in the summer when i was 7 and my brother was 2, my mother worked as the lady in the grocery store who gives out samples. i don’t remember the grocery store, but i do remember that her free samples changed day to day.
the two that stick out in my mind are butterscotch chips (they had just come out and she brought bags home) and this polaroid film where you can peel the back off the instant photo so that it had even borders. by that i mean, you know how on a polaroid, the bottom border is a little bigger than the other three? maybe it’s bigger so you can write a little caption, or so you can hang onto it (and shake it) as it develops. with the new film you could peel the photo off its back and the whole thing would be an even-shaped square.
i have a photo of my mother on this type of polaroid paper. someone must have taken it in the store as a demonstration. in it, my mother looks pale and thin. it’s safely tucked away in one of my albums where i don’t have to look at it too much as it’s rather sad. it’s a reminder of tougher times.
anyway, during this odd job time, mom had to hire a babysitter for me and my brother, as we were too young to stay home alone. a few times we went across the street to the ciula’s. joyce always had her hair in rollers and smoked cigarettes while playing solitaire at her kitchen table. i don’t recall her ever wearing anything other than a pink robe. she drank ginger ale, and her husband robert smelled like a pipe and watched game shows. he had an olive complexion and pomade hair. my mother was a hairdresser by trade, and she’d give joyce perms and smoke with her, all the while talking about the divorce or kids or car payments. they both called me honey, and my brother locked us all out of the house one night, robert rigged a coat hanger to jimmy the screen door to get us back inside.
when joyce couldn’t watch us, my mother called scott or doug, teenaged brother who lived up the street. i’d had a crush on scott for as long as i could remember. he had mousy brown hair, a ton of freckles and small snake eyes. he was a complete punk jackass but i thought he was the coolest. once he took me on his back on a sled ride down the steepest driveway on our dead-end block and i was thrilled. the first time scott babysat us, i was convinced i would charm scott into noticing me and falling in love.
he came over and immediately turned on mtv and got on the phone. bewildered, my brother and i kept to ourselves. after a few hours i said, hey, when’s lunch? he said, lunch? i’m making you lunch? you can’t make it yourself? i said, no, my mom said you’d make us lunch. he said, what do you want? i said, a ham sandwich. so he made us one and cut it into eight triangles. i was so in love.
the more he came over, the more friends he brought along with him (after my mother left, of course). soon the entire neighborhood of kids, and their friends, was over at my house, turning on mtv really loud, eating everything in sight, running wild, no adult supervision. my mother soon got wind of this and shut down the whole establishment. no more scott and 8-piece sandwiches.
a month later, in a fit of desperation, my mother had scott’s brother, doug, sit for us. she laid down the law before she left: no other kids, no mtv, hands off the food, my daughter has been instructed to tell me everything if you don’t follow the rules. she needn’t have worried: doug was amazingly dull, a real mouth-breather. not at all sharp like scott. yawn.