Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [60]
And my dad said, “What do you mean?”
“People don’t want to give anything at all. You getting much today?”
My dad realized the guy thought he was a fellow homeless panhandler. My father thought it was funny but the story was met with some silence from my sisters and me when he told it. It was just too close. It’s one thing if some rich person thinks you’re homeless but when a seasoned pro thinks you’re one of them that’s another thing.
My father blew through the house money in approximately two years. When you’re fifty-five years old with no job, no retirement money, no pension, you’d think you might want to at least buy a little apartment in Montclair, New Jersey, or somewhere, to live in. But he was going to hit it big with Stylebook. And now it was a nonfiction book on Fitzgerald. He was now taking temp work, borrowing a few bucks here and there. He borrowed twenty bucks from Katharine when she was a brand-new peon at a publishing house making around $12,000 a year, and after she gave it to him she got up in the middle of the restaurant and screamed, “You are the worst father ever! I hate you!” and walked out.
As for my mother, she didn’t look homeless, but she was becoming less and less of a mother you could take out in public. She had a uniform: a black pencil skirt, gray cashmere cowl neck, long pearls which always got hooked on one breast, black stockings, stylish black heels (high), lit cigarette, jangly charm bracelets of her mother’s, and gold bangles and gold and platinum rings. She would no sooner wear silver than she would a candy necklace. This was what she wore when she went out, except sometimes she lost part of her outfit.
That summer Kate had a bunch of friends get married. By the fall, she needed to buy some wedding gifts and she wanted to hit the boutiques along Bleecker Street. She called Mom and they decided on lunch at Tartine and then some shopping. Mom was wearing her usual outfit. After lunch they hit a slew of stores up and down Bleecker. Coming out of Pierre Deux, Mom shrieked, “Oooh! Where’s my skirt?”
Kate looked down and Mom was indeed missing her standard size-one black pencil skirt that she had been wearing earlier in the day. The rest of her uniform was intact: poof of faux-blond soufflé balanced on top of a gray cowl neck, long strand of pearls, black opaque stockings showcasing a pair of gams that would have made Ann Miller get a desk job, black undies underneath the stockings, and three-and-a-half-inch Joan & David black pumps.
“Mom!” Kate yelled, totally startled and baffled. “Where’s your skirt?”
“I don’t know, Kate. It was here a minute ago. Oh, for God’s sake.” Mom lit a cigarette to calm herself and focus on the case of the missing skirt.
“Were you wearing it when we left the restaurant?” Kate asked, panicked, looking through her bag for something to tie around Mom’s torso.
“I must have been, don’t you think?” Mom asked, less concerned about her current state of undress than intrigued by the puzzle of it all, as if it were just another trick Will Shortz had up his sleeve for her. Two young women walked by Kate and Mom, locking eyes on Mom’s stockinged rear.
“Jesus, Mom. Should we get a cab?” Kate said.
“Are you out of your mind? That’s a brand-new Calvin Klein skirt!”
Kate began huffing loudly. “Well (huff), I don’t (huff-huff), Jesus, Mom (huff), I mean, Jesus.”
“I went to the bathroom at Tartine and I’m pretty damn sure I had it on when I came out.” Mom parked her cigarette between her lips and began running her hands up and down her sides and under her sweater. She felt something in her sweater and pulled it downward and out popped one black Calvin Klein skirt. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Mom said, cackling with delight. “Here it is, Kate!”
Kate cackled, too, as Mom pulled it over her hips and smoothed it down with her hand.
“I’d hate to think how many stores we were in since lunch,” Mom laughed.
“Yeah, I sorta thought of that.”
“Let’s go have a beer at the White