I didn’t call her that night. I needed to be more sure before I called her.
## What I Knew About My Mother
Denise Vale is — and I say this having spent thirty-two years trying to find the accurate, fair way to say it — a person for whom appearances are a primary concern. Not vanity in the way you might assume. It’s more specific than that, more anxious than that. She grew up with parents who cared deeply about what the neighbors thought, and she absorbed that caring the way you absorb things that are in the air of the house you grow up in. By the time I was a kid, I understood that there were things we did in public and things we did in private, and that the distinction between those things was maintained with considerable energy.
This is not the same as dishonesty. I want to be fair to her. She was not routinely dishonest with me or with my brother Luke when we were children. She was — is — a woman who prioritizes the smooth surface of things, who believes, genuinely believes, that if you can just get through the embarrassing moment without anyone noticing, the moment will have been survived. The corollary to that belief is that drawing attention to a problem is always worse than the problem itself, because you can manage a problem privately but you cannot un-draw attention.
Financially, she had always been what I would call stretched. My father’s departure had been hard in practical terms — he had not been generous in the settlement, and my mother, who had worked part-time through most of their marriage, had returned to full-time work in her late forties with a skill set that was not well-compensated. She managed. She was proud of managing. She would not, under almost any circumstances, ask for help in a way that would make the asking visible.