Being Thelma and Louise

by Nikki Hanna

Mom was seventy-five and I fifty-four when we became Thelma and Louise. I’d say, “Get in the car, Thelma.” Her eyes would light up like a child discovering a spotted puppy. Always up for an adventure, she grabbed her purse, cane, and a handkerchief and shuffled to the garage at an amazing pace given her bad knees.

Before Dad died, he often surprised Mom with spontaneous escapades around Iowa. When he said, “Get in the car, Mom,” she was always ready. They would set off for a destination to which she was not privy until they got there. I suspect my invitations reminded her of those impromptu adventures. No doubt she delighted in the memories and the feelings of anticipation our trips resurrected.

Mom never saw the Thelma and Louise movie, so she didn’t protest when I assigned us that label. And she did not object when I insisted that I got to be the character who shot somebody—not that she would have wanted that role anyway. She was an Iowa farm woman immersed in heartland conformity and not one inclined to aspire to criminal activity. I, on the other hand. . .

After Dad died, I brought Mom from rural Iowa to Oklahoma for long visits to distract from the grief that threatened to overwhelm her. In addition to that loss, she coped with declining physical abilities. The responsibility of caring for her weighed heavily on me. I worried she would fall on my watch. Her small dog, who was also on his last leg, accompanied her on the Oklahoma visits. I agonized over the prospect that Cricket would die and generate more grief. I also worried that Mom would trip, fall on Cricket, hurt herself, and kill the dog.

While I worked, Mom sat in my house alone all day, surveilling through a picture window the comings and goings of neighbors while she occupied herself with jigsaw puzzles, word games, or crochet. Out of her element in my downtown Tulsa townhouse, she expressed considerable curiosity about the destinations of passing cars. In her rural environment, she could predict where neighbors were headed by the direction they were going, the day of the week, and the time of day. The anonymity of my neighbors and my lack of interest in their business baffled her. 

Feeling guilty about leaving her alone so long, I planned adventures for the evenings.

We patronized her favorite restaurants. The extensive menus and generous proportions disturbed her. She would often say, “I’ll just eat off your plate,” which irritated me. Her depression-era mentality prompted her to stuff condiments into her purse in which she carried a knife to cut up table scraps and plastic bags in which to store them.

After dinner, we hit craft stores, gift shops, and malls. I made certain Mom was the best-dressed octogenarian at the First Methodist Church in Prescott, Iowa. I held her hand from the car to the shopping carts, carefully navigating curbs, sidewalk flaws, and doorjambs. The tender nature of this action comforted me. Her hands were soft, her fingers long and slender, and her mother-like grasp gentle but sure. We fit together with a naturalness possible only through common ancestry. I have her hands. My daughter does, as well. I look at my granddaughter’s tiny hands, and I wonder. . .

We developed a fresh, easy banter, and she took on the mission of getting the better of me. When I got the better of her, she pretended to be annoyed, but the upward turn of her lips and the sparkle in her eyes betrayed her. It was tit for tat. She gleefully bettered me, most often in my most unguarded moments. When detailers left my new car’s moonroof cover open, I pushed every button I could find trying to close it. This created a host of other problems, which included interior lights permanently lit, causing me to drive around town looking like an all-night casino. Mom, sitting in the passenger seat, reached up, slid the moonroof cover shut, and sat there smiling like a Cheshire cat who had just left a fur ball on my spot on the sofa. I decided to take advantage of Mom’s mechanical aptitude and asked her, “Why don’t you shut off the interior lights, smart ass.” And she did.

I took Mom everywhere, even out with my single friends. The guys asked her out on dates, and I threatened to shoot them. Married all her life, she was perplexed by my single lifestyle. Terrorizing her over my exploits became a temptation too enticing to resist.

Dressed in leather pants for a date, I asked her, “Am I sexy yet?” And I followed up with, “I wear leather on dates so I smell like a new truck.”

Borrowing one of Dad’s lines, she responded, “You are one watt short of a nightlight.”

In spite of that protestation, she must have thought I looked smart, because she took my picture. As I was leaving with my date, she said, “Don’t call me if you get thrown in jail.” This was a familiar threat I had heard often during my teenage years. Her comment was confounding to my date, though. No doubt, his plans for the evening did not include getting arrested.

Although we were girlfriends like Thelma and Louise, Mom didn’t abandon her motherly role completely. I often read into the night, which—in her mind—was wrong. She showed up in my bedroom doorway late one night in a nightgown with a floral pattern representative of wallpaper. Wild-eyed and wobbly, everything about her seemed askew. Her hair resembled a fright wig. Waving her cane, she was a scary sight. 

“You’re going to go blind,” she scolded in a raspy voice. A patronizing lecture ensued against which I held my position.

“You are not the boss of me.”

After a couple of airborne jabs of the cane, she shuffled back to bed, mumbling something about a home for the blind and debtors’ prison. My heart rate returned to normal as I shook off goosebumps and resumed reading.

Among people of Mom’s generation in Iowa, such a chastising event was known as a conniption fit. She was generally meek, mild-mannered, and compliant. Nothing was more intimidating to her than a Methodist minister or law enforcement. For that reason, I introduced my dates to her as The Chief of Police, after which she suggested they check my record.

On our road trips, it was not uncommon for me to be pulled over by the highway patrol for speeding. Having been single for over twenty-five years, I viewed any opportunity to interact with law enforcement as an adventure extraordinaire while Mom froze up the second the blue lights started flashing. However, after frequent incidents, she acclimated to the experience. We never got a ticket—probably because of a nifty, fail-safe routine I worked up for such occasions.

Mom looked like Mrs. Santa Claus—short, round, and sporting a calico print dress and old-fashioned glasses complemented by white hair the texture of cotton candy and sculpted into a helmet-head style. Riding shotgun, she was just the sidekick I needed to get out of a ticket.

When pulled over, I would roll down the window, point to her, and say to the officer, “She made me do it.”

He would inevitably lean over to take a look. Mom sat petrified in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead with her hands in her lap, holding a handkerchief. Her purse hung from her arm à la Queen Elizabeth style. Frozen in fear, her lack of eye contact was reminiscent of a dog who had peed on the living room rug. The only movement was from her hands wringing the handkerchief.

I’d ask the patrolman, “Would you take her to jail?” If that didn’t get a laugh, I'd whisper, “You know, she kidnapped me.”

If that didn’t get a lighthearted response, a contingency plan was needed—a coup d’état. I’d confess that we were Thelma and Louise, and that she was the one who shot somebody.

An Oklahoma patrolman called my bluff one day when I asked him to take Mom to jail. He said, “I would, ma'am, but I would have to tase her first.”

This produced an unpleasant visual in my mind, and I wisely decided to skip the kidnapping routine and allow him the last word. He suggested that my passenger looked suspicious and was surely a threat to any community. We were ordered to continue on to Missouri and to not make any stops along the way. “Get out of here,” he said, rather harshly, I thought. But before he got into his car, he turned and tipped his hat. We didn’t get a ticket.

Thelma and I haunted a casino occasionally, primarily for the buffet. But we did hit the slots. Although this was an exciting adventure for her, it was also—in her mind—a sin. So, she made me promise not to reveal this transgression to her church friends in Iowa. Or my brothers.

We were not sophisticated gamblers. The first time we hit the casino, we carried a large sandwich bag of coins from my change jar. I had no idea slot machines had gone coinless years ago and was shocked and disappointed to discover the levers had been replaced with buttons. What a bummer. A casino security officer observed us old ladies trying to locate an opening for coins in a nickel slot machine. He escorted us to a place to cash in our coins and oriented us on the modern nuances of gaming. In return, we were rude and inconsiderate.

“Shoot. I wanted to pull the handles,” Mom complained to him while frantically pounding buttons and staring transfixed at spinning cherries.

“Me, too. This is a bummer,” I said, as I hammered away on my own buttons.

In ten minutes, our $70 dollars in change was gone, and we ambled over to the buffet.

I took Mom along with me on several business trips. We went to Hawaii, where she worried about being a burden and said, “If I get sick, just throw me to the sharks in the ocean.” That was an improvement, I guess, over her suggestion when we were in Iowa that I throw her over the fence to the hogs. Really. My response: “I can’t wait to do that, but physically I cannot hike your fat ass over the fence into the pig sty.” Further, I noted that I didn’t think my brothers would appreciate it if I did so, or if I took their mother on vacation and fed her to sharks.

I did threaten my four brothers that I would bring her back to the mainland with a tattoo to which one bro, who had been in the Navy, advised me, “Just make sure it’s spelled right.”

“Sign her up for paragliding,” another brother said.

“Oh, oh, oh, and hiking into the mouth of a volcano,” suggested another. 

“Take her to a nude beach,” the final obnoxious brother proposed.

Mom loves these animals unconditionally, but they are why I view marriage as something similar to hugging a cactus. I digress.

Soon after arriving on the big island of Hawaii, Mom and I sat at a sidewalk cafe in Kona sipping pineapple drinks with umbrellas in them. Mom suddenly froze and took on an expression of grave concern. “Mom, what’s wrong?” I asked. Through squinted eyes, she looked both ways to make certain no one could hear her, leaned over the table, and whispered, “All these people here are foreigners.”

“Mom, in Hawaii, you are the foreigner.”

She was genuinely perplexed by my response. Having rarely been outside of rural Iowa, Mom had little sense of other people or places. Her comment reflected the depth of her naiveté. When we visited Salt Lake City, she worried the mountains would slide in on us. In wonderful places she said, “I don’t know why anyone would want to live here.” This from a woman who lived just a mile from a smelly pig farm that, when the wind was in the right direction, smelled to high heaven and spoiled many a planned weenie roast or Ante Over game.

Mom had spent her life in small farmhouses, a trailer house, and senior housing apartments. When she visited me in Tulsa, she was dumbfounded by the large city homes. “Why would people want to ramble around in those big houses?” she asked. After years of shopping in small town venues, she marveled at the inventory in city stores, on car lots, and in malls. She asked, “Who buys all this stuff?” I had wondered the same thing, especially during visits to Dallas or Chicago, so I appreciated her mystification.

On a trip to California, I took Mom to Venice Beach where it looked as though an extreme Rocky Horror Picture Show party had broken out. I teased, “Mom, do you want a tattoo? I bet Thelma had one. This skull and crossbones looks interesting. It’s about pirates, not poison. We love pirates.” Mom was not up for a tattoo, of course. So, I focused on crowd-watching and exposing her to the concept of diversity. 

As we walked the sidewalks of Venice Beach, a woman wearing a thong bikini biked past us. Her tanned and shiny bare butt worked up and down as she peddled away. Mom was clearly astonished—aghast and appalled even. I explained that this was common California beach apparel. “She’s not naked as a jaybird, Mom. That’s a thong. And here in Venice, that is a thing.”

Mom squeezed my hand hard and grabbed my arm for balance as a pack of roller skaters whizzed by, barely missing us as we ambled along the beach sidewalk. The skates made a horrendous racket and their rap music blasted sounds we old gals considered obnoxious nonsense.

“What the hell was that?” she asked. I was thinking the same thing, but was stunned to hear a swear word from my right and proper mother. Her face instantly reflected regret. I believe I made her feel better when I told her that Thelma would have no doubt expressed some form of profanity in such a circumstance. And, as a consummate swearer myself, I advised her to consider such words as sentence enhancers. “They jazz up the comment and add interest,” I advised. In the past, I had only heard Mom swear once when she fell on my concrete front porch. I was so taken aback by her language that I failed to asked whether she was hurt. Instead, I said, “Mom, you swore!”

As she aged into her eighties, it became apparent that Mom had embraced a newfound level of spunk. She was chastised by church ladies for swearing during card games at a nursing home and was disciplined by the staff there for speeding in her wheelchair. I am told these behaviors are labeled indiscretions, a term experts apply to old people who no longer give a shit. 

As the years passed, Mom’s health deteriorated, and our excursions became limited to trips near her apartment in Iowa. We were still Thelma and Louise, but the days of big adventures were over. Medical crises continued to gain momentum. She went into a nursing home at eighty-eight. In the midst of a medical episode there, she thought she was dying, and so did I. So, she slipped off her wedding ring and handed it to me. We cried while a tender aide comforted us. Mom was better the next day, so I slid it back onto her finger, holding on tight to that precious hand that nurtured me all my life. It was clear where she was headed. 

She died later that year. The times we shared were sweet. We were girlfriends—carousing, teasing, and giggling. We were tight. We were Thelma and Louise, although we never shot anybody. And we never got a ticket.