“Good, huh?” Toot watches me chew. I give her an okay sign with my fingers so as not to choke on the crumbs. “So are you with me on the teeth?”
“Whatever you want to do is fine.”
“It’s not just cosmetic, B. Though, at my age, you look for little avenues of self-improvement even if they lead you up a blind alley of ugly. I wish it were just naturalism—”
“Narcissism.”
“Uh-huh. But it’s medical. I can’t chew. I have to chop my salad so fine it’s like soup. What the hell, maybe I’ll lose a couple of pounds.”
It occurs to me that my sister has grown larger over the years out of necessity. Without a man around, she had to stay the size of her sons to keep order in this crazy home. I did all I could to help, but it wasn’t enough. My nephews, Nicholas and Anthony, are, sadly, gavones. Yet there’s a ray of hope: Her youngest son, my namesake, Bartolomeo the Second (whom we call Two), seems to have my artistic eye. He’s a theater major at Villanova.
“Well, who are you going to?”
“Dr. Pomerance. The man is a genius. They say he did Hubert Humphrey’s teeth.”
“He had his teeth capped? It doesn’t look it.”
“Old pictures.” She shrugs. “Listen. I need a flavor.”
“Uh-huh.” My sister, who doesn’t know “longue” from “lounge,” has always said “flavor” instead of “favor,” and I’m not about to start correcting her now.
“It’s my Nicky. He’s moved into a house in Freehold with . . . her.”
“The girlfriend?”
“Ondine Doyle. Sounds cheap, doesn’t it?”
“Actually it sounds like a flounder special at the Mayfair.”
“That’s not even slightly funny.” Toot fans herself. “It makes me sick. Rosemary Callabuono has loved my son since high school, and he won’t give her a tumble.”
“Rosemary With The Lupus?”
“Yeah, but it’s in remission. Better a woman with lupus than a woman with no virtue. Of all the girls in the world, he chooses that. Please.”
I try to picture Ondine. It’s not easy, since my nephew changes girlfriends as often as he changes pants. I recall a curvy, petite blonde with short legs and an upturned nose. “Is she the one who sat in his lap at the Feast party?” I ask, remembering her grinding into my nephew like a drill bit while the band played “Louie, Louie.”
“That’s the one! She hooked him with sex. They’re not kidding me. Nicky said, ‘I love her, Ma.’ I said to him, ‘You love your ass!’ ”
“Why is it fast girls always have French names?”
“How the hell would I know?” Toots’s eyebrows weave together, the lines quizzically forming the shape of a bird in flight.
“If Nicky’s moved out, that means you have an empty room.”
“Don’t get any ideas,” she warns. “I’m not ready to redecorate. I think I’m going to put an exercise bike in there.”
“Wonderful!”
“Maybe I can build up a little muscle tone.”
“Good idea.” I am nothing if not supportive.
“What? I look flabby?”
“No, no, it’s just that exercise gives you pep. And who couldn’t use a little extra pep?”
“You have a point.” Toot smiles.
I’ve learned over the years to stay mum with my sister on the subject of physical fitness. She’s never broken a sweat in her life, yet the basement is filled with every new piece of exercise equipment that comes on the market. A couple of years ago Woolworth’s carried the revolutionary Tummy Chummy, a small wheel with two handles for toning stomach muscles. Toot bought it, took it home, got down on her knees, and commenced rolling; but her abdominal muscles were so weak she collapsed on the wheel, hit her head on a chair, and gave herself a black eye. Ciao, ciao, Tummy Chummy.
“I’m so ashamed of my son. Shacking up in Freehold like he was raised in a barn. They live in the nicer section, but still . . . it looks like a rat hole.” Toot holds her nose. “Everything about it is stashad. Mark my words. Nineteen seventy is the beginning of the end of civilization. Morality has gone right out the window.” Toot sips her coffee. “They need curtains—”
“Draperies,” I correct her.
“Draperies. Furniture. Lonnie said he’d pay.”
“Good. Because I’m busy. I don’t have time to run around shopping for deals.”
“Believe me, if she was a quality individual, I could trust her to do the decorating, but she’s from the side of the tracks where the houses shake when the trains go by, so she doesn’t know from nice. She doesn’t own foundation garments. I know for a fact she doesn’t own a slip, because I saw France when she climbed into Nicky’s car after we visited Aunt Mary Mix-Up at the home.”
“At least she visits the infirm.”
“Nicky dragged her. Oh, I could cry. No class. She wears open-toed sandals in December without stockings. You get the picture. Everything about her clings.”
“She’s young.”
“Seven years older than Nicky. No prize there, I’m telling you. She’s well on her way to wizened. You don’t know. You don’t have children. How could you know the disappointment, so deep I get a shooting pain in my pelvis—”
“Stop,” I interrupt. Toot has a terrible habit of getting pains in places men would prefer never to hear about.
“My pelvic bone. Right here.” She points south. I don’t look. “No wonder it became inflamed when Nicky passed through the birth canal. It was like an omen. Nine pounds of him dragged through me like a wagon wheel. And didn’t the little bastard bring me pain for the rest of my life?”
“Come on. You adore him.”
“I know. I hate him and I love him so much I could kill him. Why would my firstborn son waste himself on that?”
“Maybe he loves her.”
Toot gives me a look as though the stench from the Carbone paper factory in Hazlet were right here in Peppermint Candy Land. “If only Ma was here.”
“If Ma were here, what? She’d commiserate, but neither of you would say or do one damn thing to fix it, because you’re Italian mothers.” I feel my face flush as I raise my voice. Toot looks startled. “That’s right, Toot, you’re all talk. You have these sons—you treat them like kings, waiting on them hand and foot, spoiling them, coddling them, worshipping them, never expecting them to lift a finger to help you in any way—then you’re surprised when they fall for these come-hither French maids instead of nice Catholic girls. You want to know why they end up with harlots? Because your boys know easy, that’s why!”
“I suppose it’s all my fault!” Toot says, banging the table and beginning to weep. Her mascara runs. Big navy blue tears roll down her face like ink from a dropper. She wipes the streaks away with a white moppeen.
“Partly!” I yell back. “But not all! Mama raised me like you raised your boys, with one difference. I knew better! I wanted to take care of myself. I took pride in my surroundings. I tried to build upon what our parents taught us. When I watched Ma iron, I thought, I can do that collar better, and I’d show her how. When she made soup, I thought, I can chop the celery finer, and I’d take the knife from her hands. When she decorated the Christmas wreath, I thought, That bow is too big, and I’d fix it. Mama was never my maid.”
Toot wearily opens a cabinet neatly filled with extra utensils from Chinese takeout, a stack of paper plates from last summer’s Fourth of July party, and plastic cups that say HAPPY EASTER. She pulls out a Santa-and-the-reindeer paper plate and stacks cookies on it. “What can I do now? They’re men. The ship has failed.”
“Sailed, sis. Sailed.”
“I want you to take these over to Nicky. God knows if he gets enough to eat over there. Of course, that’s probably my fault too.”
“Probably. If your Mother Guilt was paint, I’d have enough to put a coat on Yankee Stadium. You did the best you could. Fini.”
A buzzer blasts from the laundry room.
“That’s the dryer.�
�� Toot wipes away her tears, then gets up and goes into the next room. She returns with a basket of freshly laundered whites. She pulls a pristine undershirt from the pile and folds it.
“Whose laundry is that?”
“What?” she asks innocently.
“Whose is it?”
“Nicky’s,” she says softly.
“He’s living in his own home and you’re still doing his laundry? What kind of nonsense is that?”
Toot ignores the question and tilts her chin toward heaven. “Do you think Ma knows her favorite grandson is living in sin?”
“Of course she knows, and she doesn’t care. She’s flying around up there like an angel, probably at the speed of sound to avoid running into Pop.”
“That’s where all this started. It started with their sick marriage. I didn’t have a good example.”
“We’ve been through this,” I tell her firmly. “Don’t start.”
Toot grows pensive. Despite my eagerness to change the subject, she goes on a diatribe about our immigrant parents and their arranged marriage and how that scarred her for life, and I’m not excluded because “Look at you, you’re almost forty and you’re not married.” I let her talk while I have another cookie.
I never feel the need to defend my bachelorhood. In fact, when I look over the landscape of my life, it’s the best choice I ever made. I love living alone—knowing there’s exactly enough milk in the fridge for cereal, always knowing where the roll of Scotch tape is, sleeping in the buff, waking up to silencio instead of bells and yells. I don’t miss a thing about living with family. I had eighteen years of it with my parents and my sister, and that cured me of any desire to repeat the experience.
“This is the crux.” Toot thumps her chest in the vicinity of her heart. “We’re a couple of love cripples, you and me. We can’t shake the past. I had a good marriage that went sour, and now look at me; I can’t move on. Everybody in the world seems to move on but me. Lonnie’s had two wives since he left me, and I’ve barely had a date. A little dinner and a show, is that too much to ask?”
“No, it’s not too much to ask.” But even agreeing with her can’t stop the onslaught.
“I’m besmirched.” She takes a stack of Nicky’s briefs and smooths them flat with her hand before returning them to the laundry basket. “No one wants besmirched. Ma married a lousy cheater, and I did the same. Shame on me for being sucked into the flume of infidelity and spit out the other end like charred rubble. Why couldn’t I see what was happening under my nose? I shoulda known better. Or, at the very least, I should’ve known something. If my ex-husband walked through the door right now, I’d throw a chair at him.”
“Which is probably why he doesn’t visit.” And probably why he left, but I won’t say that out loud. Why pile on?
“Maybe it’s the end of the road for me, but not for you. You should marry Capri Mandelbaum.” Toot places the laundry basket on the window seat.
“I do not like the word should.”
“You can afford to be cavalier. If you want to marry”—she snaps her fingers—“you can. A man can always find a woman, but a woman after a certain age can only find heartache. Lucky you. You don’t know what it’s like when loneliness is thrown on you like a burlap tarp and you can’t breathe some nights from the regret.” Toot refills my coffee mug.
“I doubt I’ll regret anything.”
“I’m older than you. I know all about it. The day comes when your youth leaves you like a dying whiff of Jean Naté. You still have your hair and your waistline, B. Look at Capri, she’s turning forty. God knows she’s lonely too, with that myopia so bad she can’t even see her own hand without glasses. She needs you, you need her.”
“I know what I need,” I say quietly.
“Take Capri away for a weekend. It’ll be like throwing two old cats in a closet—something will happen. You’ll either kill each other or mate.” Toot burps the Tupperware cookie saver.
“What a lovely proposition either way.”
“Go on, joke. I don’t understand you. She’s rich! The Mandelbaums have more money than Onassis, and it’s even better because it’s American dough. Can’t you see? You could redecorate the entire state of New Jersey; the old lady would write the check. You could be hanging chandeliers in the men’s room at the Shell station on Route 9, for godsakes.”
“That’s not my goal. I want to make the world elegant. Decorating homes is satisfying, but I have a bigger dream.” The moment I say it aloud, I’m sorry I did.
“What?”
“It’s bigger than just being rich or decorating gas stations.”
Toot sits down. “You don’t want to move out of town, do you? ’Cause if you moved, I’d kill myself.”
“I’m not moving.”
“Thank God.” Toot exhales. “What is it, then?”
“I want to renovate and redesign the Fatima church.”
Toot waves me away like a gnat. “You’ve spent your whole life there. I don’t see why Father Porporino wouldn’t give you the job. You’re the only decorator in town.” She cups her hand at the edge of the table and scoots a couple of crumbs off the tiles.
“I should get the job because I have a vision for the church, not because there are no other candidates.”
“You and your megamania.”
I don’t bother to correct her. This time, she’s close enough.
She continues, “Relax. I’ve never seen a room of yours that I didn’t love. You may be the only decorator in town, but you’re also the best.”
My sister makes no sense, but I’m in no mood to explain and the cookies are giving me a sugar drop that makes me feel like I’m plummeting in an elevator shaft. I hold my head. Toot gets up and leans against the sink. She surveys her backyard as she folds her hands, looking eerily like the Saint Theresa statue on the window ledge. “What’s going to become of us?” she says. “I’m gonna wind up all alone like Aunt Teeney, who went to sleep sucking on a sourball and choked to death after it lodged in her throat like a pinball, creating a dry socket that paralyzed her larynx and killed her dead. Who’ll be there for me?”
I feel a rush of pity for my sister, but I resist it. Her Miriam Hopkins act isn’t going to wash with me. “Oh, please, you are not alone. Who comes when you call?”
She takes a moment to think about it. “You do.”
“Who papered your living room and hung your sconces?”
“You did.”
“Look at this kitchen! It’s a triumph of design! It could be in House and Garden! Brand-new everything from stove to cassoulet pot.” I get up and join her at the sink.
“I love what you did in here. I do.” She reaches up and runs her hands over the copper pots. They tinkle like chimes.
“Who helped you buy your new car and took you into the city for toe surgery—”
“That hurt worse than the pelvic bone,” she says quietly.
“I’ve always been here for you.” I put my arms around her. “And I always will be. So knock it off.”
“Every man I’ve ever known has let me down . . . except you. Three vaginal births, and you drove me to the hospital every single time.”
“That’s right. I did.”
“You even cut little Two’s cord. Lonnie was in Miami. He was always in Miami.” Toot pulls a handkerchief from under her bra strap; she unfolds it and blows her nose. “You know, I’ve never been to Miami.”
“You want to go to Florida? I’ll take you.”
“No thanks. Too much humidity. My hair goes to Brillo in that heat. But you’re a prince to invite me.” Toot takes my hand. “I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for me. So I’m going to make you a birthday party.”
“No you’re not.”
“Yes I am. I’ve already planned the whole thing with cousin Christina. Poor thing. She’s so depressed. I was hoping a party would help her through her grief.”
I yank my hand away. “I can’t believe you’re guilting me like th
is.”
“What guilt?” Toot looks off in the middle distance innocently.
“No party!”
“I know you hate surprises—”
“Detest them!” I rap my fist on the counter to make the point.
“So I’m telling you all about it beforehand. The guests, of course, will think it’s a surprise, because I have to have something for them to do.”
“No!”
“I want to give back. Let me do this. Forty is a millstone.”
“Milestone,” I correct her.
“Whatever. All the cousins want to come.”
“I can’t stand those people.”
“All these years you gave them gifts. Let them buy you a present for a change.”
“I still have fifteen wallets from my thirtieth birthday party.”
“You should have returned them.”
“And gotten what?”
“A professional man like you can always use ties and handkerchiefs.”
“Have you seen how they dress? I’ll choose my own accessories, thank you. No party! Do you understand plain English? No!”
Toot checks her manicure and then looks at me. “Too late. I already cleaned out the garage.”
As I drive to Freehold I’m tempted to get out of the car and throw myself into the manmade lake outside the industrial park to cleanse myself of my sister’s bitterness. I don’t know what she’s complaining about. Her ex set her up for life. To this day, Lonnie sends her jewelry; in return, my sister makes a pot of gravy and meatballs and sends it over on the first Sunday of the month. Granted, it’s not a fair exchange—the pieces Lonnie sends are samples, and half the time the bales are flimsy and the clasps don’t catch—but perhaps it’s the thought that should count.
My nephew Nicky resides con inammorata (there’s a handwritten card that says “Doyle/Falcone” on the mailbox) in a ranch on Main Street in Freehold. It’s a pleasant neighborhood with houses facing one another in the cul-de-sac like triangular wedges of cheesecake on a platter.
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