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Rescue Me

My parents met in a library

After college, my mother was a librarian My father came in to borrow some books, saw my mother, and fell in love

They were married six months later

Everyone says m

y mother used to look like Elizabeth Taylor, but in those days they told every pretty girl she looked like Elizabeth Taylor Nevertheless, I always picture Elizabeth Taylor sitting demurely behind an oak desk My father, bespectacled and lanky, his blond hair modeled into a stiff crew cut, approaches the desk as mya poodle skirt flourished with fuzzy pink pom-poms

The skirt is so with the rest of own, saddle shoes, ballet slippers, and the h-school cheerleader

I almost never saw my mother when she wasn’t beautifully dressed and had completed her hair and makeup For a period, she sewed her own clothes and many of ours She prepared entire meals from the Julia Child cookbook She decorated the house with local antiques, had the prettiest gardens and Christmas tree, and still surprised us with elaborate Easter baskets well past the time e had ceased to believe in the Easter Bunny

My mother was just like all the otherone’s hoht was a worthy pursuit, and shelook easy

And even though she wore White Shoulders perfuht jeans were for farmers, she also assu called feminism

The surade,The Consensus, by Mary Gordon Howard It was a heavy novel, lugged to and fros filled with towels and suntan lotion and potions for insect bites Every , as they settled into their chaises around the pool, one wo The cover is still etched in my brain: a blue sea with an abandoned sailboat, surrounded by the black-and-white college photographs of eight young woraph of Mary Gordon Howard herself, taken in profile, a patrician wo a tweed suit and pearls

“Did you get to the part about the pessary?” one lady would whisper to another

“Shhhh Not yet Don’t give it away”

“Mom, what’s a pessary?” I asked

“It’s not so you need to worry about as a child”