What My Mother Gave Me by Elizabeth Benedict Page A

easily.
    She went to the drawer where neat files held receipts and cancelled checks, pens, paper clips, stamps. Everything in its place. She handed me the receipt for the white outfit.
    â€œNow, I would wear this if I was younger,” she said, folding it perfectly back into the box.
    I could never fit things into the box from which they had come. I could never get a map back into a rectangle or match the corners of a fitted sheet.
    Behind us, the train circling the tree’s branches blew its horn and the endless rendition of “ Th e Twelve Days of Christmas” played. Th e lights blinked on and off, sending blues and green, red and pink into the room.
    â€œBut then, you’re not me,” she said.
    Th e way she said it, I understood that she had known this all along.
    A mother’s love is like that. I know this now that I’m a mother. We give our children the best of ourselves so that they can find the best of what is in them. Th e day I rejected the gift of the white suit, I got the best gift of all. My mother let me know that I had finally become that person I’d dreamed of becoming: a girl who spoke her mind, who was independent and opinionated. A girl who knew who she was and what she wanted. A girl who would not wear an all-white pants suit. And by recognizing that, she gave me permission to go into my own mismatched future. What a gift.

My Mother’s Armor
    MARGO JEFFERSON
    â€œLook back, Mama. What were your favorite clothes?” I asked her this year. She’s ninety-five, and we had come back from a luncheon with her birthday club. She had worn wine-colored wool pants, a gray sweater with a touch of sparkle, pearls, and a black cape. She’d finally decided on wine instead of gray—“I don’t want monotony”—and I’d fussed a bit because our ride was waiting while she chose her handkerchief. “Are you ready?” I asked, when she’d slipped a white lace-trimmed one into her purse. “Have you put on cologne?” she answered. I had not and so I did. Th en we were both ready.
    And now we were home again, lounging in the living room.
    â€œWhat were your favorite clothes?” I asked.
    â€œMy evening dresses,” was her answer. Th is surprised me a bit. She’d loved hats: I’d anticipated total recall of millinery triumphs in sisal or felt. (I’d been in awe of a cream-colored Tastee Freez swirl of a hat with a black veil.)
    â€œShort or long evening dresses?”
    â€œBoth.”
    â€œWhat was the difference?”
    â€œ Th e short ones were flip and flirty.”
    â€œAnd the long ones?”
    She laughed and put one hand to her forehead, fingers arranged in a classic heroine-about-to-swoon pose. “Beware my foolish heart,” she drawled.
    Th e night is like a lovely tune,
    Beware my foolish heart . . .
    Th at ballad appeared in 1949, when my mother was thirty-three and I was three; I like to imagine my parents moving onto the dance floor as the orchestra took a sumptuous lyric plunge into its opening notes.
    â€œMy Foolish Heart,” “Lush Life,” “Stardust,” “Misty,” “Sophisticated Lady.” I heard these songs over and over on our record player. Th e flip and flirty numbers, too, deft syncopations of wit, lust, and romance. “ Th at Old Black Magic,” “Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me,” “Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You?” And of course that urbane salty blues which hailed our city:
    Goin’ to Chicago,
    Sorry but I can’t take you.
    Th ose proud Chicago department stores we shopped in! Marshall Field and Chas. A. Stevens, designed by the firm of D. H. Burnham, the architect who’d ruled the World’s Fair. Carson, Pirie, Scott, designed by Louis B. Sullivan, master builder of the skyscraper. Mighty structures of granite and terra-cotta; arrogantly eclectic with their escalators and Tiffany lamps, their modernist