FRESH YARN presents:

The Grand Union and My Mother's Career
By Marianne Taylor

In 1976 the Grand Union supermarket in Wayne, New Jersey, started giving out race cards with every purchase. Each card represented a horse that was scheduled to race every other Friday night at 7:30 pm on Channel 9, WROR. The idea was to collect a card for every horse in the race; if you had a card on the winning horse, and if that card had a star when you scratched away the silver, you could win the big ten grand. Just like that -- a woman like my mother could be rich.

I was 14 years old in 1976, the year that my mother tried to quit smoking for the first time. She, Pat Taylor, came from a long line of smokers. At Grandma's house, there was an ashtray next to every chair -- even a stand-up ashtray next to the toilet. If you stood on Grandma's lawn in summer, the house, with all its windows open, appeared to be on fire. These weren't the kind of smokers a person could get mad at either because my mother's family began smoking long before those medical warnings appeared on the side of every pack. They came of age in a generation of feel-good smokers, a time when three out of every four people in the elevator were smoking. My mother was destined to be a smoker the way some girls were destined to become nuns. Not smoking for my mother was like not sleeping indoors or not speaking English.

In our own house, my mother did not keep a stand-up ashtray next to the toilet but there were ashtrays in all the closets whenever she tried to quit. By 1976, the party was over for smokers. We kids used to come home from our junior high health classes and hand our mother laminated photographs of black cancerous lungs: "And your lungs, Mom, are probably worse!" By 1976 it was illegal to advertise cigarettes on television, and by then, maybe only one person was still smoking on the elevator and that person looked guilty.

My mother cut down to half a pack a day. To compensate, she allowed herself these other things: exotic jellied candies which she kept hidden behind the tea cups; arm wrestling; and the Grand Union horse races. My mother weighed 110 pounds but could arm wrestle my father, and most who challenged her, to their knees. When wrestling, the tendons jumped out of my mother's neck like taut rope and her head shook and her mouth turned inside out and her skin turned red as her lipstick. It looked as if all the rotten things that ever happened to her might just start shooting right out of her ears. Then, when the knuckles of grown men twice my mother's size were finally ground into the patterns of our vinyl tablecloths, my mother would sit back, brush off her Kresgee's housecoat, and light up a Newport. Newports were mentholated and, according to their ads, transported the smoker into a world of cool blue pleasure. But that didn't happen to my mom. Her washed-out housecoat, the yellowing wallpaper -- all remained exactly the same.

The trouble really started when my mother cut down to five Newports a day. For incentive, my father pointed out her non-smoking life expectancy on his life insurance charts. A non-smoker lived 30% longer. "Smokers," he told my mother, "gamble with destiny."

None of us, not my brother or sister or even my father saw the horse races coming. My mother had never before shown a propensity toward real gambling, not even Bingo. No, the horse races snuck up on us. Had my mother known it was gambling, she surely would have denied herself such a depraved indulgence. But it didn't seem like gambling; it seemed like…well, like grocery shopping.

Her white patent leather purse soon began to fill up with cards. We watched her after dinner, spreading all her cards out onto the tablecloth to count and recount them. By the first race she had a card on all but two competing horses. Certain horses, like Jupiter's Moon, my mother had ten cards for; others like Renegade, she only had one. When the race came on, she had all her cards lined up in front of the TV. WROR was one of the stations you had to have a kid hold the antenna to watch so that was what my brother and sister and I took turns doing. Still, the vertical rolled non-stop so all we could make out was a few horse legs here and there. What we did was listen to the announcer who talked faster than we had ever heard a man talk before. "We've got Jupiter's Moon neck and neck with Sable McGee who's comin' up from behind…" My mother was on her knees in front of the screen, mumbling Hail Marys, screaming out horse names. "Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee, GO RENEGADE! Blessed are thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus, Holy Mary mother of God pray for our sinners now and at the hour -- LET'S GO JUPITER'S MOON!" When Sable McGee made her photo finish she got up and kicked the TV. Sable McGee, one of two cards my mom didn't have.

"It's so rigged, Ma!" My older sister told her.

"Yeah Ma," I put my arm around her. "You think they printed even one Sable McGee card?"

"It's a rip-off Ma; they just want you to buy more groceries."

For whatever reason, my mother simply could not accept this. I imagine she went to sleep at night with the Sable McGee card floating above her head. It must have stayed with her, too, when she washed all the dishes, and particularly when she laid her single items onto the Grand Union check-out belt. This was how she began to shop -- by the single item.

For six entire months my mother bought her groceries one item at a time -- the same six months that she cut down to one Newport a day. She would come home, put the item away, and head back up to Grand Union for the next.

"Ma, why don't you just wait five minutes in the parking lot, then go back in again?" My sister proposed. "Why bother coming home at all?"

"They'd know," my mother told us. "If I waited in the parking lot -- they'd know."

"Like, Ma," I informed her, "like they don't already know."

As my mother did the dishes, my father explained to her she was under the spell of a maliciously calculated Grand Union marketing conspiracy.

"A what?" she responded, wringing out her washcloth.

Each race, my mother had more and more cards. Hundreds. And each race the only horse she didn't have cards on, won. Once she thought she actually won the big $10,000 but when we checked the card we saw that the winner was Sally-Baby not Polly-Baby. Besides the day her mother died, this was the only time I ever saw her cry.

More than occasionally, she let one of us kids stay home from school because each trip was worth twice the cards if she sent a kid over to check-out #3 with a tube of toothpaste while she waited at check-out #5 with her single can of tuna. It got embarrassing for her, even when she alternated check-outs, because there were only five, and she refused to go to the same cashier twice in one day. She was, after all, a highly principled woman. So, my mother eventually did what any good mother would do: she reached out to the neighborhood for help.

My mom didn't have a lot of friends. Her social interactions were limited to arm wrestling, and shaking hands with strangers during "the sign of peace" at Sunday mass. But the horse races changed all that. Suddenly, she was calling up the parents of my girlfriends and begging them to score her cards. "I hate to ask you Renee, but…" Mrs. Plum, who lived up the street, someone my mother maybe talked to once in 15 years, was dropping stacks of race cards in our mailbox. My sister, who was 17, was now allowed to borrow the car as long as she, and all her girlfriends, came home with cards.

Around the house we were like a family preparing for nuclear war. We had four tubes of toothpaste, toilet paper stacked up to the windows. Opening a cabinet could mean a dozen cans of tuna falling on your head. The dog had enough dog food to live for 35 years and all of our dinners were cooked in baths of chemical powders: Shake and Bake and Hamburger Helper and Just Add Water Meatloaf. My mother didn't have time to cook anymore. Suddenly, she had better things to do.

On my mother's first whole day without a cigarette, she stopped by the church and signed up for an Assertiveness Training class. In this class my mother learned to stamp one foot on the floor and declare, "I-am-somebody!" to anyone willing to listen. The church was en route to the Grand Union, of course, because my mother no longer went anywhere that wasn't on the way to the Grand Union. She was tired, she said, of picking up after three ungrateful teenagers, sick and tired of driving us to our stinking jobs at fast food restaurants. "Do I get paid?" she began to ask us. "Who pays Mamma?"

"I don't know," my younger brother innocently replied, "is it Dad? Does Dad pay you?"

So now, when I'd ask my mother to drive me down to my lousy job at the Burger King she would say, "What am I, your chauffeur? Do I look like a chauffeur?" But the truth was, Burger King was not on the way to the Grand Union so my mother could no longer be bothered. My brother might ask "Mom, could you pick up some charcoal for my fish tank?" and my mother would say, "Do I look like a coal miner? Do I?" When really, it was because the Grand Union didn't sell aquarium supplies.

So now, I was riding my stingray bike to work in my weird Burger King uniform. And worse yet, riding home with the top third of my Peter Frampton perm plastered flat to my head after eight-hour shifts in my Burger King hat. Not only did I have to ride my bicycle on the public streets with hat head, but my brother's fish were dying from lack of charcoal. And my sister could no longer borrow the car on Saturday night unless she chalked up twenty cards a week. Also, we all had dirty clothes. Why? Because my mother was no longer an old washerwoman.

"I-am-somebody!" she would say, maintaining direct eye contact.

"Well, whoever you are," I stared back at her, "could you drive me to the Burger King?"

According to my mother, it was her Momstitutional Right to say no. In Assertiveness Training, she had apparently drawn up her own "Bill of Mother's Rights." It was also her Momstitutional Right to lay on the couch all day and eat jellied candies because she was no longer the doormat of 345 Indian Road.

"The doormat has retired," she told us, her mouth full of gelatinous lime paste.

One night, while scooping a ladle of Just-Add-Water Meatloaf onto his paper plate, my father asked my mother, "Pat, have you ever considered the idea of going back to work?"

"Yeah," My sister said, "Why don't you just get a job at Grand Union because you live there anyway?"

But my father was right, going back to work was exactly what my mother needed. While we missed our old chain-smoking, washerwoman mom, we saw that something was missing in her life -- something she was never going to find at the Grand Union horse races. "She's spinning her wheels," my father told us.

The Women's Movement missed my mother completely. In 1974 when the feminists burned their bras outside the Miss America pageant, my mother just said, "Oh for cryin' out loud." When hundreds of thousands of women marched on Washington for the Equal Rights Amendment, my mother called them "loose cannons," and "one short of a six pack."

Like most good Catholics, my mother believed that women should have all the children God sends, even if he sent a solid dozen. God only sent my mother three children but now those three children had turned into snotty teenagers who distorted their faces whenever she kissed them. The children God sent her wanted service, not love. They wanted two things: rides and money. What happened to those other children, the ones who curled up by her side and watched Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore?

When I imagined my mother going back to work, I pictured Mary from The Mary Tyler Moore Show because she was the first liberated woman I'd ever seen up close. Mary had her own apartment with a bed that dropped right out of the wall, and a high-pressure job in a Minneapolis newsroom. I thought my mother might have her own desk and a boss like Lou Grant and a nice work buddy just like Georgette. But it wasn't going to be like that for my mom, not even a little. Sure, in 1959, before my mother had all the children God sent, she had been a secretary at a big insurance company in New York City. But now, no one used short-hand anymore. Typewriters were word processors and computers scared my mother even more than traffic circles. Even the Grand Unions had computers now.

On top of my mother's fear of computers was her forgivable fear of driving. She refused to drive on highways, freeways, or any roads that led to traffic circles, jug-handles, or exit ramps because she grew up in the Bronx where all the roads were normal. This was unfortunate because 95% of New Jersey is highways, traffic circles, jug handles and exit ramps. As a result, my mother's universe expanded only as far as the Grand Union, two miles to the south, and the Oakland Industrial Park, two miles to the north.

My mother, still a regular loser at the bi-monthly horse races, started circling jobs out of the Help Wanted ads. Before long, she realized there were only three things she was qualified to do: become a medical experiment, sell Mary Kay cosmetics, or work in the Oakland Industrial Park.

Her first job was nothing like the news room on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. My mother worked at Chatham Labs, a chimney sweep factory where she sat on an assembly line all day and capped containers of toxic orange powder which was supposed to clean out chimneys in the same way that Drano cleans out sinks. No one wore dust masks and the break room had only two chairs, one of which was broken. The line leader was a woman named Shirley who told jokes that were so dirty even the men with tattoos got up and left. I know because one summer I worked there with her. Chatham Labs paid over twice as much as Burger King plus time-and-a-half for overtime.

As soon as she started to receive regular paychecks from Chatham Labs, my mother stopped collecting Grand Union race cards. But she did keep up with the Assertiveness Training. At the factory, my mother was somebody, and for the first time in my life of knowing this woman, I saw her through the eyes of other people. Vinny, the Quality Control guy, used to time her on skid packing because he said he'd never seen a woman pack a skid so fast before. His nickname was "Vinny the Boot" because he fired anyone whose cans slipped by uncapped. Then I told him about the arm wrestling. Soon my mom, in her broken chair, was pinning "The Boots'" hairy forearm onto the filthy break room table.

Before long, my mother moved up the industrial ladder to a better factory in the Oakland Industrial Park. This factory made Estee Lauder perfume and Aramis cologne. Again, my mother was the heartbeat of the break room. I worked there one summer too, saving for college, and we capped bottles of Youth Dew side by side. I could see by then that my mother had become two very important things: a non-smoker and a financially independent woman. That summer my mother was promoted to Line Leader and I was promoted to Garbage Girl, two positions revered by all because they earned another 75 cents an hour. To celebrate, my mother took me out to the Pompton Diner which was the last diner in our town to have mini jukeboxes at each table.

Throughout her long career, my mom had worked in just about every factory in the park. I still have boxes of barrettes under my bed from the years she spent at Karina Designs and Hair Accessories. She always saved the rejects for me. Her last job was at a Bio-Med factory where she fused together pacemakers and other hardware that went inside people's bodies. Sometimes she would bring home parts to show us how the hardware worked. "You mess one up?" and then she would demonstrate for us what would happen by faking a heart attack at the dinner table. My mom was still my mom, but she was also, and more importantly, somebody else. "My mom?" I would tell my friends in college, "My mom works in Bio-Meds."

As the years went on my mother's fingers grew crooked and swollen. Rheumatoid arthritis finally forced her to retire from Bio-Meds but not before two of the daughters God sent her had graduated from college.

Around my mother's house now, the ashtrays are long gone but the exotic jellied candies are still hidden behind the tea cups. Occasionally, we venture out across New Jersey's vast expanse of traffic circles, jug handles, and exit ramps. At any one of our favorite diners we might talk, without cigarettes, about the Grand Union horse races, or Dirty Shirley from Chatham Labs. My mom, till this day, will not admit that playing the Grand Union horse races was gambling rather than shopping, just like she will never admit that capping cans of chimney sweep was part of her own little Woman's Movement. I see it like this: she played the odds. No, my mom never did score the big ten grand -- but in the end, she came out ahead. And while feminist icons like Mary Tyler Moore were running their news rooms, my mom was arm wrestling "Vinny the Boot."

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