Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  That September my mother enrolled me in first grade at Bay Harbor Elementary, which signaled that she wasn’t sure when my father was going to be able to leave the facility. I hated school there; I found myself lost in my classes, which had many more students than I was used to. Lessons rushed right past me, and while everyone else copied down notes from the overhead projector I doodled absentmindedly in my notebook, or reread the letters my father had sent me from the facility, adorned with Mickey Mouse and characters from the Peanuts gang. I got punished for talking during class and spent most recesses picking trash off the carpet, which suited me just fine, as socializing in a school this large overwhelmed me. One day, my frustrated teacher opened the door to the classroom, which faced the street, and instructed me to keep watch for my father.

  “You just stand there and wait for your daddy to come and get you so he can punish you,” she told me. I searched the traffic for his red Oldsmobile, wishing it were that easy to bring him back to me.

  IN OCTOBER, I FINALLY got my wish. My mother had been gone all day, and when she waltzed through Rita’s front door my father was standing behind her, wearing his familiar beige cable-knit sweater.

  “Hey, kiddo!” he called to me. I ran into his arms like a cheetah, colliding with him with such force that I could have broken my neck. He scooped me up and threw me onto his shoulders, and I was home again. It was my mother’s birthday, October 12, and she called it “the best birthday present I ever got in my life.” I have a photograph that was taken later that night, in which I am sitting on his lap and he is holding out his cheek for me to kiss. I’m tan and topless—I was still young enough to pull that off—and my hair is long and brown. He looks thinner than I remember him being, and his arms are wrapped firmly around me. We were whole again.

  The night my father was released from jail, Miami, October 1983.

  We didn’t leave Florida right away, as we were out of money. I gathered as much when my father was installed as the new line cook at Bagels and Donuts, where Rita was the manager. I celebrated the last day of 1983 at the counter watching my father flip burgers and fry eggs, and at the end of the night I got my first sip of champagne.

  I don’t remember saying our goodbyes, but by spring we were on the road again, this time in a car. My mother, amused by our plight, sang “On the Road Again” incessantly as we spent a week traversing the dusty Southwest. We got caught in a sandstorm near the ArizonaCalifornia border, and since there were no rest stops as far as the eye could see, I got out and peed right there on the road as the sand stung my ears and eyes. To pass the time as we inched toward Orange County, my mother and I crafted a shopping list for when we finally got our own place. “Ivory soap,” she recited as she stroked my hair, “Cheerios, maple syrup, balsamic vinegar, extra virgin olive oil, Gold’s horseradish, the purple kind; heavy cream for my coffee and half & half for Daddy’s coffee; Yuban coffee; Dijon mustard; Uncle Ben’s; shampoo; capers, nonpareil—”

  “Mommy, what does ‘nonpareil’ mean?” I’d ask.

  “You know, I’m actually not sure,” she admitted.

  “But Mommy, I thought you knew everything,” I said. It had to be true; she’d said it.

  “Well, I know everything but this, all right?” she snapped, then continued with her inventory in more soporific tones: “Valencia oranges, grapefruit, romaine lettuce, Baker’s chocolate squares, so we can make brownies”—her brownies were deliciously decadent and dusted with a thin coating of powdered sugar, which she dumped into a sieve and gently shook over the plate.

  “Mommy, do you remember when you made zeppoles?” I asked. Another of her powdered sugar delicacies.

  “Yes,” she said. “Those were good, huh?”

  “And that stuff you made that night with Daddy, I loved it, it was brown and burned a little, those dry fish pieces. Mommy, what was it?” I couldn’t erase the flavor from my mind, nor the scene, at our condo in Turtle Rock, of her and my father laughing as they dabbed the sluglike pieces of fish on paper towels to absorb the oil.

  “Calamari,” she said, but pronounced it “calamah.”

  “And it wasn’t supposed to be burnt,” she added, tightening her lips into a firm pout, as if someone had pulled a drawstring on either side of her mouth. It was her signature scowl and she employed it until the end of her life.

  “Mommy, can we make it again?” I asked. “And zeppoles, can we make those, too, just you, me, and Daddy?” I wanted to have our life back, just the three of us. So did she.

  “Soon,” she said. “Very soon.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Rio Verde Street

  Lake Forest, California

  May 1986

  • • •

  AFTER TWO YEARS SPENT IN A TINY TWO-BEDROOM APARTMENT so cramped that when you sat down on the toilet your knee hit the tub, we moved into a spacious one-story spread located in a tract housing development that had just been carved out of a hillside in Lake Forest. Though the scenery changed, my mother’s “I need a Valium” refrain echoed for years, transcending the crisis we’d narrowly averted. Her little blue pills made her irritable and her temper was shorter than usual when they wore off, and the only thing that centered her somewhat was her epic phone conversations with David, her ex-husband, whom my mother anointed my uncle. I grew accustomed to picking up the phone and hearing David’s friendly, effeminate drawl, and he seemed to be equally fond of me, sending me rings with small, brightly colored stones from his antique jewelry business in the diamond center in New York.

  “Hello, Jennifah,” David would say in greeting when he called every other afternoon.

  “Hi, Uncle David!” I’d say, twirling myself into the long, metallic blue cord from the kitchen phone until I was wrapped up like a mummy. “Whaddya doin’?”

  “Nothing much, Jenny, how are you?” he replied. “How is your motha?”

  “She’s mad at me, Uncle David,” I said. “Today she took the skin on my arm and pinched it and twisted it around! It hurt so bad!”

  “Hey!” a voice barked from behind me. “Gimme that phone!” If this had been a cartoon, steam would have been escaping from her nostrils.

  “Dammit, Mom!”

  “Shit, Jenny, I told you to use ‘darn it’!” my mother snapped, whipping the phone out of my hand.

  Yet another dance recital, Laguna Beach, 1987.

  Perhaps employment as my personal chauffeur was grating on her—between school, acting classes, Girl Scouts, tap, jazz, and ballet, we were single-handedly keeping Chevron in business—but she got her revenge by dragging me to South Coast Plaza every weekend. The three of us had gone there many Sundays when we lived in Irvine, which was five miles from the mall’s Costa Mesa locale. But now my mother was taking me for shopping excursions without my father, and instead of a leisurely stroll through the May Company and I. Magnin, followed by a ride on the carousel, she would make a beeline for Bullocks and Nordstrom as I blithely trailed behind her. At first I enjoyed visiting the upscale mall because I was guaranteed hot chocolate and a croissant at Vie de France, and the occasional trinket from Sanrio Gift Gate, home of Hello Kitty. We knew the saleslady at Brass Plum by name, and soon I was outfitted in the same clothing I saw draped over the young characters on my favorite TV shows. Esprit, Guess, Benetton, Reebok, Z Cavaricci, DKNY, L.A. Gear, Jessica McClintock, Gucci watches—I had it all, but not because I wanted it. I wanted Garbage Pail Kids and Keroppi stationery, but my mother wanted a child dressed in the latest fashions. She even bought me a pair of Keds that were mismatched on purpose—the left foot was yellow and the right was red—and I was teased mercilessly at school for it. “I don’t understand,” she said, dismayed, when I cried to her. “This is what’s ‘in.’”

  But she was cultivating a sophisticated sense of style in her daughter, even if she was boring her to death. Our mouths would water as we passed Escada and gaped at the smart suits; we’d amble past Caché and she’d target her next fantasy acquisition in the window; she already
had two St. John Knits and she hungrily eyed the latest designs, fingering the tight stitching even as she balked at the price tag. Joan & David shoes were her favorite extravagance; honorable mentions included her Gucci keychain topped with its signature gold-plated interlocking G’s, three Louis Vuitton purses with a matching wallet, and a Vuitton checkbook holder, which I inherited. On the rare occasion I need to write a check, my friends gasp and admire it with that same glazed-over look my mother sported for years. The shiny amber brick floors of the sprawling hundred-acre mall became as familiar to me as my own bedroom carpet, while traversing the passageway to FAO Schwarz, in a semisecluded wing of the mall, was like an adventure. I was as enamored with the mall as my mother was, until I wasn’t.

  The honeymoon ended with Williams-Sonoma. Children and cookware generally do not mix, and my mother was determined to fill her free time with all aspects of the culinary arts; she even went through a phase where she baked her own bread and made her own mayonnaise. She bought two oven bricks so she could make pizza, a feat which took just eight short hours but produced a thin-crusted margherita that wasn’t half bad. Nothing we ate ever came from a bottle. She made her own pasta sauce and even her own vinaigrette—there was no Hidden Valley at my house. She bought a wok so we could stir-fry our dinner if we wanted, a pressure cooker to make risotto, a double boiler, a Donvier ice cream maker—which did churn out some pretty good ice cream, the one time she made it—and a food processor, which I used to crush ice that I ate like snow. We had a juicer so we could have fresh-squeezed orange juice every morning, a purchase that spoiled me for life, and a deep fryer we used to crisp French fries. We owned the entire set of Le Creuset pots and pans, which were orange and blue and incredibly heavy; we got silverware from Italy with stems that looked like bamboo, except it was stainless steel. She bought the entire set of Henckels knives and a wooden block in which to keep them; we had blenders, corkscrews, cheese graters, ladles, pasta spoons, zesters, cutting boards, strainers in three different sizes, different knives for cheese and grapefruit, ice cream scoopers, pie servers, plates just for artichokes, a gravy pourer in the shape of a rooster, colanders, stainless steel spoons and cups just for measuring, an espresso machine that I am pretty certain she never used, wineglasses, champagne flutes, juice glasses, coffee mugs, teakettles she simply returned when they wore out, and beer steins we kept in the freezer so my father’s beer could stay colder longer—so cold, in fact, that ice crystals formed in his Coors. She bought Dansk dishware for our more casual meals and began to store the expensive Arabia ware set of dishes, cups, and saucers from Finland that couldn’t be replaced. Not only did she have enough cookware to open a small restaurant, but she collected cookbooks that represented every imaginable cuisine: Cuban, Mexican, soup, bread and soup, spa cuisine, pizza, Italian, French, Joy of Cooking, Asian, 20-Minute Menus, Cuisine Rapide. Julia Child, James Beard, Paul Prudhomme, and Maida Heatter were all represented, as were Craig Claiborne, Marcella Hazan, and Pierre Franey.

  In addition to Williams-Sonoma, we visited the bedding departments of Saks, Neiman Marcus, and Robinson’s, and my patience was rewarded with goose down pillows and Laura Ashley comforters. Frequent visits to makeup counters meant she had the latest in Shiseido, Chanel, and Fendi, and later, MAC and Bobbi Brown. She always had a fresh bottle of Opium or Joy on her dresser, her favorite fragrances, and when the levels were low my father and I always knew what to get her for Christmas. She had a hairstylist she visited once a month in West Hollywood who dyed out her grays, and under his advisement she went through every brand in the hair care pantheon: Sebastian, Phyto, Matrix, Biolage, Nexxus, Aveda, Joico, Bain de Terre, Sorbie—every time we got into the shower there was a different brand staring back at us, supposedly better than the last because it was more expensive. (Not that my father cared: The only shampoo he ever used was Selsun Blue for his dandruff, and he eschewed conditioner altogether.) I grew so disenchanted with shopping that to this day it makes me so anxious that I start sweating and my legs turn to Jell-O if I have to spend more than twenty minutes in a department store. That list she had created on the road had a secret counterpart, and she spent a decade making sure we procured everything on it.

  For a spell my mother caught a break when the bills came, because they didn’t—her credit card company was sending her bills to Lake Forest, Illinois, because our California town was so new. But when they finally arrived they were paid with my parents’ earnings from a lucrative two-summer-long custodial contract they’d secured from Chapman College, money that was never put into a bank. My parents’ idea of a checking account was to cut a hole in the padding underneath the carpet in the master bedroom, where my father stored his cash; if times were flush, my father cut another hole, then another. Money came into my parents’ lives in big, unaccounted-for bundles and flowed between their cigarette-stained fingers like fine Long Island sand. Nothing was official—my father’s carpet business was off the books and taxes were a rumor. My parents did put my birthday checks into a savings account and called it my “college fund,” but it never went north of $2,000 and didn’t pay for a single textbook. Except for a car here and there we never owned anything, ever, including the house on Rio Verde.

  Almost as soon as we moved in, everyone from “Back East” came to visit—my father’s sister, Rosalie; her daughter, Helen, with her husband and kids, twice; my half-sister Angie, with her husband, Frankie, and their newborn, Nicole, my father’s first granddaughter; my halfbrother, Tony, and my father’s Aunt Katie, who taught me how to play solitaire. I thought we were the coolest family in town because everyone wanted to visit us, and I only realized years later that our popularity stemmed from the fact that we lived in immaculate, sunny Southern California, which is apparently every New Yorker’s idea of paradise.

  But best of all, there was Rita. Rita visited a few times a year and her trips were Special Occasions. “Jenbo!” she’d yelp as I ran into her arms at the airport and buried myself in her Opium-scented hair. Rita was bronzed to perfection, with perfectly lined lips and freshly manicured nails. She always adorned herself with expensive sweaters and pantsuits that my mother often borrowed, then bought for herself as soon as Rita left. Rita was my mother’s material idol, I could tell—all those trips to South Coast had a focal point, a dream to work toward, and that dream was Rita, seven years younger than my mother, who was nearing fifty.

  Rita always flew in from Florida armed with a catalog of wild stories about her crazy friends, some of whom I’d met that summer in Florida. Like her ex-boyfriend Steve—nicknamed “Steve-Steve”—a creepy stalker type who had tried to curry favor with Rita by reading me bedtime stories during my tenure in Miami, whispering the words into my neck with breath so hot it glued my hair to my skin. In a particularly boneheaded move, Steve was arrested in Ecuador for attempting to smuggle cocaine in the sole of his tennis shoe. Or her friend Betty, who owned a sweets store next to Bagels and Donuts (that my father and Rita had routinely pillaged, much to my delight)—who had irrigated her eye with what she thought was Visine, only to discover when she couldn’t open it again that it was really nail glue. At first I had no idea what my parents and Rita were gabbing about, but they were uncensored in their speech and I picked up quick. But the fact that I was privy to such adult subject matter wasn’t exactly a departure from the way I was already being raised. There was no Disney in our house; instead of Mary Poppins and Dumbo I was reared on Woody Allen. I could recite the jingles and snappier lines from Radio Days, a favorite of mine because it depicted the world in which my parents grew up, but I had no idea what songs the Little Mermaid sang. When, at the age of seven, I started memorizing dialogue from The Breakfast Club, my father gave me a lecture about watching movies that were beyond my maturity level. But it was too late; he couldn’t expect me to curb my viewing habits when I had influences like HBO, Cinemax, MTV—and, of course, Rita.

  Her zaniness was not dampened by the passing of time; on the contrary, it seemed to grow in
proportion to her years. Rita, who preferred to park in the fire lane when we went to the supermarket, was the playmate who lit matches with me, a nine-year-old budding pyromaniac, in the bathroom of a fancy restaurant in Coronado. I had recently fallen in love with the smell of phosphorus, and I swiped a matchbook from the host stand. Rita, game for anything, suggested we sneak into the bathroom, where her eyes lit up with each spark. My mother later told me that our waiter approached the table and politely informed her, “Ma’am, your daughter and another woman are lighting matches in the bathroom.” My parents knocked on the door and rescued the two of us from a lawsuit waiting to happen, and after we resumed our dinner and strolled along the island’s streets in the summer heat, Rita assured me, “If I was your mother, I’d let you play with your friends whenever you wanted, as late as you wanted.” Being the stool pigeon I was—my father’s character assessment, as I spilled every secret I ever possessed to my mother, including his Friday night candy donations—I informed on Rita not ten minutes later, and my mother pulled her aside right there in the street and set her straight: “She is not your daughter,” she admonished. “She is my daughter, and she will live by my rules. Do you understand me?” But there were moments, before I knew what mature love was, when I wished Rita had been my mother. She was magnetic. I noticed that she and my father had a special bond, laughing and joking together like they were the married couple, and in a strange mix of fantasy and confusion, I began to wonder if I was really their child and not my mother’s. They just seemed so perfectly matched that if I was casting the movie, they would be the romantic leads. Rita and my father mirrored each other’s energy, while my mother’s tended to lag.