my mother and I swung around toward the raspy voice to find a tall, scruffy-looking man, leaning on a cane, and eyeing my mother beneath a critically lowered brow.
Bernice was momentarily speechless. I was pretty sure that no one had ever called her an old bat before.
“A joke,” he said, staring at her and then looking at me with the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. “Doesn’t have much of a sense of humor, does she?” he asked.
“Afraid not,” I answered while I noticed that the scruffiness wasn’t so much scruffy as it was a rather attractive five o’clock shadow.
“Excuse me,” Bernice said, “but I’d rather not be talked about like I wasn’t here.”
“Then perhaps you should leave,” the man suggested. “In fact, that probably would be for the best. Leave, woman,” he intoned like he was playing to the back of the house, “and let your unfortunate daughter get on with earning an honest day’s wages.”
“I’ll thank you to mind your own business,” Bernice said in her best ice-maiden-of-the-’50s fashion.
The man leaned closer to her. “I think the manager is on his way over to see what the commotion is about. If I were you Mama, I’d get my skinny ass out of here. If you get sis here fired, she’s gonna have to move back in with you and that would sort of cramp your style, wouldn’t it, doll face?”
Regal as a queen, my mother turned away from him. “Expect a phone call tonight,” she said to me before she headed for the seafood department.
“You’re my hero,” I said to the man with the mouth. “Have some yogurt.”
“I’ll take the yogurt, Heidi, but I reject the mantle of hero. Those suits they have to wear are always so confining,” he said with a look of distaste and a little shiver. Then he tossed the free carton of yogurt into his cart, hung his cane on the handle and limped out of the dairy department.
“Mother,” I said into the phone later that night, “I swear to you that I have no idea who he was.”
I was in the wingback chair in the living room, my feet in a basin of sudsy hot water, waiting for a cup of tea to steep and listening to my mother tell me for the fifth time how appalled she’d been to find me handing out samples at the supermarket.
“To think that you would settle for being a vendor—a hawker in a ridiculous costume. I have important clients who live in that area, you know.”
My mother didn’t have customers. She had clients. I found the perfect dress for a client during my last buying trip to New York, she’d say. The same women had been keeping her in business for years. And they brought in their friends and their daughters and their daughter’s friends. The boutique, in a converted town-house east of the river on a little street off Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee, was so exclusive you could barely find the sign.
The kind of women who dressed like my mother just seemed to know how to find it. I was sure that if my mother didn’t manage the place, I’d have absolutely no idea where it was.
I wiggled my toes in the satiny water, took a sip of chamomile tea, and let my mother elaborate on all the ways I was a disappointment to her. When I could get in a word, I said, “Mother, I have to start somewhere. Besides, it’s only temporary.” I added a good-night and hung up.
The phone immediately rang. I picked it up.
“The least you could do is let me wish you a good-night,” Bernice said. “And I know you have to start somewhere and I’m proud of the fact that you’ve at least started. But for heaven’s sake when you’re walking around with that basket of yogurt, stand up straight. That slouch just makes you look even more ridiculous. Goodnight, dear.”
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