What My Mother Gave Me Read Free Page A

didn’t have these fancy flash cameras.”
    â€œDidn’t that make you mad?” we wanted to know. “Didn’t you want pictures?”
    My mother shrugged. “Well,” she said finally, “there was one picture taken when I was twelve, but it was of my whole family, and I have no idea where it is.”
    She had that look on her face she always had when she was hiding information from us. She wouldn’t meet our eyes. She pursed her lips. We didn’t believe her. We searched our basement, turning up old dolls, worn stuffed animals, and boxes of our own artwork and school papers. At family gatherings, we begged our aunts and uncles, “Who has the photo?” Th ey looked at us as if we’d asked who knew how to do open-heart surgery. No one, it seemed, knew where that photo was or thought it was important.
    â€œTell us what you looked like,” I begged my mother.
    â€œI don’t remember.”
    â€œDid you have curls? Were you fat or thin?”
    She laughed and told me how much fun it was to grow up in a big family with so many sisters and brothers. What a gift it was! How lucky she had been! She told us how her father, an Orthodox rabbi, always had the whole congregation over to dinner every week and how everyone sang and danced, beating a rhythm with real silver spoons on my grandmother’s polished wood table. She mentioned how her sisters saved their most beautiful clothes for her, handing down velvet dresses and watered silk shirts, how they fussed over her because she was the baby. “Family is everything,” my mother insisted. “You girls remember that.” As if to prove it, she still lived within twenty minutes of all of her sisters, and they were always at the house, a trail of exotic names like Freda, Th eodora, Gertrude, and the more American Jean, and if they argued sometimes, I told myself, well, I argued with my own sister, and I still adored her. Arguments didn’t have to mean that there wasn’t love.
    As I got older, I couldn’t stop thinking about the missing photograph and wondering what it would tell me about my mother. I wanted it to reveal that she was the prettiest of all her sisters, that she had the most personality. I wanted the picture to show me who my mother was before my father fell in love with her and then changed his mind and grew cruel. My sister and I hit adolescence, and suddenly my mother, who was always fussing about her own appearance, saw our pain. My sister came home crying because two girls at school had mocked her awkward pixie haircut. Our mother immediately took my sister to John Robert Powers Modeling Agency and they gave her a makeover, telling her she had the wrong clothes and the wrong hairdo, something my mother rectified with a flash of her credit card and two trips to Clip ’N’ Curl in Belmont and to Filene’s in downtown Boston. When a boy in my history class drew a caricature of me on the blackboard, all medusa-haired and skinny, I came home and tried, secretively, to iron my curly hair straight. I broke the iron and singed my hair, and had to admit both matters to my mother. She put her arms around me and then she took me to the Star Market to get a box of Curl Free.
    But my sister and I were still sensitive about our looks. We didn’t want our images caught on film anymore. We put our hands up when our mother approached with the camera. “Now that makes me very sad,” our mother said, but we were teenagers, and we didn’t care about making anyone happy but ourselves.
    We grew up. Our father died the year I graduated college and we hoped our mother would remarry, choosing a kind, funny man this time, getting the second chance at love we thought she deserved, but she seemed uninterested in meeting anyone. We got married ourselves and moved away, and there were oceans of photographs documenting our lives. After I gave birth to my son, and my husband and I began