Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  “Clotie would bring me a hot lunch to school every day,” my mother recalled, “steamed fish, fresh vegetables. Of course, I was mortified, because I was the only kid who had her lunch brought to her on a silver platter—literally.”

  Vivian was found to be suffering a nervous breakdown in addition to agoraphobia, and the only effective treatment in 1946 was electroshock therapy, which was administered to Vivian for a year. In the house. When the children were home.

  My mother shrugged. “They were rich,” she explained. “They could afford to keep her out of the asylum.” But they couldn’t find a way to muffle Vivian’s screams before the electricity coursed through her body, and once or twice a week, when Vivian was getting treatment in the bedroom, my mother and Arline would sit on the staircase in silence and listen.

  “I could hear her screaming. Oy, Jenny, it was awful,” she said. “After that, my mother had housekeepers come in six days a week, and on the seventh day she would make us get on our hands and knees and scrub the floor.”

  “Like Mommie Dearest?” I asked. Because of its high camp factor it was one of my favorite films. My mother joked about it with me for years, occasionally popping into my room with a hanger in her hand and cryptically reciting its signature line, “No more wire hangers!”

  “Not quite that bad,” she said. “But she was so obsessed with cleanliness that she once threatened to throw all my books into the incinerator if I didn’t put them away. And then she did it.”

  “Books?” I asked, alarmed. That must have cut my mother deeply. She read at least five books a week, all procured from the Orange County Public Library, some of which went unreturned.

  “But that’s nothing. My mother once told me how she tried to abort each of us,” she said quietly, staring straight ahead as we circled the El Toro marine base. “She said she took hot baths to try to force a miscarriage each time. What can I say? She was not a well woman.”

  “Wow,” I said, not knowing what else to say. However much my mother told me about her own life, there was little she said about my father’s. Even the smallest inquiries yielded vague results.

  “Hey, Ma?” I asked one day.

  “Ye-es?” she replied.

  “How did you and Daddy meet?”

  “Through friends,” she said blithely.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Well, we were good friends first,” she added. “And then one night we went to dinner at a friend’s house and started playing footsie under the table. After that we went home and the rest, my dear, is history.”

  “Mom! Ew!” I exclaimed, pantomiming retching.

  “Well, you asked,” she said.

  “Hey, Ma?” I asked a few seconds later.

  “Ye-es?”

  “Where did Daddy grow up?” I asked.

  “Daddy grew up in Red Hook, in Brooklyn,” she said, “but they moved to Bay Ridge when he was still a kid.”

  “Was that close to Manhattan Beach?” I asked.

  A haughty chuckle escaped her lips. “No, my dear,” she said, “that is nowhere near Manhattan Beach.”

  “Because you guys could have passed each other on the street, like, a thousand times! And you were strangers. And now you’re married!” The thought delighted me to no end.

  “I doubt we ever passed each other on the street,” she said.

  “How come? You never know,” I said.

  “I just have a feeling,” she replied.

  “If you both grew up in Brooklyn, how come you moved to California?”

  “Well, we were living in Miami when you were born, and after a little while we decided we wanted a change,” she said. “We’d moved there because his kids were there, but things didn’t really work out with them as he’d hoped, but that’s a story for another time. We went to Houston but I got sick of it after about a year and a half, so I said to your father, ‘What about California?’ David and I had been to Southern California once before, and I remembered really liking it. I also really liked San Francisco, but San Francisco gets cold in the winter, so we decided to try Orange County. I told your father that the weather there is like the Mediterranean, always sunny and never really humid. So we went to California and ended up in this little cottage in Laguna Beach. That was where you choked on the tortilla chip and Grandma Helen gave you the Heimlich, remember?” I nodded. “We loved Laguna, but it was expensive, even in 1980. So we had to move, and we found the place in Turtle Rock. It’s funny, a friend once told me, ‘Never move anywhere for the weather.’”

  “But you did,” I pointed out.

  She shrugged. “What do they know?”

  THAT SPRING RITA came for a visit. She’d already spent Christmas with us, and four months later she returned because my mother was spending a few weeks in New York to see David and someone needed to drive me to school and tap, jazz, and ballet. Of course, my mother was taking Amtrak, which extended the trip by at least a week. When she returned she found her only daughter had grown a double chin, thanks to all the junk food my favorite aunt was feeding me. “Jenny?” she said when we picked her up at the train station, as if she didn’t recognize me. “We’re putting you on a diet, kiddo.”

  The day after she returned was my father’s birthday. The four of us planned an informal dinner of bagels and lox; any kind of celebration seemed inappropriate because of David’s illness. Apparently he was in the hospital when my mother had boarded her train at Penn Station, so she was understandably blue. Sometime in the afternoon my father took me to my favorite stationery store to get a new pencil box, even though I already owned half a dozen, but I think my father just wanted to get out of the house for an hour. When we returned we were confronted by Rita at the garage door.

  “David died,” she said quietly. I ran to my parents’ bedroom to find my mother lying on her side of the bed with a phone in her hand. Even though her cheeks were wet with tears she was laughing.

  “Why is she laughing?” I asked Rita. “Shouldn’t she be sad?” Maybe it wasn’t true, a false alarm, and she’d just discovered the truth and her laughter signified relief.

  “She is sad, Jenbo,” Rita said. “But sometimes we laugh to feel better. We’re different like that.” By “we” I knew she meant the Sacks side of the family.

  “Mommy? Are you okay?” I called from the doorway. “Why are you laughing?”

  “I’m on the phone with Donald,” she whispered. Donald was David’s best friend, a former high school classmate of theirs who was raised a few streets away in Manhattan Beach. I had spoken to him on the phone a few times since David had been sick and I noticed that they employed the same effeminate drawl. I had asked my mother if David and Donald were boyfriends, but she said no, they were more like brothers. “Well, maybe more like cousins,” she said, correcting herself.

  She never told me that David had AIDS, but a few months later an HBO special about the AIDS quilt came on and I turned to my mother, who was watching from the kitchen doorway, and said, “Mommy, David died of AIDS, didn’t he?” It didn’t take a genius—I’d seen Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On lying around the house, and she seemed especially interested in news reports about the disease.

  “Yes, Jenny, he did,” she said. “Do you want to know how AIDS is transmitted?” Leave it to her to turn this episode into a lesson plan.

  “I already know,” I said. It was all over the news. Despite the tragedy, my mother sat down with us for dinner that April 10, my father’s fifty-first birthday. As she dished out the bagels she recited snarkily, “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land …” I didn’t get the T. S. Eliot reference, as my attention was focused on the clock, which I was watching intently; my father had been born at 5:05 and my goal was to stick a candle in his bagel in lieu of a cake, which we didn’t have.

  “Um, Daddy?” I asked with faux ignorance.

  “What?” he asked, sounding agitated and passing the plate of lox to Rita.

  “What time is it?” My c
andle was poised …

  “There’s a clock right in front of you,” he snapped, clearly annoyed. I broke into tears and ran to my room. My mother followed suit, returning to her bedroom, and Rita followed, calling after her, “El? El!” Our house was in turmoil. It wouldn’t be the last time, either—in the months after David’s death my parents fought into the night about one thing or another. I couldn’t make out their sharp yelps and retorts, but a few times my father left and I feared he wouldn’t come back. Whenever the front door slammed I’d tiptoe out of my bedroom and knock on her door. “Did he leave?” I’d ask my mother. “I don’t know,” she’d respond. But he always came back, until he didn’t.

  CHAPTER 4

  Peacock Street

  Lake Forest, California

  April 1989

  • • •

  THE CALL CAME EARLY THE NEXT SPRING! THE OWNER OF THE house on Rio Verde was moving back and we had to leave. Such are the perils of perpetually renting. My parents found us a three-bedroom, two-story house off Jeronimo Road with a brown-carpeted conversation pit, that 1970s-era relic, two living rooms, a bar, a dining room, and three fireplaces. The backyard was tiny, just big enough for a few tomato plants, which we never tended. It set us back $1,300 a month, and I occasionally heard grumblings from my father about “cash advances.” The house turned out to be too big for the three of us, and too dark—the west-facing windows let in little light and the setup of the place left vast areas shrouded in darkness. The Rio Verde house had been bright and sun-kissed; at Peacock we were vampires. We never, ever sat in the conversation pit, and we never burned a single log in any of the fireplaces.

  Soon after we moved into the Peacock house my mother took me to the Capezio store to get ballet clothes. “Mom, nooooooo,” I complained. I’d had enough superfluous shopping for a lifetime.

  “But you need new ballet shoes,” she argued.

  “No, please, I’m fine,” I said.

  “But Jenny, it’s okay, we’re right here,” she said, pulling into the lot.

  “Mom,” I said, in a “Let me level with you” tone. I waited until she turned off the engine before presenting my case. “You don’t need to spend money on me. I hear you and Daddy fighting, I know how bad we’re doing with money. You don’t have to do this, I’m fine with the ballet shoes I have.” It was all an act. I just couldn’t stomach another shopping trip, but what I’d said about their fighting was true.

  She looked stricken and leaned back in her seat. “Jenny,” she finally said, “there’s something I should tell you.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Your father and I are busting out all the credit cards,” she said gravely.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It means that we’re going to go bankrupt, and since we’re not going to pay our bills—because we’re eventually gonna declare bankruptcy anyway, so, you know, what’s the point—we can spend all the cards to the limit. Do you understand? So, we can get you those ballet shoes. You don’t have to feel bad, because we’re not going to pay the bill.”

  Damn! She’d found a way to take me shopping despite my efforts to resist. “What does that mean, you’re going bankrupt? Isn’t that bad?”

  “Well, it can be,” she said, “but we’ve been using fake Social Security numbers. Your father used his father’s for a time, and I’ve been using someone else’s, don’t ask me why. Long story. And after we declare bankruptcy, we’re gonna go back to using our real ones.”

  “Oh,” I said. A more mature person might have called it fraud, but my parents weren’t capable of something as ugly-sounding as fraud. This was Yonny and Swellenor! They were too cool to be criminals. No, there was a special name for what they were doing: “busting out the cards.” Their bust netted all we could have asked for: another set of couches for the front living room; the train set my father had always wanted; a surprise twelfth birthday party at Medieval Times; several months of cash advances for tuition and rent; dinners in Newport; braces, now that I had finally stopped sucking my thumb; Chanel and Ann Taylor for my mother; countless cartons of cigarettes; and new tools for my father. What he should have gotten was a set of dentures, because his teeth had started to fall out. But this was the same man who still wore his brown leisure suits from the seventies. Wore them well, don’t get me wrong, but he just wasn’t the type to splurge on appearances.

  One of the reasons my parents fought so much was the disparity in their incomes. My father earned north of $50,000 a year, tax-free, while my mother earned, well, nothing. Ironically, it was my father who had talked her into early retirement right before they married, when she got sick of dragging herself out of bed every morning to teach junior high and realized she was burned out. She took the California teaching test a few times in an effort to restore her license, but she kept failing the math section by a few points. So she started her own carpet sales outfit, an offshoot of my father’s business she dubbed Gold Coast Carpets. Soon I was joining her on appointments to carpet warehouses as I had with my father. Still, she didn’t work as much as he did, and I found myself riveted by their arguments, which mainly dwelled on her inability to “contribute.”

  “You don’t contribute, Eleanor, dammit! I’m killing myself here!” my father would shout, spit flying, before he slammed the front door. One night I overheard my parents screaming at each other in the living room next to the empty conversation pit:

  “Eleanor, shut the fuck up!”

  “Oh, go fuck yourself, Johnny!”

  “Go fuck myself? Fuck you!”

  I felt so helpless, doing nothing as my world was imploding. I decided I had to act or I’d never forgive myself, so I stomped halfway down the stairs and watched as they fought over a white cardboard box of bills, which was caught in a game of tug-of-war between them. As soon as I saw this I screamed, “Will you two … stop … acting … like … children!” My throat was pained and my voice came out in tight little huffs, that’s how scared I was to raise my voice to my father.

  They froze. My father had just hurled the box skyward and the ceiling’s cottage-cheese-textured coating fluttered down around him like snow; credit card bills, gas bills, electric and water bills drifted down to their feet.

  “Okay, okay,” my mother said, nodding, appearing to come to her senses. My father’s face was still contorted into a grimace; he took the half-empty box and ducked into the other living room, the one without the conversation pit. I could tell he was going to leave again, and I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be for just a few hours this time.

  The next morning I awoke to find a note to my mother on the dining room table with thirty-six dollars folded inside. It was all the money he left us with.

  “He’s gone, isn’t he,” I said to my mother, who joined me at the dining room table. Her arm circled my waist.

  “Yep,” she said. “Looks like it.” The two of us spent the day driving around, halfheartedly keeping an afternoon carpet sales appointment but mainly staying away from our empty house, which was now much too big for us. It was just the two of us again, and we steeled ourselves to face each day without him.

  My father’s absence hardened my mother; soon she confided the real reason behind his departure, an admission prompted by the sight of her twelve-year-old daughter standing at the refrigerator pouring a drop of white wine into her water.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “What? Nothing, just taking a drop of—”

  “You’re too young to drink that,” she said. “Let me see.” I held up my four-ounce juice glass for her to inspect.

  “Mom, you and Daddy always let me have wine and water with dinner,” I argued. “I like the taste.” She’d gotten a particularly tart Sauvignon Blanc just when I was becoming obsessed with everything sour: Granny Smith apples, salads dressed in nothing but balsamic vinegar, Sour Patch Kids.

  “Let’s talk for a second,” she said, and led me into the living room. She told me that my fat
her had left because his drinking had spiraled out of control, and until he fixed it he couldn’t live with us. This was a surprise to me—I’d never once seen him drunk. He must have been drinking after I went to bed. “I’ve been going to something called Al-Anon,” she went on. “It’s a support group for codependents, which are people married to alcoholics. If you want, you can come with me—or, better yet, there’s a group called Alateen, if you want you could go to that.”

  “Um, no, it’s okay,” I said. I didn’t really find it necessary, since his alcoholism didn’t directly affect me. My father didn’t seem to be in any hurry to fix his problem, either, renting an apartment in Dana Point. It was much smaller than any place we’d ever lived, and it reeked of bachelor. The dishes he served our lunch on were cheap, probably from Kmart, as was the silverware, which was not nearly as nice as our stainless steel bamboo. The place was also stocked with bottles of scotch, vodka, and gin. If a bone of contention with my mother had been his alcohol consumption, he was flaunting it now. I visited a couple of times, took lonely jaunts with him along the beach, and we even went fishing once, but all he could talk about was how every sappy pop song on the radio reminded him of my mother. And in 1989, that was every song but “Funky Cold Medina.”