Essays, Chapbooks, Contests...Etcetera
RITA PLUSH:
Author & Speaker
Author & Speaker
Not Too Late to Liberate
In her 50s, my mother saved up for driving lessons from the weekly house money my father doled out and got her driver’s license. A quiet woman, docile where my father was concerned, her license was her I-Am-Woman-Hear-Me-Roar moment of liberation. It was the first breakaway bit of independence she engineered where she didn’t ask him either for money or permission.
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“Look what I got!” she trilled and waved her card like a banner at a parade that night she told him of her triumph. And the plates did shift—not dinner plates, the very earths.
“You?! Drive?!” my father cried out, as if my mother behind the wheel went against the very nature of the universe. It did. His universe. Behind her apron or her knitting was where he knew to find her and wanted her to remain. Driving? She’d become “runaround,” never home to have his dinner on the table when he returned from a day’s work. And drive she did, my mother, running from drycleaner, to butcher, to my house. As time passed, she braved the LIE in their big white boat of a ’63 Caddy, for an occasional journey to A & S in Manhasset. In the summer she took on the Atlantic Beach Bridge that ferried her to the Catalina Beach Club. There, under an umbrella in the sand, my mother and her friends, in their one piece bathing suits and sun-tanned pulchritude (not a dieter among them), set up their mahjong walls and let the cracks and bams fly. And she was still able to clock in on time to make my father’s meal from scratch. |
Rita (right) with Her Mom
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Inspired by her coup, she brought her good taste and managerial skills to the bedraggled gift shop at her synagogue. She revived the shop into an enterprise that required members to make appointments to buy the religious items and Judaica giftware for sale. In her own way, my quiet mother was becoming a woman of her time.
In the 70s, when the streaking craze was at its height, she told me she’d streaked my father. Did she even know what streaking was? She’d done the run, passing my father while he was having his dinner. What she dreamed up for his dessert, one can only imagine.
In the 70s, when the streaking craze was at its height, she told me she’d streaked my father. Did she even know what streaking was? She’d done the run, passing my father while he was having his dinner. What she dreamed up for his dessert, one can only imagine.
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Rita Plush lives and writes in Queens, New York. Her writing practice includes both fiction and non-fiction.
She is the author of the novels Lily Steps Out and Feminine Products, and she wrote a short story collection titled Alterations. Rita is the book reviewer for Fire Island News. Her stories and essays have been published in The Alaska Quarterly Review, MacGuffin, The Iconoclast, Art Times, The Sun, The Jewish Writing Project, The Jewish Literary Journal, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and many others. As a sought-after speaker, Rita has presented at libraries and synagogues, and at Hofstra University and CW Post Hutton House on varied topics including: decorative arts, interior design, “Writing and Publishing in the Modern Age,” “So You've Written a Book; Now What?” and “Coco Chanel ~ The Woman-The Legend.” Rita has been giving Zoom classes and talks on writing and the decorative arts. This is her third essay published in Sanctuary. Follow Rita on:
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