“Kat, this is your mom.” Click. Her phone messages were succinct.
“Kat, this is Susan.” Another message. Click.
I never called her Susan, but was pleased when she left a message. Usually she hung up. Mom and her friends didn’t have answering machines.
On the phone, she talked about Oprah and The Good Wife, and then steered the conversation to her favorite topic: how great I was. She was hyperbolic in her admiration of her children. We were born teachers, she said. We were born writers, she said. We were born doctors, she said. Well… I fainted in Health class during a film of a cow giving birth, but if Mom thought I’d be a doctor… she had to be right!
One thing riled her up: I was her favorite, so how dare I not be the favorite of everyone, not just in the family, but, if I understood it correctly, the entire world?
For instance, there was a fracas about my aunt’s will. Dad expected to be his sister’s heir. Instead, she left the whole estate to her bossy niece, X.
Mom liked my aunt (“the only decent one in that family”), but asked, “Why on earth didn’t she leave it to your dad?”
“Oh, X was always her favorite!”
“I would have thought you’d be her favorite! There you are, at her deathbed, and…”
“Mom, the intensive care unit was dominated by her visitors. They kicked us out!”
Mom was loyal to a fault. When my best friend and I took an acting class in fifth grade, we were cast as trees. The only speaking role was that of a bird, played by a fourth-grader.
“We’re better actresses,” my friend said. “She only got it because she’s pretty.”
Mom thought it was absurd that I didn’t have the leading role. “All that talent,” she muttered. Out of loyalty, she also thought the play should be rewritten so my friend could be the co-star.
And then there was the time I applied to only one graduate school (the applications cost $25, which I thought outrageous) and was offered free tuition and a teaching assistantship.
Mom looked suspiciously at the letter. “Why isn’t there anything about that fellowship?”
“Well, I didn’t get it.”
She wanted to call up and complain to the department chair, but I convinced her the whole thing was a whimsy (true) and if I didn’t like it I was coming right home.
Another thing she wondered: Why wasn’t I publishing my essays in The New York Times instead of the local newspaper?
“Gee, do you think they’d be interested in the butter cow?”
Okay, she knew when she’d gone too far.
The best thing she ever said to me: “We’re not just mother and daughter, we’re friends.”
Not only was she my friend, she was my best friend.