My mother and her sister Rita were the best of friends. December 31, 1982.
But my mother didn’t seem to notice—if anything, Rita’s presence gave my mother an excuse to shop. The four of us would take off for long weekends to San Diego on Rita’s dime, staying at Le Meridien in Coronado and ordering niçoise salad as we lounged by the pool. Sometimes just my mother, Rita, and I would drive up to Beverly Hills and spend a weekend at the Bel Age enjoying room service while my father stayed behind to work. Rita led the three of us into the lap of luxury, and it was a hard habit to break when she left. She provided a brief respite from the drudgery of dirty carpets/unfulfilling homemaking/third grade, and gave us an excuse to laugh, which came in handy when we lost the Chapman contract. After two years the college decided to use an in-house crew and it was a big financial loss. The pile under the carpet dwindled and our reliance on plastic grew. We had just purchased a powder-blue Ford Econoline work van for my Dad and a cream-colored Taurus for my mom, a lemon that constantly leaked coolant. But because we’d lost Chapman we couldn’t replace the Taurus, so we stuck it out through the syrup smell and the unending repairs.
Our decreased spending ability was something even I picked up on, as I found myself home more often instead of at the mall. I also grew more conscious of the fact that my father performed tedious, back-breaking work for a living, while my friend Heather’s father owned a hardware store; Tori’s father worked in an office and even had a home computer—a Wang!—and Kara’s father … well, I’m not sure what Kara’s father did, but he didn’t come home with bulging biceps covered in sweat and rough, callused hands. By the time my father had put in ten years of carpet cleaning he had to stop wearing his wedding ring because, he said, his hands had become so swollen. Every day when he came home I’d ask, almost like a doting wife, “How was your day?” to which he’d respond, “Tiring.” We ran through this routine every evening for years and he always answered the same way.
Since my mother wasn’t crazy about outdoor activities, it was my father who spent an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic on winding Laguna Canyon Road every summer Sunday so we could spend a few blessed hours at the beach. He was the one who took me to Wild Rivers, either alone or with one of my friends, and sat around watching me careen down one water slide after another without even the benefit of beer. Once I hid an inflamed throat from my mother so she couldn’t prohibit us from one of our weekend jaunts; I’d already had pneumonia twice, in addition to numerous bouts with bronchitis and strep throat, and she would have locked me in my room with a humidifier if she’d known I was ill.
“See, Eleanor?” my father would say over dinner, which we had together at the same time every night with few exceptions. “We’re bonding!” And here he’d hold his wrist up to his forehead and keep it there as he sipped his wine and passed the bread, like it was Krazy Glued to his skin. Get it? Bonding. My father’s lame humor never ceased to tickle me, and I always laughed at his silly jokes. Another one of his dinnertime gags was his contention that he wasn’t John Mascia, but Bruce Springboard—a play on the reigning prince of rock, Bruce Springsteen—a guest in our house who swung by for my mother’s sautéed escarole and oven-baked chicken. I must have been a great audience, cascading giggles as I accompanied him to weekend home measuring appointments and trips to the upholstery warehouse where he picked up books of carpet samples. As soon as we got home I’d press my nose against the swatches and breathe in the new floor smell; to this day I can’t pass a carpet store without staring at the multicolored patches and suppressing a desire to walk up to them and sniff.
My father and me right before my tenth birthday party, November 1987.
At the same time, my social life on Rio Verde was vastly improving, though friends one day could turn out to be bullies the next. The little devils who lived across the street, a pair of prepubescent brothers, were behind one of the scariest and most exciting hoaxes of my young life up till that point: a chain letter. It had arrived in my mailbox on a Saturday morning, precipitated by a prank call and a hang-up, and luckily Heather, my friend from school, was there when I opened it. “Come here!” I shrieked, and read the sinister contents aloud. It said something like, “We know what you did, and if you don’t pass this letter on, everyone will know.” It may or may not have mentioned the government, but either way, I soon became convinced that the government had sent the letter. I looked at Heather with wide, terrified eyes: How did they know about what had happened to Daddy? I mean, it must have been about that. It was just too accurate a guess for it to involve anything other than the fact that my father had been in jail.
“Heather,” I said grimly, “there’s something I have to tell you.” I told her about how the police had come for my father in Irvine and how we had to follow him back to New York and Florida, where he was kept in various facilities. “I don’t know how they found us here,” I said, hysterical, “but please, please don’t tell anyone!”
“I promise, Jenny,” she said, clearly not sharing my sense of urgency.
“Cross your heart?” I said. “Because if the government is after us again I can’t tell my mommy. It would kill her.” But I told my mommy anyway, showing her the letter the next morning when Heather was still asleep.
“Jenny, get over here,” she said sternly, dragging me into the garage and locking the door. She wagged her finger in my face. “Listen to me,” she said. “You are never to tell anyone about what happened with Daddy and the facility. Do you understand me?”
“But Mommy,” I explained, “it could be the government! They could be after us again! They could take Daddy away again!” If I found out before she did, I reasoned, then maybe I could stop it this time. I could rewrite history.
She opened the letter, mockingly read the first few lines aloud, and laughed. “Jenny, if the government is coming for us, it won’t be in the form of a chain letter,” she said. I whimpered for a few minutes, unable to weed out the real from the imagined, but I came to understand her way of thinking. Chain letters, newly discovered by my peers, were fast becoming the rage in my class. I should have been able to differentiate a low-tech viral hoax from the very real events that had transpired three years before. “Now,” she said, folding up the letter and handing it back to me, “you go in there and tell Heather that your father was arrested and let go immediately afterward—because he got a traffic ticket. It was a mistake, that’s all. Your father was mistakenly arrested.” I nodded. But I had one more question:
“Is that really why Daddy was sent to the facility?” I asked. “That’s not why, right?” I’d never really gotten an explanation and I wasn’t going to ask him. She sized me up and probably realized that she couldn’t explain away two separate arrests and five months in jail with a misunderstanding at a routine traffic stop.
“No,” she admitted. “Do you want to know why Daddy was arrested and sent to the facility?”
“Yes, please!” I exclaimed.
“Shhh,” she said, “calm down. Okay. Your father was arrested because there is another man with his name who did something bad, something very bad. This man is also John Mascia. It was a simple case of mistaken identity. But you are not to tell Heather that. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Mommy,” I said obediently.
“You must never tell our business to strangers,” she said. “They are not your family. They are not your blood. Do you understand?”
I nodded again.
“Now go tell her the truth—he was arrested because of a ticket, and let go right away.”
“Yes, Mommy.”
But I didn’t have to worry too much about Heather holding our skeletons over my head, as my parents decided a few months later to send me to Catholic school, which boasted a superior education. The only hitch was the forty-five-minute morning commute. My parents alternated driving days; if my father had a job that took him north he would be the one to take me, though this only happened once or twice a week. My father would let me listen to all th
e pop music I wanted, whereas my mother insisted on the news and smoked with the windows closed; in the space of a year the cream velour seats became pockmarked with cigarette burns. But after commuting an hour and a half each day for two years the news became tiresome, and before long she turned off KFWB 980 and began to tell stories in her mannered, animated way: about the gods on Mount Olympus and their lusty, hubris-infused adventures; Scheherazade weaving her yarns for King Shahryar; Robert Kennedy and all the promise lost when he was killed (“He would have kept us out of the war!” she railed); and in the same vein, the tragedy of Vietnam (“You’ve got to read a book called The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman—well, maybe when you’re a little older”); the glory of Elizabeth I; great dancers like Suzanne Farrell and Isadora Duncan (“Poor Isadora died a horrible death—her scarf got caught in the car wheels and rear axle, strangling her!”) and their Svengalis, like Balanchine; great actresses like Sarah Bernhardt, who played Hamlet and performed long after her right leg was amputated, and Meryl Streep, who we both believed to be the Greatest Actress of Our Time (I’d even decided to be an actress after seeing her in Heartburn) and who, my mother told me, was a graduate of the Yale School of Drama (where I therefore decided I must go); even James Irvine, onetime owner of a third of Orange County, after whom Irvine was named.
“When James Irvine arrived, the only people living here were Spanish settlers and Serrano Indians,” my mother, who had just finished reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, told me, “and the hills were covered with row after row of orange California poppies as far as the eye could see. It must have looked like the hills were on fire! Well, Irvine took one look at those golden hills and declared, ‘All this is mine.’” Here she would stretch out her arms and her voice would get deep, mimicking the zealous entitlement of Donald Trump. No topic was off-limits, as she could pontificate about pretty much anything, lecturing as if she stood before a class of twenty-five. “You have such big gaps in your history,” she would lament, and proceeded to do her best to fill them in, talking long after we’d pulled in to the school parking lot. Even the prospect of my tardiness couldn’t slow her down; I often had my hand on the door handle for a good ten minutes before she was finished with her story for that day.
As we sailed down long stretches of freeway with little to gaze upon other than the glorious snow-capped mountains we quickly took for granted, her recitations of history turned into tales of her life before me. It would always begin, “Did I ever tell you about …” and from there I was launched into April 1945, when FDR died, something she said she vaguely remembered. “My mother ran outside and everyone on the block was standing around the radio crying,” she recalled. “This is when we lived on Ocean Avenue. I was only five or six at the time, so I didn’t really know what was happening.” That same year my mother nearly died from double pneumococcal pneumonia, the unintended side effect of tonsil removal surgery, which everyone had in those days even if they didn’t need it. “I inhaled the ether,” she said, “and I got so sick afterward, they thought I might die. They weren’t sure for a while. My parents were very wealthy so they got private round-the-clock nurses who came to the house and kept me sequestered from everyone. The pneumonia was in both lungs and I was in bed for weeks.”
“And you still smoked after that?” I asked. I had already begun ribbing my parents for smoking so much, and for so many years—they’d both started in their early teens.
“Yeah, I know,” she conceded. “Stupid, huh?” She told me that her father had made a fortune in the garment industry only to lose it all because of bad business decisions. “He was an alcoholic,” she said, “and as he drank more he began to lose his judgment.” He also terrorized my mother and her sisters, threatening with a sneer in his voice that he’d flatten them into the wall if they made too much noise. “He always called us morons,” she said, “which was funny, because we were all so smart.” Arline was the one with the genius IQ and my grandmother agreed to let her skip two grades, which my mother insisted was a mistake because she was already short for her age. My mother graduated from Brooklyn College with honors, “so for my father to call us morons was ridiculous,” she spat.
“So what did you do when your dad called you that?” I asked, my voice full of concern. I couldn’t imagine being treated that way by my parents. Even if we fought, I knew they loved me. I couldn’t imagine doubting it.
“I told him to shut up,” she said. “But that was later on. At first, when he yelled at me that way, I’d get such a lump in my throat, you know, where you feel like you’re swallowing your tongue, d’ya evah get that?” I nodded; I knew it well. Arline and Rita both left home as soon as they were old enough to marry. At seventeen, Arline hitched herself to the construction worker who was building the house across the street and went to live with him in Connecticut; my mother had helped Arline carry her suitcase out to the car and their father locked her out of the house in retaliation. Rita met Kara’s father during a family vacation to Miami when she was also seventeen, but my mother didn’t leave until she married David at twenty-four. “Did I ever tell you what my father did when I got my fellowship to Columbia for Russian studies?” she asked me. I shook my head. “We went out to dinner one night: me, David, my mother and father, and Rita. My father was drunk, nokhamol, and I said to my mother, ‘We don’t have to go celebrate, it’s okay,’ but she insisted we go. A fellowship to Columbia is a big deal. I ended up in class with all of these CIA agents who were cramming for the cold war,” she said, laughing. “Too bad I didn’t finish my degree—I was three credits shy, all I had to do was finish my master’s thesis, but David and I were going through a divorce, so I stayed in bed and didn’t get up.”
“You never finished?” I asked.
“Yeah. Boy, was I stupid. Anyway, when I was accepted we went to this restaurant, and we were sitting at the table, and out of nowhere, my father announces, ‘You all think she’s so smart? She’s not fit to lick Arline’s boots!’”
“What?” I asked, horrified.
“Well, David was livid. Rita started crying. I didn’t know what to say, I was just stunned, so David says, in front of everyone, ‘Why don’t you throw your drink in his fucking face?’”
“Did you?” I asked.
“Nah,” she said.
“Still,” I said, “that was so cool of David!”
“I know,” she said, nodding. David and my mother both taught English literature for several years at Thomas Jefferson High School in East New York, Brooklyn. In the mid-seventies they opened a live-in drug-rehabilitation center for high school students called Alpha School. It went without saying that David was gay; it’s not something she ever had to explain to me. “Sex is the glue that binds people together,” she once mused, “and when that’s gone, everything else follows.” That didn’t stop my mother from remarrying him four years after they divorced the first time. “We were best friends, Jenny, what can I say? Besides, the Mexican divorce I got for us after the first marriage probably wasn’t legal anyway.” All told, they were married for twelve years, finally divorcing in 1975, the year she met my father. David’s being gay meant that he could still be friends with my mother without incurring any jealousy from my father, not that my father seemed like the jealous type. In fact, my mother was set to visit David soon because he was sick. She said it was some type of blood cancer but she wasn’t sure if it could be treated.
“My father called David a fagalah behind his back all the time,” my mother said. “When he walked me down the aisle when we got married—we had this big tent wedding in our backyard in Manhattan Beach—he handed me to David and said, ‘Here. Now you can deal with her.’”
“Oh, Mommy,” I said, feeling genuinely sorry for her.
“Not everyone has a good daddy like you do,” she said. “Just remember that. You’re very lucky.” I nodded obediently. “He was awful to my mother, too,” she added.
“How?” I asked. “What did he do?”
“Well,
he came home drunk all the time, and I know for a fact he cheated on her, too,” she revealed. “And my mother knew it. In fact, she once begged me to follow him around and report back.”
“Did you?” I asked from the edge of my seat.
“No, I refused,” she said. My grandmother never left him, even after he forced her to sell her share in a brownstone on Fifth Avenue because he needed the money to pay off his debts. He also forced her to sell their mansion in Manhattan Beach for much less than it was worth, something like $75,000. “Today, my god, it could probably go for at least three-quarters of a million, maybe more,” my mother told me. “The day he died, I’ll never forget, she called me up in Miami, and I answered the phone, and I couldn’t even understand what she was saying—she was wailing, crying, ‘My husband is dead! My husband died!’ Even today, if you ask her about Sam Sacks, he’s Saint Sam, who never drank, never cheated on her, ugh, please,” she said, waving her hand in disgust.
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” I said.
“What are you sorry for?” she asked. “I just learned that there is no such thing as unconditional love.”
I studied her face; surely she couldn’t mean that. “But I love you unconditionally,” I said.
“And I love you unconditionally, too,” she said. “But that’s never guaranteed. And that’s what the wonderful Sam Sacks taught me.”
“Mommy, Daddy never cheated on you, right?” I asked, believing such a thing to be impossible but asking anyway.
“Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head. “Never.” Sam had started drinking not long after my grandma Vivian’s mental breakdown. “My mother was so beautiful, Jenny,” she told me. “You have to understand, she came here from the Ukraine before the Depression, and even when everyone else was starving she looked like a movie star.” My mother was right—we had black-and-white thirties-era portrait photographs of both sets of my grandparents displayed prominently throughout the house, and my grandmother Helen could have passed an MGM screen test as well. Vivian was raised by her grandparents in a tiny Ukrainian town called Mogilev-Podolskiy but came to the States when she was a teenager, fleeing the post–World War I pogroms that engulfed her corner of the Soviet Union. In one particularly harrowing incident, Vivian and her extended family were forced to hide in a closet to avoid capture and six-year-old Vivian began to cry. Her uncle held a knife to her throat, ready to end her life if she made enough noise to arouse their attackers. “After the Holocaust my mother said, ‘I will never set foot in Europe again as long as I live,’ and she didn’t.” One night when Vivian and Sam went to see The Best Years of Our Lives, a postwar MGM weepie, she suddenly turned to Sam in the darkened movie theater and said she didn’t feel well and had to leave immediately. She appeared to be in the throes of a massive panic attack. Sam ushered them into the car and a doctor was called, then a psychiatrist. After that night a revolving door of doctors treated Vivian at the house, and the three Sacks girls soon found themselves reared by nurses and housekeepers for the next several years as Vivian struggled to function. The most loyal staffer they had, a young black housekeeper named Clotie, became their surrogate mother.
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