Free What My Mother Gave Me by Elizabeth Benedict Page B

superior realm, a territory she wouldn’t have dreamed of trespassing upon. When he died, when I was seven, she left the selection of my reading material to two of her closest friends, both of whom had been to college. She had only finished high school, and though she knew herself to be intelligent, she was fastidious at granting intellectual pride of place to those with what she considered superior credentials.
    And so, I have come to understand why she never got me presents, and this failure was the objective correlative of her inability to give me any useful guidance on a good way of being a woman. Th is, too, has been a cause for generous lashings of self-pity when I drink the hemlock of deprivation and regret for what I have not had, or what I had to earn or win myself, through luck or labor.
    I THOUGHT NO more about the question of my mother and her gifts, or lack of them. And one day—it was a sparkling late afternoon in the middle of May—I was in a cab driving down the West Side Highway. Th e sun glimmered on the river; coin-sized patches of light danced along the Hudson’s silver skin. My eye fell on a rather unprepossessing boat; I heard its cheerful, workmanlike tooting. I saw the sign spelled out in white along its sides. CIRCLE LINE , it said.
    Immediately, I am back more than fifty years. It is a spring day, but an earlier one: the beginning of April. Easter vacation. My mother has taken a day off. “We’re going on a little adventure,” she tells me. She has booked tickets for Circle Line: the boat that takes people around Manhattan Island.
    I remember, driving next to her in our two-toned blue Nash Rambler, a high sense of rightness, but a rightness whose exaltation nevertheless felt entirely secure and safe. My mother was driving me on “an adventure.” She had taken a day off. We were going to the city. Not only to the city: we were going on a boat. No one we knew had ever done this. It was something people talked about doing, but never did. And we were doing it!
    I don’t remember how long the voyage took. I remember sitting next to her and eating ham sandwiches we’d brought from home. I remember bringing her a coffee from the bar inside the boat; I selected, for myself, a lemonade. Th e air smelled wonderfully of salt and the larger world. “ Th ere’s the Statue of Liberty,” my mother said. We picked out the Empire State Building. Neither of which we’d ever actually visited, or, being New Yorkers, were likely to do. I was so proud of her, and of myself as her daughter. She had taken a day off! She had had this wonderful idea! She had made everything possible. Everything that no one else could have done.
    It occurred to me that day, fifty years later on the West Side Highway, that this was a very great gift indeed. Better than a Ginny doll or an angora sweater or a poodle skirt or a heart-shaped locket or a gold bracelet or my first pair of high heels. She was giving me the gift of the larger world. And the belief that it was something that could be reached. If you just thought of it, and figured out how to make it happen. Th is was the reward for not being like other women. Th is was our reward for not being like other mothers and daughters. An adventure on the water. Th e sight of the glittering city. Th e possibility of the greater world.

Th e Gift Twice Given
    JUDITH HILLMAN PATERSON
    â€œYour mother is dead. Forget about it.” Said or unsaid, the message was clear. Forget her and your life as it used to be.
    My fourth-grade teacher told the others my mother had died that summer. Th ey were to be nice to me but not mention it. I remember nothing about either the first day of school that year or my birthday. No presents. No cake. I remember loneliness, confusion, and my father’s devastating grief. My life depended on him—a dead man walking.
    He soon married my stepmother, Dot, the war widow of a distant cousin. I loved my