Concrete Angel

by Patricia Abbott

  Grandmother snorted. “Beloved? Who came up with that? Sounds like something—well—something romantic. I’m surprised Hank Moran would allow his child to sleep with a thing like this.” She dangled it a foot in front of her.

  “You think he notices such things.”

  “Christine can’t touch it until I have a chance to sterilize it. It looks like it was left outside in the rain. Probably full of mold. And she’s nearly nine years old.” She turned to me. “Christine, do you absolutely need this—cat—to get to sleep?”

  I began to shake my head, but Mother stepped in.

  “She won’t go to sleep without it,” she said, flopping onto her old bed and giving a start as the sharp springs poked her.

  “Of course, she’ll go to sleep. She’s too old to drag such a thing around, soil her bedclothes with it. I put you to bed every night with nothing to distract you from your sleep. But that’s me. Maybe you know something different. Have some modern ideas about bedtime.” Grandmother waited for a comment, and when none came, said, “Well, I’ll leave you to settle in. Beloved!” she repeated, shaking her head.

  A minute later, I started to cry and Mother handed me the cat. I was a bit of a crybaby and missed Daddy. He’d always put me to bed. Well, nearly always. Well, sometimes. I also missed Mrs. Murphy, the most likely person to be there at bedtime. And the thing did smell; I hadn’t noticed it before. Its fur was matted, one eye missing. Why had I grabbed this toy instead of one of the nicer ones Grandmother Hobart might approve of? I put a thumb in my mouth, wrapped both arms around the cat, and fell asleep instantly.

  Beloved had disappeared by morning. A new toy—a horse made of a washable brown plastic—took its place. My grandmother threw the nameless horse into the washing machine once a week so it never smelled of anything other than plastic or detergent. I didn’t take to it but felt it useless to complain. Mother was more than enough for Grandmother to cope with. And Grandmother was more than enough for Mother. I trod carefully around their jousting matches. Learned how to be even quieter. I’d adjusted to living with Aunt Linda; I could adjust to Adele Hobart.

  “Ready to look for something? A job, I mean.” Grandmother had asked Mother a few days after our return. Daddy was refusing to give Mother money until she signed the papers his attorney drew up.

  “I hear the Woolworth’s in center city’s hiring girls to work cosmetics.” Grandmother folded a dishtowel and put it aside. It was one of the few items she didn’t iron. “God knows, you know all there is to know about makeup.”

  “I filled out an application there already,” Mother lied. “And what kind of job is working behind the notions counter for a college graduate.” She unrolled a curler from her hair. It was still a bit damp, but it would have to do.

  “I don’t remember your graduation, Evelyn. Maybe you didn’t invite me.” Silence. “Your father’s pension wasn’t meant to stretch to three people,” Grandmother said with a sniff. “What if Christine needs orthopedic shoes or braces—like you did?”

  It felt like an accusation and I shut my mouth and shoved my feet under the chair.

  Mother snorted. “Hank’ll take care of things like corrective shoes. He wouldn’t let his kid go without anything important.”

  “I think you’ll be surprised. Men can start a new family in no time at all.”

  “I’m thinking of going back to school.” Mother tucked the roller into its net bag, but it rolled right back out and dropped onto the floor.

  I made a swipe for it, but Grandmother grabbed it first, handing it to her with a grimace. “Sticky, aren’t they? You use too much hairspray. Could you run them through the dishwasher?” Finally dropping the issue of the curlers, she asked, “ Beauty school?”

  “No, I meant real school. Well, secretarial, at least.”

  “With your looks, you could probably get a job as a receptionist right now,” my grandmother said, brightening. “I could watch Christine after school and over vacations.”

  I smiled wanly, hoping it wouldn’t happen. Some of the nicest times with my mother were after school when she could justify pouring herself the first drink of the day from the bottle she kept in her shoe bag. Mother was likely to turn her full attention on me between drink number one and two. Sometimes she’d set the table and put out all sorts of nice food. I’d drink Coca Cola with a cherry in it. Or strawberry Kool- Aid in a pinch.

  I prayed. Oh, please God, don’t let Mother take a job.

  I needn’t have worried.

  Eve wasn’t sure why she didn’t want a job. In high school, she’d stood behind the cash register at a drugstore one summer, hating every minute.

  “People were always handing me an odd coin or two along with their dollar as if I was supposed to know what to do with it. Standing at a counter was unbearable in heels, and I didn’t like the way my legs looked in flats. You’re good with money, Christine. You’d have no problems.”

  She was certain she could think of a way to make some money if Grandmother would let her alone for a minute. She needed to think and her mother’s screechy voice prevented it.

  “Did he back out?” Grandmother asked Eve after she’d finished talking to Roy. Adele stepped out of the kitchen and handed her daughter a towel. “You must be freezing.”

  “It’s nearly summer, Mother, and no, he didn’t back out!” Mother wrapped the towel around her waist like a man would, her breasts in full view. “You sound like you wish he had.”

  “Where did you meet this fellow anyway?” Grandmother asked, obviously trying to avoid her daughter’s chest as her eyes darted around. I was in the room with them now, out from under the table, but still nobody noticed.

  “There’s something about his voice. Unsavory, I think you’d call it. Like Raymond Burr in Rear Window. Raymond Burr was so comforting as Perry Mason and on Ironside and yet…”

  She’d watched Rear Window on The Late Show with us a few weeks earlier, a rare concession to my mother’s love of old movies. “Eve, listen, only the other day, Mrs. Brewer told me her nephew was looking for a nice girl. I’ve seen his photograph and…”

  “For Pete’s sake, Mother, I don’t need you to find dates for me. He—Roy— wanted to go out to a restaurant, but I told him I already had dinner in the oven.”

  Grandmother laughed. “That’ll be the day.”

  Mother paused. “Listen, I don’t have the time to go into this stuff right now. I need to look good tonight.”

  She hurried off, knowing my grandmother would put out the best spread she could and let her take credit. The farther Mother was from the kitchen, the better things would go. While they were occupied, I went outside and rang the bell. It took a long time for anyone to answer.

  “Oh, Christine,” Mother said. “Here you are. You shouldn’t stay out so long. We were getting worried.”

  Making dinner for my mother and her date was apparently the kind of strange thing Grandmother did on her quest for a new husband for her daughter. She was positive the marriage was over. Before Mother had time to digest Daddy’s defection, her mother accepted it and had set out to replace him. Having us with her was clearly a temporary situation although our departure seemed more unlikely all the time. Mother was thirty-four, a number many men would think of as middle aged. Plus she was used goods—with a kid to boot.

  Roy was scheduled to come at eight-thirty— after I was in bed. Grandmother had arranged to visit her friend, Dottie, down the block—an unusual concession as she didn’t like to be out at night. A pan of lasagna sat in the oven; a salad awaited a dressing, both made by my grandmother.

  “What if he asks about it?” Mother asked, hovering over her mother’s final touches. “I can never keep all those cheeses straight.”

  I saw the worry lines creep across her face and, sensing it, she smoothed her forehead with her hand.

  “He won’t ask,” Adele told her, buttoning a cardigan despite the heat. “No man gives a thought to where his food comes from if a woman’s involved. T
urn it on about fifteen minutes before he’s due to come and it will be done half an hour after he arrives. You’ll be in bed, Christine.”

  I nodded, knowing who was boss.

  Lasagna was the fanciest and most fattening meal Grandmother made so tonight was important to her too. She left with only the familiar smell of her Jean Nate cologne wafting behind.

  Mother stood in the kitchen for a minute, panicking. “How will I get the lasagna out of the pan, Christine.”

  It seemed to be impenetrable with the oozing cheeses and tomato sauce. Thankfully, we remembered the pie-shaped utensil. You could slice it—like pie. Mother turned the oven on, running into the bathroom for a final check.

  “How do I look, kiddo?”

  I beamed at her.

  I was hustled off to bed when the doorbell rang and went gladly. Maybe this would be the end to our imprisonment with Grandmother. I’d do what I could to aid my mother. I would make him like us, make him think I was adorable.

  I could hear him from my bedroom and peeked out to see what kind of guy Mother had landed. He wore a light-colored pinstriped suit with an open-collared, starched white shirt and was definitely the type of man who attracted her: tall, well-dressed, at ease in his body and not afraid to show it. The men Grandmother pointed out on the street or in stores were more like elementary school principals or ministers. They were sweaty, paunchy, and poorly-dressed. Not like my father at all.

  Mother gave a quick glance at the bedroom door, jerked her head for me to go, and let him kiss her. It looked like he was trying to pour himself into her mouth. She staggered a little afterward, as if he’d sucked all the oxygen out of her. There was no doubt this Roy took kissing seriously.

  There had been only one man so far— for a few dates— after Hank and before Roy. Don was a cheese monger at the Reading Terminal Market and smelled faintly of Limburger when he came to get her. He wore a Bavarian outfit to work inside his minuscule booth at the marketplace, a buxom blonde woman named Dora or Norah dispensing hunks of cheese beside him, irritating German music playing in the background, a row of sausages hanging from the ceiling of the booth like party decorations.

  Once we went downtown to see Don in his shop, things deteriorated at a fast clip, much to my grandmother’s regret.

  Roy came up for air now and took a seat on the sofa. “Sheesh, you keep a clean house,” he said, looking around. “I should wash my hands or something.”

  “Make yourself at home,” Mother told him, sounding like she was already regretting the evening. She glanced around for a magazine to hand him. “I need to check on your dinner,” she finally said and fled.

  It was years before I heard the full story of what happened next.

  Eve, sounding like the waitress at Littleton’s Diner on Ogontz Avenue, rushed into the kitchen and opened the oven. Things were surprisingly cool for an appliance cooking their dinner. Did the thing turn off by itself when the meal was done? Except it wasn’t done, she discovered, when she poked a finger inside the noodles. Not even close. The oven was set at 350, what could be wrong? Should she smuggle Christine in here, she wondered? Calling on a nine-year old for help wouldn’t look right.

  Did she do something wrong? Forget something Adele had told her?

  When these failures occurred, she wondered if such incidents were the result of the shock therapy. Had certain passages in her brain been jumbled? Or had she always been this way? Would Roy know what was wrong with the stove and be able to fix it or would bringing him into the kitchen only give her ignorance away? She could call her mother, but the phone was in the living room and he’d hear the call, perhaps hear Adele chiding her. Maybe she should dash down the street and ask her mother in person? In moments like this, she reverted to a totally dependent child. They had talked about this at The Terraces, the discrepancy between how she felt shopping and how she felt growing up in the Hobart house. And, all of her dazzling ideas flew from her head when confronted with any domestic task.

  “I need to borrow some salt—from next door,” she said, popping into the living room. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  Roy, who’d discovered the TV and was already watching some comedy, nodded. “Take your time, honey. I never eat this early.”

  She hurried down the block, and after battering uselessly on Dottie’s front door, realized the women were probably in the back. With row houses, getting to the rear meant circling the entire block, and she took the longer route, not wanting to cross Roy’s field of vision.

  The two older women were heading into the house, folded chairs under their arms, when she arrived.

  “For god’s sake, you have to light it! It’s gas.” Adele said once she’d told her the problem. “Haven’t you been married for years? What did poor Hank do for his dinner? Never mind, I know the answer.”

  “Is this really the best time to go over my failings?” Eve felt completely depleted by this turn of events and wondered if she had the energy to go through with the evening.

  Adele gave a dramatic sigh, looking meaningfully at her friend so Eve couldn’t help but know the subject of her ineptitude had been discussed at length—probably for years. Dottie was Adele’s only friend and confidant. “Look, I’ll show you how to do it on Dottie’s stove.”

  “Ooh, mine’s electric, Dell,” Dottie said apologetically. “Turn mine on and you’re ready to go.”

  Adele looked at Dottie as if she were being difficult on purpose. “Well, I can tell you how to do it, Eve—or draw a picture, I guess. You need to hold a match to the pilot—down in the broiler. Or maybe I should come home with you.” She sighed again. “He might not think anything of it. Knows it’s my house, right? You can tell him I don’t let anyone into the kitchen.” Adele sounded proud of her quick-thinking.

  Before Eve could respond, Dottie cut in. “Oh, I just remembered. My neighbor has a gas oven. Mrs. Mackin—right next door.”

  “Well, let’s be quick about it,” Adele said with a sigh. The three women hurried over to the Mackins’ house.

  “You know, I don’t like having a strange man alone in my house. My best gold earrings—the ones I wear to church—are right on the tray on my bureau. What do you know about this man anyway? She met him at the hairdresser’s, Dottie. What kind of man has his hair cut in a beauty parlor? And I didn’t care for his voice on the telephone. Not at all. What was the word I used to describe it?” Eve shook her head, lips tight. “Whatever it was, it caught it perfectly.” Adele glared at her daughter. “Come on. You remember, Eve.”

  “I don’t remember,” Eve said. “It wasn’t that memorable.”

  “We usually eat at six,” Celie Mackin said, waving them into the tiny kitchen when they arrived. Her girth took most of the available space and her three visitors huddled by the door. The Mackin family was wedged hip to hip around the kitchen table, eating peach shortcake on a red-checked tablecloth. “I can’t think why we’re eating so late tonight. Oh, look, I forgot to turn the oven off when I took out the meatloaf. It won’t relight now—has to cool off first. It’s a funny old thing that came with the house.”

  Eve was about to make a break for it, putting an end to this agony, when Mr. Mackin, a burly gray-haired man, rose from the table suddenly, nearly lifting it off the floor. His napkin waved from his collar.

  “Do you want me to light it for you, Eve?” When she didn’t answer, he added, “Or I can probably show you how to do it on paper?” He hiked his pants up and threw his napkin on the table as if he were accepting a challenge.

  “He’s an engineer at the phone company,” Celie Mackin said. “He can draw a diagram of anything mechanical. But don’t ask him to draw a bird or flower!” Husband and wife chuckled simultaneously, obviously a family joke.

  In Eve’s family, the jokes were almost always hurtful anecdotes about her thievery, incompetence, or acquisitiveness, so the Mackins’ camaraderie was refreshing. She smiled wanly, listening patiently as the four adults offered tips on how to light a gas stove. Fe
eling more confident, she sailed out the door, wondering whether Roy had given up on dinner and gone home. She’d bet anything he hadn’t touched her mother’s dime-store jewelry. He probably hadn’t left the orbit of the television set.

  When she got back to the house, Roy was sitting in the living room with Christine, wearing a pair of lavender shorty pajamas, perched on his lap. A bony leg draped each side of his thighs. Her head, sweaty from sleep, nestled in Roy’s neck.

  It was disturbing, though Eve couldn’t say why. He did look a bit like Raymond Burr, for one thing. A name for certain men—what was it—played hide and seek in her head.

  “She came rushing out of her room,” Roy said, placing Christine carefully on the floor and rising. “Bad dream, I guess.”

  “Did you have a bad dream?”

  I remembered shrugging, noncommittal, unsure how to play this. I’d thought I was helping my mother by cuddling with Roy, but it was turning out badly.

  “Christine doesn’t usually take to strangers,” Mother said, still sounding uncomfortable. “Christine, you go back to bed now. I’ll be in to check on you in a minute. I’m sorry I was gone so long, Roy. I meant to come right back but…”

  “I didn’t know you had a daughter that age.”

  “She’s only nine. I don’t know what she said, but I’m sor—”

  “I have a niece about ten, but she’s a bigger girl. Stocky. I could fit Christine’s foot in the palm of my hand. Delicate.”

  Could Christine be flirtatious with strange men? Eve wondered. Roy was still talking. Saying something about girls thinking they were adults before they were.

  “So when she flounced into the room like a junior Scarlett O’Hara, I had to laugh.” He laughed now as if to show her.

  Why was he still talking about Christine? Five minutes had passed and still he went on. A lone drop of perspiration made its way down the middle of Eve’s back. She looked at Roy closely. As he spotted her inspection, a guarded look crept over his face.