The Pearl
The only thing I work harder on than a good short story is a bad one. It’s like the squeaky wheel thing, the ones that glide onto the page I never pay much attention to, they’re fine, but the ones that I have to pin down word-by-word, the ones that keep me awake at night, the characters to whom I’ve given the wrong names – I can’t leave them alone. That’s what this story was like, the title specifically, I’ve changed it maybe a million times and am still not sure. I was going to call it My Mothers but it looked like it was missing an apostrophie and I can’t handle that. My pet grammatical peeve. Otherwise rules for writing are overrated, I think normalcy in general is overrated, I think I would have been a good waitress and perhaps missed my calling as a Fortune Cookie Writer. Know anybody who’s hiring?
Offered to you in the least Steinbeck-y way possible, here is The Pearl.
Thanks for being here.
The Pearl by Sherry Cassells
All my life I’ve had an outlaw personality – my mother wished aloud that I was normal – she said I was just like her scoundrel of a sister and I wore that accusation like a halo even before I met Auntie Grace.
I thought she was too good to be true, this wild, much younger aunt, it was as if she were a fake thing my mother held up as the brunt of cautionary tales. She said if you do that – where that represented a beautiful misadventure – you’ll end up like Aunty Grace.
Since I wanted nothing more than to be like Aunty Grace, I did exactly as I pleased.
The first time I saw her for real was the night before I started high school. I don’t know what I expected, but I’d seen her in photographs that barely contained her, such a wild thing, and I mean maybe there was something teeming underneath, but she seemed so tame.
Next day I went for lunch with kids from school and there she was, the waitress at the Chinese restaurant, all funny and friendly, her name tag said PEARL, we sort of unintentionally pretended we didn’t know one another, which was weird but I guess also true, she was nothing like the way she was at home, which was nothing like the way she was in the stories my mother hissed, which, it turned out, were mostly fiction. I mean the essences were true, the outlawness, but not all that excess property my mother used as moral ground.
Of course I also was nothing like the way I was at home.
She stayed with us, in the spare room across the hall, which was more silent than it had been while empty, it felt deeply mute but familiar, the way our house got when my parents traded wordless anger back and forth like a contagion.
But Aunty Pearl.
Like the sudden sophistication my mother wore into the velvety Saturday nights of my childhood, my Aunty Pearl wore a light-hearted enthusiasm into the florescent diner of my youth.
Somebody at school told me her mother got the receptionist job at Borden’s Dairy by pretending her name was ELSIE, like the cow in the Borden commercials, so I was on to Auntie "Pearl” immediately.
The restaurant, originally called The Oyster, was too high-end for our small working-class town – we grew up on Woolworth’s grilled cheese and pale fries – it lasted only six months before they changed it to The Pearl, and offered a limited Chinese food menu, run exclusively by locals, many entries were followed by an inked-in asterisk, I can’t remember exactly what the disclaimer scrawled at the bottom of the page said, something like *expect substitutions.
Aunty Pearl said things like what you thinkin’, honey? when she took orders, and ready darlin’? – she made jokes and suggestions and many friends – she yelled to the chef from a table one time Harry your mom’s here and you saw Harry’s head through the little window there all bald and surprised, it was hilarious, looked like his big happy face was on a serving plate. The Pearl soon became the busiest place in town, the strange menu caught on, Aunty Pearl wrote things like Chop Phooey, Egg Faux Young, Don’t Drop Soup, Cried Rice, on the chalkboard outside. When they weren’t busy, she dissected fortune cookies, with a ribbon she caught and pulled out the existing a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and folded in personalized ones she’d write on the fly your hair looks perfect today or dinner’s on the house or your waitress is mad about you.
Whatever people needed. Whatever she needed.
But at home she was quiet with brave edges, refined but not invisible, she talked to my mother with a crisp sort of impatience that made me bite my lip wondering who would be the first to blow.
A couple of nights after her arrival she came down to the kitchen when I was just standing there looking into the dark backyard and she said what are you thinking? I’m not sure anyone had ever asked me that question before, didn’t know if it was rhetorical, I’d been thinking about Nick from The Great Gatsby we were reading in school. We sat at the kitchen table for hours that night, and most nights thereafter.
I guess maybe she was both ways, quiet and thoughtful, wild and exhuberant, she was all ways. Still is. And so was I. Still am.
My mother, who meant to insult us in unison, kill two birds with her bitter comparisons and edited truths, is the one to credit, if that's the right word, my own brave poetic heart, if those are the right words. It was she who, anecdote by anecdote, formed the outlaw I longed to be, the very one I have become.
Auntie Pearl waited exactly two weeks before she told me the truth, she said it at breakfast one Sunday morning when we were all there, my father just stood up and left the kitchen as if somebody was calling his name, my mother didn’t say anything but was the first to fall apart. I went to her with, for the first time, unfiltered love. I understood deeply and immediately what her silence had cost her, and then I turned to Pearl who stood in front of the brightening window and I was not floored or flabbergasted, I was barely surprised, I think the outlaw in me knew all along she was my mother.
I know this story is maybe too short to support this sort of reveal, I know not enough time has passed nor enough pages for you to give much of a hoot about any of us, and mostly I know the word outlaw is not the right one for what we are but I like the way it sounds and am stubborn. And that’s the difference right there between me and Pearl – I still call her that – she keeps things internal where they brew into the most gorgeous poetry, and I let them out right away. Didn’t always. But my mother encourages it now. Since the release of her big secret, she is herself again, light-hearted and honest, the girl my father fell in love with he laughs.
What is flabbergasting is my mothers’ devotion to one another, all the tumbling love.
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Wasn’t going to include this bit because I like endings like that more than I like endings like this but like I said, I can’t keep much inside so here goes: There's something about when I say her name – stay with me here – when I say it super slow – P e a r l – (try it!) it feels like along with her name comes a real pearl, round and irridescent and beautiful, as if I’ve been keeping it under my tongue my whole life.