Girl Talk

by Julianna Baggott

  He arrived in the middle of a euchre party, a small friendly get-together of glittering old women with cotton-candy spun hair, chatting above the drone of a soap opera, The Young and the Restless in particular, its love-struck characters chiming from multiple TVs scattered throughout the downstairs. It was a warm-up, really, for our euchre coming-out at the infamous Marianne Focetti’s. Ruby liked to tell us stories of Marianne and her husband Lenny—how Marianne made Ruby lick a frog once when they were children and how Lenny had parachuted kittens off the Bayonne Bridge. She added, “Iron-ti-cally, he was a paratrooper in World War II. See how God is on my side?” These were little pep talks meant to get us psyched up. I was less than motivated.

  When Church arrived, I was wearing what Ruby called flashy leisure wear, a black sweatshirt with sequins stitched on it in the shape of a cat with a little face and emerald eyes, green sparkling leggings to match the eyes, thin black socks, and high heels. I hadn’t been expecting him until the next day and felt completely humiliated. Church smiled and raised his eyebrows, pointing at me in a gesture that mocked, Lookin’ good. Ruby pulled up a fifth chair to a folding card table in the living room and told the boy to sit and try to pick up the game. She seemed immediately suspicious of him, perhaps because the stories that had preceded him had put her on guard. He’d interrupted one of Ruby’s monologues on what I had come to realize was her favorite topic: how to keep your man. I’m not sure how much of it was targeted at my mother, but my mother seemed oblivious. She was on a vacation, truly, and didn’t seem to mind letting Ruby dress her up or listening to the old woman’s didactic stories. This time she was giving how-to instructions on heating up holiday romance. Evidently, she’d once taped holly to her nipples and shaved and ornamented her pubic hair to resemble a Christmas tree. She loud-whispered it so that no one would accuse her of speaking inappropriately in front of “the children.” I pretended not to hear her. But after she’d finished, Church piped up, “Ho, ho, ho!” and everyone stopped and stared. I let out a muffled laugh, a kind of snort. My mother stood up and quickly ushered Church to his room, which was across the hall from ours. I’m sure she was under no illusions about Church Fiske and his behavior problem. When Church emerged again from his bedroom, my mother said, “Why don’t you two take a walk around the neighborhood or something?”

  “And take Jacko,” Ruby said. The little dog had been irritating the guests, begging for scraps, paws up, his pecker jiggling with his little panting breaths.

  I was relieved, having grown weary of euchre and the loving pats of little old ladies. I said, “Hold on,” and left Church standing in the room of card tables and smoke and ran to my room to change into O.P. shorts and a T-shirt. When I came downstairs, the front door was open and I could see Church standing on the stoop. I clipped on Jacko’s neon leash, waved a finger-wiggling toodles, and shut the door. I was thrilled to have someone my own age to talk to, finally. I decided that minute that I was free of the soap-opera marathons, the how-to-keep-a-man lectures, and the endless conversations about falling arches, arthritis, and corns. And I was free of my clarinet, too. I hated it, really, the sappy songs, the flatulent squeaks and honks.

  Church was ecstatic, too, but not for the same reasons. “A card party! I love it! It’s so typical. Did you see the ladies in their huge earrings and that lipstick and all their thin dyed hair air-sprayed up on their heads? Just like I thought it would be, but better! They’re so Italian! Do you think they’re, you know, connected to the mob? Didn’t you say he was a drug lord or something? Well, not a drug lord—I mean, they’re so middle class. It’s beautiful. Even that little dog! Look at him!”

  Jacko was peeing on the foot of a mailbox, thrilled to be out of the house. He kicked behind himself politely, a well-bred instinct, although there was only the sound of his little nails scraping cement, no dirt or grass. I was pissed at Church for doling out more of this whole wonder-at-middle-class-life crap as if we were a National Geographic special and he was laughing at the natives. As I let him chatter on, though, his voice high and almost squeaky, more like Juniper’s than I’d remembered it, I realized he wasn’t laughing. He was taking it all in and he loved it; he coveted it.

  We walked down to the end of the block, Jacko snorting because of his asthma, the humidity, his smushed face. “We should head back. Don’t you think?” Church asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Look, that dog’s going to bust a gasket.” It was obviously an excuse. Church wanted to return to the Pantulianos’ house to the euchre party. I was suspicious of his motives, but we went back inside, sat on the love seat, and watched the ladies smoke and deal and gossip, Jacko snug between us.

  As time passed, I realized that Church’s weird admiration for the Pantulianos made it a whole lot easier for me to be around him. I’d been nervous about his showing up, but once he was there, it was as if he looked up to me. My intimate knowledge of the middle class gave me the upper hand, in a way. And as time went on that summer, Church began to be a part of the oddly cast family. I still had a crush on Church sometimes, but because he was always around, he began to annoy me, like a brother might.

  He loved going to Mass at Assumption, which we attended every Sunday with the Pantulianos. “Catholics are so gory!” he said. “Jesus hanging everywhere, bleeding and dying. It’s great!” He’d been raised a Christmas-and-Easter Episcopalian in a stodgy church where parishioners, mostly ancient, sang marching hymns, their crosses always unoccupied. He loved dipping his fingers in holy water, genuflecting, all the secret hand motions, not just the sign of the cross, but forehead, lip, and heart crossing, the chest rapping.

  While my mother and I were taking our daily euchre lessons with Ruby, Church was studying baseball with Dino in his study. Dino was a first-generation Italian American. He believed firmly that to be a true American, you had to love a baseball team with all your heart, and he loved the New York Yankees. Church loved them, too, and the idea of loving them. He was a quick study. He’d say, “Lissy, ask me about the greatest team ever to play the game.” And before I could ask, he’d say, “Combs, Koenig, Ruth, Gehrig . . .” He’d talk about Don Larsen’s perfect game against the Dodgers in the World Series in ’56 as if it had just happened. He was infuriated that Yogi Berra was fired after the Yanks lost to St. Louis in ’64 and he bemoaned the introduction of free agency in ’65. He was crazy about Mr. October. “Tell her, Dino, about Reggie Jackson. The whole thing, play by play.”

  When the Yankees played well, Church and Dino were happy. When the team lost, they were irritable. They were always talking about the race between Mattingly and Winfield; spitting at the mere mention of Steinbrenner’s name; sticking up for Niekro, the aging knuckleballer, and Hendersen, the base stealer; keeping an eye on the other contenders, especially the Toronto Blue Jays. Dino had a bad feeling about them.

  Church also loved reruns. It wasn’t that he’d never seen Sanford and Son, Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch. He had, but never with simple appreciation. There had been little time for TV in the first place. At boarding school, watching TV was made nearly impossible, what with sports and study hall and lights out. And in the summers, there were so many camps. If by chance he got to settle down in front of a TV, without someone insisting on the news, he had always had to withstand the voice-over of snobbery, laughing at, not laughing with, a criticism of the anti-intellectual nature of society. Everyone, it seemed, was well versed in the rhetoric of antitelevision. Just as he loved loving the cross-hung Jesus and the Yankees, he loved loving reruns, developed a crush on Marsha Brady, a chummy friendship with Richie Cunningham. He became irate when I questioned why Gilligan, the Skipper, and the Professor had to wear the same clothes day in and day out and the others seemed to have entire steamer trunks of wardrobe.

  “How far off course could they have gotten anyway? It was only a three-hour tour!” I said.

  “Who do you think you are? You don’t question it. You have faith!”

  He e
ven loved the commercials targeted at the unemployed: an endless supply of classes on how to drive eighteen-wheelers and how to enroll in correspondence classes in medical transcription. “I could drive a rig,” he’d say. “Now that’s a noble calling.”

  Meanwhile, my mother still paced out by the swimming pool, and on Sundays at Mass, she prayed fervently. She was especially fervent after the read-aloud petitions when the priest said, “And now let us pray for all of the intentions kept in the privacy of our hearts.” At this moment, my mother closed her eyes, her fingers squeezed so tightly together that her hands turned a bright red.

  Once I whispered to her after I’d gone up to receive the Eucharist, “What are you praying for?”

  She opened her eyes and looked around as if surprised to find herself here in church.

  “Are you praying for Dad?” I asked. “To come home?”

  “I’m praying for my mother’s soul,” she said. “And mine. And yours, too.”

  When my mother was drunk, she cursed us in Polish,” my mother said one night. “She’d call my father a bastard, bekart. She’d yell out, ‘Jezus Chrystus,’ and refer to the two of us as idiots. ‘Idióta and idiótka.’ ”

  Evelyn Verbitski, my mother’s mother, married beneath herself. She was originally an Oleski; a branch of her family had immigrated in the latter part of the 1800s. Her relatives did well in the new country, not so well that they were invited to the Newark Bay Boat Club, but leagues ahead of the Bohemian immigrants who crammed into one room, forming little impoverished colonies. Eventually, more Oleskis came over. My grandmother lived in Poland until 1936 when she was twelve years old and her family joined relatives already set up in Bayonne. She’d grown up in the district of Kraków, but pretty far north of the city, amid farms that mostly yielded grain. She was a superstitious woman who taught my mother strange habits like to always put the same shoe on first—if left, always left, or if right, always right—and how to throw shoes to see what your luck would be—bad if it landed sole and heel up.

  “When I did something wrong, she’d tell me the story of how she sewed on a Sunday while she was pregnant with me because my father needed a button put on for church. It was an old superstition that if you sewed on a Sunday when you were pregnant, your child was sure to be born an idiot.”

  And so when Evelyn (then Oleski) fell in love with Wladyslaw Verbitski one day in the fall of 1947 as he sat in his friend’s front yard cutting open the stomachs of long black eels, she was taking a social step backward in the Oleski tradition, despite the fact that her own family didn’t have much money and was the poorest link in that tradition, and she never forgave him for making her fall in love with him. As far as my mother could surmise, he’d done nothing at all except sit there, slightly stooped and dirty and fish-smelly, carving into the bellies of slick black eels with a kitchen knife.

  Once Evelyn had married Wladyslaw, she never looked back. She cut herself off from her family. She claimed to be embarrassed by him, but it seemed really to be more her choice. Each Christmas her mother would send her oplatek, a piece of the family’s large unleavened wafer, but she never ate it. One Christmas Eve, in the Polish tradition of Wigilia, she lit a candle in the window and set a place for the Christ child at the table, with salt and bread, a coin under the plate, and straw beneath the tablecloth. She made pierozhki, a clear beet soup with mushrooms and carp, grain pudding called kutya, poppy-seed cakes, and twelve-fruit compote. My mother was eight years old. “The light,” my grandmother told her, “is to guide the Christ child here to our house.” But my grandmother was always angry about something, and this was no different. In the morning, my grandmother woke my mother up early. “Look,” she said, her breath steaming with alcohol. “He is not here. Nothing is true.”

  My mother had said every dreamy word about her love for Anthony Pantuliano, and now she began to dwell on how it all came undone, a part of the story that hinged on her mother. Of course, my mother’s relationship with Anthony crossed an ethnic barrier that at that time was difficult to cross. He didn’t come to the house for a date, ring the doorbell with a stiff arm extending a large and bloom-heavy bouquet, and have a chat with her father as he would have had he been Polish. My mother would tell her parents that she was out with a girlfriend—Peggy Harpes, or better yet, Elsa Pawelski from Mt. Carmel, their church, meaning the Polish Catholic church in town, as opposed to Assumption, the Italian church where the likes of the Pantulianos went every Sunday to pray and every Wednesday to confess. She would meet Anthony a block down and over from Verbitski’s Fish Shop. Sometimes he’d have his uncle’s Pinto and they’d head out to look over the tankers on Newark Bay from the Hudson County Park. Sometimes they’d walk to his apartment building and he’d show her the pictures he’d developed in his darkroom—ugly, beautiful pictures. She remembers a little girl with a burn-scarred face staring out of a car window, World War II vets playing poker at the VFW, and, of course, the picture of her at the fire. With that picture blown up, she could make out her father in the background, picking up bits of glass from the street.

  “What did your mother do? What was so crazy?” I asked one night. My mother had such high standards for herself and others that I expected that her complaints about my grandmother wouldn’t be so terrible. And, at first, it seemed I was right.

  “She drank too much. She was always cold, her little blue hands like something iced. I never saw her undressed, not even in a slip. I hated her.” My mother stopped there for a minute, surprised she’d said it, but not willing to take it back. “She told me she stepped on my father’s foot after they were married, a superstition to ensure she would be the boss of the family. She loved failures. And he obliged her by failing idiotically so she could punish him and drink and curse her bitter life and in some strange way be happy.”

  “How did she start the fire?” I asked, tentatively.

  “At first I believed her, that my father had been careless, that he’d started the fire, that he’d come home for lunch and left a lit cigar on newspapers next to the toilet where he’d been sitting. He went down to the shop. But fires—cigar fires—on newspapers catch slowly.” My mother lowered her voice to the softest whisper. “I’ve thought about this for years. My mother was polishing silverware at the dining-room table. She must have smelled the smoke, but she did not move. Smoke must have spilled out of the bathroom and filled up the dining room. But she just sat at the table polishing spoon after spoon. I’ve seen her sitting there a million times.” She tried to describe her mother’s face squeezed tight with lines, the downward pull of her lips, shining up her own warped reflection. “I wish you could see her sitting there rubbing the spoons with her rag and polish, coughing, choking on the smoke, and then the heat. That’s where the fireman found her, collapsed at the table. He scooped her up and carried her out. She was proving that her husband was an imbecile, that he was killing her. This is how she operated.”

  “And what did she say? Did she ever answer for it?”

  “In the hospital bed, she said, ‘You nearly killed me, you dumb lazy man.’ Glupi, she called him, ‘stupid’ in Polish, tapping his head. ‘Glupi. Idióta!’ And my father cried, tears staining his overcoat. He said, ‘I thought I put it out. I thought I wet the tip in the sink first.’ I stood in the doorway and watched. She pulled him to her and said, ‘There, there, you stupid man. There, there.’ In the end, a few years later, his heart froze up. It seized in his chest and he died. She killed him.”

  Some nights during the summer that never happened, my mother would borrow Ruby’s car—at Ruby’s absolute insistence. By demanding that my mother drive her Cadillac Coup de Ville, Ruby was allowed to spoil my mother, and Ruby loved to spoil my mother. She bought her clothes and jewelry and often slipped her spending money. She fed her homemade cannoli. I’d seen other people react to my mother this way. It was as if they could sense that she’d had a bad mother and they instinctively wanted to make up for it. My mother must have sensed the inverse in R
uby, who’d never had children, and so they made a good pair.

  My mother would go out driving around the city by herself. She’d come home dazed and dreamy, her hair tossed by the hot air that beat in through the rolled-down windows. I’d ask her where she went and she’d shrug, saying, “I don’t know.” But I was pretty sure she’d driven past the spot that used to be Verbitski’s Fish Shop, Uncle Dino’s old apartment building, and out to Hudson County Park. I imagined she parked the car and smelled the musty sea water and stared out across the water to Elizabeth’s seaport.

  On those nights she’d borrowed Ruby’s car, my mother would get into bed late. She’d stretch her arms up over her head and stare at the ceiling. I was always waiting for a story to follow, another installment in the saga, even when I was still drowsy from having been awakened. But on the nights she circled Bayonne in Ruby’s Cadillac, she’d sigh quietly, not saying a word. I wondered if she’d even noticed the change in things or if she was able to still see it as it had been, pristine.

  I’d started to tell Church my mother’s love story. He was the first person I would tell, but not the last. The versions I gave him were abbreviated summaries in the beginning, probably because I loved the way he’d beg for more details. “How did it happen?” he’d say. “Slow down. Just tell it like she told it.” And I’d consent, giving more and more detail until the details rose up clearer and sharper from the things my mother had told me and from what she’d left out. One day Ruby trudged off with my mother to the Short Hills Mall, what I knew would be an all-day affair. My mother would in fact return with an entire new wardrobe of stretch pants and gold sweatshirts and accessories so metallic I’d envisioned them shopping with a metal detector like the ones those old men on the beach use. Also, my mother needed new clothes because she’d gained a few extra pounds because she’d stopped weighing her portions. Church and I took the opportunity of a free day to ride the bus all over the city. We walked through the park, now dirty and ill-kempt, the homeless parked on benches, Dino’s old apartment building, laundry strung across six-foot balconies, and, last of all, the fish shop, now a neon-lit video store. In the apartment above it, where my mother had once lived, a light glowed in the window. Church was like a kid on a field trip to the nation’s capital, but the things he’d point out were not the Lincoln Memorial or the White House but a hypodermic, a trashed rubber, a homeless woman walking without shoes. For me the trip was disappointing. I’d expected a historic replica, I guess, little shrines and plaques stating that Anthony Pantuliano and Dorothy Verbitski had sex here, and if not that, at least some respect, some upkeep, well-trimmed shrubbery and little PLEASE KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs.