“Did you love your mother?”
The question roused Doug from his revelry of blissful mental emptiness. He was not aware that the party chatter had turned to mothers and how great or how nasty they could be. Mostly he questioned why he took a job with a Dallas advertising agency when his college degree was in journalism. The pay was better. That was the only reason he could think of. After all, advertising just elected Richard Nixon president. That night at his boss’s home on the shores of White Rock Lake Doug’s purpose was to maintain a certain level of camaraderie with fellow workers. It certainly was not his love of Cold Duck or the haze of cigarette smoke or that god-awful imitation crab on a cracker.
“I beg your pardon?” he murmured.
“I said, did you love your mother?”
The woman in the beehive hair-do blew cigarette smoke out of the side of her mouth, which served as an indication of good manners. As supervisor of the secretarial pool, she was openly disdainful of young men in the office who held marginally higher job descriptions than she had but who made much more money than she did.
“We’ve all talked about our mothers except you, so I took it as an indication that you didn’t like your mother. You didn’t love her, did you?”
A million memories of his mother rolled through his mind. One time he asked her why black people lived in different neighborhoods than white people. Her eyes hardened and her lips pursed.
“Well, they just don’t have the same ability to think as we do, and it’s just better that they live among their own kind.”
That reason didn’t make any more sense than why blacks had to sit in the movie house balcony, drink from separate water fountains or use separate toilets. However, little Doug knew not to pursue that line of reflection.
One time he overheard his mother tell the neighbor lady about what the preacher’s wife did on Sunday
“There she stood up there in front of the congregation and started talking like she was the minister instead of her husband.” She paused to purse her lips in censure. “And then she bowed her pretty little head and began to pray.”
Doug never understood what was so bad about the preacher’s wife praying at the pulpit, but he knew better than to share his confusion with her.
The next image that came to Doug was the day he walked into the living room to see his older brother stretched out on the sofa and his mother sitting on the edge. Her hand lightly rubbed over his mouth as she said, “You have such lovely broad lips.”
He sat up and asked, “Are you sayin’ I got black lips?”
“Oh,” she huffed. “I can’t say anything to you.”
Doug felt like he had witnessed something wrong on many different levels, even though he didn’t know for sure what they were. He never shared his feelings about either.
One last memory made him shudder. He was in her hospital room. She was hooked up to an IV line and dying of cancer, but he wasn’t supposed to know that. He was instructed not to say the word cancer because she didn’t want to know that she had cancer. How was he to say good-bye when she didn’t want to think about the fact she was going away? He was able to keep a smile on his face until he left the room, and then he cried.
“Well, did you love your mother or not?” The woman with the cigarette wanted to know.
“My mother died of cancer when I was fourteen,” Doug told her. “Thank you for ripping the scab off my scar.”
She stopped puffing smoke out of the side of her heavily painted lips.