How Many Days Until Mama?

Mama smelling her older brothers’ lunch boxes when she was a plump little girl is one of my favorite stories. I think about that sometimes to make myself smile, after a tiring day, when I have mostly moved “to do” items to the next day’s list and not finished much of anything. Mama was amazingly productive. She helped all of us with our homework, kept a clean house full of happy baking smells, fed sick neighbors, worked part-time as a nurse, sewed and embroidered, played the piano, always looked pretty and smelled of Channel No. 5, and was never too busy to listen. She probably slept very little. I thought about Mama again last night, when I was trying to fall asleep. But this time she wasn’t sewing my pale-blue prom dress. (It was shiny and sleeveless, and Reggie said I looked like a princess when I wore it.) This time was different.

Mama’s been gone for six years now, but sometimes, when the phone rings, I still expect it to be her. Calling to see if a cloudy, chilly day has made me feel fretful and sad.

My sisters and I often talk about our own favorite “Mama stories.” My baby sister (she’s in her 50s now, so I should probably stop calling her that) loves the stories of Mama growing up in the 1930s and 40s, just outside the small town of White Castle, Louisiana, along the Mississippi River levee. She reminds us how Mama, as a teenager, ran home after school, grabbed a cold sweet potato and some crackers for a snack, and then hurried to the levee to watch for planes flying over. This was during WW2, and Mama always believed in supporting her country. My oldest sister, Marian, who insisted on getting her driver’s license as soon as she turned 15, was always amused that Mama got to drive when she was only 13 years old. Mama had explained in her matter-of-fact voice how it happened, “All the boys (her older brothers) were away fighting the War and your Maw-Maw Gert couldn’t drive. Somebody needed to drive. I just did what I had to do.” That was Mama’s life. She did what needed to be done, and without a lot of talking about it.

I like to think about Mama as a child, sliding down the levee on a sled made of boards nailed together and waxed by her brothers. Or Mama throwing a book at Uncle Lewis after he teased and picked at her until she “just couldn’t stand it anymore.” (Maw-Maw Gert, of course, punished only Mama, not having heard the teasing. Mama was the first one at the train station to pick up Uncle Lewis when he got back from the War, wounded and shell-shocked, as they called it then. She always said he was never the same after the War.) I also like to imagine Mama in high school, running to catch the school bus in such a hurry she forgot to powder her face and had to use flour patted from a huge flour sack in the old store by the bus stop. 

But, almost better than the old stories (when we were children we would beg her, “tell us about the old days, Mama.”), are my memories of how she raised her family, and was always there for us. She taught us to focus on what we could do and not what we didn’t have. “Life is simple. Just always do your best,“ she would say.  Mama could not swim and was afraid of the water, having almost drowned once as a child. So she make all of us learn to swim when we were very young. She encouraged us to do well in school, not by scolding, but by making homework an adventure for us. “See how many of your spelling words you can write in ten minutes, and then see if you can finish even more in the next seven minutes. Then we’ll play dancing pencils for five minutes.”

When I was moving 600 miles away to work on my Ph.D., Mama could tell I was nervous about leaving. She told me, “You know, when I left White Castle to go to nursing school in New Orleans, it might as well have been 600 miles. I couldn’t go home to visit and didn’t have many visitors either. For the first few weeks I was so homesick I thought I was going to die.”

“Did you think about quitting and going home?” I asked. She looked surprised, “No. Why would I do that? There was nothing for me there. My plan was to finish nursing school, and then join the Army. The Army paid for me to go to nursing school. I wanted to take care of all our boys wounded in the War. Besides, I made friends and it got easier. You’ll do fine.”

While I was away at school, Mama sent me a card every week, filled with family news, and a $5 or $10 bill, “to get a special treat for yourself.”

I never told her that I knew about the life she would have had in White Castle. Maw-Maw Gert, who had asked Mama many times to quit nursing school and come home, told me about a young man there who loved Mama. His father owned a drug store, and he wanted to marry Mama and start a family with her, there in White Castle. But Mama must have known that was not the life she was supposed to lead.

Even after Mama married Daddy and moved away, Maw-Maw still complained about her working as a nurse. But Mama was a good daughter. When I was young, we visited Maw-Maw almost every Sunday, eating a meatloaf or fried chicken dinner promptly at noon, and then cleaning dishes in the crowded kitchen before gathering in the “sitting room” for a while. Mama would play Mother Beloved and other of Maw-Maw’s favorite songs on the piano. Most days, Daddy, Paw-Paw, and Uncle Joe watched television, and we girls would sit on the always-clean linoleum floor and play cards or Chinese checkers, or cut out paper dolls from an old Sears catalog. Sometimes Paw-Paw took us outside and helped us catch “devil horses.” My brothers were babies then, and I was always sad they didn’t have the chance to know Maw-Maw and Paw-Paw before they were sickly and feeble.

Daddy always wanted to visit his parents, across the Mississippi River, near Carville, after we left Maw-Maw Gert’s. Sometimes Mama would say we needed to get home, but usually we wound up crossing the river on the ferry boat to my other grandparents’ house, which looked like a scaled-down plantation house. It was a little run down, but still nicer (on the outside) than Maw-Maw’s house in White Castle. The inside of Daddy’s childhood home smelled of cigar smoke, and not meatloaf or chocolate cake. Dust and dog hair were everywhere on the hardwood floors, and there was a mean mutt and my even meaner grandfather who used to let it jump on me (when Mama wasn’t around) to teach me not to be afraid of dogs. It never bit me but I’m still frightened of them. How do you reason with a dog? Mama always made sure we didn’t stay long.

I am something of a workaholic and often eat lunch at my desk at the library. A few weeks ago I was under deadline pressure to finish some statistical reports, and trying to eat and work at the same time. I ate my ham sandwich right from the plastic bag, so no crumbs (my door was closed and no one could see my bad manners!). There is a peculiar, but pleasant, smell that sandwiches have when closed up for a few hours. My sisters and I always call it the “lunch box smell,” from Mama’s stories of exploring her older brothers’ lunch boxes when they got home from school. 

After I ate my ham sandwich, sniffing at the empty bag reminded me of all the lunches Mama had made for her children, all through grade school and high school, and even after. My first two years of college I lived at home. She made me a lunch every day to take with me. I tried to tell her I didn’t need her to do that, but she only said, “You need to eat a good lunch to keep going. If you have it with you, you only have to worry about your studies. Here, take it. I made a ham salad sandwich for you, and I put in some plums and those bakery brownies you like. Have a good day at school.” Then she hugged me. That was Mama. She always wanted, and expected, us to succeed. I'm sure she was the only person who read my entire dissertation on the job satisfaction of reference librarians. She even asked me questions about it.

(Everything from Mama's kitchen was delicious. I don't remember one failed meal, and even her sandwiches were perfect, with everything we liked but nothing we didn't, like crusts. I once asked her what magic ingredient made all her food so special. She had only smiled. I suspect it was love.)

Thinking about Mama last night was different. I was a little girl again, sitting in the bathroom stall at school, but with all my clothes on, worried about how long it would be before Mama came home from the hospital after her back surgery. I escaped to the bathroom often, just to sit there. It was an almost-perfect place to hide away from my classmates, who sometimes teased me because I was shy and cried easily. Especially Andrea, with her new shoes, big face and tight pigtails. She even followed me to the bathroom at times, to look over the top of the stall and say, “Why are you sitting there with your panties on? Your uniform is going to fall in and get wet.” During the Cuban Missile Crisis, we had to bring non-perishable foods and other items from home, in case we had to go to a fallout shelter. Mama packed ours in some of her pretty pillowcases, embroidered with roses and spring flowers. Andrea said, “You’re not supposed to use pillow cases. You’re supposed to use plastic bags.” For once I ignored her, proud of Mama’s pretty sewing. Years later I asked Mama why she used her special embroidered pillowcases for our fallout shelter supplies. She said, “Well, if the worst had happened, and we were separated, I wanted my girls to have something of mine to hold onto."

The Cuban Missile Crisis happened when I was in second grade, but my biggest fear wasn’t the war itself. I knew nothing about war, but I was deathly afraid of being separated from Mama and my baby brothers, of us being in different fallout shelters and unable to see one another, maybe forever. That was so many years ago, but I can still picture in my mind those yellow triangles on the fallout shelter signs. Every time I saw one, or thought about the Cuban Missile Crisis at school (the nuns made us pray about it often), a hot feeling of dread would hit my stomach and pull me in. It was as if I were shrinking, about to disappear, and no one cared. What if I couldn’t find Mama and my little brothers? Then I would cry.

That was how it felt to be apart from Mama—a burning stomach, and me shrinking and feeling insignificant. After her back surgery, Daddy brought us to visit her at the hospital. She could tell I was upset when it was time for us to leave. Mama looked pretty in a rose-printed, cream colored gown, despite the dark circles under her eyes. She hugged me and I noticed her perfume. She whispered, “Just count the days until I’m home. Only a few more days. It’s already Thursday night. By the time you get home from school tomorrow, that will be another day. On Saturday, your Aunt Mattie is going to pick you up and bring you here for a visit. I’ll ask her to let you eat lunch in the hospital cafeteria. Then on Sunday I’ll be home, and Daddy is going to pick up your baby brothers from Nanny Gee. We’ll all be together again. Only a few days and they’ll fly by.” That made me feel better. Not as joyful as I felt on regular Saturday nights when it was time to watch Adventures in Paradise on television, and then pick up Mama from her weekend late shift at the hospital. But better, until Daddy pulled me away from her and out the door.

On some nights, like last night, I can’t sleep because I feel all my years in the pain in my back. Or someone I love is hurting and I can’t help. Or I’m sad about the unkind things I’ve done in my life, and the pain and sorrow in the world flashes through my mind, over and over. I don’t have Mama’s strong faith in the Church, or her belief that everything that happens is part of God’s plan. I’m once again that young girl, sitting in the bathroom stall with her panties still on, or being pulled from a hospital room. A lonely child who misses her Mama and feels like she’s shrinking.  I know if I could see her again, I would feel better. I picture Mama sitting in that rocking chair, reading her prayer book. Her pretty, black wavy hair now shaded with gray. She looks up and smiles, “How are you? Are you hungry? I have some chili in the freezer from last week. And I made cornbread this morning.”

And I wonder, how many days till I see her again?