Crossed Over by Beverly Lowry

Author:Beverly Lowry [Lowry, Beverly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76596-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2002-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Good and Bad

We didn’t want to be like our mothers, our mothers fluttered, and had no fun…. Our daddies shot the moon…. What rascals. We wanted to be like them.

I wrote that, in an essay about Southern girls and their daddies. In my family, our father was the wild one. He drank too much, danced to dangerous music, gambled with stakes he didn’t have, borrowed against not only his own future but ours. Playing his high-stakes games, he could never afford to be wrong; he didn’t have the margins or the resources. He was—and, by extension, we were—always in the hole. From time to time, deep down in it.

I adored him. He was bigger than life, brighter than music; he sang and danced and told stories. He enlarged my sense of pure possibility. I once wrote about him in a novel: “He brought a lot of life to the party. A whole lot of life.”

Karla fears I am casting her father in the role of wimp: not man enough to hold on to his wife or keep his daughters in line. Karla keeps telling me what a big man Larry Tucker was, how people were afraid of him, how, coming home once to find her sitting on the toilet stoned out of her mind, he knocked Karla off the toilet seat, into the tub. Tells me how Mama Carolyn threatened Larry Tucker when they divorced: “Lay one hand on my girls,” she said, “and I’ll take you to court.” And so, Karla says, Larry Tucker was hamstrung. The girls were wild, getting wilder, he was afraid if he used force Carolyn Moore would …

“Daddy just loved Mother so dadgum much,” Karla says.

We are all so frighteningly frail.

My mother was not a wimp either; she had a hot temper, she could lay into the designated enemy with the ferocity of a cornered cat. But she was essentially good; a person of warmth and kindness, whose needs, when it came down to it, were simple. My mother wanted a home. Period. She didn’t, however, get one she felt safe in until the last five years of her life.

I tell Karla, it’s a problem if she thinks that “decent” and “hardworking” seem unmanly descriptions, and the problem is hers, just as it was a problem for me that I thought my mother was boring when all she wanted was for life maybe to be a little calmer, a lot safer. Meantime, the rascal danced his upbeat dance.

We are on opposite sides of the Plexiglas in one sense here—the good/bad mother/father—but the effect is the same.

I tell Karla she should think about this, long and hard, because I don’t think I got it about my mother until after she was dead.

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