The Dish

Its silver is tarnished, if it is silver. Maybe it’s silver plate dulled by the years. I don’t know any more about this serving dish’s pedigree now than I did when I was 15. I know only that my mother loved it. And because she loved it, I saved it. And because I saved it, for a few seconds one week ago, it became more than a dish. It became a time machine.

But first the rabbit:

When I was eight, I fell in love with a small, stuffed rabbit that sat in the window of the Rexall drug on Main Street in Randolph. The rabbit was white and fluffy with pink eyes and a touch of pink on its ears. It was life size, not huge like most stuffed animals, so, even at the age of eight, I was surprised by its price: $3.99.

A double feature at the Randolph theater right next door cost 25 cents. A vanilla Coke at the soda fountain 10-feet away was only a dime. I could get a Tootsie pop for two cents and two Mint Juleps for a penny. Why was this rabbit so expensive?

I remember pressing my nose against the cold window that separated that rabbit and me, my mother pulling me away, telling me that the window was dirty. I remember wishing and praying for weeks after, that my parent’s ship would come in and that I would wake up one morning and find this little bunny next to me.

I was 15 when I remembered that rabbit and how much I’d wanted him. I was with my mother and she had her nose, not quite pressed up against the glass window of a store just off Hancock Street in Quincy Center, but close. Very close.

She was staring at a glass dish propped up against a block of blue velvet lit from above by tiny, white lights. The dish was divided into five smaller sections, and the edges were glimmering. There were other dishes in the window and vases and silver bowls. But it was this dish that held my mother’s gaze.

I saw in her eyes that day the same look I saw when she was oohing and ahhing over some stranger’s baby, or when my Aunt Lorraine announced that she was pregnant again.

If only, I knew she was thinking. If only.

“Imagine celery in the center strip right there, flanked by red radishes and green olives on one side and cranberry sauce and black olives on the other? On the table at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Wouldn’t that be beautiful? Wouldn’t the Nanas love that?” she said that day.

But did she?

Or have I made up these words? My mother didn’t cook to impress. She cooked to feed my father and me, and on Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter, my grandmothers, too. My mother did not entertain. Why did she want this dish?

We were inseparable that summer of 1963. My mother was manager of Wethern’s, a hat shop on Hancock Street in Quincy and I was a seasonal employee at Bell Shop, a small clothing store, a few doors away. Every day, except for Sundays, (stores were not open on Sundays in 1963,) we rode to work together, ate lunch together, poked around Remick’s and Woolworths and most of Quincy Square together. Then, at day’s end, we drove home together, listening to Don Kent, the weatherman, planning, once we knew the forecast, what we would wear the next day.

The day my mother showed me the dish was ordinary. We were in the back of Wethern’s sitting on crates eating our lunches, (She made our lunches, bologna sandwiches mostly because they were my favorite.) “When you finish, I want to show you something,” she said. This was not unusual. My mother was always showing me something: a James Metcalfe poem she’d clipped from the Record American; a box full of hats that had been delivered that morning; the newest coats on the mannequins at Remicks. This day, she checked that her hat was on straight, (She always wore a hat. “Free advertising” she said,) locked the shop door, hung the “Will Return at 1:00 PM”sign, crossed Hancock Street and led me around a corner and down a street where on a bend, in the shade, was a shop with a window lit by what looked like glittery stars.

After she showed me the dish, after she made her wish out loud, my mother walked back to Wetherns and I walked back to the Bell Shop and if we talked about the dish on the way home that night, I don’t remember.

But the next day I began saving my money. I stopped splurging on vanilla cokes and butterscotch dipped cones at the Dairy Queen. I stopped going to the movies with my best friend, Rosemary. I saved my pennies, even the ones I got for returning bottles I collected at Nantasket beach.

My plan was to give the dish to my mother on her wedding anniversary, which was August 18. But come the second week of August, I was short of my goal. I had been paying for the dish weekly, stuffing dollar bills in an envelope and hightailing it to the store to make a payment, hoping my mother wouldn’t catch on. I never missed a week. Maybe that’s why the man who owned the store said you can pay me later. Maybe that’s why, when the day came for me to pick up the dish, he had it boxed and wrapped in silver foil and tied with a white satin bow.

Oh, my mother’s face, when she opened that box! And my father’s. I hadn’t told him. I hadn’t told anyone.

That dish made my mother happy for a lot of Thanksgivings and Christmases and Easters. But until this year, it’s always been just a dish to me.

A week ago when I unwrapped it, I saw only its tarnish and age. And then as I held it a kind of magic happened. For a few seconds, the past appeared, in high definition and I could see my mother, her blue eyes sparkling, standing at that store window, the dish no longer in the window but in her hands. And I could see her filling that dish, celery in the center strip, red radishes and green olives on one side and cranberry sauce and black olives on the other, with every movement smiling.

My mother was real again. And this made me smile.