Concrete Angel

For Philip

...the love of my life.

W
hen I was twelve, my mother shot a soda-pop salesman she’d known less than eight hours. She used the gun Daddy had bought a few weeks earlier, telling her it was to keep us safe now that their divorce was final and he’d be living too far away to protect us. He taught Mother how to fire, load, and clean it, taking her to practice shooting at a nearby gun range.

Daddy was right. There
was
a dangerous, if imperceptible, current coursing down that suburban street because it was only a few weeks later that the incident occurred. Jerry Santini walked out of our bathroom, saw my mother removing bills from his wallet, and headed for the phone—mumbling something about a “thieving bitch” and “not getting away with it.”

Mother, adept at identifying potential danger and acting quickly on it, moved toward the drawer where she’d placed the gun, planning only—or so she insisted later—to stop him from making the call.

Stymied by our blood red telephone, a Swedish import with the dial on the bottom, whimsically called an Ericafone, Jerry’s attempt to reach the police was thwarted. Mother caught him in the chest, the ribs, the thigh; she emptied the entire chamber, in fact. He’d been shooting his mouth off when she started pulling the trigger.

“He had this idea I was running a scam, luring men up to our apartment with the intention of robbing them,” Mother said. “Can you imagine?”

Jerry couldn’t have known my mother had run up against the police and their tactics before, that his reference to her being thrown in jail was anathema to her. Or that his words would send her into a fugue state where her actions were unpredictable, centered entirely on self-preservation. And his particular threat of incarceration was more potent than raising his fist or shoving her around. Physical retribution she would’ve accepted as fair payback or tolerable, at least. If he’d only kept still after his first threat, he might’ve survived. But he made the inevitable move toward the phone, persisting in saying what he’d do and seemingly acting on it.

So however it happened, whatever state Mother was in, and whatever Jerry Santini said, or did, or didn’t do, she shot and killed him, emptying the gun and letting it clatter on the hardwood floor. Or perhaps I only imagine such a clatter. I couldn’t vouch for it having been asleep at the time.

There wasn’t much Jerry
did
know after only an hour or two’s acquaintance. Our apartment gave the impression of belonging to a woman who wouldn’t need to rob a man of, at most, forty dollars. Having her child asleep in the next room would also seem to preclude her undertaking a robbery much less a fatal shooting. These were certainly rational thoughts—they just didn’t explain a woman like my mother.

The things Jerry Santini knew were purely physical ones: the feel of her skin, the taste of her lips, her scent, which still wafted on the air he no longer breathed. Some pricey perfume, purchased with the contents of some other guy’s wallet he might have reasoned if he managed to smell it while looking futilely for that strangely placed dial.

Mother met Jerry Santini at a shoe-repair shop earlier that day. She was always a sucker for a man who took care of his clothing, and Jerry wore an expensive pair of well-polished, buttery-black wingtips. There were no holes in his socks, an item she examined carefully over the top of the wooden stall. She was disproportionately impressed by appearance, often judging people solely on such things.

“We were sitting side by side in those little cubicles,” Mother told me later, an untoward strand of merriment in her voice given the day’s outcome. “I wonder why cobblers think nicely stockinged feet need to be hidden. Jimmy—”

“Jerry,” I corrected her. “His name is—was—Jerry.”

“Right. Well, Jerry made a joke about that very thing.”

They kidded around about similar stuff, striking an immediate, although ultimately, deadly rapport.

“I put these socks on clean this morning—so my feet can’t smell,” he’d said, sticking a foot out as proof. Witty repartee wasn’t in his arsenal.

Oh, they were jolly at first, or so she made it seem in the story I heard.

She invited him up to her apartment where she served him stuffed figs, cocktail nuts, dates, and several dry martinis before taking him to bed. She’d given up cooking for men after a nasty episode a few years earlier, but kept prepared foods such as these on hand for potential guests—items looking attractive in a cut-glass bowl. We often made a Sunday dinner of the leftovers if they didn’t disappear on Saturday night.

“Good thing you like sardines and chicken liver, kiddo. Dinner will improve when we can split a bottle of wine.”

I nodded my agreement, pathetically anxious to take on the role of Mother’s confidante rather than her child. Perhaps a glass of wine would seal it.

“It was the briefest of encounters—Jerry’s and mine,” she told me
much
later, in a half-humorous, half-disdainful voice.

I smiled, pretending to understand what her words meant, not knowing yet what shared information or intimacy would come to mean.

After shooting her date with a degree of marksmanship no one would’ve predicted given her single lesson in firearms, Mother shook me awake, but failed to convince me, even after several attempts, that he’d tried to strangle her.

“Look at the marks, Christine,” she hissed, as if Jerry Santini might be listening. “Right here.”

Head cocked, her nails expertly polished a pearly pink, she massaged her throat like Gloria Swanson in
Sunset Boulevard
. I tried to see some marks. I badly wanted to see at least an early blossoming of bruises though its importance was not yet clear to me. But her neck was white and blemishless.

She dropped onto my bed and began to sob, claiming no one ever took her side. It was then she confessed she may have peeked inside this man’s wallet, an action she’d been forced to take given our current position.

“I thought the odd ten perhaps.”

When I didn’t immediately fall in with this idea, didn’t know, in fact, what she was talking about, she added, “Your father’s so stingy. How he can expect us to live on...”

In order to cut-off a comprehensive recitation of how she’d been wronged over the years, I threw myself on top of her, listening to her hammering heart through the thin fabric of her negligee, crying the next minute myself. I
did
feel responsible for her current unhappiness. If it weren’t for my presence, Mother and Jerry might’ve gone to a nightclub or theater where she wouldn’t have been tempted. Or, she might have been able to steal the odd twenty dollars less conspicuously—blaming its loss on a waitress or busboy. I had a vague memory of an incident like this before. Was it a scam after all?

Or maybe they would’ve gone to
his
apartment, where no gun conveniently waited in a drawer. My role in this debacle was growing large. I listened to her heartbeat, the one I’d first heard in the womb. Its ferocity made it impossible to ignore. I was already setting myself up for the upcoming finale. Preparing myself for the role I’d soon play—the one I’d always perform for my mother. The role I
wanted t
o play.

I hadn’t heard any of the activity in the living room because my mother had turned on
Saturday Night Live
before Jerry and she made love, and it was still playing. As Mother showed me her throat, sobbing over her ill-treatment by men and me, the Swedish rock group ABBA was singing the eerily appropriate
SOS
. I’d slept right through the early
SNL
skits about bumblebees and cheeseburgers, the lovemaking going on in the next room and, more blessedly, the gunfire. Only Mother, screaming in my ear, was loud enough to wake me.

After our expiating sob fest, we linked hands and tiptoed into the living room—as if we might be disturbing someone—to examine the consequences of Mother’s greatest faux pas, me still clinging to the pale hope her imagination had gotten the best of her. Or, at the very least, that the wound was not a fatal one. She continued to jabber away, pretending we were looking at some ordinary mishap—like a broken vase or a ruined piece of furniture— so the oddness and horror of finding a dead body in my living room didn’t immediately sink in.