Free The River Queen by Mary Morris

nickel she needed for bus fare.
    My mother truly had an artist’s flair. She could do anything with her hands. I recall her quilting my bedspreads late into the night. She spent seven years on these. Or painting a portrait of a woman—half her face black and the rest of it blue. She explained to me that the black was a shadow. Just a few years ago we went to an exhibit of Picasso portraits at the Museum of Modern Art. My mother swept through the gallery. “Now that one, you see, it’s very good.” She pointed to a charcoal sketch. “He was very free when he did that. He didn’t overthink it.” A small crowd soon gathered around us. They thought my mother was a guide of some kind.
    But she never finished school. She returned to Saks and had been selling lingerie ever since. And now a woman she seemed to recognize came in to return a peach-colored nightgown. They had gone to grammar school together, but hadn’t seen one another in twenty years. “My brother-in-law has just moved back into town,” my Aunt Ruth said. “Shall I give him your number?”
    It took a while for my father to call. When he finally did, he said, “I was going through my pants before I sent them to the cleaner and I found your number.” Hardly the most romantic opener, and perhaps it should have been a sign, but my mother was glad he called. A week later they went on their first date. My mother was not a young woman, in her thirties, living at home with my grandmother, her brother-in-law and sister. She had been waiting for a long time for her life to begin. And he was a forty-four-year-old bachelor. My mother wondered at first if something wasn’t wrong with him.
    Before leaving on her date, she told my grandmother, “If I don’t like him, I’ll be home by ten.” At a quarter to ten my father told her he was tired and took her home. When she walked in at ten o’clock, my grandmother said, “Oh, you didn’t like him.”
    â€œI’m going to marry him,” my mother replied.
    He called her on Sunday from a skating rink and asked if she liked to skate. She loved to skate, she said. In truth she had skated only once before in her life, but she went down to the rink anyway and sprained her ankle. The following weekend he took her to dinner and she ate soft-shell crabs. When she vomited all the way home, she was sure she’d never hear from him again.
    He didn’t call the next day, and she knew it was over. She’d spend every New Year’s Eve for the rest of her life sitting with her sister and brother-in-law, childless as they were, embittered and alone. Then in the evening the phone rang and my father said, “I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier, but I thought you’d need to rest.”
    He offered to drive her to work on Monday morning and she accepted. When he picked her up, my grandfather sat in the front seat. Every morning after that my father picked her up with his father in front. Then one Friday night he invited her home to dinner. My mother told me that Grandma Morris didn’t care if she was a two-headed monster with green hair. She was thrilled that “Sonny” was bringing a girl home. In her more bitter moments my mother would quip that she was the only Russian Jewish woman my father had met who could “pass” among his fancy German Jewish friends.
    The following Monday when my father picked her up, his father got out of the car and moved into the backseat. They didn’t really know each other. I’m sure if they had, there would have been second thoughts, but they were married six weeks later. And I was born thirteen months to the day after that. They had another child and, as the soothsayer predicted, built a house near the shores of Lake Michigan.
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    I T IS odd to move through the world without caffeine. It produces in me a strange, sleepwalking state, as if I’m wrapped in gauze. Though