What My Mother Gave Me by Elizabeth Benedict

this aching to be disorderly and mismatched.
    â€œNothing,” I’d grumble.
    â€œ Th en come downstairs.”
    I’d close my notebook and cap my purple pen. Sighing, I’d part that curtain of beads, and enter my mother’s world.
    IN MY FAMILY we opened our Christmas presents on Christmas Eve after we ate a three-hour-long Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes dinner. Stuffed with calamari, baccalà, snails, eel, lobster, anchovies, and shrimp, we all squeezed into our tiny living room. Every year, my father had to remove furniture to fit a giant Christmas tree, which we decorated with animated ornaments: trains chugged through its branches; birds popped out of silver eggs and chirped; the entire cast of a tinny “Twelve Days of Christmas” hid in bulbs and emerged out of synch, the lords a leaping and the maids a milking while the song played on and on.
    Every year I made a careful list of books and records that I wanted, gifts that my mother considered futile indulgences. Yet she did fulfill my wish list, and with each box wrapped in shiny foil that was handed to me on Christmas Eve, I hoped it was my full set of John Steinbeck books, or the Lovin’ Spoonful double album. I would also get a bottle of Chanel No. 5 that lasted the whole year, and a cashmere sweater. I knew, too, that there would be clothes—outfits—that my mother had picked out, that reflected her taste, that would match right down to the buttons. Over the years, I had perfected the sigh of delight I gave when I opened these boxes. How could I tell my mother that I found these outfits dreadful? It was easier to thank her, fold them up, and tuck them away somewhere, unworn.
    But this Christmas, when I opened the box and pulled the piles of white from the tissue, the desire to please and the desire to be my true self collided mightily. I pulled first the jacket—stiff, heavy white cotton-polyester blend, with a busy white pattern and large white buttons down the front—and then the pants—as stiff and heavy and white, with the same pattern—from the large white box. I stared. Th e outfit stared back.
    â€œIt’s fitted, you know. It will show off your figure,” my mother announced. “ Th e girl said it’s very popular.”
    I tried to duplicate my well-rehearsed sigh of delight, but instead a strangled sound came from me.
    â€œYou could wear it dancing,” my mother added.
    Dancing for me was done in fraternity-house basements where boys swung me around to “Rosalita” or pressed me close while Boz Scaggs sang “Harbor Lights.”
    I chewed my lip, the white suit heavy on my lap. Th e time had come, I realized.
    Th at white suit, the awfulness of it, gave me the courage to announce myself: a young woman who wanted to experience a world in which anything could happen, where pandemonium took preference over order. But I didn’t want to hurt my mother’s feelings. Th is was the woman who, when Peter Hayhurst broke my heart, drove me past his house just so I could gaze at it and maybe catch a glimpse of him. When I was nine, she told me I could marry Paul McCartney if I set my mind to it. She encouraged my love of reading, and read the stories I wrote. In fact, I took all of my carefully coordinated outfits to college with me just so she wouldn’t feel bad. Th at was why I had boxes of scarves and socks in every color imaginable in my closet, beside the boxes of holiday theme items she sent me: the orange towels and ceramic pumpkins, the cornucopia and the pilgrim statues.
    But that Christmas, I took a deep breath and announced myself. I was not someone who would wear this white suit, I said. I did not want to match, I said.
    My mother, dressed in Christmas red from head to toe, smiled.
    â€œNot your thing?” she asked.
    I shook my head, studying her for signs of betrayal or disappointment or hurt. But found none.
    â€œBring it back,” she said