That Said (19 page)

a married man with two children—

for having had a long affair

with my aunt.

 

She has to clean it every single day,

and every single day

she changes the patch.

 

I didn't used to think it odd

that he lived in a house with Tess

and his kids, and also

in an apartment with my aunt.

For twenty-six years

they acted like an old married couple.

Then they made it legal.

 

When he wears his formal black eye patch,

Al looks like Moshe Dayan.

He couldn't get a glass eye

to replace it, one like Sammy Davis Jr.'s.

He had a little tear on his bottom lid

they couldn't sew up.

 

Before I was born,

driving between Flossie and Tess,

he fell asleep at the wheel.

My mother says Al is lucky

that all he lost that night

was an eye.

 

I catch a glimpse, just as

Flossie is about to cover it

with a folded square of gauze.

Gently, she pulls adhesive tape from a roll,

cuts the sticky white strip

into two equal lengths,

makes a big sticky X

to lay across the gaping socket

to hold the gauze in place.

 

She is the one who sees me first.

Surprised. When he faces me,

flashing me his one good eye,

my aunt quickly covers

his nakedness. But it's too

 

late, I've already seen—

where his other eye should be—

the wrinkled pocket of skin

I've always been so curious about.

“I could make you the best-dressed girl in school,”

my mother used to say. “But I won't.

Better that you're famous for something else,

like getting good grades

or having the best manners in your class.”

 

My mother was famous.

She owned the best dress shop in town.

At thirteen, I could almost fit

into the size 3 petites

that hung in our store downstairs,

directly under my bedsprings.

So what if a dress hung loose on me.

Why was my mother so stingy?

 

The first week of school,

she drove to Little Marcie's Discount Clothes.

 

She beamed as she dumped the bag out

on my bed, my new fall wardrobe

piled high as a pasha's pillows:

pajamas and panties and argyle socks,

white cotton blouse with Peter Pan collar,

red tattersall jumper, dungarees,

and a blue plaid woolen skirt.

Inside every collar and waistband,

the fraying outline where the label

had been razored out.

“Don't turn up your nose,” my mother said.

“What gives
you
the right to be a snob?”

 

Unfolding the blue plaid skirt,

she made me stand on a kitchen chair

while she chalked the endless circle of pleats.

Pins scratching my knees, she put up my hem.

The next day, I

and five other girls in Mrs. Cooper's class

wore the same Little Marcie's blue plaid skirt,

just like a parochial school uniform.

 

But not Stacie,

the best-dressed girl in my school,

who bought her clothes at Lord & Taylor.

I wanted what Stacie had—

her Pendleton skirt and Lanz nightgown,

her London Fog raincoat and Bass Weejun loafers—

and Stacie's mother, instead of mine.

 

Stacie's mother spoiled her, my mother said,

because Stacie was plain,

and her grades just average.

“She doesn't have anything else going for her,”

my mother said, “other than clothes.”

 

Hypocrite! My mother's whole life

was about clothes!

Buying, selling, wearing, breathing, eating,

sleeping, talking clothes!

Like a musician with perfect pitch,

my mother had a natural talent for clothes.

 

She grew up during the Depression.

She'd had to work and work

to get to where she was today—

the owner of the best dress shop in town—

but she was sick of clothes.

Sundays, summers, Christmas Eves,

she could never take a vacation

away from clothes.

 

Her customers waited for her

behind dark green corduroy curtains,

in separate dressing rooms,

waited barefoot, in their bras and slips,

waited for her

to run to the racks and bring them back

the perfect garment to try on.

 

And I waited, too,

apprenticed to my mother's exquisite taste.

Sweeping the floor

or stacking flat hosiery boxes

behind the counter, I'd climb the folding ladder

so I could better see

my mother tease a woman's arm

into a silk sleeve of a blouse,

or help her step into a skirt,

or pull a gabardine sheath over her hips,

or drape her in challis—

 

I watched my mother

button them up and zip them down.

I watched her dress the entire town.

Everyone in town, but me.

 

Browsing in the store,

they'd pinch me on the cheek and say,

“You'll be a lucky girl when you grow up.”

I wasn't so sure that it was luck.

 

She was the queen;

I, the heir.

It would have been a snap for her

to make me the best-dressed girl in school.

But for me she wanted better.

 

“Give me, give me,” I'd shout in my head.

And my mother would answer,

as though she'd heard me,

“If I give you all these dresses now,

what will you want when you're fifteen?”

My mother's feet were always killing her.

All day she stood in the store

selling dresses, hobbling to the dress racks

like a Chinese woman with bound feet.

 

My mother's mother died of the Spanish flu

when my mother was a baby.

Raised by her grandmother,

aunts, and sisters, my mother inherited

their brown hair, their nice figures,

their hand-me-down dresses,

and their old cramped shoes.

 

And so her toes grew crooked and her arches fell.

I was twelve when she bought her first pair

of orthopedic space shoes. Custom made,

they cost a bundle, plus tax.

She had to go to the factory in Manhattan

and stand for fifteen minutes,

ankle-deep in a pan of wet plaster of Paris.

Six weeks later, the shoes arrived—

molded in the exact shape of her feet,

the hard, black leather already broken in,

bulging with hammertoes and bunions,

and grained like a dinosaur's skin.

 

She clomped to the cash register,

she clomped to fetch a customer a dress.

At noon, she clomped to the deli

and ordered a corned beef sandwich,

her rubber soles trailing black scuff marks.

It was worse than wearing

bedroom slippers in public.

 

Six o'clock, she clomped upstairs

and cooked us dinner, and after dinner—

my father dozing on the sofa,

my sister and I sprawled on the floor

in front of the TV—

my mother plopped down in her easy chair

with her cigarettes and newspaper,

and soaked her feet

in a dishpan of soapy water.

 

Why couldn't she keep her pain to herself?

I cringed, trying to ignore her

torturing herself with a pedicure—

using the fancy cuticle cutters, scissors,

clippers, and pumice stone

from the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue.

An hour later, her feet were done,

wrinkly pink, like a newborn's.

 

My mother was wearing her space shoes

the day we bought my first high heels

at Schwartz & Son's, the only store in town

with an x-ray machine that showed

if your shoes fit properly

and your feet had room enough to grow.

 

Young Mr. Schwartz jammed my big toe

against the metal sliding ruler.

I'd grown a whole size since the fall.

He brought out the pair of ugly

“sensible shoes” my mother chose—

squat heels and square toes—

and the ones I wanted—

black patent leather pumps,

pointy-toed, dangerous.

 

Two inches taller, I teetered across the carpet,

toes pinching with every step,

as Old Mr. Schwartz conducted me

to the x-ray console that only he

knew how to operate.

 

I stepped onto the pedestal,