The Price of Champagne

The smell of roses seems to permeate everything. It’s the first thing I notice as I enter the home of my youth. Roses, gardenia, and other fragrances I don’t recognize bloom unseen from the champagne colored living room. The color of champagne dominates my child-hood. I remember being ordered to be spotless before I could enter any room other than my own.
I remember being unable to hug my mother or touch her in any way unless I had just come from my bath and had completely dried for fear of dirtying or spotting one of the champagne colored jumpsuits she had favored and thus ruining her perfect appearance.
I almost expect to see her standing in the doorway with her familiar scowl, and saying

something like “Elise, you haven’t been painting have you? I hate it when you get paint

on my things, and your father will be home in a minute. You know how he hates

disorderliness.” But, of course she is not and never will be again. She had been as
beautifully cold and perfect in death as she had been in life. The beautiful southern-belle my mother had been would have accepted nothing less. Anna LeFlore was a beautiful woman and before she had succumbed, with the utmost dignity, of course, to the cancer that was eating away slowly at her heart, in away she had never conceded to the bitterness which preceded the cancer. She made all of the funeral arrangements,
ensuring that the last silk she would lay upon would be the finest and the palest of pale gold, the color of fine and expensive chardonnay.
As I look around the room I think how strange it had been for me, only hours before, to see my mother for the last time as she was lowered into the cold, hard ground. It’s almost stranger for me to be standing in a room I have not set foot in for thirteen years.
The room, the house, the grounds it seemed nothing had changed and yet I knew everything had. I had changed.
I was no longer the frightened little girl hiding at the top of the stairs, trying to block out the cacophony of the screamed curses and drunken, crying responses. I was in, fact now a mother who had tried to shield her own five year-old from all of the little insults I suffered as a child, which made me have no contact with my own mother for over a decade. And now the perfect southern-belle with the perfect husband, home and decidedly un-perfect daughter was gone. As cold and as much a stranger to me in death as she had been in life. But I shake myself from my melancholy reverie and beckon to my own progeny, a much happier child than I had ever been. “Come on, Bella. We need to
go find our rooms.” With her dark curls bouncing and her blue eyes shining with awe at a room we could have fit our entire apartment in, she abandoned the silk wall coverings she was tracing and came obediently to take my hand.
Much later, after my daughter had fallen into the deep slumber of the innocent and un- troubled, I once more ventured out into the showplace of a house that had been my personal hell for the eight years I had lived there before being sent to a boarding school. I ran away from there and lived on the streets until I found a job asa freelance artist. I knew exactly what I was looking for and found it almost immediately. The letter was in the exact place my old nanny, and only ally in my stepfather's house, had said it would be. Ella had told me at the funeral that my mother had an attack of her conscience right before she died. In the secret nook in the back of my mother’s top desk drawer lay a single piece of gardenia –scented, cream colored stationary. As I slowly unfolded the letter I recalled a statement that I had shouted at my stepfather fourteen years before. “I wish I lived with my real father!” That single unintended, though heartfelt desire had earned me a slap that had knocked my small, seven year old body unconscious for almost two days. When I awoke my mother demanded to know where I had learned that I did not actually belong to Edward James Rothsworth the fourth. When I tremulously explained that I had over heard Mrs. Jeffries, the cook, say that I had my daddies coloring and something about how shameful it was that my mother allowed me to have to do with anyone on the reservation. My mother had coldly informed me not to listen to servants gossip and when I pressed her about the matter a few days later, all I got was yelled at and another slap, this time from my mother.



As with all of my mother’s correspondences with me, whether they were by letter or face-to-face, she came straight to the point. “ Your nanny felt you should know the shameful truth about your birth and, though I don’t agree, for reasons that no longer matter, I have conceded. I met your father when I was only sixteen years old, and in a fit of rebellion made the worst mistake of my life. His name was Joshua Blackeagle and for, your sake, I’m sorry to say that he died when the plane taking him to Washington D.C. crashed. He had a father on the Cherokee reservation. That is all I know. I hope that your own little mistake brings you as much shame and disappointment as you have brought me.” It was signed simply as “Mother”.
I realized that I would leave this house in the morning and never look back. I had been allowed only the one night to find anything of value to me and get out. The house, it’s properties and everything else had been left to my cousin Clarissa, my mother’s sister’s only child, and she hadn’t had to let me have that.
The next morning as Bella and I climbed into my old Cameron I felt as if I knew why my child-hood had been filled with so much anger. I had been penance for one parent and the price the other had to pay to have a beautiful, young wife. I knew as I drove down the long drive way that I was leaving sadness behind in my mother’s beautiful champagne –colored house. And as I turned onto the dirt road leading to the reservation and saw the riot of color in the dawn sky I felt like maybe, just maybe I was going home.