Marlene V. The Witnesses
I called my mother last Saturday morning to tell her I could not air her out that day. As we were catching up on the week's events, she told me that a group of Jehovah Witnesses had parked their car in front of her house.
Mom: Oh, shit. The Witnesses are here. (pause) I'm not going to answer the door.
Me: I don't like when they come to my house. I can never get them to leave.
Mom: I just don't answer the door. Ooh, there's a big fat one today. (pause) Did I tell you what happened to my blue nightgown?
Me: No, Mom, you didn't.
(Dear reader, you will remember the blue nightgown from a previous Life With Marlene entry. The nightgown is light blue with a picture of Garfield on the front. Since my mom has owned it for such a long time, it has the thickness of a Kleenex tissue.)
Mom: It has a big slit in the side of it! But I think I can get a few more wears out of it before it falls apart.
Me: Don't you think it's time to retire it? What happens if you walk the dog in it and it falls off?
Mom: (nonchalantly) I just hide behind the trees.
Me: But you are taking a risk. You never wear underwear and now your nightgown has a slit in it.
Mom: All the men are lining up to see me.
Me: I think they are running from you.
At this point in the conversation, I could hear the doorbell ring in the background.
Mom: (hushed voice) The Witnesses are here!
Me: I don't think they can hear you. You're in the kitchen- it's on the other side of the house.
Mom: (hushed voice) I tell ya, everyone's come by this morning. First the Boy Scouts are looking for clothes. Now the Witnesses are here.
Me: If you answer the door in your blue nightgown, I'm sure they'll never come back. They would figure the devil has hold of you.
Mom: God, can't these people leave? There's seven of them. There's a fat white man in his 50's, some black guy in his 20's, two white guys, two Hispanic women...oh there's some white woman. I bet she's the fat white guys wife.
Me: Oh.
Mom: They are totally playing the race card. (pause) Gigi Giorgi's coming down the street from softball practice- she has a bat. Maybe she'll beat the shit out of them.
Me: That's not too nice.
Mom: I got 'em figured out.
Me: I still say you shoulda answered the door in your nightgown. They would never bother you again. Of course, if you answered the door in your nightgown when the Boy Scouts came, you'd be in jail.
Mom: Yeah.
Pure Consumer
I am returning from my sabbatical of blogging about Marlene. I apologize to those who may have missed me. You see, my mother really hasn't gone out over the past few weeks. All that changed yesterday.
I called my mom around 10 in the morning, with no expectations of taking her out. " I have to get socks," she said. "Your sister has taken all the socks in the house. They're somewhere in her room and that's a sty. I'm gonna buy new socks and hide them."
"Okay," I said. "Where do you want to go to get socks?"
"I dunno...Target or Walmart. Walmart. I hate Target," she said.
I was going to tell her I hate Walmart, but there was no coercing her to Target. "Okay."
When I went to get my mom an hour and a half later, the dog was asleep on her back by the radiator in the dining room. Obviously Cookie was having some sort of action-packed dream because she started tapping her back foot against the radiator as she slept. My mother and I watched her.
"She's like you," I told my mother, "She wiggles her foot while she sleeps. You two could do it in unison."
My mother made her disgusted face at me and grabbed her coat.
Walmart was packed. I parked far from the store entrance. I knew this displeased my mother, but I couldn't get within 100 yards of the store. The shopping trip was uneventful; my mother fell into her usual shopping pattern of picking things up and looking at them like she is an immigrant from some Eastern Bloc country tasting capitalism for the first time. Marlene even got to play "pure consumer" by having the chance to try some new snack chip product.
"Can I dip these?", my mother asked the lady who was handing out the samples.
"Of course, Mom. It's a freakin' snack chip," I answered for the sample lady.
Marlene made her face at me and placed a bag in her cart.
After our Walmart sojourn, I wanted to stop at Michaels to pick up some material for a sewing project. Michaels was also packed with shoppers. When we got inside the store, there were no carts in the corral. My mother's cardinal rule of shopping is to ALWAYS get a cart, even if you don't buy anything. I could tell she was about to throw a fit.
As luck would have it, one shopper just finished going through line. I politely asked him for his cart and gave it to my mother. She pushed it about three feet and made her face.
"It squeaks," she said.
"They all squeak," I told her. It was true. The store was full of the sounds of shopping carts groaning in pain.
I procured all my sewing items, while my mother walked around the store, picking up items and looking at them. Every time she pushed the cart, it responded with a painful noise, like many fingernails scraping down a blackboard.
I found my mother by the yarn section. She was looking at needles.
"It's more expensive here than Walmart," she told me, fingering a set of plastic needles. "I got needles there for cheap."
"The ones you got are aluminum," I told her. "You can't set them on fire."
"How many people do you know who set their knitting on fire?" she asked no one in particular.
As I went through line (Marlene didn't purchase anything), I noticed it was pouring out.
"Do you want me to pull up the car for you?" I asked my mother. "It's pouring out. I don't want you to get caught up in the rain. You're made out of sugar and so sweet, you'll melt."
The woman ahead of me in line giggled when I said this.
"Kim, go to hell," my mother said. And then she made her disgusted face.
