Elvin drove Cathy’s shiny-new Day-Glo VW van. They took Route 17 to Route 87, which led them past Cathy’s hometown, Paramus, New Jersey, not yet famous for its malls. She gave the whole town the finger, waving it angrily out the window, throwing her whole body into the effort, her stringy hair flipping around her head. She singled out her high school and her parents: “Fuck you, Bergen Catholic! Fuck you, Mom! Fuck you, Dad!”
When she settled back down into her seat, she hugged Elvin’s thin, muscular arm.
My mom said, cheerfully, “Nice van. It must have been expensive. Did you buy it yourself?”
Cathy turned around and silently glared at my mother, who shrugged innocently.
They passed around a couple of joints. My mother was nervous about getting stoned, but she was curious. She shook her head the first few times the lit joint passed, but then once she saw that it didn’t cause seizures, she took a few hits. Nothing happened at first. Eventually she got fuzzy-headed, giggly, and sleepy. She laid her head down in Anthony’s lap, and he stroked her hair. It finally hit her that she was here, with him, like this, after so many years. She felt peaceful for the first time in as far back as she could remember.
Anthony rattled off questions. He wanted her to tell him where she’d been, what she’d seen, what she’d done. He said, “What do you think of this country? All of our hostility? It’s all so ugly. And everybody dead. Bobby Kennedy and King.”
Elvin spoke up. “And Vietnam’s got 542,000 of our brothers.”
“This is one fucked-up world,” Anthony said.
“But,” my mother said, “we landed on the moon, too. It isn’t all tragedy.”
“I don’t know,” Anthony said. “It seems like a hoax to me. I mean, if you look close at the pictures, you can see the air bubbles. It was probably all Hollywood underwater bullshit. I don’t trust anyone, especially not anything government-run officially American.”
“I would believe that,” Elvin said.
“Me, too,” said Cathy.
My mother thought about telling Anthony about the miscarriage, the blood, the polio-stricken nun; about how she almost drowned because she wanted to be loved. She could have told him about Juniper Fiske and her fiancé, Guy; how she was helping Juniper plan the wedding, now only four weeks away; how she’d glimpsed the golden life, but that she didn’t feel like she fit in there any more than she did here. She said, “I’m almost a nurse.”
Cathy glanced at my mother and rolled her eyes, which my mother read as a feminist critique, something like Typical women’s work.
My mother quickly switched the subject. “Do you still take pictures? I thought you’d be shooting the war.”
“A Buddhist threw my camera out of a bus. He told me that I shouldn’t document and witness but should experience life. I work part time at a magazine shop. I want to buy a new camera, I think. I don’t know. Maybe he’s right—you know, experience life.”
“And are you going to school?”
“This is my education. This and genus Psilocybe straight from the Mexican highlands.”
“ ’Shrooms,” Cathy explained before my mother had time to ask. “Magic mushrooms?” she said, her voice rising, meaning Ever heard of them?
“But did you get drafted?”
“I’d never serve.”
“Did you burn your draft card?”
“No, I’m 4-F, because of my eye,” he said, a little embarrassed. “But I would have burned my draft card. Dino wanted me to serve any way possible. He wanted to pull some strings and get me a desk job or something. He wants me to do my duty, serve my country, and all of that patriotic bullshit. I told him I’d rather save the world than take part in blowing it up. He didn’t get it. Some people just don’t get it. Nothing’s so simple like it used to be. I’m not so innocent. Are you?”
“No,” she said. “Not at all.”
But they were still innocent, something within them pure and sweet, or I wouldn’t be here. I imagine them on their way to Wallkill, New York, back to a time when I wasn’t myself but two parts, that I was swimming inside Anthony with my small, flicking tail and that I was the ticking egg waiting patiently inside my mother, and the two of them in the Day-Glo van, a sleek ship hurtling them toward an unavoidable future.
They made it up to Wallkill, pulling over only once to pee by the roadside. It was around seven o’clock. The concert had already started. Eventually, the cars in front of them stopped, the road jammed up tight. The curtained windows had kept the van dark even when it had been midafternoon. They stepped out, blinking. My mother felt disoriented. By the time they walked to a spot where they could pop their tent, my mother was covered with little red mosquito bites and it had started to rain. She hated it there, the crowds, the mud-smeared bodies, everyone so out of control. She was soaking wet, trying to pull her shirt away from her chest, her bra completely outlined in revealing detail, seams and all. No one else seemed to mind the rain. Cathy’s white shirt was plastered to her little braless tits. Elvin’s Afro glistened, his white Indian silk shirt sleek against his skin. Anthony took off his shirt and let the rain beat down on him.
Cathy shoved her guitar case into the tent—my mother had already been subjected to a number of renditions of “There But for Fortune” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” in Cathy’s high, shaky voice, which sounded nothing like Joan Baez even on a very bad day—and she was relieved. Elvin wanted to see what kind of mushrooms they could get, and so eventually he and Cathy headed off into the crowd.
The tent had enough room for only two—plus a guitar case. Dotty and Anthony climbed in. This was their chance for privacy. And this is the moment that is the hardest for me, the moment I see my mother at her weakest, feeling desperate and alone—she was truly lonesome, her father newly dead, her mother now no longer really her mother. And yet there they are in my mind, two kids, working at buttons and zippers while they kiss, and soon enough he is inside of her, their bodies rocking together slow and then fast and I am shot out and swimming for love and I am the love waiting. That’s all it took.
I imagine them after, the tent so hot they can barely breathe in it, only a small breeze kicking open the front flap. I imagine them grinning like kids holding sparklers in the dark. And as many times as I have wished I could have stopped my mother, as hard as this romance was for my mother, this doomed love affair, I would not change it now if I could. How could I change it without sacrificing myself? There is something so right about the scene, sweet and sad, their young bodies flushed with blood, so perfect.
Finally they jiggled into their clothes and climbed out of the tent. They couldn’t hear the music, it was so far away, but they could hear roaring in the distance, the crowd all around them. Everyone was now pressing in, touching each other. My mother felt out of control as if the crowd around her was becoming the body of an animal, a snake maybe, and she was only one small muscle, one tiny scale. She was hungry. She had to go to the bathroom.
Anthony told her to just squat, that no one would care. He said, “You’ll never find a Porta Potti without a ten-hour line.”
“I wouldn’t pee in one if I did,” she said.
He gave her a banana from his bag. It was bruised and overripe. He turned to her. “I’ve got to step inside it, deeper. Let’s live it. Come on, Dotty. Come with me.” And it seemed to her like a proposal, not quite of marriage but a commitment to him and to an experience, an entire life with him that stretched out in front of her, wildly twisting like a snake. His one eye shining, his black patch wet, he stared into her eyes. He held her hands up next to his chest. He was serious, honest; this was what he wanted. “C’mon,” he urged. “I’ve been waiting forever to be a part of something this cosmic. Come with me.”
She said, “No, I can’t.” It was simple. She couldn’t go, and he had to. He threw back his head and stared up at the sky; the rain washing over his face. His hands slipped from hers.
“I won’t be gone too long,” he said. “I’ll come fo
r you.” He turned away from her without looking back. She watched his bare muscled shoulders as he made his way through the crowd, deeper and deeper, until it swallowed him whole, and he was gone.
My mother crawled inside the tent and listened to the crowd shifting around her, pressing in. She waited for an hour or two. Cathy and Elvin never returned and neither did Anthony. Finally someone fell onto the tent, bending the support beam, and so my mother got out, leaving it there crumpled. She headed away from the music, until finally she found a spot that wasn’t so crowded. She pulled down her jeans and squatted in the mud to pee. She ate the banana and trudged on, head down, winding through the mud-caked bodies. She sat down now and then to rest and even doze a bit.
Eventually dawn broke. By midmorning, she got to the road. She saw a garbage truck rumbling by with a load of trash. It passed her, rolling along slowly, and holding onto the back was a kid with curly hair. He was also covered in welts. She called out to him and ran after the truck. He held out his hand and hoisted her up. He was younger, going into his senior year of high school, as it turned out. He talked a lot, about basketball and his coach and his dad. He said he’d temporarily misplaced his good friend, but just after he’d said it, he mentioned the garbage, its sweet awful smell, something poetic that made the loss seem more permanent. She was thinking about her clothes folded on top of her shoes on the back of Anthony’s toilet and it made her cry. She and the kid were quiet, watching the endless road that was crammed with cars and people, face after face, and Dotty took them all in, each one, until she thought she would explode.
15
The euchre party was set for a Thursday, but that morning Marianne Focetti called to tell Ruby that her Italian tiler, Aldo, hadn’t finished the bathroom. “He’s an artist, Ruby. You can’t rush art.”
Because the euchre party was held under the auspices of a casual get-together and not all-out war, Ruby couldn’t refuse to have it at her place, so she consented to hosting. She was frantic, charging around with her mop and bucket, clipping at our heels with the vacuum, all the time saying, “This is what she wants. To get me all upset. She’s playing hardball. Can’t you see it?”
My mother helped Ruby scrub, and I was in charge of a kitchen counter of egg timers for Ruby’s spezzato and muffuletta: one timer for simmering rice, one for bread in the oven, and one for a pan of mushrooms, peppers, and onions that I was to stir diligently, slowly, without stopping, except to get Ruby if a timer dinged.
Church and Dino were ordered around, hauling her heavy velvet furniture from one spot to the next to make space for card tables. When Dino wasn’t lifting, he was pacing back and forth from his study where there was an important ball game on his TV, which seemed to make him extremely nervous. He hated to miss a second of his Yankees on the field. In retrospect, I suspect that Dino was a little compulsive about his routines, always five o’clock, always the same drink, always the same pants, but this time, although he was investing a lot of energy into keeping up with the game, play by play, I think he was also anxious about finding Anthony. He said he’d “put the word out,” which seemed like code for some underground system of family connections. Of course Church smelled mafia. In any case, Dino was nervous about getting the news, worried about what he might learn. Even Jacko was more tense than usual, his nails clicking and skidding as he jogged after Ruby, his stunted face bobbling in the plastic funnel.
I was feeling a lot of pressure as well, to perform, not only at euchre but at appropriate euchre conversation and mores. Was I good enough to mingle with the euchre elite, the euchre intelligentsia? Despite the fact that I looked the part—hair teased, nails done, dressed in the acceptable uniform of matching-separates flashy leisure wear—I wasn’t absolutely confident.
My mother, however, seemed not the least bit rattled. It was a Thursday, and the mail carrier had brought a letter forwarded from Keene by Mrs. Shepherd, the maid, from Tati and Bobo. It was a chastising letter from Tati, really; Bobo only signed her named in faint pencil at the end. “Why didn’t you tell us that my brilliant Robert was chosen for the conference? We had no idea he was so highly regarded.”
My mother laughed, a loud cackle so perfectly euchre appropriate. She was dressed impeccably, her hair so stiffly sprayed it would go up in a blue flame if lit. “So,” she said. “He’s coming back.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Conferences end. He could have made his excuse more permanent, an illness that required treatment in Arizona, something chronic, if he planned on staying. But this, well, he’ll be coming home, that’s all; it’s clear.”
“Then what?” I asked, not rudely, just curious, naïve. “What are you going to say?”
My mother stopped laughing. “He won’t know what hit him,” she said.
This news didn’t relax me at all. I envisioned both fathers coming to claim me: Anthony Pantuliano being escorted in by a pair of Dino’s henchmen—a vision supplied by Church’s mobster-populated imagination—a wild, rugged, bushy-haired, big-headed man, his one eye darting around nervously because he is bookended by the two blockheads in big-shouldered suits and dark sunglasses, and then Bob Jablonski limping up the front steps in his Bermuda shorts, his real leg a guilty Arizona tan but his fake leg still true to us, loyally pinkish white, still shiny and hairless with its little black sock and shoe and laces, maybe getting down on his knees, maybe not. And my mother, the third point of the triangle, smoking casually, almost cocky in her euchre party outfit, and me standing in the middle, not knowing what to do, my chest a buzzing hive.
The euchre party started at two. The regulars were a mangy group. Ruby complained about Mrs. Totello because she would always argue that it was better to get your meat at Malone’s, not Scaglione’s, when everyone knew she was just sticking up for her husband, an Irishman whose cousin owned Malone’s. Mrs. Allesandrini always wanted to brag about her disastrously untalented children, one a garage attendant, one a house painter, both in and out of rehab, always between jobs, with illegitimate children. Ruby could mimic her perfectly: “Oh, Donny’s hoping any day to get a call to park cars over at the lot in Jersey City. He’s a good boy.” Mrs. Totello and Mrs. Alessandrini were no real challenge, not to mention the aged, toothless Mrs. Marcucci, who couldn’t tell her hearts from her diamonds.
Marianne Focetti was the true danger. She was really after Ruby—and capable of throwing anything at us. We were her targets, Ruby claimed. Nothing was sacred. Where Ruby got her lamp shades, for example, was an opportunity for intense scrutiny. “If you don’t know the right answer,” she warned, “just say you can’t remember. You’re from out of town. Eat a cannoli.”
Marianne Focetti arrived with her own entourage of small chubby women in stretchy clothes. She was ferret-like, chewing a small wad of gum fiercely, her eyes clipping around the house. Dino kissed her cheek, said his hellos, and retreated, pulling Church with him, into his study. Jacko sniffed the polished toes poking out of their open-toed sandal pumps.
Marianne said, “Oh, this color!” pointing at the walls. “Avocado! It brings back memories. It matches the kitchen appliances I had in the ’70s. Remember?” She lowered her voice and said to Ruby, “Don’t you hate inheriting the previous owner’s mistakes?”
Ruby said crisply, “We’ve lived in this house for twelve years. You can assume all the decisions are mine.”
It was a bad start. Marianne came across amusing, and Ruby, defensive. My mother and I shifted nervously; Ruby’s kitchen was filled with avocado-colored appliances from the ’70s. We glanced at each other conspiratorially, agreeing via mental telepathy to keep Marianne out of the green kitchen. The euchre began slowly. I was overplaying, reacting too quickly, not being patient. My mother kicked me under the table. Ruby was dishing out the cards, shuffling maniacally, like a card shark, smoking like a fiend. It was tense. The smoky air was humid and thick despite the air conditioner rattling in the window. Marianne was winning, up by two games. And then there was a knock
at the door.
It was a boy about my age at the time, fifteen, maybe a scrawny sixteen. Ruby let him in, Jacko yipping. He swiped the baseball cap off his head and nodded at the ladies. “Sorry to innerupt,” he said. “But I got news for Mr. Pantuliano, if you don’t min’ and it’s not much trouble and all.”
“Dino!” Ruby screeched. “Some kid for you.”
Dino charged out from the back room with Church at his heels. “You Sal’s kid? You got word?”
He nodded. “Sal wrote it down for youse.”
“And where is he?”
“Sal?”
“C’mon, kid,” Church said, irritated, doing his best Corleone impersonation.
“Anthony Pantuliano!” Dino said.
“ ‘Ant’ny Pantuliano,’ ” he read from a small slip of white paper unfolded from his back pocket, “ ‘sells cars in Queens. Buicks, good prices, some deals. He’s been there two and a half years.’ ” He looked up to see if everybody was watching him, and everyone was. “ ‘He’s had two different wives before this, no kids with either of them. His girlfriend’s name’s Josephine, but call’t Jo. They’ve got a two-year-old girl.’ ” He looked up. “Real cute kid.” And then he returned with seriousness to the paper. “ ‘Only a little record, a disorderly in ’70 and ’72, a possession in ’69, that didn’t stick. He was called in for questioning, somethin’ political, in ’72. Nothing after that but parking tickets, and not many.’ ”
“You got an address?”
“Two,” the kid said. “Home and business. He’s a manager at the car dealership. Buicks, like I said. Before that”—and he returned his attention to the slip of paper—“ ‘He worked installing windows, as a postman. He parked cars at a hotel, but then he wrecked one.’ ”
“A car salesman!” Dino said. “And this is American morality? I thought he was going to save us from the horrors of capitalism. He buckled! You see it? He gave in!” Dino pointed his finger in the air, vindicated. “And he is so morally respectable!” He shook his head.