Crazy Grace’s Mistake
by John E. Keats
Photo by Christina Schmidt
In my first full-time job out of high school, during the reckless eighties, I met an actual crazy woman. Her name was Grace. She had ashen, parched hair reigned back by elastics, wore black-rimmed glasses, and maintained a stunned, humorless expression. She was in her forties, a Baby Boomer, but Jesus, she seemed ancient! The Hendrix and Van Halen and Springsteen blaring in the Filene’s Basement stockroom I supervised annoyed her. She kept boasting about the wisdom conventional experience had given her. Grace was a wife, had raised kids, been a medical secretary. A nineteen-year-old, often hungover and puffy-eyed, apparently not cut out for college, would never, she said, tell her what to do. So when she knotted a forty-dollar leather belt to a dolly to drag a carton of shirt hangers around, to keep from arching her back, or made a dozen time-burning trips to the bathroom with a Dixie cup while sweeping clean her hanging area, to weight dust with water and keep her sinuses clear, or told the rest of the staff that any procedural detail I conveyed and enforced was shortsighted or silly, I should have been respectfully silent. I tried. My frustration festered for weeks. I finally confessed to my boss that I couldn’t work with someone so maliciously disruptive. Okay, I just called her crazy.
The store manager, another Boomer, a sweaty giant in ill-fitting suits, as puffy-eyed as I was, and more into Jimi Hendrix, had my back because I followed the company’s laws. Rebellious music and partying were great, but give me structure and procedure, I said! Yes sir. Give me duties! Give me overtime, too, but no work worries to take home with me, like some corporate martyr. My boss tugged at the insecure knot of his resented tie and laughed, I guessed, at my charming willingness to tread upon the worn road he’d travelled. He didn’t laugh, though, at Grace’s faded plaid pants that looked like pajamas, or at how she talked about the Bible with just enough tact that you couldn’t really nab her for preaching on the clock. Instigator was a word I often heard associated with her. She was pretty isolated out back, just tearing plastic from garments and hanging them onto rolling racks, but she would stick her neck out eagerly when women from the sales floor would pass her by, as if she might be sniffing out attention or contact, instead of focusing on her job. And since I would, on occasion, get trapped in the break room with her, I did once witness her make her way over, all wide-eyed and shifty, to some naïve, discouraged girl who felt belittled enough by a more ambitious comrade to cry in public. She even brought the wounded kid water in another God damn Dixie cup, as cover, I thought, for her predominating sin, that urge to disrupt, no matter how neighborly her machinations would have seemed to an ignorant stranger.
My complaint got Grace transferred to the men’s department. I still had to see her when she collected totes of dress shirts or armfuls of men’s underwear. The comfort of consensus, the fact that everyone now knew she was nuts, eased the tinge of surprising guilt I felt for turning her away; so, too, did the stories I smugly digested about her mean stubbornness. She had refused to exchange the pajama pants for slacks. She wouldn’t follow the enforced color scheme, ROYGBIV, when charged with setting up displays, as if she were really free to make her own crazy rainbows of shirts on the walls and fixtures she didn’t own. She was sneakier than originally suspected. She spied on everyone, and meddled, and must have spawned mysterious plots that fueled the constant, crazy, wild focus in her eyes.
And God, someone whispered, did you ever see her accountant husband? One Christmas, I did. Some frail guy in what seemed like a boy’s brown, itchy suit walked in the Basement’s front door with a case that could have contained enough explosives to blow the whole operation to hell, but in those days before 9/11, not one person adrift in the chatting, elbowing, stomping seasonal crowd seemed to give any kind of afterlife a thought. I was collecting hangers into boxes from around the cashiers’ feet and watched him whip out a saxophone and start blowing out Silent Night. Jesus, it was sweet, disruptive in a weirdly pretty way, an unexpected challenge to the numbing fog of earning low wages and the self-reliant, cocky respectability even the lowest, functional role in democratic capitalism can bring. It was even a nice alternative to the racket of the rock music I’d left out back. But the minute I saw Grace shuffling up the aisle, carving a crooked path through the masses, wearing her drab, comfortable shoes and her baggy, kaleidoscopic pants, I just knew the musician was her mate. She didn’t talk to him, or do more than brush something off his slight shoulders, before folding her arms beside him—proud, I thought, to be able to lay claim to one more eccentric thing—to scrutinize the sound that I suddenly found boring. But she seemed genuinely capable of a fretful compassion toward a man who was, if you stole his instrument, so sadly erasable. It was odd, that tenderness. It didn’t quite fit—but oddities, I reasoned, were normal, when you were crazy.
Around that time my mother, in her sixties, started working with us. I made her cry trying to talk her out of coming. I didn’t want her to hear about my drinking with coworkers, or learn that I smoked. Cigarettes had a role in making her a widow when I was five. I realized quickly that I was being selfish. She was a cashier because she loved to socialize, and she instantly drew people in the Basement to her, including Grace. I waited for a war to begin. My mom was also outspoken. I knew she would tell Grace exactly what she was. I kept an eye on my mom in the break room, before and during work, as she sat and interacted with younger, nervous, newly hired girls. She laughed with the clique, too, the women who claimed the same table every day, but told them she wouldn’t sit with them because all they did was cast judgment on everyone. (I had taken a seat there more than once, to mock Grace.) They kept inviting my mother over, but every day she’d microwave a cup of water, open a baggie full of scalloped sugar cookies and tea bags, and sit in her own spot, dunking her cookies in her tea. Sometimes Grace sat beside her, listening to her tell stories across empty tables about taking care of her sick parents in the Depression, marrying late, having her only child at forty-three. I noticed how abnormally attentive Grace was to all she said. I asked my mother if it was tough talking to her. She said that Grace was a little harsh toward a son-in-law and got kind of worked up over the lies politicians told, but she took a dirty joke and seemed like a nice woman.
Took a dirty joke? Nice woman? I stayed quiet. I knew my mother would learn the truth, and I just hoped she wouldn’t get hurt, or too let down, when she did. I was maturing. I was learning and earning, living my life; wising up, I supposed. It wasn’t my business. And I kept waiting for Grace to rat me out about smoking. She never did. I just forgot, like a certified fool, to take my Newports out of my pocket one day at lunch and gave myself away to my disappointed mom.
Grace became a little warmer toward me, when we were forced to exchange greetings or interact about the merchandise, and it seemed to confuse us both. We never got friendly. She wasn’t really friendly with anyone. My mom and I were, with lots of people, and over the years, as my mother heard more about the accepted reality of Grace’s mental condition, she commiserated more than critiqued: “It’s so sad she’s an outcast. She’s a good listener. I know she’s a little disheveled looking, but she’s always so clean.” I tried to be kinder, but soon my blood would boil as I recalled those trips with a broom and her Dixie cups, and my heart went cold remembering how she dismissed my legitimate authority. I kept giving up. My mother went to baby showers and anniversary parties that Grace wasn’t invited to. I was the best man for a good friend, a guy I worked and drank with for years, talking about girls, music, and passions that must have mattered then. We both got bachelor degrees while working at the Basement and quit around the same time. He went to law school and got condemned by the clique for being greedy, a label that infuriated him. I went to graduate school for English and got praised for being sensitive and humane. My mom was seated with his parents at the wedding but defected over to the Filene’s Basement table and had a blast. Grace, of course, wasn’t there but by then would have totally understood the sentiment involved in my buddy dramatically kissing my mom under a chandelier, at the end of the night, and saying he loved her so loudly that I think it echoed.
My mom retired in 2001, at seventy-seven. Her arthritic limbs couldn’t take the six-hour shifts required by heartless new corporate mandates. Grace remained until the Basement went out of business several years later. A lot of people we called friends kept sending us Christmas cards. I still lived at home, and told anyone who asked that I was trying to make myself a writer, but I was really struggling to cope with learning how wrong I was about almost everything. Drinking had almost destroyed me, so I gave it up. I gradually came to hate retail and was ashamed at how slavish I’d been to it for so many years. I loved to read books, but wanted to write, and found that all the literary rules I sought in six years of college weren’t really worth a damn if I didn’t have the guts to break them. The last friend I had left, my now-successful lawyer buddy, suddenly seemed like someone I’d never known at all, and we stopped talking, but he and his wife kept sending computer-generated Christmas cards with pictures of their kids and good wishes in restrained fonts. My mom stopped sending cards after a holiday fall she had at about eighty-two that cracked her spine. I should have taken over the duty, but didn’t. No one had ever answered the long, warm notes she used to write on every card, or wrote their own—except Grace. She provided discreet updates about her family, and responded briefly to my mother’s questions, often with biblical clichés. She sent more cards, too, for St. Patrick’s Day and Mother’s Day. After a very long time, I wrote and admitted to her that my mother had developed dementia, and I didn’t feel right leaving her alone, so I was living off my retirement savings. My mom soon received a handwritten response. Grace didn’t say everything would be all right. She didn’t say God was good, rejoice. She just hoped my mom and I were okay and never mentioned the dementia.
I read an article about a husband whose wife got early-onset Alzheimer’s. He said all their friends disappeared. He blamed himself, said his conversation must have been depressing. He had a hard time concentrating on anything other than her. I read a book about love, and mercy, by Kierkegaard—because I was sinking, in all kinds of ways; drowning, along with the wreckage of everything I thought of as real—and threw it at the wall because all it endorsed as right and good was so damned hard to do. I read signs of dementia as new flaws in my mom’s character, when she wouldn’t fit into what I wanted her to be. I let my foolish frustration steal from the compassion she deserved. I stood in the hall of our apartment building sometimes and read the names of strangers on the mailboxes. We’d known the woman above us for over forty years. She’d recently had a heart attack and kidney transplant. I shoveled her SUV out in the winter, but we only complained about rent increases or the weather on stairs or walkways. I remembered how my mom told me her mother helped her neighbors in Revere deliver their babies. Once you got outside the walls of your home, or beyond the longest lines in your family tree, how deeply should you care? And why do standards of compassionate duty fluctuate as trends? Should casting a wider net of active love at more fellow humans really be as fashionable an act as choosing to wear skinny jeans or classic Levi’s?
The other day the mailman knocked at our basement apartment’s door. I jumped. Nothing unexpected really happens anymore. The dementia slowly worsens. No one calls. No one rings the bell. My mother, in her nineties, only able now to talk to me and doctors, said, “I knew this wasn’t home! Let me go back to work, where I belong!” Outside the door was a small package. I murmured thanks at the ascending postman’s back. I didn’t know his name. The return address was Grace’s. I feigned excitement and told my mom that she had a gift. Inside the envelope she found a box of cream-filled wafers, along with a short note: “Sugar cookies are one of your favorites. Enjoy them with tea.” My paltry guts or my shaken heart started torturing my conscience and my eyes. I wanted to let myself cry. “What a foolish thing to do,” she said. “Those wafers are like straw. I hate them.”
And that was true. She had always hated them. But I reminded her of the scalloped sugar cookies she used to love with her tea at work. Grace had remembered, I said, what brought her comfort so long ago. She just made a mistake about a detail. “I worked with her yesterday,” my mother said. “Only an idiot would forget that. We need money. She was always crazy.” And I wanted to apologize for having put that thought in her head. I wanted to tell her how important that small, rare thing from Grace was. Stressed, and a little sleepless, I swear, I even considered going to Grace and bowing down to her. But I didn’t and said nothing. I told myself there was no point in making a scene. Audience almost shouldn’t matter. Meaning was for me to wrestle with inside, as all the best love is, and the hardest measuring of mercy and shame.
I microwaved more tea, wondering, for the first time, if the private rainbows Grace had imagined and tried to realize in arrays of expensive shirts might have been worth seeing. Young people screamed and raged about paternity or infidelity on Maury or Jerry Springer. My mother clawed at the wax paper around the wafers, with nails I should have been trimming. “You know,” she said, while chewing, “these don’t have as much cream as they used to, but they’re so good for a change. They were always my favorite.”
