"Shrine" by Sandra Florence

Shrine

Sue thought about the closet in her old bedroom at home. Her mother still kept all her dresses hanging in there, and all the satin shoes that matched the dresses. She had the shoes stacked in boxes and placed underneath each dress.
“You should open a museum, Mom, and charge admission.”
“Don’t be silly,” her mother laughed and pushed Sue’s shoulder.
“Seriously, you could get out the old photos of me wearing the formals and display them alongside the shoes. You could do all the formals and dances and me with what was his name, Jack, uh…oh Jack Davis. Tall, blonde, horn-rimmed glasses.” She had gone with him to the Christmas Ball her freshman year. Red dress, red shoes, her hair up in an attempt to look like Audrey Hepburn. 
“And the other pictures of me with Mark and Bill. Mardi Gras my junior year. Wow! Where did we get that dress? Blue brocade.”
“That was a lovely dress, and you looked so pretty.”
“Does brocade still exist? Actually I bet the last piece of it is hanging in my closet,” Sue said laughing.    
“Do you really need to make fun of a time in your life when everything was happy?”
“Not everything.” Sue went into her room and opened the closet door. There it was. Blue brocade under plastic. And alongside it the long white formal she’d worn to the Senior Prom. Sue had loved that particular dress. It was now yellowing in the shrine at her mother's house. 
The shrine contained a memory her mother had of her and couldn’t let go of.  It was funny and sad. Still she tried to joke with her mother about it.
"You could put in a wax effigy of me. Stand it in the corner of the bedroom and put on different formals as the seasons change." Sometimes her mother laughed at her silly suggestions. Now she seemed to be getting sad. She sat on the edge of the bed, her head leaning on her right hand. “I don’t understand you,” her mother said.
“I know,” Sue said.
Sue thought her own years in high school, all the parties and formals, as her mother's favorite time. After all, her mother had missed all that, having dropped out of school at fifteen to go to work. Now she wanted to remember Sue as a carefree party-girl. It was an image her mother had invented, and Sue thought it was cheesy, although at the time she had happily participated in the scene — the corsages, photos, the boys, the parties, and later, in the backseat of a car. They were her mother's dreams for herself really. That's why she kept all the dresses, perhaps pretending they'd been her own. And then later, Sue told her mother she was a lesbian.
“That’s preposterous! Why would you say such a thing? Just to hurt me?”
“Because it’s true, Mom.” Sue said this to her mother’s back as she walked away.
When Sue went for visits, the house was still. Her mother kept the front rooms dark. One morning Sue opened the curtains, and her mother rushed into the room.
"What are you doing?" 
"I'm just opening the curtains; it's so dark in here." Her mother had gone over to the curtains and started fussing with them. Sue left the room. When she came back ten minutes later, the curtains were drawn. Everything was in place just as it had been for twenty-five years. Oh, Sue's mother had added a few knick-knacks from her vacation to Hawaii and road trips with her second husband, but pretty much, things remained the same. And that's how she wanted it. The same, before they were different.

Sandra Florence

Sandra received her Master’s in English / Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and has been writing and teaching in Tucson, Arizona, for the last thirty-eight years. She taught writing at the University of Arizona for 19 years, at Pima Community College for six years, and at Pima Co. Adult Education for 10 years, teaching refugees, homeless students, adolescent parents, women in recovery, and juveniles at risk. She is the recipient of two NEH grants, one in 1997 under the initiative, The National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity, and the second in 2015, entitled, Border Culture in the Classroom and in the Public Square. She has published both literary and scholarly work on writing and healing and writing as a tool for public dialogue.

Headshot: Dianne Roberts

Photo Credit: Staff