One
“I’m heading out to the mall to return those shoes I bought,” Sarah said to her mother as she headed for the hall closet for her coat. “Do you want to come with me?”
“No, there’s something I want to watch on television,” came the reply. “Call your grandmother and see if she wants to go with you.”
Sarah sighed. “Mom, I just want to go return the shoes. It’s not a big shopping excursion.”
Her mother looked up from the TV Guide and peered at her over the tops of her reading glasses. “How do you think she’ll feel if she finds out that you went out and didn’t invite her to come along?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah replied briskly. “Let’s be wild and crazy for a change and find out.”
Her mother raised an eyebrow. “Nice attitude. This is your grandmother. Who knows how much longer she’ll be around to go shopping with you.” This was the standard line of guilt issued whenever Sarah tried to leave the house without intergenerational involvement.
Sarah rolled her eyes. “Knowing Grandma, she’ll outlive all of us.”
“Call her. Now.” The look in her mother’s eyes told her that this was not negotiable.
Grumbling, Sarah went to the old black rotary phone and dialed. “When are we going to enter the 19th century and get touch tones?” she yelled to her mother.
“When hell freezes over,” her mother said, adamantly. “Phones today are such crap. These are well made. You can’t beat quality.”
Sarah shook her head in defeat and finished dialing. Her grandmother picked up on the third ring.
“Hello?”
“Hi Grandma. I was heading out to the store to return a pair of shoes and wondered if you needed anything.”
“That’s not what I told you to ask her!” shouted her mother from the next room. “Ask her to go with you!”
“Oh, no, I don’t need anything. But I haven’t gone to the mall in a few days. Is your mother going?”
“No, she’s watching something on TV.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose that if Kathy isn’t going, then I’ll just stay home.”
“Are you sure, Grandma?” asked Sarah. She knew that the process involved having to ask no less than three times to ensure confirmation.
“No, you go ahead. I think I’ll just stay home and watch... wait, are you going to the MacArthur Mall or the Ruby Hill Mall?”
Sarah took a deep breath. “MacArthur.”
“Oh, well, in that case. Yes, I will go with you. I want to stop by and see if those black pants are finally on sale at Winslow’s. I’ve had my eye on them for weeks. They thought I’d buy them at 30% off, but I’m smarter than that. This week, I have a coupon.”
Sarah’s shoulders drooped. “Uh-huh. A coupon. So you need to go today?”
“The coupon expires tomorrow. You can’t just let a coupon for an additional 15% expire. That would be wasteful.”
“Right. Ok, I’ll pick you up in five minutes.”
“I’ll be waiting. Bye now.”
She pretended to beat herself in the head with the receiver before replacing it in the cradle. She knew what was coming next. She walked into the living room to gather her purse, car keys and shopping bag with her shoes.
“Is she going with you?” asked her mother.
“Yes.”
She closed the TV Guide and sat the recliner upright. “Well, in that case, I guess I should go, too.”
“Why not?” asked Sarah rhetorically. “Make it a party.”
It had been this way all of her life. Nothing at all could be done without the involvement and consent of her grandmother. And god forbid that you wanted to do something—anything—alone. This was not how the system worked.
Sarah was the only child of an only child of an only child. This meant that four generations of meddling and expectation funneled down through the ages and rested squarely on Sarah’s shoulders. Nothing could be done without the consent of the elders, like some sort of strange middle class suburban tribe. When she was a little girl, she could clearly remember her mother and grandmother consulting with her great-grandmother about ridiculous minutiae. A memorable conversation involved her mother being extremely pleased with her choice of an Easter dress for 4-year-old Sarah. Her grandmother smiled and nodded in quiet approval until her great grandmother spoke.
“Where,” she began, leaving dramatic emphasis in her pause. “Where is her Easter bonnet?”
“I… I didn’t think she needed one,” said her mother, now uncertain about the whole outfit.
Her grandmother immediately sided with her great grandmother. “Didn’t need one? Of course she needs one, Kathy. What would people think?”
Sarah, sensing the tension that always happened when her mother was criticized, began to cry. “I don’t want a bonnet,” she whimpered, not entirely sure what a bonnet was, but knowing enough to want to take her mother’s side.”
“Not now, Sarie-bearie,” her mother said, shushing her.
Her great grandmother leaned forward on her cane, hunched with age and smelling of Jean Nate powder and eau de toilette. Her face was etched with a permanent scowl. “No crying, little miss. Your face is going to freeze like that.” This admonition only made Sarah cry harder, because she believed that this is what had happened to her great grandmother as a child. Maybe no one had warned her.
“Kathy, control her. Dottie, I think it’s a sign of a poor upbringing that Kathy thinks that bonnets are unnecessary on Easter Sunday. Really. What an absolute disgrace.” Great grandmother poked Kathy with her cane and walked towards the kitchen. “And don’t think for a moment that people won’t notice if she shows up for church without a bonnet.”
Sarah’s next memory was of the following Sunday, being the only girl in Sunday school wearing a hat. The other kids made fun of her, and her humiliation flushed her cheeks red. Her mother saw her face and checked for fever. “Sarah, honey. What’s wrong?”
“I hate my hat,” Sarah said, pouting.
“No no, don’t say that,” said Kathy. “Mrs. Berger said that your hat was beautiful!”
“But I hate it. The kids make fun of me.”
Kathy grabbed Sarah by the wrist and pulled her to the side of the hallway, speaking sharply. “Listen to me: I’ve heard just about enough about this hat from all directions. You’ll wear it and like it. That’s final. Now perk up, little girl.” She pinched her leg in what was supposed to be an affectionate manner, but one that always made Sarah indescribably angry. She didn’t want to perk up. She wanted to throw the hat into oncoming traffic. But she knew that she would never hear the end of it, so she sat quietly in the pew and tried not to fidget. The rest of her life had been a repeat of the bonnet incident. Everything had been about appearances and what the neighbors must have thought.
Sarah snapped out of her memory as soon as her grandmother climbed into the backseat of the car. As they pulled down the block, her grandmother started. “Will you look at Mabel’s yard? When was the last time that woman pulled a weed?”
“At least it looks better than Mr. Stevens’ sidewalk,” Kathy said. “Those tree roots have made it completely uneven.”
“It’s a hazard,” agreed Dottie. “Why, I don’t see why the city hasn’t forced him to repair it.”
“Well, I hear that his daughter is involved with the city manager.”
“His married daughter? Oh, I’d expect as much from a Stevens girl,” said Dottie. “You know, their mother wasn’t much of a parent. Why, I even heard that she liked to drink wine.”
“Well wouldn’t that just explain all?” asked Kathy.
Sarah did her best to tune out the conversation. She never cared about sidewalks or weeds or who was seeing whom or who dared to take a drink, and had become even less interested since she had gone away to college. This was why it was particularly difficult to be home for the summer, living with inane rules designed to create a façade of perfection, made more irritating by the fact that no one was actually looking.
Sarah had been working at a paid internship all summer, making surprisingly good money at a local office of a major pharmaceutical company. She had hopes of spending time with friends after work, but her mother’s house rules clearly stated that she had to be home each night by 5:30 to eat dinner with her parents. “After all,” Kathy said, “your Grandma might drop by, and what would I tell her if you weren’t home?”
“You could tell her that I have a life,” Sarah ventured. Her mother was not amused.
“Sarah, there are certain things that aren’t acceptable. Number one is not having dinner as a family. As long as you live in our house, you will obey this rule. And number two is that it’s not acceptable to go out and socialize on a weeknight. My god, you might come home after other people have gone to bed. Do you know what a scandal it would be if Mrs. Davis heard the garage door open after her bedtime? The whole neighborhood would know that you were out whoring around.”
“Oh for god’s sake, Mom. Having dinner at Chili’s with some coworkers—female coworkers at that—is not whoring around. You act as though we’re Amish. We can live large and do crazy things like use electricity and wear clothes with zippers.”
“Don’t be fresh, young lady.”
“Come on! It’s not unreasonable to want to hang out with friends!” Sarah couldn’t believe that at 21, she was having this argument.
“You heard me,” her mother said, putting her reading glasses back on to finish the paper. “This conversation is over.”
Just recalling the conversation was enough to make Sarah’s blood boil. Who cared what the meddling old woman next door thought about her comings and goings? Why were they always so obsessed with other people’s opinions?
“Sarah!” her mother shouted. “Where on earth do you think you’re going?”
“Uhhh… the mall?”
“You were supposed to turn back there,” Dottie noted from the back seat.
“I don’t take the main entrance. I like to park around back.”
There was a moment of silence before her mother spoke. “You park in the back of the mall?” She paused to wait for Sarah’s response. “You do know who parks back there, don’t you?” Sarah bit her tongue to refrain from replying, “Customers.” She knew that being a wiseass wasn’t going to help.
“Rapists,” her grandmother said matter-of-factly.
“What?!” Sarah exclaimed with exasperation.
Her mother nodded. “While you were away at school, a high school girl parked back there and was beaten and raped.”
“I read about that in the paper,” Sarah said. “She wasn’t parked near the building. She was parked all the way out by the wooded area, and if I remember correctly, it was after midnight, the mall was closed, she was with other people and they had been smoking pot.”
“Young people today have no moral fiber,” Dottie lamented.
Sarah tried to ignore her. “So what does this have to do with parking five spots from the door on a sunny Saturday afternoon?”
Her mother and grandmother exchanged looks. “I don’t think this is normal,” Dottie said. “You need to do something before this gets out of hand.”
“Sarah,” her mother asked cautiously. “Are you taking drugs?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Sarah shouted.
“Don’t use that kind of language. People will think you’re not a lady.” Dottie was shaking her head in disgust.
“You seem to know a lot about this ‘smoking pot’ thing. This is clearly erratic and irrational risk-taking behavior,” Kathy said, watching Dottie out of the corner of her eye, looking for approval.
“What is?” asked Sarah.
“Parking in dangerous places,” her mother said. “Trying to justify being risky.”
Sarah stopped at the red light and put her head down on the steering wheel. She was convinced that a summer at home with her family was going to lead to an aneurysm, and she swore that she could feel the headache forming. Maybe if she was really lucky, she could hemorrhage in the next 30 seconds and they could avoid the parking topic altogether. But as the light turned green, she realized that she would live long enough to go shopping.
With both her mother and grandmother barking at her, she pulled into the parking lot, drove to the side of the mall—surely no one had issue with the side entrance—and parked. The car fell silent.
“I would never park over here,” her grandmother began. “There aren’t enough lights.”
“Good thing it’s mid-day and sunny,” Sarah said as she hastily exited the car, grabbed her shopping bag from the trunk and walked towards the entrance. She could hear them talking behind her, but she put enough distance between them that it was just a faraway drone of conversation.
“No, there’s something I want to watch on television,” came the reply. “Call your grandmother and see if she wants to go with you.”
Sarah sighed. “Mom, I just want to go return the shoes. It’s not a big shopping excursion.”
Her mother looked up from the TV Guide and peered at her over the tops of her reading glasses. “How do you think she’ll feel if she finds out that you went out and didn’t invite her to come along?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah replied briskly. “Let’s be wild and crazy for a change and find out.”
Her mother raised an eyebrow. “Nice attitude. This is your grandmother. Who knows how much longer she’ll be around to go shopping with you.” This was the standard line of guilt issued whenever Sarah tried to leave the house without intergenerational involvement.
Sarah rolled her eyes. “Knowing Grandma, she’ll outlive all of us.”
“Call her. Now.” The look in her mother’s eyes told her that this was not negotiable.
Grumbling, Sarah went to the old black rotary phone and dialed. “When are we going to enter the 19th century and get touch tones?” she yelled to her mother.
“When hell freezes over,” her mother said, adamantly. “Phones today are such crap. These are well made. You can’t beat quality.”
Sarah shook her head in defeat and finished dialing. Her grandmother picked up on the third ring.
“Hello?”
“Hi Grandma. I was heading out to the store to return a pair of shoes and wondered if you needed anything.”
“That’s not what I told you to ask her!” shouted her mother from the next room. “Ask her to go with you!”
“Oh, no, I don’t need anything. But I haven’t gone to the mall in a few days. Is your mother going?”
“No, she’s watching something on TV.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose that if Kathy isn’t going, then I’ll just stay home.”
“Are you sure, Grandma?” asked Sarah. She knew that the process involved having to ask no less than three times to ensure confirmation.
“No, you go ahead. I think I’ll just stay home and watch... wait, are you going to the MacArthur Mall or the Ruby Hill Mall?”
Sarah took a deep breath. “MacArthur.”
“Oh, well, in that case. Yes, I will go with you. I want to stop by and see if those black pants are finally on sale at Winslow’s. I’ve had my eye on them for weeks. They thought I’d buy them at 30% off, but I’m smarter than that. This week, I have a coupon.”
Sarah’s shoulders drooped. “Uh-huh. A coupon. So you need to go today?”
“The coupon expires tomorrow. You can’t just let a coupon for an additional 15% expire. That would be wasteful.”
“Right. Ok, I’ll pick you up in five minutes.”
“I’ll be waiting. Bye now.”
She pretended to beat herself in the head with the receiver before replacing it in the cradle. She knew what was coming next. She walked into the living room to gather her purse, car keys and shopping bag with her shoes.
“Is she going with you?” asked her mother.
“Yes.”
She closed the TV Guide and sat the recliner upright. “Well, in that case, I guess I should go, too.”
“Why not?” asked Sarah rhetorically. “Make it a party.”
It had been this way all of her life. Nothing at all could be done without the involvement and consent of her grandmother. And god forbid that you wanted to do something—anything—alone. This was not how the system worked.
Sarah was the only child of an only child of an only child. This meant that four generations of meddling and expectation funneled down through the ages and rested squarely on Sarah’s shoulders. Nothing could be done without the consent of the elders, like some sort of strange middle class suburban tribe. When she was a little girl, she could clearly remember her mother and grandmother consulting with her great-grandmother about ridiculous minutiae. A memorable conversation involved her mother being extremely pleased with her choice of an Easter dress for 4-year-old Sarah. Her grandmother smiled and nodded in quiet approval until her great grandmother spoke.
“Where,” she began, leaving dramatic emphasis in her pause. “Where is her Easter bonnet?”
“I… I didn’t think she needed one,” said her mother, now uncertain about the whole outfit.
Her grandmother immediately sided with her great grandmother. “Didn’t need one? Of course she needs one, Kathy. What would people think?”
Sarah, sensing the tension that always happened when her mother was criticized, began to cry. “I don’t want a bonnet,” she whimpered, not entirely sure what a bonnet was, but knowing enough to want to take her mother’s side.”
“Not now, Sarie-bearie,” her mother said, shushing her.
Her great grandmother leaned forward on her cane, hunched with age and smelling of Jean Nate powder and eau de toilette. Her face was etched with a permanent scowl. “No crying, little miss. Your face is going to freeze like that.” This admonition only made Sarah cry harder, because she believed that this is what had happened to her great grandmother as a child. Maybe no one had warned her.
“Kathy, control her. Dottie, I think it’s a sign of a poor upbringing that Kathy thinks that bonnets are unnecessary on Easter Sunday. Really. What an absolute disgrace.” Great grandmother poked Kathy with her cane and walked towards the kitchen. “And don’t think for a moment that people won’t notice if she shows up for church without a bonnet.”
Sarah’s next memory was of the following Sunday, being the only girl in Sunday school wearing a hat. The other kids made fun of her, and her humiliation flushed her cheeks red. Her mother saw her face and checked for fever. “Sarah, honey. What’s wrong?”
“I hate my hat,” Sarah said, pouting.
“No no, don’t say that,” said Kathy. “Mrs. Berger said that your hat was beautiful!”
“But I hate it. The kids make fun of me.”
Kathy grabbed Sarah by the wrist and pulled her to the side of the hallway, speaking sharply. “Listen to me: I’ve heard just about enough about this hat from all directions. You’ll wear it and like it. That’s final. Now perk up, little girl.” She pinched her leg in what was supposed to be an affectionate manner, but one that always made Sarah indescribably angry. She didn’t want to perk up. She wanted to throw the hat into oncoming traffic. But she knew that she would never hear the end of it, so she sat quietly in the pew and tried not to fidget. The rest of her life had been a repeat of the bonnet incident. Everything had been about appearances and what the neighbors must have thought.
Sarah snapped out of her memory as soon as her grandmother climbed into the backseat of the car. As they pulled down the block, her grandmother started. “Will you look at Mabel’s yard? When was the last time that woman pulled a weed?”
“At least it looks better than Mr. Stevens’ sidewalk,” Kathy said. “Those tree roots have made it completely uneven.”
“It’s a hazard,” agreed Dottie. “Why, I don’t see why the city hasn’t forced him to repair it.”
“Well, I hear that his daughter is involved with the city manager.”
“His married daughter? Oh, I’d expect as much from a Stevens girl,” said Dottie. “You know, their mother wasn’t much of a parent. Why, I even heard that she liked to drink wine.”
“Well wouldn’t that just explain all?” asked Kathy.
Sarah did her best to tune out the conversation. She never cared about sidewalks or weeds or who was seeing whom or who dared to take a drink, and had become even less interested since she had gone away to college. This was why it was particularly difficult to be home for the summer, living with inane rules designed to create a façade of perfection, made more irritating by the fact that no one was actually looking.
Sarah had been working at a paid internship all summer, making surprisingly good money at a local office of a major pharmaceutical company. She had hopes of spending time with friends after work, but her mother’s house rules clearly stated that she had to be home each night by 5:30 to eat dinner with her parents. “After all,” Kathy said, “your Grandma might drop by, and what would I tell her if you weren’t home?”
“You could tell her that I have a life,” Sarah ventured. Her mother was not amused.
“Sarah, there are certain things that aren’t acceptable. Number one is not having dinner as a family. As long as you live in our house, you will obey this rule. And number two is that it’s not acceptable to go out and socialize on a weeknight. My god, you might come home after other people have gone to bed. Do you know what a scandal it would be if Mrs. Davis heard the garage door open after her bedtime? The whole neighborhood would know that you were out whoring around.”
“Oh for god’s sake, Mom. Having dinner at Chili’s with some coworkers—female coworkers at that—is not whoring around. You act as though we’re Amish. We can live large and do crazy things like use electricity and wear clothes with zippers.”
“Don’t be fresh, young lady.”
“Come on! It’s not unreasonable to want to hang out with friends!” Sarah couldn’t believe that at 21, she was having this argument.
“You heard me,” her mother said, putting her reading glasses back on to finish the paper. “This conversation is over.”
Just recalling the conversation was enough to make Sarah’s blood boil. Who cared what the meddling old woman next door thought about her comings and goings? Why were they always so obsessed with other people’s opinions?
“Sarah!” her mother shouted. “Where on earth do you think you’re going?”
“Uhhh… the mall?”
“You were supposed to turn back there,” Dottie noted from the back seat.
“I don’t take the main entrance. I like to park around back.”
There was a moment of silence before her mother spoke. “You park in the back of the mall?” She paused to wait for Sarah’s response. “You do know who parks back there, don’t you?” Sarah bit her tongue to refrain from replying, “Customers.” She knew that being a wiseass wasn’t going to help.
“Rapists,” her grandmother said matter-of-factly.
“What?!” Sarah exclaimed with exasperation.
Her mother nodded. “While you were away at school, a high school girl parked back there and was beaten and raped.”
“I read about that in the paper,” Sarah said. “She wasn’t parked near the building. She was parked all the way out by the wooded area, and if I remember correctly, it was after midnight, the mall was closed, she was with other people and they had been smoking pot.”
“Young people today have no moral fiber,” Dottie lamented.
Sarah tried to ignore her. “So what does this have to do with parking five spots from the door on a sunny Saturday afternoon?”
Her mother and grandmother exchanged looks. “I don’t think this is normal,” Dottie said. “You need to do something before this gets out of hand.”
“Sarah,” her mother asked cautiously. “Are you taking drugs?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Sarah shouted.
“Don’t use that kind of language. People will think you’re not a lady.” Dottie was shaking her head in disgust.
“You seem to know a lot about this ‘smoking pot’ thing. This is clearly erratic and irrational risk-taking behavior,” Kathy said, watching Dottie out of the corner of her eye, looking for approval.
“What is?” asked Sarah.
“Parking in dangerous places,” her mother said. “Trying to justify being risky.”
Sarah stopped at the red light and put her head down on the steering wheel. She was convinced that a summer at home with her family was going to lead to an aneurysm, and she swore that she could feel the headache forming. Maybe if she was really lucky, she could hemorrhage in the next 30 seconds and they could avoid the parking topic altogether. But as the light turned green, she realized that she would live long enough to go shopping.
With both her mother and grandmother barking at her, she pulled into the parking lot, drove to the side of the mall—surely no one had issue with the side entrance—and parked. The car fell silent.
“I would never park over here,” her grandmother began. “There aren’t enough lights.”
“Good thing it’s mid-day and sunny,” Sarah said as she hastily exited the car, grabbed her shopping bag from the trunk and walked towards the entrance. She could hear them talking behind her, but she put enough distance between them that it was just a faraway drone of conversation.
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