In the last few years of her life, my mother did a lot of sleeping. Not at night: night hours were for worrying and sometimes for the kind of reminiscing that recasts a life experience into something cringingly stupid you once did. Mom slept during the day, sometimes dropping off in the middle of a conversation. She slept deeply, if briefly, mouth open, head falling forward, gentle snores. Kind of like listening to a canoe bump against a dock as the wake of a speed boat spreads toward shore.
She and I had our best times during our daily 4 p.m. phone calls. 4 p.m. my time was 7 p.m. her time. She was back from what passed for supper in the no-frills retirement home, probably having skipped the hot dogs and beans and gone straight for the strawberry shortcake. She had brushed her teeth, put on her PJs, turned down her bed and eaten a couple pieces of chocolate before she dialed. She told me gentle lies about how she was feeling. She'd report on the confusion levels of her dining table mates: whether anyone remembered to pass the serving dishes and if she'd gotten a spoonful or two of mandarin orange slices before that ill-mannered wretch at the end of the table upended the bowl onto her own plate. If Mom had been to a play or concert, she'd expound on the audibility of the event. On a slow news day, she would ponder her maiden cousins, Selma Opal and Esta, aka the Roberts girls.
I met the Roberts girls once or twice. They lived in a little, tidy, airless house in Hamilton, Ohio. They had a parakeet. They kept their Venetian blinds closed at all times. They kept nothing of interest to children in their home. A visit with them did not include snacks or a meal. They seemed pleased to see my mother and pleased when she left. When the last of them died, she left my mother more than $100,000. The same amount was bequeathed to each of my mother's two brothers. Mom found this bewildering.
She formed the opinion that I should write about the Roberts girls. They grew up on a farm. They inherited the farm and sold it soon thereafter. They never married. They lived together all their lives. One of them worked.
That's it?
Tell me about them, I would urge.
They watched my brother and me while Father helped with the haying. They went to college but Esta didn't finish.
This was not a lot to go on but it's all she had to give me, beside the recurring pressure to write about them. One fine day, I realized I could do that, unhampered by stubborn facts.
I gave each sister a voice, to entwine and harmonize with the other two. Definite opinions. Dreams. Taste in food. Personal clothing style. I made all sorts of stuff up. Sex found its way gingerly into the narrative.
I got a fair amount written in the Spring of 2004, just before my mother died. I gave it to her to read, the last time I saw her. She was very loosely anchored, by then, but her past, with the golden sheen of a long Ohio summer day, still interested her. So did my story. She didn't say a thing about the truth of the matter.
Makes you wonder about history books, doesn't it?
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