I would clean and press a dress and have it neat and ready for work in my closet, but when I went to get it, it would be gone and in its place would be a wrinkled, milk-shake-spotted tweed skirt and a blouse ripped under both arms.
“Alison”, I’d yell. “Where is my brown dress?”
“Which brown dress?” Alison would say, her eyes shifting from side to side like a metronome.
“My office dress”, I’d say. “It was brand clean and pressed and now it’s gone.”
“I haven’t seen it”, Alison would say, slipping through the front door and signalling to whoever had it on not to go past the house. That night when I got home the dress would be back in my closet, reeking with some musky perfume and still warm.
But even with Alison and the depression, Mary and Dede and I never attached the desperate importance to our work clothes some girls did, as we learned one night at a roadhouse north of town.
A large group of us were sitting in a booth drinking terrible drinks and eating old boiled chicken that had been slightly heated in deep fat, when we became aware of a commotion next door. A heavy thumping, a few curses and then little moans. One of the men in our party peered around the curtains and reported that a man in the next booth was throwing his ladyfriend against the wall like a handball. “How terrible”, we all said as we climbed up on our chairs and peered over the partition.
Sure enough, a rather small but strong man was hitting a girl and sending her crashing into the wall. Each time as she hit she’d straighten up, say “Aw, honey”, and he’d hit her again. Finally, however, there was a ripping noise, and when the girl looked down, saw that her dress had caught on the corner of the table and torn, she immediately burst into tears. “Stanley Johanson”, she sobbed. “Now look what you done. You tore my office dress!”
For a long time we bought our clothes at nice stores, waiting until they were marked down for the last time, which usually meant that we were just buying our summer clothes when the rest of the world was getting ready for snow. But ‘It’s not your clothes but you, yourself that counts’, Mother told us and so we whetted our personalities and patched our petticoats and dreamed of the day when we’d be rich and could be beautifully dressed and dull.
Then Dede and I found the Bargain Mart, a funny little dark store with funny little dark clerks; store hours geared for musicians and gamblers; clothes that often bore in addition to labels from other stores, little traces of other occupancy, such as a little grease and powder around the neck, a forgotten clip, even a handkerchief in the pocket; and dusty, cluttered show windows displaying, even in summer, children’s dirty white fur coats, heavily embroidered Chinese mandarin coats and big waterproof work shoes. Dede and I never could decide whether the Bargain Mart sold stolen clothes, bought up left-overs from other stores, or dealt in white slavery in the back and sold the clothes of their victims in the front. Whatever it was we liked it.
We first found the Bargain Mart one evening about ten-thirty when walking down the street after a movie. I had caught and torn my only pair of stockings on the seat at the movie, and was wondering what I would do about work the next day, when Dede said, “Look, a store! And it’s open. Maybe they carry stockings.” We went into the Bargain Mart and for a few minutes just stood and waited. There didn’t seem to be anyone there. Everywhere were counters piled high with underwear, hats, dolls, men’s hunting jackets, purses, silk scarves, jewellery, satin nightgowns, kimonos—but no clerks and almost no lights. Finally, nervously I said, “Maybe the door wasn’t supposed to be open. Maybe there are burglars in here.”
Dede said, “So what. There’s enough junk here for all of us. Look, I’ve found a pair of stockings.”
She had been digging down under a counter and had come up with a pair of pinkish tan silk stockings, so old they crackled like tissue paper and were faded on the creases. There was no price mark on them. Dede took them toward the back of the store and yelled, “Hey!” Instantly from somewhere up front near the door a tiny little dark man appeared and said, “Something?” “Yes,” I said. “These stockings. How much?” “Dollah”, he said. “These stockings are old”, I said. “Look, they’re faded.” “I’ll get new ones”, he said, reaching under the counter. “What size, please?” ‘Ten”, I said and he pulled out a box and produced a pair of sheer, new, beautiful silk stockings. So I gave him the ‘dollah’ and we left.
A few nights later Dede and I were going home from work and happened to pass the Bargain Mart. A little dark woman waited on us, or more truthfully, stood in the shadows and watched while we pawed through the dresses, suits and coats, which were hung among and on top of the men’s suits and coats and gave the back of the store the look of a crowded coat-room.
After some searching and no help from the woman, I found a very smart, three-quarter-length mouton coat with plaid wool lining, marked, for heaven’s sake, $35. I tried on the coat and it was most becoming. I showed Dede the price and she said, “If it hasn’t got somebody else’s initials where they’ll show, take it.” So I did. “Oh, what a darling coat, where did you get it?” everyone said and I, looking as dishonest as the Bargain Mart clerks, said, “My aunt sent it to me.”
The thing about the Bargain Mart was their boxes, which were bright magenta with ENORMOUS gold letters on both sides screaming BARGAIN MART at anybody within a radius of twelve miles who didn’t carry a white cane. Dede and I loved the Bargain Mart but we certainly hated those boxes which were made of such punk cardboard they tore when we stopped in the alley and tried to turn them wrong side out.
We didn’t take Mary to the Bargain Mart because we knew that she’d be more interested in what they were doing in the back than in the good bargains, but we took Mother and she bought, for seventeen dollars, a grey tweed coat with a ‘Made in England’ label in the sleeve and a fountain pen in the pocket.
Mary didn’t miss being taken to the Bargain Mart because she had her own ways of being well dressed on no money. In the first place, she liked, and had the courage to wear, high style clothes and so when she had to lengthen a dress by inserting a girdle of a different material, people didn’t look at her and say, ‘I’m sorry!’ as they did to me. They said, ‘Mary, how smart!’ Then Mary had a dressmaker who charged very little and could copy pictures in the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. The only problem was to get the finished article away from her before she had a chance to embroider it. She wanted to embroider wool flowers on coats, big birds on dresses and leaves and flowers on suits, and the reason she charged so little for her sewing was because she intended to charge a lot for the handwork we wouldn’t let her do.
Then Mary made good use of our trunks and when asked to a cocktail party would rummage in the trunks, grab the garden scissors and often emerge in an hour or two looking at least different. One Saturday afternoon she took our black taffeta evening dress with the huge full skirt, and our white high school graduation dress and, by cutting off the sleeves and lowering the neck of one, and removing the skirt from the other, evolved a very smart ankle-length black jumper dress with a white dotted organdie blouse with enormous puffed sleeves, real lace on the collar and a demure little black velvet bow at the neck. Mary’s only trouble was that she made so many of her major changes with pins that sitting down in one of her creations made you feel like one of those Hindus who lie on spikes.
One time, a Mrs Schumacher, a very rich friend of Mother’s, met Mary at a cocktail party and admired her dress, and when Mary told her how she had made it not ten minutes before out of some old portières and a few potholders, Mrs Schumacher was so impressed by Mary’s cleverness that the next day she sent over a huge box of clothes accompanied by a note which said, ‘Some things I’ve hardly worn and thought you and your brave little family might use.’
“Hooray!” we all said, diving in, jerking things out and throwing them over our shoulders. But when we’d looked at everything, we knew that we would all have to be a great deal braver than we were to wear Mrs Schumacher’s hand
-me-downs, which were big blouses and big party dresses, of chiffon, satin and beaded fringe, all orchid or fuchsia.
“Here”, we said, tossing them to Anne and Joan and their friends for ‘dress ups’ and for years afterwards we could hear them in the playroom quarrelling and saying, ‘Now, Joan, you know Tyrone Power wouldn’t wear a beaded Schumacher’, or ‘How can I be Sonja Henie when you have on the chiffon Schumacher.’
Last year at an autographing in southern California, a large woman in a beaded purple chiffon Schumacher came up to me and said, “I’ll bet you’ll never guess who I am”, and I wanted to say. ‘I don’t know who you are but I know what you’ve got on.’ But I said, “No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”
She said, “I’m Mrs Schumacher from Seattle”, and I said, “How wonderful! You’re the woman who gave us all your old clothes during the depression”, and to my surprise she wasn’t at all pleased but got very red in the face, said, “I don’t remember any such thing”, and went flouncing off, ashamed because I had been poor.
Another friend of Mary’s, a woman so rich that she could afford to wear brown dresses trimmed with black tatting, like our cleaning woman whose son gathered their coal off the railroad track (only the rich woman’s dresses were labelled Florence Original and the cleaning woman’s St. Vincent de Paul), came to tea one Sunday afternoon bearing over her arm a beautiful grey coat with a collar and reveres of blue fox. “I’m tired of this old thing”, she said, tossing it at Mary and carefully undoing the fastenings of her own manure-colour-trimmed-with-black-Persian-lamb creation.
Mary said, “Oh, how beautiful, Aunt Alice. May I try it on?” “Of course, dear”, said Aunt Alice smiling benevolently. “I want you to have it.”
“Oh, my gosh, what a pretty coat”, said a friend of Alison’s who had just dropped in to return my skirt, Mary’s blouse, Dede’s jacket and Alison’s shoes. “Can I try it on?”
“NO!” screamed Mary, Mother, Dede and I together.
“Well, all right”, said Alison’s friend. “Gee, Alison, did I tell you how mad my sister is? Yesterday was her birthday and her boy friend gave her a cross with a head on it.”
“Some sort of religious medallion?” asked Aunt Alice.
“Uh, uh, it’s a red colour and has long hair”, said Alison’s friend.
“A figurine?” asked Mother.
“Gosh, no”, said Alison’s friend. “It’s one of those fur scarves with a head on it. You know.”
“Oh, a cross fox”, said Aunt Alice.
“That’s it”, said Alison’s friend. “I think it’s ugly. It looks just like an animal. Well, bye, Alty, thanks a lot for the clothes.”
“Heavens, what a silly little girl”, said Aunt Alice. “Now, Mary, that coat is a Charlie Petcock original and my, it is becoming to you. Just made for red hair.”
I said, “Let me try it on.” Mary did. I looked in the glass and felt like a movie star. Then Dede, Alison and Mother tried it on and we all looked like movie stars.
“Oh, Aunt Alice, it’s beautiful! Thank you, thank you!” we said when she left.
She said, “Remember it’s a Charlie Petcock original. Take good care of it.”
Monday Mary wore the coat to work. Monday night I wore it to a movie. Tuesday I wore the coat to work. Tuesday night Dede pinned up the hem and wore it on a date. Wednesday Mother wore the coat down town and Mary wore it to a party. Thursday I wore the coat to work and Friday we got the bill from Aunt Alice. ‘One Charlie Petcock original—$75.00.’
“Why that stinking old skinflint!” we screamed. “That rich horrible old grafter!” and kept the coat and wore it over the weekend.
Monday night Mary returned the coat and Aunt Alice, after going over it with a magnifying glass said, “I think you’re being very silly, Mary. You couldn’t even buy the fur for that.”
Mary said, “In the first place I thought you gave me the coat and in the second place seventy-five dollars would buy winter outfits for our entire family.”
Aunt Alice jammed the coat into one of her bulging closets and said, “Seventy-five dollars is very little to pay for a Charlie Petcock original.”
Shoes were also a depression problem. First there were the children who delighted in greeting me at the end of a weary day by lifting a foot and displaying either a large new hole or a sole flopping up and down like a panting dog. “Not another pair?” I’d groan and they’d say, “Um, um, and my play shoes have come unsewed and my party shoes are too short.” You could get very good children’s shoes for $2.50 in those days but $2.50s didn’t grow on trees and I longed to bind the children’s feet.
Mary and Dede and I got our shoes in cheap stores that carried pretty good imitations of Andrew Geller and I. Miller for $1.98 if you could stand the pain and didn’t go out in the rain. The $1.98 Andrew Geller’s and I. Miller’s required a great deal of breaking-in, in fact almost complete demolition before you achieved anything approaching comfort, but they looked very nice. I remember a pair of green Lizagator pumps I bought that lasted well, but took over two months of breaking-in by the whole family before I could walk across the room in them without fainting from the pain.
We had a little shoemaker in our neighbourhood who would do anything to our shoes, short of half or whole soling, for fifteen cents and many’s the morning we waited in our stockinged feet in the breakfast nook while Anne or Joan or Alison ran up to Mr Himmelman’s with our shoes. ‘There’, Mr Himmelman would say, polishing the shoes on his sleeve after he had sewed up the side or put on heel tips. ‘Just like new, eh?’ And Alison or Anne or Joan would bound up the front steps, slam the front door and hand us our shoes saying “Just like new, eh?” no matter what they looked like.
One time I bought myself a pair of brown suede ties which looked very nice but were apparently made of suede-finished scratch paper, because the first day I wore them it poured and rained and my feet got soaked, and the next morning when I went to tighten the laces of my new shoes the holes came out and hung on the lacings like little gold beads.
“Hurry and take these to Mr Himmelman”, I told Alison. “Tell him to bore new holes or something.”
But Mr Himmelman told Alison, “These are not shoes. These are just imitation shoes. Bah, no good. Tell your sis I’m sorry I cannot do a thing.”
Last winter I paid $49.50 for a pair of real alligator pumps and though they are comfortable and have stayed sewed even in snow, I miss those old exciting days when a sudden storm might mean the dissolving of my brand-new pair of brown simu-calf pumps, and leave me standing at a busy intersection in my stockinged feet.
13
‘Now Listen, Mother, It’s only a Fifteen Minute a Day Programme’
DURING THOSE YEARS WHEN we were all living at home, Mother managed to keep reasonably busy. She took care of my two children, made beds, washed dishes, cut the lawn, gardened, washed, ironed, cooked, marketed, sewed, darned, fed and administered veterinarily to our household pets, which included at one time three dogs, four cats, a canary, two guinea pigs, a white rabbit and a mallard duck, and fed and administered homoeopathically to her five children, our house guests who often stayed five years, and an adopted sister.
For recreation Mother listened to dreams, helped with homework, heard long, often dull, stories about jobs and lovers, listened to the radio, made sketches, grew primroses, read all the new books and almost every magazine published, attended family-night movies and entered contests.
For years we all saved wrappers and box tops and Mother wrote twenty-five words or less on ‘Why I Like Ivory, Lux, Camay and Oxydol’, and had gentle unselfish dreams of what she would do with the ten thousand dollars or the new cars she would win.
But not until the Old Gold contest came along and she accompanied her entry with a letter stating, ‘I am a little old grandmother who smokes two packages of Old Golds a day’ (and coughs constantly), and won fifty dollars and a flat tin of Old Golds, did she have any success.
With the fifty dollars, M
other bought a new clock for her bedside table and paid off some of her more insistent ‘at the doors’. The clock, which had numerals that shone in the dark, immediately began pointing out to Mother how late she was going to bed and how early she was getting up, so she put it in Mary’s and my room, in which location it became a symbol of her cleverness instead of a reminder of her hard lot.
We were very tolerant about Mother’s contests, but we were not at all nice about her radio programmes. “How can an intelligent woman listen to that drool?” we would yell as we turned off Stella Dallas, who in spite of years spent with the finest families in Boston still said ‘we was’ and ‘I seen it’ and called her daughter ‘Lolly Baby’.
When we turned off Mother’s programmes, she would sigh and say, “Oh, well, they’ll be doing the same things tomorrow, anyway.” “But Mother,” we’d wail, “they’re so corny.”
“I don’t remember asking you for your opinion”, Mother would say. “And I find them very relaxing. It’s like having someone read aloud to me while I do my boring housework.”