Waverly Jong
I had taken my mother out to lunch at my favorite ese restaurant in hopes of putting her in a good mood, but it was a disaster.
Whe at the Four Dires Restaurant, she eyed me with immediate disapproval. "Ai-ya! Whats the matter with your hair?" she said in ese.
"What do you mean, Whats the matter, " I said. "I had it cut." Mr. Rory had styled my hair differently this time, an asymmetrical blunt-line frihat was shorter on the left side. It was fashionable, yet not radically so.
"Looks chopped off," she said. "You must ask for your money back."
I sighed. "Lets just have a nice lunch together, okay?"
She wore her tight-lipped, pinched-nose look as she sed the menu, muttering, "Not too many good things, this menu." Theapped the waiters arm, wiped the length of her chopsticks with her finger, and sniffed: "This greasy thing, do you expect me to eat with it?" She made a show of washing out her rice bowl with hot tea, and then warher restaurant patroed near us to do the same. She told the waiter to make sure the soup was very hot, and of course, it was by her tongues expert estimate "not even lukewarm."
"You should so upset," I said to my mother after she disputed a charge of two extra dollars because she had specified chrysanthemum tea, instead of the regular green tea. "Besides, unnecessary stress isnt good for your heart."
"Nothing is wrong with my heart," she huffed as she kept a disparaging eye on the waiter.
And she was right. Despite all the tension she places on herself—and others—the doctors have proclaimed that my mother, at age sixty-nine, has the blood pressure of a sixteen-year-old and the strength of a horse. And thats what she is. A Horse, born in 1918, destio be obstinate and frank to the point of tactlessness. She and I make a bad bination, because Im a Rabbit, born in 1951, supposedly sensitive, with tendeoward being thin-skinned and skittery at the first sign of criticism.
After our miserable lunch, I gave up the idea that there would ever be a good time to tell her the news: that Rich Schields and I were getting married.
"Why are you so nervous?" my friend Marlene Ferber had asked over the phohe ht. "Its not as if Rich is the scum of the earth. Hes a tax attorney like you, for Chrissake. How she criticize that?"
"You dont know my mother," I said. "She hinks anybody is good enough for anything."
"So elope with the guy," said Marlene.
"Thats what I did with Marvin." Marvin was my first husband, my high school sweetheart.
"So there you go," said Marlene.
"So when my mother found out, she threw her shoe at us," I said. "And that was just for openers."
My mother had never met Rich. In fact, every time I brought up his name—when I said, for instahat Rid I had goo the symphony, that Rich had taken my four-year-old daughter, Shoshana, to the zoo—my mother found a way to ge the subject.
"Did I tell you," I said as we waited for the lunch bill at Four Dires, "what a great time Shoshana had with Rich at the Exploratorium? He—"
"Oh," interrupted my mother, "I didnt tell you. Your father, doctors say maybe need exploratory surgery. But no, now they say everything normal, just too much stipated." I gave up. And then we did the usual routine.
I paid for the bill, with a ten and three ones. My mother pulled back the dollar bills and ted out exact ge, thirtees, and put that oray instead, explaining firmly: