Enid Brock: My Mother's Closet

Enid Brock is a member of the Wednesday morning women's writing practice circle and also attends the Friday feedback class where she regularly produces wry, thoughtful essays on food, parenting, families, and domestic life. Her article, "A Real Life Reality Show" appeared in the Creative Solutions column of FamilyFun Magazine in June, 2009. This is her response to the prompt, "My Mother's Closet."

My Mother's Closet

She wasn’t a clotheshorse, my mother – still isn’t. When I was a girl, she mostly wore shorts and tee shirts and sandals she had made at the Sawdust Festival in Laguna Beach. No bra, ever. She kept her red hair short, refused to pierce her ears, and wore no jewelry at all for many years, except for the silver bangles all the women in our family wear. She didn’t even wear a wedding ring, because the jade one my father had married her with was broken beyond repair. At UC Irvine faculty parties, my father -- who was a Physics professor -- always introduced her as his friend, and people who didn’t know better assumed they had an open marriage, which they did not. But this was the 1960’s, and that is the way things were then, in the academic world.

When my parents went to a party, which they rarely did, my mother wore one of two party dresses. If it was a faculty party, she wore her paisley mini dress with the full sleeves and the long, tight wrist bands, which my father had bought for her at ‘Happiness is a New Rag,” on the Coast Highway in Corona del Mar. I still have that dress.

Or, if it was a family party, Mom wore a tailored navy blue dress, with a few crisp pleats in the skirt and short military sleeves, accompanied by stockings and blue pumps. That dress is gone now, no loss.

My mother hung her dresses in a five foot closet she shared with my father, but she kept the rest of her clothes in a mahogany low boy. It had a wide, beveled mirror mounted on top that swiveled back and forth so you could see yourself. I loved to tilt the mirror forward so I could enjoy my reflection, all the way from my messy six-year-old braids down to my skinny bare feet.

Every week my mother washed and ironed a white linen bureau scarf and laid it across the top of her dresser. Then she carefully placed a silver-backed hairbrush and matching hand mirror in the center of the cloth and a round, silver jewelry box in the top right corner. The box had a dent in its top, and once in a while I loved to ask her why that was, as if I didn’t already know. Mom would tell me that the box had belonged to her grandmother, Florence Odell Hoxie, and that Florence always kept it on her bureau, too. Right before bed, Florence would take off the diamond horse shoe pin she wore every single day and put it in the box. Then, first thing in the morning, she would put it back on. She even wore it on her nightgown at breakfast, and she always wore it the same way, with the ends pointing up.

“So the good luck wouldn’t pour out,” I would breathe.

“Yes, exactly,” my mother would reply.

“And she traveled with it, too,” I would prompt.

Then my mother would smile, because she always loved Granny Florence the best, and she would tell me the rest of the story: how Florence had a temper, and drank martinis all day long, and cheated at bridge, and had many, many gentlemen friends – just as you would expect a young, beautiful, and wealthy cattle widow to have. How one day she decided, on a whim or maybe in a rage, to pack up her suitcase and drive out from Riverside to Santa Barbara for a week or so. She always stayed at the Biltmore, my mother reminded me, where there was a man in saddle shoes who sent her three dozen red roses every Valentine’s Day for thirty years.

“Because he loved her very much,” I would add, and my mother would nod, yes.

So on this particular day, Florence packed up her bag and hurled it into the trunk of her MB, and then she jammed the car into reverse and backed out of the gravel driveway so quickly she made the pebbles squeal, and the trunk was still open and her suitcase fell out, and she just drove right over it.

“And that is how she dented the box,” I would conclude.

“And she never fixed it,” my mother would reply. “She left the dent right there, as an object lesson.”

Mom didn’t wear Florence’s pin with her shorts, or with her hippy sandals. But whenever she put on a party dress, paisley mini or navy twill, she always wore the diamond horse shoe. Ends up, of course.

Trackback(0)

TrackBack URI for this entry