Those thoughts led me to Father John. He had not been judgmental in the least about my life and he had not tried to convert me. No matter how I tried to poke holes in the things he said—not aggressively, out loud, of course, but politely in my mind—I could find no fault with his words.
The Catholic Church of my youth had been one of guilt and self-denial, but perhaps that was because Nonna, who lived across the street, had so heavily nuanced every Sunday and every religious event with old-world customs and the ancient beliefs of her own childhood. I was very little, but I could remember Nonna and Nonno telling my mother and then me and my brothers what to do.
“Did you get your ashes? It’s Ash Wednesday, you know.”
“Ashes? Seriously?” my mother would say, horrifying her parents.
“Some example you set! Come on, take your kids, get in the car, and I’ll take you down to the church.”
“I don’t want ashes on my forehead. I just washed my hair,” I would complain.
“Come on, Grace,” my mother would say.
“I’ll take you to Holstens for ice cream after,” Nonno would say. “That’s a good girl.”
Well, for a trip to Holstens Brookdale Confections, you could smear ashes all over my face.
And my mother? She objected but in the end did what she was told. They said get in the car, she got in the car. My mother would never have objected to Nonna’s insistence that our whole family observe every saint’s feast day in Christendom.
During Lent, we attended daily Mass and fasted in between meals. The adults refrained from drinking alcohol and the children gave up candy. We kept Christ in Christmas with an Advent wreath, had a molded plastic crèche with about fifty pieces or so, and we never put the baby Jesus in the manger until Christmas morning. Naturally there was always a fight about who got to do it. And Nicky, a natural-born pain in the neck, always put the sheep on the roof and just generally vandalized the Nativity’s sacred mysteries.
We sang our hearts out in the church’s children’s choir and participated in the Christmas pageant. One year when Nicky was about eight, he was a wise man and that caused no end of snickering and rib-poking while he walked up the aisle in a fake beard and long robes. He carried an empty tissue box wrapped in gold foil with colored glass gems glued all over it. Help me. Frank and I died laughing, and seeing us with tears running down our faces, Nicky began to giggle.
That’s just how it was. Nonna and Nonno had dinner with us almost every night. We said grace before every meal and Nonna always heard our prayers at night, correcting us if we made mistakes or left out a dead relative or a saint she thought deserved mention.
All those things, those rituals and observances, were inextricably woven into our lives. We passed our days always mindful of the Church’s liturgical calendar. It had seemed perfectly normal when we were kids, but later on Frank and I began to choke on the excessiveness of it all. Nicky, of course, went through all the motions, never allowing a cloud of doubt to mess up his pretty head.
Our obsessive Catholicism had probably driven Frank to study philosophy and me to reject any organized religious faith. Regina had reeled Frank back into the Church’s good graces, but there was no one to do the same for me. The brand of Catholicism my family practiced was so easy to walk away from and twice as difficult to reclaim. It was just too much from either end.
I pulled into my parents’ driveway and Frank’s car was there. I sighed and realized that I sighed with the same resolution as my mother did when there was a challenge ahead and a job to be done. But for all my anxiety about so many different things, I was always slightly giddy with excitement to be home.
I went in through the front door—it was Thanksgiving, remember? No garage entrance for me that day. Even though I had never lived in that house, I honored all the customs.
The living room was blockaded with two long folding tables and every chair we owned. The tables were draped to the floor in big pieces of olive green velvet, and thrown over them were some kind of Indian bedspreads laid on the bias. Mom had bought centerpieces of mums and some kind of berries and had stuffed them in glass pumpkins. There was a beautiful bentwood cornucopia on top of the entertainment center filled with silk flowers. Last year’s Christmas cards with photographs had finally been put away, but the old wedding favors were just pushed to the side. What did I expect?
“Hi!” I said. “Happy Thanksgiving!”
“Oh! Aunt Grace! You’re home! Happy Thanksgiving to you, too!” my niece, Lisa, said. “Hey, you guys! Aunt Grace is home!”
“I’ll be right back.” I went to throw my weekend bag in my room.
Little Lisa’s heavy black eyeliner and colloquial “you guys” marked her as someone from north of suspicion, just as I did when I said “soda.” I giggled because I had never divided the country in those terms until that very second and I realized how ridiculous it was. If she had said “y’all,” it would have seemed equally ridiculous, mangled by a New Jersey accent.
“Grace? Grace?”
It was my mother calling me. I envisioned her winding her way through our eccentric cast of characters just to see my face as though I had been gone for years. She burst into my room, hugged me and then sighed with a vehemence that revealed her obvious exhaustion.
“You’re home safe and now the holiday can begin!”
“Ma! You sound like I’ve been living in Mozambique! And look at you; the sun’s still high and you’re already dragging. You gotta let me help you, okay?”
“Are you kidding? I even bought you your own apron! My feet are throbbing.”
I made the rounds of hellos and inquiries. Hi, Nonna. How are you feeling? How much weight have you lost? She actually did look a little thinner. Her boyfriend was to arrive at three, she claimed to have lost twenty-three pounds, and she was finishing a new crocheted cover for Mom’s tissue box.
“Nice, Nonna! An Indian-corn motif!”
“Yeah, I thought it was classier than the Pilgrims from last year.”
“It’s very nice. Really.”
What could one say?
“Nonno told me he liked it last night.”
“And what does he say about your friend George?”
“That he might be cheating in his canasta game—I should watch him very closely.”
“Yeah. Keep a close eye on him!”
I ruffled the hair of my two nephews, who moaned at the interruption of their Xbox game, and in the kitchen I gave Regina a hug.
“Hey, you!” she said, and hugged me back.
“Hey, yourself! You losing weight, too?” She looked thinner.
“Yeah, right. I’m gaining a pound a day. It’s the tunic.”
“Sure. Where are the men?”
“Hurry outside and say hello to your father and your brothers and then get yourself back in here! I’ll tell you it’s a good thing I have that extra oven in the garage!”
“Ma? On Thanksgiving you could use three stoves and ovens,” I said, taking a huge shrimp from a platter and loading it with cocktail sauce.
“Don’t you dare pick at my food!” Mom slapped my hand. “Go, go!”
Outside, Dad was at the grill drinking beer with Nicky and Frank and basting his turkey. We all hugged and kissed.
“We’ve been out here since eight o’clock this morning! It’s a twenty-eight-pounder,” he said. “I told that guy up at the Piggly Wiggly I wanted the biggest goddamn turkey he could find! This little pip-squeak tries to tell me that I should cook two fourteen-pounders and I says to him, Whaddaya saying? It don’t look right to have two turkeys! There’s people starving out there!”
“You’re absolutely right, Dad,” Nicky said, his nose nearly in the crease of my father’s butt.
“It’s very impressive,” I said. “Reminds me of that movie…what’s that old movie where they cook that kid’s pet turkey? And everybody cries at the table?” They looked at me like I had lost my mind. “Well, I would think that turkeys make lousy pets anyway
. I’m going inside.”
I settled into the kitchen with Mom and Regina. The entire house was swollen with sounds and mouthwatering smells as my mom, Regina and I worked on dinner.
“So where are Marianne and her mother?” I said.
“Late,” my mother said.
“Probably stuffing her bra,” Regina said to me under her breath. “Right?”
“What was that? She’s bringing a pecan pie,” Mom said.
“Nothing. I hate pecan pie for Thanksgiving,” I said. “That’s for Christmas. She never heard of pumpkin pie?”
“And she’s only bringing one,” Mom said.
“My gavones will eat the whole thing,” Regina said. “Watch. Just watch.”
“You got it!” I said, and continued my nightmare of Annoying Episodes with Marianne. “Watch. Nicky won’t get a slice of her freaking pie because my darling nephews will scarf it and she’ll make a whole scene. Uck. I can’t stand her. Sorry.”
“Well, let’s just try to be nice to her, dear,” Mom said.
“Only for you, Ma. Only for you.”
The doorbell rang. It was George Zabrowski arriving like an aging Uncle Fester. He had a corsage for Nonna, cut flowers for my mother and the biggest box of Russell Stover chocolates I had ever seen. Old George wore a nice tweed sport coat and a tie, his remaining hair was wet-combed, and when he got closer to shake my hand, he smelled like he’d forgotten he had put on cologne the first time.
“So here’s the wonderful and beautiful granddaughter I haven’t seen since the day I met your Nonna,” he said.
Okay, I take back that little dig about him and his cologne.
“Yep! That’s me!” I blushed because don’t you know this old coot took my hand and kissed it? I adored him. Right then and there I fell in love with an old Polish geezer. Well, how do you like that?
I looked over to Regina as he kissed her hand, too. By the time he got to Mom, she was holding this Miss America bouquet of flowers to her bosom and grinning like a young girl as he kissed her hand and then held it, telling her how honored he was to spend such an important day with our family.
I wanted to say, Wait, you’ll see what a pack of jackals we are, but before I could make a smart remark, my mother spoke.
“Oh, no, George, the honor is ours to have you! Would you like a shrimp?”
Well, it went on like that, with George eating the forbidden shrimp and flattering everyone until he depleted his repertoire of superlatives to heap on females. Normally I would have gagged, but all I could think was how great it was that Nonna had this sweet old guy who came into her life with a trunk filled with courtly mannerisms. He was perfect for her. Even if he was full of it.
At ten minutes to four, ten minutes before we were to sit down, Marianne and her mother arrived.
Marianne, nearly breathless with her specialness, brought her pie into the kitchen and placed it on the counter like she’d taught Martha Stewart how to bake. “Hey! How y’all doing?” Naturally, the pie was in a ceramic pie container with a fake cherry pie for a cover.
“She’s gonna waste my poor son’s last dime,” Mom whispered, bending down to me as I pulled a casserole out of the oven.
I stood up and had a look at her. Of course she was wearing a tight cotton turtleneck covered in tiny turkeys dressed like Pilgrims. And had a fresh French manicure.
“Hi, Marianne,” I said, wondering if she realized her entire ensemble was a size too small. “Where’s your mom?”
“Oh! I didn’t see you there, Grace! How’s my maid of honor? Happy Thanksgiving, y’all! Mama’s in the living room.”
“Same to you,” Regina said. “Your bad boy is outside hydrating with mine.”
Marianne had no clue what hydrating meant. I was sure of it.
“Tell Al to bring in the bird,” Mom said. “Everyone is starving.”
We cleared the center island and put three bottles of Chianti and two bottles of Pellegrino on the table. The Pellegrino was a special request from Nonna for the sake of her romance so we wouldn’t look like a band of Gypsies, drinking water from the tap.
The turkey was given an exalted position on the end of the island on an enormous cutting board, right by the outlet, so Dad could use his electric knife to carve. All the other dishes of food were lined up like soldiers on warming trays with serving utensils by their sides. We all found our way to the table except for little Lisa.
“That turkey could be a toddler,” I said to Regina.
“That’s a little sick,” she said with a laugh. “Lisa! Come on! We’re gonna say grace! Teenagers,” she said. “Did you notice that eye makeup?”
“Who cares?” I said. “It washes off.”
Well, here came trouble out of the guest room and swishing into the living room, where we were all gathered around the table. Lisa had changed into the kind of lace-trimmed silky camisole that is popular with young girls and a very short skirt that was destined to give Big Al, and possibly Frank, agita like they never had in their lives. Her bra straps, from the bra she had yet to need, were showing. Big Al hadn’t seen her yet, but Frank’s eyes were bulging.
“In the name of the Father…” Big Al began.
Frank shot Regina a death ray. Regina looked back at him as if to say, Who knew?
“And of the Son…”
Any minute now, I thought. But we got through Dad’s special grace for the holiday. Just as Mom and I got up to get the platters of antipasto, Big Al went off like a Scud missile.
“Holy Mother! What the hell? Regina! Cover your daughter!”
“Pop! What?” Lisa said with the expected defiance.
“Oh, God,” Regina said.
“What?” Lisa said again.
“You come to my table in your underwear? Where’s your respect? Answer me that?” He turned to Regina. “You let your daughter dress like a putana? Whaddaya, nuts? You want—”
“Calm down, Al,” my mother said, in a low voice everyone heard. “We have guests!”
“Maybe you had better go put on a sweater, sweetie,” Regina said.
“No!”
“You’re not sitting at my table half-naked!” Dad shouted.
“What’s the problem?” Nonna said.
“Your great-granddaughter is not dressed decent!” Dad said.
“Stand up, honey,” Nonna said. “Stand up.”
Lisa, more angry than humiliated, stood. Nonna gave her the once-over. And then here came Marianne’s two cents.
“Well, it is a little skimpy, hon. I think I might wear a jacket if I were—”
“Stay out of this,” I hissed.
“Watch it, Grace…” Nicky said.
“You watch it, too!” I said back to him.
“I think she looks adorable!” Nonna said. “Now, sit! Let’s eat!”
My father had been trumped by Nonna and shrugged his shoulders. But it didn’t matter to Lisa that she’d quickly been exonerated by the queen of Naples. Lisa had been demoralized and singled out for a public reprimand. Therefore, she was entitled to stew in her self-righteous indignation, and dammit, she was going to stew and sulk for the remainder of the meal.
“Don’t mind Pop; he can be a poop,” I whispered to her between the tortellini in brodo, the oysters on the half shell and three more bottles of Asti Spumante that Dad had set aside for the day.
That made her smile and she said, “No duh.”
Peace was restored.
When it was time to carve the turkey, we all got up and went back to the kitchen. One by one, the plates were piled high with meat, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, string beans with garlic and bread crumbs, whipped sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, breaded cauliflower and asparagus. And just in case we overlooked a food group, there was a platter of pickles, olives and celery and dishes of relishes.
“Boy, if I didn’t have to get up for more food, I wouldn’t get any exercise at all,” Regina said.
“Reg, I like my women to look like women,” Frank said in
his most manly voice, and slapped her on the backside.
“Hey!” she said, pretending to be annoyed. Then she stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. They looked at each other the same way Michael and I looked at each other and I missed Michael then.
Suddenly I realized that Nonna was with a Polish man. How come it was permissible for her to have a Polish boyfriend and my Irish one wasn’t worthy? Then I remembered, it was because of Michael that I led a godless existence. Right. Have another glass of wine, Grace. I could say I had made friends with a priest and then see how that went over with the ruling party. As soon as we all sat down again, I did.
“Guess what, Dad? I met a priest.”
“Where? At Mass?”
“No. At his rectory.”
“What were you doing in a rectory?”
You see, this is the problem with alcohol. I had intended to keep the details of my trip to Mexico under wraps until the last possible moment. But once you poured more than two glasses of wine for me, I would tell you anything you wanted to know. I might even make some stuff up. It wasn’t my finest personal quality and I knew it. But I wasn’t going to lie to my family at Thanksgiving. That was just too tacky.
“Well, here’s the story.”
I told my father all about the trip and how excited all the old people were about it. Then I told him—not that he cared, but I made him listen anyway—that Bomze had given me some time off to care for Michael, and in return I was to figure out how I was going to get the trip organized for as little money as possible.
“So how’s it going?”
“Michael?”
“No. The pilgrimage.”
“Well, I got the airfare all donated, but I can’t find hotel rooms yet.”
“Old people shouldn’t have to stay in some dump,” Dad said.
“What’s that?” Nonna said.
“I said, old people making a trip to see the Blessed Mother in Mexico City should stay in a nice place that’s safe and, you know, nice.”