Maggie Jigs

(January 22, 2001)

The worst part is the nervous swirling in your stomach as you watch someone opening a gift over which you wracked your brain to get just right, and you already know they hate it, but you have a tiny ray of hope...

With Maggie there's no guesswork. She'll hand it back, state, "I don't like it" with a decisive shake of her little white head, and frankly question how much you, the imbecile, spent on such a...thing. Yeah, my grandmother would march her 4-foot tall, 87-year-old self up to the Pope and loudly declare him a damn fool for spending too much on his robes.

This Christmas, on a mission to find something practical but pretty, useful but not impersonal, I finally found a simple off-white cardigan sweater. I walked around Marshall's holding it, pretending to browse while weighing its good points and bad points. It buttoned down the front so she could get it on and off easily. The buttons were simple, flat pearlized discs, nothing the least bit fancy. There wasn't so much as a single embroidered snowflake to bitch about. Medium knit, cotton yarn that wasn't too open-weaved, too shiny, or too scratchy. Another bonus, it's not pure white. Pure white is a color that only goes into Maggie's smoky, dirty apartment to die. This ivory, sort of eggshell white might survive the environment, and can be worn with absolutely every other conceivable color.

Of course, color coordination is the last thing Maggie would think important. She has some sort of Yarn Blindness. In the years before her eyes got too old for detail she crocheted hundreds of blankets, every one of them ugly as sin. Maybe it was her refusal to buy any but the cheapest bargain-bin yarns, whether or not there was enough to finish a whole blanket, that made every blanket a crazy, eye-crossing kaleidoscope. The ugliest one that's still around combines Dryer Lint Grey with Traffic Cone Orange in wide, wavery stripes. I keep it because a girl needs an heirloom or two, even though the sight of it has been known to cause nausea.

This sweater I found. It really was perfect. She just HAD to like it, because it was the same exact style that Maggie already owns by the dozens yet keeps buying duplicates at every garage sale and Goodwill she can reach by bus, piling into boxes in her smoky, cluttered bedroom. Except THIS sweater would be totally new. It's still soft and nice. She'd be its first owner. Any coffee stains it would get, she'd be the one to have dribbled there. Any rips, she'd be the one to have snagged on a nail while walking past a telephone pole. Any pilling and fading would be because she washed it a hundred times in that cheap, harsh no-name detergent. Any missing buttons would be her missing buttons, to wonder where they'd fallen off, to procrastinate about replacing.

Put simply, I wanted to get her a new sweater that didn't look like her dozens of garage sale rejects ("Rags! She wears RAGS!" wails my mother). I wanted to have her feel good wearing a sweater that wouldn't be held together by a huge rusty diaper pin straining to join the two sides together over her sagging chest (she owns no mirrors so she still thinks she's a size four, nothing ever fits her.) I wanted her to have a new, pretty sweater she could wear while grocery shopping with her neighbors and they wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen with her. She wouldn't be mistaken for a bag lady at the bus stop.

I don't know what it was like to be a young girl during the Depression, the youngest of eleven grabby children all desperate for the attention of an indifferent, demanding mother. I can't imagine being devalued as a person just for being born female, forced to go to work instead of to school, and measured in worth by how little I consume. Hints of the miserly, stark upbringing Maggie and her sisters had flicker constantly in the present, like mirages that show us for a second the skinny, uncertain girls these crabby old women once were. Like last summer, there was a family reunion. After everybody ate and the kids had gone down to the water, some of the women were cleaning up while the men ambled off to start a game of Bocce. Hub and I sat in the shade with Maggie and her sister Rae. Out of nowhere Rae said, "I didn't eat much." "No, I just had one piece of chicken and a little potato, " Maggie quickly replied. So much becomes clear. I can picture the girls trying to outdo each other in a bidding war for their mother's favor, where frugality was the objective. Who can keep the same pair of shoes the longest. Who paid the least amount for new underwear. Who ate more, who less.

It's the only theory that explains why Maggie does not think herself worthy of new clothes. She feels real anguish over paying for the cheapest K-mart blouse, at nine or ten dollars. Anything over a dollar is extravagance. I've seen her pick up a too-small blouse on the $1.19 rack at Goodwill and try to get the nun at the register to sell it for .99. I've had her demand I stop the car so she could pick over a pile of trash on the curb.

We're embarrassed, yet it's her greatest pride. Who's to say she's wrong?

I stand beside her as she sits on the sagging sofa. My stomach churns. I watch hopefully while she unwraps the box and lays aside the tissue paper. She pulls the sweater part way out of the box.

She doesn't even unfold it.

"No, I don't like it."

"Why don't you try it on?" I ask, unfolding it so she could see how plain it is, how basic, which should show how careful I was to choose something she would like.

"Honey I don't like it, I don't want it," she says, shaking her head. "Take it back and get yourself something."

Hub and I decide to just take her out for lunch. She's in the mood for Chinese food, so we get ready to go to a buffet at a place she likes. We wait while she combs her stringy white hair, finds her handbag and...a sweater. For our Christmas lunch together, she chose a pink sweater, faded to a bland, whitish non-color, with grime worked into the weave around each frayed sleeve and a sprinkling of tiny holes near the collar, maybe from where some much tinier lady re-pinned a name tag too many times. She's managed to make the two top buttons meet, and it's just as well the rest are long missing because they couldn't have closed over her breasts anyway. Her mouth is set and her eyes clear. She holds her head up high and looks at me expectantly. Defiantly, almost. I sigh.

"So," I say, cheerfully. "Does this place have good Crab Rangoons or what?" I take her hand as we walk out the door.