For four days we rumbled eastward, sleeping and eating and playing so many hands of War that our cards bent and softened from all the shuffling. I annoyed my mother by making silly faces in the mirror. “Stop it!” my mother scolded, annoyed by all that she could not control. And then: “Oy, I need a Valium.”
We got stuck in a snowstorm around Denver and my mother took me outside and pointed out the snow, the first time I’d ever seen the stuff. To lull me to sleep each night, my mother, though harried and chain-smoking and shedding pounds by the day, was an oasis of calm as she sang “Dona Dona,” her signature lullaby in her fragile soprano—first in English, then in Hebrew—and stroked my butt-length brown hair:
How the winds are laughing,
they laugh with all their might.
“I like the donut song,” I murmured before I fell asleep.
We disembarked into a New York I can’t quite pull into focus save for the lights on the Verrazano Bridge, a glittering necklace suspended in the night sky that dazzled my young, unsophisticated eyes. We didn’t have bridges in Orange County; Irvine still had tumble-weed rolling down the street. (I’m not kidding—the day we moved to 150 Rockview, a big round piece of brush blew past my mother’s front fender. “I don’t believe this,” she gasped, horrified.) Instead of tumbleweeds New York had litter, even in Staten Island, which is where my father’s brother Frankie and his family lived and where my mother and I were going to stay. For how long, I didn’t know. But I cringed as I stepped over a broken bottle on a sidewalk in Annadale. My mother laughed: “My daughter has never seen glass in the street, can you believe it?” she reported to Frankie’s family. But California’s surfaces had been pristine, honeysuckle and hibiscus blooming even in a planned development like Turtle Rock, where their fragrance beckoned from every traffic island.
One day my mother and I took a trip back over the Verrazano, ending up in a neighborhood lined with cobblestoned streets, which I had also never seen, and which fascinated me. She led me into a building, and after we passed through various layers of security, there he was.
Still tan and healthy, with his prematurely gray comb-over and strapping lean muscle mass, my father greeted us once again with “Hey, kids!” like everything was hunky-dory.
“Daddy!” I squealed, and ran into his arms. He wasn’t behind glass in this facility; this time we sat with him in the open at a long table with other people wearing the same color uniform. I got to see him, smell him, peck him on the cheek; I was thrilled. He bounced me up and down on his lap for a while as he talked to my mother, but I wasn’t paying any mind to their conversation. At the end of the hour I got yanked away, and I cried and reached for him as my mother carried me out of the facility. She appeased me with Hostess cupcakes purchased from a snack truck outside, and I stopped crying as soon as my mouth was stuffed with chocolate.
Before the weather got really hot my mother and I were on Amtrak again, this time headed to North Miami Beach to stay with Aunt Rita. Thirty-seven and leggy, Rita had grown up with my mother and their sister, Arline, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Manhattan Beach. While my mother’s almond eyes made her appear Asian, by some twist of genetic fate Rita resembled a Spanish goddess. Her olive skin and curly brown hair, christened with golden-flecked highlights, attracted male attention all over Miami, usually of the damaged variety. Already twice divorced, Rita lived in a sixth-floor apartment on the Intracoastal Waterway with Kara, who was now engaged to Miguel.
My mother (left) and Rita clad in their
beloved St. John Knits, 1983.
“Will Daddy be there, too, Mommy?” I asked on the train.
“Maybe,” she said, “Daddy might come later.”
“Mommy, do you know everything?” I asked, wanting to be sure before I continued with my line of questioning.
“Yes,” she said, without missing a beat.
“Then why can’t he come now?” I asked, frustrated.
“Shhhh, my little peanut-face, take a nap.” She stroked my hair and stared out the window as the orange groves flew past and softly sang another lullaby from her repertoire:
And even though we ain’t got money
I’m so in love with ya honey,
And everything will bring a chain of love.
And in the morning when I rise
You bring a tear of joy to my eyes,
And tell me everything is gonna be all right.
It was a song she sometimes sang to soothe me when we took long car rides. It took on new meaning as we journeyed south into the unknown, into a part of the world populated with questions that yielded few answers—for her or for me.
CHAPTER 2
North Bay Road
North Miami Beach, Florida
July 1983
• • •
MY MOTHER AND I HAD ONLY BEEN IN FLORIDA A FEW DAYS when she had to leave. As she waved goodbye from the window of her northbound train, Rita held me close and tried to dam the flow of my tears. “Maaaaaaa,” I wailed, unable to conceive of another separation from another parent. Rita, helpless, could think of only one thing that might cheer me up.
“Hey, Jenbo,” she said, using her newly coined nickname for me. “You want some ice cream?” Rita gave everyone nicknames: My mother was Swellenor, because her tiny frame had become uncharacteristically bloated when she was pregnant with me; my father was Yonny, because Rita dropped the J from everyone’s name, and by that same principle, Kara became Yisa and I was also sometimes Yenny; and Rita was Retard, and sometimes Tardy, because, as she liked to joke, “I’m manually retarded.” This stemmed from her inability to operate even the most basic electronics.
“Ice cream?” I asked, abandoning my sorrow as quickly as it came. “Yes! I want chocolate ice cream!” And with that, Rita had cemented her status as Favorite Aunt.
In my mother’s absence I woke with Rita just before eight and we headed down to the pool, where I shimmied into my yellow tube and floated all afternoon, bronzing my skin until the Mexican family down the hall assumed I was one of them. (They were Mexican Jews, so they were half right.) When we came back to the air-conditioned apartment around lunch, Rita would grab the bag of Milky Way bars out of the freezer and we’d chase them with Coca-Cola. Then she’d rub some Banana Boat on my skin and we’d go back down for more. When the sun set we’d fix fresh bagels and lox for dinner and watch reruns of Love, American Style and Bewitched. Later in the evening Rita would give me her lingerie to play dress-up, and I’d walk out in her four-inch Ferragamos and a negligée so big that it trailed behind me. She’d laugh until she snorted, and hand me more of her designer duds to model: bikinis, slip dresses, her prized St. John Knits. She’d paint my lips with Saint, her favorite shade of red lipstick (and my mother’s). Before bed I’d get to stretch out in her long bathtub and she’d fill it up with warm water mixed with Spring Green Vitabath, a treat I’d never before enjoyed. I was in the lap of luxury, and I loved it.
But some days when I’d wander into Rita’s bedroom and take a nap on the little mattress she’d placed near the ocean-facing window for me, I’d gaze out onto the Intracoastal and try to conjure my father through sheer mental force. “Daddy, please appear, right now,” I’d say into the air. Then I’d turn toward the bedroom door and repeat in my head, “Daddy, walk through this door right this second. Please, Daddy, if you can hear me, please come back for me.” But he didn’t hear me, and the door stayed shut.
“How long have I been here?” I asked Rita one day as I dressed and undressed my Barbie dolls.
“A month,” she said from the couch, where she was reclining and watching TV.
“How long is a month?” I asked.
“Thirty days,” she said. She was sucking on sour balls from Winn-Dixie. I crawled up and grabbed some. She kept them around the apartment in glass jars and they were quickly becoming my favorites.
“How much longer will I be here?” I asked. “When is Daddy coming home?”
“I don’t know, Jenbo,
” she said, concerned. “Soon.”
Sometimes I annoyed Rita, too, and since Kara and Miguel were off doing their own thing, our relationship became tense, like the one my mother and I had shared in solitude in Irvine. One night we had an argument over what to eat for dinner—“I want Cheerios!” I insisted; “You can’t have Cheerios for dinner, Jenny!”—and she smacked me across the face and split my lip with one of her long nails.
“I want Mommy!” I wailed; but my mother would have done the same thing. I stared out the window at the orange and purple sky and fantasized about Cheerios until Rita came back in and apologized. She looked pained. I guess we all were.
My mother did come back, though we knew she would have to leave again. Not that Rita’s life didn’t have its share of excitement. When my mother wasn’t around, Rita had all kinds of interesting friends over, often into the wee hours, and they’d camp out in her bedroom. Whenever the door opened I got a whiff of cigarette smoke, except it didn’t smell like her usual cigarettes. One night I finally got to see the source of those funny-smelling cigarettes up close. Rita was lying on her bed watching TV next to a small orange contraption that looked like a mini paper towel holder lying on its side. In it she put a thin piece of paper from a package marked “Zig Zag,” which looked like the tracing paper I’d used to copy Daddy’s drawings, and sprinkled some stuff on it that looked like dried bits of grass. It went through the roller and came out looking like a cigarette.
“Rita, what’s that?” I asked, mesmerized by the process.
“This?” she asked, holding up her homemade creation. “This is a Turkish cigarette. Your aunt Rita smokes a lot of Turkish cigarettes.” My aunt Rita also liked smoking a lot of regular cigarettes, and often fell asleep with a lit one dangling between her elegantly manicured fingers.
My mother went up and down the coast all summer, though I don’t know how long she stayed in each place. Time to me then was like lava, somehow creeping and bubbling its way forward without my consent. When my mother was finally in Florida to stay, I took it to mean that my father was here, too.
“When do I get to see Daddy?” I asked, excited, after her train pulled in.
She sighed. “Honey, we can’t,” she replied.
“Why not? Isn’t he here, too?”
“He is,” she said. “He’s in another facility. But this facility is different.” As long as my father was in corrections in Florida, I didn’t get to visit him. Which was probably better; I was tired of feeling so frustrated when he couldn’t come home with us.
“Mama, I have one more question,” I said.
“What?” she said, exasperated.
“Why would somebody smoke the grass?”
She stopped and clenched her jaw. “Where did you hear that?”
“Well, I heard Aunt Rita talking about grass. Why would somebody want to smoke the lawn?” Perhaps it was an odd delicacy, like Rita’s Turkish cigarettes?
“They’re not smoking the lawn, Jenny,” she said, stifling a laugh.
One day my mother took me to an apartment in Miami and introduced the shy twenty-three-year-old inside. “Jenny,” she said, “this is your sister, Angela. Angela, this is the brat, my little peanut-face, Jenny.”
“I’m Jennifer Cassese Mascia,” I said, pronouncing each syllable of our other last name with pride: MASS-see-ya. “But you can call me Jenbo.” My mother smiled at Angie and turned to me.
“Jenny, we don’t have to say ‘Cassese’ anymore,” she said. “And your Daddy isn’t Frank anymore, either. People are going to call him John now. No more Frank.” I was confused. She called my father “Frank” in public but “Johnny” around the house.
“But aren’t Frank and John the same name?” I asked. Like William and Bill, or Richard and Dick. One was a nickname for the other. Wasn’t it? Suddenly we had new names and I was finally meeting one of my siblings.
“JENNY, DID I EVER TELL you that you have two sisters and a brother?” my father had asked as he tried to teach me to draw at our big round glass dining room table in Irvine.
“I have brothers and sisters?” I’d replied, overjoyed at the prospect. “Where are they?”
“They live in Miami, which is where you were born,” he said.
“Are they coming to visit, too?” My grandpa Frank and grandma Helen—my father’s parents—had already been to Irvine to visit, as had Aunt Rita, though I barely remembered her visits.
“No, not yet, Jenny Penny,” he said, using his nickname for me. “They can’t come visit us here yet. But—”
“Why not?” I asked. “I want to meet them!”
“I’ll show you pictures,” he promised, and went upstairs. He came back down with a manila folder filled with drawings on yellowing paper. There was a bold pencil rendering of Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, a comic book character named Captain Comet, Mickey Mouse and Daffy Duck, the dresser in someone’s house, a Camel ad come to life, a ’59 Ford, shaded powder blue, and a list of “Old Songs to Remember”—“The Still of the Night” by the Five Satins, “Tears on My Pillow” by the Imperials, “I Only Have Eyes for You” by the Flamingos. He pulled out a piece of paper dated “Dec. 11, 1958,” and on it a smiling girl younger than me with a pageboy haircut pulled a blanket around her little body; she looked off to the right and smiled slightly.
“This is Tina, she’s your half-sister,” he said. Then he pulled out another sheet of paper, a smaller square, dated “11-14-59.” It was a woman with dark lips and upswept hair accented with light pink. She wore a pink wrap and had pearls dangling from her ears.
“This girl right here, her name is Marie,” he explained. “When I was very young, Marie and I were married. I loved Marie very much, but I was bad and dated all her friends when she went away to summer camp.”
“You didn’t!” I said. “Daddy!”
He laughed and pulled up his right sleeve and flexed his considerable biceps. There he had a blue bird with the name “Marie” etched in cursive underneath it. “I got this in Coney Island when I was nineteen,” he said. “They colored it in with needles.”
“Needles?” I asked, flinching instinctively. I was so scared of needles, and medicine in general, that when I scratched my cornea with a piece of plastic my father had to bribe me with a Snoopy Sno-Cone machine before I let him put the drops in my eye.
“You think that’s bad, kiddo, look at this,” he said, and rolled up his other sleeve. On his left arm was another blue bird, this time with “Johnny” written there.
“Daddy!” I said. Then: “I want a tattoo!”
“No,” he said, sternly.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Please, Jenny,” he said, exasperated, like I was already a rebellious sixteen-year-old. “What if you marry a doctor one day?” I imagined myself a doctor’s wife, clad in a nurse’s uniform.
“So you got the tattoo because you were married?” I asked, wondering even at that tender age whether my mother had a problem with it.
“Yes,” he said.
“But you’re married to Mommy,” I pointed out.
“I’m married to Mommy now,” he said. “But Marie and I were married when we were very young. I was nineteen and she was fifteen, and that was when we had your half-sister, Christina,” he said, pointing to his drawing. “Tina.”
“Tina,” I said, trying it out. “How old is Tina, Daddy?”
“Tina is, uh, let me see,” he said, doing the arithmetic in his head but theatrically counting on his stubby sausage fingers for my benefit. “If she was born in ’fifty-six, that would make her twenty-six now,” he said. “She will be twenty-seven in September.”
“I was born in November,” I said.
“That’s right,” he said, still shading in his characters. He could have been an illustrator for Disney, he was that good. “You were born November 22, and your motha and I were married on the nineteenth. Three days before you were born.”
“Nooooooo!” I said, laughing. He frequently made this
joke, and it annoyed my mother no end. “Don’t tell her that, Johnny!” my mother would protest. “She’ll tell all her friends one day and they’ll think I was schwangered when we got married. Jenny, your father and I were married in 1976; you were born in ’seventy-seven.” Knowing my mother as well as I do now, I can’t believe something like that ever mattered to her, when so much about her life was so utterly unconventional.
“Your other sister,” my father continued, “is named Angela. She lives in Florida, too, with Tony, who is your brother. Tony is, madonn’, how old is Tony now, El?” he shouted into the kitchen.
“Uhhhhh … Tony is … he must be nineteen now, Johnny? Twenty?” my mother called back.
And now here was Angela, the sister closest to my age, standing before me in the city where I was born. I took her in: brown hair and brown eyes, like me, and a grin so infectious and sincere it gave her chipmunk cheeks. She bent down and hugged me, then leaned in for a much longer hug with my mom.
“How have you been, Ange?” my mother said into her neck as she patted her back.
“Good, good. Eleanor, god, it’s been so long,” she said. My mother left me for the day with Angela, who let me stand on her coffee table and sing my favorite song on her karaoke machine, “What a Feeling” from Flashdance. I was so obsessed with that movie that my mother came back from Nordstrom one afternoon with an off-the-shoulder pink sweatshirt with a cut-out neck, just like Jennifer Beals. Never mind that I was five.
Next I got to meet my other sister, Tina. “Well, how are you, Miss Jennifer?” Tina said after my mother introduced us. “It’s very nice to meet you, but we’ve met before. I was your first babysitter.” She looked at my mother and beamed, then turned to me, awaiting my response.
“I need a Valium,” I replied. Tina suppressed laughter while my mother slowly shook her head and sighed.
Tina was married to a man named Bill, who was closer to my mom’s age. They lived in Indian River Estates and had a dog I fell head-over-heels in love with, a golden retriever named Bridget. I ran around Tina’s property with Bridget in tow, waging duels with tree branches and composing musical theater. My mother sometimes left me with Tina for weekends, probably figuring I needed a change of scenery. I liked her immediately; she reminded me of my father. Plus, she gifted me with my first Cabbage Patch Kid, procured from a friend who was on the waiting list at the toy store.
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