MOTHER.

(from At Home With the Pumpkin King)

My mother was an extremely unusual person. She lived in reality. Lord knows how she ever got a taste for it. Obviously not from my father. Sometimes I worry she must have been lonely, all day in reality, by herself. But then the loneliness was also real, and so she must have liked it.

If anyone tried to commiserate with her about our lunatic father, she would cheerfully announce that soon they would both be dead and therefore why not be nice to him? Spilt milk, fine lines, nocturnal emissions, shattered glass, all gave her a particular satisfaction. Here was reality, behaving as it should.

There was a time, I admit, when I thought her cold*. Other children’s mothers waited afternoons on the doorstep for the bus to arrive. I saw other children scooped up and praised. Even my father, when delusion was going well, would wax rapturous about his four sons, though generally he forgot which of us was good at what.

My mother, on the other hand, did not praise or condemn. She was only interested. Honors in Social Studies, failures in geometry, got much the same reception. She’d nod, ask a few questions and that would be it.

We worried about her. She was awfully isolated, wasn’t she? We thought she must be depressed. My father lectured her on the importance of being involved in the community. He himself was terribly involved, to the despair of many. He built bicycle paths as commanded by God in Heaven, who did not recognize that land could be held by private individuals.

Our mother, he decided, should likewise become involved. She ought to help out at school. All her children agreed. We wanted her to be one of the shiny, enthusiastic mothers of the Parent Teacher Association.

How difficult it must have been to balance sometimes, even for one anchored in reality: on one side, love, and, on the other, sanity. She joined. She attended meeting and field trips, saved popsicle sticks and soup labels.

It wasn’t long before the rumors reached our ears. The other mothers told the other children and they reported to us: our mother was a sociopath. She was incapable of being shocked by budget cuts, enraged by Phys Ed teachers, or delighted by art involving macaroni. She had no passion for bake sales. She cooperated but, still, she was unnerving. It was delicately suggested she stay home.

“I was told I am not a team player,” she explained.

The other mothers looked upon us with sympathy forever after: our mother was a PTA apostate.

But this was nothing, really, compared to the trouble she got in at church. We all thought it would be lovely to have a mother who went to church. We hoped she might learn, as the other church mothers had, to bake Black Forest cupcakes and smile with sweet resignation. She seemed amenable to God and even to the afterlife, though whenever we asked her about it she looked at us as if we’d phrased our questions slightly wrong.

If, in her presence, anyone became pushy about theological or metaphysical matters she would leave to the table and stir whatever was on the stove, remarking, half to herself, “Consciousness has many interesting properties.”

For a number of weeks she dutifully attended Bible Study, the Pastoral Search Committee, and Lady Lamplighters. On Sunday morning we accompanied her proudly to church and paid no notice of anyone but her, in her good but practical denim skirt, her gentle milk white face, and the sterling silver owl she wore everywhere. We did not bother trying to understand the sermon. This was her department: Mother was in charge of God.

I admit I don’t know exactly what happened. There was an extraordinary amount of tumult at church to which Mother was somehow connected. For example, the very nice man who directed the choir, and the very nice man who played organ, suddenly moved in together and gave birth to a beautiful Vietnamese girl whom they named Claire, after our mother.

Other people were not so appreciative. Bible Study took a violent turn. The Lady Lamplighters turned militant, and the church as a whole seemed headed for schism. A big meeting was held in the high school auditorium where it was decided -- if I may summarize -- that the church must either reinvestigate its deeply held beliefs, question its assumptions, revamp its politics, rethink its role in the community, or kindly request that my mother choose some other denomination.

Thereafter my mother stayed home. One of the few times I saw her show irritation was when a visitor pressed her to explain exactly what had occurred.

“All I did,” she insisted “was ask a few very obvious questions.”

* My mother’s predilection for reality was not, alas, inherited by me. I take after my father.