Avery

by Susan Shearouse To make sense of my life, I try to understand my mother.

Before she was my mother, she was a person in her own right.

Born in 1912, when women were deemed too delicate and mentally inferior to vote. Her mother was Chrystine Jordan Coffin. I do not imagine Chrystine (later to become my Granny) was thrilled with the news that she was pregnant again. Her baby Arthur, two months old, was still sucking at her breast. Avery grew up in Arthur’s shadow, and struggled to find her own place in the world all of her life. He was brilliant, graduating from Georgia Tech at 16. She was never as pretty and winsome as her younger sister, Jane. “If I wanted ice cream, I’d tell Jane to ask for it. That way I’d get some.”

I know so few stories from her growing up days; I wonder what may have happened to her along the way. What I do know is the stories she told me, and her desperate efforts to control my body and my life.

Girls in her day were supposed to be decorative until they could acquire a husband by whatever means necessary and a household of their own. By her description she was not decorative, ever. Her words: rail thin, gangly, too tall, ugly, even. Her intelligence mattered little to this proud family; she was female, after all. Even in the depression years of the 1930’s, the Coffins were well off enough that she could attend college, Oglethorpe, in her hometown, Atlanta. She loved those college years, where she shone as sorority president, and competed with the best of them at golf, swimming, and tennis. Years later when she wrote her own obituary, she omitted all of that she’d done beyond college. Rather, we read about her proudest accomplishment, her year as president of her sorority, 70 years earlier.

This was the era of debutante balls and coming-out parties. Avery was a part of that. There, according to the prescribed path for young women, she was to find a man, just like Scarlet O’Hara and Melanie, without the Civil War complication. She’d marry, have children, cook, sew, clean, join the garden club and the women’s club, perhaps a bridge club too. The way life was supposed to be if you were born into a certain class.

For Avery, somewhere along the line, that script got lost. When she finally married at 26, she was embarrassingly close to becoming an Old Maid. Remember that card game? The loser got stuck with the Old Maid card, a cartoon of an ugly old woman with wrinkles and warts and weary eyes. When I was a child we’d dealt those cards and learned the lesson, the worst fate a girl could meet was to be unmarried.

Avery married a young engineer, James D. Shearouse. He met the family’s requirements: a Georgia Tech graduate from a good enough Savannah family. After her wedding portrait and details of the beautiful event were printed in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, they settled into a little apartment across the street from her parents. Her first baby, James D. Shearouse Jr., came along a year later, right on schedule. From there, the plan started to slip.

Over the next 20 years, they moved 17 times. She had four children, each born in a different city. Jim went off to World War II, leaving her home with two little boys. When he returned, he became a career officer. Two more babies, many more moves. What Avery wanted more than anything was a place to settle down, as close to Atlanta as she could be, where she could pick up her tattered copy of that long ago script. As an army wife, that’s not the life she got. At her funeral, one of her friends told me, “she always seemed so melancholy.”

She was endlessly creative, Martha Stewart before there was a Martha Stewart. Her hands were always busy. She decorated each new house, sewing curtains, hanging wallpaper, painting kitchens and bedrooms and bathrooms. My brother Jim still has that desk she found abandoned years ago. I watched her splash paint remover across it in the backyard, her skirt falling away in heavy pieces as it was eaten away by lye. Beneath layers of chipped black paint and years of attic grime she uncovered a handsome mahogany jewel with brass inlays. Then she brought home a stack of books from the library and taught herself how to dye a piece of leather and emboss one of its corners with roses, a proper top for this masterpiece.

She stitched her three sons’ clothes and her own, and of course mine when I came along. Her creativity in the kitchen fed us three meals a day, making the ordinary extraordinary. School lunches went beyond peanut butter and jelly to cream cheese and olives. Every dinner was carefully crafted. Ground beef folded into pie crust for Tuesday night, the usual fried chicken or pot roast on Sundays. Homemade desserts: Apple pies and pound cakes and cheesecakes, or exotic charlotte russe or floating islands or boiled custard.

Mothering, however, was not her thing. Driven to be doing, doing, doing, she could not slow down for the joys of snuggling, listening and laughing with a small child. Why did they have a fourth one? She told no one she was pregnant. When the news was telegraphed home, the message to family and friends was, “We really wanted another boy.” There was something frightening about having a girl. Was she pursued by her own memories? As I grew up she made it clear, my body was a danger to her.

She lost herself in sewing girly clothes with lots of lace and pleats and frills, then moved on to doll clothes, building doll houses and building doll furniture. She didn’t bring me into these projects; that would take too much time. “Patience is a virtue,” she often quoted, as she rushed us all onto the next thing.

The family snapshots were requisite line-ups, stiff poses in Sunday school clothes, pictures she could mail home to Granny to show what a good mother she was. Penned on the back in Avery’s careful script was some complaint. In one photo, her four children pose on a lawn in Panama. I was maybe 18 months old, and was supposed to sit in front in a child sized wicker chair. I hadn’t learned the rules yet. On the back, “someone [me] always has to stand up,” my mother grumbled. Another: “I can’t get them to all look intelligent at the same time.” My brother Chris later reflected on our childhood that to Avery “we were human furniture.”

My father was an engineer, an army colonel. Mrs. James D. Shearouse was his wife, living still in the shadow of a man. She excelled in her role as the Colonel’s wife wherever he was posted. She proudly provided elegant teas for the officers’ wives. Her elaborate Christmas parties were the talk of the women’s club. Avery gathered armloads of magnolia leaves, dousing them with lye and scrubbing the chlorophyll away with a toothbrush, spray painting the lacy pattern of veins gold, then arranging them in broad bouquets. She stenciled three wise men on the big mirror in the hall, poured scalding hot sugar syrup on the marble top of that small console table in the dining room and pulled it into butter mints, ignoring the burning pain in her hands. My role? Wearing the blue plaid dress she had made, the one with lace on the collar and a little red bow at the neck, and those black and white saddle oxfords, I offered trays of hors d'oeuvres to the assembled guests. “And don’t forget to smile!”

Years later they retired to a continuing care community much like the one I’m living in now. I paused at the door to their apartment to read their names and a wave of sadness washed through me. After all this time, printed on that panel: Col and Mrs. James D. Shearouse. Not Avery and Jim Shearouse. She still couldn’t claim her own name, her place in the world.