Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Jennifer Gillan Page B

more than an hour of light left, so I took advantage of it and decided to look for work. I felt suddenly alive as I skipped down the block in search of an overgrown flower bed and the dime that would end the day right.

The Best Deal in America
    BEBE MOORE CAMPBELL
    The money is yours until you give it away. The credo was Maxine’s mama’s, honed over half a century of parsimonious dealings and painstakingly passed on to her youngest daughter during the formative years of her improverished childhood. Neither the potency of the lesson nor the uncontrollable yearning to decorate her life with shiny new things had diminished over the years.
    As Maxine waited at the counter of World of Linens, she “read” the saleslady, just the way her mama had taught her to: the emotional type. Her slim fingers inched the sheets toward the woman, like a blind beggar extending her cup. “See?” she said, pointing to a small mark. “There’s a stain right here.”
    “Well, Miss, did you try to find another set?” the saleslady asked.
    “This is the last one.” Maxine made her lips tremble.
    “Well, gee, I’m really sorry.” The saleslady watched as the young black woman lowered her glance, then heard the deep sigh and saw the spasms shuddering through her body. “Is there anything I can do, Honey?” she asked, putting her hand on top of her customer’s. Maxine counted to three in her head, then lifted her eyes just slightly. “I really need them, I’ve got guests coming. Do you think I could get a little discount?” she asked.
    “What did you have in mind?” The woman still held her hand.
    “Oh, 15 percent.” Ten. Ten. Ten.
    “We’re only allowed to give 10.”
    “Ten will be fine,” Maxine said, swallowing her smile.
    Maxine was the Bargain Queen. She knew where she could haggle for Giorgio, Poison and Obsession—not knock-offs, the real stuff—and pay $10 a bottle. At a little shop in Chinatown, when the owner wasn’t around, she could get a full set of silk-wrapped fingernails for just $9. Jewelry? That would be Virgilio’s on Los Angeles Street: the best gold for the lowest prices. The man to ask for was Salvador; Maxine knew his shift.
    “The discount diva strikes again,” Denise, her roommate, said when she brought home the sheets. Sitting at the kitchen table, she looked up from the California bar review book she was poring over. Denise was a wiry girl, with skin the color of Kentucky bourbon. “How much did you save this time?”
    “Four eighty-seven,” Maxine said, ignoring Denise’s sarcasm.
    Denise rolled her eyes. Why anyone would grovel—and she’d seen Maxine do just that—over a few bucks was beyond her. She thought of the hardball the lawyers played at the firm where she worked.
That
was deal-making. “You need to expand your vision,” she said, turning back to her workbook.
    Maxine climbed the stairs and threw the sheets into the linen closet, slammed the door, then pressed her forehead against the cool wood for a moment and waited for yet another fit of inexplicable rage to subside. Lately, when she finished shopping, anger crept around her neck like a pearl choker, and she’d remember the times her mama begged the neighborhood grocer to sell her peaches for 10 cents a pound, all of them rotten. When she turned around, Denise was standing in front of her. “Listen,” she said. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, but you don’t even use half the stuff you buy. You waste so much money.”
    “You didn’t come up like I did,” Maxine said in a low voice.
    Denise looked into her friend’s face, saw the tense jaw, the anger in her dark eyes, and stepped back. “I know you used to be poor,” she said, remembering the time she visited Maxine’s mother’s house in Louisiana. Clean, but Lord …
    “No. You just think you know.”
    But all her scrimping would soon be worthwhile, Maxine thought a week later as she stared through the plate-glass window of the new-car showroom.