I can still picture my mother
spending long hours at the kitchen table scouring the Sunday newspaper, not for
the latest news, but for bargains. This
was in the late-sixties—before double coupon bonus days, midnight madness and
weekend blowout sales. It was the dull age of retailing when one might see a
“half-yearly” or “Lincoln’s Birthday” sale, but for the most part you were
lucky if Gimbels Department Store had foundations at 17 ½ percent off.
Mom would sneak a cigarette or two
late at night, a habit she’d successfully kept hidden until I was in high
school, and pour over the advertisements like a bookie adjusting her point
spreads. Her total absorption burned
holes through the vinyl gingham red-checked tablecloth.
No household item escaped my
mother’s frugality. Plastic bags of all types became valued pieces of
luggage. They were washed, dried and
re-used again and again until the synthetic fibers finally disintegrated and were
given a proper burial in our trash bin.
On special nights out I’d often
catch mom spelunking inside a nearly empty tube of lipstick with a bobby pin.
“The tube is almost half full,” she’d say.
My two brothers, sandwiched between
two older and two younger sisters, had to endure the worst of mom’s
thriftiness; wearing hand-me-down leotards from their big sisters under their
pants in the cold winter months. Under
duress, my brothers donned thick, stretchy tights of the type worn by Robin
Hood and Superman, but in girlish pinks and yellows. It might have worked if only it had been
several years later when Joe Namath made pantyhose for men seem GQ. To this
day, it’s a taboo subject at family gatherings.
If anyone wants to bring an immediate flush of embarrassment to my brothers
and send them into an emotional tailspin, just mention the word “leotard.”
There were no trips to the
barbershop for my brothers. Haircuts for
them were more like hair divestitures; their heads were shaved, military
style. Mom would sit them down on a
chair in the backyard, throw a towel over their shoulders and shear their heads
practically down to the bone.
I’d add to their misery by rubbing
my hands over their freshly-shorn, sandpapered skulls saying, “Women go wild!”
But my sisters and I also suffered
my mother’s tonsorial mutilations. Every
few weeks mom would have us sit on chairs in the kitchen with the linoleum
floor lined with newspapers. She would
pull out scotch tape to secure our perfectly straight hair across our foreheads
to trim our bangs. It never did the
trick. Year after year of childhood photos show our bangs slanting upwards, on
a twenty-degree angle, giving each of us a vaguely extraterrestrial, Mr.
Spock-type look.
There was no reason to buy new rain
boots when our old leaky boots could be made weatherproof through mom’s
ingenious re-use of Wonder bread bags.
Of course she meant well, she wanted our feet to be warm and dry when we
got to school. But what she didn’t
foresee was the horrible cloakroom scene when the boots came off and we were
left wearing the bags. With the ensuing
taunting from classmates at the unmistakable primary red, yellow and blue
Wonder balloons covering our shoes, it’s a wonder none of my siblings or I were
humiliated into a lifetime of intensive psychotherapy.
We six bread-bag-footed children of
Vulcan bangs and buzz cuts and unisex leotards skipped through our childhoods
believing this was all perfectly normal.
And then one day I discovered that my mom was different. It could’ve been the time I learned that our
daily treat of baked cakes and cookies made from scratch, always waiting for us
after school on the kitchen table, was special because other mothers made
theirs from something called mixes. Or
perhaps it was when I found out that no other mothers in our neighborhood made
soap out of lye and pig’s lard from the hog my father had slaughtered each
year. (We lived in the city.)
I’d like to say I’ve completely
escaped mom’s legacy of exuberant prudence, but as Cokie Roberts wrote, “We Are
Our Mothers’ Daughters.” How true. I’m just like her. I can’t seem to throw out
a plastic bag to save my life.
