Anybody Can Do Anything (15 page)

11: Bills! Bills! Bills!

A bill is a thing that comes in a windowed envelope and causes men to pull in their lips and turn the oilburner down to sixty degrees and women to look shifty-eyed and say, “Someone must have been charging on my account.”

A bill collector is a man with a loud voice who hates everybody. A collection agency is a collection of bill collectors with loud voices who hate everybody and always know where she works.

I could no more have a complete feeling of kinship with someone who has never had bills than I could with someone who doesn’t like dogs. Owing money is not pleasant and undoubtedly stems from weakness, but those of us who have known the burden of debt; have spent our long wakeful night hours peering into that black sinkhole labeled “the future”; have grown wild with frustration trying to yank and pull one dollar into the shape and size of five; have flinched at the sight of any windowed envelope; have cringed with embarrassment at the stentorian voices of bill collectors; have been wilted by money lenders’ searing questions; and have often resorted to desperate dreams (in my case usually involving scenes where a beautifully dressed, charming, red-haired lady says to a lot of different people, “Your pleading just bores me—close my account!”), emerge finally, if we
are able, kicked and beaten into a reasonable facsimile of a human being and/or dogliker.

Which is why, I guess, I’ve never felt very close to bankers. Bankers remind me of a little girl I used to play with in Butte, Montana—a little girl named Emily, who always had a large supply of jelly beans which she carried in a little striped paper bag, the top of which she kept closed and tightly twisted. When Emily wanted a jelly bean she untwisted her bag, reached in, took one, put it in her mouth, retwisted the bag and told us, her loyal playmates drooling on the sidelines, “Gee, kids, I’d like to give you some jelly beans, I really would, but my mother won’t let me.”

Experience has convinced me that all bankers are little Emilys. The only time they untwist their little striped bags and take out a jelly bean or two is after you have proved conclusively that you already have plenty of jelly beans of your own and aren’t hungry anyway. When you don’t have any jelly beans and are starving they say, “Gee, kids, I’d like to give you some jelly beans, I really would, but my Board won’t let me.”

The best pal I’d like to have least after a banker, is a credit manager. Credit managers are people who, by birth or training or both, live entirely in the past, have no faith in the future, are not interested in the present, hold grudges indefinitely or at least for six years, never forget old slights and are always ready and eager to rehash old quarrels. Credit managers collect, the way other people collect recipes, all the nasty things anybody has ever said about anybody else.

If you were two payments behind on your vacuum cleaner in 1943, the year Mama got that fishbone stuck in her throat, Bobby broke his arm and the sewer backed up, and apply for credit in 1949, the credit manager shuffles through his neat stack of white cards, swells his nostrils and says, “I’m sawry, but it says here that you didn’t live up to your contract on your vacuum cleaner and your attitude was sullen.” The rest of us are taught that every day is a clean slate but a credit manager is taught that every day is an old bill.

The only person ever able, to my knowledge, to completely confuse credit managers is my mother. Mother, a truly charming and most talented woman, has no more financial sense than a hummingbird, arguing with her about money is like trying to catch minnows in your fingers, and what is worse she adopts a reasonable attitude toward bill paying.

When a credit manager would call Mother and shout accusingly, “You promised to be down here on Monday and you didn’t show up,” Mother wouldn’t cringe or get tears in her eyes, but would say pleasantly, “I know but I was busy with something else.”

When the credit manager said, “Why didn’t you come down on Tuesday, then?” Mother would say, “Would you mind holding the phone a minute, the cat seems to have a fur ball in her throat?”

Some time later, having disposed of the cat, Mother would pick up the phone and resume, “Hello, Mr. Crandall, I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. Let’s see, Tuesday, oh, yes, there was a program at school.”

“What about Wednesday?” Mr. Crandall would ask.

“Wednesday is a very bad day to get someone to take care of the children,” Mother would say.

“What about Thursday?” Mr. Crandall would ask irritably. “Couldn’t you have come down Thursday?”

“No,” said Mother, “I couldn’t. I was having the chimney cleaned and I had to get Mrs. Murphy’s lunch.” Mrs. Murphy was the cleaning woman but the credit manager, whose head was beginning to buzz, thought she cleaned the chimneys.

“Then will you be down today?” he would finally ask wearily.

“Oh, not today,” Mother would say. “I’m making Alison’s dogwood costume.”

“Next Monday then?” he’d say, still with hope.

“All right, next Monday,” Mother would say, adding after he had hung up, “If my primrose woman doesn’t show up.”

Mother employed the same infuriatingly reasonable tactics with Mary and me.

“Mother,” I’d shout in exasperation, “I gave you twenty-five dollars Thursday to pay the gas bill and they called me today and said it hadn’t been paid.”

Mother, intent on
frosting an applesauce cake, would say, “Which man did you talk to?”

“A Mr. Ellsworth,” I’d say.

Mother would say, “Is Mr. Ellsworth the one with that lump behind his ear?”

“I don’t know about the lump,” I’d say, “but he has a Southern accent.”

“Oh, then the one with the lump must be Mr. Hastings,” Mother would say. “Mr. Ellsworth is the one whose daughter failed her college board examinations and he is awfully upset about it.”

“Which college was she going to?” Dede would ask.

“Wellesley,” Mother would say, “and I told him that I had a very dear friend who teaches at Wellesley and promised to write to her and see if anything can be done.”

“Who do you know at Wellesley?” Alison would ask.

“Charles Horton’s sister, Mabel,” Mother would say.

“Is she old ‘there is rhythm and grace in every pore of the human body’ who used to sit on the couch with her skirts clear up around her thighs?” Dede would ask.

Mother would say, “She wore tweeds she wove herself and she is very nice.”

“Oh, that old bore,” Mary would say. “She’s not coming out here is she?”

Dede would say, “She’s probably packing her loom right now.”

Mother would say, “I think Mabel is very charming.”

Mary would say, “You do not. You think she’s a great big bore but you won’t admit it because she’s from Boston.”

I would yell, “WHAT ABOUT THE TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS FOR THE GAS COMPANY?”

Mother would say, “Lower your voice. I gave it to the egg man.”

“But I promised it to the gas company and the egg
man isn’t due until next week,” I’d wail. “Why did you give it to him?”

“Because,” Mother would say, gently and with great reasonableness, “his wife has arthritis. Now let’s eat this applesauce cake while it is hot.”

Mother’s approach to any direct unpleasant question is to pick out the least important word in the question and make an issue of it. I can best illustrate this by an incident depicting a similar type of mind. When Anne and Joan were nine and ten, we overheard the following conversation one day as they sat on the back steps discussing school.

Anne said most dramatically, “Do you know that Janice Price is only ten and she
smokes!”

Joan said, “What brand?”

Mother, a strong believer in and supporter of the small business, made keeping the household accounts more confusing than world government. Mother had an egg man, a bread woman, a rabbit man, a chicken man, a spice man, a vegetable man, a butter man, a milk man, a laundry man, a coal man, a slabwood man, an alder man, an old forest growth man, a good plumber, a punk plumber who would come on Sundays, a painter, a primrose woman, an electrician, a Fuller brush man, five magazine men, an ice man, a chimney cleaner, a sewing woman, a bulb man, an orange man, a dahlia woman, an apple man, a regular manure man,
a well-rotted manure man, a pots-and-pan woman, a moth-ball-and-potholder woman, a wire toecover man, a little old needle woman, a Christmas wrapping woman and a downspout man.

All of these “at the doors” as Gammy used to call them, had regular times to appear but both because they all loved Mother and because her method of payment was so erratic, they dropped in whenever in the neighborhood. On payday they swarmed around the house like yellowjackets around a rotten apple.

Occasionally when Mary and I would try to bring order into our lives and live on a budget, we would gather the family together for strength and try to take Mother to task for her “at the doors.”

“Can’t you get rid of some of them?” we’d wail.

“I’ll do my best,” Mother would say. “Now which ones do you want to eliminate?”

“The potholder-and-mothball woman,” we’d all shout together.

“Why?” Mother would say.

“Because,” we’d say, “her potholders are no good. She makes big mistakes in her crocheting and when you try to grab anything hot you burn your fingers in the holes and you know as well as we do her mothballs make the whole house smell like a Chinese whorehouse and contain some sort of special breeding stimulant for moths.”

Mother would set her lips stubbornly. “Mrs. Twickenham,” she’d say, “makes mistakes in her crocheting because she needs new glasses which she can’t afford. I know her mothballs are no good and smell horrible but I always try to throw them right away.”

“Why do you buy them, then?” we’d groan.

“Because I had Cleve drive her home one rainy day and she lives in a little one room shack and she looks like Gammy.”

So Mrs. Twickenham stayed.

“All right,” we said. “What about that awful wire toe-cover man? You know we’ve never been able to figure out a use for one of his inventions.”

Mother said, “I have. I’m using his egg basket to keep the dogs off my camellia cuttings.”

“What about his butter slicer, his bread cutter, his fruit basket, his soap dishes, his lettuce bag?” we said. “They none of them work and whenever you open any cupboard in our kitchen, one of them lunges out and snags your stockings.”

Mother said, “Yellow Belly had her kittens in the fruit basket and anyway Mr. Muster’s wife has t.b.”

Mother, a completely selfless person herself, has her own means to combat selfishness. When my sister Mary married a doctor all the rest of the family, via Mother, immediately became well supplied with expensive vitamins. It was simple. When Mother stayed with Mary she loaded her suitcase with different bottles from Mary’s medicine cabinet and distributed them to the other members of the family.

Occasionally, of course, there would be slip-ups, like the time we all took, with excellent results, quantities of a Kelly-green bile-priming pill in the belief that it was a newer, stronger vitamin A. Or the time we all took, for several months, a great many bright red cinnamon drops in the belief that they were some wonderful new all-in-one vitamin, enormous quantities of which Mary always seemed to have on hand. “No wonder Mary gets so much done,” Mother told us, as she came staggering in with a new supply. “I’ve never felt better in my life.” “What energy, what vitality—hooray for vitamins!” we told each other over long distance and when Mary’s husband heard about it he said, “Chalk up another for Christian Science.”

When I moved to the country, Mother arranged summer outings for all the family at my house and saw to it that Don
and I dug lots of clams for distribution among the drylanders. When one of us married an Italian the others got plenty of olive oil, when one acquired an orchard the others all got fruit, when one got chickens we all got eggs. If one of us has a rare rock garden plant, Mother snips it up, roots the pieces and distributes them to the others.

As I write this I am convinced that the Government could use Mother but I’m not exactly sure where, unless it would be to confuse the Russians.

My first experiences with debt were mild and vicarious but they fostered
in
me a strong and lasting belief that bills were shameful things and should always be kept secret.

When my brother Cleve was about twelve he decided one desperate day that his only hope in a world which seemed to be peopled entirely with females (Mother, Grandmother, sisters, cats, dog, cows, horses, even the turtle and canary were she’s) was to answer an advertisement in a magazine and become, with nothing down and plenty of time to pay, a “high-paid executive” and show a few people!

To his chagrin, immediately upon receipt of his evasively filled out coupon, he received from the advertiser, not a magic formula, not explicit instructions for brain control, not one darn thing that overnight would enable him to emerge suddenly from his messy, cough-drop-boxy, gun-littered room, a suave, smooth, high-paid executive in a blue, pin-striped suit, but a great big, thick arithmetic book labeled
First Steps in Accounting
and filled, he discovered to his disgust, after he had thumbed through a few pages, with nothing but “thought problems”—that most detested of all types of arithmetic problems. Cleve immediately abandoned all idea of becoming an executive, tossed the accounting book under his bed and returned to his job as unofficial assistant to the Laurelhurst bus driver.

Unfortunately, the Executive Builders didn’t give up so easily. They had started to mold a high-paid executive and
by God, man, they were going to finish. Every week or two for months they deluged Cleve with courses, ledgers, notebooks, examinations, books of receipts and mimeographed letters on character-building, cooperation, don’t be a quitter and forging ahead. Surreptitiously Cleve garnered them from the mailman and shoved them under the bed.

Then one day the courses stopped and the letters began.

“Mr. Bard,” said the President of the Executive Molders, his long admonishing finger appearing across the entire face of the letter, “have you no honor? Don’t you know that buying things and not paying for them is STEALING?”