Copyright 1995(c)                                       947 Words

                          ALWAYS RIGHT
                         By Del Freeman 

     Eleanor watched her three-year-old grandchild play with her
Christmas loot and thought smug, self-satisfied thoughts. She was
right. Again.
     The spread of wretched excess around her made her all but ill.
No child could possibly assimilate all these toys. Steffie would
be discovering new gifts daily, for weeks, having been unable to
comprehend all her presents as they were unveiled.
     Ah, well, the last thing they needed on Christmas morning was
another of those temper fits that ended with her daughter screaming
about not needing her advice and stomping out. Donna said Eleanor
was a nag, and maybe she was. But she was still right, dammit.
     There was no longer some future point at which she envisioned
any other end to such a conversation, and it, more than anything
else, depressed her. No matter what she did, or how she tried, the
two would never be friends, she realized. They simply had nothing
in common aside from the grandbaby. Nothing. It was sad and it made
her less aggressive in offering advice, but nothing stopped her
entirely.
     Take the Christmas orgasm, for instance. She insisted the baby
was too young to appreciate such largesse. She watched Donna buy the
gifts her daughter would have liked to receive herself, at a
younger age, and discouraged the expenditure of so much money.
Donna ignored her or snapped back that it was Christmas and where
was her spirit.
     "I want to enjoy Christmas and that means giving gifts to
people I care for, Mom. Just because you don't like Christmas," -
- a subtle dig here at her failure to fall in love with Santa
Claus through the eyes of the baby -- "doesn't mean I don't."
     Yeah, yeah, Eleanor thought. Enjoy it into hock and never get
enough savings to get out and on your own. How long, oh Lord, how
long?
     Eleanor thought Donna a person who made the same mistakes
repeatedly. Frequently, she lost her temper when attempting to
speak in reason with Donna, and in the course of their argument
said "yes, dammit, I do want you to save enough to buy a car AND
a trailer. Don't make it sound like curing cancer. People do it
every day. You don't have to do it tomorrow, but aren't you tired
of being the one who always gets kicked out because it's not your
place?"
     Eleanor couldn't imagine not being bone weary if she'd been
Donna. When Donna left home at 17, she went to stay with friends.
She'd been more or less doing the same thing for the past eight
years, and managed to end up with Eleanor no more often than every
year or two. 
     Time, during those visits and no matter their spacing, dragged
on longer than time in any other universe, minus Donna. She watched
Donna teach her own baby all the negative things her daughter had
learned, and shook her head in regret.
     Christmas had been another example of their differences.
     "You haven't got anything for the grandbaby?" Donna asked in
disbelief.
     "I have, but it is not shiny new."
     Eleanor had found a PlaySkool playground at a garage sale. A
slide descended on the left, a ferris wheel that must be turned
manually on the right, and a carousel in the middle which would
turn of its own volition when the center pole was plunged. It had
once conatained PlaySkool figures, but now contained only one.
Eleanor shopped thrift stores and garage sales for figures that
would fit but weren't conformed to exactly fit the seats as was the
one PlaySkool figure. Nobody, least of all Steffie, would object
to having her ride peopled by miniature Barney, Baby Bop, Betty
Boop and Garfield.
     Donna thought it tacky and cheap, but Donna was going to be
very glad some day when she inherited what Eleanor conserved by
living as she considered practical. There was no challenge, Eleanor
often told her friend Inez, in shopping at K-Mart. First, it was
too expensive for the quality of its clothes when one could find
a Bob Mackie in a thrift store for $5, and second, they had all the
sizes grouped together. Anybody could do that, Eleanor often
commented.
     The truth was that shopping had always been her passion and
she'd had to discover early on a way to feed that habit within the
boundaries of her budget. It was a social outing for her and she
took it regularly, each Saturday morning.
     She took it with greater gusto once her daughter moved back
home, though she did sometimes take the granddaughter.
     She'd found the toy and paid $3 for it and her daughter had
purchased a myriad of single-theme figures and scenes costing far
more. The grandbaby ooh'd and aah'd at the related figures and
spent 30 minutes turning the ferris wheel, sliding the figures down
the slide and plunging the center pole to make the carousel spin.
Eleanor had refrained from saying 'I told you so,' but barely.
     As the Garfield figure flew out and skidded under her desk, 
Eleanor told her granddaughter to get up off the cold floor. She
reached behind her, leaving the computer screen covered in
budgetary projection figures, and placed Garfield back in his
carousel seat. She lifted the playground onto the couch. Steffie
jumped up and ran to depress the center pole of the carousel from
its new height, standing on tippytoe to reach it. 
     Eleanor Maxwell never saw the Garfield figure which flew with
sufficient force into her throat to crush her larynx. 
     Donna Maxwell Chambliss later described her mother's as "not
a pretty death." She did not cry when she said it.
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