“People will wonder why you’re driving around with three corpses in your car.”
My aunt was asleep in the passenger seat, or so I thought. Her head bobbed a bit, but I glanced over just in time to see her smile when she said “corpses.” I smiled, too. It was another example of her dry wit and it caught me a bit off guard.
We’d been driving from Glen Arbor back to Sutton’s Bay; about a 45 minute drive through the back roads of Michigan. We’d spent the day at the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes and then picnicked at a nearby park. Ahead of me was my cousin, Mary, her call filled with the teenagers from our group. Behind me, an array of cousins and second cousins, a caravan of relatives. In my car, Aunt Edith, my cousin Sally, and my mother, no one except me, under the age of 70. They’d been talking as I drove, clarifying details of the past like sorting buttons in an old sewing kit. At one point Aunt Edith, about to comment on her daughter’s choice of car ahead of us said, “Well, I just wish she would…” and her voice trailed off. I caught my mother’s eye in the rearview mirror and we shared a knowing smile. Sure enough, when I glanced at my Aunt she was drooping, head slightly bouncing back, fast asleep. Within moments, the whole car was silent and when I looked in the mirror at my mother again, she and my cousin Sally looked like bobble head dolls, nodding to the rhythm of the road.
I focused on the road for the next 30 minutes, a bit drowsy, and willed myself not to turn on the radio for fear of waking my elders. It was the first quiet moment since we’d arrived in Michigan four days earlier and though I was tired, I relished the opportunity to listen to nothing.
My mother is a storyteller. She spins long, detailed memoirs at the dinner table remembering every name, every location, and almost every date. Even when my father tells a story, my mother fills in the names, corrects the dates, and raises a questioning eyebrow at the settings of his tales. The stories are never straight. They do not follow along like chapters in a book but rather unfold like origami and then fold back again from bird to flat paper and then back into a magnificently intricate winged bird.
I thought this ability to float a tale in the air was purely a skill of my mother’s, but after my first day with her extended family I was beginning to understand it as more of a genetic trait.
“Well, you know, Maryellen,” my aunt would begin, “That’s the time Norman stole checks from Dad and he was lucky to walk away alive from that mistake.”
“That wasn’t the first time Norman tested Dad’s patience,” my mother interjected and from there the two swapped story after story of Norman’s mischief and misdeeds and my Grandfather’s angry reprisals.
My mother and my Aunt are almost spitting images of each other even though seven years separate them. Their round faces and high cheekbones are haloed by a circle of gray curls (what I’ve jokingly called a poodle cut) and when my mother takes out her dentures, the resemblance is uncanny. It’s not only their looks that mirror each other, but their speech cadence, the set of their jaws when intently listening, and the lift of their eyebrows when a story strays from a detail they remember a different way. Even their laughs are identical and only when they sit side-by-side are their differences readily apparent.
For starters, my mother is a devoted Democrat, working for the political party most of her adult life. Aunt Edith, on the other hand, is a religious Republican, unafraid to share her opinions with anyone who will listen. My mother is an amazing cook, whipping up gourmet meals and desserts for political dinner parties and social gatherings. My aunt can cook, but her idea of gourmet is a layered salad slathered with sour cream, canned peas, and pearl onions. At one point during the visit, I was ordered (for my Aunt can phrase any plea for assistance more like a command than a request) to report to the kitchen no later than four in the afternoon for my tutoring in how to make (construct, really) an ice cream cake.
Ice cream cake is one of the few things I remember about my Grandmother. When we drove back in the summer from the Pacific Northwest to Des Moines, Iowa when I was a child I’d run into my Grandmother’s apartment and check her freezer never to be disappointed by the layered pastels of a sherbet frozen cake wrapped in thick whipped-cream frosting.
“It’s time I passed on the tradition,” Aunt Edith informed me and for the next hour we cut angel food cake with an electric knife, added drops of food dye to Cool Whip, and positioned slabs of rainbow sherbet so the cake lay level and round.
Later, she roped me into making a fruit salad claiming she couldn’t read the recipe she most likely read a million times before. After stirring the brown sugar and the walnuts and the marshmallows and the coconut and oh yes, the canned mandarin oranges and pineapple bits (which constituted the “fruit” in the fruit salad), we pulled the setting ice cream cake from the freezer just in time to thickly spread the Cool Whip icing around the edges, over the level top and stuff it down through the hole in the center.
Other differences between my mother and my aunt are in their level of patience. The double entendre of “it’s all relative” comes to mind. There are times, with my mother, that I feel we are always in a rush to get somewhere or complete a task or even just move through life. Patient is never a word I’d really use to describe my mother since she rarely sits down and when she does, is continuously busy with something – a book to read, a shirt to sew up, a letter to write. She works at a pace that exhausts me and though her words may sound supportive and patient, there’s an underlying edge that has always made me feel a bit doubtful of my actions.
But compared to my Aunt, my mother is the poster child of patience and acceptance.
“Well, I just want us to be aware of the time,” my Aunt would say again and again. “We don’t want to be late or keep the restaurant waiting!”
It was perhaps an hour before we needed to get going when she said this and her daughter, Mary who’d made the reservation and knew how to get where we intended to go was no where to be found. It was a like a push-me-pull-me cartoon – Aunt Edith wanted to get a move on while Mary was still putting all the pieces together – dressing her kids, walking the dog, finishing a conversation with another relative.
But we moved like a herd of cats throughout the week heightening my Aunt’s need to be early and rushing my already scattered cousin.
I had vowed weeks before my arrival that this trip was all about my mother. Truth be told, I didn’t really want to go to Michigan, but it meant a lot to my mother so I bought the ticket and packed my bags. Throughout the journey there I practiced my deep breathing and when our plane was delayed in Chicago making our connection with my sister in Traverse City hours late, I was a model of yogic patience.
Still, I stayed calm reading my book, intermittently solving a Sudoku puzzle or two, and when my eyes were tired, people watching.
I find Midwesterners to be a friendly bunch, but distinctly different than those of us from the Pacific Northwest. I was born in Iowa City, but when I was nine months old, my parents packed up the Plymouth Valiant station wagon and shipped us all – my brother, sister, and I – to Bremerton, Washington. For a few years after the move, we’d travel back in our Plymouth to spend our summers in Iowa while my father worked on his PhD. Though I was born in the land of corn, I have always considered myself a Washingtonian with Washingtonian affects and a penchant for cool, rainy weather.
My partner would disagree. Ann’s a born and bred Wisconsinite, a Madisonian to be specific and I still chuckle when she flattens out her vowels as she excitedly tells a story. My parents, Midwesterners too, love it as well. Ann says that you can always tell a Midwesterner because they can carry on a conversation anywhere, any time, and yes, about any subject though they prefer talking about the weather. When I ask for specifics about why she sees me as more of a mid-country person than a West Coaster, she’s short on examples usually ending the conversation with “I can just tell.”
While my mother and I sat stranded in the O’Hare Airport, I still didn’t see much resemblance between me and all the others seated around us. Then my mother struck up a conversation with the woman sitting next to her and before I knew it, I was involved in the conversation at first because I was embarrassed that my mother was sharing so many family stories and later because I wanted to add details to her tales.
“Oh my god,” I thought, “I AM a Midwesterner!”
By the time we got on the plane I was exhausted. I’m not a very comfortable passenger on planes and generally I don’t sleep for any length of time. But the second the small plane took off, I could feel my head toss back and melt warmly into the headrest. I woke up only once during the flight, to the weight of my jaw slack and heavy and then nodded back to sleep, an upright corpse on her way to Traverse City or as I jokingly came to refer to it – Traversity.
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