Mae

Neighbor Essay #2  Mae

We moved to a smaller apartment. My sister Marge was about to be married within the year and we could get a smaller apartment.  It was a different neighborhood, different schools, different nuns, with different habits.  Our uniforms changed from green to navy blue, but still they were jumpers with pleated skirts, and the same slightly yellowed white nylon blouses worn under it. The beanie and the saddle shoes completed the outfit. Again, we had a landlady downstairs, and constant reminders from our mother about “lift your feet” and “hush your big mouth.”  We were well used to it. 

The apartment was narrow and dark, but Mother was friendly with Mae, the landlady, and so it was deemed okay.  Mae worked as a postal clerk, in the drugstore on the avenue, just around the corner  and down a couple of blocks. When you entered the drugstore, you walked to the back of the store, and there in the left corner of the store was a carved out spot that looked like a teller’s window at the bank.  All day “Mae” sat behind that window with the bars, on her high stool, and sold stamps and handled parcel post deliveries.  Whenever my mother sent me for stamps, Mae (or Mrs. Campbell as I called her) would say cheerily “Hello Dear, what can I do for you?” 

Sometimes I worried that she had overheard my sister and I yelling or fighting or that she may have heard me crying in the bathroom after my mother scolded me for yet another infraction.  Mrs. Campbell had tightly curled hair of a sandy color and a lot of large spread out freckly areas on her face.  She had a fierce double chin that wobbled over the top of her blouses and sweaters that she wore over her shoulders and held on with a chain like thing across her chest. Her pink, shiny cheeks didn’t have freckles, and her gold rimmed glasses held onto the end of her nose.

She wore brown or green most of the time.  But the most curious thing about her was her hands, or more particularly, the palms of her hands.  They were very pink and soft looking and reminded me of roast beef, the rare kind that we only ate around the holidays and special occasions.  I watched them closely when she counted out my change and handed me the stamps.

A couple of years after we moved in, Mae decided to raise the rent, and broke the news to my mother as they played cards and drank beer downstairs in her kitchen one Friday night, which they did often. “You understand Margie, cost of living and all that.”  Later that night when Mother came back upstairs, we heard the news from our bedroom, right off the kitchen, where my father sat smoking and working on his crossword, a can of beer at his side.

 

“And she just kept eating her pretzels” Mother yelled to Dad in that loud whisper she used when she didn’t want us to hear. “That’s it, we’re moving” she announced. It didn’t matter much to me, but my sister and I both wished she had found something a little farther away. 

We moved next door. 

 

Boys from school teased me unmercifully about the move “Think you’ll be able to find your way home after you move?” followed by their doubling over with exaggerated, hysterical laughter. We moved from a second floor apartment, to the first floor apartment next door.  I liked that idea, it meant the landlady would have to lift her feet and my mother wouldn’t always be yelling about that. “Ha”, my sister said smugly “she’s the landlady, she can walk around with heavy boots on if she wants to.”

The houses were built no more than one foot from each other.  All day, as my father and brothers-in-law and older sisters went up and down the stairs, in and out of the gates, I roller skated and stayed out of the way.  That night, my sister and I dressed in our pajamas which had been left in our empty rooms, brushed our teeth, walked next door, and went to bed in our new apartment.  After several months of passing each other on the sidewalk without so much as a nod, Mother and Mae made up and returned to the occasional Friday night card games and cans of Schlitz, though Mother always said Rheingold was better.