Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Joyce Harrington The Plastic Jungle

“If you stay in the Soft Goods you’ll be all right.”

My mother’s voice comes to me and I go on combing my hair. My hair is quite long now. I haven’t cut it for four years, except when my girl friend, Alexis, trims the ends. Alexis’ family is Syrian and my mother doesn’t like me to pal around with her. Oh, God! There she goes again.

“Don’t go in the Housewares Department. Mimi, do you hear me? Don’t even go near it. It’s not safe. Answer me.”

She’s standing in the doorway. Momma, don’t you want me to get you a nice new scrub brush so you can scrub out the rest of your life? No. Be nice to Momma, she’s at a hard time in her life. My sister says. My sister who lives in Great Neck and doesn’t have to listen listen listen, and come up with an answer. I put on some lipstick and try to say something.

“Momma, I’m only going to buy a bathing suit.”

The lipstick is crooked and I wipe it off. Forget it. I stuff things into my shoulder bag. She comes into the room and sits down on the bed plop like that. She dumps herself down when she sits. Always. Like a sack of somebody else’s dirty laundry she’s carried around too long. The bed shakes.

“A bathing suit, anh. What, one piece or two?”

“I don’t know, Momma. I’ll see what they have. Maybe I won’t get anything.”

I’m ready to go, but I haven’t been released yet. I have to wait until all the questions have been asked. Until all the wrong answers have been given. There aren’t any right answers.

“A bikini? Don’t bring home a bikini. You bring home a bikini, I’ll send it right back.”

She won’t though.

“All right, Momma. No bikini.”

“You’re going with that Alexis? She’s not a nice girl, Mimi. I saw her in the pizza place smoke a cigarette.”

So what should she be smoking, a cigar? No. My mother is still fighting the Six Days’ War. Alexis is an Arab guerrilla who kills Israeli babies. Would she like to see me in khaki shorts with a rifle on my back? Marching? Singing? Shooting Alexis? Would she?

“No, Momma. I’m going by myself.”

“Don’t lie to me. You never go downtown by yourself. Why can’t you go with a nice girl like Rose next door?”

“No, really, Momma. This time I’m going alone.”

Because Rose is a nice fat girl and it hurts both of us to go shopping together. Could you understand that, Momma? That Rose couldn’t wear a bikini, and she would have to say they all looked terrible. And I would have to say something bitchy about her flab, and then we couldn’t speak to each other for a week.

“You have enough money?”

Her hand is in her apron pocket pulling out the old black-leather change purse.

“Yes, I have enough. I have to go now.”

“Here. Here, prices go up overnight. Everything goes up, nothing comes down. Just in case.”

A weary crumpled five-dollar bill gets shoved into my shoulder bag. At last I can go. I head for the door.

“Thanks, Momma.”

Her voice follows me to the front door.

“Be home for supper. Be careful. Don’t go in the Toys, they’re all plastic.”

Out.

I go along Westminster Road and turn toward the subway. What do you do when your mother is crazy? Is everybody’s mother crazy or only mine? She worries about plastic, she’s afraid of it. Never mind about drugs, about Vietnam, about crime in the streets. My mother carries on a pogrom against plastic.

It’s a menace, she says, and she won’t have it in the house. I have to keep all my records at Lex’s house. My sister says maybe she wouldn’t be like this if my father was still alive and if my brother lived closer and if she wasn’t having a hard time with the change of life. If. But the fact is that my father is dead and my brother lives in New Mexico and my mother is crazy. Be nice, my sister says, go along with it. It’s harmless.

I reach the subway steps and go up. The subway is out in the open here. Not really elevated, but running on tracks above the ground. Nice, to ride along seeing daylight and the backs of houses. Alexis is waiting for me on the platform.

My brother the college professor in New Mexico sends his monthly letter with a check or his monthly check with a letter. He helps out. It’s very hot in New Mexico, they moved from their apartment to a little house near the college, there’s a nice back yard for Jemmy to play in, they are expecting another baby in October and he didn’t write that sooner because he wanted to be sure everything was okay. His wife, Eleanor, had a miscarriage last year and Momma got so upset she had to go to bed for a week.

Momma reads me the letter after supper. She cries.

“Why New Mexico,” she moans, “so far away? Might as well be China. He couldn’t get a job in New York?”

I’m eating my dessert while she’s crying. She makes very good apple cake and my mouth is full of it. But I can’t swallow.

“You could go visit them.” I mumble around the cake and finally get it down. “You could go out there, take care of Eleanor, take care of Jemmy.”

That does it. The tears disappear, dry as the Negev, dry as New Mexico, no more irrigation canals down the checks.

“Oh, yes, Madam. Who would take care of you? You are not yet as big as you think you are.”

Right on, Momma. I’m not as big as I think. But who is? You, my little shriveled Momma with tear spots like watermelon pits on your blue wash-and-wear permanent-press coverall apron with a daisy on the pocket from Sears Roebuck?

“I could go and stay with Celia.”

And spend the summer being built-in unpaid nosewiper for that batch of my mother’s grandchildren. Listening to my beautiful sister, the heroic mother of three, complain about life as the doctor’s wife. (He’s never here when I need him, and when he is here he’s too tired.) Who told her to marry the doctor?

“Momma.”

That’s right. Blow the nose. You look great. It’s all red.

“Momma. I could go stay with Celia. You could go out to Sam and Eleanor.”

More Kleenex. Stuff it in the pocket. What does she do with all that damp Kleenex? Iron it out and use it again? Put it away neatly in a drawer for my inheritance? I give and bequeath to my youngest daughter, Mimi the Nuisance, all the Kleenex I cried into during her lifetime.

“Celia has enough to worry about. You think she needs you besides?”

Thanks. That may be the nicest thing you’ve said to me all day.

I push back my chair and start to clear the table. The dishes are odds and ends of old sets, chipped and cracked, replacements picked out of dirty bushel baskets set out on the sidewalk in front of Benny’s Bargain Bazaar. When my father died, the good dishes, two sets, were packed up and shipped out to Great Neck. To Celia because she has a family and keeps a kosher home. We don’t bother anymore. It’s my personal opinion that Celia stayed kosher just long enough to get her hands on those dishes and, of course, when Momma comes to visit. I start to wash the crummy dishes.

“So where’s the bathing suit? Let’s see this year’s free show at Jones Beach.” She’s still sitting at the table, sipping her third cup of tea. The tears are gone, the Kleenex is gone, and she’s ready for the next round.

“It’s in my room. I got a job, Momma.” I’m splashing around with the brown soap and the greasy dishwater (Momma won’t get detergent because it comes in plastic bottles) with my back to her waiting for the eruption. It doesn’t come. Nothing.

“Did you hear me, Momma? I got a job.” I look over my shoulder and she’s sitting kind of crooked in her chair with her eyes closed and her mouth open and her face turning blue. I should have known.

Then I’m yelling, “Momma, stop it!” But she doesn’t stop it. So I grab the bottle of ammonia from under the sink, and my hands are dripping dishwater all over the clean floor, and the bottle slips, of course, but I finally get it under her nose and she breathes again. She gasps, she wheezes, she groans, and a few more tears roll down the old tracks.

“Come on, Momma. Go to bed.”

“How can I go to bed? You made such a mess on the floor. Now I’ll have to mop it all over again.”

“Never mind. I’ll clean it up. You go to bed.”

She lets me take her arm and start leading her out of the kitchen. She’s all bent over like she’s cuddling a pain next to her heart.

“I’m old and sick and all you want is to leave me. So get a job. What kind of a job could you get? You can’t even wash dishes without flooding the kitchen.” All this with more wheezes and groans, and she stumbles on the doorsill and nearly falls down. “It’s just like the time with the plastic geraniums. Remember what the doctor said.”

“Do you want a doctor now, Momma?”

“Who can afford a doctor? Who can afford to be sick? I’ll go to bed and maybe I’ll still be alive in the morning.”

I get her into bed with two pillows and a heating pad. The television at the foot of the bed with the remote control next to her hand, this morning’s Daily News and a copy of TV Guide. The television has plastic knobs, but somehow Momma missed that. As I head back to the kitchen to mop up the five water spots that make a deluge, her voice quavers after me.

“Mimi, be a good girl and bring a cup of tea and don’t put too much sugar. And don’t slop it in the saucer.”

Okay.

While I’m waiting for the kettle to boil I’m thinking about Momma and the plastic geraniums. That was the start of it all. Almost a year ago. She had this box on the kitchen window full of plastic geraniums. She used to try to grow real ones but the window never got much sun, and she would forget to water them. So, okay, the plastic ones. They were bright red and always in bloom, and she liked them. No problems.

Then one day, she was hanging the laundry on the clothesline from that window, and she had a mild heart attack. That’s what the doctor said. A mild heart attack. Take life easy, Mrs., and you’ll be all right. You are not a young woman any more. You don’t have to polish your house from morning to night. Did my dear Momma hear that? No.

When it was all over and she was back on her feet, all she could remember was that she was leaning over the geraniums and suddenly she couldn’t breathe. The geraniums were out to get her. The plastic was stealing the air from her lungs. I came home from school one day and found her in the middle of one of the biggest house-cleanings I’d ever seen, even from Momma who is a champ in this field. And everything plastic was in the garbage can. Even my hair rollers and now I have to use frozen orange juice cans.

The kettle is screaming, so I make a cup of tea medium strong with a spoon and a half of sugar no milk and put a paper napkin on the saucer. I take it in to her but she’s asleep half sitting up with the lights on, the television on, the heating pad on. I turn everything off and tiptoe back to the kitchen and drink the tea myself. The job will be first on the agenda at breakfast. If I like it maybe I won’t go back to school in the fall.

The job is okay. I mean, it’s no big deal, but it’s kind of fun and it’s nice to have a little extra money. Momma finally stopped moaning about it when she found out it was in the Infants’ Wear Department where I would be relatively safe and I could get a nice discount on things for the grandbabies. It’s part time. I work three days a week and still have enough time to go to the beach and get a decent suntan. Alexis is working here, too, in the Bath Boutique, but I didn’t tell Momma that.

Every morning Momma packs me a lunch in a brown paper bag which I am supposed to eat in the employees’ lunchroom. She’s in one of her quiet periods now, knitting a sweater set with bootees for Sam and Eleanor’s new baby. Only complaining about the butcher (he’s giving short weight), the heat (you don’t feel it, Mimi, you spend all day in an air-conditioned store), and the plastic jungle (it sneaks up on you, Mimi, and soaks up all the air, so somebody should do something).

Every morning I take the brown paper lunch and shove it in my shoulder bag. Thank God the shoulder bag is big enough and I don’t have to carry the lunch in my hand like a little kid. Sometimes I eat it, but sometimes Lex and I, we meet some guys we know from school, and then we goof around downtown at lunchtime and maybe have a hamburger or some pizza or something.

Momma should know, she’d really flip. I wonder sometimes if I told her, which would be worse, throwing her lunch away or meeting guys. With Momma you never know.

Every night we play twenty questions. What did you do today, Mimi? That’s the way it starts. Then I have to tell her every item I sold, who I sold it to, was she pregnant and how far along, what the grandmothers are buying, what new items the store has in for babies. It’s almost like she was jealous, like she wishes she could be me, working in that dumb store. I mean the store is okay. It’s only that when I have to tell her all about it, it sounds so stupid.

And always the last question, the wrap-up like they say on the television news. Did you eat your lunch, Mimi? Someday the president of the store is going to call her up and say I’m sorry Mrs. but your daughter was eating your brown paper lunch today in the employees’ lunchroom and she choked on it.

Tonight a surprise. It’s Thursday night and I’ve been working late. Momma has a snack waiting for me on the kitchen table, and she’s waiting for me with a funny smile on her face.

“Guess what, Mimila?” She can’t wait for me to sit down, wash my hands even. It’s like she’s about to explode with something. Maybe she won the lottery. She thinks I don’t know she buys tickets and hides them.

“What, Momma?”

“Tomorrow I’m coming downtown! How do you like that?” She sits back in her chair with her hands on her thighs and her elbows out like she’s just been crowned Queen of England.

“That’s great, Momma.” What are you gonna do? It is great. She hasn’t been downtown since the plastic menace started. Maybe she’s getting herself straightened out. Maybe she’ll be all right now.

“One thing, Madam. I’m going to check up on you. See what kind of people you spend your days with. You can’t be too careful.”

“Momma! They’re just people, salesgirls. What’s to be careful?”

“And, believe me, if there’s any plastic in that Baby Department I’m getting you transferred out of there. You’ll thank me for it. You’ll see.”

There’s no stopping her now. I’m wondering what happened today to set her off. And I’m thinking what she’ll do when she sees all the baby bottles and potty chairs and rattles and junk at the counter next to mine.

“Momma, I only sell beautiful baby blankets and beautiful cloth diapers and beautiful clothes for beautiful babies. I don’t touch any plastic. You don’t have to come.”

“Oh, yes, Madam. You don’t want me to come.” Now she’s standing over me triumphant, and my feet are hurting from standing all day, and my head is beginning to feel like my feet.

“You don’t know what I saw today, do you?” She’s really in full swing now and all I can do is listen. “Down by the bakery I was. And out in front was a baby in a carriage drinking milk from a bottle. The mother was in the bakery and the baby was outside. So there I was looking in the window and thinking I might buy a loaf of seeded rye, and this baby starts crying and throws the bottle. What happened, Mimi? What happened?”

“Don’t tell me. Momma, where’s the aspirin? I got a headache.”

“Don’t try to change the subject. The bottle didn’t break. The bottle did not break! And why not? PLASTIC!”

Momma is the picture of outrage, the protector of innocent babies from the plastic menace. Her arms are flapping a mile a minute, and her little body is stiff with indignation.

“So what did you do, Momma?”

“What did I do? What would you do? I picked up that plastic bottle and I dropped it down the sewer. That’s what I did. Some mothers don’t care what happens to their babies. The Mayor should make an emergency speech on television.”

“Great, Momma. Why don’t you tell him? In the meantime, is there any aspirin in the house?”

I’m holding my head in my two hands now because it feels like it’s trying to break in half, and also so I can put my hands over my ears.

“There’s some in my sewing box.” Momma never keeps medicine in the medicine chest. God forbid anybody should be sick and not let her know about it. “Don’t take more than two.”

She follows me into her bedroom while I look for the aspirin and back to the kitchen for a glass of water, and her voice never stops.

“So the second thing I’m going to do tomorrow is buy two dozen regular glass bottles and send to Eleanor. They still make glass baby bottles, Mimi? I can’t depend on Eleanor to be careful. She let Sam take a job so far away, how can I be sure she won’t drown that baby in plastic?”

I swallow the aspirin and decide there’s only one escape left. “Momma, I’m going to take a hot bath.”

“Don’t fall asleep in the tub. Remember, I’ll see you in the Baby Department around eleven. Maybe we’ll have lunch in Schrafft’s. Sleep good, Mimila.”

Later on I’m lying in bed watching shadows on the ceiling. My head is calmed down and my feet are just tingling but not hurting. Once in a while a car goes by and the lights race across the ceiling and down the wall.

I’m thinking about the times Momma and I used to go shopping and she knew that store inside out, where all the bargain counters were and what days there were special sales. It used to be fun to go with her, even though she never let me pick out my own clothes.

I remember one time I got lost in the store and they took me to the office on the eighth floor and said they would make an announcement over the loudspeaker. But Momma was there in the office before we got there. So we didn’t get announced, and Momma only yelled at me a little, and then took me to the Toy Department and bought me a stuffed dog.

I’m lying here in bed thinking about those old things, and some tears are running down the sides of my head and getting in my ears, and I’m wishing for something to happen between now and tomorrow morning so Momma won’t come downtown.

The next morning I’m dressed and out of the house before she gets up. She’ll be mad I didn’t eat breakfast, but I stop at Lex’s house and have coffee and Danish and tell her what Momma’s up to. Neither one of us can think of any way to head her off, so we go on to the store together.

All morning I’m so nervous I keep dropping things. I give the wrong change for a twenty-dollar bill and the customer yells at me and I almost yell back at her. Finally it’s time for my break and I meet Lex in the coffee shop, but I can’t eat anything. My hand is shaking so, of course, I spill my coffee all over the counter. The waitress comes to wipe it up and says “Clumsy” under her breath but just loud enough for me to hear, which she would never do if we were regular customers.

So I say, “Lex, I’m going back,” and I go without leaving a tip and without even finishing my coffee break.

Angie, the regular full-time lady who works the baby counter with me, sees I’m not feeling so good, and she says, “It’s not so busy right now, Mimi. Why don’t you put away some of that stock?”

So for the next half hour I have my mind occupied with sorting out little undershirts and nightgowns and training pants and stuff, and things are pretty quiet before the noontime rush, so I don’t even notice when eleven o’clock comes and goes. And no Momma. I’m just sort of standing there in the middle of a pile of diapers, looking at the clock over the elevators which says a quarter after, and thinking. She’s not coming. She’s not coming.

Then the next to the last elevator opens and Alexis gets off and starts running toward me. Alexis is naturally very olive-skinned, but this is the first time I ever saw her look green.

I start to say “What’s the matter?” But she grabs my arm and starts pulling me to the elevator and it’s like she can’t say anything, but she finally manages to get it out.

“Your mother!” she says and then clams up and won’t look at me in the elevator. And I shout, “My mother what?” And I’m thinking all the things Momma could do to make Alexis look like that, and what was she doing on Alexis’ floor anyway which has the Bath Boutique and Housewares and the Pet Shop.

And then the elevator is stopping and we’re getting off, and over to the right there’s a crowd of people. Alexis is pulling me that way and starts shoving through the crowd, and a fat lady says, “Who do you think you’re pushing?” But Alexis just lets her have it in the corset and starts yelling to the store guards who are trying to hold everybody back. “Here she is, here’s her daughter!” And then Alexis starts crying.

I still can’t see anything, but one of the guards takes my hand and makes a path for me through the crowd. In the middle of the open space there’s a little bundle on the floor covered with a plastic shower curtain. There are shoes sticking out at one end, and I can see that they are Momma’s best comfortable shoes a little rundown at the heels. I don’t want to see what’s at the other end. Maybe it’s some other old lady wearing Momma’s shoes.

The guards are shouting. “Stand back, stand back! It’s all over.” But nobody moves, and I can hear a loud voice saying over and over, “I saw it happen. She got off the elevator and walked over here like she knew where she was going. Then all of a sudden she got this funny look on her face like she was lost. She looked like a little lost kid. And then she just fell down. I tried to get her sitting up, but she wasn’t even breathing.”

Then somebody is saying, “Are you the daughter?” My head is nodding yes, yes, yes, and I look and see it’s the store manager and behind him is a short guy with a mustache and a black bag, and I guess he’s the doctor. The store manager is holding my arm very tight like he’s afraid maybe I’ll scream or faint or something, and the doctor goes over and pulls back the shower curtain which is green with daisies all over it.

The doctor listens and looks and shakes his head, and then he looks up at me and says, “Is this your mother?” My head is still nodding yes, yes, yes, and Alexis is holding onto my other arm and bawling as if it was her mother. But I’m just standing there nodding and looking at Momma on the floor with a stack of yellow plastic dishpans on one side of her and a mountain of avocado-green plastic garbage cans on the other and at the end of the aisle a display of bright red plastic geraniums.

Some guys in white jackets come up with a stretcher on wheels, and the doctor is saying “Did she have a heart condition? Is there somebody you can call?” And the store manager says, “You can call from my office.” So off we go to call Celia, with the store manager still hanging onto one arm and Alexis on the other, and she’s saying, “You can come and stay with me.”

But I’m thinking, now I’ll have to go and live with Celia. Unless I can go to stay with Sam and Eleanor. And I’m thinking I won’t have much trouble choosing between Albuquerque and Great Neck if I have any choice. And then I’m thinking, I wonder how come I forgot to tell Momma they moved the Baby Department to the fourth floor and put the Housewares where the Baby Department used to be.