Version 2.0

There's a picture of my mom, circa 1963. She's got a pixie cut, cigarette pants, and a mock turtleneck with a pair of slingback flats. She's dancing in front of a low table and a hip little danish-looking sofa, laughing.

I have never met this woman.

My mother is the sixth of eleven children and seemed, to me at least, to recede into whatever space she occupied. Her social life consisted entirely of Saturday morning telephone conversations: two to be exact. One to one of her siblings, rotating so that each recieved as many calls as the others. The other was to Bea.

Bea lived with my mother for ten years in a modest yet apparently chic apartment in Washington, D.C. and it was a small town scandal.

The moment my mom graduated high school, she ran off to the biggest city she could think of and began her new, glamourous city life as a soda jerk in D.C. (Mom still makes a mean milkshake...) She met Bea at the boarding house: two working girls with big city dreams. It was Bea's idea to apply to the FBI in the first place. They marched up those imposing steps arm in arm, were hired on the spot, and moved in together shortly thereafter.

At this point, the narrative always goes blank.

Blinking like a little strobe light through this ten year gap is the annual FBI dinner dance. Mom needed a date, dad needed a date, and, via a bit of coworker matchmaking, they agreed to be one another's date for this event.

Don't think romance: think prom-- think dateless and prom. Think prom that happens every year and every year you have to go. Think about being the kind of person who will always be dateless for prom. Now imagine that you have met another such person and, out of necessity, gratefully, you band together. Every year, dad would ask; every year, mom would go. And in between, they saw one another not at all.

There are artifacts from this time, but only a few. Aside from the photograph, there is a surprisingly extensive collection of silver tableware that mom split with Bea when she moved out: salt and pepper shakers, ashtrays, serving boats and the like. It sits, carefully wrapped in a series of high cupboards in the kitchen. I've seen it exactly once.

The clouds part on the tenth year. Mom wants to have kids and she isn't getting any younger. It's hard to say what dad wanted, but my parents' marriage really makes most sense when seen as an extension of the FBI dinner dance.

There is a picture of Bea helping my mother on with her garter belt at the wedding: they both grin nervously at the camera. It was soon after this that Bea met Maggie and they became Bea-and-Maggie.

For years, we would visit relatives "back East" in the Summertime and Bea-and-Maggie were always on the itenerary. You could tell how favored relatives were by the amount of time allotted to them per visit. Bea-and-Maggie were always heavily weighted, coming in second only to my Aunt Peggy, who had horses.

I always loved Bea-and-Maggie's place. They didn't know quite how to relate to kids and, so, treated my sister and me like miniature adults. My sister could take or leave it but for a bookish little girl like me, this was love at first sight! Finally someone to talk to! They'd bitch about work and I'd bitch about school and my mom would slowly thaw at the kitchen table into this woman that I'd never met before, the kind who just might dance around the coffee table, laughing.