Concrete Angel

by Patricia Abbott

  “You look like a fellow who’d marry a girl who smells of lilacs,” she said, adding it to his bag. “I’m one myself. That’ll be four dollars.”

  Robotically, he gave me a five and waved the change away, hanging around for ten minutes and watching Mother make another sale or two.

  At the end of our first yard sale, my mother had netted a tidy sum without expending more than our time. But nothing was half as interesting as watching Mother in action. If we were no longer going to eat iced donuts, or drive to the beach to watch the sunset, or dress like fairies and sashay down the streets, this was the best I could hope for.

  And that was how Mother’s business operated for a long time. If Daddy knew what Mother was doing—why the closets had filled, what went on most Saturdays, where those delivery trucks came from—he didn’t let on. It probably would’ve looked a lot more innocent than some of her past stunts. Their bills tumbled, looking better than they’d been for years. There were no complaints from stores about thefts, no irate phone calls. It was a serene period although the volume of goods stashed away continue to mount. Mother couldn’t part with any of her nicer possessions. It was strictly the more ordinary products that found their way to the sales table. But there were quite a lot of those. Quite a lot of everything.

  The yard sales became a regular event in our neighborhood. I wonder now why they continued for so long with no one asking her where all her products came from. And if the police noticed anything, they never asked for a permit. Mother was behind the eight ball for once. She was good at giving the impression of being sure of herself.

  The final blow came a year or so later, when she was finally forced to cut a couple of nosy neighbors in on the scheme along with the mailman. It’d become too big an enterprise to ignore, too many fingers wiggling in the pie. It was one of my mother’s last fairly innocuous schemes.

  “Do you know what your grandmother said to me on the last day of her life,” Grandmother asked my mother, adjusting the tablecloth so each side had a twelve-inch drop. “Wait a sec,” she said, straightening up with a hand on her back. “I’m sure I’ve told you this before.”

  Her tone was faintly accusatory—as if Mother solicited the story. She’d dragged the tablecloth out of a buffet drawer an hour earlier. It was one of the few decorative items Adele Hobart took any joy in. She smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle from the starched linen and waited. I was playing with my dolls under the very table: forgotten.

  “Maybe, but I don’t remember it.” Mother lay on the sofa waiting for the phone to ring, watching her mother walk from one end of the table to the other.

  Since our return to the Hobart house, only a week or so after Daddy had been forced to pay extortion money, we’d regretted our quick decision.

  “But the words he hurled at me for days couldn’t be ignored, Christine. Do you see what I mean? We had to go home.”

  Home! Did Mother see this place as home? But where else would we go? Who else would take us in until things got sorted out? That she would give us a home wasn’t at all certain either. And since our arrival at Grandmother’s, things had become even iffier. The silence between Mother and Daddy had gone from a crack to a chasm.

  If our house in Shelterville had turned into a warfront, this one had its own set of hurdles. Sometimes, it was small things like my grandmother’s repetition of stories that drove Mother crazy. Other times, it was as if Grandmother absorbed her husband’s more disapproving attitude after his death and redoubled her attempts to control Mother’s behavior in memory of him. Control of me became an impediment to peace too.

  One thing was certain, Mother would have to behave herself here because there was nowhere else to camp out. From under the table, I could see Mother’s fingers clench and unclench as she listened to Grandmother’s feet moving from one end of the table to the other, to the sound of her creaking knees, the little clicks her dentures made, and her story now going into full swing. From under the table, it was all pretty scary.

  (“She has us where she wants us, Christine. She’d been waiting for that day.”)

  “I haven’t told you this before?” Grandmother continued. ”Your grandmother was in the hospital and I came in bringing a few drugstore items: a packet of bobby pins, Woodbury soap, Spearmint gum, and the latest issue of Photoplay. I never cared much for movie magazines or movies themselves, but my mother loved them. She’s like you, Evelyn. Me, I couldn’t get past the fact that movies were made up stories. None of it real.”

  “And why is that a problem?”

  “Well, because it feels like a waste of time. Like someone telling you about their dreams all day long. Anyway, Mother was sleeping, but she woke when I opened the drawer to put her things away. That’s when she said it.”

  Grandmother’s feet stopped abruptly as she placed a pair of blue and white candlesticks in the center of the table, inching back to check their placement. “Don’t the candlesticks look nice on the white? I know these are only from Woolworth’s, but they look genuine on my grandmother’s linen tablecloth. Delft-like, aren’t they? You have to remember, I’m not like you—keeping such a fancy house, squirreling away more place-settings than there are places. But I have a few good things.” She stood back far enough for me to see her fully as she admired her table. Her eyes lit up. “But I bet you have something better in the cellar, Evelyn. Do you want to go down and look?”

  “Look, tonight’s nothing special.” Mother sat up suddenly, glancing at the phone as if he—Roy Tyson—might be listening. “It’s just…”

  I could tell she didn’t want to talk about Roy.

  “Okay, then back to my story. Suddenly your grandmother looked me right in the eyes and said, ‘Dell, you look like hell.’” Grandmother moistened her fingers, straightening the wick on one of the candles. “Make sure you have a book of matches handy tonight, Evelyn. I don’t think the table lighter has a drop of fluid in it. No one around here smokes since the Surgeon General’s report. I suppose it’s a good thing, but I miss the smell of a rich pipe tobacco, of watching a man fill his pipe and light it.”

  “Everyone I know still smokes. Roy does, for instance,” Mother said triumphantly, putting her feet on the arm of the couch and pushing off. “Smokes, drinks, swears. He’s a devil, all right.”

  I wondered why she was bragging about this.

  Grandmother laughed weakly. “I’m not sure I like the sound of this—Roy.”

  “You couldn’t stand Hank either,” Mother reminded her. “You made that perfectly clear.”

  “Well, I never said it—at least not in so many words. I always thought he saw us as hicks, I guess.”

  “Too true. Hey, maybe your mother was making a poem,” Mother suggested, lying down again. “Dell, you look like hell rhymes, doesn’t it?”

  “What? Oh, you mean Mother, no, she wasn’t making a poem. And now I do remember telling you this before because you said the same thing then.” Grandmother was lost in thought for a second or two. “She may not have said Dell. It might have been just, ‘You look like hell.’”

  “You always put the Dell in. Plus, it’s more memorable as a poem. Doesn’t come off as mean.”

  “She was mean. I could tell you stories… Anyway, I was taken by surprise,” Grandmother continued, “and said, ‘Look, Mother, as it happens, I’m on my way to the beauty parlor this minute. I was dropping these things off first so you’d have them.’”

  She pulled out a chair abruptly and checked the seat for crumbs. “Anyway, she closed her eyes, and then…died.” Aggrieved, she pushed the chair back under the table a bit too roughly and then patted the back in apology. “These chairs are antiques. Not that I put store in such things. I can’t remember where we found them.” Grandmother hesitated. “I’d rather if you didn’t use your father’s chair. I know it’s silly…”

  Mother interrupted. “I’m sure Grandmother didn’t realize what it was she was saying. No one can be at the top of their game under those circumstances. In the mid
dle of dying, I mean.”

  “She knew all right,” Grandmother said, bitter again. “I did look like hell, although I’d never use the word. Oh, my mother was different from me—very different. She was always turned out well, even on her death bed. More like you,” she said, semi-accusingly. “Whereas my hair tied up in a bandana, ready to do battle…”

  I could see her lips draw into the familiar knot from my hiding place, and she wrung her reddened hands as if preparing to stick them in a tub of ammonia—an item always sitting somewhere in Adele Hobart’s house.

  “Did you know right away she was dead?” Mother asked.

  “I thought she’d only drifted off at first. I’ve always wondered if she had any notion those would be her last words. She always said mean things to me—though I was the most obedient child you could imagine. A mealy-mouthed pussycat. Now my brother, Carleton, well, he could do no wrong in her mind, and he was a demon.” Grandmother shook her head. “She was blind to his faults. Completely blind. I had to track him down at a bar to give him the news. I remember taking the #23 trolley car along Germantown Avenue, hopping off at his favorite watering holes, places I never went into before or since. Oh, remember those dear old trolleys. I miss the sound of…”

  She was standing over my mother now, as upright as a flagpole, her hands clasped in remembrance. It was hard to imagine her young. But even from my supine position, I could feel some strange strength pulsing through her body, heaving in her chest, making her hands tremble with energy. It threatened to well up and run right out of my grandmother like a bolt of electricity. I could see several long hairs sprouting from her chin. Was she turning into a witch like Mother always said?

  If we stayed in my grandmother’s house much longer, we’d be invalids. Each day was a little more exhausting than the last. We had left Shelterville so precipitously, we hadn’t had time to get ourselves together. Now, months later, Mother still hadn’t had the energy to examine her junk in the basement; she hadn’t been to a shop in weeks. Unheard of. Grandmother had driven the spirit out of her. Why had this return to her childhood home seemed like a good idea? I went over it again, fingering the nearest edge of the tablecloth. Because she’d no other place to go. Not with a child in tow. I watched as Mother rubbed the hands on the chair arms agitatedly. Was it a myth thieves had itchy fingers?

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Grandmother said immediately. “Makes little grease stains and I can’t afford to have it cleaned constantly. And please stop pushing on the arm with your feet. There’s no money in the budget for a new couch.”

  With an air of satisfaction at having said her piece, Grandmother continued dusting, going over the top of the buffet with her dust cloth for the third time, moving each item as if it hadn’t been thoroughly dusted five minutes before. She was a spinning top of vitality. It was dizzying.

  “Rheumatic fever, huh?” Mother asked.

  For a minute, I’d forgotten their conversation.

  Grandmother nodded. “She came down with it as a child and after that she was never strong.” Her voice sounded spent; she was running out of words like a top about to turn on its side.

  Mother rose and checked her hair in the wall-sized mirror over the sofa, fluffing it up where lying down had flattened it. Grandmother had long accused her daughter of being obsessed with her looks, but actually, according to Mother, it was all because of the mirror’s placement, reminding her of her face each time she passed through the room. The mirror also spawned the habit of addressing the image rather than the person you were speaking to.

  I wasn’t tall enough to make use of it unless I stood on the steps.

  “I’m going to take a bath before Christine gets home from school,” Eve told her mother —the mirror version—and walked into our bedroom.

  They’d both actually forgotten I had the day off. I wondered what I should do now—try to sneak out or hold my ground. I could still monitor their behavior, so I stayed put. It was always better to know what they were up to.

  Wiggling to the other end of the table for a better view, I watched Mother take off her clothes, cramming them into the pink hamper separating our two single beds. Gone from our shared bedroom were the ironing board and sewing machine. My addition to the household had necessitated moving certain domestic activity to the basement. Mother claimed she almost missed the smell of damp fabric being steamed into submission by the ancient iron.

  She walked naked down the hallway. Through the open bathroom door, I watched as she poured a generous amount of bath salts into the tub and turned on the tap. There was no shower in my grandmother’s house. Water splashing on the walls and floor was a no-no: moisture, mildew, mold. The progression was inevitable. And only six inches of water was allowed in the tub. Mother told me in her childhood, her father actually inspected the water level while she waited in the hallway, still clothed. No nudity in his household.

  “It was always cold by the time I got in,” Mother told me. “He kept the water heater turned low to save money.”

  I bet she would fill it to the top as a bonus for listening to that story again.

  Over the sound of the running water, I could hear my grandmother running the vacuum in her bedroom, diligently crashing into a wall every few seconds, pushing the old Hoover with such fervor it made the floorboards groan.

  “Anyone else would play the radio while they cleaned, but she prefers the sound of her own efforts,” Mother told me once.

  “Can’t concentrate with that noise,” she’d say if anyone attempted to play a record. Concentrate on what? Perhaps grandmother prayed as she worked. Recited the Bible verses she favored.

  The phone rang. A shrill ring making all of us jump. The Hobarts didn’t encourage phone calls and got few, so when one came it was always a shock. The vacuum stopped in a split second. Nothing wrong with my grandmother’s hearing. I watched as Mother paused in the bathroom too, listening to what her mother said to the caller.

  “It’s him,” Grandmother said a second later, outside the still semi-open door. “What’s his name? Can you take it?”

  “Tell him I’m in the bath.” I could tell Mother was angry.

  “That’s not a genteel thing for a mother to say to a strange man,” Adele said, fretting, poised at enough of an angle not to see my mother’s naked body. “Can’t I say you’re out shopping or at the dentist?”

  “For God’s sake, Mother. He takes baths, too. Roy,” Mother had suddenly remembered his name, I realized, and she turned the tap hard enough to make the pipes squeal. “Never mind, I’ll take it.” She stood and dried her wet hand on the towel.

  Grandmother sighed with relief and quickly stepped away as her daughter came barreling past her naked. I could see the small smile on Mother’s face.

  “I’ll get out of your way.”

  Grandmother turned away from the flash of Eve’s pink-gold skin and tiptoed into the kitchen where I knew she’d be listening. Apparently my spot under the dining room table was not visible from any room. It was Mother who claimed her mother’s attention—everyone’s attention.

  It was nothing new for Mother to be watched. At least grandfather’s days of evoking guilt had ended with his death. We could never have returned to his house. He’d never put himself in the position of coming to a store to retrieve Mother again, or to answer a phone call from a cop or an irate parent whose earrings had gone missing, or dole out hush money to keep her out of jail. These facts didn’t come to me until later, of course.

  Our first day back.

  It was hard to reconstruct the exact events: the vitriolic words hurled hurtfully across rooms in Shelterville, the slammed doors, the shoves, pinches, slaps and name-calling, the broken glass, broken coffee table, broken promises, Daddy’s secretive phone calls to lawyers, his girlfriend, his parents. Oh, it was nasty. I tried to stay out of the line of fire as much as possible. But her need for a confidante, a nine-year old one if no one else was available, trumped good sense. She filled me in on an
ything I might have missed.

  “What harm did we do having our little garage sales?” she asked me.

  The call to grandmother was humiliating. “It’ll only be till I get on my feet,” she told Grandmother. When was the last time she’d been on her feet? We stood in the doorway of the infamous bedroom/sewing room a few days later. Bright pink curtains with white bunnies fluttered in the faint summer breeze, a surprising new touch but something I was long past at nine. I heard Mother sniffing, probably detecting a familiar odor from her childhood—ammonia? She put a hand on the doorframe for support. Who’d rescue us this time? How would we escape? Was Mother too old to attract the sort of men she desired? For certainly only a man could save us. I would have to help.

  Grandmother didn’t notice my mother’s apprehension. She was too busy fussing over me. I was tearful at our swift move and sitting fretfully on my new bed. My bed in Shelterville had a canopy, a ruffled bed skirt, crisp pink sheets Mrs. Murphy ironed. It smelled good, and I didn’t share it with anyone. My closet was filled with expensive dresses my grandmother Moran purchased at stores in New York, toys from all over the world. Although I was not a spoiled child, I was a well-equipped one. We brought few things with us. Basically we came looking like the paupers we’d now be so as not to incur my grandmother’s rage at our lifestyle.

  “We’ll only take the clothes on our back,” Mother said, her voice full of rage. “We’ll show your father how little we really care for material things.”

  At grandmother’s house, my bed, and Mother’s too, were little more than thin mattresses covered with thin white sheets. The box springs seem to shiver. No bedspreads—another dust collector. No attempt to make it cozy. Clean, simple, clinical. Typical Hobart décor.

  “Give her the stuffed cat,” Mother said, motioning to the toy peeking out of her purse, which sat next to my grandmother. “Give her Beloved. Then she’ll go to sleep.”

  I put out my hands expectantly. Beloved had been the only toy I’d managed to grab in our flight.