Sputterpub's Blog

My mother is a wizard at returning merchandise. Like a builder who gets more gratification from demolition than construction, she seems to enjoy returning more than acquiring.

When I was young, I’d often come home from school to find her tentative purchases. She’d pick up several items when I needed one, and as I tried them all on we’d choose the keeper. Then she’d dash back to the store and return the losers. She performed the same home service for my brothers and dad, but she always got more kick and merchandise from the girls’ departments.

It wasn’t fun. She was pushy about the process and her comments could wound. But it was better to endure her return service than to accompany her to the store. Nothing was more embarrassing than shopping for clothing with Mom. She thought she could tell in ten seconds whether the stock was interesting enough to tempt us. If we entered the store she was quick, uninhibited, and judgmental to the point of humiliation.

“Lydia,” she’d instruct loudly with her doubtful face, as she scanned my body for flaws, “you just can’t wear separates that cut you like that. You have to remember to choose one-piece outfits and vertical lines.”

It was worse when she summoned help. I’d be stuck in the overwarm dressing room, and she’d stand with one foot in the cubicle and one foot out, so anyone passing by got a shot of me in undies. She’d clearly loudly insist that we needed a bigger swimsuit bottom for me, to wear with the smaller-size (sighs) bra top.

But that was when I was young and embarrassable. If there’s one thing my brothers and I had to learn from hanging with our mother, it was to get over embarrassment.

Mom still returns. Sometimes the centerpiece of her day is to take something back to Macy’s or Nordstrom. At the least, she’ll threaten to return and rebuy something she’s purchased in the last month, in order to get an adjustment to the current sales price.

What’s troubling me lately is how she’s taken to giving back gifts. Not to the store, but to the giver. Or worse: refusing them, in a sort of preemptive return.

Like when her neighbors came by with Christmas fudge. Fran and Bill are twenty years younger than Mom and act filial. They showed up in matching seasonal sweaters and Santa hats. They chorused “Merry Christmas!” when Mom opened the door, Fran holding the holly-decorated plastic plate in front of her like a trophy.

“Oh honey, thanks,” my mother reported saying. “That’s so sweet. But you know, I don’t eat fudge. I’d hate to see it go to waste. Why don’t you give it to someone else?” I know about this because Mom described the scene to me over the phone. She seemed satisfied, proud even, to suggest a better home for that fudge. I imagine Fran’s dismay at this needless rejection, and I marvel that my mother doesn’t have a clue.

And that was Mom trying to be sensitive. When she gives back my gifts, sometimes she uses words like “stupid” and “nonsense” to argue how senseless it would be for her, well-meaning as she is, to suppress her opinion about keeping the item.

I can’t think of a time I’ve given my mother a gift that she’s kept. I thought I’d finally succeeded last year, when I presented her with a comfortable warm jacket. I’d bought the same style for myself and I knew how perfect it was. For her I selected different colors than mine, neutral tones like she always favored (Mom is the queen of beige). She seemed charmed when she opened the box. Grateful even. It was at least a week before she confessed to me that the jacket didn’t really suit her. She loved it but wouldn’t be wearing it, and she was sure there was someone else I knew who could use it. She brooked no argument. She pushed the garment into my hands and changed the subject.

I found a home for the jacket, around the torso of an old friend. But I noted how much it hurt when she returned it to me.

This year I may have carved an inroad. My younger brother came up with an idea for something we three offspring could give her together. Mom asserts that her hearing is fine, except that she builds up wax her otologist removes every three months. She claims that she only uses the closed captioning on her TV set when she’s watching BBC: to understand those accents. But every time we visit, there the captions are, on sports, news, whatever. And both of my brothers (technophiliacs like Dad was, scrambling to acquire the latest in entertainment equipment) assert that her TV audio is poor. So first one brother and then the other recommended that we get her a new auxiliary speaker, designed to improve TV audio quality. I leaped aboard that plan.

I don’t know what made Mom suspicious, but she raised objections. “You kids don’t have to buy me anything,” was the sweet opening. But then: “That’s stupid.” And “I told your brothers I don’t want that nonsense.” And finally “You’d better not.”

I felt my dander rising. But I got control of myself. I still can’t believe it, but instead of reacting as she pushed that old button, I said, “Oh come on, Mom. That sounds ungracious. And you’re not an ungracious woman.”

She went silent. As in: receptive.

Encouraged, I said, “I don’t know what you think we’re up to, but why are you resisting? Obviously we’re talking about some sort of equipment. Are you concerned that you won’t have space for it? Or that it will be another item to learn to control?”

“That’s it,” she said. “I have enough remotes. You know, Lydia, I’m not a youngster any more. I don’t want to learn another system.”

“I hear you,” I replied. “Remember when the boys bought me that Amazon TV thing? It must have been three years ago. They’ve taught me how to work the device at least once a year. It’s still sitting on my side table. I’ve never used it. I kind of hate it.”

Suddenly we had rapport. By the time we ended our phone conversation, she was using terms of endearment. Believe me, it isn’t often Mom calls me Honey.

My brothers and I are proceeding with the speaker gift. But they’ve agreed to set it up as an automatic accessory that Mom never has to control or tweak. We’re cautiously optimistic.

It was a bit after 4 PM on the third Friday in October. The sky was clear and there was little traffic. In fact, my ex’s Toyota and the Jeep that hit him were the only vehicles in sight. The CHP has invited witnesses to come forward, but so far no one has.

According to the report, Carl made a left turn onto the highway right in front of the Jeep. The woman driver said she tried to avoid the collision, but the front of her car plowed into him.

He was T-boned. His old Toyota isn’t known for side protection. He died on the scene, probably instantaneously, possibly without pain.

I got the news from my former stepson, four days later. Mark apologized for taking so long. That was weird; I haven’t seen Mark for over twenty years and haven’t communicated with his father for at least ten. He said he understood from his current stepmother that his dad and I had been in touch from time to time. That’s not true. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Carl occasionally raised my specter in his third marriage.

I always wondered if I’d hear. I assumed that if Carl died his old law partner might find me. Never did I suspect that it would be Mark.

I was chronologically insignificant in Carl’s life. He was married to his children’s mother for seventeen years, then with me for seven, and now with Hilary for about twenty-five. We had no children together. We parted amicably. There was infrequent communication afterward and my last birthday email to him, about a decade ago, went unanswered.

It was only seven years, but it was an intense seven years.

I was Carl’s midlife crisis. He was forty-one when we became a couple, and he already drove a red roadster. I was the younger woman (thirty-two). We met through work. We had an affair that only lasted about six weeks before he declared we were soul mates and had to marry. I didn’t disagree.

I wonder now, if a man’s forties could be his most significant adult decade. I asked my brother, and after consideration he opined that it isn’t an age as much as it’s the decade when you lose your father. He said that’s when you confront your own mortality, which is what it takes to make that final lunge into manhood. It happens that my brother was in his forties when our dad died. And so was Carl.

But there was more. Carl lost his law mentor, the senior partner in his firm, the man who introduced us, while we were together. He lost his younger sister to adult respiratory distress. He lost his career as his old firm imploded in the era of deregulation. In addition, we terminated an unwanted pregnancy, went through the subsequent vasectomy together, weathered the medical crisis that resulted in my hysterectomy, and parented four children who all needed counseling because of the abrupt dissolution of their parents’ marriages (our deal) and the questionable mental health of the spouses we left (theirs).

Those seven years felt longer than childhood. We lived half a century during the 80s.

And we were as intense as the years. Carl had been placidly married before. He never revealed himself to his wife. She was far prettier than I – slim and blonde and buxom – and she bored him to tears. They married right after college, and they prospered more than they expected. She led him to larger homes, season symphony tickets, high-ticket travel: the customary purchases of increasing wealth. She loved their life together but it seems she didn’t know him, for through those seventeen years he remained the repressed Republican drinker I encountered.

Like I said, I’m not so pretty. But I’m pushy, and I’m obsessed with figuring out life and making mine count. With me Carl opened up emotionally, described the military/sexual history about which his wife never asked, outlined the book he wanted to write, took up laughing.

And we didn’t last. There was too much stress, between challenging kids, dysfunctional offices, hysterical exes. There were too many occasions when I blew up about his drinking and he, ritually pouring hard stuff down the kitchen sink, promised to stop. Our fights grew more passionate as our tenure stretched. Ultimately he accused me of not loving him enough. By then he may have been correct – he was drinking again, crying again every time the booze took effect, otherwise stuffing his emotions. I realize now he had no idea what to do with them.

He left, to determine if we were driving him crazy or if he was doing it on his own. He didn’t return. Then an old college girlfriend looked him up. She’d been an also-ran to his first wife, but finally Hilary prevailed. She moved here to be with him, they took a place in the suburbs and, as far as I can tell, Carl resumed the type of boring but sane life he’d endured before me.

The last time I had lunch with him, it should have been civilized and amicable, but he took a pot shot at me. I was surprised. I knew he’d been angry, but I didn’t realize till then how wide it went. He criticized me for failing to explain the meaning of Chanukah to him. WTF? I mean, say what? I remember how stunned and almost entertained I felt. As if Chanukah meant anything to an adult!

He told me Hilary was Unitarian. She’d taken him to her church and that’s where he heard the Maccabee story. Somehow he found the story, or my failure to tell him the story, significant. As if.

I think that was our last face to face interaction. How the profound had fallen! After that were a few birthday emails, where we found nothing to discuss other than the kids. We really hadn’t been about parenting; of course we petered out.

Now Carl is dead, and his forty-four year old son is seeking pictures. Carl was always the cameraman, so there aren’t many with him in front of the lens. Maybe I have them all. His first wife moved recently, and put things in storage. His third wife has not stepped up with photographs. When we split up, we agreed I’d keep the snapshots. Carl knew he could always visit them.

They’re all snapshots. My father and my first husband were slide photographers. They had backlit viewers and portable projection screens. They debated the merits of carousels versus cartridges. And after Carl left came the age of digital photography: first in camera-shaped machines that stored images on memory sticks and then of course on smartphones. The Carl era, also known as the 1980s, is all on snapshots and mostly in three albums.

As far as I’m concerned, my job is to support and respect Carl’s kids, but not to insert myself or intrude. Asked to find photos, I’ve now spent days poring over the shots in the albums and the shoe box of fuzzy unbound pictures. Scanning them to Mark. I’ve been pushed down memory lane. I’ve been awakening each morning to recollection.

Viewed now, I wonder if I was the love of Carl’s life. It didn’t feel like that at the time, but I was the only one with whom he tried to be himself. His first and last wives were attractive and conventional and comfortable. They used subtext and practiced passive aggression. They never asked him the important questions.

There’s a reason I have his poetry, the pictures of him laughing or mugging for the camera. There’s a reason I have his anger.

I knew him. I’m sure he was still drinking. The liquor that spiced our initial affair and the first couple of years of marital sex became a drag for us in time. We recognized that he had a problem. We made a few rehabilitative attempts. Home attempts, doomed to fail.

It got worse with Hilary. I had lunch with her once, at her request, ostensibly to discuss Carl’s awkwardness with peri-adolescent daughters. But as soon as I said, “and the booze,” Hilary jumped into the conversation with what seemed like eagerness. “Do you think he’s an alcoholic?” she clamored.

“Certainly,” I said. And then she dumped. She revealed how much worse he then was. Hiding bottles between the wall joists in the garage. Blaming Hilary for driving him to drink. She even mentioned a few car scrapes.

I’m sure Carl was still drinking because, if he’d found a way to stop, he would have let me know. He would have sought some resolution. Or closure. Something.

And I’m pretty sure Carl never got comfortable with Hilary’s daughters or his own. Poor Carl. He had a younger sister but he was sent away to military boarding high school, out of state, when Amy was just 12. His son Mark was an only child for ten years. Then Robin was born, four months after my son, and we raised those babies like they were twins till we split up when they were seven. I wanted the kids to keep seeing each other, but Carl insisted on a clean break. My son got years of therapy; that wasn’t the case for Robin. Hilary said she was obese (at ten) and had trouble with honesty. So was my boy. But he got better.

Here’s what I know. Carl died a bit after four on a Friday afternoon. On Robin’s thirty-fourth birthday.

Here’s what I think. He was driving home from his job, a now unnecessary position but Carl’s a workaholic too, so he’d keep at it as long as possible. He’d had a few nips from the bottle in his office. It might be Jack Daniels. It might be vodka. It was certainly hard liquor.

He was a good driver. He was seventy-five but he still had reflexes. He was in his Toyota and he made a left turn directly in the path of the only other vehicle in the area. He always got sentimental when he drank. I’ll bet his eyes were watering. I’m not saying it was a suicidal turn. I just think his vision was blurred by tears.