Mothers, Daughters, Diamonds

My memories begin as quilt squares, repeatedly arranged until their pattern reveals why certain ones never fade.

My mother Betty and her sister Winifred (Freddie, a stunning beauty swarmed by boys, except for my father Bill who loved Betty), were raised on a farm with no electricity or plumbing. They were complete opposites. Freddie insisted on the best department store clothes. My mother saw this as frivolous and learned to sew her own. Her beautiful fashions, sewn on the treadle machine I kept, won county fair blue ribbons.

One day my mother called me, upset over a visit with Aunt Freddie. Their disagreement ended with my aunt’s idea of an insult.

“You never had anything, Betty,” Freddie said, raising her left hand to display a wedding ring with a diamond large enough to let a fortuneteller see the future. Deeply hurt, my mother missed the point. Her own ring, with the faintest glint of a diamond, was her prized possession. “I had your dad,” she told me. “He saved for this ring by working at the canned soup factory in Chicago.”

I reminded her of the sisters’ long-standing clothes issue.

“Mom, Aunt Freddie was always superficial but clever. She worked at using people. As a bank teller, she knew who was rich and set her sights on the target—Earl, an Oklahoma oil man. Remember how she bragged about the hundred dollar bills he tied all over the Christmas tree for her?”  

My mother couldn’t understand that being defined as the poor country mouse was her sister’s attempt to control her.

Until we brought Maggie home. She told Freddie she was moving to Illinois to be the resident grandmother.

“What will happen to me?” my aunt whimpered. “You have a daughter who will take care of you. Look what I’m left with.” By then Earl had died, and her son Fred was legendary in our family for being self-absorbed to an alarming level.

My mother said she didn’t know but explained her life’s joy awaited. Sadly, the worst did eventually befall my aunt. No diamond ring rolled to her rescue.  

Near the end of my mother’s life, she sat by the window, watching me play hide-and-seek with two-year old Maggie. We chased and dodged each other around a giant blue spruce. Her precious giggles bubbled through the branches.

My mother’s face glowed with an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile. She’d never looked that way before. She knew; I didn’t.

As mothers and daughters do, we’d always had our own banter, especially when shopping. My mother would pull something hideous from the rack and say, “Karen, can you believe someone thought this was a good idea?” Or she’d beg me to try on something bright, saying, “You look so good in red.” Inside a store one day, from her stroller, before she could talk, Maggie figured out the game. My mother and I turned around to see her smiling, a dress hem pulled from the rack and held between her teeth. My mother and I laughed.

Out of all the Designing Women episodes, I only remember  a scene about a woman having a daughter. One of the leads said, “Then you know who will hold your hand when you die.” At the time, I cried, feeling I’d heard something lasting, but I didn’t understand what.

Yet.

I wasn’t present when my mother died. But two days earlier, she said, “Honey, you look so tired. Go home and be with Maggie.” She knew. I suspected.

Maggie and I have our own banter, like her inability to ride a bike. She was seconds away from doing it but insisted on putting her feet down. Every time. Off-handedly a few years ago, I said I’d know when to die, and she smiled, I think, as I described the scene.

“Well, that settles it,” she said. “I’m never learning.”

But she will.

Mothers and daughters know.

At the end, I’ll be helped, at a pre-arranged time, to sit by a window. Someone will distract me with conversation and suddenly stop, pointing outside. Maggie, her silken black hair streaming in the wind, will peddle by.

My diamond on a bicycle.

Riding me home.