“It brings to mind a higher cleavage,” she explained.
I was with her when she made the purchase, when she labored long and hard over the choice between aqua and peach. With Daddy, she could’ve had them both and the real deal.
I was wearing the sturdy sandals that began making an appearance in the seventies, shoes making feet look twice as wide as they were. It was a shoe to climb a mountain and probably expressly designed to prevent a woman’s foot from appearing small, delicate, sexual. You couldn’t bend those sandals with a surgical instrument.
“It’ll take a few weeks to break them in,” Grandmother said, pulling them out of the box. “Your arch has to get used to it.”
It was some time before I realized how ugly they were. And my arch didn’t get used to it. Instead I developed a permanent cramp in the instep of my right foot. Other than my footwear though, I was a carbon copy of my mother, wearing my hair in styles unflattering to a teenager, not suited to my face at all. What did I know? I didn’t spend any time with kids. I had no more insight into teenage society than Pat Boone.
“You see what I mean about your grandmother,” Mother said, looking pointedly at my feet when I came in the door. “She’ll try to dress you like someone from Petticoat Junction if you let her. Next it’ll be overalls and gingham. Mickey says…”
On principle, I stopped listening. Mickey’s pronouncements were aired incessantly despite him exhibiting no discernible signs of intelligence. How could my mother be so clever about some things and so blind about others?
We were eating scrambled eggs and toast. The jam or jam-like substance was in one of those little packets filched from the corner diner, not the expensive kind of peach preserves Mickey liked. Mickey. It was bizarre how a man so completely unknown to me last summer now dominated our lives. Had there ever been a man named Mickey you could take seriously? Someone who didn’t hold a baseball bat or speak in a squeaky voice? Why didn’t he use the name Mike like any normal guy?
“His brother was called Mike,” my mother said when I pressed her.
Did the DiSantis’ name both their sons Michael? If so what happened to Mike? I didn’t ask. It was a piece of the Mickey folklore I could live without.
Mother met Mickey DiSantis when she traded in her ‘66 Cutlass for a newer model. Mickey sauntered out of the showroom, selling her a low-mileage two-year old model in minutes. The car was black. He told her only black was classy enough for her. Was there ever a person who used the word classy and was? Certainly not my stepfather.
This would be the first in a long line of pronouncements from Mickey on subjects as varied as clothing styles, refrigeration, NATO, digging for clams on the New Jersey beach, methods of burial, President Kennedy, Vietnam, the proper temperature for red wine, the proper maintenance of the bowels, how to bluff in poker, and dog racing. His mind was wide-ranging in subject if narrow in comprehension. This all occurred to me later. At the time I classified him as weird, icky, a dope, a dork—who still wore his hair in a slicked-back pompadour in 1978.
Mother was hungry for compliments—so the “classy” car comment worked brilliantly, giving her hope for a brighter future, possibly with Mickey. Her current job, spritzing people with perfume at Gimbel’s Department Stores, was poor-paying and hard on the back since she insisted on wearing high heels. She decided the foyer of a department store was as good spot to meet potential beaus. Daddy had found the job for her himself, telling her she’d get a store discount for her trouble as well as a small salary. He still pumped in the majority of our upkeep.
“Should Hank put you in harm’s way,” my grandmother asked worriedly. “We all know your history with department stores.”
“That’s all behind me now,” my mother promised. Behind her perhaps—but also in front of her.
Gimbels’ Cheltenham’s store manager played golf with Daddy on Saturdays, and the feeling was Mother wouldn’t have the nerve to try something with him circuiting the floor twice a day. She was tightly reined between the entrance and the cosmetic counters. The scents, delightful at first, permeated her clothes, our house, her. I’ve never been able to wear perfume since her short stint at Gimbels.
There were an amazing number of things that had soured for me. Eating evoked guilt; friends were not to be trusted; books produced eye-strain; the medical profession—all frauds; Daddy was a cheat; his family—snobs; my grandmother, Hobart, a scold. I was beginning to wonder if sex would be another tarnished subject. Sex had yet to be discussed despite my age.
Mickey DiSantis didn’t approve of women working.
“God made women to look good, give birth, and shop,” he told her on their first date. “I can see why Gimbels wants you standing at their entrance though,” he said. “You probably account for a huge increase in traffic—people drawn in from the mall. You’re magnetic.” And so were his words.
Mickey and Mother’s romance took off like a rocket, the building blocks being a mutual adoration of Mickey. Okay, he was good-looking in a Vic Damone kind of way. But before I knew it, I was stuck at the tiny kitchen table, brushing up against their new found love until it hurt.
“A long courtship doesn’t make sense at our age,” Mother told me when I questioned the speedy union.
When Mickey wasn’t home, I was lucky to get much of anything for dinner, but too many complaints put a tense look on Mother’s face. I’d thought the strained look would disappear once she married, but instead it grew worse. She was like a juggler with all her balls in the air, waiting to see which one would fall first, where it would land. Cooking was still problematic, but Mickey’s salary didn’t stretch to household help and he couldn’t be manipulated as easily my father.
Mickey was world-weary at forty-five. He’d seen it all sometime in the past, maybe in the Marines in Korea. Or perhaps with his first wife, Racine.
“A little house like this practically takes care of itself,” he told us repeatedly. “And feeding me is child’s play. What else would you do all day now that you’re not spritzing?”
Mother swallowed any complaints. She’d finally rid herself of the smell of Obsession and wasn’t going back.
Finishing my eggs in two mouthfuls, I looked desolately at my dessert—an apple. It was May and the apple was pulpy and tasteless. Didn’t my mother know it’d probably been sitting in a bin somewhere since October? You were supposed to buy strawberries in May. Or apricots. I started to tell my mother this, but her eyes had gone slit-like as she stared at her almost empty plate.
Mother was definitely in one of her moods, and it was useless to expect much thought about food. It was hard to remember the Eve of the tea parties and trips to the shore for cotton candy. The mother who was glib, sassy, and fun. It was easier to recall the mother who’d repeatedly fucked things up. Was this another example of a screw up or a smart move? A fuck-up or a step-up? The only reason I could come up with for Mickey’s presence in our lives was she was playing it safe somehow. Hiding out in this lower middleclass neighborhood where no one would know her, far out of the reach of Daddy’s country clubs and cotillions. Out of her mother’s house and orbit as well—in a different section of the city. Choosing a domineering fellow like Mickey to keep her in line perhaps? Although he’d claimed to like women to shop, it hadn’t worked out that way. He had a skill for sniffing out money spent, could sense something new in the house in minutes. Mother’s time with Mickey would refine her survival skills for the years ahead. No way would this marriage last, or so I hoped.
If Mickey had been home for dinner, there would’ve been pastry. Yesterday Mother had run over to Hansen’s Bakery on Ogontz Avenue, a twenty-minute trip each way, for éclairs. She hadn’t trusted me to perform this errand since the time I’d come home with a stale angel food cake.
“Couldn’t you tell it was old by the puckered look?” my mother said, tossing it in the trashcan. She might not know how to bake a cake, but she had a keen eye for a deficient one. Cakes, she understood.
“They don’t give their best stuff to kids.”
I didn’t like angel food cake anyway—it reminded me of cotton, but it was the only sweet Mother ate nowadays. She’d slice the smallest piece imaginable with a razor-bladed cake cutter and eat it standing at the sink; there was no joy in pastry for my mother anymore. The bathroom scale was the enemy because Mickey liked skinny women. Skinnier than she’d ever been and she’d always been thin. His eyes followed women in restaurants or on the street, ones who looked like Audrey Hepburn or Faye Dunaway. Mother, though thin, had curves. Now she struggled to flatten them.
“You’re not a kid,” she’d reminded me as we stared sadly into the trashcan. “Put on a little eyes shadow and you could pass for eighteen.” Was that what she wanted?
Mother pushed her egg around on her plate until it dissolved into runny white goo; her toast sat untouched. I could see the effort such fasting took as she nervously fingered the flowery oilcloth. Her nails were polished sherbet-pink. I wondered if she’d bought the lipstick to match. We spotted the new color in the latest issue of Glamour, which we thumbed through quietly at the corner drugstore. According to Mickey, subscriptions were a waste when you could read magazines free at the library.
“It costs me half the price of the magazine to get to the library,” Mother told me but not him.
“Any éclairs left?” I was frantic with hunger.
Mother shook her head. Dispirited, I took another bite of the apple. Had I eaten enough? My grandmother always scolded me if I didn’t eat a proper meal. Aunt Linda, years before, had also emphasized the importance of eating well. Their definitions of well might differ, but here I was becoming skeletal without an anorexic instinct in my body. All because of—you know who. I ached for a real dinner. Pot roast, roasted potatoes, and corn on the cob. Peach cobbler, for dessert. I was desperate enough to consider moving back in with my grandmother. Or better yet, Aunt Linda.
“There’s always room here for you, Christine,” she’d said last time I visited. I often fantasized what life with Aunt Linda might be like. No angel food cakes in her house. She was particularly partial to Red Velvet cake, a creation revealed to her on recent trip to Savannah.
“Boys don’t make passes at girls with big asses,” Mother told me whenever she caught me reaching for a cookie.
Not true, and these were strange assertions coming from someone who wouldn’t let me date or even do homework with a boy. Sometimes it made me dizzy, figuring my mother out. Looking good was something I should do only for her apparently. Or was it Mickey? I was almost fifteen after all, my child-murderess days long behind me. I was ready for boys or at least a friend. The ties binding us had been loosened considerable by Mickey’s sudden appearance on the scene. I slipped effortlessly into the wallpaper as soon as he entered the house. But an existence on the perimeter of my parents’ lives was something I’d learned years before.
As far as having a friend, there had always been a reason to avoid close relationships. We were on the run half the time— from what I didn’t usually know—and things like friends were dangerous. People too close asked questions, demanded confidences shared over Coca Cola or old episodes of The Brady Bunch. They tricked information out of you, ratted you out to principals, store detectives, cops, fathers, husbands. This was my mother’s assessment, her history, and girlfriends I brought home were disparaged.
“She certainly is a plain one.” Or, “I found her going through your closet while you were downstairs.” Any mention of an unfamiliar name evoked such responses from my mother.
“Your mother couldn’t possibly object to me,” Neil Burbage, a guy at school, had said disbelievingly only the week before. He was a tall, gawky boy with acne despite the new medications on the market. His jeans were always too new, too pressed. But I knew she’d object to him—and strenuously. Mother didn’t even like me to go with a friend to Luther League at St. Paul’s Church.
“The minister’s wife’s always there,” I told her.
She continued to shake her head. Why? Sometime I felt like I lived in a house of secrets. It was like Imitation of Life, my favorite old movie. Maybe I’d turn out to be black like Susan Kohner. Maybe Hank Moran wasn’t my real father and I might bump into my actual dad on the streets if she let me wander them. Why was she keeping me under wraps? Was I the secret weapon? Hadn’t I already done enough?
Mother began clearing the table. “Want to fix my hair, kiddo? Mickey’ll be home soon, and I’m a mess.” This was untrue; on her worst day, she looked better than anyone. At forty, she was still a peach.
Their bedroom had been two separate rooms until Mickey, gleefully swinging a sledgehammer, removed the offending wall. Now, it was a shrine to Mother’s beauty products and rituals. A wall-length closet housed her clothing, each piece hung on wooden hangers in vinyl sleeves; fourteen foot maple shelves held her makeup, wigs, hair products, and assorted beauty aids. Mickey installed a fan so the air was always fresh. This was his single act of generosity: making Mother gorgeous.
“You’ll thank me for it when your clothes smell as sweet as the day you bought them.” He threw us both the slimy smile I’d quickly grown to hate.
There wasn’t much room for Mickey and Mother in the room and the improvements had cost my stepfather a lot. But having a wife who took her looks seriously pleased him. I dreaded watching his eyes go wide and soft when he came home to find his wife dolled up, his dinner waiting. I could tell he wanted to do “it” as soon as possible. Doing it had become an obsession with me since their marriage. I imagined I heard them “doing it” every night—all night long. He looked like Robert Mitchum watching Marilyn Monroe in River of No Return, which I’d seen on television recently.
Entering Mother’s marital bedroom was risky. The bed mustn’t be sat on, nor should I wear street shoes on the fluffy white carpeting. No fingerprints could mar the white walls or woodwork. I was not to use her comb or brush. Mother was repulsed, or was it terrified, the one time I forgot this dictum and idly pulled her best brush through my hair. I watched mutely as she grabbed the brush, removed a fistful of hair from it, and threw it into an ammonia bath.
“You’re a pug— like my father,” my mother said with a degree of affection once when she saw me in the mirror behind her. “Herbert Hobart lives on.”
A pug? I examined my face closely, looking for the squashed-in features of the breed. I didn’t see it, but maybe I was kidding myself. I could hardly remember my mysterious grandfather by now, and we certainly kept no pictures of him around. Neither did my grandmother. No dust collectors in her house. If you wanted to see him, you had to pull her one slim volume of photographs off the top shelf in the bedroom closet, and this activity was not encouraged.
“Now, what do you want to go and make a mess for, Christine,” my grandmother would say. “Those little black corners are losing their glue.” The album was out of my hands in seconds.
I was meant to forget Herbert Hobart, and I had.
Mother didn’t realize she was being mean when she compared me to a pug. Or at least that’s what I told myself.
“In her mind, she’s being honest—about other people, at least,” my grandmother said. “And she’s not exactly statuesque herself.” Grandmother puffed herself up. “Your grandfather was considered a handsome man in his day—a real catch for me.”
Mickey’s possessions were entirely off-limits. Mother had found a husband who took his belongings as seriously as she did. His black velvet robe and soft leather slippers waited for him now on his mahogany valet. At night, these items were replaced with a dark suit, white shirt, subdued tie, and highly buffed black shoes. An expensive mother-of-pearl brush and comb set, an inlaid wooden box for his cufflinks and watch, and a black onyx dish for his change rested on his bureau.
Except there were never any coins in the dish. Mickey deposited his loose change into a coin counter he’d found in a notions store in New York City. Money was dirty and Mickey didn’t like to handle it. Often he�
�d tell a surprised clerk to keep the change rather than put his soft, manicured hands on the few coins owed to him.
“Never mind,” he’d say, turning his back if the clerks tried to give it to him. “Don’t you have a Lion’s Club jar? A crippled kid’s fund?”
The gilt and walnut mirror above Mickey’s bureau was especially valuable. The glass was old and didn’t reflect properly, but such trivial things apparently didn’t matter with an antique. It was regularly polished with a special cleaner purchased from a mail order shop in Toronto. Mickey’s things must cost a lot of money, I thought. He must have been rich once, had possibly gambled it all away. But Mother said his stuff was mostly bought at pawn shops or flea markets.
“Rich people don’t grow up in row houses in Philadelphia; they live in Bryn Mawr or Bucks County.” The name Bucks County brought a strained look to her face. She was probably thinking about Daddy out there in a big house. “So don’t get any ideas about Mickey being able to support us like your father did,” she added. “The days of Hank’s largesse are gone. I’ve returned to my roots.”
It took me a minute to realize she meant she’d returned to a life much like the one she’d known in the Hobart house. Why had she done this? It was better when we were on our own. I still hoped she’d reform, that she’d ditch Mickey, that my father might take us back. Return us to our rightful home in Shelterville. It was growing less and less likely though. Mickey wasn’t about to give her the necessary divorce after knocking down a wall. It’d be hard to sell the place with only two bedrooms. And mine was teensy, more a nursery than a proper room.
After six months of studying their bedroom, I was still fascinated with its excess. For the two years before, we’d often shared a room and my mother’s things had been carelessly stuffed in a cardboard bureau, sometimes even a box. For all Mother’s eccentricities, being overly fastidious was not one of them. She did not care about the stuff in this room. Those things, the ones she truly loved, were wrapped in tissue paper in Grandmother’s basement or in her storage units. Those were her secret possessions, ones no one, including me, could ever hope to understand.
Concrete Angel Page 16