Most of her clothes had hung from doorknobs or hooks in Grandmother’s house. Loose buttons and fraying hems were repaired by my grandmother. Only Mother’s shoes retained the glamour of her bygone days in Bucks County and Shelterville. Our toothbrushes had mingled along with combs and brushes in the tiny bathroom all three of us used. What had changed?
Was Mickey demanding hyper-attention to housekeeping and personal hygiene? Did he inspect their bedroom for telltale curly hairs and dandruff? All I had to go by was his ex-wife, Racine, who enjoyed a similar setup. Or that’s what Mickey told us. We’d never been there. And she could do her own hair since she wore it in a pixie cut Mother claimed was long out of style.
“A woman’s hair should neither be too long or too short.” She seemed angry about Racine’s disregard for the current styles. As if such apathy was letting Mickey down—even in her position as former wife.
“If you can comb your hair with your fingers, it’s too short. Men like to watch women brush their hair. That’s what they call allure. Only Claudette Colbert and Jane Wyman got away with short hair.”
Oh yes, I thought about Mickey and my mother a lot. About what they saw in each other, what they did in their bedroom, if they ever considered my position as an onlooker to their romance. I was certain there’d be no more babies because Mother complained about what carrying me for nine months did to her figure. Mickey didn’t want any more kids either. He already had a daughter, Mary Theresa, who lived with Racine.
Mary Theresa wore her parochial school uniform with the dedication of a novice nun. It was a navy jumper topping a white, long-sleeved blouse. On a cold day, she was permitted to add a white or navy sweater. Her knee socks never slumped, her black Mary-Janes were polished to a high glint.
“Snap out of it, kiddo,” Mother demanded now.
Seated at the mirror, she was stroking her face. She was especially enamored with her cheekbones, imagining them to be her best feature. Once, I mistakenly voiced the opinion that men seemed more interested in other areas of a woman’s body in movies and books.
“Shows how much you know, Christine. Hips and cheekbones hold it all together. Nothing would sit right without them.” She gazed into the mirror as if she were going to say something important, something profound, and I held my breath. “I couldn’t live with a man who didn’t respect cheekbones,” she said. “Mickey noticed mine right away.” She paused and made a face. “Hank—not so much. Maybe because his are imperceptible.”
The perfect union despoiled by cheekbones.
I picked up the comb. (God knows why I’d become proficient in hair styling—perhaps Mother willed it into being.) “How do you want it?” I asked, stroking her honey-colored hair upward. Her eyelids quivered with pleasure.
Truthfully, it gave me pleasure too, handling my mother’s hair. Usually we did it up—in twists, knots or buns. Such hairdos were out of style, but she was convinced upswept hair pulled her skin taut. There was the slightest suggestion of slackness in her chin, I’d noticed with horror. No hairdo would tighten skin under a chin. Mother’d have to go to high-necked dresses and scarves like older soap opera stars wore.
“Instant plastic surgery,” she told me now, gathering her hair in her hands, still oblivious to what lurked—like the shark in Jaws—beneath. “How about like Grace’s?” she suggested, referring to the new way Princess Grace was wearing her hair in Ladies Home Journal. Jackie Onassis, our former source of inspiration, had been replaced when Mickey turned out to be a rabid Republican rather than a temperate one like Daddy. Because Mickey wore a white shirt and dark suit to work, he identified with his employers. Or his oppressors, as a future boyfriend would note.
Eve’s hair had faded rapidly in the first months of dating Mickey, paling from the rich chestnut she’d favored in the mid-seventies to nearly platinum now. Her makeup and nail color had also been altered.
“As long as he doesn’t expect me to look like Pat Nixon.”
I was struck dumb. Perhaps I’d have to copy Tricia or Julie’s styles—those plastered big bobs they favored. But nobody knew how they wore their hair anymore. They’d all disappeared from the public eye after getting on the plane on the White House lawn some years before.
“Tell her to get off her boney backside and spend some of his money at a hairdresser,” my grandmother said on the subject of her daughter’s hair.
But most of the time, I didn’t mind. It was one of the few times I emerged from the background and took center stage—or at least the part of the stage behind her. “Isn’t it nice being together like this?” she’d say to me as I stood there, comb in hand. But it was her face she sought out in the mirror, her eyes she watched.
Information came pouring out of her during these sessions. Most of it was about Mickey. Why hadn’t my father held her interest the way Mickey did? If Mother had treated him this well, we’d be in Shelterville, sitting pretty, Mrs. Murphy fixing our meals, cleaning our house. It didn’t occur to me till years later she’d learned something with the failure of her first marriage and was applying the knowledge.
“Do a twist tonight—so he doesn’t see the roots. He won’t say anything because he’s too worried about his damned angelfish to notice me. It’s got some fish funk and he’s talking about bringing a fish expert out here to look at it.” She shook her head. “When I had the flu last month, I dragged myself to the doctor’s office on the H bus, but the fish gets a house visit.” Mother’s dislike of Mickey’s hobby was a rare source of friction between them—and something I would’ve liked to exploit.
“Does the house smell of fish food?” I routinely asked, sending her into paroxysms of cleaning. “Don’t you hate sticking your hands in that water?” This remark necessitated her donning two pairs of rubber gloves.
Mickey had lined our miniscule living room with wall-to-wall fish tanks as he was fond of the room lit by aquarium lights. Mother wasn’t supposed to open the curtains even in the daytime. She went along with the tank decor, thinking the humidity was probably good for her skin, reading her trashy romance novels in the dim light when she wasn’t scouring the kitchen floor or working on her tan.
Only a few of her most prized pieces were interspersed here and there among the tanks. I doubted Mickey had any idea about the true magnitude of her junk.
“What’s this doing here?” Mickey had asked the other night, pulling a pewter candlestick off a corner chest. “Were you gonna light a candle near my tanks? Christ!”
“It was just an accessory,” Eve said, taking it out of his hands. Her tone was soothing. “I’d never light it. The wax, you know.”
“You’d better believe it, Babe. Hey, it left a mark.”
Outraged, he reached in his pocket and polished the sullied spot with his handkerchief, looking at her with disdain. “Didn’t you see the care sheet for this chest? You can’t put anything on it that sweats.”
On the return from their honeymoon, he’d presented Mother with a list on how to care for every item in this house, neatly typed by Racine. Her handoff to Mother had been flawless.
The idea for this marine decor had come to Mickey in a restaurant in Miami on their honeymoon. An event I missed, although Mother promised I could accompany them to the Hotel Fontainebleau next year. I couldn’t wait to choose a lobster from one of the tanks, even if it was kind of icky to pick one when you knew the chef would drop the poor thing into scalding water moments later.
“They don’t feel a thing,” Mother said when I mentioned it. “It’s why they have those hard shells. The shells absorb all the heat and turn red. Totally painless.” Her sharp red nails mimed the fall into scalding water.
Since the Miami trip, Mickey had fallen hard for the fish. Hook, line, and stinker—Mother complained. He spent hours poring through thick books he checked out of the children’s room at the library. We couldn’t get over how many books were written about aquariums. Caring for fish, it turned out, was more time consuming than raising a child.
; “I guess it’s because there so many different kinds,” I said.
“Well, they’re all fish to me.” Mother stared at an orange and blue one that never emerged from its hole in a rock. “What the heck do you think that one’s afraid of? He kind of reminds me of you, Christine.”
She looked at me with a frown—as if I had spawned such a deviant. I was always startled to hear my name in her conversation—shocked to hear any pronouncements or observations about me. If I hid inside rocks, it was because of her. I wondered what kind of mother the fish had had.
Mickey was glued to the counter at the Woolworth’s fish department on Saturday afternoons, discussing which neon tetra might make the best adjustment to his habitat. The entire setup cost more than the honeymoon that spawned the idea. One tiny diver in the Mediterranean tank was more expensive than the rarest fish since its arm could wave and the scuba gear he wore emitted real bubbles. It was made from pure silver or some precious metal so it wouldn’t rot or turn green.
“For Pete’s sake,” Mother said, once she was out of his hearing, “how much time can he spend on them? Don’t they pretty much take care of themselves in the ocean?”
Minutes (and money) spent on the fish meant minutes not spent on Mother. She couldn’t survive another defection, my grandmother told me, shaking her head. Though Hank had been a womanizer, he was her daughter’s first love.
“If she’d treated Hank better, you’d still be living inside that lovely house in Shelterville,” Grandmother reminded me constantly.
It’d been weeks since Daddy asked me to spend the night or even have dinner with him. His occasional call was always rushed—and most of our conversation was about what Mother was up to.
“Need anything, Christine,” he’d say at the end of each call, reminding me of Grandfather Hobart’s half-hearted offers ten years earlier. It was clear he’d no expectation I might take him up on it. Never imagined I’d ask for a new dress or a larger allowance. And I didn’t. My father believed me to be a murderer. Surely it was this fact, and not some innate dislike of me, that put a wedge between us. Would there come a day when I could tell him the truth?
So now it was Mickey on Mother’s tanned, toned arm, escorting her like Prince Rainier out to their classy dark sedan. If the evening’s entertainment was more likely to take place in a closet-sized bar owned by a bookie on Washington Lane instead of the dining room of the Oak Ridge Country Club, so be it. A Saturday night out was the goal and Mickey was more inclined to supply it than Hank had been. Mickey didn’t play golf, had no business associates, and believed in Saturday night dates.
Mickey came in at nine-thirty, right after the showroom closed and I stayed in my room. Sometimes my mother practically threw herself at him when he came through the door. Once I saw Mickey’s hand slide down my mother’s tight slacks, fondling her bony backside before he remembered I was watching.
“Whoops,” he said, throwing his hands up like someone caught robbing the bank in a western.
Mother laughed hysterically, with her new, hard, fake laugh. Since that incident, I’d kept my distance during these nightly reunions, waiting until the cooing and shrieking stopped.
If too much time passed, as it did that night, Mother made an appearance. “Don’t you want to come and see Mickey, Sweetie? He gets kinda hurt when you stay in your room.” She waited impatiently at the door while I put on my slippers. “Don’t you want to comb your hair first? And a little lipstick wouldn’t hurt.” You’d think she was setting us up.
It wasn’t enough that she was gorgeous, I was expected to do the best I could with what limited assets I had. All of Mickey’s women were made to do their best—just like with Daddy. Mickey’s ancient mother, who I’d met only once, still tottered around on high heels and wore false eyelashes at the age of seventy-five.
Downstairs, I found Mickey eating his nightly lemon at the dining room table. Yes, lemon. He asked for the same dinner every night: a salted lemon, a small steak cooked well, a small potato, no butter-just pepper and Tabasco, and a salad of lettuce and tomato dressed with red wine vinegar. No coffee—just tomato juice. He also took a handful of vitamins in the morning and did a Jack LaLanne workout on a record album at six-thirty a.m. in the basement. He glued pictures of Jack in the correct positions on the wall, facing the photos as he struck each pose. Doing my homework, I had the eerie feeling Jack was doing sit-ups right behind me. Mother told me Mickey’s father had died of a heart attack at forty-three, and it scared him.
My mother could talk about Mickey forever. It was hard to believe a man, rather than things, could capture her attention to this degree. And a poor man to boot—by Moran family standards. Mickey’s Achilles’ heel was a sweet tooth. That night, the extra éclair was waiting at his elbow. I gave my mother the evil eye, and she shrugged, throwing her arms around Mickey’s shoulders. He went on eating with Mother draped around him like an evening wrap. With her heavy tan and sharp features, she resembled a fox like the one on those stoles women had worn twenty years earlier. The ones where the clasp was the fox’s mouth biting its own tail. She mouthed something across the table to me, gesturing with her head, batting her eyes.
“So what’s up, Christine,” Mickey asked, pushing his plate aside.
Mother winced when he pushed his plate back, a sign of poor table manners in the Moran family. Mother, schooled by my father, had often told me that eating silently at the dinner table was rude. You were supposed to talk pleasantly about interesting subjects while enjoying your meal.
My grandmother said when Evelyn said rude, she meant lower-class. Apparently, none of these rules applied to Mickey. He took no interest in talking as long as there was food on his plate and could damned well shove his plate wherever he pleased. I could easily imagine him saying such a thing. I often considered what awful things he might say once he was done biding his time. I toyed with the idea of dropping a hint that I was more lethal than he might expect. Actually, I might take him out without a second thought.
“Can I babysit for the Martins on Friday night?”
The request came out in one long hiss. Mother wanted Mickey to begin thinking of me like a daughter. She’d gotten the idea from one of the numerous advice columns she consulted—all read with the goal of reigning Mickey in more tightly than his first wife had, by not repeating Racine’s mistakes—though neither of us knew what they’d been. Not repeating Mother’s blunders with Hank Moran either—a fresh start.
“He’s a dirty wop,” Grandmother said bitterly. “He can wash those greasy hands ten times a day, but it won’t fool me. Hank Moran had clean nails.”
Mickey’s nails were never dirty—he was overly meticulous if anything— but I kept quiet. Because of her unfortunate and obvious attitude toward Mickey, visits with my grandmother had declined. He could sense her animosity. If he came in and found Mother on the phone with her, he immediately bristled.
“Plotting against me?” he’d said only last week. Oh my, it was a house full of suspicions all right. And all of them festering within eight-hundred square feet.
“Babysit, huh? Mary Theresa didn’t babysit.”
“Christine wants to earn her own spending money.”
He thought about it for a minute. “What would you do if the Martins’ house caught on fire?”
“Get the kids out of there and call the fire department from the neighbor’s house.”
“Pretty good thinking. All righty. Babysit away. Pocket money’s a good idea.”
The three of us watched as a large, flat translucent fish devoured a tiny, bright blue one. “Damn,” Mickey said. “The guy at the store said they could cohabit.”
One of Mother’s economies in the lean years before Mickey appeared had been the “return” of her “return business,” although on a smaller scale than the earlier version due to various irksome constraints. She now knew no postal worker was going to deliver a constant stream of goods without getting a cut or turning her in. She knew, too, a surplus of gar
age sales, though they’d grown in popularity in the intervening years, made her too visible to a variety of overseers. She’d soon be accused of running a business without a license. Especially in the tightly configured neighborhoods we’d lived in since leaving Shelterville. But a temperate use of the scheme seemed feasible, especially given our economic status in the pre-Mickey days. Although I knew about it, she mostly ran it herself this time, perhaps wanting no witness available to be quizzed.
After their marriage, Mother worried Mickey might find out and call a halt. She was addicted to the free merchandise as well as to the excitement of pulling it off. She needn’t have been concerned; Mickey thought she was a genius. He was sorry, he said chuckling, that she couldn’t think of a way to get a few products from the U.S.Treasury. I didn’t get the joke until my mother explained it, but it never failed to send my mother into gales of laughter. If Mickey gave any clue that he was making a joke, however feeble, she was quick to supply the laughs. Although on her own, Mother had a poor sense of humor.
Coming home from school, I spotted Mother sunning herself on a chaise on the front walk. She did a half-hour on each side with large applications of cream in between, wearing a tiny yellow plastic eye protector that made her look meaner than usual and a swimsuit designed to garner a perfect tan. She’d decided to ignore new information about the effects of sun-tanning, reasoning the ozone layer had been intact during her formative years.
“I read it’s the bad burns you get as a kid that give you cancer.”
“Hand me the lotion, Christine,” she said now, her eyes slowly opening. “No, no, the pink stuff!”
I watched while she slathered it on, and then went into the kitchen and poured some milk, grabbing one of Mickey’s expensive peanut butter cookies to go with it.
Concrete Angel Page 17