The Sunday Memory Drawer - My Mother's Friend, Marie

The goal of these Sunday Memory Drawers is to provoke a stream of thoughts about the past.   Flitting from one historical moment to another.  Talking to my grandmother on those cold winter Sundays did just that.  A memory from 1942 morphing into one from 1962 and then back to 1928.  It was the genesis of the Sunday Memory Drawer on Len Speaks.  And so, in these blog entries, I ping pong as well.

Putting together last week's homage to Dad's photographic slides of my parents' basement parties, I found a picture of somebody I hadn't given two thoughts about in practically three decades.  But, there she sat and I rerun the photo again above.  My mother's friend Marie chatting up my grandfather. 

And a mental keg was tapped, necessitating a blog entry devoted solely to her.  A veritable flood of remembrances of this lady who seemed to play a major role in my mother's life.  For a while, she was omnipresent.

And here I am, now declaring in the year 2012...boy, was she a bitch!

Of course, thinking about it all at this juncture, I can make that pronouncement.  But, back when I was a kid, I could never put all the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle of a woman together.  In retrospect, Marie had a definitive impact on my mom and our family.  Most of it, not in a good way.

Truth be told, I have no idea how Mom originally met Marie, although I think it might have been when both lived in Yonkers' Leake and Watts Orphanage.  That would mean they were childhood chums and this carried over to their years as single women and then young married wives.  When I first became aware of Marie, she was already married to some pile of muscle named Rich and they had a kid, Richie, who was about six months older than me. 

As I have written before, any adults in my folks' circle, regardless of whether they were family or not, I would address as "aunt" and "uncle."  Yet, Marie and Rich never got that salutation from me.  As a matter of fact, Mom would insist on it.

"Just call them Marie and Rich."

Hmmmm.  How come these people don't count?  I never understood this exception to the rule.  Did this mean that Marie and Rich were even more special?  Or were they simply not worthy of the loftier honor?  How to Confuse a Five-Year-Old in Ten Easy Steps.

Marie stood out like a lightning bolt.  While Mom and the other female "aunts" all dressed nicely, Marie always seemed to kick it up a notch.  Her dress was always a little tighter, a little shorter, and a whole lot brighter.  It was like she was electrically powered by Con Edison.  Meanwhile, her make-up choices also were on the showier side.  Lots of lipstick, make-up, and mascara all of it probably viewable by a Project Mercury astronaut orbiting the Earth.  

Yep, Marie was flashy in both appearance and attitude.  Back then, to me, she was my mother's fanciest friend.  Today, thinking back, I'd have a different perspective.  Phony, pompous, and hello, your wardrobe and your age need to meet.

Whenever Marie would visit, she would suck the air out of the house as soon as she rang the doorbell.  And she'd always sneer just a little at where my folks at I were living upstairs in my grandparents' house. 

"When are you getting your own place?  This is so small.  You need to be in our building."

Uh huh. 

In their apartment complex just south of downtown Yonkers which today is what we lovingly refer to as "projects."  A neighborhood you don't want to be walking alone in after...well, you never want to be walking alone there.  I drove past it a year or two ago and the place was a dump.  But, years ago, Marie liked to present herself as living in Trump Tower.

But that was Marie.  As I think back, we were all planets revolving her in the Universe Known as Marie.

Of course, as Mom continued her friendship with Marie, she liked to plan outings between our two families.  Since Marie apparently thought we were living on Tobacco Road over there in lowly Mount Vernon, we'd almost always go over to visit them on their home field.  While the two women gabbed away, my dad and I were uneasily thrown together with our counterparts in Marie's world.  And they were not perfect fits to say the least.

My father and Rich seemed to have nothing in common.  I remember them talking briefly and then sitting in cold silence as the topic of weather was exhausted quickly.  Rich was big and brawny and probably had the brain of somebody from the Ozarks.  In comparison, he'd make Jethro Bodine look like cafe society.  I could tell that my dad certainly wanted to be any place but with anyone else but.  I wondered if he knew that I felt the same way.

Because I was stuck with their lummox of a son, Richie.

Hey, Mom, what am I supposed to do there all day?

"You can play with Richie in his room."

Uh-huh. 

Richie was a few months older but light years behind in social graces.  Virtually every toy he had involved the military and some form of combat from World War II.    With game and play scenarios that might have been concocted in General Dwight D. Eisenhower's war room.

"Okay, you're the Kraut soldier and you have to hide under the bed until I invade and then kill you."

May I also add that his method of "killing" always included punching me in the arm.  Excessively.  The Nazis on Normandy Beach got off easier than I did in Richie's stalag of a bedroom.  Can we play something else, please?

"Okay, you're the Jap hiding on this beach.  Take your shirt off, hide under the bed until I land in my helicopter and then kill you."

Take my shirt off?  Years later, I am thinking that there were issues with Richie that ran a lot deeper than the blood shed on Midway Island.  I'd wait for the words from my mother that never came soon enough.

"We're going home."

Whew.

In this mess of a relationship, I started to notice another nuance.  Marie didn't particularly like my dad.  And, many moons later, I would learn that he couldn't stand her either.  Back when I was a wee captive in Richie's dungeon, we would ultimately break for dinner.  And, since Marie's idea of cooking generally included the words "Swanson" and "Frozen," we'd all get dragged out to eat.  To the same place that Marie knew would rankle Dad.

"We're going to the House of Lee and eat Chinks."

Yeah, Marie was a real progressive gal.

My father hated Chinese food.  Marie knew it.  And didn't care.  The scene played out almost every time we got together.  My dad would counter if there was another restaurant option.

"No, Harold, we're eating Chinks...or we're not eating at all."

Yep, that was Marie.  And it may have explained why Rich Sr. and Rich Jr. were as fucked up as they were.  If only Dr. Phil had been a fly on that Yonkers wall...

To this day, I have no clue what the bond was between Marie and my mother.  But, certainly, Mom looked up to her friend as some benchmark of style and what she should be doing in her life.  I noticed it in very small ways.

Suddenly, the coffee table and lamps we had in our living room were almost identical to the ones in Marie's "penthouse."

When Richie got a new desk and book shelves in his room, I wound up with the exact same setup.

When they went on a vacation to Niagara Falls, so did we, rain slickers and all.

I began to wonder.....

Hmmmmmm.  There's six months difference in age between me and Richie.

Nah, couldn't be.  Or maybe.....

Luckily, as the kids got older, the get togethers for mortal hand-to-hand WWII combat and moo shu pork became rarer.  My mother started to recognize that there was no way in hell that Richie and I would even be acquaintances, let alone the bestest of friends.  There was no reason in the world to push this alliance.

And, in a rare stroke of genius for Bluto, Rich must have realized the same thing.  I remember the day Marie called my mom and told her she had caught him with another woman.

What a bastard, my mother probably thought.

Smart guy, my father and I probably thought.

After her divorce, Marie focused more and more on securing Victim #2.  As a result, she saw my mother less and less.  Eventually, we heard that Marie had made a conquest.  Some rich guy named Irv who ran an accounting firm in Manhattan.    The second news item announced that Richie had been packed up for a long stay in a military school which would be loaded with lots of kids he could kill when they're hiding under his bed with their shirts off.  But, certainly, Richie's departure from the scene for "scholastic" reasons was a smokescreen.

Yep, with a new Mr. Moneybags, Marie clearly thought her son was in the way.

Now, much to Marie's disdain, my mom went back to work as soon as I turned ten.  She would always work in and around Mount Vernon, usually doing some sort of light factory work at places like Union Pen Company or Kulka Electric.  She made new and certainly less haughty friends at those places.  Until one day, after a long absence, Marie returned like a bad cold.

"Irv has a bookkeeping job for you in Manhattan."

Mom hemmed and hawed.  Manhattan???  Wow, that's far.  We only went there to see the Easter and Christmas shows at Radio City Music Hall.  I recall my mother declining the offer.  Except Marie didn't let up as if she was getting a commission from an employment agency.

"How long are you going to be a factory girl in Mount Vernon?"

She badgered my mom into taking this job.  She worked in Manhattan for the next twenty years and I don't think she enjoyed a day of work ever again.

Marie had struck again.

Long after my parents had both permanently retreated to their respective corners in the boxing ring of marriage, I once asked my dad about the weird connection between my mother and her friend Marie.  The response back was like many others.

"It's a long story."

One never told.  And that tale, like many others, remains in eternal seclusion in the walls of Ferncliff Cemetery.  The narrators are gone.

And, likely, so is Marie.  Off to that great Elizabeth Arden in the sky.

Dinner last night:  Panini with proscuitto, mozzarella, and kalamata olives at Fabiolus Cafe.