“What lie? You told me my mother was crazy. Is that a lie? The woman has lost her mind.” Church had regained his unflappable exterior.
I decided to attempt to say what was wrong with Juniper Fiske and Dotty Jablonski by taking a look at advertising from a historical perspective. It’s one of my favorite pastimes: how advertising lays it all out for you, our dirtiest secrets, our favorite lies, our most desperate fears, more honestly than anywhere else, the ugliness of my job. I’ve looked through magazine after magazine, especially the ones from that 1969 summer my mother’s father died and I was conceived in a tent at Woodstock. My mother was reading Juniper’s Ladies’ Home Journals. My mother was trying to envision the rest of her life, looking at articles on brushing her eyebrows and recipes for pot roast and, between those pages, the advertising promising what could be hers.
“Our mothers were afraid of the untidiness of the subconscious and bang! there’s an ad for Perma-Prest sleepwear from Sears, two girls waking up wrinkle free and happy. They were afraid of their bodies, and there’s the feminine hygiene spray.” I glanced at Church to see if he was following. He seemed vaguely interested. “They were afraid of the bomb, the end of the world as they knew it—and this is my favorite—there in the back is an advertisement for sunglasses, special lenses that would darken instantly to protect observers’ eyes from the blinding light flash of an atom or hydrogen bomb. They developed Substance N, in honor of Admiral Nimitz, who received the surrender of the Japanese on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, and put it in their sunglasses to keep Juniper’s and Dotty’s eyes safe. They called themselves the Military Optical Company, located in Kansas City. It was such a beautifully worded advertisement that our mothers could get the impression if they had a pair of these sunglasses and the bomb dropped, they would be “observers,” sipping martinis on a veranda, watching the distant fireworks of an atomic holocaust.”
“I don’t think Juniper was ever really afraid of the A-bomb. Maybe you don’t realize how much money she comes from.”
“It’s so perfect,” I said. “It’s a perfect example.”
“Of what?”
“Of what we’re talking about! Look, I’m not just selling a product, marketing research, targeting my truest consumer in my little office all day long. I’m psychoanalyzing a culture, putting the nation on the couch. I’m not only monkeying with the American mind—”
“—and that’s a delicate thing—”
“I’m creating the American mind. I had a friend tell me that she actually wanted to start smoking because the people on the nicotine patches looked so damn happy.”
“You know what’s wrong with you, Lissy? It’s that you don’t believe in anything. Do you believe in God?”
“I believe I’m ignorant.”
“And Jesus?”
“It’s a great story. I know it inside and out.”
“It doesn’t matter what you believe in; you just have to have the ability to have faith. You think because you can’t believe in what your mother believed in—and you can’t, I agree; it’s not possible—then you don’t believe in anything. You lack inventiveness.”
“What should I have faith in?”
“If you believe in total crap, then crap will save you.” He paused. “Look at me, for example. I believe in the American middle class—you told me that, right? My own private religion—and one day, if I believe in it strongly enough, it will save me.”
“The American dream didn’t save my mother,” I said.
“But didn’t it?” With that, Church took off his sports coat, balled it up into a makeshift pillow against the window, and dozed off. I agreed with him at least that I couldn’t believe in what my mother had believed in. But Church didn’t understand what was at stake, that this wasn’t just rhetoric; I was pregnant. I had made sure that I was on the other side of the advertising game. I was selling the golden life through minivans and new siding, lemon-scented dish detergent and nonstaining lipsticks. Buying bit by bit, in tiny ways, but not buying the entire dream at least. Not the way my mother had. Not completely selling out like Anthony Pantuliano, hawking Buicks—their slogan being A New Symbol for Quality in America. But Church was right. I had no faith in anything, not even my own body. I’d always been afraid of my crumbling ovaries, my flimsy fallopian tubes, my dank, possibly tumorous uterus—it was a safe way to live, in fear. But now swollen with life, I had to make decisions, and I wasn’t sure what those decisions were. I felt like I had nothing to go on but my mother’s example—an effect of my habit of living her life. But I was going to be a mother. What would I teach my child about life? Could I keep making the same mistakes?
I learned later that when my father’s chest pains started, he had been wearing a yellow golf shirt and bright yellow golf pants with migrating geese stitched into them. He’d been playing alone, because his normal Tuesday-Thursday partner had to have some bridgework done. But he’d bumped into Bill Ragsdale, a podiatrist who’d done my mother’s bunions, and Arch Polkey, a professor from Keene State College, an odd bachelor, a quiet chubby fellow. They’d been laughing because Arch was wearing pants identical to my father’s, bright yellow with the migrating geese stitched into them. And then my father’s face blanched. He grabbed the front of his golf shirt and sat down on the green.
There were three messages on the machine that night, two from my mother (one from the hospital and one from home) and the last call from Kitty. She hadn’t been at my place when we arrived, not answering at her new number, and Church had been a little worried. It wasn’t her night to strip and it was getting late.
“Your father’s in the hospital.” My mother had left the message. “He had chest pains. We’re at the hospital still. I’ll call you back. Now there’s no need to rush home. We’re fine.” I translated this as: Rush home.
The next message was better news. He was doing very well, but my mother sounded no better. He’d been feeling fine, shooing doctors away from him, asking to go home, and the doctor had released him. They were at home now, trying to rest. My mother sounded exhausted, her voice shaky. I was shaky, too. My hands were sweaty, my head light, and I was already tired and hungry, from the morning sickness, that dizzy washed-out feeling from travel and, now, fear. I ate some bread, balling up the soft center, but it was hard to swallow down. I drank three glasses of juice.
The third message was from Kitty. It was short and sweet. “I am with a movie guy, Churchie, who make movies. I love this guy now. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.”
Church fell back on the sofa like he’d been punched. “What does that mean?”
“That’s Kitty Hawk,” I said.
I walked to my bedroom and started to repack. Church followed me, incensed as if it were my fault Kitty was going to ditch him for “a movie guy.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Look, I’ve told you how I felt about this from the start. There are no surprises here.”
Church plopped down on my bed. “You know he doesn’t make movies. You know that, don’t you? He’s lying to her.”
I picked up the phone and called my office secretary, the type who’s always home but never answers because she’s busy eating popcorn and watching Star Trek with her five cats, the type of shut-in who mistook a Hacky Sack sitting on someone’s desk for a pincushion although she’s twenty-five and should know better. I told her I’d be out of the office the next day, that I’d call soon. I didn’t call my parents. I didn’t want to wake them. When I walked back into the living room, Church followed again and sat down on the couch.
“You don’t understand Kitty,” he said. “She’s a lost soul. Her mother was a whore, Lissy. Growing up, she saw her mom fucking guys all the time.”
“I don’t know if you can believe everything she says,” I said, even though what he said sounded right—it sounded like the truth of that toughened sadness I’d seen in her, the feeling I’d gotten that she was a survivor.
“Lissy, w
ho would lie about her mom being a whore, about ‘sucky fucky’ and shit like that?”
I didn’t want to have to think about Kitty Hawk, about her terrible childhood, about her soul, but I could feel my heart give a little in my chest. I offered to take Church home with me, to get away from the whole scene. “It won’t be an upper, but you won’t be alone,” I said.
“I won’t be alone, because she’s coming back. I’ll call up Matt. I’ll drag Giggy away from Elsbeth’s harness. We’ll do vodka water ices and bitch about women. She’ll come back, Lissy.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to sound positive. “You’re probably right.”
Church’s dad called the Pantulianos again one night late in the summer that never happened. He had a brief talk with my mother first. Church and I were eating Oreo cookie ice cream. My mother walked as far away from us as the cord would allow, saying things like “How awful,” and “How long has this been going on?” and “Oh, I had no idea.” Guy and my mother made some sort of arrangement. My mother jotted down dates and times on one of Ruby’s memo pads from Assumption Church that read NEED DIRECTIONS? ASK GOD. And then she cupped her hand over the phone and handed it to Church. Their conversation was short, and after Church hung up, he went straight to his room without saying anything to anybody. It was then that my mother explained, “Juniper’s gone over the edge. Dinah’s going to take over for a while. His dad wants him home.”
Juniper Fiske had had a complete nervous breakdown. She was admitted into McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. It was plush and privately run. She would end up staying there for two weeks. This was a few days after my mother and I had seen Anthony Pantuliano in his front yard in Queens, the night my mother formally introduced me to my grandmother.
We’d gotten back that night to Dino and Ruby’s feeling tired, our mood somewhat reverent. Dino and Ruby and Church were up watching David Letterman. Ruby jumped up. “You need some coffee. I’ll get coffee. We’ll talk.” Dino and Church looked at us questioningly.
My mother declined. “I think we’ll just go on off to bed.”
“Women only,” Ruby said. “Just us gals.”
My mother shook her head, smiled. We went to bed and made an unspoken pact, true to the Verbitski tradition of silence.
I even held out on telling Church, who’d begged me for the whole story the next morning. He whined, “It’s not fair. It’s like ripping the last page out of a novel. It’s like going to The Empire Strikes Back and not finding out that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father and he dies.”
I just shook my head.
Dino and Ruby were also trying to read our expressions, to find out some small detail.
The night Guy called my mother to tell her about Juniper, the Pantulianos took my mother out to a fancy Italian restaurant, what I suspected to be an attempt to get the story out of her before she left for good.
Church and I had the house to ourselves. We sat at the pool’s edge, lit from the pool’s tiled sides, our bare feet dangling in the water. Jacko was asleep in the blue glow of the bug zapper. Church was nervous. He wasn’t talking about it, but I knew he didn’t want to be sent to another boarding school, much less a military academy, if his father could pull it off. He didn’t want to see his mother, whom Piper had told us “looked like a little shriveled weed wasting away in a housecoat, totally pathetic,” and he didn’t want to see Piper either, who’d be attempting to capitalize on the family’s delicate balance of power, making a race for head of the household while their mother was at her weakest. He knew Dinah wouldn’t let her, but he also imagined it would be an ugly struggle.
Church said, “C’mon, Lissy, tell me the story. What happened? Is he your dad or what? Could you tell? Is she still in love with him?”
I couldn’t refuse him. “She didn’t say anything to him. We stayed in the car. We watched him in his front yard.”
“I knew it,” he said. “You didn’t even get to talk to him! See, we have no control. All I want is control over my own life.”
“She still loves him.” As soon as I said it, I knew I was going to cry. I didn’t want Church to see me. I hopped off the edge of the pool and went under, holding my nose. My T-shirt, a red Indian print, lost some of its dye, a little pink cloud swirling as the shirt billowed up around my bra.
When I came up, Church looked bleary eyed, as if he might cry, too. He pulled his polo shirt away from his stomach and wiped his face. It was then that I loved him most, not sadly or gently, but almost breathlessly, the way that my mother was desperate about Anthony, the kind of love that comes from so many needs unanswered. And I think it’s this moment that anchored inside of me, that anchored Church deep inside of me, forever maybe, as some kind of answer.
I swam up to him, tugged on his shorts. I said, “C’mon in.” He slid into the pool and we were face to face. Our first kiss was more like we’d bumped into each other, but then we started kissing as if we did it every day. We were up to our necks. I was balanced on my tiptoes. He dipped underwater to take off his shirt. I struggled mine off over my head. I was nervous, afraid suddenly that I might slip underwater and try to breathe, that I’d come up sputtering and coughing. I was worried about being naked for the first time in front of a boy. I glanced over Church’s shoulder at Jacko and was disturbed to find him watching us with his popping eyes. Our clothes drifted and settled piece by piece to the pool’s floor. We were bony, a striking white where our tan lines faded. My limbs felt rubbery, and I was shaking despite the water’s being end-of-summer warm. I wondered where we would stop—I knew he didn’t have any protection—and then he was suddenly inside me, my legs wrapped around him, my body light, and I thought how amazing it was to have my hands on his skin, his skin on my skin, skin sliding against skin. There was no blood, like I’d heard there would be, and no real pain. It was just our bodies locked together, more out of fear than passion. But I wasn’t able to really feel everything. My mind was reeling. I was mostly afraid of pregnancy, of course, but even at this age it was a mixed bag of emotions. I’d just heard the stories of my mother’s romantic youth while lamenting my own dull life. I wanted to be desperately in love, but I couldn’t be, either. I knew too much. I put my hands on his shoulders and pushed him back. The bug zapper crackled, the drain glugged.
“We can’t do this?” It was a question.
“We can’t?”
“I don’t see how we can.”
“Sure we can. People do it all the time.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. And he looked into my eyes for the first time, really, deeply. “But you know we should. You know that it’s what we should do.” I knew that he was right and I knew exactly what he meant: that we shouldn’t be so afraid, that it’s no way to live, that we should do something. I’ve thought about this moment many times since, and I’ve wondered what might have happened, not pregnancy, really, but what would have happened to the two of us if we’d have been able to fight against that helplessness, that desperation. I’ve wondered if we would have become different people, stronger, less guarded—not that having sex would have made us fall in love with each other, but having sex might have made us the kind of people who could have fallen in love with each other, who would have let ourselves fall in love with each other.
Church backed out and he slid from me. I knew that we had made the right decision and a terrible mistake. We stood there for a minute, too embarrassed to move, and then slowly we let go of each other. He dove underwater to collect our clothes, piece by piece, handing me mine, both of us politely intent on our own nakedness, not watching each other. Half in the pool, half kind of out, we put on enough clothes to cover essentials—Church in sopping boxers and me in my wet underwear and bra—and went to our own bedrooms to change into something dry.
When Dino and Ruby and my mother came home, we were lying down in front of the television, our heads resting on cushions pulled from the sofa, Jacko on a pillow between us. I had hidden
my wet clothes in a plastic bag, stuffed in my suitcase. I assume Church shoved his wet clothes in with his dry. I wondered, too, whether the stolen goods were there, the fridge magnet of Jesus, the beer-can baseball hat, the patriotically crocheted toilet paper cover. The bowling ball had reappeared miraculously in the closet from which it had originally disappeared. I guessed Church hadn’t thought through how exactly he was going to smuggle that one out of the house.
We headed out the next morning after an enormous breakfast of over-easy eggs and triangles of buttery toast. Ruby paced and smoked and made sure we ate until we were stuffed. Dino was quiet. As we got to the door with our bags, Dino pulled out a Yankees cap for Church. He hugged Church and then me. Ruby kissed our cheeks, leaving red lip prints. Soon, we were in the car. Ruby and Dino waved from their front stoop, like the grandparents I never really had, Ruby in her pumps and popping black-eyelined eyes and painted-on eyebrows, Dino in his swishy jogging pants, and Jacko scratching tenaciously at his head guard. I knew that I would miss them.
We arrived after a few rest-stop breaks at the Fiskes’ house on Cape Cod midafternoon. Dinah came out to greet us. She hugged Church, and he responded weakly, the backpack an excuse not to use both of his arms. Piper lingered in the door frame, her arms crossed. I waved from inside the car. She nodded. Church came around to my side of the car. He said, “So, I guess we’ll keep in touch and all that bullshit, right?”
“Right,” I said.
He seemed okay with that, and he backed away from the car. My mom put the car in reverse, and then Church added with a cocky grin, “See you later, Tiger.”
And I started to laugh, and so did he. My mother turned to me as we were pulling out. “What was that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just Church being weird.”
When we got home, the house smelled like layers of Mrs. Shepherd’s Pine-Sol and Pledge. It was clean, and empty, so empty it seemed to echo. We stood quietly for an awkward moment in the entranceway, like trespassers. But then my mother said, “I’ll put on a pot of coffee. Go turn on the radio or something.”