When the Power Fails

She was always a powerful woman. No matter that she was short and tiny – or as she often sputtered to people who referred to her that way – small and slender.  She packed a wallop despite her diminutive size.

I met Jean when I was a few days over 15 years old. She hired me, with reservations I later learned, to wash dishes in the restaurant she and her husband owned. She was always quick to point out she was the actual owner – SHE had purchased the restaurant to give her husband something to do.  He did most of the cooking; she did most of the arguing. And she kept the books.

For a long time, months, I just tried to stay out of her way and do my job perfectly. Perfectly meant never letting the kitchen run out of plates or the dining room run out of silverware.  Perfectly meant watching with my third eye for the waitresses to set empty coffee pots up on the shelf above the serving window and run quickly to empty the grounds and clean them out, replacing them before the waitresses reached up for them again. Perfectly meant keeping the long chrome shelf where waitresses dumped their dirty dishes as empty as possible, so there would always be room for another load, so there wouldn’t be a thunderous crash of a precarious pile of china.  She scrutinized my work, and I hurried to do what I was supposed to do before she could open her mouth to tell me to do it.

A year later, I was rewarded for my perfection with a 25 cent/hour raise and an increase in the interest she showed in me personally. I ramped up my drive toward perfection.   One Friday night, she suggested that someone else “close” in my place – maybe I would like to go home with her and her husband, swim in their pool.  Would I like to go home with them and swim in their in-ground pool? Did I just die and fly to heaven?  From then on,  I became one of the “golden” few who stopped working Friday nights at 7:30 when the rush was over, sat in the back room together eating dinner and watching All in the Family and then climbed into their blue Volkswagen station wagon’s back seat for the drive to their country home and a late night swim.  Jean and I would sit up into the wee hours, talking in her room. She and her husband lived at different ends of the house.  We shared an interest in psychology, in philosophy, in reading. She’d recommend books and I’d devour them. She talked to me as if I were an adult.  I wished fervently at the time that she could have been my mother  -- my own mother was not interested in any of those things.  In fact, in all the time I knew my mother, I don’t think I ever saw her read a single book. I suspect Jean may also have wished I was her daughter. Her own daughter, a few years old than I, had married a man Jean hated, had a child by him, and was now divorced.

When it was time to apply for college, she urged me to consider an elite private university in the area over the state universities that I could afford and had a better chance of getting in. The carrot she dangled in front of me was an offer to live with her while I was in school – the private university was not more than a few miles from their home.  Her own daughter had not gone to college at all. When I did not get accepted to the university, my devastation was more about my lost opportunity to live in the extra bedroom and pretend I was Jean’s child than anything else.

As much as I idolized Jean, I was also afraid of her.  She was a legend among the regulars who lined the counter every morning for the ease with which she took them on if they said anything that even slightly offended her in the areas of politics, religion, business, and especially “women’s lib”.   She was ready and waiting for anybody – customers, delivery persons, employees – who dared to disagree with her or question her in any way. In addition, she and her husband often fought bitterly in the kitchen, sometimes loudly enough for customers to hear them.  Most of the fights were pretty much nonsense but they were intense and the experience taught me that she was ready to bite with little provocation.   

And bite me she did. The first chomp came when I announced that I was going to marry a man I hadn’t dated for very long…. a man she didn’t think was good enough for me…. a man who was much older than I, a customer who had shown up one day working across the street and took an interest in me. Jean had been in favor of the dates he’d asked me on. I hadn’t displayed much interest in meeting guys since I’d broken it off with my high school boyfriend. My self-esteem was non-existent, so she probably saw his interest as a necessary ego boost for me. She didn’t believe our relationship was going to go anywhere. Surely I was smarter than that.

She was furious when I showed off my engagement ring, given to me after barely six months of dating. The kitchen of the restaurant, which had been so warm and friendly, became frigid.  She barely spoke to me. When I announced a few weeks later that I was resigning with two weeks’ notice, I was officially a persona non grata. Dead in her eyes and banished from her heart.

But that was not the end of it. Our relationship was resurrected once I was divorced from the man she hadn’t wanted me to marry. I was excommunicated again when I went away to film school, and rebirthed one final time a few years later. The details of those banishments and restorations are clear in my memory but not quite ready for public consumption.  They may never be.

Jean is 91 years old now. She lives in an assisted living facility. She no longer drives, plays tennis, or goes to the Atheneum. She’s as feisty as she ever was, and I suspect she tortures her peers and probably some staff.  I’ve spent a lot of time avoiding her over the past 20 years although a perverse sense of loyalty and some fond memories of old times drive me to see her every year or so.  My avoidance is more about my admitted inability to maintain a solid sense of myself in her presence than anything, an inability to stand up to her and say, “I do not agree with you.”   

I saw her recently. It was bizarre. We had set up the time in May. She had forgotten my birthday for the first time in over 40 years, calling me a week after the fact. The conversation had been benign. I felt magnanimous – after all, I told myself, she’s 91 years old. I told her I’d be up her way in July when I had a long weekend; perhaps we could have lunch together. She put down the phone to get her calendar. She acted like she wrote it all down. She repeated it to me -  the month, the day,  the date, the time.  She was looking forward to it. The week arrived. I kept intending to call to make sure we were still “on.” But it was a busy week, and suddenly it was Thursday night. I called, no answer. I left a message on the answering machine reminding her I’d be there the next day for lunch and to call me if she got in at a reasonable hour. She didn’t call. I was on the road at 6 a.m. the next morning, and called her from the parking lot of a Dunkin Donuts  just after 9. She acted surprised. She hadn’t listened to my message from the night before, had no recollection that I was coming, even accused me of having made the date with someone else.  Once she settled down, she was pleased to hear from me and yes, she was going to be home around lunchtime, and she’d love to have me join her in the dining room.

By the time I arrived, she’d started a ruckus about not having received my call the night before. She’d decided that another person with the same last name as her had taken my call and had not had the decency to pass along the message. The fact that I’d dialed her number from my contacts list made no difference.  She was irate and self-righteous. I felt like I’d landed on another planet. A few minutes into my time with her, she referred to our phone conversation of the night before. “It was this morning that we spoke,” I reminded her, “not last night.” She looked at me confused. “It was?” Now she did not believe we had spoken earlier that morning.  She repeatedly told me I’d made the lunch date with someone else.  She told me twice the story of how her daughter and son-in-law’s beloved pet had recently died.  She reminisced fondly (and mostly accurately) about old restaurant days. She told me twice that she’d always been proud of me.  After two hours, we embraced, said goodbye and I left, wondering if she would remember that I had been there.  I drove away in a sort of shock, reeling from what I’d seen and heard, not quite believing that this was the same woman I’d acquiesced to for years, the same woman whose opinions had so controlled me.   

There were many people along the way who thought I was better off without Jean’s influence, including my mom, bless her, and others who are likely reading these words and thinking, “Yup, that would be me.”  Before my mom passed away, one afternoon as we sat talking at her bedside in our living room, I told her that every time I saw Jean I had an urge to tell her how wrong I had been in wishing even for a short time that she had been my mother.  My mom looked at me seriously. I could tell she was pleased. “Really?” she asked. “Absolutely, “ I assured her. “I had the best mother all along. Jean doesn’t hold a candle to you.” “That’s really nice to hear.” She seemed surprised. “Thank you for telling me,” mom whispered. I hugged her tightly. “I had to,” I said. “It’s the truth.”