Life-changing words: ‘Buck up, girl!’

My father died suddenly and unexpectedly during my senior year of college, although I continued on for two more years to obtain my master's degree because I loved being out there in New Mexico. Let's face it – one more year, and looking forward to graduate school majoring in painting where I could do what I loved all day long with no more algebra to worry about was a dream come true.

It was 1970 when my father died of a heart attack. I had last talked to him that Sunday night, my regular time to call home. I usually reversed the charges from a pay phone at my dorm, but this time I was sitting on the staircase at the home of Ignatz Sahula-Dycke, my friend and patron. I didn't know that this was the last time that I would ever talk to my dad.

I was with my boyfriend of the time, Gene King. He walked me back to the dorm, which was the most coveted one at the school. It was sort of like a nice modern motel, and the back windows faced a parking lot. It was two stories tall, and my room was on the first floor. I was still in the bathroom getting ready for bed, feeling warm and mellow from the wine that Sahula's wife Dorothy had generously poured that night, followed by her characteristic nose-laugh snort. She looked like the old movie actress Imogene Coca.

Suddenly, pebbles hit my window, which was Gene's usual beckoning. It was unusual that he came back again so late. "Your father died," he said bluntly. "You'll have to call home." I went to the same pay phone I always used to call on Sunday night, this time feeling very different. My mother answered, and like Gene, she was very unemotional; she said, "He's gone; buck up, girl!"

I got dressed, and Gene and I walked downtown to the Home Cafe, an all-night restaurant, for coffee. "You might not be able to come back to school," he said, insensitive as usual. This wasn't my immediate worry, as I knew my mother's dream was for me to become a schoolteacher like her, and she would do anything to achieve this goal. "Teach until you're 62," she'd always say. Then she'd arch her back in her big La-Z-Boy recliner, throw her arm back and say, "Then you can lay back like me." This, of course, didn't sound very appealing to me. She had started planning her retirement when she was 22. I just lived for the day.

I flew home for the funeral at the end of October, returned to school, and went back home for Christmas, returning to New Mexico in January for the winter quarter, which I felt lucky to do. In the first week of February, right around what would have been my father's 55th birthday, my mother appeared unannounced at the window of my art class!

She had done this a couple of times before, and remember, she lived in Delaware, a six-hour plane trip away. She had brought along a friend from Milton; I don't even remember if it was Mickey Dickerson or Marie Lawson. She wore the mink coat she had bought herself for Christmas, embroidered with her current initials, "MRB," in the silk lining. "Let's go to the Plaza Hotel," she said. It was the fanciest hotel in town, and I had never been there.

Gene King went along too. We sat at a table near the big window overlooking the Plaza in Old Town Las Vegas, N.M. I ordered rainbow trout. I got no seafood in the school cafeteria, nor would I want to, but I thought it should be good in this upscale restaurant, fancier than those that Gene and I frequented. The fish wasn't what I had hoped for; it stared up at me with a glassy and foreboding eye.

My mother stood up and said she had an announcement to make. "I'm getting married," she boasted proudly! This was said only three months after my father died, and practically on his birthday! They had been happily married for 30 years, and it wasn't like she had been carrying on with someone. So happily, I supposed, that she wanted to repeat it right away.

I somehow masked my shock. I had learned early to do this, as she was always scanning my face for any sassy look, contradiction or even humor. "Don't roll your eyes," she'd accuse. I wouldn't dare, being so quiet and meek back then, all the time smoldering inside. I might have whispered under my breath, "That's fast," but I doubt it. Anyhow, she flew into a rage at me! I think it was her own guilt turned toward myself; she was so proud of not being "on the shelf" for long.

Somehow I got back to the dorm. She followed me in her rented car and stood under my window, screaming, "That man's in love with me! You'll starve out here! You're cut off!" I screamed back through the window, "I'll sell paintings!" She ran back and forth in the dark like a demented beaver, in the mink coat, white picture hat and high heels. I don't know what her travel companion friend thought of this scene.

I screamed and cried! Girls plus the dorm monitor banged on my door for 20 or so minutes, but I never answered. I went without my allowance for two weeks and feared for my tuition for the spring quarter until I had to call and apologize from the same fateful phone booth. It was an Academy Award-winning performance, and I wasn't one bit sorry, but the money finally came.

She was married in August somewhere around here and gave me money to get out of town. She gave me enough to go to Mexico with Gene King, and then we flew back to school. Two years later, she divorced the man who wanted her so quickly. Forget any appropriate period of mourning for my father, her faithful husband of 30 years! She said this second man was wearing a sweater like my father's when she saw him, and that's why she fell in love with him. That's a great reason to marry someone! Although he wore a sweater like Jim Bounds, he wasn't a bit like him. No one ever could be, in my eyes.

I wanted to tell this story and set it in stone so it wouldn't disappear into the ether. Me being me, it didn't bother me as much as you might think, because I did "buck up," like she told me to. I got serious about studying and even made the dean's list.

Does pathos a writer make?