Concrete Angel (15 page)

“Oh, you would make a big fuss over such a small purchase. What did it cost? Pennies.”

“You deserve a refund.” Mother reached over and slid her finger across the top of the cake. Grandmother didn’t say a word, but Mother, not expecting silence, defended her iced finger. “Oh, the cake’s ruined anyway. Where’s the harm?”

“They’ll tell me it’s a manufacturing problem or something I did wrong,” Grandmother said, ignoring Mother’s finger. “And if I want reimbursement, I’ll have to write the company. The store won’t admit any fault.” Grandmother peered farsightedly at the bottle. “I’ve been through things like this before.”

“Which is why you have to take action at once. I’ll write the letter.”

Mother reached for her purse and took out a pen and an old deposit slip from the bank to scratch out a rough version. “You’ve gotta give ‘em hell. I know how it’s done.” And she did apparently.

T
wo weeks later, Grandmother was hammering at our door, an unusual occurrence. “You’re not going to believe the nice note I got from Meadow Fresh,” she said, breathless with excitement. “Remember Meadow Fresh—that faulty bottle of vanilla? Writing was a good idea, Evelyn.” The note of respect in her voice made me smile.

“Just a note?” Mother said. “Didn’t they give you a coupon? Or a refund check?”

“You’re not going to believe this, but they sent me an entire case of vanilla extract! Did you ever hear of such a thing? A whole case! I’ll have to give it away at church or something. They’ll think I’ve gone senile, carting vanilla extract around. Isn’t it the stuff alcoholics drink? I don’t guess you’ll be needing any?”

Mother declined her offer and went off to sit in her favorite chair in the living room to think.

A
t first, Mother actually bought the merchandise. Knowing one returned can of hairspray might possibly net a carton of twelve cans, it felt like small potatoes to purchase a can. And that familiar red can was her first return: Aquanet hairspray, which she took a pair of pliers to, bending the nozzle slightly. She packaged it, including a sweet, slightly apologetic note.

Dear Sir:

I have been a lifelong admirer and purchaser of your excellent product, which has kept my hair tidy through thick and thin. Imagine my disappointment today when I tried to press the nozzle on a brand new can and it didn’t work. It was actually bent. I thought I should advise you of this flaw in your product.

Yours truly,

Mrs. Eve Moran

She included the receipt for the item. Two weeks later, a case of Aquanet arrived. Twelve cans to be stockpiled for future use. Aquanet Hairspray was not the kind of thing my mother craved, but the less money spent on household items, the more money that could be given over to sparkly things. Over the next months, dozens of cartons arrived with beauty products, kitchen products, bathroom products, and the various odd things Mother took a fancy to. Some people might say six dozen boxes of swizzle sticks was overkill, but when Mother wrote the manufacturer that a chipped stick had cut a guest’s tongue, what could they do? I was able to use some of them on projects for school.

It was exciting, if worrisome, to see Mother reinvent herself. She’d gone from a mental patient to an entrepreneur practically overnight. The color in her cheeks rose, her posture improved, and I watched with only a small degree of trepidation. Her newly minted control persuaded me.

Not all of the manufacturers fell into line. Some ignored her letter; others sent an apology with a small coupon; some, a paltry refund check for the exact amount. And when she made the mistake of hitting the same company twice, she received a threatening letter instead of the expected window cleaner. After that, she decided a filing system was required.

“This is a damned good way for you to learn the alphabet,” Mother said as she sat me at the table with a box of manila file folders.

I was six perhaps and knew the alphabet, of course.

“Find the file folder with the letter the company’s name begins with. Tuck the letter inside. See, A for Aquanet.”

After only a few months of this enterprise, she’d amassed a pile of paperwork. Soon she was making copies of her letters at the nearest branch of the library. “No sense forgetting what I said to them.” She turned out to have significant organizational skills, which had never been tapped.

And I was good at numbers. My future as a low-level office worker was assured. I didn’t mind the business’ prosaic nature; it was nearly as good as my time with Aunt Linda or my early days with Mother. She grew happier with each delivery, and I enjoyed my new status as a member of her gang: anything winning Mother’s approval was gravy to me.

“Daddy doesn’t need to know about this,” she said as she tried to shove another carton in a closet.

Our house in Shelterville, with its three-car garage in the rear, was testing Mother’s ability to store her goods. “Let’s have a little yard sale,” she decided one day and hung out a sign.

Daddy was playing golf probably. Even on Saturdays he was seldom available to us before dinnertime, claiming he made important contacts on the green.

Mother didn’t want to be caught in yet another scheme to accrue merchandise, and an ad in the paper would do just that. Daddy read the local gazette from front to back, having a contract with the company to supply its paper. But she quickly found she could attract a fair number of customers by merely sitting outside in a pink two-piece bathing suit—not a common sight in an upscale suburb.

“It’s so darn hot today,” she said to her first customer, fanning her damp chest. “Can I pour you some lemonade?”

It was a middle-aged man who’d braked with a squeal when he spotted her.

“I bet we have loads of stuff your wife would find useful.” Mother handed him a glass of lemonade as he stood open-mouthed at the table. “There are so many items it’s foolish to pay retail prices for.” She waved her hand over the table top. “You’ll net quite a savings here.”

He shook his stupor off, saying, “Helen could probably use some scouring powder. Or maybe a package of vacuum bags. Helen’s my wife,” he explained, looking around hungrily. “Always running out of Ajax, my Helen.”

“I’m sure Helen could use vacuum bags and Ajax,” Mother said, stuffing both items into a bag, “but wouldn’t she love it if you came home with some bath salts—something just for her.”

She laughed her most womanly laugh and handed him a jar. His eyes filled with doubt. Mother had cut the prices, if only slightly, from what was asked for in stores, but these were pricey bath salts. She seldom bothered with the low-end beauty products.

“I have three scents,” she told him. “But I bet she’s a lilac girl.”

The man watched slack-jawed as she bent over and retrieved a larger jar from under the table.

“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.

“D
o 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?”