My mother, in an uncharacteristic burst of charity, once wished for me as many “women-friends” as she had enjoyed. She had a lot of them, I know, because as a little girl I would be dragged along with her when she went “visiting.” In our age of cell-phones, text messaging, twittering, video phones blah blah blah, this practice of actually driving or walking to someone’s house for an extended, sit-down, face-to-face conversation has almost disappeared. But it was an important ritual for my mother and her friends.
Mother would bring her knitting to Hazel Harris’ house in Provo, having likely bought the yarn at the store where Hazel worked. (I would spend most of each visit unsuccessfully trying to ignore Hazel’s facial tic.) Mother and her friend Beulah Phipps would often give each other home permanents in Beulah’s tiny house in a shabby subdivision built in the ’40s for the steelworkers and their families. And Mother and Joey Maag would sometimes can peaches or tomatoes at Joey’s house in Pleasant Grove before Joey went blind. But most of the time they would sit there in their handmade housedresses and cross-stitched aprons, drinking coffee when Mother still drank coffee and Postum when she didn’t, and would just visit — about their children, their spouses, their lack of money, their neighbors, Church, all the small things that made up their lives.
I hated these visits on several levels. As a child, I had an embarrassingly active sense of smell, and their houses, with their strange combinations of hand lotion, laundry soap and food smells, were often almost intolerable. The ammonia odor of the hair permanent solution at the Phipps house would make my eyes water. On one visit in Price, the hostess had had a small fire in the kitchen, and I spent the whole visit sitting on her front porch because the smell in the house made me gag. Mother was mortified, but spent her requisite several hours visiting anyway. I spent the time dreaming of being home with my dolls and stuffed animals, making up stories about them.
But the worst part always — always — came when Mother would describe in some detail to her friends my latest misbehavior. “What would you think of a girl who…ate a whole bag of cookies/wouldn’t practice the piano/talked back to her mother/won’t clean up her room/etc.?” she would ask dramatically, and whatever friend we were visiting would cluck her tongue in disgust. (I like to think some of them might have looked away in embarrassment, but I don’t remember any.) I remained silent, because I found that any protest would only make me seem guiltier. Mother so enjoyed this little exercise in public parenting that she started doing it to my friends, and I soon quit bringing them to the house.
I went visiting with Dad and Mother, too, almost always on Sunday afternoons when Dad’s store was closed. These were usually a little more cheerful, because Dad liked to brag about his children, especially me. I remember going with them to the home of Art and Hazel Henderson next to the American Fork cemetery, where Art would kindly tease me and Hazel would give me cookies. We’d also make the long, somewhat risky journey to Price at least once a month, dodging the coal trucks in the canyons of tiny Highway 6 to visit with my grandparents and Mother’s siblings. (To honor their memory, I won’t describe what Mother and Dad and my Aunt Marie and Uncle Mack would drink, at least until they all got religious.)
This penchant for visiting went to extremes sometimes. My father’s older sisters, Effie and Fern (who had seven or eight marriages between them and were chronically short of funds), frequently came to visit from Colorado and California and would stay for weeks, even months at a time. (Alcoholism and its effects was a persistent theme in my father’s family, and in some undiscussed way it had taken its toll on my aunts’ lives, although I never saw any of the three of them drink much.) I would be moved out of whatever room I had into whatever space could be found, and one or the other of them would settle in. And the visiting would never cease.
Fern was lively and fun, talking animately about her husbands and family and her part-time job behind the beauty counter at a pharmacy in Pasadena. (“This is my Aunt Fern,” my brother said when he introduced her to his friends. “She wears HATS.”) She was always beautifully dressed and coiffed, but only now do I realize how few dresses she really had. She gave me a subscription to Seventeen Magazine when I was in junior high and always reminded me how important it was to look nice. I adored her. Mother would sew her and Effie a dress when they visited, and they were always delighted.
Effie was stout, a born-again Baptist who was visibly uncomfortable going to our Church on Sundays, mostly because she couldn’t take the Sacrament. Her several marriages had produced only one son, who largely ignored her, and she found solace in religion. She would always interject “Hallelujah!” and “Praise Jesus!” into whatever prayer was being offered, which made my brother and me sneak a look across the table and roll our eyes. And she was a tattle-tale, reporting on my misdeeds (pianos unpracticed, messes unmade) to my mother. I loathed her. (And, in a little bit of cosmic irony, guess which one I look more and more like as I age?)
Once I got older and less easy to intimidate, I eventually escaped visiting duty. But Mother continued with it well into her eighties until she couldn’t drive anymore. And maybe the lack of it contributed to her death a few years later. Her offspring weren’t very good visitors, at least at the level she expected it.
Visiting as a social custom is almost dead, I think, and we are likely the poorer for it. Electronics has improved the speed and ease of communication, but nothing can replace the impact of a face-to-face experience. Why else would Condi Rice continue to place her very female self right in front of the Saudis and the rest of the Middle East? Along with all the political rhetoric, she is telling them, “Deal with me — and with us.” Despite the introduction of tags and widgets and emoticons, certain nuances can’t be carried electronically. And the sheer sacrifice of time involved in traveling to and remaining at a visit sends its own message: You’re important. You matter to me. We need to talk.
Just don’t assume you have to drag me along. Especially if the house smells.