Coming Up For Air

''Mom's a complicated woman,'' says Walls. ''I really like her. She might not have been the classic mother, but I sort of refuse to get mad at her.'' When her brother Brian got married, his fiancée put Walls in charge of dressing Rose Mary in something suitably mother-of-the-groom. So she called up her mother and said, '''I found this dress that would be just perfect for you.' Mom was furious. 'What makes you think you have better taste than me?!' She showed up with a dress that had a huge stain on it that you could see from across the room. She showed up looking like a homeless woman! Poor Brian. It was just another reminder that you can't expect her to play that role, because she's just not going to do it.''

Rose Mary has odd quibbles about her portrayal in her daughter's unflinching memoir. The suggestion that she was a bad driver irks her to no end, as do claims that she owned museum-quality jewelry when the kids had no food. ''I about fell over when I read that. My husband bought [a beautiful lapis lazuli belt] once, and he went around telling the kids that it was museum quality.'' But she's glad her daughter has flushed the past out of her system. ''For her own sake, I'm so glad Jeannette wrote the book,'' she says. ''When we were in West Virginia it was very, very hard, and I didn't realize how hard it was on the children until I read the book.''

Touched by her mother's blessing of the book, Walls wanted to thank her with a gift. ''I was thinking, like, maybe a car,'' says the author. ''And Mom didn't even have to think about it. 'An amber bracelet with silver filigree!' And who am I to say 'You need a telephone! You need electricity!' She got the bracelet, she's so happy, she wears it with her grungy street clothes. But this is the thing I love about Mom. She sits there and gazes at it and will get into a long discourse with you about where the richest amber deposits in the world are.''

Recently, Rose Mary passed along to her daughter a dingy aluminum Pepsi cooler she found in storage. Inside was a ratty old nightgown, an ornate candy jar, Rex's tool belt, and short stories Walls never knew her father had written and dozens of letters he'd never gotten around to sending her. A treasure for a grown woman who desperately misses her difficult dad. Walls once told him, back when she was living on Park Avenue and living a lie, that she was after stability. She married a man she wasn't head-over-heels in love with because she needed an anchor. In one of the yellowed letters now piled on her lap, her father responded, ''Jeannette, problem with an anchor is it's damn hard to fly with one attached to you.''

''Bless his heart,'' says Walls, shaking her head. ''Gotta love him. Gotta love him.''