| ||||||||
|
|
The
Grand Union and My Mother's Career PAGE
TWO: "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.
|
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.
