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.” I don’t remember the tree; I remember the thrill in her voice.She pronounced it carefully, and spelled it.She also liked to say “portulaca.”The drama of the words “Tamiami Trail” stirred her, we learned on the same Florida trip.People built Tampa on one coast, and they built Miami on another.Then—the height of visionary ambition and folly—they piled a slow, tremendous road through the terrible Everglades to connect them.To build the road, men stood sunk in muck to their armpits.They fought off cottonmouth moccasins and six-foot alligators.They slept in boats, wet.They blasted muck with dynamite, cut jungle with machetes; they laid logs, dragged drilling machines, hauled dredges, heaped limestone.The road took fourteen years to build up by the shovelful, a Panama Canal in reverse, and cost hundreds of lives from tropical, mosquito-carried diseases.Then, capping it all, some genius thought of the word Tamiami: they called the road from Tampa to Miami, this very road under our spinning wheels, the Tamiami Trail.Some called it Alligator Alley.Anyone could drive over this road without a thought.Hearing this, moved, I thought all the suffering of road building was worth it (it wasn’t my suffering), now that we had this new thing to hang these new words on—Alligator Alley for those who liked things cute, and, for connoisseurs like Mother, for lovers of the human drama in all its boldness and terror, the Tamiami Trail.Back home, Mother cut clips from reels of talk, as it were, and played them back at leisure.She noticed that many Pittsburghers confuse “leave” and “let.” One kind relative brightened our morning by mentioning why she’d brought her son to visit: “He wanted to come with me, so I left him.” Mother filled in Amy and me on locutions we missed.“I can’t do it on Friday,” her pretty sister told a crowded dinner party, “because Friday’s the day I lay in the stores.”(All unconsciously, though, we ourselves used some pure Pittsburghisms.We said “tele pole,” pronounced “telly pole,” for that splintery sidewalk post I loved to climb.We said “slippy”—the sidewalks are “slippy.” We said, “That’s all the farther I could go.” And we said, as Pittsburghers do say, “This glass needs washed,” or “The dog needs walked”—a usage our father eschewed; he knew it was not standard English, nor even comprehensible English, but he never let on.)“Spell ‘poinsettia,’” Mother would throw out at me, smiling with pleasure.“Spell ‘sherbet.’” The idea was not to make us whizzes, but, quite the contrary, to remind us—and I, especially, needed reminding—that we didn’t know it all just yet.“There’s a deer standing in the front hall,” she told me one quiet evening in the country.“Really?”“No.I just wanted to tell you something once without your saying, ‘I know.’”Supermarkets in the middle 1950s began luring, or bothering, customers by giving out Top Value Stamps or Green Stamps.When, shopping with Mother, we got to the head of the checkout line, the checker, always a young man, asked, “Save stamps?”“No,” Mother replied genially, week after week, “I build model airplanes.” I believe she originated this line.It took me years to determine where the joke lay.Anyone who met her verbal challenges she adored.She had surgery on one of her eyes.On the operating table, just before she conked out, she appealed feelingly to the surgeon, saying, as she had been planning to say for weeks, “Will I be able to play the piano?” “Not on me,” the surgeon said.“You won’t pull that old one on me.”It was, indeed, an old one.The surgeon was supposed to answer, “Yes, my dear, brave woman, you will be able to play the piano after this operation,” to which Mother intended to reply, “Oh, good, I’ve always wanted to play the piano.” This pat scenario bored her; she loved having it interrupted.It must have galled her that usually her acquaintances were so predictably unalert; it must have galled her that, for the length of her life, she could surprise everyone so continually, so easily, when she had been the same all along.At any rate, she loved anyone who, as she put it, saw it coming, and called her on it.She regarded the instructions on bureaucratic forms as straight lines.“Do you advocate the overthrow of the United States government by force or violence?” After some thought she wrote, “Force.” She regarded children, even babies, as straight men.When Molly learned to crawl, Mother delighted in buying her gowns with drawstrings at the bottom, like Swee’pea’s, because, as she explained energetically, you could easily step on the drawstring without the baby’s noticing, so that she crawled and crawled and crawled and never got anywhere except into a small ball at the gown’s top.When we children were young, she mothered us tenderly and dependably; as we got older, she resumed her career of anarchism.She collared us into her gags.If she answered the phone on a wrong number, she told the caller, “Just a minute,” and dragged the receiver to Amy or me, saying, “Here, take this, your name is Cecile,” or, worse, just, “It’s for you.” You had to think on your feet.But did you want to perform well as Cecile, or did you want to take pity on the wretched caller?During a family trip to the Highland Park Zoo, Mother and I were alone for a minute.She approached a young couple holding hands on a bench by the seals, and addressed the young man in dripping tones: “Where have you been? Still got those baby-blue eyes; always did slay me.And this”—a swift nod at the dumbstruck young woman, who had removed her hand from the man’s—“must be the one you were telling me about.She’s not so bad, really, as you used to make out.But listen, you know how I miss you, you know where to reach me, same old place.And there’s Ann over there—see how she’s grown? See the blue eyes?”And off she sashayed, taking me firmly by the hand, and leading us around briskly past the monkey house and away.She cocked an ear back, and both of us heard the desperate man begin, in a high-pitched wail, “I swear, I never saw her before in my life….”On a long, sloping beach by the ocean, she lay stretched out sunning with Father and friends, until the conversation gradually grew tedious, when without forethought she gave a little push with her heel and rolled away.People were stunned.She rolled deadpan and apparently effortlessly, arms and legs extended and tidy, down the beach to the distant water’s edge, where she lay at ease just as she had been, but half in the surf, and well out of earshot.She dearly loved to fluster people by throwing out a game’s rules at whim—when she was getting bored, losing in a dull sort of way, and when everybody else was taking it too seriously.If you turned your back, she moved the checkers around on the board.When you got them all straightened out, she denied she’d touched them; the next time you turned your back, she lined them up on the rug or hid them under your chair.In a betting rummy game called Michigan, she routinely played out of turn, or called out a card she didn’t hold, or counted backward, simply to amuse herself by causing an uproar and watching the rest of us do double takes and have fits.(Much later, when serious suitors came to call, Mother subjected them to this fast card game as a trial by ordeal; she used it as an intelligence test and a measure of spirit.If the poor man could stay a round without breaking down or running out, he got to marry one of us, if he still wanted to
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