When my grandmother died, I ended up with all her purses. She didn't call them that though. They were "pocketbooks," a word as crisp as the sound they made clicking shut. There is a fat black beaded one like a loaf of bread, and a strange wire bag shaped like an egg basket. There is one my Aunt Ruth crocheted made with silver lam`e thread and spangled silver disks; it has a tortoise-shell bottom and draws closed on a tasseled cord. There is also a cream quilted satin clutch with its hankie still inside. My favorite, though, is the white leatherette. It has a flaring bottom and a flat wide strap that used to hang from my grandmother's wrist, or the crook of her arm, like she was Laura Petrie or Jackie O. The knobs of its clasp are round and gold and so big and shiny you can see your face bending away from you, and the strange warped slits of your eyes. Those gold balls slide tightly against each other so that the metal has worn, and when they finish their hard caress, suddenly they clear, letting you in.
This purse, it opens like a yawning mouth. It is red sateen inside. My grandmother let me play in there, with the rattling keys and gum-paper chains and everything else that rolled and knocked about as I tipped it back and forth like a rocking ship and tried to remember what I had seen. It was a kind of game I played: to take it out, and put it back in, and try to remember it all:
A compact--no, two--one face powder (slim, gold, heavy, Revlon), One rouge (new, Cover Girl pink plastic); A lipstick (either red or a coral frost); A round brush and a teasing comb; Kleenex and a hankie (why both?); Rhinestone hair-pins; An emery board; A short green pencil from the Conneaut Lake Putt-Putt Golf Course; Wrigley's spearmint gum -- sticks, ripped in half (a lady never chews more, you look like a cow); A rubber jelly change purse that opens when you pinch its sides, stamped "Meadville Tribune" (it's got a lucky penny); An Avon rain hat -- at least one -- for sudden rain, folded into impossible pleats and tucked into a plastic suitcase stamped "April Showers"; Sales slips.; To-do lists -- lots of them; Clippings from Dear Abby; A postcard on which she's copied a poem, "Man's best friend"; And notes to herself on how to improve. If I stick my face way down deep into the pocketbook, and close my eyes, I think I can still smell her there: powder, rouge, lipstick, hairspray, and Wrigley's spearmint gum.
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