by J. M. Monaco
‘Why do you bother with that?’ I’d ask. ‘They look fine.’
‘No, no,’ she insisted. ‘They need to be spotless. There. Perfect.’
LPs my brother and I bought, a strange mix ranging from The Sound of Music, Saturday Night Fever and Carole King, to the likes of Peter Frampton, Queen, David Bowie and Bob Seger, are all stacked in a pile next to a cheap record player and speakers. In the closet are old bathrobes and towels, more worn shoes, more old nursing journals, a few formal dresses with padded shoulders my mother would have worn to weddings or anniversary parties. Next to them are two men’s formal polyester shirts. One white, one light-blue, also yellowed, a cheap red tie slung around the top of the hanger, waiting for my father to wear for a special night out.
But it’s the boxes and crates full of photos and photo albums that dominate everything else in the room. My mother was always the keeper of our family’s visual archive. She framed our life events the way she wanted to remember them, neat and tidy with no signs of cracking. Aside from the displays on some of the walls downstairs, in the living room, and on a small kitchen unit that also holds my father’s collection of cheap model classic cars, all the rest of the photos are here, stacked and stored in some fifteen or so containers.
I find my 1979 high-school yearbook, complete with my old friends’ signatures and farewell messages of good luck. There are a few images of me with Beth. We sit close together, hugging, inseparable, ready to take on the world. Beth’s note to me next to her graduation photo is brief. To Jo, You are the most beautiful, strong girl I have ever known. Don’t ever change OK? You’re the best. Best friends always. Will always love ya, Beth. A boy called Chuck, who ended up with a gold front tooth after suffering a drunken fall on his face one night, writes, Knock em dead Jo. The world aint gonna know what hit them when you get out there. Johnny Hartman, a long-haired mechanic with a motorbike with whom I was desperately in love, but would never have, because his long-term girlfriend, Colleen Miller, a cosmetology chick, was tinier and prettier than I, and never let him out of her sight, wrote the most profound note: To JoJo, Don’t ever give up on your dreams you are so talented. Don’t ever stop being a dreamweaver. Don’t let anything stop you from getting what you want and from getting out of this shit hole. Johnny. The quote I supplied for my own photo read: The best days are yet to come, can’t wait to see what’s out there. I owe everything to my best friend Beth, I couldn’t have done it without you. I laugh at our teenage profundity.
The same box holds photos taken throughout my junior and high-school years. Dave and his old neighbourhood friend, Dom Santori, the best man at his wedding, huddle together in our front yard comparing their flexed-arm muscles. Each one eyes the other as though preparing for combat. I’m posing on my own in our backyard in black and white, gazing off into the distance with overdone eye make-up, mascara so thick it weighs down my eyelids like a row of black crows. It was the year I experimented with plucking my brows which resulted in the expected fine-lined arch. Boy, I thought I was something. Now I’m standing near our front door with Barbara, the girl from across the street, both of us puckering our lips, one hand on a hip, the other holding up our long hair, heads tilted back. I find Beth, both of us proud of our bikini bodies on the beach. Beth and I posing in our prom dresses. Beth and I with our prom dates donning matching corsages. We are waiting in hope, anticipating something remarkable around the corner. I’m in awe at the sight of our youthful beauty, over-plucked brows and all, how flawless the smiles of our teen years appear from this distance of years with the fuzzy magic of the lens. What a downright shame I couldn’t have enjoyed it more then. We were told by adults and teachers it was supposed to be the best time of our lives. But they were all liars. Who were they trying to kid? Our smiles masked everything.
I find a few photos of my graduation day from fancy pants Ivy League when my mother was snapping away, ordering me to smile. ‘Oh, you can manage a bigger smile than that, Jo.’ No wonder I was pouting. It appeared as though I may have tried to trim my own hair in my effort to save a few bucks. I wore the expected gown over a sleeveless A-line sundress. I looked awfully wide in the thing but I remember buying it especially for the occasion. The things we choose not to see when we spot a bargain. I finished off the look with the cap and tassel, but the garb was enough ammunition to provoke my father into making a full-blown ground strike. He agreed to join in a couple of photos only, and was reluctant to attend the ceremony as the second guest-ticket holder.
‘We’ll see. Maybe,’ was his response, his most overused phrase throughout my childhood and beyond.
His evasiveness over the years generated the expected effect. By the time my brother and I were old enough to know better, we stopped asking him for anything, material or otherwise, but my mother, in her persistence, in her endless desire for some kind of marital and family order, still clung onto hope that he’d change.
By the time Dad had sat through the first half of the speech from the honoured guest speaker, the world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking, Dad’s patience had ran out. He had more important stuff to do, it seemed, the details of which we would never know. It was all top-secret, hush-hush. Who knows, maybe over the years he was concocting a challenge to Stephen Hawking’s theory of cosmology and couldn’t stand to listen to the little man basking in celebrity stardom from his wheelchair. Oh yes, our old man, Jimmy O’Brien, was a mystery.
When he’d had enough, he stopped fidgeting, stood up, stepped over the long line of other crossed legs in that crowded row of seats, the ones that belonged to those proud, suited middle-class parents who looked on with pride, wiping away tears from their eyes, and he left as fast as he could. Dad wouldn’t waste any more of his precious time on the canapé spread, the small talk with other parents or faculty who didn’t mind schmoozing in the hope that they would generate some charitable donations over the summer. Many guests, of course, would have been wealthy alumni who’d want to give something back, especially if their younger ones were waiting in line.
During my time at the Ivy League I hovered between two opposing worlds. While my mother cheered me on for my academic curiosity, my tenacity – how she loved to see me work hard, sweating every last droplet till there was nothing left – it was obvious that she thought a more practical vocation for a woman, like nursing, made more sense. When one day she asked me out of genuine interest and concern, ‘What kind of job will you do with an art history degree, you know, when you have to pay back your loans?’ I struggled to respond. She had a good point. At that stage I had no idea what I would do after my degree.
‘Well, I want to be a well-rounded, educated person. It’s for the love of learning about the world,’ I said. That was the sort of thing I liked the sound of when I studied at the community college, alien as it was to some of the others there, and what I tried to articulate in my fancy pants interview. ‘What’s wrong with that? Maybe I’ll get a job at a museum.’
She waited before responding. ‘I guess it’s good you got the printing company to fall back on.’
My grandmother, Nonna, wondered why I was wasting my time when I was the perfect age for having children with my great child-bearing hips. She was already planning to sabotage my aspirations. ‘I told my friend Carmella all about you, Jo, that you’re single and we were thinking you should meet her son, Marlon. Ooh, he’s a handsome one. And he’s got a good job. Does maintenance over at MIT. Good benefits over there.’
Dave vacillated between encouragement and siding with Nonna. He was thrilled at the prospect of me meeting the children of the rich and famous yet warned me of the inevitable. ‘Yeah, there’s a biological clock ticking away. If you’re not careful, it’ll be too late. Tick, tick.’
My father didn’t bother adding much of his two cents, except to say this: ‘I was good at drawing. You know you got that talent from me, right? But that was like a kid’s pipe dream,’ he laughed. ‘Anyway, I didn’t have to finish school, and look, I’ve done alright.’
To him I was a traitor to the labouring working class, the people doing the real work. To my family I was a vacant dreamer, the one who had some cocky nerve to voice a ridiculous whim about living a different life, one in which I imagined the beauty in impractical things. I guess I always knew the arts were a luxury only the middle- and upper-classes could afford, but I wanted to feel what it was like to have some of that luxury too, just a little taste, in spite of my family.
When on campus I was never just a typical student like the other younger, wealthier ones around me. I became the flexible undergraduate always available to help out at the printing company during school breaks. And yes, OK, maybe some of my talk about all those books I had to read, all those essays I had to write, kind of got on my co-workers’ nerves.
By this time, Mike and I decided to go our separate ways. He had no interest in my studies, felt hard done by when I couldn’t spend time with him, and he wanted to settle down and have kids as soon as possible. ‘Time’s ticking on, Jo. Got to get on with it.’ In the end it was clear that he wasn’t going to be the one to help get me that new money I’d need for the grand white house, books and piano. Not to mention the swimming pool. Mike still worked at the printing company and that was alright. It wasn’t long before he found himself another girlfriend, a younger new employee from the Philippines. She was a cousin of one of the supervisors who worked in the delivery area. He fell madly for this little thing and it wasn’t long before they planned to get married. I was happy for him, really I was, and wanted to stay friends. Sometimes after I’d had a few too many drinks when I was alone late at night in my shared student apartment, I would call him and reminisce about all the good times we had. The last time I did this, he told me politely it would be a good idea if I didn’t call anymore.
I’m not sure if it was him I missed so much as his family and their frequent parties, especially the family reunions where they all seemed genuinely interested in each other. I enjoyed bumping into his mom, Sheila, who worked in the accounts department. We arranged to have coffee now and then and the conversation would take us to the subject of Mike and his new life, how thoughtful his girlfriend was, how generous her family were. ‘They’re like that, the Filipinos. Very loyal people, you know.’
I managed to find some consolation through the small group of older students. The university worked hard to support us and organise social events for us and I learned to appreciate them. Some women in the group were middle-class, in their thirties and over. They had families but never had the chance to go on to higher education or their degree was interrupted, probably when they had children. In my book that was another good reason not to have kids. Some of these women became wise big-sister figures. They looked after us younger ones, yet shared our anxieties too.
Early on it was easy to spot the others who were like me. I could pick out the ones who had emotional wounds that hadn’t healed. They tried to cover them up with smiles, layers of surface bandage, but the minute they were nearby I could almost smell it; the aftermath of suffering. In the first year I became close friends with thirty-three-year-old Michelle, who was in her second year of mathematics. She confided in me about her family history that consisted of continued sexual abuse by her father. Throughout the unbearable heat and humidity of the Boston summer, she wore long sleeves to cover her self-harm scars. There must have been at least twenty light tone marks of different lengths and thicknesses, like rickety steps of a ladder, all the way from her wrist to the upper half of her left arm. I had a sympathetic but uncomfortable laugh with her when she joked about it.
‘I like to call them my laugh lines,’ she told me one night over a drink. ‘I did it when I was drunk or stoned. It was a good way to laugh through it all.’ I was always surprised that she could smile and look radiant when she explained such things.
I admitted to Michelle that I had tried it too, in my teens. And I agreed that drunk or doped up was the best way, sometimes with a friend for a bit of encouragement. I remembered the time one of the gang, her name was Donna, an obese, pimply girl who had a mean father, deliberately smashed the bottle of beer the two of us were drinking one night in a dark corner of the local park. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘We’ll take turns.’ As she pressed the sharp glass into her skin, she screamed hard and fast. ‘Fucking bastard, fucking bastard.’ She stopped at two small scrapes, just enough to draw a bit of blood and cause lots of redness around the cut, then handed it to me.
‘Fucking bastard, fucking bastard,’ I repeated, copying her intentions, ending up with nothing more than a mere scrape, then we both cried, drunk after two beers, holding each other and swearing we’d stay best friends for ever, a pact we broke that same year when we went off to different high schools.
What did it all mean?
Frustration in times of helplessness, self-hatred, and maybe even boredom. Yes, simple boredom. Not knowing what else to do with ourselves when there were no other options.
Michelle and I connected instantly, shared an apartment the following year with a quiet history student called Leah, and I looked forward to our regular conversations about art, literature, philosophy, politics, feminism, and messed-up families. But Michelle’s lows came on fast. She would disappear suddenly into the dark corners of the library, come home, not eat and lock herself in her bedroom, or go astray somewhere else for days.
I found it difficult not to take it personally. Michelle had no problem achieving the highest marks on all her assessments and exams. Later on when she graduated, a year or so before I did, she finished with summa cum laude honours and was offered a full scholarship and expenses on a PhD course. We lost touch after I graduated but I discovered through a mutual friend that she gave up on academic life about midway through her PhD. After returning from a big trip to the East she settled down in a quiet California town, unmarried, where she began her new life teaching yoga.
Somehow Michelle smiled through the dark shadow of her past, and spoke with a confident tone that meant all around her would stop and listen. When she wasn’t saying something worthwhile or pondering something important, she made it clear, even in silence, that she just didn’t give a shit, she didn’t need people. This is what I most envied about her. The approach drew even more people, men in particular. Male students, young undergrads and the older postgrads, flocked around her, wanted her opinion, were desperate to sleep with her, ached to devote themselves to her. And all she had to do was smile occasionally, offer a slight bit of encouragement, yet somehow manage at the same time to convey that she could survive without them all quite easily.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t work the same kind of miracles. In the first term I attended the introduction party for new mature students and set my sights on getting to know an attractive guy called Brendan. He was a dark-skinned black man from Michigan, twenty-seven years old, and studying engineering. The army paid all his tuition and expenses. He had a gripping shy smile that transformed his face. When I first engaged him in small talk he seemed wary and disinterested, but at some point I got him to hook his eyes on mine and that smile appeared.
After a bit of persistence, I was successful in setting up a first date. Later we became an item for a while that semester, which made me feel pretty damn pleased with myself. I was attracted to our obvious differences, yet I convinced myself we had more in common. His mother worked as a mid-level manager in the field of social work. A caring profession, I thought, like my mother’s. His father left them years ago when he and his brother were young, and that made him angry, but his mother stayed strong on her own and got by with the love of family. Of course he was angry, I understood that, for sure. I was angry. What could be better than to be angry together? Although I could only dream of Ma leaving Dad for good, staying strong for her children. We were a good, natural match, I thought, like blues and oranges, purples and greens. Mix them all up and you get a perfect complimentary kaleidoscope. I stopped myself at whimsical imaginings of what our mixed-race kids might have looked l
ike. But while I daydreamed about growing old with Brendan it soon became clear that even though he admitted to liking me a lot, he wasn’t sure how far we should take our relationship.
‘You’re white, Irish and Italian-American, working-class from Boston. That combination kind of spells disaster,’ he joked one night when we were in bed together. It didn’t matter what Ivy League I was attending, I couldn’t get past those things. ‘It won’t exactly sit well with my mother and the others back home, and family is family, after all.’
When he uttered those words I sensed they had been well-rehearsed. It was only a matter of time, I realised, before he’d get rid of me. By some horrendous coincidence, his best friend and roommate at college, another army scholarship guy, just so happened to have been the buzz-cut student from my interview. Well, it was no surprise to find that this guy, Sam, had taken an obvious dislike to me, as I first suspected at the interview. He could see my desperation through all of the bullshit and good posture. Not having Sam on my side wasn’t going to fare well for my future prospects with Brendan.
Sam displayed openly his distaste for me whenever I hung out at their apartment, when I talked too much, laughed too loud, or supposedly, in his view, phoned Brendan too much. When they had others over for meals and parties it was clear I was the odd one out who hadn’t learned the right things to say or not to say. I came across as the laughable side-kick. One evening someone brought up the subject of eighteenth-century English poets.