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The
Grand Union and My Mother's Career PAGE
THREE: Like most good Catholics, my mother believed that women should have all the children God sends, even if he sent a solid dozen. God only sent my mother three children but now those three children had turned into snotty teenagers who distorted their faces whenever she kissed them. The children God sent her wanted service, not love. They wanted two things: rides and money. What happened to those other children, the ones who curled up by her side and watched Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore? When I imagined my mother going back to work, I pictured Mary from The Mary Tyler Moore Show because she was the first liberated woman I'd ever seen up close. Mary had her own apartment with a bed that dropped right out of the wall, and a high-pressure job in a Minneapolis newsroom. I thought my mother might have her own desk and a boss like Lou Grant and a nice work buddy just like Georgette. But it wasn't going to be like that for my mom, not even a little. Sure, in 1959, before my mother had all the children God sent, she had been a secretary at a big insurance company in New York City. But now, no one used short-hand anymore. Typewriters were word processors and computers scared my mother even more than traffic circles. Even the Grand Unions had computers now. On top of my mother's fear of computers was her forgivable fear of driving. She refused to drive on highways, freeways, or any roads that led to traffic circles, jug-handles, or exit ramps because she grew up in the Bronx where all the roads were normal. This was unfortunate because 95% of New Jersey is highways, traffic circles, jug handles and exit ramps. As a result, my mother's universe expanded only as far as the Grand Union, two miles to the south, and the Oakland Industrial Park, two miles to the north. My mother, still a regular loser at the bi-monthly horse races, started circling jobs out of the Help Wanted ads. Before long, she realized there were only three things she was qualified to do: become a medical experiment, sell Mary Kay cosmetics, or work in the Oakland Industrial Park. Her first job was nothing like the news room on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. My mother worked at Chatham Labs, a chimney sweep factory where she sat on an assembly line all day and capped containers of toxic orange powder which was supposed to clean out chimneys in the same way that Drano cleans out sinks. No one wore dust masks and the break room had only two chairs, one of which was broken. The line leader was a woman named Shirley who told jokes that were so dirty even the men with tattoos got up and left. I know because one summer I worked there with her. Chatham Labs paid over twice as much as Burger King plus time-and-a-half for overtime. As soon as she started to receive regular paychecks from Chatham Labs, my mother stopped collecting Grand Union race cards. But she did keep up with the Assertiveness Training. At the factory, my mother was somebody, and for the first time in my life of knowing this woman, I saw her through the eyes of other people. Vinny, the Quality Control guy, used to time her on skid packing because he said he'd never seen a woman pack a skid so fast before. His nickname was "Vinny the Boot" because he fired anyone whose cans slipped by uncapped. Then I told him about the arm wrestling. Soon my mom, in her broken chair, was pinning "The Boots'" hairy forearm onto the filthy break room table. Before long, my mother moved up the industrial ladder to a better factory in the Oakland Industrial Park. This factory made Estee Lauder perfume and Aramis cologne. Again, my mother was the heartbeat of the break room. I worked there one summer too, saving for college, and we capped bottles of Youth Dew side by side. I could see by then that my mother had become two very important things: a non-smoker and a financially independent woman. That summer my mother was promoted to Line Leader and I was promoted to Garbage Girl, two positions revered by all because they earned another 75 cents an hour. To celebrate, my mother took me out to the Pompton Diner which was the last diner in our town to have mini jukeboxes at each table. Throughout her long career, my mom had worked in just about every factory in the park. I still have boxes of barrettes under my bed from the years she spent at Karina Designs and Hair Accessories. She always saved the rejects for me. Her last job was at a Bio-Med factory where she fused together pacemakers and other hardware that went inside people's bodies. Sometimes she would bring home parts to show us how the hardware worked. "You mess one up?" and then she would demonstrate for us what would happen by faking a heart attack at the dinner table. My mom was still my mom, but she was also, and more importantly, somebody else. "My mom?" I would tell my friends in college, "My mom works in Bio-Meds." As the years went on my mother's fingers grew crooked and swollen. Rheumatoid arthritis finally forced her to retire from Bio-Meds but not before two of the daughters God sent her had graduated from college. Around my mother's house now, the ashtrays are long gone but the exotic jellied candies are still hidden behind the tea cups. Occasionally, we venture out across New Jersey's vast expanse of traffic circles, jug handles, and exit ramps. At any one of our favorite diners we might talk, without cigarettes, about the Grand Union horse races, or Dirty Shirley from Chatham Labs. My mom, till this day, will not admit that playing the Grand Union horse races was gambling rather than shopping, just like she will never admit that capping cans of chimney sweep was part of her own little Woman's Movement. I see it like this: she played the odds. No, my mom never did score the big ten grand -- but in the end, she came out ahead. And while feminist icons like Mary Tyler Moore were running their news rooms, my mom was arm wrestling "Vinny the Boot."
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The
Women's Movement missed my mother completely. In 1974 when the feminists
burned their bras outside the Miss America pageant, my mother just
said, "Oh for cryin' out loud." When hundreds of thousands
of women marched on Washington for the Equal Rights Amendment, my
mother called them "loose cannons," and "one short
of a six pack."
