MY GRANDMOTHER beat me to the phone. By the time I got there, she had the receiver cradled on her neck and was trying to pull a tall stool over with her foot. I pulled it the rest of the way, and she sat down, ignoring me. “Sophia!” she shouted. “This is your mother! Can you hear me?”
My grandmother had led the way with the indoor toilet, but long-distance calling was another matter. She always shouted until the person on the other end assured her that she could be heard. When my mother told her she could hear her, my grandmother started speaking normally. She said, “Good, and yes, Margaret seems to have had a fine time. What?”
She listened and then told me to run outside and bring the morning paper in to her. I did. She turned to Eleanor Roosevelt’s “My Day” column and told my mother to talk to me while she read it through.
I took the phone. My mother asked me right off if I’d liked Tom’s family. I said I had. Then she asked what my plans were for the rest of the holidays. I steadied myself and told her she already knew what they were. She was quiet, and then she apologized. She sounded so thoroughly earnest, and while I was considering how to respond to her, she said, “Well? So are you going to use the discounts or not? I know what I’d do.” I told her I was embarrassed by what she had done, and she asked me if I was going to chastise her repeatedly. She said, “I did it, and I’m sorry. I truly am. What else do you want me to say?” I told her I didn’t know, but yes, I was thinking about using the discounts. I’d stayed up late the night before, thinking about all I wanted, starting with a formal gown. I wanted something sequined, the sort of dress that attracts a great deal of dangerous attention. I wanted matching shoes, and while I was at it, I wanted a handbag, a permanent wave, a manicure, makeup, and a facial. She screamed, “What? Is this Margaret?” I told her she had heard me right, and when I handed the receiver to my grandmother she had to wipe it on her robe. My palms had sweated all over it. I was trembling as well.
She listened to my mother a moment, looked at me hard, and said, “I wouldn’t say Margaret’s changed, but let me wait and give you my verdict after she comes home from the beauty shop.” She winked at me and then told my mother she had been correct in saying that Mrs. Roosevelt’s column was the most ridiculous one yet. I read the column while she offered my mother a scathing and hilarious commentary. Mrs. Roosevelt said she intended to go right out shopping and catch all the after-Christmas sales. She planned to buy ahead for next year. My grandmother told my mother, “Now Eleanor’s children know to expect something shop-worn, broken, or otherwise mauled next year.” The Roosevelts, she said, were made of money, rolling in it, stinking with it. Together, she and my mother created a picture of Eleanor Roosevelt in some department store in Washington, rummaging through the sale racks, hunting down the best bargains. I put my ear close to the receiver. My mother was laughing uproariously, adding more details about Eleanor’s hounding clerks for even deeper markdowns, pointing out dropped stitches in sweaters, inquiring after the colorfastness of a blouse, threatening to make the store pay for ruined laundry if the color ran, being pushy all around.
My grandmother held the phone out to me again. I was afraid my mother would question me about my sudden desire to fix myself up, but she didn’t. She offered me her velvet dress and her double strand of pearls. If that didn’t suit me, I could get anything I wanted and consider it a late Christmas gift. I thanked her, and I thanked her also for all the things she had already given me, especially the earrings. She said she was looking forward to coming home and opening her own Santa Claus. We were to keep the tree up for her. “When I get back, we’ll have another Christmas morning,” she said. “You know we’ll have a good time, because we always do.”
A popular cosmetics advertisement of the day said, “Give looking pretty your all.” I spent the four hours before Tom’s sister’s piano recital doing just that. I’d never spent so much time on myself, and I recall wondering how women who did this regularly had adequate strength left to enjoy themselves. I did everything I had seen my mother do, starting at the top of my head and working down. My grandmother predicted that Tom would whistle through his teeth and say I looked swell. She had taken a bath, dusted herself with her Mavis powder, brushed her hair, and put on her mother’s Sherman dress and those ancient shoes. When she caught my eyes fixed on her shoes, she said, “They’re polished. If the boy’s family takes issue with my shoes, I can always remove them.” My closet looked so bleak that I went into my mother’s. I tried on everything she had. I chose a black georgette skirt and a white organza surplice blouse tied by a side bow. If I could’ve gotten into her velvet dress, I would’ve. Two years’ worth of sitting around reading had given me what she called “office hips,” and when I had to call my grandmother in to zip me, and then listen to her memories of cramming her sisters into corsets, I pledged myself to a slenderizing program. She told me I should get on this right away, unless I wanted to spend my honeymoon undressing in the dark.
When Tom arrived to pick me up, he did not whistle through his teeth but he did say I looked swell. My grandmother could have told him how long it took me to accomplish this, but she didn’t. She told him to come with her. She wanted to show him some things. She led him all around the house, commenting on her collection of antique surgical implements and the homemade nativity scene she had accepted in lieu of payment for delivering a set of twins. He liked this particularly, the way the Wise Men’s calico head-pieces were held on by Nehi bottle caps, the way Mary tipped over if she wasn’t wedged up next to Joseph. He said it reminded him of the strange crucifix he’d seen in the hospital. I tried to tell him I knew which one he meant. I wanted to tell him what I had imagined about it, but my grandmother led him away before I could. She took him into the long hall and showed him how lovely my mother had been upon her graduation from Miss Nash’s School, how feisty she looked in the picture Mr. Baines took of her at Grandfather Mountain. She pointed to one taken of me in the first grade and said, “Margaret read The Jungle Book that year.” Then she pointed to my second-grade picture and said, “She read Kidnapped that year. It scared her teacher to death. This same thing had happened when her mother slipped my copy of The Mysterious Stranger off to school with her. That was in 1917. Her teacher thought Twain was a nut. He was not a nut. He got some strange ideas there toward the end, but he was not dangerous, as Miss Nash led those girls to believe. I tried to make the woman show me the evil in Twain’s story about the frog contest, and she could not. She would’ve had them read Sir Walter Scott continuously if she’d had her way. Sir Walter Scott. I almost pulled Sophia out of the school over the reading list, except they seemed to be making such headway teaching her enough manners to operate in good company.”
She would have rambled on in this very uncharacteristic fashion had Tom not waited for her to take a breath and said we should leave for the recital. His mother was hoping we could get there a little early. Without a word, my grandmother walked down the hall. When she got to the end, she turned around to me and said, “So very much has happened. Am I correct?” I told her she was, and then I collected her coat and gloves for her. She rode quietly all the way to town.