Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo? Read online

  Every spring for the past twenty years, my father has headed for Myrtle Beach with a genial herd of twenty fellow JC Penney managers. Now retirees, they bunk four per condo, and for a solid week their routine stays comfortingly unvaried. The festivities commence at sunrise with a long stretch of golf, then a brief break for lunch, followed by more golf, capped by a rejuvenating nap. In the late afternoon they gather in their respective condos for men’s versions of appetizers: mixed nuts and snack mix. Over the years, each group developed a signature predinner snack, and my father’s condo, thanks to his tireless campaigning, wowed the competition with gin and tonics and microwave popcorn. Their appetites whetted, the whole aftershave-scented, Dockers-and-Greg-Norman-shirted gang goes to dinner, where company gossip and shop talk about JC Penney is energetically exchanged. After dessert and decaf, they rise from their chairs, announce to one another that “it doesn’t get any better than this,” and head off to bed, some of them donning earplugs to block the noisy snoring of their condo mates. Then they get up to do it all again.

  This past spring my father arranged a double dose of fun for himself when a smaller group of different JC Penney retirees—coed this time—descended on Charleston the week before his golf jamboree. For him, the only thing more blissful than a week of talking about JC Penney is two weeks of talking about JC Penney. My mother accompanied him to Charleston, less for the Penney’s conclave and more for the shrimp and grits. In need of a getaway, I arranged to meet them both in Savannah, at which point my father would journey to Myrtle Beach, while my mother and I would spend our first long weekend together alone.

  When my husband, Tom, and I traveled, he adamantly refused to do historic-house tours, which he called deadening experiences (even as he fed his own interest in relics of the Cold War, dragging me through abandoned missile silos and the former headquarters of the East German secret police). During the few times I was able to bring Tom along, his face had the same sour expression that my childhood Siamese cat wore when I dressed it up in doll’s clothes. “What am I going to learn about a historical figure by looking at his chamber pot in some dismal roped-off area?” he would grumble. Well, my mother and I loved looking at chamber pots. I remembered with fondness a trip to the Dickens home in London, where I gazed, transfixed, at the great man’s commode.

  I booked a flight to Savannah and began planning. I was a little nervous, because I wanted my mother to have the time of her life. Until the morning I left, I was still planning furiously.

  I knew my parents would be parked at the arrivals area because they had confirmed it with me four times. Parents love to reconfirm a reconfirmation.

  “Hey, kid!” said my father from the front seat of their car as I hopped into the back, which was instantly familiar: the pile of books on tape, the matching towels to protect their clothing when they ate in the car, the jumbo pack of bottled water and energy bars, the spare rolls of quarters and breath mints.

  “Hah, honey,” said my mother. Her Southern accent had returned in full force. It happened every time my Alabama-born mom crossed the Mason-Dixon line: Within minutes she was once again a Daughter of the Southland. Her drawl deepened, her pace slowed, her smile widened as she drank in the humid, magnolia-scented air and transformed from quick-moving Northerner to General P. G. T. Beauregard.

  My father turned around, concerned. “Have you got the directions to the hotel?”

  “Yes.” I produced a printout from a folder marked “Savannah.” Truly, I was my father’s daughter. We both loved making folders and filing them in neat rows inside pristine file cabinets with color-coordinated labels.

  “Well, good!” he said, passing it to my mother. “Hey, kid, did you get that funny email I sent you yesterday? The one from Vern Leister?”

  I received many, many, many, many forwarded emails from Vern, one of my father’s Penney’s cronies, but I knew precisely the one he was talking about, because it was my father’s favorite sort of email. Vern’s header was Sure brought back a lot of memories, followed by forty-two pictures of items from days gone by: S&H Green Stamps, a series of roadside signs for Burma Shave, Lincoln Logs, a pile of penny candy … And no postwar nostalgia collection would be complete without a black-and-white photo of Marlin Perkins, host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

  “I thought you’d be interested,” he said. “Your generation didn’t experience some of this great stuff Did you see the picture of Old Yeller? It was one of those feel-good movies of the time.”

  Feel-good? I reminded him that the harrowing scenes of a snarling, rabid Old Yeller being shot dead by his tearful young owner made me feel distinctly bad when I saw it as a kid, but his gauzy memory only retained the earlier scenes of a frisky Old Yeller frolicking through the fields, his eyes clear, his muzzle free of rabies foam.

  “Every Saturday afternoon we’d go to the movies,” continued my father mistily. “It was something all the kids did in those days. You’d pay ten cents for a movie and five for popcorn. Man, I looked forward to those movies all week. They were gentler times.” He shook his head and smiled. The man actually enjoyed all of Vern’s missives: World’s Scariest Bridges (“AND YOU THOUGHT THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE WAS FRIGHTENING!!!” Vern had typed); Something to Make You Smile (a mother pig nursing five puppies, a giant Saint Bernard and a kitten snoozing peacefully together); or the ever-popular This will blow your mind (a card trick that magically picked the very card you were thinking of). Inevitably my father asked me about them later, which is why I could never delete his email forwards, dutifully reading each one and writing back a comment like “How about that?”

  “Folks, I have to tell you that sometimes I don’t know which one of you is sending me an email,” I said. “You two are growing together like an old tree.”

  “Hm,” said my mother. “I know: I’ll sign each email with an X. No, a double X. That’ll be my trademark.”

  “And I’ll sign it with two O’s,” decided my father.

  My mother frowned. “No, Jay. Don’t sign it with anything. Just leave it blank. I’ll do double X and that’s how the girls will know the difference between us.”

  “But why can’t I have a signature too? I want double O’s.”

  “It’s too confusing! Why do you need double O’s? I don’t know why you’re so adamant about this, I—”

  Their argument could easily have stretched to ten minutes if I didn’t do something. Lord have mercy, it was going to be a long weekend. “Excuse me,” I broke in, “but is anyone paying attention to where we’re going?”

  My mother rustled the direction sheet and looked up sharply. “Jay, we’re about to miss the turn.” Thirty minutes and four squabbles later, my parents had piloted us to the Gastonian hotel, a lavish Regency mansion where I had spent my honeymoon. I had booked one of the only two rooms with twin beds. My mom and I had rarely done anything like this together, so I wanted it to be perfect.

  My father lugged my mother’s gargantuan suitcase up the stairs and dragged it to the front desk, where a preoccupied young woman sat.

  “Well, hello there!” my father cried.

  “Hello, sir,” she said, putting down some paperwork. “I’m sorry, I was just finishing up some forms for my mother. She is applying for U.S. citizenship.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice?” said my dad. “Where is she from?”

  “Haiti.”

  “Oh.” My father’s smile vanished. “There’s so much turmoil over there, I hope she gets out okay.”

  I fidgeted as my parents quizzed her about her family. My folks chatted, at length, with everyone: waiters, people in elevators, young mothers with strollers. Maybe the clerk has stuff to do, I fretted. There could be a time limit for those forms to be submitted, and the minutes are ticking away, and then her mother will have to stay in Haiti forever. Stop talking!

  But the clerk seemed perfectly happy to answer my folks’ questions and volley back their jokes. I willed myself to relax. Not everyone was in a perpetual hurry.


  We checked in, stowed our luggage, and got right back into the car for the first stop on my airtight itinerary, Bonaventure Cemetery. Oh, how we Dunns love graveyards. We started wandering among the moss-covered tombstones and grand old trees draped with soft Spanish moss. Aside from one German couple, we were the only people in the cemetery, which was often the case.

  “Ooh, look at this one.” My mother stood in front of a moldering tombstone chiseled with the words LOST AT SEA. Nearby was another grave with a disconsolate white-marble angel clinging to the side. That was my kind of tombstone. I wanted a weeping statue, overcome with grief at my passing, for all eternity.

  I gradually drifted to a far corner of the cemetery, lost in romantic fantasies as I sat on a carved stone bench while the wind gently stirred the live oaks around me. What if you could pry open some of the coffins? Would you find bits of silk from burial dresses, heavy old rings, strands of hair from all of the Elizas and Josiahs? Would their skeletal hands be clutching a musty keepsake—a small Bible, a daguerreotype of a loved one? What if you opened the lid and the person’s face was magically intact, fresh as life, before the air caused it to disintegrate? Within minutes, it would be gone, except in your dreams.

  My idyll was broken as a car slowly pulled up behind me. It was my father, who tired of all activities after exactly one hour. No matter where we were—a museum, a shopping center—once that hour passed, he would announce that he’d wait for us outside and go park himself on a bench. You could never continue shopping or gazing at art without thinking of him grimly waiting like a tied-up spaniel.

  He rolled down the car window. Zzzt. “The place closes down in twenty minutes,” he said with a concerned frown. “We’d better get ready to go.” The exit was six yards away. I could see it from where I stood. And what did he mean, “get ready”? Pack provisions? Saddle up?

  “I’m not done yet,” I said over my shoulder as I made my way toward a particularly haunting statue of a lamb, or was it a dog? Slowly the car glided behind me. I tried shooing him away like a chicken, but it was no use. He remained nearby with the engine idling until I gave up with a sigh and got into the car.

  We drove back to the hotel to freshen up for dinner and then took a walk to Chippewa Square. I asked them on the way if we could make a quick stop at the drugstore. For starters, I’d forgotten my sunblock, which was a disaster, as I have very thin skin, like a newt. “And to be frank, I don’t feel myself today,” I told them.

  My mother stopped on the sidewalk. “What’s the problem?” she demanded. She took my chin into her hand and squinted at me, aiming my head at different angles.

  “Wrong end,” I said.

  My father put down the map he was studying. “You mean you’re not going to the bathroom?” he announced loudly as a nearby tour group peered at me with concern.

  “This is just the second day,” I said in a low voice, hoping he’d follow suit.

  Obstructed bowels happened to be a subject that worked my father into a frenzy of fearmongering. “You get impacted!” he thundered. “You want fecal impaction? Days go by, you let that fester long enough in your bowels, and it’ll turn into a rock. You think you can pass a rock? Well, you’d better call the Guinness Book of World Records, because you’d be the first person to do it.”

  “I could be wrong, but I don’t think fecal rock passing is an official category for them.”

  “You think this is funny? Next thing you know, you’re off to the hospital to get it surgically removed. Is that what you want? You think giving birth hurts? That’s a walk in the park compared to getting your impacted feces taken out.”

  My mother narrowed her eyes at him. “Jay, how the hell would you know? Men always like to downplay the pain of childbirth. I had three of your children, and let me tell you, each time I was paralyzed from the neck down, and still I screamed for more drugs. Hell, if someone had put a knife in my hand, I would have performed my own C-section.”

  He ignored her. “You better thank your lucky stars you don’t get colon cancer!” he boomed at me. “Gotta keep it moving, or all that toxic waste sits around in your intestine, eats away the walls of your colon, and pretty soon you’re pooping in a bag! You want that? Because I got a news flash for you, they don’t make designer colostomy bags.” My father dearly loved to deliver “news flashes.”

  My mother put a hand on his arm. “Let’s find a drugstore. I think there’s one on Bull Street. Jay, you wait here.” She marched me to the pharmacy, heading straight to the Aisle of Shame, which offered relief for every ailment that itches, burns, or oozes out of the lower half of your body. “Here we go,” she said, picking up a plastic container. “Stool softener,” she read loudly. “Huh. You might be past that point, if you’ve got a fecal rock.” As embarrassing as it was, I couldn’t help but get a little sentimental. Who but your mom cares about your bowels?

  “Could you keep it down?” I said. “And just because Dad says I have a fecal rock in my lower intestine doesn’t mean I actually have one, or that this condition even exists in the first place. Dad’s not a doctor, remember? He’s a former JC Penney manager.” My father gleaned most of his medical news from reports on the CBS Sunday Morning show. Mix in a little thirdhand information from golf buddies and a soupçon of Internet rumor, and suddenly the walls of your colon are being “eaten away.”

  My mother held up another jar. “Castor oil,” she said. “Mama used to give me a spoonful of that stuff every morning. Lord, did that taste awful. It does keep you regular, though.”

  “Why don’t you announce it on the loudspeaker?”

  She picked up another box. “Ooh! Enemas! How about one of these? They work right quick.”

  “Mom? You don’t need to read each label aloud.”

  She was obviously enjoying my squirming. “Look at this! Who knew they still made milk of magnesia?”

  I grabbed a box of Ex-Lax. “Let’s go. Will you buy it? I’ll wait by the door.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Who are you going to run into in Savannah?” But she did it, as I waited outside with my father on a bench.

  After dinner, my dad dropped us at the Gastonian and continued on to a roadside motel so he could leave early for Myrtle Beach. We raced up to our room to inspect it, stopping first in the lobby. “Oooh, free wine!” my mother cried. She poured it so enthusiastically that it slopped over the top of her glass.

  In the room she ran over to the bed. “Look, they put a praline on our pillow!” my mother said delightedly. “Maybe they’ll give us more stuff tomorrow.” She opened a desk drawer. “I’ll take this pen and put it in my purse. Then maybe they’ll replace it.” Inwardly I beamed like a lighthouse that she approved of the place. She has hated an entire guidebook’s worth of B and Bs. “Charming and quaint,” to her, meant thin walls, saggy beds, and tepid coffee.

  She briskly unloaded the contents of three large plastic bags, covering the entire bathroom counter with Soft & Dri antiperspirant in Kissed Peach, makeup-remover towelettes, and three generous containers of prescription pills.

  I picked up one bottle. “Why so many pills?”

  “There are only three.”

  “No, there are four.”

  She looked at the fourth bottle. “Sleepin’ pills don’t count.” Au contraire, lady, I thought. Sleepin pills most definitely count, especially when you wash them down with a few glasses of Pinot Noir and start speaking in tongues and tearing strips of wallpaper off the walls, as you are wont to do.

  Before bed, she set up her travel-sized white-noise machine. Every member of our family, including my two-year-old nephew, possesses a noise machine of his very own. I was the last holdout. White noise always makes me jumpy. I can never fall asleep on an airplane because of the ambient noise and am always the lone passenger on an overnight flight who remains awake, glumly reading Us magazine under a tiny pool of light while everyone else snoozes around me, heads thrown back obliviously, mouths gaping. But my husband was determined to g
et one, insisting that the drunken revelers in our Brooklyn neighborhood made too many whooping noises on the weekends as they spilled out of bars.

  “If there’s silence, I’ll just sit and imagine that I’m going to hear a noise, and it will bother me,” he said, using some sort of vague Klingon logic. “The silence calls more attention to the fact that there will be a noise that will inevitably come.”

  Eventually he wore me down. “The nicest models have actual nature sounds,” he said. “We can use the rainstorm noise. Who doesn’t like to sleep during a nice rainstorm?” And so one morning a pricey contraption called Tranquil Moments arrived in the mail. It offered a jarring array of sounds that were the opposite of tranquil: frogs croaking, a lashing thunderstorm, the lonely cry of disoriented gulls.

  Tom eagerly opened the box and started fiddling with the machine. We explored the panel of soundscapes before settling on Harbor, with a foghorn that seemed fairly soothing until we realized that unlike the real thing, it blatted every three seconds.

  “Look, you can mix two noises, like you’re a deejay,” he said. “See? You can make a mash-up. Let’s try Frogs, and … hm … how about Crackling Fire?” The combination sounded like the poor creatures were croaking helplessly while being roasted alive.

  He hastily changed the dial. “What about Ocean Surf and Thunderstorm?” I pictured a sailor lost at sea, struggling to gain control of his craft before plunging over the side into the icy water, spinning down, down, down, his mouth open in a silent scream.

  Tom sighed and gave the dial another twiddle. “How about Generator?” He turned up a muted humming noise. “We can mix it with Rainforest,” he added, blending in the sound of water gently pattering on leaves. I pictured oil machinery and pipelines chugging ominously away in the formerly pristine Guatemalan rainforest. The only sound missing was that of squawking animals fleeing in terror.