Silent Rules

Deborah Meltvedt

Word Count 1501

In 1961, after my younger sister was born at St. Agnes Hospital in Fresno, California, my mother wanted a Tubal Ligation. Now she said. She had paid her dues, six unplanned pregnancies, and five births. Her request was denied since it was a Catholic hospital and there were rules about the sanctity of reproduction. So my mother played the insanity card. Wouldn’t hold her newborn daughter until she got the surgery. I like to think screaming was involved. It worked. Four days later she left the hospital with Mary Kay on her lap and stitches crisscrossing her abdomen like wings.

Forty- five years later my mother returned to that same hospital acting psychotic one night. She swore she saw somebody murder Tiger Woods in the parking lot below. I was not surprised by this delusion. Pain meds were dialed high, golf, not Catholicism, was her religion, and I think she was a little bit in love with Tiger. And it had been five months since she had a cigarette.

When my mother was born, her father bought himself a car to soften his disappointment for not having another son. To compensate, my mother grew up being damn good at sports. She liked math and boys and golf and getting away from Iowa. She married my father, who was a “catch” –a fighter pilot who mowed down the bad guys in World War II and had two college degrees. Soon my mother gave up math and boys and any chance of a college degree. And golf. After my brother was born and my father was in medical school, my mother told a doctor she was anxious and couldn’t sleep. He said she needed a hobby. Do something for yourself. So she took up Salem’s which calmed her nerves through five more pregnancies and my father’s continued dependence on bourbon and war ghosts. In school, my sisters and I made her disabled ashtrays out of clay and devotion. We begged her to stop when the Surgeon General’s report came out. You could die. But she didn’t die for years, instead, she played golf.

When I was nine years old my parents drove us to the Midwest so that my siblings and I would know where they came from. It was the first time I drank Malt shakes and saw chipmunks and learned the stupidity of my older sisters thinking they were falling in love. It was the first time I remember lying for my mom.

Every afternoon at our summer cabin in Minnesota my mother locked herself in our tiny bathroom and lit up her Salem’s. Just look out for your grandmother she told us. This was our call to action as my sisters and I dutifully sat on tattered blankets by the second-floor window spying on the road. I spy a blackbird. I spy a chipmunk. I spy Granny Johnson turning up the walk. I liked the game, the thrill of being a conspirator with mom, but I knew at age nine that Granny Johnson must know. We all smelled like it. But my parents were raised as Midwestern Scandinavians where their ancestors would rather kill themselves than be uncomfortable with the truth. So my mother, at the age of forty-six, when one of us screamed here she comes, took her last inhale then flushed lipstick-stained butts and choked the air with Aqua Net hair spray, killing spiders and ants and any doubt that I, too, would learn to avoid speaking our truths.

My mother was beautiful with high cheekbones and Rita Hayworth legs that she crossed at cocktail parties on Saturday nights. Learn to smile was one of her silent mantras as I watched her grin at grocery store clerks, the officer who never gave her a ticket, and my dad’s women patients who claimed he was the next best thing to God.

Once my father’s practice was established, my parents joined the San Joaquin Country Club. In summertime, my mother would drop us off at the club pool, while she hit the greens. We ate greasy hamburgers and fries and inhaled laps of chlorine. But my mother’s world lay seemed magical. Eighteen holes of wonder where she inhaled tar and freshly mowed grass. Swans swam in the San Joaquin River, the greens were cut to perfection, and voices were hushed, not like at our home.

There were biblical rules of my golf. Thou shall not get sick on my mother’s golf days (when women were allowed an early tee time) and if you play well enough the universe will grant daughters big breasts and afternoon Daiquiris at the country club lounge.

But the Club had its own laws in 1971. Unwritten (you had to be white to join) and written (you had to be a male to belong). My mother just wanted to play the damn game. She couldn’t be bothered with gossip and fashion like her golfing friends who played bridge and drank martinis after the 18thhole. I liked most of these women, they gave my sisters and me compliments and receptions, but when I was older and questioned the privilege of white male clubs I also questioned Republican housewives who stood by their husbands no matter what. I remember one party when my father drank too much. I overheard my mother’s friends telling her to be nicer. Let him beat you at golf for once. Then my mother saying, hell no, that’s the only thing I can win.

Even though I loved my mother dearly, I did not share golf with her. She tried to teach me when I was thirteen, but I hated the look of disapproval that settled from her downturned mouth to the slope of her hips. But we shared loving the Country Club lunches where I tolerated her denials as much as she did my politics. In the lounge of overstuffed chairs, we ordered the French Dip or Patty Melt sandwiches, sharing fries that we dipped in endless shots of catsup. I don’t remember most of what we talked about. Maybe that blouse at Macy’s. How my sister Betsy never listens, how my father never (fill in the blank).

We couldn’t eat in the “Men’s Grill” because women weren’t allowed. Just like they weren’t allowed to join the club alone or get the best tee times. But my mother had her own rules for lunch:  Be polite to the staff, lie to the waiter even if the food is bad, don’t tell her anything about sex, do not ask her why she won’t leave your father, sometimes it’s better to keep your mouth shut, and (always) share your fries. Then after she had paid and lit up her cigarette, I would follow her detour through the Grill where men, who my mother could beat by ten strokes under par, stared at her tanned, gorgeous legs.  

I don’t remember when my mother stopped playing golf. At age eighty she started to skip the colder mornings, her coughs growing louder. Scandinavian stubbornness ruled until one February night when the pain was too great.

Through three seasons, we visited her hospital rooms. The fragileness of her diaphragm muscle became cupped like an insect wing, gasping, and every visceral organ inside of her-intestines, liver, and the shell of a uterus that once bulged in births –kept saying goodbye for days.

We were not a family of prayers. But we knew how to lie. We told her she would be home any day. We promised iced tea down her throat. We said the doctors are smart and they are doing everything they can.

Palliative care does not slip easily off anybody’s tongue and my father choked on it for days. We needed to believe, even if not true, what doctors said. That when all systems fail and the heart and the lungs contract in slow motion there is the point where the patient floats, like a drunkard in delirium, and consciousness just slips away. 

I was alone with her when it happened, her non-golfer on Friday, July thirteenth. The monitor slipped fast from forty to nineteen beats to zero. When my father returned, we sat awkwardly, without the machines breathing into our new world without her. Then he asked me “Do you know of a good funeral home?” and I laughed that even after fifty years of marriage there was no talk of death.  

Late that night my father and I went to eat because we had no idea what to do in grief. This is when he told me that back in Marshalltown, Iowa my mother was given an honorary membership into the men’s golf club because she was that good.

Then we toasted to Beverly, him finally with just water and me with cheap white wine and I thought a lot about rules we love and laws that aren’t worth it. I ordered fries, shared them with my dad, and dragged them in tiny pools of catsup, holding them there, burning, in the dryness of my mouth. 

Deborah is a public health educator who lives in Sacramento, California with her husband Rick and their cat, Anchovy Jack. She has been published in local literary anthologies and in the Creative Non-Fiction Anthology What I Didn’t Know: True Stories of Becoming a Teacher. Her first book of poetry Becoming a Woman was published last year.