Inheritance

When our parents pass on, not everything they leave behind can be boxed up.

Credit: The Spruce / Jason Donnelly

I was only seven or eight years old. I know this to be true because by the time I turned ten, we had moved from the house where the incident on the stairs took place to a new home, where my mother celebrated my milestone birthday with a traditional party: neighborhood boys, balloons, and cake.

Her gift was a large plastic toy cannon that fired ping-pong balls. Perhaps having watched my older brother’s habits, my mother recognized that young boys play “war” almost as a genetic rite of passage. They build forts and wield wooden swords and rifles in mock battles. She must have figured that a cannon that fired ping-pong balls would fit the bill. And it did.

But her attention to that brief passage of male youth differed from her parenting in general, which focused on my contributing to the well-oiled running of the house and learning lifelong domestic skills. Today, I am the master of our kitchen and laundry room, and I get an odd pleasure out of vacuuming.

“You can come down for dinner when you fold the sweater correctly,” my mother announced one afternoon. “Until then, you sit here.”

I have no memory of what precipitated this situation or why we were sitting on the second-floor landing of our tiny townhouse. Maybe my mother witnessed me casually tossing my sweater on the floor of the bedroom I shared with my older brother and sister. It wasn’t an unlikely occurrence.

“Watch,” she said. “I will show you one last time.” She smoothed out the sweater before us and deftly folded it in five moves.

“Fold the right sleeve diagonally until the cuff lines up with the waist.

Fold the left sleeve diagonally until the cuff lines up with the waist.

Fold the right sleeve toward the center.

Fold the left sleeve toward the center.

Fold the top half of the sweater toward the bottom half.”

“There, now you do it,” she said, her breath redolent of Sanka and Benson and Hedges.

She fluffed up the sweater and dropped the prison sentence between us.

“But you already folded it!” I whined in a fruitless argument, tears welling as my predicament became clearer. She had already folded and unfolded the sweater three or four times, so why was it so important that I do it, especially with the possibility of my missing dinner hanging in the balance? She turned and started down the stairs.

I made various half-hearted attempts, but the results always resembled leftover scraps from the loom. So, I would cry at my frustration. And I would laugh—not a humorous laugh but one of resignation—that I would be captive to the landing forever and never again savor my mother’s macaroni and cheese with its cut-up segments of Hormel’s cocktail sausages.

My mother periodically poked her head around the corner of the living room and looked up at me.

“Tears?” she would ask. Or “This is funny?” she would add if she caught my laugh of resignation.

I must have eventually mastered the task because otherwise, you would be reading a newspaper article:

Seventy-five-year-old man finally succumbs
on the second-floor landing of his family home.

Unable to fold his sweater correctly, his mother condemned the boy to a life of solitary confinement. He never graduated from college, married, or traveled to Italy.

“I suspect she had her reasons,” the man once offered, “but she never explained why I was banished other than to say, ‘You need to know how to do this in life.’”

I say, “I must have mastered the task” because it’s unlikely my mother finally gave in by taking the sweater and motioning me downstairs with a nod of her head. That was not her way.

Maybe the sweater was just a handy prop in her classroom of life’s lessons. Maybe it was that there’s an exacting way to do everything:

Add the thickening agent, such as flour or cornstarch, to a cool liquid, not a hot liquid, or it will form an unusable gelatinous lump.

Put your shirt on first and then your pants.

Pour the bleach into the wash after the tub fills, not when you first put the whites in.

Maybe it was because she wanted me to be different than my older siblings. Maybe she thought of their rebellious selves and said, “Not with this one.”

I would have liked to have held out at the top of the stairs as the young Paul Maclean character did in Robert Redford’s movie version of A River Runs Through It, where, unwilling to eat his oatmeal, he sat stubbornly at the dining room table for the better part of a day until his father, a Presbyterian minister, finally relented in a moment of Godly-like grace.

But I was no Paul. For much of my life, I believed I must have been near the head of the line when they handed out the compliance gene, as it became a behavioral tendency that often defined me in both business and life. Maybe my mother saw that tendency in me and knew it wouldn’t serve me in the long run. Instead, maybe she wanted me to stand up for myself and fight back as Paul did. Maybe she wanted to hear me say “No!”

Today, I can’t fold clothes without envisioning her sitting on the edge of my bed, a Mona Lisa smile on her face, one leg gently bouncing, crossed over the other, a lit cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.

But then, decades later, with her ashes long since scattered to the winds, I wondered if the whole incident with the sweater had nothing to do with me. Maybe it was the coda to the story she told me in the small Vermont café about what her father and then her priest had taken from her as a teenage girl. Maybe the correctly folded sweater was just symbolic of the exacting order and perfection she felt compelled to demonstrate as wife, mother, housekeeper, piano teacher, gardener, and Catholic converted to Judaism as if to say to herself, “This, I can control.”

We never spoke of the sweater incident again. And I don’t remember discussing other aspects of my youth, such as playing sports, dating, or possibly attending college. Those were foreign concepts to a woman who had come of age during the Great Depression and World War II. But my schoolwork always elicited the same response: “You can do better.”

I know my mother loved me, but it was safer for her to live behind a self-imposed emotional boundary. She showed love by caring for the house and for us. We weren’t poor, but there was no discretionary income in my father’s paycheck. As a result, no one did more with less than my mother. But expressing emotion in words was not her way. We would end phone calls with me saying, “I love you, Mom,” and she would reply, “Me too.”

So maybe my tendencies to follow the rules and be exacting in whatever I did was a seed planted at the top of the stairs and nurtured in my Wonder Bread years. I did what was expected of me because it pleased my mother, and while I wanted more than “Me too,” I took what she could give. Not surprisingly, wanting to please others, to be something so elementary as to be liked by others, to be perfect became ever-present drives when I went out our kitchen door for the last time.

Years later, my mom sent me a birthday card that I still have. The photograph on the cover shows a young boy leaning on an open car window, looking at something beyond the frame. Inside was the card’s printed message.

The years flew by.

And before I knew it,

He was all grown-up.

What a wonderful man you’ve become. Happy Birthday.

And then, in her best Catholic-school script.

Dear Jeff.

Lately, I have looked at cards for Jeff, and nothing really grabbed me until this one. It’s the absolute truth.

Love & hugs from Mom

The written words would have to do.

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I briefly mentioned the scene with Paul Maclean from Robert Redford’s adaptation of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. In Episode 380: “Digging Deeper to Find the Heart of the Story,” I use the film as a catalyst to try to get beneath a story’s surface to its “aboutness.” Like Norman, I struggle in my early drafts to move beyond surface storytelling and uncover what I am truly trying to say. I’m grateful that I have a writing coach in Cindy House who magically sees between the early lines and pushes me to “dig deeper.”