with Ron, whom she was about to meet for the first time, and stopped in Knoxville to call and let her know what time we would arrive. Fearing her rejection of this new love of my life, I reminded her once more that he had been married for awhile right after he came home from Vietnam, making him a "divorced man."  Even though I didn't know why at the time, the word "divorce" had always been whispered at my house. I wanted to make sure she knew the whole truth. I held my breath through her long silence. Finally she said: "Maybe you're wondering why that doesn't bother me very much. I was married for ten years to another man before I met your father. I know what it's like to be trapped in an unhappy marriage."   That evening the three of us ate fried chicken at that same familiar dining room table, listened to tornado warnings on Mama's "weather cube," and tried to decide if we should make a run for the basement. Our earlier exchange on the telephone was not mentioned again for another twenty-two years.

It has taken me a long time to learn that being afraid doesn't have anything to do with lack of courage. As a matter of fact, what is courage if it is not facing our fears, head on, day after day? Mom's faced her last twenty-five years alone, convinced that her loneliness was "God's judgment on a sinner."  Nonetheless, she bathed and dressed herself every morning, made the bed, reminded herself of the importance of good posture, prayed for all the people she loved, and faced the challenges of the day.  As her health declined and her mind became clouded, she still managed to bathe, dress, make the bed, and pray.  Those basic tasks required Herculean effort in the last few months of her life, and it would often take the greater part of her day to complete them. She persevered.

When she left us in l996, it seemed to me that she literally evaporated from the inside out. Her beautiful smile never lost its dazzle, but her once full, stately frame was reduced to the size of a twelve-year-old. It became difficult for her to hold herself up in a chair or wheelchair, but she tried. When we went on our last walk together around the nursing home parking lot, she turned her face up to the sun and smiled.  I remember noticing that her head was barely above the back of the wheelchair and marveled at how tiny she had become.  I stopped to straighten her in the chair and told her how lucky we had been to have had such a special mother. I also told her that, while we would miss her terribly,  it was okay if she needed to let go. Two days later, her fragile spirit flew away as she slept.

I've heard of people having visions, but I'd never given any thought to having one myself.until two weeks after Mama died. It was late at night and Ron had already gone up to bed. I was sitting on the sofa finishing my day's quota of thank-you notes for the flowers, food, and cards that had poured in before and after the funeral. Suddenly I felt an "awareness," and looked up, expecting to see Ron in the doorway. Instead, the walls of the room seemed to draw back for a moment, and I found myself looking down a hallway, just like the one in the assisted living center where Mama had stayed. Coming toward me was a vigorous, beautiful young woman pushing my dear, wizened little mother in a wheelchair. Mama was slumped over and I could only see the top of her tiny white head, but the  younger  woman was smiling reassuringly and waving. I didn't recognize her at first, as I had not seen her in a long time, but as she came closer in that millisecond's vision, there was no mistaking that dazzling smile, that erect posture.and that silver-dollar-sized Clorox stain next to the pocket on the left side of her apricot-colored wrap-around skirt.