My mother still flirted as she approached her date with eternity. She had been a flirtatious honey-haired beauty and, at ninety-five, saw no reason to quit. When Maryanne sent her husband to drive her to a garden club meeting, Mom said to me later, “Fred is such a hunk. He can drive me anytime.”
At 95 years, she still laughed a lot despite past ordeals, like almost being shot once when my drunken father fired three rounds from a .22 rifle “just to scare her.” She was eighty-eight when her third husband died. I missed him, not because he had many admirable qualities as a stepfather, but because he’d been a highly responsible pain in the ass to my mother for forty-three years. Because I lived nearby and worked mostly from home as a telecommuting technical writer, I became her next overseer.
Mom’s small, single-level white house stood at the top of a steep driveway on a knoll surrounded by trees and a small yard. Each Tuesday shopping day I found her sitting on her sofa, where she read, wrote cards and letters, did crossword puzzles, ate, and snoozed. She enjoyed reading large-print novels like Jodi Picoult’s Lone Wolf, Robert Parker detective stories, and even Fifty Shades of Grey, which she said wasn’t very good despite all the talk at the town newsletter and garden club meetings about the sex in it.
What Mom saw as I drove her places were car bumper stickers that she found amusing. “I like that one,” she’d said on our trip to the supermarket one day. “I Don’t Brake for Yankee Fans.” Then she’d cackled, as if remembering my father had been a Yankee fan and relishing the thought of running him over. He had also been a handsome athlete with “sexy” tennis legs, one of her favorite male attributes. However, his volatile temper on the tennis court had been a bad sign. Somehow their marriage had lasted eighteen years.
Without support like a grocery cart, she walked slowly with her left eye closed, wobbling sometimes. She said her eyes hadn’t worked well together since her stroke years ago, and so she saw distances better just using her right eye. At the supermarket she said, “I try to keep both eyes open here so men won’t think I’m winking at them.” When I suggested a black patch for the left eye, she said, “Ha-ha.”
Once inside the supermarket, Mom disappeared with her grocery cart while I shopped for my family. I knew she inspected older men there as though she were eyeing a box of doughnut holes. I spotted her leaning into the freezer case, searching for her favorite shrimp scampi dinners. Considering her bad eyesight, I asked if I could help. She said, “Did you see that hunk in the dairy aisle? The tall one with the good legs.”
Mom had been feminine but tough. The first winter we lived in my grandparent’s old summer house, she split wood for the kitchen stove, shoveled snow from the driveway, and, in March, emptied the outhouse using my grandfather’s old wooden wheelbarrow. Later, when my father’s salary as a salesman to New Hampshire restaurants proved inadequate, she secured a job as a company’s mailroom coordinator, bought a used jalopy, and commuted twenty miles a day, wearing the type of frilly dresses that brought male employees to visit the mailroom more frequently than usual.
After my retirement I wrote a memoir, using humor to mitigate a painful childhood. I knew Mom would not laugh at my description of how I’d come of age with an unfaithful and abusive alcoholic whose jealous rages were often triggered by my flirtatious mother. When I let her read a draft, she said, “Don’t publish it until after I kick the bucket.”
With her death at the age of one hundred years and six months, I wrote that Mom had been an attractive younger woman and, in her elderly heart, had still seen that honey-haired beauty in the mirror. Years ago after her third husband died, I’d remarked how difficult it must have been for her to live with a man who was so overbearing. Mom paused, as if contemplating whether he’d had a redeeming quality, then laughed and said, “But he was pretty good in bed.”
Whenever I visit Mom’s gravestone at the town cemetery, I think of the laughter that spanned her one hundred years and how she’d outlived three husbands and was sizing up new candidates right up until the end. Eternal optimism.