Melita Schaum–The View From Space

The last time I went to visit my parents, I walked in on my mother cleaning the house wearing my prom dress of thirty years ago.  I guess the smell of mothballs and carnations should have tipped me off.  It was eerie, seeing my own self projected into the future:  a wallflower at 79.  Wrinkles and crinoline.  Sweet Baby Jane.

I said the only thing that came to mind:  “That’s my prom dress.”

“Yes, it’s comfortable.”  She continued her tango with the vacuum cleaner.

“But it’s my prom dress.”

“Well, you’re not going to wear it, are you dear?”

Recently I’ve noticed my mother changing her orientation to things.  Last month, for instance, she handed me a ring.

“Would you like this?  I’m getting rid of it.”  It was her wedding band, the one she’d worn for 47 years.

I was visiting for Christmas, in their retirement resort outside of Phoenix, a mobile home park festooned with so many holiday lights it resembled a landing strip.  You could hear the buzz of voltage two blocks away.  Pulling in, I recognized their neighbor, Earl Peeper, standing in his front yard, gazing up at the night sky.

“80,000 watts,” he marveled.  “They can see us from space.”

“Mom, why are you giving away your wedding ring?”

She held it up against my outfit like a fashion accessory.  “Oh, it’s so plain, and for Christmas I had your father buy me this.”  She gave a little Queen Mother wave to show off a cocktail ring of platinum and diamonds, large as a nut cluster.  I glanced down at the slim gold band that had been on her hand for half a century, part of a set she and my father had bought during the war, half borrowing, half bartering to make the final payments.

“Well,” she shrugged, “if you don’t want it, I’ll add it to the yard sale.  I don’t think it’s worth much.”

She put it back in the box among other pieces of costume jewelry.  There was the yachting pin she’d bought for their retirement cruise to the Caymans, the charm bracelet from her youth, bristling with tiny pewter baby carriages and enameled hearts.  I recognized a pair of huge hoop earrings from a five-and-dime she’d worn to a Halloween party decades ago, where she’d dressed as Mata Hari.  Afterwards, my father and she had fought over how closely she’d foxtrotted with our dentist.  I thought of all her disguises, the ones she’d danced in, accessorized, displayed, and now was beginning to discard.  Maybe she was right—no matter what you wore, life in the end was just a gym with paper streamers and a bad band.

My mother hiked up her slips and put away the vacuum.  Outside, the neon sizzled, the neighborhood lit like a slot machine.  My father in another room muttered at the television, tinged blue by its flickering eye.

I went to stand in the yard for a while, the daughter from another planet, looking towards home.

Melita Schaum’s essay, “Constellations,” was the winner of the 2010 Orlando Award, and appears in LAR 9. To learn more about the Orlando Awards, please visit A Room of Her Own Foundation.