After my father left, my mother switched to Benson & Hedges. Then after he'd been gone for a while, she used a graduated filter system that was supposed to help her taper off until she quit. She went through all the steps: the first filter that took out a little, the next one that took out more, then the next one that took out even more until the last one, which let through almost nothing, as if you practically weren't even smoking anymore. Still, my mother couldn't get past it. She kept smoking with that last filter for years.
I remember her cleaning out the filters, twisting a Kleenex into a point and sticking it in, and the Kleenex coming out covered with sticky brown sludge. She'd do three or four Kleenexes until there was not much sludge on them, then she'd put the filter back on another cigarette and light up.
There were ashtrays all over wherever we lived--in the military units and apartment buildings, in other people's homes while they were away, in all of the rentals my mother said someday she'd like to buy. There were ashtrays on the counter by the sink in the bathroom, on the end tables in the TV room, on the coffee table in the living room, and on the picnic table out back. The outdoor ones were those heavy, tin-foil-feeling ones--round, but with a corrugated edge so you could put a lot of butts in all at once. When it rained, the outdoor ones filled with muddy, tea-brown water, which had ashes, filters, and filth floating in it.
There were ashtrays on the work table in the garage where my father oiled his guns; on the ledge by the hose out back where he cleaned his birds and gutted his fish and skinned his rabbits. There were ashtrays on the tables on either side of the bed in my parents' bedroom, and then, after my mother moved into the spare room, which had been my sister's room before she'd gone away to college, on the orange crate on the side of that bed, too.
There were ashtrays in their cars--her big, fake-wood-sided Ford station wagon in which she shopped and hauled us kids around; his tidy, compact, perfectly white Peugeot. The ashtray in the Ford was crammed--broken, lipstick-stained filters poking out of it and falling on the floor and rolling around with the crumpled hamburger wrappers and French fry bags and waxy Coke cups and straws from wherever our mother grabbed dinner for us when we were late and she didn't have time to cook. The door to that ashtray would never close. It was always, no matter how often we emptied it, crammed. On the floor of her car were those tough, skinny, gold-colored strings you opened the cellophane with, and empty wrappers, some almost whole, the top part opening up like a lid or flopping back and forth like a broken neck. There were parts of packages, curly pieces, irregular triangles and little strips, slivery pieces that clung to your skin, ragged pieces she had torn open with her teeth.
The ashtray in my dad's car was never crammed. It was always, like the rest of his car, well tended, neat, and to the degree he could control it, child-free.
At home, my mother's ashtrays were ceramic, home-thrown pottery; avocado or Aztec gold or burnt sienna, the colors women were using in the art classes she was always going to take. One of them, in a nod to the hippies, was chartreuse.
My father's ashtrays were fat, thick, heavy ones from the military. The butts in my father's ashtrays were short, smashed squarely, almost tidy. He smoked them all the way down to the end, then put them out with one firm press. My father did not like to be interrupted while smoking. He preferred to smoke deliberately, with a drink.
My mother never smoked cigarettes all the way. She smoked them nervously, between stirring something on the stove or answering the phone or changing the laundry. She would never carry a cigarette from one room to the next. She said when a woman walked with a cigarette it made her look cheap. My mother smoked when she was trying to sit down for a minute between things. There'd be a cold cup of coffee from when she'd tried to sit down before, and she'd remember a phone call she had to return or hear the buzzer go off in the laundry or a pot boil over, and in one frantic movement, she would stand up, suck in a drag, stub out the cigarette, often breaking it because it was still so long, and run to the phone or laundry or kitchen.
Her ashtrays were full of broken sticks, the paper jagged at the break, shreds of tobacco poking out of them like splinters. Her ashtrays were full of long curled straws of ashes, like fallen-down columns. My father said to her, more than once, that one of these days she was going to burn down the goddamned house.
***
There is a photo of my parents at a luau. It looks like it's from the early '60s, so I must have been around by then, but I don't remember ever seeing them like this. My mother is wearing a shoulderless shift. Her neck and upper arms are firm and fit. I can see the delicate bones of her collarbone, the line her skin makes when it goes from her ear to her neck. I know that the skin of her shoulders is smooth.
She's sitting at a low table with six or eight other adults who all look about the same age as her. The men, all white, have on Hawaiian shirts. Some of the women, not her, have flowers in their hair. Her hair is dark and wavy and long. I've only ever seen it like that in pictures. There's a big plate of things on skewers, and bowls of rice. Some people are drinking from coconut halves, others have regular highball glasses. My mother is turned to talk to the woman next to her and is holding a cigarette. This picture, of course, is still, but I can tell that my mother is not gesturing with her cigarette. She would not do anything to draw undue attention to herself; would never cheapen herself like that. She holds her cigarette like a prop, something to make her look confident and sure, as if she belonged. My father stands behind her, a Camel in his right hand. He's talking to someone next to him, a fat guy laughing at something someone has said. My father is smiling at the man, but I know his smile is not because of something anybody's said, but because his other hand, the one without the cigarette, is resting on the smooth and naked shoulder of his pretty, sexy wife.
***
My sister was the first of us kids to start. She was in high school. My mother caught her. My mother and I had gone out somewhere--I don't remember where--and had come back early. My sister had gone into the bathroom, stuffed a towel in the crack at the bottom of the door, and tried to smoke. My mother could smell it the second she walked in the house. She went straight to the bathroom and tried the door--it was locked--and called my sister's name. My sister didn't say anything. There was a frantic sound of flushing, and some rumbling in the trash. My mother rattled the door and shouted, "I know what you're doing in there, Betty!" I didn't know how my mother knew it was my sister and not my brother, who was only one year younger.
"I know exactly what you're doing in there!" my mother shouted again. She sounded angry, but also, in some way, triumphant, like this was one thing she would not be fooled about.
There was also something sad in her voice. She was seeing her elder daughter alone and curious, afraid of being caught but needing to investigate this adult, forbidden thing. She was seeing her daughter turn into her.
***
My mother would not smoke around her mother. We went to visit my grandmother in Oklahoma City almost every summer. After my brother and sister had grown, I made this trip with my mother alone. My grandmother knew her daughter smoked, and that her son-in-law, of whom she had never approved, did so as well. She also knew he drank.
My mother's mother despised smoking. She thought it was a filthy, cheap thing for a woman to do. A few times my mother and I went out to the grocery or a movie or museum without her mother, but most of the time we were at home with her. There were no men--my grandfather was dead; my father was gone; my brother was away at college--so we stayed at home and did the things that women did: cooked and cleaned and worried and remembered.
After her mother went to bed, my mother would smoke. She would only smoke outside and only on the back porch, not the front where someone might see her. She would, as if to compensate for what she'd been denied during the day, smoke several cigarettes, all the way down to the filter, one right after the other; then smash the butts into the jar she had in her purse for this, then dump them into the trash behind the garage.
Sometimes I'd go out onto the porch with her. I wouldn't smoke--I was still young--but I would sit with my mother and we would talk. After the hot, dry day, the air would finally be getting cool, and my mother no longer had to behave the way she did around her mother.
My mother was working as a Welcome Wagon lady, but she didn't like to talk about her job. What she liked to talk about was school. She was going back to college at night to become a social worker. Sometimes we worked on our homework together, her on one side of the table and me on the other, each of us surrounded by our books. Sometimes she told me about what she was learning in her political history and sociology and anthropology classes, or we'd talk about what I was doing in English. Some of these times she seemed happy, like something good was just around the corner.
But out on her mother's porch, when she was smoking in the evening, my mother sounded tired. I tried to cheer her up sometimes, but I hardly ever could.
After my mother's father died, the front curtains in her parents' house were always drawn. The house was dark and so quiet you could hear a clock ticking in the next room. My mother was in her early 40s then, which seemed very old to me. I knew my mother didn't like being at her mother's house, so I didn't understand why she kept going there. I didn't understand how long you stay your parents' child.
***
My mother smoked her first cigarette on the train on her way to H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College in New Orleans. She'd wanted to go there, very far away, to study speech and drama. It was the farthest she'd ever been from Oklahoma; the longest she'd ever been away from her parents. The train took days. She went by herself. It was the biggest adventure she'd ever had, made even bigger when the train broke down in the middle of the night. Everyone woke up and there were people in the corridors in their robes and pajamas, and everyone was talking. At first everyone seemed concerned and scared, but then they opened the restaurant car and the bar and it became, my mother told me, almost like a party. They were way out in the country--nobody knew exactly where--but far from the lights of any town or city. It was completely dark outside, but mild and warm, and people stepped on and off the train in their pajamas and robes with their drinks, to walk around in the still, warm air and look at the stars. When somebody asked her where she was from and where she was going and offered her a cigarette, she took it.
I smoked my first cigarette during the year I spent abroad on a high school scholarship. In England, where I lived, I smoked Silk Cuts and Players. In France, where I visited, I smoked Gitanes and Gauloises. In Spain, where I also visited, I smoked something really cheap called Escudos and coughed and hacked all night. I bought a pack of cigarettes every other day and smoked instead of eating breakfast or lunch. I ate only one meal a day--dinner, late at night, which I thought was very Continental. Once, with a girl who was the granddaughter of a man who made millions importing them, I smoked these incredibly potent but very smooth Russian cigarettes, Sobranies, which were wrapped in elegant black paper.
During that year, I had also gotten drunk for the first time and had my first sexual affair. When I came back to the U.S., I told my mother about the smoking but not about the drinking (which she still hated about my father), nor the sex.
The first year I lived away from home was also the first year my mother lived alone. My mother had lived with her parents for l7 years, then in a dorm at Sophie Newcomb for a year until she transferred to the University of Oklahoma, where she met my father, then, after she got married, with my father. After my siblings were born and my father was away on tour, she lived with her children. After my father left for good and my brother and sister were away at college, she lived with me.
When I came back from my year abroad, during the summer before college, I lived at home with her. She said if I was going to smoke anyway, she'd rather I didn't do it behind her back, and she started bringing home all different kinds of cigarettes for us to smoke together.
We tried the new ones--"You've come a long way, baby" Virginia Slims and the long, skinny, "silly millimeter longer" 101s. We tried Benson & Hedges, which had the best ads. We tried the old ones, like Newport, Kool, and my mother's regular, Salem. I wanted to try Lark, because that's what Ringo was smoking in a picture I remembered of the Beatles. Plus there was that great jingle, "Have a Lark, have a Lark, have a Lark today!" to the tune of the William Tell Overture. Larks tasted horrible. We also tried Winston, Marlboro, Old Gold, Parliament, Lucky Strike, and Kent. My mother didn't like any of the regular ones, only menthol. She said it if wasn't a menthol she might as well not even smoke at all. The only brand we didn't try was Camel, my father's brand.
Every morning when he woke up, my father coughed. They were wet, thick hacks. I'd hear him in the bathroom clearing his throat like he was saying, "A-hem, a-hem, a-hem" over and over, and hawking. When he came out of the bathroom he would get a cup of coffee my mother had perked--he always used his military cup with his squadron logo on it--and sit down with his newspaper to do the crossword. After his cup of coffee, he went back to the bathroom and coughed and hacked some more, and then on his way back to the table he would grab a bottle of Dos Equis from the fridge and sit back down with it. My mother would come over to warm up his coffee, but he would not acknowledge her. He'd take a swig of his Mexican beer and another drag of his cigarette and get back to his crossword.
One of the few times I remember my father playing with me when I was little was when we'd play this game about counting the letter "e" on the back of his Camels. He'd ask me to count them and I would try, but I always missed one or counted one too many times, and I never could remember from one time to the next how many "e's" there were. I remember the package, the camel, the pyramid in the background, the skinny lines of sky, the gold and yellow and brown to make it look like Egypt. I remember how far away it looked, and how exotic and dark and masculine. But I could never remember how many "e's." I never got it.
My father told me about "three on a match." During the war, by which he meant World War II, cigarettes were one of the men's only rewards and comforts. A cigarette could calm a soldier down, or maybe, for an instant, be the only thing to get his mind off his pain. My father told me how some guys would light a cigarette for a wounded guy, a guy in pain, "real pain," my father would say. You'd have to light it for him and maybe even put it in his mouth, and he'd just barely be able to suck on it. It would just barely hang there, quivering, on his bottom lip, and he'd drop ashes on his chest and not even notice, even if it burned, because he was already in such immense, incredible pain, "real pain."
My father told me this with his face half turned away from me, as if the mere remembering were painful to him. He wanted me to see that I would never--no one who had not been in the war would ever--understand the pain of being in the war.
Three on a match was bad luck--you could light one for one buddy, but never for two buddies, because by the time the third cigarette was lit the Germans would have spotted you and you'd get shot.
He didn't say these things like they were common stories known by anyone who'd ever seen a movie. He told me these stories as if they had happened to him.
I didn't know when he was telling me these things that my father had never fought in the war. I learned this from my mother after he left. She told me he had always, since he was very, very young, wanted to be a soldier like his father. His father had been in World War I, and when he came home a hero, he brought his gun and taught his sons, my father and his baby brother Stanley, to clean and care for it. As soon as he could, my father enlisted. He was accepted for pilot training school, but by the time he finished training, the war was over, and though he made a career of the Navy, my father never saw an active day of combat in his life. My father saw this as a failure. It was his shame.
***
My mother stopped smoking a few years after she moved away from the last place she had lived with my father. She'd had to stay there in Texas for several years to make the money she needed to move. She moved to New Mexico, where she had wanted to live since she was a child--she had been on a car trip there with her parents. I was in college by then, and both of my siblings had been away from home for years. My mother moved to a small apartment by herself; then several years later, after she retired, she moved to a small town where she bought a house. It was the first piece of property she had ever owned. She had a garden and a cat, and she was happy.
My father stopped smoking when his doctor told him that his third wife, who was not a smoker, was getting the equivalent of a pack a day from being around him. My father quit cold turkey. He had never quit before.
Throughout the 10-plus years of their marriage, my father called his third wife "my bride." I believe my father found the kind of love he'd always wanted.
But then shortly after he gave up smoking, my father had a stroke. His doctor said his body might be reacting to the sudden deprivation of nicotine, after daily doses for more than 50 years.
Though my father survived, after the stroke his memory slipped, and his speech would slur. These things weren't new, but the stroke allowed us to talk openly about them because we could pretend the stroke had caused them.
My mother died first. The death certificate called it an "expected" death. We had discovered her colon cancer when I'd gone down to see her the previous summer. I was able to quit my job and go care for her during her last six months. My sister was there a lot, too, and my brother came down when he could. Chris, my partner, was able to be there sometimes, too, including the night my mother died.
Then six weeks after my mother, my father died. His death was not expected. Although for decades we had wondered how anyone could live the way he did, there was no "precipitating event" that made his death seem imminent. His wife told us he'd said he felt like taking a nap and headed down the hall to their room. An hour later, when she saw the light on in the bathroom and knocked and there was no answer, she opened the door and found him on the floor, dead.
Between them my parents had three kinds of cancer--colon, skin, and prostate--as well as high blood pressure, bad circulation, anemia, shortness of breath, and heart and respiratory failure. I have no doubt that their smoking, if it didn't actually cause, at least contributed to these conditions.
But I also think that, for years, their smoking saved them.
Within a few years of their marriage (the exact date of which I have never known because they never, at least in my or my siblings' memories, ever acknowledged--much less celebrated--an anniversary, or ever told us a story about how they met), my parents were deeply unhappy with one another. Smoking allowed them to take a break and get away for a while from whatever was making them miserable. It was something each could look forward to. They, each alone, could get away from the kids, the noise, the crap, for a quiet smoke. Or they could, each alone, drive to the store for a new pack when the cartons my mother had bought at the Navy PX had run out, then make their way back as slowly as they could. Smoking was a pleasure they had once enjoyed together, but grew to prefer alone. My father could do something for only himself and imagine that he were strong and tough, a hero of the war. My mother could do something for only herself and imagine that she were above it all, unfazed and independent, cool, like a woman in the movies. They each could imagine other lives. They each could imagine that their shitty lives weren't shitty.
I'm grateful for this. I'm grateful that their smoking helped them get through their terrible years, then allowed them to live long enough to quit for good, and then, for however brief a time, live happily until they had to die.
