The Mother-in-Law Diaries

by Carol Dawson

Genres: Family Life; Sagas

Synopsis

Much to the surprise of his mother, Lulu Penfield's first-born son has gotten married. It's not that she minds; she's fairly sure that he's made a good choice. What's really eating at her is the realization that she is about to become--gasp--a mother-in-law. Lulu's been around the block more than a few times. She's had more than the average number of mothers-in-law, and she's found herself more than once figuring out how these women manage to embed themselves in her marriages. As mothers-in-law go, she's had some real doozies. There was the Budgeteer, who insisted on teaching Lulu how to squeeze every penny out of her measly salary, how to keep her house spic and span, how to give birth, and of course, how to nurse her baby. There was the witch, who was skilled at casting some rather damaging spells. Try crossing that mother-in-law. There was the cool and poised New Zealand mother-in-law, whose son slandered her at length, leaving Lulu to wonder just how true his stories were. And there was the ghost of a mother-in-law, who lingered in Lulu's husband's study and had a word or two for Lulu herself. Now there's Lulu, about to become the sacred mother to whom the daughter-in-law must bow, about to become the source of wisdom about the son--his sins, his past, his potential. In a funny, bittersweet novel, Dawson takes us through the ups and downs of marriages and mothers-in-law. THE MOTHER-IN-LAW DIARIES will ring true for every woman who's ever said "I do" and who didn't realize that she was marrying not one person, but two.

Release date: January 1, 1999

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 299

Sample

Good God, Treatie. What have you done?

Ever since your call I’ve been so upset I can hardly think, although the whole time we were talking I was trying to corral my feelings so that you wouldn’t guess how wild they are. Over the phone that wasn’t so difficult, since the only expression you seemed to expect from me was stun. Which is what you got. You can never know how much consternation lay dammed behind it. It’ll be over my dead body if you ever do know.

Of course the minute I write this, wondering if you will ever read it, I keep feeling I should be addressing you as my dearest Tristan. Dear son. My sweet boy. Your little surprise has triggered so many emotions that I’ve simply got to talk to you somehow, write what I would never dream of saying out loud, and how could I possibly call you Tristan for that? That name was your father’s idea anyhow. Well, maybe it was both of us, being the romantic students of literature we were, but at least you’ve never complained, being the brave stoic you are—being, in fact, the treat God misdirected to me in a fit of absent-mindedness and then failed to cancel despite my many follies. So how in the sam hell could you have committed such a folly yourself, without telling me first?

I’m sorry for the scream. Right now I’m praying you took it for shocked delight. I hope your earache’s better. It’s too bad it was the holey one. But that’s another thing: that eardrum should never have been on a jet flight to San Francisco—not with a cold coming on after ten hours Alitalia from Rome. Didn’t you know six year olds have no business as stoics? Or were you just too tired to cry? Whatever was your mother thinking of that she didn’t pay closer attention?

But you got me now, haven’t you?

Marriage! Elopement!! Treatie, I don’t understand. We’ve been so close. We’ve been through so much together. Living with Swalla was one thing, but this!!! Besides which, I have to confess to feeling deeply hurt by your silence. Couldn’t you have at least called and told what you were planning to do even if you wouldn’t extend an invitation? Only one other time in your whole life can I remember you deliberately hiding your purpose from me. And when I think of how much you’ve confided, sharing minutes and thoughts and epiphanies, I’m struck dumb. Your blueprints for tattoos and orifice piercings. Your Twisted Sister tapes. Your crush on that cold little Mill Valley girl when you were thirteen. Your poems. Your desire to join the Special Forces. Remember the time you described getting stoned on the mesa and falling facedown into a compost pit? And the Saturday morning that I took one look at you and knew like lightning—“Treatie,” I said, “I’ve never talked with you about sex much, have I? We’ve not yet had a proper little chat?” and your face convulsed involuntarily into that sheepish grin—“Mom, too late.” And later when girls started phoning and I relayed the messages and Heather who’d just graduated from Princeton with an honors degree in economics fell in love with you? “But honey,” I said, “he’s only fifteen years old.” “I don’t care,” she said. “He’s man enough for me.” And when you finally told her, “No, Heather, we’ll have to break up, I’ve already got a mother,” she came and sat at the kitchen table while you were at school and cried and cried while I patted her shoulders, thinking, Poor thing. Poor thing. Thank you, Lord.

And now what?

You’ve gone and changed a major life condition— secretly. And it’s the big one. You may not realize it, but short of birth and death, this is the SS Lusitania, Treatie. Well, if you can’t trust your own parent with a sacrament, whom can you trust? For goodness sake, look at me! Didn’t I show you by example? Didn’t you get it? You weren’t even baptized. How many sacraments are left, besides Extreme Unction? What do you need this one for?

Maybe it’s your No Rites History that actually prompted you to hire the hearse to drive you and Swalla in her funeral veil and matching gown to the judge’s chambers—sort of a “This isn’t really happening, ha ha” and “Just covering every step at once” grab-bag. Not that I’m knocking judge weddings, God knows. Yours probably sat behind his desk the way mine usually did, in his robe color-coordinated to the bride’s outfit; perhaps a white boutonniere for contrast. Swalla holding a lily. I’m glad that Swalla’s got an interesting sense of style, but what an occasion to show it.

Oh, my Lord. Swalla! I’ve just realized. Treatie, on top of everything else you’ve changed my life condition. You have actually reached across two thousand continental miles and tampered with my life condition. Do you realize what this means?

You’ve turned me into a mother-in-law.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy.
Men never do, and that is theirs.
— OSCAR WILDE

Mothers-in-law.

If there’s one species I know about, that’s it. Forget men. Forget dogs and parakeets. The women who give birth to future husbands: those are the creatures I’ve recognized since the age of five, when I met my very first one in the nursery of the Bernice, Texas, Central Baptist Church when she came in to pick up the four-year-old boy whose hair I’d been stroking lovingly for an hour in the corner. My first, conceptually speaking. Then and there I could tell, from the way her son leaped from my arms and flung himself into her skirt folds, that I was up against a force beyond any I’d ever reckoned with before. This was the woman who counted.

The thing is that despite my wide field experience, the mother-in-law principle has remained until now one-sided. You can stand one hundred years on a river bank painting the opposite view without getting your feet wet, but you won’t see the perspective behind your own back until you’ve thrashed through the water, clambered up the other bank, and squinted, that is if the rapids don’t drown you first. As you know, I’ve rolled over coughing and spluttering plenty.

Do you happen to remember your sixteenth birthday, Treatie? Looking back, I think that was when I should have had my initial glimpse of things to come if only I’d been smart enough to realize. I can see it now. There I stood cooking spaghetti for your all-time favorite meal when you asked if you could invite a friend over to spend the night. I said, “Of course you may. He can come to dinner. Who is it? Michael?” And you said, “No, Laurel Ann Goodwin.”

It was then that she should have come back to me. Mrs. Barnes. Murleen.

Murleen Barnes.

My first mother-in-law, carnally speaking.

YOU KNOW, TREATIE, we girls pick the women we’ll join by picking the boys we love.

The boy stands there in all his tender glory. You only have eyes for him. Meanwhile a woman whose existence you acknowledge only in principle starts seeping into your life the moment you say ‘I will,’ whatever it is you happen to be willing: time, fidelity, hitchhiking around the Mediterranean. Of course, I’m not sticking to the strict legal sense of the term. Marriage doesn’t even have to be involved. In fact the more I consider it, the more I’m beginning to think that the whole concept of mother-in-law has a breadth that can only be truly appreciated in retrospect.

Time reveals all things; or at least a few. How could I have guessed way back when I was in high school that Murleen Barnes, a woman I met rarely (twice in the course of a whole year, even though I was inside her house four nights out of seven) was connected to me on deep subterranean levels just as surely as tap roots are connected to subsoil? It’s now been over twenty-two years since I’ve given her a thought. Yet back on that sunny white winter’s day in Durango, Colorado, as you waited there beside the stove while I stirred the Bolognese sauce, and asked, “Can Laurel Ann come stay over-night, please, Mom? We’ll get up early, I promise,” Mrs. Barnes should by all rights have come slamming back into my consciousness with hurricane force. “She can ride on the school bus with me tomorrow morning,” you said, your voice falling mild, your smile curving in sweet reason, your eyes shining bright with loaded, unspoken freight.

And through the distant air around us I should have heard a sound.

A COUGH EXPLODED. The scuffling feet made a dry rasping along the floor. Once in a while a pop filtered through the wall as her toe joints released a step and seized another. The image of her nylon nightie slithered through my thoughts which were chock full of static electricity; I imagined it clinging to her bare-legged stride.

The instant we heard the cough Jack froze above me in midarch. How long had all those noises been happening? us not hearing?

“Who is it?” I whispered, and he slipped his hand over my mouth and shook his head.

I prised the fingers away for a second. “Burglar?”—the word barely leaking from my throat.

“Mom,” he breathed.

The hand clamped down. Smelling our mingling chemistry and his musty gas-station scent, I wanted even then to bite it. Fear sparkled through my veins. The terror intensified heat like a craziness. I saw his eyes lock on to mine above the fingers’ blunt tips—those tools of miracle competence that could knot a tiny fishhook onto a hair-thin fly or change gears like a snake shifting or slide up my thigh until—and then I bit his fingers because I just couldn’t help it.

“Ow!” He flinched. For a second the hand jerked away.

“What’s she—” I mumbled. The fingers mashed down, harder.

It was dark. The room melted without edges on the darkness and his shoulders rose against it, pale blurs. My eyes switched back and forth. All at once there was the feeling that we were in an old-fashioned train depot stuck in time way off the main line with wooden benches and an empty ticket window and dust motes hanging in the sunbeams. From the other landscape we’d been exploring only seconds before, mapping every square inch of forest, hill, and canyon that we could reach with our tongues, we’d now been dragged away to this room by this single sound.

I lay waiting, impaled, like a moth chloroformed by fear. I could barely make out his jawline dusted with bristles. He’d only recently begun to shave. The hollow of his throat beat just above my eyes like a tiny bird—that pocket of life, those blood vessels so available under thin silk. His mother stepped, paused.

In the instant silence hung definition: from now on for all time, this act of love would be the ultimate profanity.

ONE HOUR BEFORE I’d stolen through the moonless blocks and houses, past window units throbbing and one lone bulldog that shoved his face against the chain-link fence and barked. For months now I’d sneaked out of the house nearly every night like an outlaw, killing time until my parents went off to bed and the central air switched on, then raising my window, climbing out onto the balcony, scrambling down the rungs of our giant TV aerial, and touching earth in the rose garden opposite the ancient oak tree. Sparky would run up and down the garden, squirming like a trout with excitement, her tail whacking my arm. “Okay, girl,” I’d whisper. “You can’t come. Stay here.” We’d stand a minute together under the jasmine, getting used to the pulsing world—star-fixed, burgeoning, dense as a realm on the ocean floor. Moths flittered through the air. Fireflies burned holes in the azaleas. We could feel the twitches within the void, the spiraling movements across stillness, darkness wheeling into a spatial arc swarming with lone migrations. The neighborhood no longer existed. No elderly couple next door watered their daylilies or stooped toward the newspaper or kneeled to pluck crabgrass or called out that dinner was ready. All over town lay bedrooms trapping people in sleep, and I was the only one out, the only one connecting, the only one alive.

Sparky skipped along beside me as I darted from tree to tree across the wide front lawn. On these nights she knew; she’d stop at the curb by our driveway and watch me head off toward the new adventures I had now discovered within my own skin—the exciting voyage across town, the flesh my ship of limitless possibilities. Two miles away the blocks opened up a different universe. Everything looked strange. Grass grew scanty and closer to the dirt. Weeds stood by the front steps. Secret lives as mysterious and arcane as those of Bedouins were contained within these walls. On the corner near Jack’s house a scraggled old chinaberry tree flung berries into the gutter every time the wind shook it. This street, which should have have been called Eighth Avenue, had somehow been inserted out of order where it didn’t belong, and it sidled between Seventh and Eighth like a bastard child in hand-me-down clothes. The houses on it were dingy, the curb no more than a gravel hump; the asphalt itself seemed just a thin black smear over hardpan clay. But it had a name.

Roland Lane.

Five blocks up I crept on to the porch of a tiny house with two front doors. Turning the knob of the left one I slipped inside and went groping through the dark. Bedsheets met my hands, rife with the odor of sleeping boy. I fumbled around, finding his arm and shoulder warm as sunny marble, then I came across muscles, ribs, a flat belly, and ran my fingers up his neck to catch in the wavy hair. Slowly he began to wake up. I felt the breath leave his parting mouth. Limbs stirred. Then, all at once, steel hands grabbed and pulled me down, and his lips were everywhere.

YOU SEE, TREATIE, I know.

NOW, LYING THERE, with Mrs. Barnes paused just beyond the wall, I began to receive her thoughts like radio signals of great clarity. They burned tracks, parsing across my brain: Scorched that casserole. Macaroni tuna. Country preacher’s pay puny as witches’ spit, what are they dreaming? they may as well not give him a red cent. “Oh, your husband, we think he hung the moon.” Then they expect the whole world! Sundays, Wednesday evenings, revivals August and Easter, sickrooms morning and midnight ready to catch every disease and bring it home, never mind that there’s only fifty-two members in the whole church, hardly a wedding anytime, no easy forty dollars, nuh-uh!—just baptizings in that scummy old cattle tank claiming they can’t afford a pool. Use a play pool! Sears Roebuck. Backyard special. At least something you can drain! Even since he started the second job with Firestone it’s still not enough to scrape by on. Could not afford to ruin a whole supper. And, oh—Maria’s two black teeth on the front which they’re babies which she’ll lose them but still. An arm and a leg just for cavities. And as for braces! Then Lannie Lynn trying to tell me she didn’t roll across that garbage can backing out her drive yesterday and smush it flat as a cookie sheet, does she take me for a chicken-head?

Between her and us was only a thin double-wood panel with a brass knob. It could have been clear as glass.

Did the pause mean she was about to open it?

A sound broke out. In panic I clenched against Jack’s arms. He didn’t move. It broke like a fist punching through a paper shell—another cough.

Somehow it sounded so lonesome. So small. Actually she was tall and rail thin, gaunt as a heron. Sometimes I’d hear her talking to Jack in a worried nasal whine, while we were on the phone: “Jacky, you better not stay out so late tomorrow night or this time your daddy might whup you, Jacky, are you going to take your little sister Maria to that Little League game like you said?” I’d wait a moment and sure enough, the voice would drop back down to a gravelly mezzo pitch: “Is that shirt new? Are you spending that hard money you work for in the filling station on fancy new shirts instead of saving up for the junior college? How come you think you have to dress up all the time? For who?”

After one long harrumph she finally started again—step, step, scuff.

I could feel her debating the choice of opening the door as she circled the living room, perhaps not yet ready to see what she’d find. Had her footsteps, once capable of ranging whole frontiers, kept on shrinking until this strict pine floor was now as deep into the night as they dared go? Did this happen always as women grew older? Got married? Had children? Certainly my mother didn’t gallivant off through the midnight hours, nor, so far as I knew, did teachers, country club golf players, church organists, grocery checkers, or the female relatives of friends.

The fever hit me like a lance. Goosebumps rose on my skin. As I lay there under Jack’s weight the terror increased, this time from an entirely new source: Where was she going? Where would I?

“I’ve got a cramp,” Jack breathed into my ear.

The footsteps suddenly stopped. But instead of hinges creaking, a sighing sound wheezed under the door. I realized instantly what it was. She’d sunk into the vinyl armchair directly facing us. I heard a rustle, then a metallic click. After a quarter of a minute the scent of cigarette smoke came curling along the dark.

I couldn’t see Jack’s eyes now. He eased down flat beside me, his lips nibbling my neck. I hadn’t even known she smoked! It was against her religion for sure; no one in my family had ever so much as touched an ashtray butt. In fact religion was the only real thing Jack and I had in common, the slender thread I’d been counting on all this time ever since we’d started going steady six months before and he’d given me his senior ring and then around about Valentine’s Night we’d parked down the country road next to Babyland Cemetery and there in the backseat of his 442 demolished my virginity, and I knew that I was now a goner for sure, tangled in barbwire, and no Armageddon was likely to come along and save me.

“Dad?” I’d said two nights after my defloration. “Did you know that on Sundays Jack Barnes’s father preaches at a Baptist church? Just like your father did?”

Dad looked blankly down from the distant height of his grim intellect, chewing a piece of fried chicken breast, saying nothing.

“I thought he worked in the tire store,” said my mother.

“Only during the week,” I turned to her. “On weekends he leads a whole congregation. And Mrs. Barnes teaches Sunday school, just like Grandmother did.”

Carefully Dad took a swig of iced tea. Then another bite, his jaw rotating. My grandfather’s published works occupied an entire shelf in our home library. Some, like the United Nations Charter on religious liberties he had helped to draft, were mere monographs. Others—the volumes of philosophy, history, and sermons—were beefy doorstops.

“Isn’t that good?” I pressed.

But Dad’s silence couldn’t disguise the judicial cool in his eye. He was being tactful.

We both knew Jack was not good.

Yet what other link seemed strong enough to justify the fact that, although we shared no mutual interests whatsoever, he didn’t read so much as a Cliffs Note, make jokes, or laugh, or care about a tenth of the things that grabbed my curiosity, I was nonetheless hip-deep in lust with the Number One Bernice High School hell-raiser from across the tracks?

And now his Southern Baptist mother sat outside his door all by herself at two in the morning, smoking like a nightclub singer.

OUR SWEAT-DAMP bellies made a sucking noise as Jack nudged himself out. The Trojan slipped off. It stuck to my thigh. He turned his head so that his eyes caught the light. It was then, at that moment, that I realized: he recognized these sounds. They were not news. The fact gleamed, familiar as breakfast; he’d lain in this bed alone in the dark listening to the footsteps s. . .