Aunt Erma's Cope Book (8 page)

As for the extra money they made, I could run my home like a business if I tried. Why, I could save thousands of dollars just passing up convenience foods, clipping coupons, saving stamps, pumping my own gas, and grooming the dog.

Could there be a book on how to run a home more efficiently and save money? Does the Pope work Sundays?

The phone rang at the Save the Whale Sperm Bank. I listened for a minute or two, then said, “If you knew ANYTHING about whales, sir, you'd know that is physically impossible!” and hung up.

14

living cheap

the BOOKSTORE was bulging with books on how to save money. It seemed strange to me that they were on a table marked Current Fiction.

Leading the list was the current best seller, How to Dress a Chicken (From Separates to Basic Weekenders), followed by How to Perform Home Surgery Using Sewing Basket Notions, and my favorite, How to Build a Summer Cabin Using Scraps Ripped Off from the Neighborhood Lumber Yard.

I didn't want to get too specific. I just wanted a general book on how to save money by doing things around the house myself. The clerk recommended one that had been selling briskly called Living Cheap.

The book cost $23.95, but she said if I followed the advice in the first chapter alone, I'd recoup my original investment in a week.

The first chapter told me if I saved coupons I could cut down on my food bills as much as twenty dollars a visit. They were wrong. The first week, I saved thirty dollars using coupons that I had clipped from every paper and magazine that came into the house.

By having coupons I got an extra carton of cat food ... an extra bucket of swimming-pool chemicals . . . an extra carton of infant strained lamb . . . and a huge savings on calf's liver.

The only problem was we didn't have a cat, a swimming pool, or a baby, and we all hated liver.

Double-stamp hours made a lot of sense. If I went to the store between 7:30 and 8:45 on a Wednesday morning following a holiday and was among the first ten shoppers to buy the manager's special and come within two minutes of guessing when the cash register tape would run out on the express-lane register, I'd receive double stamps, which when the book was filled would give me ten cents off a jar of iced tea that made my kidneys hurt.

I licked and pasted until the family said my mouth-wash just wasn't cutting my glue breath.

I tried creative things with my leftovers, disguising everything with a blanket of cheese and a sprinkling of parsley to kill the taste.

Some of the suggestions were just not practical, like “Don't shop when you're hungry,” which eliminated all the hours when the store was open.

I soon tired of trying to disguise cheap cuts of meat to look like something wonderful. (The chicken necks lashed together like a Polynesian raft set adrift on a sea of blue-tinted rice just didn't do it for me.)

Moving quickly to Chapter 2, I discovered I could create an exclusive health spa in my own home for pennies. If there was anything I needed help on it was my body. I neglected it shamefully. The only equipment I had was a phone that rang every time I got into a hot tub.

At the shopping center I decided to blow a few bucks on one of those pulley exercisers that you attach to your doorknob.

Fifteen minutes a day, said the directions, was all it took to lose inches. It was midafternoon when I started to mix together all the concoctions to restore my youth.

First, to give my hair shine, I separated three eggs, beat the yolks with the juice and grated rind of a lemon, and massaged it into my hair. I topped it off with egg whites which had been beaten stiff.

Next, two bunches of mint leaves were blended with body lotion and applied to my face and entire body. Slipping a towel over me, I opened the refrigerator door and removed a bowl of ripe avocados to which olive oil had been added and plunged my fingers into them to make my nails hard. The last thing I did as I stretched out

on my back on the floor was place a sliced cucumber over each eye to tighten the skin.

Attaching the pulley to the door, I slipped my wrists into the loops of the exerciser. Slowly at first, I stretched my arms down to my side and felt my mint-covered leg being pulled up over my waist.

I must have lifted and lowered my legs for five or ten minutes when I experienced pain—pain that can only be caused by a door slamming into my skull.

“Anyone home?” asked my husband. He always looked at me when he said that.

I tried to sit up, but a cucumber slid down into my towel.

“I was going to ask if you were all right,” he said, “but I have just answered my own question.”

“You don't understand,” I said. “I have just saved fifty or sixty dollars in beauty treatments at some expensive spa. I am using the secrets of the stars.”

“Don't look at me,” he said. “I won't tell a soul what I have just seen. Is there dinner? Or are you it?”

I got to my feet, clumsily clutched my towel, and started toward the shower. “That's the thanks I get for trying to save you money. I've been working my fingers to the bone scrimping and saving and doing things around here myself just to cut down a little on expenses and that's the thanks I get.”

“I know,” he said. “And I loved the chicken-neck rafts. It's just that if you really wanted to help and save money, you could start with the car.”

“What do you want me to do for it?”

“For starters, you could learn how to use the self-service islands. That would save a couple of pennies per gallon. And when gas is scarce, you could take time out of your day and have the car gassed up. That would really help.”

He didn't know what he was asking. He was talking to a woman who, every time she tried to pull on the car lights, inadvertently released the hood. A woman who had driven for years with the rear-view mirror turned in at lip level. He was talking to a driver who started to pull out of a gas station one day when a man knocked loudly on the car trunk.

When I jammed on the brakes he said, “Ma'am, here's your gas cap. They forgot to put it on.”

“Thank you,” I said, dropping it into my handbag.

“Aren't you going to put it on your gas tank?”

“If I were,” I asked cautiously, “where would I put it?”

I couldn't remember the last time I got gas. He had been getting it to and from work, so I mentally blocked out fifteen minutes on my schedule to pop in and pop out.

Thinking I was in a right-turn lane of cars, I eased around the thirty or forty cars ahead of me and pulled in just in front of a Volkswagen convertible. The man in the car jumped out and tapped on my window.

“Whatya think we're in line for? Demolition Derby?” I had seen that look on a face only once before and vowed I'd never forget it. It was a movie with Rod Steiger, who was playing the part of Pontius Pilate just before he sentenced Jesus of Nazareth.

“Don't worry,” I smiled. “I'm not in the full-service line. I'm pumping my own gas.”

I think it was then that he threatened to braid my lips. I took my place at the end of the line and played the radiator game with the rest of' ‘em. (Each one chipped in a quarter and the one whose radiator boiled over first got the pot.)

Several hours later when I pulled to the pump, a guy with a clipboard said, “What time is your appointment or are you a standing?”

“A standing what?” I asked.

“A standing appointment for your gas.”

“You're kidding.”

“No. We take a certain number of appointments per day. There's a shortage of gas, you know.”

“I'll tell you what. If you'll fill my tank I'll give you a four-piece place setting, consisting of a dinner plate, bread-and-butter plate, and a cup and saucer of the popular Toughware in the wheat pattern.”

He relaxed his clipboard and picked his teeth with a matchbook cover.

“Wait a minute. If you put in ten gallons, I'll give you a Styrofoam cooler and a set of glasses with baseball heroes of the forties complete with signatures.”

When he started to walk away shaking his head I yelled, “How about a rainbonnet in a handy travel case and balloons for your kids?”

With a lot of luck, I had just enough gas to make it home. I had blown three hours for nothing. I couldn't believe it. There weren't any impulses left in the world any more. Every Thursday, the beauty shop; every six months, the dentist; every year, the gynecologist; every April, H & R Block; every three months, my son's guidance counselor; every five weeks, the Avon lady; every Thursday, garbage day; every three hours, the grocery.

Now I was saddled with a 3:30 P.M. odd-numbered day every other week except when the month had five weeks in it, standing at the gas station for a fill-up, tune-up, lube job, and tire check.

No wonder my husband wanted me to take on the car. It was a full-time job.

A lot of my friends talked about the energy crunch and how it was affecting their lives. Most of all, the crisis was reflected in how far they could go for their vacations.

According to Living Cheap, there was an answer to the problem. You simply planned a wonderful “at home” vacation.

Imagine, no turning off 138 necessities of life, leaving instructions for your neighbors, jamming the family into a car, and setting off for Mosquito Larvae Lake or Kneespread, Texas, to God knows what awaits you.

No husband hostile because he could only make ten miles a day. No children hostile because their knees touched. No mother hostile because all she had to look forward to was a handbag full of quarters in a flying-lint laundromat.

My husband was suspicious about an “at home” vacation, but my son was downright surly. I told him: “How would you like to vacation in a place with great weather, two ovens, good food, a bedroom for everyone, TV privileges, and indoor plumbing? Close to swimming facilities, shopping areas, and all your friends?”

“It sounds like home to me,” he grumbled.

“Let us think of it as Disneyland,” I smiled. “The kitchen is Adventureland, the utility room is Frontier-land, the garage is Tomorrowland, the bathroom. Main Street, U.S.A., and the bedroom, Fantasyland.”

“We can take a lor of minitours and see our own state,” I added, “and for the first time relax and get to know one another when we aren't racing around in a tense crisis situation. And look at all the money we'll save.”

The first day of the vacation, I had a few chores for my husband, just to “pull the house together,” that he had been putting off.

This included fertilizing, rolling, seeding, and mowing the lawn, adjusting the TV antenna on the roof, painting the exterior of the house, installing a humidifier in the crawl space in the hall closet, wallpapering two bedrooms, fixing a leak behind the washer, and—if there was time—stripping the kitchen cabinets and staining them a lighter color so the kitchen wouldn't seem so dark.

On the morning of the second day, I received a phone call from Mona and Dick Spooner from Billings, Montana, and their two little boys, Ricky and Richie.

They were passing through town when Mona remembered her old friend whom she had not seen since nursery school. When I asked her who the old friend was she said it was me. Naturally, I invited them to stay a few days.

They unloaded five years of laundry, fifteen suitcases, and a cooler that leaked water on my wax buildup.

During the next three days we became authorities on the Spooners.

The boys were just learning English and had not gotten to the three most beautiful words in the English language, “Close The Door!”

We discovered Richie could bounce a ball steadily against the house for 146 hours without stopping.

Dick was a finalist in the gargling Olympics.

Mona's only mental stimulation was sitting in front of the TV set in her baby-doll pajamas trying to answer the questions put to guests on The Newlywed Game and turning to Dick saying, “Am I right, baby?”

Ricky would not drink water out of a glass until it had been wrapped in transparent wrap like the motels.

Richie liked to throw rocks in the toilet because it bubbled when he did that.

Mona was allergic to domesticity and let me do the laundry because she wasn't “into electricity.”

Sticky ... I mean Ricky swiped a pillowcase full of our knickknacks (seashells, ashtrays, and coasters) and stuffed them under the spare tire of their station wagon so we didn't know how to reclaim them without a scene.

The Spooners stayed for four days, which just about took us to the end of our vacation. The visit—counting short trips, entertainment, extra food and drink, and an eighty-dollar plumbing bill to turn off the bubble machine, set us back $450.

Somehow Living Cheap lost its credibility for me after the Spooner Experience. I didn't feel like buying clothes secondhand, shopping garage sales, or haunting park-'n-swaps.

I was bored with being clever. Who cared if I saved all the little containers of hot sauce from Mexican carry-out or painted my varicose veins in Crayolas to make everyone think I was wearing rextured stockings? No one.

Mother was visiting one afternoon when she saw the book on the back of the commode in the bathroom.

“Whose Living Cheap ?” she asked as she came down the hallway and entered the kitchen.

“No one's any more,” I said. “I'm out of my Brand X period and am between self-improvements at the moment.”

“If you ask me, there's never been anything wrong with you that a little organization couldn't cure. You're always running around at the last minute like a chicken with her head cut off. . . going in nine directions. You can't seem to get it together.”

“I do all right.”

“Do you want to go through your entire life being 'all right'? Have you ever been on time for anything? Never!” she said, answering herself.

"If you heard the 'Star-Spangled Banner' you wouldn't recognize it. You've never seen a first inning, a first race, the first act, or the opening of anything in your life.

“Look at this house . . . coffee cups in every room . . . stacks of magazines . . . shoes under everything . . . dog dishes in the living room . . .”

“It's a candy dish.”

“The dog's eating something out of it. Did you get that little brochure about a course at the high school at nights called 'Tidying Up Your Life' or something like that? You ought to look into it. Lord knows you could use some help. When was the last time you tossed out the notes on your refrigerator door?”