Bargain Hunting

Left: My former bedroom, one of Mom's nine closets in her Louisiana home. Dad has 1/2 of a closet, for which he had to fight and continues to maintain a vigilant watch.

I don’t know what was more fun growing up an Army brat—going to the Post Exchange to make out my Christmas toy wish list or going by myself with Mom each fall to buy the new winter coat. As much as I loved the PX toy department, the annual shopping trip downtown by bus, in whatever city we lived, will remain the high point of my youth. Mom and I would get all dressed up, gloves and hats were mandatory. We would alight from the bus, chase through the magnificent department store doors, and feel our way down the aisles touching every scarf, glove, and stocking on the first floor. Eventually we would arrive at the place of magical metamorphosis, the hat department. There we would play for at least an hour lifting each hat from its form and running to a mirror to assess out transformation. “No, Mom, that’s too severe.” “Not that one either, you look like a stork has made a nest on your chimney.” “Oh God, too much hat, not enough body.” We would take turns exacting appraisals from each other and make imaginary life trades with movie stars and celebrities. Eventually, one of us would find The Hat that made us the woman we wished to be. Mom often delayed buying new curtains for the house so one or both of us could renovate our look from top to bottom. We’d finish off hunting day by collapsing at the department store lunch counter to order up chicken salad sandwiches and super large cherry cokes. The red leather swivel stools on stainless posts allowed just enough room for us to squeeze in with our new coats draped in department store zipper bags, hats carefully laid in important-looking spherical boxes, and a shoe box or two. It was a divine day on which I felt like a princess.

Over the years, fashioning just the right outfit for each important event became an even more consuming activity as Mom learned to sew and design for me and my sister, Danielle, who somehow escaped the shopping gene. An informal contract slowly evolved: Mom would sew; I would cook for the crew. It often took three weeks of night time sewing and eighteen dinners of spaghetti, meat loaf, and fried chicken for Dad and the boys to acquire a Chanel-like boxy suit fashioned from velvet with a matching or contrasting satin lining. A blue-dotted Swiss Easter dress took many bivouacs in fabric stores to piece together three separate patterns, acquire the fabric, confer over a strategy, and build the masterpiece. Standing still, in a tissue paper form, was a ritual so holy and prescribed that I dare not wiggle or interrupt it once it was underway. My mother, once possessed of the vision we designed together, bent herself over her sewing machine and plunged the pedal to the floor as though she was in a race for her life with a driver in the next lane threatening to overtake her. Pit stops were infrequent, but copious profanity-laced explosions were commonplace when the thread broke or the machine took the wrong path along a jacket sleeve. But, holed up like a monk in our laundry room, Mom persevered in her mission to shape a dream.

The men in our family were the unwilling victims in this ritual. My brothers traded many hours crawling under the garment racks and in fabric stores for time they longed to be in the yard blowing up plastic Army men with Black Cat firecrackers. Mom and I conspired how to keep the pack stable. As long as there was the hint, promise, or predictability of warm food, the little wolves remained contained and rarely bit or snarled at either of us.

Our shopping trips eventually terminated when the harmonic shopping bond between Mom and me broke. Not long after the birth of my second child, mother came to Dallas armed with her usual itinerary of stores to hit, but equipped with less than her usual stamina. Two weeks before her trip to Dallas, Mom fell in a deep hole in the bayou and broke her ankle while laying out crab nets to catch the swamp dwellers for a cookout. She appeared at my door in Dallas on crutches, my Dad following her with a wheelchair in tow that Mom had rented for her Dallas shopping extravaganza. Out first sortie took us to NorthPark Shopping Center where I pushed my other through Lord and Taylor, Titche’s, and more of her regular targets. One of the wheels on the chair didn’t line up with the other three so that movement down aisles of clothing was like pushing a boat through mud. This obstacle would shoot down whatever fantasies the average hunter had about bagging the perfect kill. Mother was not deterred, however. “Push, Dear, there’s a skirt over there I have to see.” “Right across that aisle, over there, the perfect blouse.” “I need a smoke, let’s go outside for a while.” My last vision of this excursion is still burned in memory. Mother is in her wheelchair, planted halfway between the doorway of the Neiman Marcus dressing room and the ready-to-wear blouses department. Ladies are shopping all around her. There she sits, stripped to the waist in all but her bra, trying to wrestle a new catch over her head. The wheelchair didn’t go through the door into the tiny dressing room so I left her to look at racks near the dressing room. Mom is oblivious to frustrated shoppers lined up behind her awaiting their turn at a fitting room. She has blocked the flow with her chair, but can’t resist a try-on of yet one more blouse. The look on her face is undeniable. With this garment, she has a chance to be somebody.