My mother didn’t answer the question. She rose up abruptly from the couch, staring with fixed intensity out the window. I could hear the growl of a rusted-out muffler, and I quickly kneeled on the sofa next to her to peer out the window just as a yellow Nova heaved itself into our driveway. An old woman in a brown coat, on a day much too hot for a coat, stepped out of the car, which was still sputtering and coughing. She looked up at the house with a pinched face and slowly walked to the front door.
“Shit!” my mother said. I glanced across the street and saw Mrs. Defraglia, one hand on her hip, saluting with her trowel to keep the sun out of her eyes as she squinted at the woman on our stoop.
The woman was wrinkled and slightly hunched. She had sandy gray hair and wore orange lipstick, which led me to believe she’d once been redheaded, and there was a sharpness to her in the tight chew-chew of her gum and the tense knot of muscles flexing in her overworked jaw. She was thin. Beneath the coat she wore blue jeans and a thin pink sleeveless T-shirt. A big wad of Play-Doh stuck out from under the sole of one tennis shoe, as if she’d just stepped in neon dog poop. It crumbled a bit as she vigorously rubbed her shoes on the mat. We stood behind the screen door, saying nothing.
Finally, she looked up. “Ruth Spivy,” she said. “Vivi’s ma.”
My mother hustled her in the door and away from the intense gaze of Mrs. Defraglia.
Ruth Spivy went on to say, “Dudley can’t sleep—not since they’re gone—and Tig won’t wean, you know how that goes. And he’s too big, too, you know, near five year old. There’s a lot of tears, you can say, ’tween Tig and Dudley.” She had a way of speaking that made her seem very important, as if everyone should know exactly the daily goings-on of Ruth Spivy, know everyone by first name, because we’d just read about them in the newspaper or watched the soap-opera drama of their life on television, and the accent was hers alone entirely, one I’d never heard before, nor since. “Bilxo come in first place last week. We made up some lost time with that, yes did. Dud said he’s going to give the winnings all to Vivi if only she’ll come home, even if she takes up with that witch again with all the kitties. As long as she’s home and given up on all this foolishness with the good doctor. Although he cured her, yes did. And she stopped all the crying jags and sleeplessness. Thank the good doctor.” She was a little breathless but went on. “Vivi called up last night, you know, yes did. Only told us she wasn’t telling us where she’s gone. Dud loves her. Maybe he loves her too much.” Her eyes filled up with tears for a second, but then she wiped her nose fiercely with the back of her hand and looked at my mother.
I was wide eyed, but my mother just stood in the hallway and listened. Ruth Spivy had removed her coat. But my mother didn’t offer to hang it up. It was there like some ugly peace offering, but perhaps not peaceful at all—maybe more like the Trojan horse. And it was all the more suspicious because it was so out of season. Ruth had kind of pushed it toward my mother at one point in her speech, but my mother had refused to take it, and now it hung awkwardly in Mrs. Spivy’s arms. Without it on, she looked even smaller. Her shoulders were bony and so slouched they couldn’t keep up either of her bra straps, which slung down around her elbows like flopped rabbit ears. Mrs. Spivy had momentarily run out of steam, although she seemed prepared to explain more, if necessary.
My mother didn’t let her go on. “Are you asking me to rein in my husband like he’s a neighborhood dog who’s knocking over trash cans and spreading garbage around people’s lawns with his big wet nose?”
Ruth Spivy was a bit confused. She cocked her head momentarily, like a spaniel. She had a knowledge of dogs, it seemed, but maybe not the same knowledge of pets and neighborhood politics as my mother. “Not sure what you mean there. But I’m asking you to do something, as the good doctor’s wife. The girl’s gotten too old for me.” She paused. It was quiet, and then she urged, “Go and collect what’s yours, missus.”
“Let them go, Mrs. Spivy. That’s my advice to you. Don’t be ignorant.”
Ruth Spivy looked around the house with raised eyebrows. “All ways you can explain ignorant,” she said.
My mother opened the front door and ushered the little woman out onto the stoop, where Ruth Spivy angrily tugged on her shabby brown coat. As I watched her shuffle to her car, I felt suddenly woozy, the woman’s body seeming to tilt, the car to lean, the grass and trees smearing into a wet, greenish blur. My mother shut the door behind her and pressed against it. I listened to Mrs. Spivy’s car labor out of the driveway and down the street. I stood next to the hall closet door and then slid down it, kicking my feet out in front of me, straight legged. I was shocked most, I suppose, by the idea that my mother was so willing to let them go, that she was powerless. I pinched my eyes. My nose started to run. It was the first time I’d cried since lying in my bed that first night waiting for my father to come home.
I must have looked at my mother in a way that caught her off guard. She straightened up and pulled her loose curls on top of her head into a messy ponytail tied with a rubber band from her wrist. She looked at herself in the hall mirror, tugged at the shirttails of her pink oxford, and said, “Don’t cry. He’s my husband, but he’s not your real father.”
It’s funny, but at the moment that my mother told me that my father was not my real father, I must have been thinking about Ruth Spivy’s son Tig, almost five years old, whom she was trying to wean, and Dudley, her husband, loving Vivian too much. I was wondering what it all meant, why Mrs. Spivy was holding on to everything so tightly. I’d even imagined her home as one like Louisa Eppitt’s, a junk-filled, run-down house brimming with knickknacks and carnival trinkets, the yard littered with chicken wire and cement slabs and refrigerators, that she was unable to let go of even the simplest and most useless and ugly things. And then the news came that there was another man, my real father, and my first thought was a physical one: How did my mother let him go? I envisioned my mother and a stranger slipping away from each other, something dreamlike. I envisioned them naked, spinning off and away from each other in space, my mother swelling with me inside her. I wondered if she was joking.
“What?” I said. “What did you say?” I didn’t know yet that my mother was a professional liar, my origin being one of her best lies—not a lie really, as my mother would let me know, but a lack of truth. But she had developed such a full and complete life around deceptions that I didn’t recognize the truth of her tone, the cock of her head, the hands so squarely on the hips. Although this was one of the most truthful things she’d ever said to me, I wasn’t sure I believed her. I wasn’t sure if I knew exactly who was talking to me.
4
My mother never liked Juniper Fiske. Put together by chance as roommates their freshman year, they each stuck it out like a good daughter in an arranged marriage. Juniper’s maiden name was Shriver; she was somehow related to the politicians and socialites and tennis pros. She was wealthy, and I’m sure this impressed my mother. I got the idea that they were so wealthy that Juniper took my mother on as a charity case in the grand tradition of volunteerism among the women in her family. She’d dressed my mother in her outdated angora sweaters in the previous year’s colors. She taught my mother how to daub perfume, ride horses, play tennis, and flirt: the fine points of tittering and gazing.
But I don’t think it was easy work. I have a picture of the two of them together at a homecoming football game at Harvard, visiting Juniper’s friends. Juniper was not an attractive girl. Her nose was too high on her face and her eyes were too close together, but in the photo she’s impeccably dressed, a boutonniere on the lapel of her tailored wool suit, her hair an inch above her shoulders and pulled back in that rich-girl style made popular by the likes of Gloria Vanderbilt. My mother, on the other hand, was a natural beauty with shiny black hair that always looked wet and eyes so large and dark they could make you dizzy, as if you were standing next to a deep hole. Her long hair was pulled back into a loose chignon with soft pincurls in front of her e
ars, the type nowadays seen only on Hassidic Jews. She had a huge smile, inappropriately large, with dark lips and oversize teeth that rose slightly from her face. My mother seemed to be yelling something to the person snapping the picture. She and Juniper were holding hands, but it was more like Juniper was holding her down, the only thing keeping my mother from leaping out of the picture.
My mother hadn’t kept in touch with Juniper personally but had heard through the grapevine that she and Guy had divorced and that Juniper and her daughter Piper and son Church were still living on Cape Cod—the Cod, my mother called it, which even I knew was wrong. I had the impression that my mother thought it a good idea to see an accomplished divorced family, that Juniper would educate her in the ways of single-motherhood, as she had in college in the ways of the upper crust. My mother called it a vacation, but I had the idea that she viewed it more as a crash course.
She called her alma mater for Juniper’s current number and then called Juniper. She said that Juniper was elated to hear from her. In fact, they’d hastily arranged a trip. We packed our bags that afternoon. My mother carried her little Weight Watchers scale in a brown bag and I brought my clarinet. I called Louisa Eppitt to cancel our practice session for later that week, but she wasn’t there, and I was forced to leave a message with her lazy father, a message that I was pretty sure she wouldn’t receive. My mother told the cleaning lady, Mrs. Shepherd, a trustworthy old woman with a frog’s down-turned mouth and a bosom like the cowcatcher on a freight train, about the spare key on the hook in the garage. She instructed her that Dr. Jablonski would be coming home sometime soon but to work around him.
We waved to Mrs. Defraglia, who was now sipping a little golden drink with lots of ice—a drink that could pass for iced tea, but as my mother said on the way out of the drive, “She’s not kidding anyone, drunk midday.”
Mrs. Defraglia pretended quickly to be looking at the sky. “Looks like rain,” she shouted across the street.
We smiled and nodded, but the sky was bright blue, not a cloud in sight.
My real father, Anthony Pantuliano, was a small man, only five foot four, with an oversize head and a penis of mythically large proportions. I learned this while my mother and I were driving the three hours from Keene to Juniper Fiske’s house on Cape Cod in my father’s Toyota Corolla. The light blue sedan was clean, recently vacuumed, with half a roll of Certs in the sparkling ash tray, and the whole car smelled sweet from his aftershave. Of course, I was thinking by then that the aftershave was for Vivian, the Certs for Vivian, that he’d vacuumed the car out for Vivian. He was spruced up for dating. I imagined him nervous and excited, driving to her place in Walpole like a sixteen-year-old who’d borrowed his dad’s car. It was all very disconcerting.
My mother had started the discussion about my biological father as if she were the head of a PTA question-and-answer meeting. “I’ll talk a bit and then open it up for questions. Please feel free to ask me anything.”
But she was rusty and her speech was clumsy and ill prepared. He’d been a presence in her mind for so long—a person with no words, only thoughts, attached to him—that it was hard for her talk about him. She jumped around so much and was so sketchy that I wished she’d conducted it even more like a PTA meeting, complete with the hum of an overhead projector glowing with a tidy timeline of events.
She began, “I was a Verbitski, Polish; he was Italian, Pantuliano. My family was against it.” But all of this sounded like Romeo and Juliet, the Capulets and the Montagues. It had begun to dawn on me that maybe she was trying to make me feel better, that for some twisted reason, a made-up father was better than one who had run off with a redheaded bank teller from dingy little Walpole. On top of that, she was used to her station wagon. My father’s Corolla had more zip, and my mother drove all automatics two-footed, one foot on the gas and one on the brakes, and sometimes, I swear, both at once. She wasn’t the best driver even under the best circumstances, but now she seemed to be overcompensating, alternating brakes and gas just to go forward in a straight line. I felt nauseated, jerking and speeding down the highway, the warm air flipping my hair into my eyes.
“Look, I don’t need this little story you’ve made up,” I said. “I can handle the truth.”
“What truth?” she asked.
“That my father’s a two-timer, that he’s left us,” I said.
My mother pulled the car over onto the shoulder and put the car in neutral. “Listen to me: Your father and I met and got married in twelve days. I supposedly conceived you on our honeymoon and you were born seven months later. You were two months premature and weighed seven pounds eleven ounces with a full head of hair? It doesn’t take a genius to smell something wrong with that stew.”
We sat there for a while not saying a word. The car was suddenly airless.
“So does my real father know about me?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I have no idea where he is.”
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me something you do know.”
“Anthony Pantuliano wanted to experience everything. He was an idealist with a big head and a giant penis.”
I think my mother, perhaps subconsciously, was telling me all about Anthony Pantuliano to get back at my father. They’d made a silent pact, of sorts. He broke the pact by leaving her and so she was free to tell me anything she damn well pleased. She was angry, and she began to tell me the story of her first love out of that anger. She was getting even. But I think that my mother believed she was telling me everything for my own good. Her own mother was a silent, ogrelike woman who told her nothing until it was too late and she was shipping off her teenage daughter to be raised by nuns. My mother realized, at the start of that summer, that she had to raise me the opposite of the way she’d been raised. My father’s affair woke her up, I think, made her open her eyes and take a look around at what she’d thought a good, solid life. That’s when she found me already fifteen with little breasts and a sweet if not pretty face, on the verge of becoming a woman, prepared to figure it all out with or without her. But she had no role model for giving it straight. In retrospect, I think she’d agree that she went overboard. But she was doing the best she could. She was dogged about being truthful. She was winging it.
An eighteen-wheeler rumbled by, making our car shiver, sucking the wind from the windows. “His fully erect penis was the size of a loaf of French bread,” my mother said. “He had only one eye. He was a visionary.”
I’d never heard my mother say the word penis before. Our previous girl talks had been failures of communication, flopped attempts at bonding. She seemed to take on a sudden matter-of-factness, a strange calm, as if she’d finally and absolutely resigned herself to telling all of the sordid details. Perhaps she called on the detached professionalism she’d practiced studying nursing at Simmons. In any case, the news was startling to me. I’d only glimpsed penises—the anatomical health book and coarse, comical, desk-carved varieties. I’d once walked in on my father after a bath before he’d wrapped up in a towel. I’d always thought of the penis as an odd dangling, bobbling pink thing or a sturdy salute. But to think of it suddenly in such graphic terms, so large, it was breathtaking, deeply disturbing. I knew that it was something meant to go inside of a woman, and, at fifteen, this was a scary enough thought with the previous notions I’d had of penis sizes. I’d just become comfortable using slender/regular tampons. I thought, My God, it could have punctured her lung. The part about his having only one eye went virtually unheard.
After the initial shock of my biological father’s distorted proportions, my thoughts turned to the man I’d always known as my father, Bob Jablonski. I wanted to defend him, as if my mother had been the one who’d had the affair. I began to wonder exactly what Bob Jablonski knew about my paternity, if anything, and, if he did, what he thought of it. From my birth, he’d played dad rather convincingly. “Does Dad know he’s not my dad?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. “Of course. He’s not a blockhead, and
it is his field of expertise.”
“How did you break it to him?”
“Well, I didn’t announce it like the Virgin Mary did to Joseph. It was a little different situation, being that no angel passed the word onto me, and he’d had no inspired dream like Joseph to prepare him.”
“So? What did you say?”
“Oh, I hate this feminist crap,” she said. “This idea that my husband is my best friend and I’ve got to confess, spill my bleeding heart out all over him. It’s really a load, if you ask me. Listen, Lissy, this is my point: Don’t tell the truth. I’m not telling you to lie, although lies can be very important. Just don’t go around telling the truth every minute, spouting out a play-by-play of what you’re thinking and feeling.”
Strangely enough, if you look at Mary in the Bible, this is kind of her motto. She is constantly keeping things in her heart, pondering them. Check the Gospel according to Luke, the stuff with the shepherds and finding Jesus in the temple. I imagine Mary making her way through the Bible, keeping all of her sorrow locked up in her heart until it swells from the size of a pocketbook to a suitcase to a steamer trunk, the angels sent in for the regalia of her ascension, hauling her into heaven, their cheeks red from effort, her heart Guinness Book of World Records heavy, so much heavier than, say, that woman with the 303-pound tumor wheeled out of the operating room on its own stretcher. My mother wasn’t a virgin, her conception wasn’t immaculate, but her anticonfessional habit was Mary’s all the way.
“So you didn’t tell him?”
“No,” she said. “It was just something we both knew. That’s all.”
I thought of my father sitting through my clarinet recitals, my softball games, the endless hours of tortured dance performances where I scuffed and teetered across the stage in a herd of pink-tutued girls. When I was nine and desperate for a sister, my parents told me they’d tried, but it wasn’t meant to be. I wondered how it must have been for my father, a possibly sterile man. (My mother had proven her fertility.) Maybe, I thought, he had to believe I was his more and more as time went on, because I became his only shot at fatherhood, and maybe he didn’t want to accept that someone else, a stranger, had upstaged him this intimately. If I play out the Mary metaphor, my father makes a wonderful Joseph, solid and dependable (aside, of course, from the Vivian escapade). Upstaged by the Holy Spirit, Joseph knew Jesus wasn’t his own son, and yet he raised him all the same. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I’m some Christ figure. The metaphor should not extend to me as some unintentional, fumbling Jesus or to Anthony Pantuliano as God. I certainly wouldn’t want to play Jesus, and even Anthony, with all of his mystery and power couldn’t have pulled off God Almighty. But my father was an excellent Joseph. He knew that I wasn’t his and yet he must have forgotten it at the same time. I can still see him in the audience beaming, his apple cheeks shining just beneath his wet eyes. It made his love all the more miraculous, and his leaving, too, more understandable. He could have walked out on my mother and me the day I was born, the seven-pound-eleven-ounce premature child who obviously wasn’t his. My head wasn’t glowing like Jesus’ head; there was no star; there were no wise men. But he stuck it out as best he could for fifteen years. And then there was a temptation. I was on his side, though. I thought temptations were bound to occur and I figured that a temptation—named Vivian Spivy—had hit at just the moment he was feeling the most weary of his role as Joseph. This is what I wanted to believe. It was a slip. He’d be back.