Appraisal
Cut
Having clipped it from the classifieds, my mother showed us the ad: Cash for Class Rings — This Weekend Only. Most households still subscribed to daily newspapers then, retrieving the bundles from lawns or landings and yanking off green rubber bands to flatten them out before reading.
My parents drove Dodge Darts with dark vinyl seats that seared our bare legs in summer. My father’s company was laying off employees, including Mr. S., a member of his own carpool. On the day he was notified, Mr. S. did not ride home with the usual group. As my mother later whispered, “Poor guy called his wife to come get him early.”
Color
Onyx is an ideal background for contrast, especially with a yellow-gold coat of arms. Today, most high school rings are composed of sterling silver and cheaper metals. The raised coat of arms on my mother’s ring looked too masculine for an all-girls Catholic high school.
Holiday Inn announced itself in cursive on a green sign, topped with a yellow arrow and sparkly star. Sitting at our suburb’s edge, the hotel appeared as we emerged from the underpass. A sharp chlorine odor filled the lobby as my parents and I made our way to the elevators. The only hotel where my family had stayed was in Cleveland, and I still thought longingly of the color TV, letterhead stationery and new pen hidden in a drawer. “Dear Kim,” I wrote to my best friend. “The pool is turquoise.”
Clarity
Peeking around the mirrored pillar in the basement, I tried to signal my mother to reconsider, but she was leaning forward, listening to a man seated behind the skirted card table. My father stood in a different line, waiting for his consultation as he stepped back and forth in his faded Hush Puppies, which had come in a red box with a picture of a Basset Hound.
Reflected, the hotel’s brown paneling didn’t glint or burst into kaleidoscopic rays, but I was used to muted surroundings. At home, I had stared at similar 70s paneling in our rec room when I was younger and confessed that I might not ever go to college.
“How come, Honey?” my mother said, startled away from an Agatha Christie mystery.
I kept my gaze on an owl-shaped knothole. “I can’t draw a star,” I confessed.
Carat
Ten is the lowest and least prestigious level of gold, my 21-year-old daughter informed me, but she still wears my late mother’s ring daily, except when working in a chem lab or playing a witch in a college production of Macbeth set in outer space. I also had worn it in graduate school but developed a habit of checking its fit to monitor my weight. Snug around my finger meant I was bloated, and my body would tense whenever I looked at it.
The numbers “19” appear on one side of my mother’s ring, and “50” on the other. “Don’t tell anyone that’s the year I graduated,” she would warn me, half-joking. “I bet some of your friends’ parents were born then.”
My father’s ring appraiser was quicker but made such a low-ball offer that my father just returned his ring to his pocket. I wasn’t as focused on my father’s ring, which was so big I could only wear it on my thumb. Its edges scraped my knuckle. But my mother hesitated over her own offer, standing at the table, and pushing her dark curls behind her ears.
“Mom!” I called from behind the mirrored pillar.
She finally glanced back, her freckled face alarmed, and I pointed frantically at my own ring finger. I knew my mother hadn’t respected her city high school, where the nuns abolished the National Honor Society because it “encouraged cheating,” but she had gone to a reputable university, attending nights while working days as an executive secretary. “I had so many gaps to fill in,” she often said.
Despite being separated in age by 34 years, my mother and I had our ears pierced on the same day. I was eight and had begged her to go first. Afterwards, she admitted she felt “a pinch.” Now I wanted to show the same solidarity in the hotel basement, even if I didn’t understand the stakes. On the ride home, I held the ring and peered inside the band. My mother’s cursive initials were engraved next to a tiny, worn panel in which I could barely make out the Virgin Mary and child.