6 Transformation
I couldn't remember when I was as impatient with the clock as I was waiting for the days to pass until Saturday. Even filling my time with farm chores, homework, and violin practice didn't make those hands move any faster. Chandler was no longer avoiding me at school. The hens had their reason to cackle, but we both avoided them. I learned how to keep my eyes in tunnel vision, something at which Chandler had become expert.
"Why did you lie about you and Chandler?" Karen Jacobs came forward to ask me at the first opportunity. "You were ashamed after all, weren't you?"
"I'm only ashamed of you. Karen. You're so frustrated, you're pathetic," I shot back. Her mouth fell open wide enough to attract flies,
Later. when I told Chandler, he burst into a roar of laughter that drew everyone's attention to us. We were beginning to enjoy our notoriety.
After school on Friday. Daddy took Mommy and me to the mall, where she helped me find a new dress and matching shoes. While we were there. I bought Uncle Simon his birthday present. He was going to be forty-five on Sunday. Mommy had decided to make him dinner and a cake, and had thrown down the gauntlet as soon as Grandad began to utter some opposition. She announced it at dinner Thursday night.
"Making a big thing out of a grown man's birthday is heathen," Grandad started.
"We're going to have a nice party nevertheless," Mommy flared.
I never saw her fill so quickly with what Daddy half-humorously referred to as her Russian fury. The veins in her neck rose against her skin, her shoulders lifted, her hands pressed down an the table, and her eyes looked like they were on springs and would come popping out to shoot across the table at Grandad's face.
Whenever she flew into a high rage. Mommy never turned crimson as much as she developed these two milk-white spots at the comers of her lips. She spoke slowly, taking great care with her words the way someone just practicing the language might. In any case. whatever Grandad Forman saw in her at Thursday night's dinner was enough to close the door quickly on his objections. He shook his head and returned his attention to his food.
Mommy's body slowly receded, losing the swollen shoulders and neck. She threw me a confident smile of satisfaction and talked about her cake. She was planning on making Uncle Simon's favorite: strawberry shortcake.
At the mall I found him a beautiful new set of gardening tools, and then a card specially designed for an uncle. I never called him anything else and never viewed him as a step-uncle, even after I was old enough to understand what that meant. To me he was as much a part of our family as Uncle Peter had been. Love bound us closer than blood.
It had been some time since Mommy and I had gone shopping together. By watching television, she had seen the changes in fashion, but it was still a bit shocking and curious to her. I ended up choosing a round-neck sleeveless shell top in all-over paisley print with shades of fuchsia, burgundy, and black. To wear with it I bought a stretchy, pull-on, knee-length skirt with one-inch ruffle at the hem. To complete the outfit. I chose platform shoes that had crocheted uppers with stretch elastic ankle straps and a ridged sole. Daddy joined us just as I was trying the outfit on, and when I looked back at him standing beside Mommy, I saw an expression of pride on both their faces,
"You look very nice,," Daddy said. "Makes you look older."
"Makes her look her age," Mommy corrected. "She's no longer a tomboy farmhand. She's my young lady."
"Mine, too," Daddy said.
"Grandad's not going to like this. He's always saying women are practically naked these days," I said.
"Don't you worry about him," Mommy said, a little of that fury coming back into her eyes. "It's not his business."
She threw Daddy a look, but he turned his eyes away and then said he would bring the car around and meet us at the mall's main entrance.
My heart was thumping with joy and excitement as Mommy and I walked out with my packages piled in my arms. I couldn't help wondering what Chandler would say when he first saw me. Most of my clothing, especially the clothes I wore to school, was so plain and unflattering,
"We'll fix your hair nice. too," Mommy decided.
I smiled to myself, imagining what most of the other girls my age would say or think if their mothers suggested such a thing. I had no fear about Mommy cuffing, brushing, and styling my hair for me. Without any sort of formal education, she had come from Russia carrying an unofficial, unwritten degree from the school of common sense and everyday skills. Her grandmothers and her mother had taught her how to cook, create and mend clothes, clean any kind of surface, provide first aid and generally make do with so much less than we had now. They taught her all this before she was ten years old.
What's more. Mommy didn't need Grandad Forman looking over her shoulder to be sure she didn't waste a morsel of food. She knew how to turn leftovers into a fresh new meal. I knew the mothers of my classmates would criticize and ridicule her for being a slave in her own home or something, so I rarely, if ever, bragged about her abilities.
Once. when I had an English assignment to write an essay about someone I considered heroic. I wrote about Mommy. It was before I knew she had come here specifically to marry Daddy without ever having met him. Still. I had often wondered and thought about the courage it had to have taken for someone so young to enter an entirely different world, where people spoke a different language, had different customs and st
yles, and whole new ways of living. I knew she had come with very little in her possession. What sort of faith in herself did that demand?
Today, my classmates and their mothers moaned and groaned about an hour or so delay at an airport or a traffic jam on a major highway. Girls my age, who were only a year or so younger than Mommy when she had arrived here, thought the world was coming to an end if their CD players broke. The stories they heard about their own grand-and greatgrandparents were akin to fables and science fiction. I knew if I told them about Mommy they would look at me as even more of an outsider. weird.
I told them next to nothing.
On Friday night. Mommy worked on my hairdo. She surprised me by having had Daddy buy some recent fashion magazines, so she could study some of the current styles.
"I used to do my mother's hair," she explained after I had washed mine and sat at her small vanity table with a towel over my shoulders. "She handed me a brush when I was no more than five and I would spend hours stroking her hair while she sang or did some needlework. Her hair was the color of dark almonds and she had hazel eyes with tiny green specks. I wondered if I could ever be as beautiful.
"I used to think we would remain forever as we were. I would be forever five and she would be forever a young woman who, when she strolled through our village, wearing that angelic soft smile on her lips, captured the imaginations of every man who saw her, no matter what age. Wives glared angrily at their husbands. I saw it all, walking beside her, holding her hand. I felt like a princess with the queen."