Experiments

Amazon reports that White Trash Rising-Lessons My Mother Taught Me has sold 38 copies! Thank you to everyone! The book is the story of my life, from my mother's pregnancy with me, through Lilly's birth, to my divorce three years later. It is a story of learned behaviors, trauma passed down through generations, and how these patterns affect a person's choices and decisions. It is also the story of the good times and the saving grace of friends and family. This week, I've been sharing some of the good memories of the Christmas season.

Science Experiments

I hoped to raise a psychologist, not like Sigmund Freud, of course, perhaps Skinner, Maslow, or James.  I would one day bask in the glory of her contribution to the field, her literary endeavors, and the hundreds, nay, thousands of people she affected.

A nurse wouldn’t be bad either.  Not my first choice, since the job is exhausting and heartbreaking.  But if she felt the need to heal, of course, I could support that.  After all, we do have many respected nurses in our family. 

Perhaps an Administrator or Executive Director.  The twenty-four-hour-a-day position and the stress would not be ideal.  Given her argumentative nature and ability to point out unreasonable rules, perhaps a career in the legal profession would be her choice.

But no, my daughter skipped over all my influences.  Years later, we used Ancestry.com and discovered our DNA is practically identical.  But there have been a few times in her life when I look at her and wonder if she is proof that the Bowling Ball cheated on me.  She tells me that’s not how it works, but I do wonder sometimes.

Instead of pursuing any of my myriad career options, Lilly chose to become a scientist.  She ignored my influence and pointed to her Aunt Donna, showing an early scientific tendency.

One weekday morning, Lilly came out of her room, and her hair was a crewcut in the front, with the sides looking as if a rat had chewed on it all night. I stood my daughter in front of the full-length mirror and asked gently,

                “Did you cut your hair?”

                “Uh huh”

                There was no way to comb it over.  Even a ponytail wouldn’t fix this mess, and the uneven sides didn’t allow for any type of ponytail.  I knew this was normal.  I had seen Donna’s children do the same, and the children of friends.  It was a rite of passage.  I might as well accept it.

                “How do you think it looks?” I asked Lilly.

                “I look boo-tee’ful” Lilly announced proudly.

                I had to go to work, and she had to go to Headstart.  It was time for Lilly to learn about the vicious world of peer pressure at Headstart. 

                “Okay, boo-tee’ful let’s get going.”

                A few parents laughed sympathetically, but none of her friends at Headstart seemed to notice Lilly had a new haircut.  A week later, while visiting Grandma, Lilly got her hair fixed.  She was quite disgusted to have to get her hair cut at a beauty shop.

                “But it’s pretty!” she protested, causing her grandma and me to wonder whether the child was born with absolutely no taste.

I couldn’t really call that an experiment.  It was a normal child’s action.  I didn’t realize it was a setup for a lifetime of my daughter’s “experiments”.  The experiments would only get worse.

                At almost four, Lilly wore a pull-up at night in case of accidents. She also slept only a few hours a night. It was common on a Saturday to be awakened before dawn by Lilly patting me softly, wearing nothing but her pull-up.

                “You awake, Mama?”

                “Uh-huh, I’m awake now, go get dressed.”

On a Saturday morning, I felt Lilly patting me and heard her say, “You awake, Mama?”

I rolled over and reluctantly opened my eyes.  With my eyes half open, I reached for my glasses, and Lilly was a blur beside the bed.  With my glasses on, I turned on the bedside lamp.

                There stood my child, a black Sharpie in her hand, her body black from hairline to the tips of her toes.  The only parts not colored were covered by her pull-up and the areas of her back she couldn’t reach. 

                “Oh shit, Lilly, that’s a permanent marker!” I screamed in horror.

                A million thoughts sprang to mind. She looked like a miniature Al Jolson. Lilly had crossed boundaries that were uncomfortable. This was never coming off, and I had to take her out in public. Would Headstart call Social Services on me? How do I get this off? Oh my God, would people think I did this to her?

                Lilly was shocked by my response.  Apparently, she thought I would find her new skin color exciting.  Instead, by hearing my words and seeing my face, she knew something was wrong.  Her eyes grew wide and filled with tears.

                “What’s purr-a-nent mean?  What is purr-a-nent?” She screamed, her right hand still clutching the capless black Sharpie marker.

                “Purr-a-nent means it doesn’t come off!”

                This caused a cascade of tears and snot. 

                “I don’t want purr-a-nent”

She screamed and threw the marker across the room.

I ran to the computer room and started searching frantically.  I was relieved to find that other children had done the same thing.  Probably not to the extent mine had, but enough to provide helpful hints.

                Baby wipes were the consensus among the other parents. Somehow, baby wipes would miraculously wipe away the layers of black marker from her skin. Digging through the house, closets, backpacks, and suitcases, I found a stock of wipes. By the time Lilly was a dark gray, I had to get her dressed to go to the store for several more boxes of wipes. By the time I had to get her to Headstart on Monday, Lilly was a light gray, which I decided would have to wear off.

                This was only the beginning of a lifetime of experimentation.  Purr-a-nent markers were rounded up and hidden. Needlessly, since it appeared that Lilly rarely repeated her experiments. Lilly was offended by the removal and hiding of all “purr-a-nent” markers.

                One day, taking her to work, Lilly went from office to office to talk to the staff.  On the way home, her little voice came from the backseat.

                “Some of your staff have purr-a-nent markers.  You let them have purr-a-nents.”

                “Because the people at work don’t color their whole body with purr-a-nent markers.” 

One morning, Lilly flooded the bathroom by plugging the sink's overflow.

                “I wanted to see what it would do.” 

She waited until the waterfall was out of control to wake me up. To be fair, she did find out what it would do. Some experiments were harmless, such as spending hours teaching her pet rabbit sign language. 

                “Bingo could sign; he just doesn’t want to.” She told me disgustedly.

It was while she was in the pantry mixing dry goods that I realized I had to control her experiments.  I showed her how to make ice cream in a bag or butter in a jar.  I had her help me bake.  Desperately, I funneled her need to experiment into harmless activities.

                I realized that Lilly would be more like my sister than me.  Donna, as the oldest, won again.  Then I remembered Mom and her pecan logs.  Mom was always finding a recipe or an idea and trying it out.  Genetics had won again. Lilly came by her experiments naturally.

Mom’s experiments peaked around the holidays.  Magazines offered shiny photos of do-it-yourself ideas that Mom could never resist.  As her “helper,” I was part of her projects.

One year, it was homemade candles.  A cheerful pre-Martha Stewart housewife had pictures of beautiful homemade Christmas candles in a magazine.  Just a few simple items.  Bricks of canning wax, something no 1970s housewife would be without.  Mom had boxes of the wax used to seal the jars of jam and jelly we made from the berries we picked. A wick cord, easy to find in the junk drawer. The junk drawer was a treasure trove of purposeless cords. We could use crayon shavings to color the bricks of clear canning wax.  My hoard of broken generic CO-OP crayons was more wax than color, perfect for candle making.

Mom melted the wax, and I cleaned the kitchen table, its poor legs wobbling in protest as I washed and dried the surface.  Our excitement was palpable. 

The directions were ridiculously easy. Melt the wax with a bit of crayon in your preferred color. We had a Christmas theme, so our first candle would be red. Once the wax is melted, pour it onto a flat surface, place the wick in the middle, and before the wax hardens, roll it into a taper candle.

I had thought that making candles meant endlessly dipping a wick into a pot of wax until, layer by layer, a candle formed.  That was what the pictures in the history book had shown me.  Mom had stumbled on a much less labor-intensive method.  As Mom added pieces of color to the wax, I was already envisioning our candles, looking like the magazine pictures.

“It’s ready,” Mom declared, holding the sauce pot in the air.

“Stand back, this thing is hot!” Mom warned as she stood at one end of the dining table.  I stood under her elbow, ready to “help” with the candle-making process.

“Once this stuff is poured out, we have to let it cool enough so we don’t burn our hands, but it has to be still warm enough to wrap.” Mom explained.

Mom poured the wax in one motion.  We watched as the wax rushed across the table and kept rushing.  Mom had miscalculated, not realizing that the table had a definite lean and that the floors of the old house slanted in various directions. 

“Catch it, catch it!” Mom yelled, pot still in her hand, aghast as the wax seemed to pick up momentum heading toward the distant end of the table. 

We both ran to the south end of the table, cupping our hands and tossing hot wax back onto the table.

“This shit is hot,” Mom told me, “Be careful!”

Holding my too-small hand on the edge of the table to create a dam, I had a handful of melted wax.  I could only agree as the wax ran around both sides of my hand.  The running slowed as the wax cooled.  The tossed-back wax and the wax behind the dam begin to coagulate into a red, grainy lump. 

“Roll!” Mom bellowed.  “We gotta roll this shit before it gets hard!”

I tried to be a good helper, but my arms were too short, my hands too small.  Mom rolled half the wax into a snake.

“Get the wick!” She ordered.

I threw the wick at her, and she tossed it onto the wax, rolling it until, eventually, a candle formed around the wick.  Instead of the artistic red wax leaves shown in the magazine, we had chunks and bits that formed a somewhat tubular shape.

There were clumps where the cooler wax had been tossed back onto the table. There was a thin section in the middle with Mom’s fingerprints where she had packed the cooling wax too tightly.  Small cracks circled the candle.  Even I could see a definite lean to the taper.

“This looks like shit!” Mom declared, holding the candle aloft.

Picking at the red wax between my fingers and under my fingernails, I could only agree.  But I wasn’t stupid enough to say so.  It certainly didn’t look like the pictures in the magazine.  I wondered whether the lady who wrote the article had a kitchen that looked like ours after the experiment.

The table had a center seam to insert an extra piece to extend it for guests.  The wax had been pushed into the center, lying directly over the seam.  Wax had oozed through the seam and dripped onto the floor below.  The seam itself was coated with wax.  No wonder our candle wasn’t the sturdy, robust size of the example.  The southward-leaning end of the table had a waterfall of wax down the edge and onto the floor.

“Clean up the mess, Pooch. We might as well make a green one next.”

As I scraped the red wax off the floor, the table, and the table edge, Mom took out a couple of books of matches and placed them under each leg. 

“You get the red off good, and I’m gonna clean out the pot.” Mom directed.

We did make more candles.  The second was barely any better than the first, but by the third, fourth, and fifth, we had a semblance of a Christmas candle.  By then, we had used up all the wax.

Mom announced, “Well, that’s all we are gonna get done tonight.”

Mom wanted a Christmas that looked like the magazines.  Our Christmas tree could never make it to publications, but she tried in other ways.

One Christmas, it was a cheesecake.  Decorated with festive colors and whipped-cream flowers, it looked delicious in the pictures. This would be easy to duplicate; simply throw the ingredients together, bake, then top it with whipped cream and canned cherry pie filling.

Our old oven had variable temperature settings, though, and a cheesecake is fragile.  We didn’t have the fancy springform pans, so Mom used a sheet cake pan. She was good at improvising. Coming out of the oven, the edges puffed up and burned, while the middle had sunk and become a dense, suspiciously damp oasis on the sheet pan.

Throwing a can of cherry pie filling on top, Mom cautioned me.

“Don’t tell your father it’s a cheesecake.  You know he won’t eat anything with cheese in it.”

“I won’t,” I promised, licking the remaining sauce out of the can with a spatula.

Mom took another spatula and spread the cherry pie filling, carefully arranging most of it to fill the hole in the middle.  With a can of Reddi-whip around the edges, I had to admit it didn’t look bad.

True to my word, I never told Dad he was eating a cheesecake.  Until one day, in my thirties, when Mom had gotten quite good at cheesecake (but not candles), I slipped up.

“Oh, you made cheesecake,” I said cheerfully.

“What did you say?”  Dad asked.  His hearing was selective, but it seemed he always heard critical words.

Mom gave me a look that would have made a deranged killer stop in their tracks. This was one of the looks that made it clear my life was on the line if I made a misstep.

“I said, Mom made us a sheet cake.”

“Hmph,” Dad muttered to himself. Disappointed that his adult daughter still announced the obvious. I don’t blame him for his suspicion. Most of Mom’s greatest experiments ended up being fed to him.

Christmas was the time to try new things.  One year, it pickled fish for some reason.  Another year, Cathy attempted her mom’s recipe for baked beans.  That turned out to be good, good enough that Dad had to make a rule declaring.

“Youse can all go outside if you are gonna sit around farting.  And stay the hell out of them beans, dammit, you’re gonna hurt someone.”

From pickled cauliflower that turned pink, to the sauerkraut that blew the lids off the jars while we were eating supper, Mom was always ready to try something new.  It was no wonder then that Lilly Pearl was the same way.  Like Dad, I could only stand by and hope for the best.