Scary Geri
by Eve Marx
My mother, Geraldine, was not a bawdy person but some of her habits were what used to be called loose. For starters, she always wore skirts but never underpants.
When she left home at nineteen, the first thing she did was join the Army so she could see the world. She didn’t get far; she spent her entire enlistment stateside, first an hour away from her father’s home in south Jersey, followed by Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia and, finally, the Red River Army Depot in Fort Bliss, Texas. She loved her military duty. She loved the sense of purpose. She loved her uniform. She rose to the rank of First Sergeant, something I only learned about after she died, when I found her insignia.
She had a poor relationship with her father, Lou, who was a real dick. When I was small, he liked to wrestle me to the floor, then dribble spittle in my face in triumph. He died a few days before I turned fourteen. Neither of us cried when we heard the news although two days later she beat her breast and howled at his funeral, embarrassing her brother and sister who called her ‘dramatic.’ She was a widow at the time, between husbands, having returned to the one-horse town where she spent her youth to start a business while hoping for help from a father who didn’t want to help.
Other than the day of his funeral, I can’t remember a single time my mother set foot in her father’s house, although I was there often, looking for food. My mother didn’t cook and was always on a diet. Lou’s second wife, Mary, fed me after school snacks. Although Mary was the only grandmother I ever knew, my mother refused to let me call her ‘Grandma” or “Nana,” or anything other than Mary. Anything else would desecrate the memory of her own mother, Eva, for whom I was named.
My grandfather, the bully, enjoyed showing me my mother’s school report cards. “Nothing but C’s and D’s,” he’d say every time, with satisfaction.
She told me he once knocked her tooth out when she was late coming home from a date. She said this with pride, like it was a good thing, or maybe as warning. She enjoyed randomly striking me when I least expected it.
“That’s for nothing, imagine what you get for something,” she’d say.
My mother was twice a widow and divorced one time; in between husbands, she had boyfriends. She was a good-looking woman. Her last boyfriend, Marty2, she met in the elevator of the tony highrise apartment building in Cherry Hill where she and the first Marty, Marty1, lived. He was her third husband. One day he took his own life by hurling himself off their 10th floor balcony after sending her out on a long errand.
She and Marty2 were together eight years and she complained about him constantly. His chief charm, she said, was that he cooked and liked to drive. She never got a driver’s license herself although she did once buy a car. After Marty2 died after a brief, harsh battle with pancreatic cancer, my mother purchased a used Cadillac so her friend Teeny could drive her around. Years earlier, Teeny had been my mother’s maid although I don’t remember her ever cleaning. Teeny was black and wore wigs. My mother was also very fond of wigs. After my mother died, I told Teeny she could have the car and also my mother’s mink coat and anything else she wanted from my mother’s vast wardrobe. My mother had a lot of clothes by then. When Marty1 lifted her out of poverty, she went a little clothes-mad.
I keep calling her ‘my mother,’ but in truth she loathed that name. She preferred I call her “Gerri,” which is how she signed all her notes. She left me a lot of notes. She was a businesswoman first and not in the least domestic. I did the cleaning, such as it was, and also any cooking. She set up a charge account at the little grocery store a few blocks away where I’d buy a quarter pound of chopped meat, two ears of corn on the cob, and a head of iceberg lettuce for our dinner. She only ever really wanted cream cheese on MelbaToast. Sometimes the woman at the register would say the charge was full and only ring up whatever items I’d purchased grudgingly. I affected an attitude of nonchalance. For the six years we lived together when I was a teen she acted like we were roommates. She often said, “Don’t have kids, they ruin your life,” and she meant it.
My high school boyfriend knocked me up. He later admitted he pricked tiny pinholes in his condoms, trying to get me pregnant and married, preventing my escape to college. When my mother saw me puking, my head in the toilet, knees on the grubby bathroom tile one morning in the spring of my senior year, she knew immediately what was up.
“You whore,” she said before going to her room for a lie down. She stayed there for two days. When she emerged, she said Teeny would take me to New York City which was the only place where you could get a legal abortion. I called and made an appointment at Park Med on Park Avenue South and they were very kind. I walked in unescorted while Teeny and her sister drove downtown to Katz’s Deli for corned beef sandwiches on rye. They had one waiting for me in the car when I came out of the clinic.
“I got a sandwich for Gerri, too,” Teeny said. “She loves corned beef.”
When I was in graduate school at Columbia I took the bus one day from the Port Authority terminal in New York to Cherry Hill, New Jersey. My intention was to spend the weekend with my mother whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. As you might imagine, I was a little tense. Marty1 had recently taken his leap off the balcony and my mother was making noises about moving to Manhattan to be closer to me and her own two siblings. To get through the weekend in Cherry Hill, I snuck hits off a joint I’d rolled when I thought she wouldn’t notice.
She noticed.
“What is that?” she said. “Dope? Are you a pothead?”
“Would you like to try it?” I said.
My mother and I spent the rest of that afternoon getting stoned. She hadn’t smoked cigarettes in years and getting the hang of the inhale was a little rough. There was some coughing and desperate gulping of water but in no time she was toking up like a pro. We smoked two or three joints over the course of three hours and were high as kites. We laughed and laughed. There were two sofas in her living room facing each other and we each stayed on our own couch. I’m not sure we moved at all other than to pass each other the joint. Eventually the high ended and the laughing stopped. My mother lay exhausted on her sofa, her eyes closed.
“That was fun, wasn’t it?” I ventured. It was the first time I could recall spending that much time together without violence or hot words. In past visits she’d hit me, curse me, or throw things, all normal behavior in Geraldine’s world.
“Yes, it was fun,” she said matter-of-factly. “And I’m never doing that again.”
My mother often threatened to haunt me when she was dead and she has done just that. I see her face and her body every time I look in the mirror. I hear her voice in my head. Her birthday is coming up. She would have been 99 years old. She’s been gone 34 years now. I miss her. I don’t miss her.
