Good-Bye, Pretty Girl​​
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The summer that we were deeply enthralled with each other, my mother and I, the summer we were last together for an entire three months, she made me a culotte dress from a vivid pink fabric in a pattern of large strawberries, split to show their blushing insides. This was a modest sleeveless garment with a scoop neck; the pants part of the dress fell to just above my knees; and the lightweight denim made it perfect for wearing in warm weather and rugged enough to withstand long rides on my bike.
I had recently turned fifteen, which was younger in those days, more than fifty years ago, than it is now; my mother was forty. In April of that year, my parents bought a summer home at the very end of Long Island, about twenty years before that part of the world would be overrun with Hollywood and Wall Street types.
It was a small two-bedroom cottage with a den that held an old-fashioned Murphy bed whose springs shrieked every time it was opened for guests. The houses were in a community that had originally been envisioned as a retirement village. But instead, over the course of about a decade, the neighborhood would fill up with city people—mostly from Brooklyn and Queens—who wanted cheap second homes near the water.
But that first summer very few of the houses had sold, and when we went to the sound-side beach in the mornings, we often had a vast expanse of sand all to ourselves. Down by the jetty, near the marina, were a few motels, and at the opposite end, a couple of big houses perched on a cliff (one was enticingly named the Sea Witch, and I envisioned the inhabitants with pearl eyes and seaweed hair).
Our house was sparsely furnished. We brought a few odds and ends from our Upper West Side apartment, including a couple of incongruously stately wingback chairs—as though the English naval officers who had sailed past our beach during the Revolution were expected for tea any moment. We bought beds, end tables, and a dinette set from a furniture store in Riverhead, the nearest sizable town back then. The house was already acquiring a rag-tag junk-shop aura, so at odds with what I later learned about “good taste” that I could scarcely bear to bring college friends out for visits.
My mother cheerfully admitted she had no taste whatsoever when it came to home décor. But she could sew up a storm, and that summer we carted out her old Singer sewing machine, a steel-blue contraption she inherited from her mother and claimed was one of the first models with an electric foot pedal.
She tried to show me how to lay out patterns on the large folding table we’d brought from the apartment, but I didn’t have the patience for all the finicky pinning and cutting. After mornings at the beach, where we slathered ourselves with suntan cream and ate tuna sandwiches for lunch, she returned home to sew or read and I tore off on my bike, mostly to explore the little inlets and coves near the marina. As I pedaled down the drive, sometimes wearing my serviceable culotte dress, my mother would always wave and cry out, “Good-bye, pretty girl!”
Often I wound up stopping at the little store on the highway about a half-mile from the house. We had no car on weekdays that summer, and the trip to town meant three miles on our bikes over a steep hill, so Four Oaks, as it was known, was the only place to pick up staples like milk or bread, or after-dinner delicacies like ice-cream sandwiches. It was a stuffy, cramped space, where trays of potato salad and cold slaw turned a sickly yellow behind smudged glass and strips of flypaper collected airborne insects, some with wings still feebly beating. We took to calling the place “Kid’s Store” because the owner, a blowsy blonde with a crinkled prow of bosom, always greeted customers with “Hey, how ya doin,’ kid?”
She was a source of unprovoked comments that often caused amusement and sometimes bafflement, such as, “All men are bastards, doncha think?” Once, when my mother returned from a bike ride on her own, she reported that Kid, as we called her, had greeted a guy with what she thought was an unbelievably impudent query: “Are you mating this year, kid?”
“Don’t you think that’s rude?” she asked me.
I mulled it over for a few moments. I knew the store was a stop for beer when members of fishing crews were on their way to the marina. “Mom, I think what she meant was, Do you have a job as a mate on a boat?”
“Well, maybe. But it certainly sounds rude to me.”
On overcast days the two of us sometimes made the trip to town, usually pushing our bikes on foot over the steepest part of the hill and then gliding smoothly past the railroad station and a ramshackle movie theater housed in an old Tudor-style building, which was once, we learned, the stables for guests at the grand hotel on the very summit of the hill, now a ghostly shell of its former splendor, abandoned since the stock market crash in 1929. We had absorbed a bit of its history from a local guidebook and once poked about in the deserted lobby, imagining glamorous flappers and tuxedoed gentlemen sipping from flutes of champagne. My mother struck a fashion-model pose in a doorway, one hand on her hip, the other flipping a lock of hair from her face. “Scott, be a dahling,” she said, “and get me another gin fizz.”
Scott would surely have hopped to. My mother could easily have fit in with the right clothes and makeup. She was what my father liked to call a “looker” or sometimes a “tomato,” his catch-all term for pretty women. That summer, she had a fall of rippling blonde hair well below her shoulders, tamed only by a headband, and was so slim we sometimes traded clothes (though never my pink culottes—those were mine). When she introduced me to people as her daughter, the invariable response was, “Why, you two could be sisters!” A line so tired I sometimes groaned, only to be jabbed in the ribs right there or later admonished, “When someone pays a compliment, always say thank you.”
Was it a compliment to me—with my nothing breasts and tall gawky frame—that we looked like sisters? I supposed so, but that summer there were times when I scarcely knew where she left off and I began. And I felt some confusion, but also pride. She was a looker, a tomato….
When we biked to town to visit the library or stopped for sodas at an old-time luncheonette on the circle, I watched the men watch us. I watched their gazes flit quickly past me to rest on my mother’s face or survey her body, that reflexive male summing-up to which she seemed totally immune. But the way men looked at her, whether it was a cheeky clerk or some flabby sunburned vacationer, I wanted to protect her, even shield her from their gaze and shout, “Don’t look at her like that!” Possessively, I thought, “She’s my mother.”
In the evenings, because we had no television, and the radio pulled in only a couple of scratchy local stations, we played Scrabble. Fierce competitions that I usually won because I’d stored up a lot of the small words—id, od, pi, ut—which when properly inserted allow you to score big. All perfectly legitimate, because we looked them up in an old musty-smelling Webster’s unabridged. “You’re just too smart for me,” she would say at the end of the game, tilting the board to send the little wooden squares tumbling back into the box. I’d memorized the backs of a couple and knew from their color and grain which were jackpot letters—a z or y or x. I suppose that was cheating, but it also spoke to my powers of remembrance.
After that we read in our separate bedrooms, divided only by a thin wall. I devoured books indiscriminately—Forever Amber and other bodice rippers, The Godfather, Jacqueline Susann, Sidney Sheldon. Mostly I preferred glitzy paperbacks with the promise of blood or romance, especially a swarthy hero embracing a raven-haired temptress. Because my mother had finished only a couple of years of college, she was trying to catch up with some of the classics, and so together we tackled Wuthering Heights. I gave up after about 20 pages, annoyed with all the talk of “curates” and “lowering brows” and “bairns.” But my mother sped through the book in a few days and at the end urged me, “You really should give it more of a chance. It’s a wonderful love story.”
I told her I didn’t like Heathcliff, he wasn’t my idea of a romantic hero: “Too dirty and weird. And it’s really violent, all those thrashings and drubbings.”
“More violent than The Godfather?”
I couldn’t answer that one.
“Well, I wish you’d read something more serious than that other slop you like.”
“Rebecca isn’t slop!” I did have some judgment, even at that age, and knew Daphne du Maurier was better than Barbara Cartland.
“Your teachers would be impressed if you worked your way through a real classic or two.”
One night, after drifting off, I awakened to hear her giggling, a sound almost as if she were being tickled, helpless and involuntary.
I tiptoed to her room and saw that she was reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with the sheet crumpled below her bare breasts because it was a hot night and on those, she often slept naked. She lowered the book across her bosom. “What are you looking at? You’ve seen them before, and you’ll grow a pair soon enough.” She giggled again. “Grow a pair! Well, it would be nice if you’d get some balls too. Life would be so much easier.” I had no idea what she was talking about and backed off, bowing slightly like a maidservant in one of the cheesy romances I favored.
On weekends my father arrived, and our rhythm was broken. I dreaded the crunch of gravel that announced his ancient dusty red Renault in the driveway. He was a large slope-shouldered man, well over six feet, with the beginnings of the paunch that reminded me of the mailman’s bag. He smelled of some sticky sweet hair goo, and he seemed to be sweating, always.
The atmosphere in the house changed. I want to say it was like the subtle change in the air before a thunderstorm, but it was more like a great, muggy cloud descending. Not that he was a dour or depressing person. Oh, no, he was full of jokes, stale puns and elaborate shaggy dog stories. “Look at that double-breasted seersucker,” he might say, peering out at the bird feeder. If my mother ever snapped at him, which was seldom, saying, “Aw, shut up!” he would invariably respond, “So’s mine. Must be the weather.”
I especially disliked him at the beach, where he wore a large straw cowboy hat, his gut ballooned above his swim trunks, and he liked to intone, “Well, I’ve made it this far.”
He called me Princess, the favorite daughterly name from movies and TV shows of the period. I hated it. The Scrabble games gave way to honeymoon bridge for the two of them, and I rode off on my bike after dinner. On weekend nights I slept in the twin bed farthest from the wall dividing our rooms. I didn’t want to hear the muffled grunts, my mother’s strange little cries. I could not wait for him to leave on Sunday.
Then at the end of August my father took his two-week vacation and brought out my Grandma Bella, his mother, to stay for a week, so two of my least favorite people took up residence in the cottage. Grandma Bella, then about the same age I am now, was a bony woman who wore tidy shirtwaists or Bermuda shorts. She was a motormouth, whose favorite subject of conversation was my cousins in Denver, Sharon and Jimmy, “perfect little angels,” enrolled in Bible school that summer, never causing a “lick of trouble.” In the mornings, before anyone was up, we heard the grating twang of the Murphy bed folding shut, and then there was Grandma, fully dressed for the day, positioned in front of the long living-room window, looking out across two vacant lots at the sound. She held her hands behind her back and rocked sideways to and fro, muttering God knows what, gearing up for the full-throttle verbiage that would sputter throughout the day.
My line of defense was to stay in bed as late as possible, attention stuffed in a book, but at the midpoint of her visit, I awakened about the same time as my mother and stumbled out to the kitchen to see if I could help with breakfast. I felt guilty, harboring so many nasty thoughts toward an elderly blood relation, a harmless old biddy who only wanted me to love her and went about it all wrong. My mother, who was mixing orange juice from a can, put a finger to her lips and smiled as I came close. She grabbed the bottle of vodka from the freezer and poured a glug in a large juice glass, then added the oj.
My jaw must have visibly dropped.
“Close your mouth. You’ll catch flies,” she said.
“Mother!” I gasped.
“It’s for your grandma. Shuts her up and slows her down for a few hours. She can’t even taste it.”
“You might make her sick!”
“I haven’t so far.” She winked. “Come to think of it, maybe I’ll have one myself.” She poured a less generous shot into another glass.
My grandmother vehemently disapproved of drinking and removed herself from the house to walk around the neighborhood when my parents had their usual pre-dinner martini.
“This is between you and me, baby girl. Don’t tell your father.”
And then I smiled too. We were conspirators, and I felt all over again that rush of love, that circle of boundless breathless affection, that kept us close and sealed off outsiders, even if they were family.
Evenings now were given over to idiotic card games, far too infantile for me, but they made Grandma Bella happy—go fish, old maid, gin rummy, and a betting game called Indian chief, where you held a card to your forehead, suit side out, and guessed if others were high or low. I could escape in the daytime—head off on my bike, avoid the beach, duck out of errands—but evenings I was trapped.
“Where are you going?” my dad would say if I ventured toward the door after dinner. “Your grandma’s here only a week a year, at most. You should spend time with her.”
When my grandmother left and my father made the daylong round trip to the airport, my mother and I had a brief respite, the beach and then the afternoon to ourselves. She made herself a gin and tonic before lunch and from the depths of a kitchen drawer, fished out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. I seldom saw her smoke, but with her first deep drag, her eyes closed, and when she removed a clip and shook out her hair, all the tension in her slender body seemed to escape from her loosened waves.
“Can I have one?” I asked.
“May I.”
“May I have one of your cigarettes?”
“Absolutely not. You do not want to follow your mother’s lead down the road to hell and damnation.”
“Why not?” I asked. “Jimmy and Sharon won’t be there. It might be fun.”
“Oh, you are such a smart mouth.” She gripped my chin and waggled it back and forth. “What am I going to do with you?”
My father’s last days of vacation fell on Labor Day weekend, and my parents had planned a small cocktail party for the few neighbors with whom they’d become friendly that summer. I helped my mother make canapés out of Ritz crackers, cream cheese, and red caviar. And I chopped up vegetables to have with a dip of my own invention, made from mayonnaise and curry powder and Worcestershire sauce. My mother checked the ice supply mid-afternoon and noticed we were short on cubes. She packed me off to Kid’s to buy a bag, and I headed out in my pink culottes, which were newly washed and smelling of fabric softener. I had a headband like my mother’s and pink sneakers, and felt as carefree as the cloudless sky, ready for mingling with my parents’ adult friends, smiling and passing hors d’oeuvres.
I plunked a bag of ice on the counter and was fishing in my change purse for money when I heard a couple of guys behind me.
“Wow. I sure would like some of those strawberries.”
“Yeah. Who wouldn’t?”
I couldn’t imagine what they were talking about. The store didn’t sell fresh produce. Kid, scowling around a scarlet-stained cigarette butt, rang up my bags of ice.
I glanced behind me and saw the wide leers on two tanned faces. College boys, by the looks of their polo shirts and madras shorts. Maybe from further east, like one of the Hamptons, not the kind you saw in our town.
They were talking about me, I realized, and I fumbled for some response, something like, “Well, you can forget about that!” But I didn’t yet know how to fend off boys, because that had never been a problem before, and I had no idea what to say to young men. But something within me shifted, almost audibly, like the Scrabble tiles falling from the board to the box, all the high-score tiles landing just where I would know to find them.
I took off the headband and shook out my hair, smiled slightly in response to their bold looks, and discovered a swing in my hips as I walked to where my bike was parked. I had something, something worth noticing…
***
That weekend marked a change in my unbridled and uncritical bond with my mother. I returned to school, and she decided to finish her college degree at NYU. We stumbled upon new tensions: she didn’t approve of my experiments with hair and clothes. We snapped at each other constantly. Once she even slapped me, hard enough to leave a mark, and called me a wicked little bitch. Sulking, I said I would call the child-abuse hotline if she ever did that again. I suppose it was all about hormones, mine erupting in full force, teen agony forcing the inevitable break between us. But to me she wasn’t so fabulous anymore—she was just an ordinary middle-aged mom, a bored housewife taking college courses to feel young again. I was embarrassed by her headbands and her ballerina flats, so unlike the designer clothes my friends’ mothers wore.
I grew a couple of inches in my last years of high school so that I was taller than my mother by the time I was a senior. I was striking too, in ways I didn’t completely understand, but guys on the street were always hitting on me, pretending to be photographers, telling me I should be a model. The first time it happened, I mentioned it to my mother and she responded with disdain: “You are nowhere near that good looking, so get that fashion-model idea out of your head. You’re going to college even if I have to fill out the applications myself.”
After the summer of the pink culottes, the summer I was fifteen, I held down jobs in the city, though I could just as easily have found something at the beach, a wait-staff or a cleaner at one of the hotels. I could not say precisely why, but it felt more grown-up to take the subways to a cool office, populated with whirring machines and real adults, sealed off from nature by tinted glass, and then drive out to the summer house with my father on weekends. I almost started to like him better, his dumb jokes and inept efforts at cooking on weeknights.
College changed my relationships with both my parents. Those were the years of Vietnam and civil rights, when all hell busted loose on every campus, even at my small but prestigious liberal arts academy in Connecticut. I became a rabble-rousing protestor, marching on Washington, picketing my boyfriend’s draft board. When I went home to the Upper West Side for school vacations, my parents treated me with something like fear. “I don’t know who you are anymore,” my mother said. “In those filthy jeans with your hair all crazy. Remember those beautiful clothes I used to make for you?”
She was nearly distraught. I didn’t care—they were part of the problem, a silent generation who supported the status quo. I knew they even voted for Nixon.
“You treat us like a couple of old has-beens,” my father said, in disgust.
“Well, were you ever anything?” I retorted.
They looked at me in puzzlement, how could such a child have come from their loins?
“If you weren’t, how can you be a has-been?” I asked.
“You will not speak to us in this manner,” my father thundered. “You will show more respect, or you will leave.”
And so I did. I flounced out of the apartment, my knapsack in tow and spent the remainder of the break with a friend.
By the time I got to Berkeley for grad school, where I was studying psychology (not the literature major my mother had hoped I’d choose), I was thoroughly radicalized. I went home to the East Coast only three times, the last with a husband in tow, a shy stammering academic, a professor in the graduate department where I was earning a PhD. (“Well, he’s certainly no prize,” sniffed my mother. “And a little old for you.”)
The visit was an awkward one. “I think you’re awfully hard on them,” said David, my husband. “They’re just sweet ‘fifties squares who have no idea who you are.”
I was half-hoping my dad would let fly one of his racist cracks, like calling the Brazil nuts in a cocktail mix “nigger toes.” Then he would understand.
Soon I was caught up in my own West Coast world, even more so after we bought property in Petaluma and took up wetsuit surfing and gardening and raising chickens. His parents, who lived two hours away, became more like my family. Occasionally I felt twinges of guilt and brushed them aside. My parents sold the beach house and the Manhattan apartment and moved to Florida. They sent occasional notes, postcards mostly—neither of them was ever very comfortable with the written word and like many of their generation, they never got the hang of email.
When my mother called to tell me Dad had died of a heart attack, I felt momentary confusion. I hadn’t seen them age, so they were stuck in the time warp where I last left them, in their capri pants and straw cowboy hat. “Don’t bother flying out,” she said, with a trace of sarcasm. “We never really made enough friends here for a memorial.”
Then a year later a neighbor called to tell me Mom was in hospice care, and if I wanted to see her, I’d better get out there pretty damn quick. I’m guessing my mother must have passed along my number at some point. The neighbor spoke with an edge of hostility, and I suppose I couldn’t blame her.
“You should go,” said David.
“What the hell do I say to her after all these years?”
“You’ll think of something.”
I was suddenly, utterly ashamed of the distance I’d kept between us.
I’d never been around a dying person before. A nurse at their condo close to the beach in Naples ushered me into the bedroom, and I was shocked to see the old woman in the huge king-sized bed. She was nearly unconscious, her short white hair neatly combed and parted. A cannula snaked from her nostrils to an oxygen tank, and a morphine drip fed into her deeply bruised arm. One slender bare foot, laced with a fretwork of blue veins, poked out from the sheet, pale and delicately arched, a reminder of her former beauty. She neither spoke nor otherwise acknowledged me, and perhaps did not even know I was present. I tried talking at first, drawing my chair close to the bed and summoning up a few memories of the summer house. “Remember Kid? Remember the pink culottes you made for me?” But she gave no sign of having heard me.
On a bookshelf in the guest room, I found a worn paperback copy of Wuthering Heights and not knowing what else to do, I read aloud to her, beginning with: “1801—I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with…”
I read for a while, accompanied by the loud drone of the oxygen tank, but it was clear she wasn’t listening. I thumbed through the book and found passages marked and starred in pencil. Those she must have liked especially: “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself that I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same…”
Why was that important to her? Could she possibly have meant my father, with his swelling paunch and greasy hair? Could she have meant me, that summer we were so close?
I found a few more passages and read in a slow and careful voice. At a certain point, I cannot say how—there was no death rattle, no sudden stoppage of her breathing—she was gone. I grasped her thin wrist, hoping for a pulse. I pressed my head against her chest, and felt perfect stillness, her skin cool against my ear. I closed her eyes, removed the cannula from her nose, and kissed her forehead. “Good-bye, pretty girl.”
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​​By Ann Landi
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In her many decades on the planet, Ann Landi has pursued several callings, as a caterer, a magazine editor, a corporate wife, an art journalist with ARTnews and The Wall Street Journal, and most recently as director of an ambitious contemporary gallery in Taos, NM. But one way or another she has always been a writer, whether investigating the attribution of an early Leonardo sculpture for Smithsonian or publishing comic essays in GQ and Travel and Leisure. Of late she has been writing short fiction for the first time. She has found that the first-person narration is her most comfortable and compelling voice. As another writer remarked, “It is not out of egotism that I say ‘I,’ it is simply the quickest way to tell the story.”
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