“Mommy,” my sister says. She is waving her fork.
“Acchh,” my mother gasps, lowering my sister’s fork. “Stop that, Roberta. You know what, Len? Make it yourself next time. You and this whole Italian cooking thing. Charley, eat!”
My father sneers and shakes his head. “Same old story,” he grouses. I am watching him. He sees me. I quickly put a forkful in my mouth. He motions with his chin.
“What do you think of the ziti your mother made?” he says.
I chew. I swallow. I look at him. I look at my mother. She drops her shoulders in exasperation. Now they are both waiting.
“It’s not right,” I mumble, looking at my father.
He snorts and shoots my mother a look.
“Even the kid knows,” he says.
A Fresh start
“SO CAN YOU STAY all day?” my mother asked.
She was standing over the range, scrambling eggs with a plastic spatula. Toast had already been popped, and a stick of butter sat on the table. A pot of coffee was alongside it. I slumped there, still dazed, having trouble even swallowing. I felt that if I moved too quickly, everything would burst. She had tied an apron around her waist and had acted, in the minutes since I first saw her, as if this were just another day, as if I had surprised her with a visit, and in return, she was cooking me breakfast.
“Can you, Charley?” she said. “Spend a day with your mother?”
I heard the sizzling of butter and eggs.
“Hmm?” she said.
She lifted the fry pan and approached.
“Why so quiet?”
It took a few seconds to find my voice, as if I were remembering instructions on how to do it. How do you talk to the dead? Is there another set of words? A secret code?
“Mom,” I finally whispered. “This is impossible.”
She scooped the eggs from the pan and chop-chop-chopped them on my plate. I watched her veined hands work the spatula.
“Eat,” she said.
AT SOME POINT in American history, things must have changed, and divorcing parents informed their children as a team. Sat them down. Explained the new rules. My family collapsed before that age of enlightenment; when my father was gone, he was gone.
After a few weepy days, my mother put on lipstick, did her eyes with mascara, cooked up some fried potatoes, and said, as she handed us our plates, “Dad isn’t going to live here anymore.” And that was that. It was like a set change in a play.
I can’t even remember when he got his stuff. One day we came home from school and the house just seemed more roomy. There was extra space in the front hall closet. The garage was missing tools and boxes. I remember my sister crying and asking, “Did I make Daddy go away?” and promising my mother that she would behave better if he came home. I remember wanting to cry myself, but it had already dawned on me that there were now three of us, not four, and I was the only male. Even at eleven, I felt an obligation to manhood.
Besides, my father used to tell me to “buck up” whenever I cried. “Buck up, kid, buck up.” And, like all children whose parents split, I was trying to behave in a way that would bring the missing one back. So no tears, Chick. Not for you.
FOR THE FIRST few months, we figured it was temporary. A spat. A cooling-off period. Parents fight, right? Ours did. My sister and I would lie at the top of the staircase listening to their arguments, me in my white undershirt and she in her pale yellow pajamas and ballerina slippers. Sometimes they argued about us:
“Why don’t you handle it for once, Len?”
“It’s not that big a deal.”
“Yes it is! And I’m always the witch who has to tell them!”
Or about work:
“You could pay more attention, Posey! Those people at the hospital aren’t the only ones who matter!”
“They’re sick, Len. You want me to tell them I’m sorry, but my husband needs his shirts ironed?”
Or about my baseball:
“It’s too much, Len!”
“He could make something of himself.”
“Look at him! He’s exhausted all the time!”
Sometimes, sitting on those steps, my sister would put her hands over her ears and cry. But I tried to listen. It was like sneaking into a grown-up world. I knew my father worked late and in the last few years, he’d gone on overnight trips to his liquor distributors, telling my mother, “Posey, if you don’t schmooze these guys, they gut you like a fish.” I knew that he was setting up another store in Collingswood, about an hour away, and he worked there a few days a week. I knew a new store would mean “more money and a better car.” I knew my mother didn’t like the whole idea.
So, yes, they fought, but I never imagined consequences. Parents didn’t split up back then. They worked it out. They stayed on the team.
I remember a wedding once when my father rented a tuxedo and my mother wore a shiny red dress. During the reception, they got up to dance. I saw my mother lift her right hand. I saw my father put his big mitt alongside it. And as young as I was, I could tell they were the best-looking people on the floor. My father cut a tall, athletic figure, and, unlike other fathers, his belly was flat behind his ribbed white shirt. And my mother? Well, she looked happy, smiling with her creamy red lipstick. And when she looked happy, everyone took a backseat. She was such a smooth dancer, you couldn’t help but watch her, and her shiny dress seemed spotlighted as she moved. I heard some older women at the table mumbling “it’s a bit much” and “show some modesty,” but I could tell they were just jealous because they didn’t look as pretty as she did.
So that’s how I saw my parents. They fought, but they danced. After my father disappeared, I would think about that wedding constantly. I would almost convince myself he was coming back to see my mother in that red dress. How could he not? But in time I stopped thinking that. In time I came to view that event the way you view a faded vacation photo. It’s just someplace you went a long time ago.
“What do you want to do this year?” my mother asked me the first September after they got divorced. School was about to start, and she was talking about “new beginnings” and “new projects.” My sister had chosen a puppet theater.
I looked at my mother and made the first of a million scowling faces.
“I want to play baseball,” I said.
A Meal Together
I DON’T KNOW how much time passed in that kitchen—I still had a spinning, groggy feeling, like when you bang your head on the trunk of a car—but at some point, maybe when my mother said, “Eat,” I physically surrendered to the idea of being there. I did what my mother told me.
I put a forkful of eggs into my mouth.
My tongue practically sprung to attention. I hadn’t eaten in two days, and I began shoveling food like a prisoner. The chewing took my mind off the impossibility of my situation. And can I be honest? It was as delicious as it was familiar. I don’t know what it is about food your mother makes for you, especially when it’s something that anyone can make—pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad—but it carries a certain taste of memory. My mother used to put chives in her scrambled eggs—“the little green things” I called them—and here they were again.
So now I was eating a past-tense breakfast at a past-tense table with a past-tense mother.
“Slow down, don’t make yourself sick,” she said.
That, too, was past tense.
When I finished, she took the plates to the sink and ran water over them.
“Thank you,” I mumbled.
She looked up. “Did you just say ‘thank you,’ Charley?”
I barely nodded.
“For what?”
I cleared my throat. “For breakfast?”
She smiled as she finished scrubbing. I watched her at the sink and had a sudden rush of familiarity, me at this table, her at the dishes. We’d had so many conversations from just this position, about school, about my friends, about what gossip I shouldn’t believe from the neighbors, always the ru
shing sink water causing us to raise our voices.
“You can’t be here...,” I began. Then I stopped. I couldn’t get beyond that sentence.
She shut the faucet and wiped her hands on a towel.
“Look at the time,” she said. “We have to get going.”
She leaned over and cupped my face. Her fingers were warm and damp from the sink water.
“You’re welcome,” she said, “for breakfast.”
She grabbed her handbag from the chair.
“Now, be a good boy and get your coat on.”
July 20, 1959
Dear Charley—
I know you are scared but there is nothing to be scared about. We have all had our tonsils out and look at us. We’re OK!
You hold onto this letter. Put it under your pillow before the doctors come in. They’re going to give you something to make you sleepy and just before you fall asleep you can remember my letter is there and if you wake up before I get to your room, then you can reach under the pillow and read this again. Reading is like talking, so picture me talking to you there.
And soon I will be.
And then you can have all the ice cream you want! How about that?
I love you every day.
Mom
Chick’s Family After the Divorce
FOR A WHILE AFTER my parents split up, we tried to stay the same. But the neighborhood wouldn’t allow it. Small towns are like metronomes; with the slightest flick, the beat changes. People were nicer to my sister and me. There’d be an extra lollipop at the doctor’s office or a larger scoop on the ice cream cone. Older women, encountering us on the street, would squeeze our shoulders earnestly and ask, “How are you kids doing?” which struck us as an adult question. The kids’ version began with “What.”
But if we were showed more kindness, my mother was not. People didn’t get divorced back then. I didn’t know a single kid who had endured it. Splitting up, at least where we lived, meant something scandalous, and one of the parties would be assigned the blame.
It fell on my mother, mostly because she was still around. Nobody knew what happened between Len and Posey, but Len was gone and Posey was there to be judged. It didn’t help that she refused to seek pity or to cry on their shoulders. And, to make matters worse, she was still young and pretty. So to women she was a threat, to men an opportunity, and to kids an oddity. Not really great choices, when you think about it.
Over time, I noticed people looking at my mother differently when we pushed a cart through the local grocery store or when, in that first year after the divorce, she’d drop my sister and me at school in her white nurse’s outfit and her white shoes and white hose. She always got out to kiss us good-bye, and I was acutely aware of the other mothers staring. Roberta and I became self-conscious, approaching the school door as if we squeaked.
“Give your mother a kiss,” she said one day, leaning over.
“Don’t,” I said this time, sliding away.
“Don’t what?”
“Just...” I scrunched my shoulders and winced. “Just don’t.”
I couldn’t look at her, so I looked at my feet. She held there for a moment before straightening. I heard her sniff. I felt her rub my hair.
By the time I looked up, the car was pulling away.
ONE AFTERNOON I was playing catch with a friend in the church parking lot when two nuns opened the back door. My friend and I froze, figuring we had done something wrong. But the nuns motioned me over. They each held an aluminum tray. As I approached, I could smell meat loaf and green beans.
“Here,” one of them said. “For your family.”
I couldn’t understand why they were giving me food. But it wasn’t like you said “no thanks” to a nun. So I took the trays and I walked them home, figuring my mother must have ordered them special.
“What’s that?” she asked, when I entered the house.
“The nuns gave it to me.”
She pulled back the wax paper. She sniffed.
“Did you ask for this?”
“Nuh-uh. I was playing catch.”
“You didn’t ask for this?”
“No.”
“Because we don’t need food, Charley. We don’t need handouts, if that’s what you think.”
I got defensive. I didn’t really understand “handout,” but I could tell it meant something that didn’t get handed out to everyone.
“I didn’t ask for it!” I protested. “I don’t even like green beans!”
We looked at each other.
“It’s not my fault,” I said.
She relieved me of the trays and dumped them in the sink. She mashed the meat loaf into the garbage disposal with a large spoon. She did the same with the green beans. She moved so feverishly I couldn’t take my eyes off of her, pounding all that food down that small round hole. She turned on the water. The disposal roared. When the sound pitched higher, meaning it was done, she removed the magnetized top. She shut off the water. She wiped her hands on the front of her apron.
“So,” she said, turning to me, “are you hungry?”
THE FIRST TIME I heard the word “divorcée” was after an American Legion baseball game. The coaches were throwing bats in the back of a station wagon, and one of the fathers from the other team picked up my bat by mistake. I ran over and said, “That one’s mine.”
“It is?” he said, rolling it in his palm.
“Yeah. I brought it with me on my bike.”
He could have doubted that, since most kids came with their dads.
“OK,” he said, handing it over. Then he squinted and said, “You’re the divorcée’s kid, right?”
I looked back, wordless. Divorcée? It sounded exotic, and I did not think of my mother that way. The men used to ask, “You’re Len Benetto’s kid, right?” and I’m not sure which bothered me more, being the son of this new word, or no longer being the son of the old ones.
“So how’s your mom doing?” he asked.
I shrugged. “She’s doing good.”
“Yeah?” he said. His eyes darted around the field, then back to me. “She need any help around the house?”
I felt as if my mother was standing behind me, and I was the only thing between them.
“She’s doing good,” I said again.
He nodded.
If it’s possible to distrust a nod, I did.
STILL, IF THAT was the day “divorcée” became familiar, I remember distinctly the day it became abhorrent. My mother had come home from work and sent me to the local market for some ketchup and rolls. I decided to take a shortcut through the backyards. When I came around the side of a brick ranch house, I saw two older kids from school huddled there, one of them, a beefy kid named Leon, shielding something against his chest.
“Hey, Benetto,” he said quickly.
“Hey, Leon,” I said.
I looked at the other kid. “Hey, Luke.”
“Hey, Chick.”
“Where you going?” Leon said.
“Fanelli’s,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He released his grip. He was holding binoculars.
“What are those for?” I said.
He turned to face the trees. “Army gear,” he said. “Bino’s.”
“Twenty times magnification,” Luke said.
“Lemme see.”
He handed them over, and I held them to my eyes. They were warm around the rims. I moved them up and down, catching blurry colors of the sky, then the pine trees, then my feet.
“They use ’em in the war,” Luke said, “to locate the enemy.”
“They’re my dad’s,” Leon said.
I hated hearing that word. I handed them back.
“See ya,” I said.
Leon nodded.
“See ya.”
I walked on, but my thoughts were uneasy. Something about how Leon had turned to the trees, too quickly, you know? So I circled back behind the house and hid in the he
dges. What I saw bothers me to this day.
The two of them were huddled close now, no longer facing the trees but facing the other way, toward my house, passing the binoculars. I followed the sight line to my mother’s bedroom window. I saw her shadow move across the pane, her arms lifted over her head, and I immediately thought: home from work, changing her clothes, bedroom. I felt myself go cold. Something shot from my neck to my feet.
“Oooweee,” Leon cooed, “look at the divorcée...”
I don’t think I ever felt fury like that, not before and not since. I ran to those boys with blood in my eyes, and even though they were bigger than me, I jumped them from behind and grabbed Leon by the neck and threw punches at anything that moved, anything at all.
Walking
MY MOTHER PULLED ON her white tweed coat and shook her shoulders beneath it, letting it settle. She had spent her final years doing hair and makeup for homebound elderly women, going house to house, keeping their beauty rituals alive. She had three such “appointments” today, she said. I followed her, still dazed, out through the garage.
“Do you want to walk by the lake, Charley?” she said. “It’s so nice this time of day.”
I nodded speechlessly. How much time had passed since I lay in that wet grass, staring at a wreck? How long before someone tracked me down? I could still taste blood in my mouth, and sharp pain came over me in waves; one minute I was neutral, the next minute everything ached. But here I was, walking down my old block, carrying my mother’s purple vinyl bag of hair supplies.
“Mom,” I finally mumbled. “How...?”
“How what, honey?”
I cleared my throat.
“How can you be here?”
“I live here,” she said.
I shook my head.
“Not anymore,” I whispered.
She looked up at the sky.
“You know, the day you were born, the weather was like this. Chilly but nice. It was late afternoon when I went into labor, remember?” (As if I should answer, “Oh, yeah, I remember.”) “That doctor. What was his name? Rapposo? Dr. Rapposo. He told me I had to deliver by six o’clock because his wife was making his favorite supper, and he didn’t want to miss it.”