Laurel DiGangi

Into The World There Came a Soul Named Joan

My mother had no respect for Time. She expected him to stretch and expand according to her moods. But Time didn’t care. He’d kept his own pace since the Big Bang and expected the universe, from sparkling galaxies to sparkling maidens, to keep lockstep with his ticks and tocks.
 

1950: MY FAIR LADY

Time watches as my nineteen-year-old mother bathes in a claw-footed tub. But Time is not a voyeur. He lacks libido and seeks only chaste amusement. Joan seems amused, too. She blows at a puff of foam that rests on her forearm, shooting smaller puffs airborne. The doorbell rings. My grandmother hollers, “Joanie, your boyfriend’s here!” The boyfriend is my father, George, although not my father yet. 

George turns his back as my towel-wrapped mother scurries across the hall to her bedroom. He tells my grandmother, “Please tell her we have to leave in five minutes.”

But tonight, especially, she can’t beat Time. There are too many creams, powders, and sprays in her big date routine. Too many bits of clothing: panties, girdle, bra, slip, and the delicate hose she must slide up her legs carefully to avoid an ugly runner. My grandmother becomes her “lady’s maid,” straightening her stocking seams, hooking up her brassiere, and packing her new beaded handbag with tissue, lipstick, and quarters for the bathroom attendant. On special occasions like this—George is taking her to see her first play, My Fair Lady—Joan wants to look extra glamorous, worthy of being onstage herself. But all George wants is to get to the theater on time. 

Time hopes my parents will argue. But my mother is too beautiful to quarrel with, traffic is good, and the ushers thankfully seat them late. My parents will have plenty of opportunities to argue about Time in the future. He’ll make sure of it.

And as they listen to Eliza Doolittle’s father sing, “Get Me to the Church on Time,” George dreams of marrying his Joanie.

1960: GET ME TO THE CHURCH ON TIME

Time is an atheist, quite ironic as the Catholic Church respects him deeply. I must stay after class an extra fifteen minutes as penance for arriving ten seconds late. You would think that getting to school on time four days a week was good enough for those nuns, but no. They insist on five. I respect both Time and the Church, but I respect my mother more. She insists on driving me the two blocks to school, bundling me and little brother Georgie, who goes along for the ride, in hats, scarves, and gloves. She won’t let me walk for fear I’ll be kidnapped or simply freeze to death. How can I say no to this love? Even though Mom skips her morning toilette, simply throwing a long coat over her nightgown, she wastes precious minutes fretting over us and often can’t find her car keys. 

Church goes the same. Whatever Mass we plan for, we’ll miss it and be late for the next. The noon Mass turns into the one o’clock Mass turns into our 1:15 arrival. There’s no room to sit, so we stand in back behind other standees. I’m only eight-years-old and four-foot-two inches tall, so all I see are the backs of coats. I long to someday sit up front, to view the gleaming white and gold altar with its flickering candles. I consider taking Communion, but we missed church last week so we cannot eat the Jesus-Host with a mortal sin on our souls. 

My father never goes to church. He says grown men who work to support their families don’t have to. I worry that we’re all going to Hell.

In a few years, I’ll stop worrying. Jesus is no match for Time.

1963: MOVIE TIME

My family stops going to regular sit-down movie theaters because Dad hates missing the movie’s first five, ten, or fifteen minutes. Instead we go to drive-ins, even in the chilly spring and fall, using the speaker-pole heaters to keep warm. Nobody sees you at the drive-in, so Mom fusses less with her hair and makeup. And if we miss the beginning of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, there’s always Horror Hotel and The Head to follow. Unlike parents on TV, mine argue about money, Dad’s drinking, and Mom’s pathological tardiness. But unlike kids on TV, we stay awake long past midnight, enjoying a second dinner of Coke and corn dogs. On drive-in nights like this, I prefer our family’s lifestyle—although the word has yet to be invented.

1964: FASHIONABLY LATE

My father often says to my mother, “You’d be late for your own fucking funeral.” She usually retorts, “That’s because I have to do every fucking thing around here.” She has a point. Sunday morning she prepares for a get-together with Dad’s family. She irons Dad’s shirts, pants, undershirts, handkerchiefs, and jockey briefs. She irons my, Georgie’s, and her own clothes as well. She tosses a pan of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls in the oven for our breakfast and boils eggs and red skin potatoes for the potato salad she’s bringing. Meanwhile I chop onions and celery. Dad smokes and drinks coffee at the kitchen table in his robe, watching TV politicians blah-blah-blah about taxes. I’m enjoying the serenity of this Sunday morning sobriety. The chugging and whistling of the toy locomotive Georgie plays with in the basement. The comingled scent of coffee, cinnamon, and freshly cut celery. If only this calm could last. 

It won’t of course. Three hours later, Georgie and I are sitting in our car’s back seat while Dad’s at the wheel, puffing a Newport and fuming. We’ve been parked here for fifteen minutes. Dad says, “Tell her if she doesn’t get her fat ass out here in five minutes, we’re leaving without her.” As I leave the car, he adds, “And don’t you get stuck there with her.”

But like usual, I do. “You stay here ‘til I’m ready,” she commands. I am now her lady’s maid, helping her change out of a blouse that she imagines makes her look fat and into another, smoothing the back of her bouffant hairdo with a rattail comb, brushing the lint off her good black slacks. 

“I might be fashionably late,” she says, “But at least I care about how I look, not like Auntie El. She’d look pretty nice if she just fixed herself up.”

Meanwhile I wonder, will Dad really leave without us?

Mom’s tardiness causes Dad’s anger, which causes him to drive like a maniac, which causes my panic to grow. Time enjoys the Rube Goldberg effect he has on my family, although he wishes he could taste that potato salad.

1965: TIME HATES LIARS

We’re running late again for Sunday dinner with Dad’s family. Oddly, Dad is in a good mood, even though Mom suddenly decided to bring a small Tupperware of Hawaiian salad to her lady friend across the street, and they’ve been yakking for the last fifteen minutes.  “Go there and tell her to hurry up,” he says, but his heart doesn’t seem in it.

Later, when we’re all in the car, only Mom seems concerned about Time. When the crossing gate slowly descends on the Archer and Knox railroad tracks, Mom says “Shit!” over the clang of warning bells. Dad says nothing. The train is a long, slow freight. Georgie and I count 72 cars. “At least now we can say we’re late because of the train, and we won’t be liars,” Mom says.

Dad lets out a single, “Hah!’ I can’t tell if he’s humored or pissed.

  Aunt El greets us at the door. “What a surprise!” she says. “Nice to see you early for a change.”  

Uncle John shushes her. “Joan’s not early. George told her 12 noon, and its already 12:20.” 

But Mom’s time blindness does not make her stupid.  She sees the unset table, the empty dining room devoid of other guests. “George told her?” she repeats accusingly, then turns to my father: “You told me the wrong time, you . . . son of a beehive.” Mom tries not to swear in front of Dad’s family. And at one o’clock, as the rest of my aunts and uncles and cousins trickle through the door, each shocked by our early arrival, Dad is proud of his little ruse. Mom beams with pride, as if she, too, deserves the kudos.

Time lets out a single, “Hah!” He’s definitely humored. He knows this trick will only work once.

1966: WAITING FOR BLOOD

My best friend Marsha lives in a fancy two-story house like on Leave it to Beaver. We are both twelve. We sit in her second story bedroom, listening to Beatles’ 45s and playing Chinese checkers when Marsha makes her big announcement: she has gotten her first period. I am hurt. She might as well have announced her engagement to Paul McCartney. Soon she’ll sprout boobs as big as Barbies’ and I’ll be left behind, waiting to grow into a pretty, popular girl—if I’m lucky. Marsha offers no details about blood or cramps or pads, so I simply congratulate her, adding, “My mother got hers late so I guess I’ll get mine late, too.”

“I don’t think it works that way,” says Marsha.

I hope not, I think. I’d prefer to be on time. 

Marsha and her family are meeting friends at a restaurant for dinner, so Mom has to pick me up at 5:30. I told her, “Please don’t be late.” But when 5:30 rolls around, Marsha, her parents, and I are standing in front of the glass storm door, waiting for my mom’s 1957 Plymouth Belvedere to appear. At 5:35, I call Mom from their new Touch-Tone phone, but she doesn’t answer. At 5:40, Marsha’s parents tell me I can wait outside, more peeved than apologetic. I stand in the cold, worrying myself sick, wondering if Mom’s been in a car wreck or if Dad had another accident at work and is in the hospital again. I shiver out of fear and bitter cold. At 6 o’clock, Mom finally arrives. 

“Why are you outside in the snow?” 

I calmly explain what happened.

“Why those bastards! How dare they leave a kid out in the cold like that! Where do they have to be that’s so goddamn special?”

Suddenly I see red. “It doesn’t make any goddamn difference!” I scream. Why do you always have to be so goddamn late?”

I don’t remember how she responded. Did she tear up and cry? Tell me how dare I talk to her that way? Or did she offer some lame excuse about having to answer the phone or a long line at the check-out lane or some neighbor dropping by uninvited to tell her the latest gossip? 

All I knew was this: maybe my uterus wasn’t ready to shed blood, but I had definitely made one small step toward adulthood.

1967: THOSE FUCKING EARLY BIRDS

This year, my parents decide to have Easter at their house. Guests should start arriving in 45 minutes. My mother is in the kitchen frosting her lamb cake. She wears nothing but her rocket-cone bra and big panties. The doorbell rings. I go to answer. I’m standing at the front door face-to-face with my Aunt El and Uncle John as I hear my mother say, “It better not be those fucking early birds.” Did they hear it too?

They stand there looking glum. But then again, they always look glum. I’m not sure what to say, other than that my mother is still not dressed. 

“Not dressed!” repeats Aunt El, shocked.

“She’s not naked,” I say. “She’s just, you know, not ready for company.”

I ask them to wait in the living room and face the big picture window so Mom can scoot back and forth from bedroom to bathroom and finish her toilette. Dad offers them a shot of blackberry brandy. I decide to finish decorating the lamb cake for Mom. I give it black jellybean eyes and a pink jellybean nose. I whisper to it, “Those fucking early birds are gonna eat you all up.” Time laughs along with me.

1968: IT’S TEN O’CLOCK. DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR CHILDREN ARE?

I have an official boyfriend. We make out in the basement, not the kind of make-out that would get me preggers but the other kind of stuff. He has a ten o’clock curfew, just like on those public service TV commercials: “It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?” So at 9:45 we cool off a bit and move our make out session to the living room. Mom knows the boyfriend has this curfew but I hear her laughing at the TV in the kitchen. Or maybe she’s playing with the dog. I could go in there and tell her to hurry up. But I like making out.  And sometimes I don’t mind my mother being late. The boyfriend’s mother calls and yells at my mother to get her son home, now. It’s already 10:30! Later my father jokes, “Maybe she thinks Laurie can get him pregnant.”

1969: NO SURPRISE HERE

Mom and I are running late for a cousin’s wife’s baby shower. “Suh-prise, suh-prise, suh-prise,” like Gomer Pyle on his dumb TV show would say.  Mom cannot decide between Outfit A, a navy blue pantsuit, or Outfit B, her navy blue slacks with a colorful, flowing top. “The pantsuit,” I say. C’mon, let’s get moving.” 

“Are you sure? Or are you just saying that so I’ll get dressed?”

“I’m sure, okay? We’re supposed to be there at two. It’s a surprise, remember?”

“Is it really at two, or is that just the time you’re telling me so we won’t be late?”

1970: A VOCABULARY SHIFT

Mom often refers to her time blindness as “putting off” doing things until the last minute. “I put off,” she’d say. “I can’t help it.” Then, one day she announces, “I don’t put off. I procrastinate.” She says it proudly, pronouncing each syllable separately, and from that day forward, it’s the preferred term for her affliction. “I procrastinate,” she says. “That’s just the way I am.”

1973: POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT

Thinking back, Mom could be on time when it seriously mattered: my first and only piano recital, my brother’s band concerts, our graduations, my wedding.  

She was proud of these minor accomplishments and afterwards might say something like, “See, I told you I could do it!”

I had read about the power of positive reinforcement, so I’d praise her up, down, and sideways. My effect, however, was limited. If only I could have started when she was a child.

1982: “THOSE FUCKING EARLY BIRDS” REDUX

My brother dies from a drug overdose. This has nothing to do with our mother’s perpetual lateness, although I indirectly blame my father’s alcoholism, both nature and nurture. We are a few minutes late for the private, close family viewing of Georgie in his casket, but so what? None of us quite feel like hopping to it. My Aunt El and Uncle John are already there gawking at his corpse, either thinking they were close family or “being those fucking early birds” as usual.

1993: A “DEAR JOAN” LETTER

Mom’s habitual tardiness has become legendary. Doctors and dentists threaten to drop her as a patient. Hairdressers stop taking her calls. One afternoon her friend Pauline, a recent widow, has had enough. After waiting 45 minutes at a Czechoslovakian restaurant, Pauline drives home. My mother calls me at work in a panic. What could have happened to Pauline? I suggest that Pauline gave up and drove home. Mom is confused. “Why wouldn’t Pauline wait when she knows I’m always late?”

My theory is proven when Pauline sends my mother a snail mail. She writes, “I can no longer tolerate waiting so long in restaurants for you. You don’t seem to realize the stress this causes me. My therapist is strongly advising that I take a break from our friendship. Please do not call me. I’d prefer that you write me a letter.”

Mom is devastated. She calls it her “Dear Joan” letter.

1994: THE SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY

I no longer remember the occasion, only the conversation. I am once again hounding my mother to quicken her pace yet trying not to yell at her. If I make her nervous, she’ll only take longer. I say gently, “We really need to leave now. We were supposed to be there ten minutes ago. 

And she says—I remember this exactly, “Don’t worry, we’ll still make it there on time.”

I can’t wrap my head around her response. Nor can Time or his best friend, Physics.

1995: “FASHIONABLY LATE” REDUX

I gift Mom with a novelty store button. It reads, “I may be fashionably late, but damn, I look good.” My husband tells me I’m just reinforcing her behavior. I tell him it can’t get any worse, so what the hell?

1998: A BAD BET

I wasn’t looking forward to meeting my parents in Vegas for Dad’s penny-pincher idea of a marvelous four-day weekend. I knew they’d bicker the entire time, and I’d wind up being the filling in their shit sandwich. My husband had to work and couldn’t tag along. Dad would have his own hotel room and I’d be roommates with Mom—stuck in my role as arbitrator in her battle with Time.

Yet knowing this, I leave her sitting on the edge of the bed while I run down to the casino for another bout of gambling. I figure, while she’s waiting for her coffee and arthritis pain pill to kick in, I could be playing video poker. Who knows? Maybe I’ll spin a royal flush!

But I fuck up, royally, gambling that my mother will be almost ready when I come back from the casino, maybe brushing her teeth in her underwear—but not sitting on the edge of her hotel bed, still in her jam-jams, half-asleep, head bobbing, the way I left her an hour ago. We’re supposed to meet Dad at a fancier casino, where they serve a legendary gut-busting buffet, in a half hour. And he doesn’t have a cell phone. 

I gently push her shoulder. “Hey. Ma. Wake up. Daddy’s expecting us.” 

She yawns, then does this thing that drives me crazy. Slowly lifts her wrist to her face, and says, “The right time is 12:05,” like she’s volunteering information that I don’t have access to. 

So now I’m cheering her on like she’s a runner in the Special Olympics. “C’mon Ma! You can do it!”—when all I want to do is scream at her for years of procrastination. 

I cheer her on for another 45 minutes until we finally catch a cab to the nicer, airier casino. But now I can’t find Dad. He wanted us to meet him at the bar. What bar? I’m at a bar. Where’s Dad? The casino, like all big casinos, is impossible to navigate. There are no edges, only rabbit holes. Mom is leaning heavily on her cane. She wants to sit—now. There’s plenty of slot machines where she can sit while I search for my father, but will I ever find her again? We might as well be in a hedge maze. And we are so, so, very, very late. Now Mom catches my anxiety. “Don’t leave me alone!” she says. But she doesn’t want to walk with me. She wants us to rest, together, to waste more time. I almost scream. But suddenly, there’s my father, leaning heavily on his cane, too.

“Where the fuck were you?” he says. At me. “We missed the buffet! They stop taking people in at two. Now we have to wait until four!” 

Mom throws in a classic non sequitur:  “What kind of restaurant closes at two?” 

“We couldn’t find the right bar,” I say, just as stupidly. Our lost-in-the-casino excuse can only account for ten or fifteen minutes, not an hour.

“Didn’t I tell you,” Dad yells, “Get your mother’s ass here at on time!”

Suddenly I lose it. 

“Both of you!” I scream. “Both of you are wrong and you keep shoving me in the middle! And I am so fucking sick of it.”

Until this moment, I don’t recall ever angrily addressing my parents as a team. But I’ll never forget them in that casino, surrounded by flashing lights and bells, standing side by side, not saying a word, gazing at me in shock.

I wouldn’t have bet on that.

2007: TIME MARCHES ON

My father passed away five years ago and now Mom is living in Southern California with me and Tom. She no longer drives. That’s my job. And as Time, that fucking bastard, mercilessly marches on, seemingly faster every day, I’m chauffeuring her to doctors, dentists, and hearing aid specialists, wishing Time would slow his ass down not only for the daily minutes, but also the big eschatological picture. 

Speaking of that picture, Mom wants me to take her to church. It’s nagging her that she hasn’t gone in years. I can’t imagine what’s worse: sitting (kneeling, standing) through a boring Catholic ceremony or rushing Mom all morning until we finally make our grand entrance in the middle of the second act. So I simply put this church thing on the back burner. I procrastinate, just like my mother. I drive her around church parking lots on Saturdays, and we talk about how someday we’ll do this church thing. I doubt either of us are going to hell.

2011: TIME WOUNDS ALL HEALS

So now time, that asshole cunt, has added insult to injury. Not only has he pushed Mom into a future of wheelchair-bound catatonia, she can no longer fight against him. Trained professionals drive and roll her from appointment to appointment. She is never late for anything or anyone.

2012: TIME WINS AGAIN  

Despite my father’s prediction, Mom is not late for her own funeral. She didn’t want a funeral. Her only wish was to be interred, not cremated, in a Chicago suburban mausoleum where much of our family was laid to rest. I hold a celebration of life in her honor, where friends and relatives remember her wacky sense of humor, love of animals, artistic talent, cooking skills, generosity, fashion sense, and all those wonderful qualities that are, quite frankly, timeless. 

I stay in Chicago several extra days to enjoy the city. My old friend Mary and I, both former graphic designers, visit the Art Institute, where four decades earlier we gawked at the Picture of Dorian Gray, astounded at both the horror and craftsmanship of Ivan Albright. But it’s the painting’s companion piece, Into the World There Came a Soul Named Ida, that has always fascinated us. A scantily dressed, elderly woman sits cross-legged at a vanity, admiring herself in a mirror. Her body is beyond aged; her skin explodes in lumps of veins, cellulite, and tumors. It’s hard to tell if she’s unaware of Time’s ravages or has given up caring.

“You know, she’s not that bad,” Mary says. “I somehow remembered her as much worse.”

“I know what you mean,” I reply. “I know what you mean.”

THE END