Conversely, my parents were the type of people who didn’t leave the house after dark. If I needed something from town, I had better tell my mom about it before 5 o’clock or I could forget about it until the next day. I used to be very on top of school projects. I’d buy all my poster board and supplies the same day a project was assigned to avoid needing something at 8 PM the night before it was due. As an adult I have learned that my parents’ stance on leaving the house after dark was not the norm. My husband’s mother had been known to take his sister to Wal-Mart at all hours of the night for that one “must have” item for a project due the next day. My mom would have let me fail.
The only time my mom could be found in town after dinner time was on nights she had taken Eleanor to the store. They would leave the house at a reasonable enough hour, usually after I got out of school. Once or twice Eleanor was with my mom when she picked me up from the bus stop.
“Hey Joyce, is that your grandma?”
“No, that’s my neighbor.”
If I’m being honest, I wished she was my grandma even she wasn’t much older than my mom. There was something about her that I struck me as youthful. She was as good a candidate for grandparent as any, though. I didn’t have any. My Pa-Pa died when I was three and the rest of my grandparents had been dead since long before I was an accident waiting to happen.
On the nights she came over to ask for a ride to town, my parents would often leave me to deal with her while they went inside to get ready for bed. Her visits could be at any time between 7 and 10 PM and I was the only person in the house who didn’t seem to care. I liked when she came over. I liked talking to her, and I liked how adult I felt when my mom and dad foisted her off on me.
Mom and Dad can’t handle her, but I can.
She would stand and talk to me under the glow of the porch light about anything from alien theories to the morning show on the radio. If it was a week night, I would have to go to bed around 10, but if it was a weekend, we could talk for hours.
“Don’t you need to go to bed, Joyce Ann?” The way she said my name sounded so different in her Baltimore accent, which to my North Floridian ears was nearly alien.
“No, it’s Saturday. I’m staying up for Tales from the Crypt at 12:30.”
“When I was a little girl,” Eleanor would tell me, “I used to sneak out of bed and watch scary movies after my parents had gone to bed. I used to have terrible nightmares from that. Don’t you ever get nightmares?”
“No, not really,” I’d reply. “I like scary stuff.”
On the nights my mother took her to the store, she would keep the supermarket open for hours after closing time. The management dreaded seeing her come in, but they were always very polite to her. Everyone at Miller’s called her “Rainbow Brite” after the rainbow colored clips she wore in her jet black hair and her brightly colored attire. I always liked the way she dressed, even if it was dated and a bit garish. One of her dresses was beige with great big floral arrangements all over it. I looked like it might have had another life as a couch.
When my mom would finally pick her up from Miller’s, close to midnight, Eleanor would have two carts full of food. She shopped for the entire month all at once and she would always buy more than she could accommodate in her tiny home. The mornings after Eleanor went shopping were like Christmas for me. She would send home all sorts of things my mom never bought, like real Pop Tarts, Basic 4 cereal, and Bryer’s Natural Cherry Ice Cream. She was the type of person to have given away everything she had to help someone in need. God would have wanted it. The trouble was, we weren’t in need. My mom and dad would try every way in the world to get her to keep the groceries she forced on them, but she would insist that they take several bags in return for helping her.
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