The Day My Mother Showed Up
I don’t know what overcame me but my hand shot up.
Having skipped a grade, I was the youngest in my ninth-grade science class. I was used to raising my hand in class and loved to engage with the teacher.
But this time, I immediately felt I had overstepped.
Out of the corner of my eye, I searched to see if anyone else had extended their arm.
I was alone.
“Yes?” the teacher asked.
My thoughts roiled in my brain.
“My mother will do,” I said, trying to sound confident.
“Thank you,” she replied.
The bell rang and class was dismissed. I gathered my books. “Why didn’t you say you had to ask her first?” I thought.
I arrived home and as usual, did my homework, but then uncharacteristically fussed about. I finally approached my mother, chopping onions in the kitchen.
I swallowed.
“My science class is going on a trip to the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.”
“That’s nice,” she said in a singsong accent.
English was her third or fourth language after Yiddish, Hebrew, Romanian and German and she often mangled her words and tenses.
I knew she was attending school at the “Y” to study English. She would laboriously write sentences in her black-and-white speckled notebook but to my eyes, she did not seem to be making any progress at all.
I cringed.
What would I say to my friends if they asked “Where is she from?”
“At least she isn’t Hungarian”, I thought. To my ears, Hungarians sounded like rude Draculas. And thankfully, she wasn’t Polish, like my father and his relatives who took turns amusing each other in an escalating vortex of irony and sarcasm. Once, when a newly wealthy friend had waxed on and on about her manicures and pedicures, my father said “Back home, you also had manicures and pedicures.”
My mother would never joke about the pre-war years.
In fact, she seemed to have no sense of humor at all.
I remained motionless and went on.
“The teacher asked for a parent to come with us and I said that you would do it.”
I secretly hoped that she would decline. Instead she looked up and smiled. “You did? When is it?”
That was that.
The die was cast.
In days to come, I heard my mother excitedly telephone her sisters and tell them that she was going on a school trip with my class.
I grew more and more morose.
The day arrived.
My mother wore a two-piece fitted suit, heels and hat.
We walked to the school.
I introduced my mother to the teacher.
I wondered if anyone noticed her accent.
The students chatted excitedly as we climbed the stairs to the elevated train station.
I glanced at my mother.
She stood in the rear, taking her guardianship duties seriously.
At the museum, we were greeted by the skeleton of an enormous dinosaur, its endless neck reaching to the ceiling of the domed entrance hall.
“What is she thinking?” I mused as we wandered from room to room.
The students examined a diorama of prehistoric families gathered around a campfire.
“Fire is also big,” I thought and then, chastised, realized I was mixing Yiddish and English with a dash of Jewish hyperbole.
My mother gazed at the mineral cabinets.
“How does she reconcile the prehistoric world with her world?” I wondered.
I saw her speaking with her charges.
I realized that she was the best-dressed woman in the museum.
The day ended but her radiance continued.
It lasted for a long time.
Elaine Rosenberg Miller’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Adelaide Review, Bangalore Review, Huffington Post, Jerusalem Post, The Forward, TImes of Israel and other publications.
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