I was born the day Diana married Charles, July 29, 1981. My mother was in the hospital with all the hullabaloo on the televisions, watching the royals and having me.
When Diana died, I was in high school and worked weekends cleaning my father's office building. He was a marriage and family therapist in private practice then. There were magazines stacked in the waiting area with her face on every cover. Diana had the kind of eyes you could look into for days. This must have been the time my obsession with her started, the time around her death, because that's when we want everyone most, that's when people become more than just people. To me, she looked like my mother and my mother always had that same kind of grace, and that must have been another thing that mattered.
My mother recently took me on a weekend trip to La Conner and Snohomish to go shopping and to get away. We ate fish at a pub. We stayed in a house on a bluff that was shaped like the bow of a ship. She brought a picnic basket in the car with scones and strawberries and coffee and cream and orange juice (she said she remembered I always liked orange juice). We walked barefoot and I noticed how our feet look exactly the same. We slept in, and sat out on the balcony in the morning and ate and drank and watched everyone below. We saw a couple with a West Highland White terrier, the kind my Grams always had. My Grams, my mother's mother, always had a dog. I'd known her to live alone ever since I was born, ever since her divorce.While we were shopping in La Conner at a thrift store, I found a string of knotted pearls on a mannequin that looked like the one my Grams always used to wear, and I bought it for two dollars. My mother said she had the original, and that it was stained with makeup that she will never be able to wash clean.
My mother took me to see Dionne Warwick perform at a casino in Anacortes a couple of years ago. Dionne Warwick talked about Sammy Davis, Jr. like he was just another guy to be talked about, and my mother and I both cried when she sang Alfie. I was disappointed to learn much later, while reading Burt Bacharach's autobiography, that Dionne Warwick didn't sing the original version, but it was sung by a woman I had never heard of named Cilla Black. I always thought it was Dionne, only Dionne. I was the youngest person at that casino, fully aware of the legend, fully aware that they just don't make them like that anymore, wearing a big fur coat and singing along to all the songs just like everybody else.
All the while, the legends of my generation seem to be Will and Kate and that mischievous little Harry. I don't remember where I was when the royal wedding part two took place, probably fast asleep in bed. I don't understand what's happening with all the little miniature hats with feathers and bows cocked to the side on every royal family member's head, or what Kate has to offer in the spellbinding department. She doesn't have the kind of eyes you can look into for days, is what I'm saying.
My mother and I talk often about the places we'll go, about how one day we'll end up on the streets of New York together even though I hate flying, because it just seems inevitable that we will. Every place we travel together feels like an adventure. In La Conner, we saw a tugboat coming toward us, slowly chugging along the water, and she started singing Don't Rain on My Parade, which made me laugh because she sang it kooky like Barbra, but also made me feel it seemed like something of my own theme song. This past year, I was just beginning all of it, flushed in early pregnancy, making jokes about eating for two at Thanksgiving dinner, soaring well into the second trimester, to suddenly being told by a doctor, by several doctors, that my baby was without a significant part of skull and brain, to wearing a purple maternity dress with shoulder pads that I had bought at the Salvation Army (while laughing it was "so Diana") as I stretched my hand out to take Communion at church, just two days after waking from the operation.
My mother and I were at the froufrou University Village shopping center in Seattle the night before the scheduled termination of my pregnancy. There were others with us, we had just eaten dinner. I had worn makeup for the first time in weeks. It almost felt like a normal night. We walked and we shopped. My mother bought me a black makeup bag, I'm not sure why I wanted a new makeup bag, and sometime after my water broke. I kept walking, moving forward, looking at all the beautiful racks of clothing until everything was wet through and through. I whispered calmly that we had to go back to the hotel, and she was the only one who existed. I have never been closer to my mother than in that hotel bathroom, when I took off my socks and shoes and everything else and it was all just a pile of wet clothes on the floor, because I suddenly felt like I was dying and everything was coming out of my body, not knowing whether it was water or blood.
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When Diana died, I was in high school and worked weekends cleaning my father's office building. He was a marriage and family therapist in private practice then. There were magazines stacked in the waiting area with her face on every cover. Diana had the kind of eyes you could look into for days. This must have been the time my obsession with her started, the time around her death, because that's when we want everyone most, that's when people become more than just people. To me, she looked like my mother and my mother always had that same kind of grace, and that must have been another thing that mattered.
My mother recently took me on a weekend trip to La Conner and Snohomish to go shopping and to get away. We ate fish at a pub. We stayed in a house on a bluff that was shaped like the bow of a ship. She brought a picnic basket in the car with scones and strawberries and coffee and cream and orange juice (she said she remembered I always liked orange juice). We walked barefoot and I noticed how our feet look exactly the same. We slept in, and sat out on the balcony in the morning and ate and drank and watched everyone below. We saw a couple with a West Highland White terrier, the kind my Grams always had. My Grams, my mother's mother, always had a dog. I'd known her to live alone ever since I was born, ever since her divorce.While we were shopping in La Conner at a thrift store, I found a string of knotted pearls on a mannequin that looked like the one my Grams always used to wear, and I bought it for two dollars. My mother said she had the original, and that it was stained with makeup that she will never be able to wash clean.
My mother took me to see Dionne Warwick perform at a casino in Anacortes a couple of years ago. Dionne Warwick talked about Sammy Davis, Jr. like he was just another guy to be talked about, and my mother and I both cried when she sang Alfie. I was disappointed to learn much later, while reading Burt Bacharach's autobiography, that Dionne Warwick didn't sing the original version, but it was sung by a woman I had never heard of named Cilla Black. I always thought it was Dionne, only Dionne. I was the youngest person at that casino, fully aware of the legend, fully aware that they just don't make them like that anymore, wearing a big fur coat and singing along to all the songs just like everybody else.
All the while, the legends of my generation seem to be Will and Kate and that mischievous little Harry. I don't remember where I was when the royal wedding part two took place, probably fast asleep in bed. I don't understand what's happening with all the little miniature hats with feathers and bows cocked to the side on every royal family member's head, or what Kate has to offer in the spellbinding department. She doesn't have the kind of eyes you can look into for days, is what I'm saying.
My mother and I talk often about the places we'll go, about how one day we'll end up on the streets of New York together even though I hate flying, because it just seems inevitable that we will. Every place we travel together feels like an adventure. In La Conner, we saw a tugboat coming toward us, slowly chugging along the water, and she started singing Don't Rain on My Parade, which made me laugh because she sang it kooky like Barbra, but also made me feel it seemed like something of my own theme song. This past year, I was just beginning all of it, flushed in early pregnancy, making jokes about eating for two at Thanksgiving dinner, soaring well into the second trimester, to suddenly being told by a doctor, by several doctors, that my baby was without a significant part of skull and brain, to wearing a purple maternity dress with shoulder pads that I had bought at the Salvation Army (while laughing it was "so Diana") as I stretched my hand out to take Communion at church, just two days after waking from the operation.
My mother and I were at the froufrou University Village shopping center in Seattle the night before the scheduled termination of my pregnancy. There were others with us, we had just eaten dinner. I had worn makeup for the first time in weeks. It almost felt like a normal night. We walked and we shopped. My mother bought me a black makeup bag, I'm not sure why I wanted a new makeup bag, and sometime after my water broke. I kept walking, moving forward, looking at all the beautiful racks of clothing until everything was wet through and through. I whispered calmly that we had to go back to the hotel, and she was the only one who existed. I have never been closer to my mother than in that hotel bathroom, when I took off my socks and shoes and everything else and it was all just a pile of wet clothes on the floor, because I suddenly felt like I was dying and everything was coming out of my body, not knowing whether it was water or blood.
