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An Unready Wedding (“Country” 13)
I was a severe disappointment to my mother, and knew it.
She loved crafts and American folk songs, which she’d heard as a child and become proficient at playing one-handed, with her nursery-school-teacher training, on the upright piano tucked into her “sewing room.” Family history enthralled her. She never questioned an assertion about an ancestor — “Just imagine, she was said to be a Maine Indian!” — or the uprightness of the American leaders she found in the tree (“look, we go back to the Puritan reformer Anne Hutchinson! she is, let’s see, a second cousin four times removed of the husband of your six-greats aunt … on Gramps’s mother’s side, of course”).
And at suppertime every day, or at least, every day that Dad was home for the meal, she risked his laughing scorn, because she was not an intellectual.
The more success I found in books, whether history or chemistry or “great literature,” the more I unintentionally put Mom in the corner. Honestly, at age 17, a person’s perspective has room to grow (mine did, anyway), so I understood only two parts of this, really: (1) Mom felt like I resembled Dad too much; and (2) Mom wanted someone more “girly.” (Clue in younger…
