Her own mother “gave teas.” All of their friends “gave teas,” each involving butter cookies extruded from a metal press and pastel bonbons ordered from See’s. My mother “gave teas” the way other mothers breathed. I also found the ankle-length red lace dress she wore when she “gave teas,” a form of entertainment more popular than anyone might imagine it to have been in the part of rural California in which we then lived. In another of those boxes I found the Jean Patou cape, red velvet with a white fur collar, that she reported having worn when she left her wedding reception. I would let other six-year-olds (Brenda, say) imagine their wedding days, their princess dresses, their Juliet caps and seed pearls and clouds of white tulle: I had moved briskly on to the day of my (Buenos Aires) divorce, and the black silk mantilla the occasion would clearly require.Īs a matter of fact I already had a black silk mantilla, dredged by me from one of the many mysterious boxes in which my mother kept the clues to being 24. Hence the dark glasses, hence the paparazzi. If you were to have asked me why I was standing on the steps of this public building in Argentina, I would have had a ready answer: I was standing on the steps of this public building in Argentina because I was getting a divorce. But here is how I most often preferred to visualize myself: not on a moor, not in Shubert Alley, but standing on the steps of a public building somewhere in South America (Argentina comes first to mind, although Argentina was like the sable coat, never actually seen, more concept than reality), wearing dark glasses and avoiding paparazzi. I was at other times walking on a moor, although I had not yet read those English novels in which moors figured heavily.
I was wearing this sable coat in an urban setting that looks in retrospect not unlike Shubert Alley. In these dramas of my own devise I was sometimes wearing a sable coat, although I had never seen one. My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular. It seemed that 24 was (I can hardly believe our discussions of age deteriorated to this, but possibly the lettuce cocktails had edged us both into a casino mode) her “lucky number.” It seemed that I had been born when she was 24. It seemed that she had been married when she was 24. I once asked her what made 24 so memorable. Over those years during which I was determined to bypass childhood, she and I discussed this question of age at a length she must have found tedious, but perhaps she did not: We are talking here about a woman, my mother, who tied what she construed to be her first gray hair in a bow and mailed it to her sister Gloria, she of the yellow-vegetable dictum. I, meanwhile, was trying to improve the dinner hour by offering what I called “lettuce cocktails” (a single leaf of iceberg lettuce and crushed ice in a stemmed glass), and inventing elaborate scenarios featuring myself as an adult, specifically an adult 24 years old, an age on which I settled because my mother had assured me that 24 was the best, her favorite year. Brenda was also encouraged to make a perfect white sauce, and to keep a chart showing a gold star for every time she brushed her teeth. When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with which my cousin Brenda, a year and a half younger, accepted her mother’s definition of her as someone who needed to go to bed at six-thirty and finish every bite of three vegetables, one of them yellow, with every meal. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
I never had much interest in being a child. Joan Didion remembers her distaste for being a child and her yearning for a glamorous, grown up life.
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