My mother died the same day Martha Stewart went to prison.
I remember it well, because I was sitting in my mother's hospital room, trying not to think about what was happening in the bed to my left, watching the muted, wall-mounted television as cameras followed a handcuffed Martha into the minimum security prison that would be her home for the next several months. I was puzzled by this. Was it really necessary to handcuff Martha Stewart? Were they really worried she'd suddenly go crazy, wrestle a weapon away from her police escorts and take a guard hostage?
"Fuhgetit, screws! Y'aint takin' me alive!"
On the other hand, I reasoned, Martha would be scary in a hostage crisis, because you couldn't starve her out. All she'd need to survive would be a pine cone, a cellulose sponge, eight Brazil nuts and a bottle of balsamic vinaigrette. She and her hostage would eat like royalty for a month.
As the respirator clicked and hissed behind me, simulating the breathing that my dying mother's inert lungs could no longer accomplish, I also remember thinking that, over the next several months, I'd probably miss Martha more than I'd miss my mother. In hindsight, of course, this was a ridiculous thought. I missed them both about the same.
My mother was an unwed mother long before it became the fashion. My father had gotten her pregnant in the fifties, then abandoned her to married someone "more appropriate," in his words. He did end up providing support for me, but only after a judge ordered him to do it or go to jail. Years later, of course, he'd tell the story to all who would listen of how he gallantly stepped up to "do the right thing" and support his out-of-wedlock child, just like the "legitimate" ones.
The fact of my legitimacy, or lack thereof, seemed to be of great interest to everyone but me in the sixties. I was busy watching Captain Kangaroo and learning how to dominate the Western world in schoolyard tetherball. I did not know that my parents were locked in head-to-head combat over whether to lie about being married and divorced. My mother, having been raised in the forties, had no wish to be thought of as "one of those kinds of girls," as she most surely would be if people knew she'd never been married, but was a mother. My father had a vested interest in punishing her for disappointing him and not leaving when he was done with her, so blabbed all over town that he'd never be caught dead in a marriage to my mother.
I would not discover until years later that my father had arranged for my mother to see a doctor of dubious repute in a motel room in Hollywood. My mother had refused on the grounds that she didn't want to undergo surgery performed by someone with shaky, alcoholic hands and filthy fingernails. I was never sure whether to take this personally or not. Would she have gone through with it if she could have afforded the sterile white comfort of a hospital room, where the procedure would have been done under false medical pretenses ("a D&C after miscarriage," for example)?
I remember it well, because I was sitting in my mother's hospital room, trying not to think about what was happening in the bed to my left, watching the muted, wall-mounted television as cameras followed a handcuffed Martha into the minimum security prison that would be her home for the next several months. I was puzzled by this. Was it really necessary to handcuff Martha Stewart? Were they really worried she'd suddenly go crazy, wrestle a weapon away from her police escorts and take a guard hostage?
"Fuhgetit, screws! Y'aint takin' me alive!"
On the other hand, I reasoned, Martha would be scary in a hostage crisis, because you couldn't starve her out. All she'd need to survive would be a pine cone, a cellulose sponge, eight Brazil nuts and a bottle of balsamic vinaigrette. She and her hostage would eat like royalty for a month.
As the respirator clicked and hissed behind me, simulating the breathing that my dying mother's inert lungs could no longer accomplish, I also remember thinking that, over the next several months, I'd probably miss Martha more than I'd miss my mother. In hindsight, of course, this was a ridiculous thought. I missed them both about the same.
My mother was an unwed mother long before it became the fashion. My father had gotten her pregnant in the fifties, then abandoned her to married someone "more appropriate," in his words. He did end up providing support for me, but only after a judge ordered him to do it or go to jail. Years later, of course, he'd tell the story to all who would listen of how he gallantly stepped up to "do the right thing" and support his out-of-wedlock child, just like the "legitimate" ones.
The fact of my legitimacy, or lack thereof, seemed to be of great interest to everyone but me in the sixties. I was busy watching Captain Kangaroo and learning how to dominate the Western world in schoolyard tetherball. I did not know that my parents were locked in head-to-head combat over whether to lie about being married and divorced. My mother, having been raised in the forties, had no wish to be thought of as "one of those kinds of girls," as she most surely would be if people knew she'd never been married, but was a mother. My father had a vested interest in punishing her for disappointing him and not leaving when he was done with her, so blabbed all over town that he'd never be caught dead in a marriage to my mother.
I would not discover until years later that my father had arranged for my mother to see a doctor of dubious repute in a motel room in Hollywood. My mother had refused on the grounds that she didn't want to undergo surgery performed by someone with shaky, alcoholic hands and filthy fingernails. I was never sure whether to take this personally or not. Would she have gone through with it if she could have afforded the sterile white comfort of a hospital room, where the procedure would have been done under false medical pretenses ("a D&C after miscarriage," for example)?
