White Carnations

We didn't have mothers anymore, nor were we mothers ourselves, so we got together on Mother's Day at a down-and-out pub frequented by gay men and regular drunks. There weren't any mothers there, as far as we could tell, and the day gave us that kind of radar. We knew who was a mother and who wasn't. It was the third anniversary of our early May outing, and we all showed up on time, at two o'clock on this sun-struck afternoon, as if we couldn't wait to get inside where it felt dark and smoky, even though smoking had been banned in New York City bars and restaurants for several years now.

The tradition started with Elaine and Lara, who worked together at a museum. When Elaine came back to the office after her mother died, Lara took her out for a fancy lunch and made her weep at the hazelnut-encrusted salmon and the chocolate turtle cake with caramel beurre salé. Sometime after that, Elaine and Anne met at a fundraiser and discovered what they had in common.

Then Lara and I met at a party. It was the first party I had gone to since my mother's death. I wore a red strapless dress and felt insanely cheerful and dangerously cavalier. I talked to women about bikini waxing and bed bugs. I found a way to touch every man I met: hand, shoulder, hip. At the punch bowl Lara introduced herself.

"What do you do?" she asked. I told her that I did program administration for a ballet school, where I used to dance myself. Before I had time to reciprocate the question, she asked, "And what do your parents do?" The snobbery surprised me from this woman in jeans and a ponytail, but I was prepared for all questions that night, prepared to hold myself apart from whatever was asked of me.

"I don't know my father, and my mother is dead."

"Yes," Lara said.

I didn't go home with a man that night. I drank spiked punch with Lara, who, it turned out, was not the kind of snob who dealt in pedigree or career. Parental loss was her stock-in-trade.

So when Mother's Day came around, with its bouquets and dinner specials, Elaine invited Anne, and Lara invited me, and there were four of us. But I imagined that our numbers were secretly legion, that in windowless joints throughout the city, huddled groups of women gathered, not a mother among them. We weren't quite commemorating, and we weren't quite commiserating, though we weren't in denial either. We spent hours together in the hard wooden booth, and we ate and drank, talked and laughed, and it was a kind of fun fueled by each of our particular experiences of death.

For Elaine's mother it was Alzheimer's. At the end, as if to prove to Elaine that she'd always favored her younger sister, she could remember the name Janice, but not Elaine, though Elaine was the one who visited her mother more often, who had to explain over and over again why she couldn't go back to her sweet little house with the Victory Garden she had planted for when the soldiers came home. Anne's mother had died of cancer, the super fast kind, for which the relatives flew in right away to say goodbye. And Lara's mother killed herself many years ago. Lara was twelve, away at camp for the summer. One morning she dropped a letter to her mother in the camp mailbox. That afternoon, her uncle came to take her home. The letter arrived a few days later. Lara retrieved it from the mailbox, lit a match, and burned it. When the paper was consumed, she let the flame burn her skin.

When you think about it afterward, there is always something, in addition to the death, that marks the occasion. My mother was killed in a car accident three and a half years ago. Taxi drivers are known for their death-defying...