Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  “For much less than it’s worth,” my mother said bitterly.

  “Eleanor, shut up!” my father raged.

  “Daddy, please don’t tell her to shut up,” I implored over the lump in my throat.

  “Whaddya want, Johnny?” my mother yelled shrilly. “It’s worth much more than ten thousand dollars and you’re giving it to that schmendrick practically for free. Talk to him, Jenny, because he won’t listen to me.” At least this explained why she’d started sleeping on the couch.

  “Daddy, is it true?” I asked him. But he wouldn’t move his sideways glare from my mother’s face. I always knew he was angry when he broke out his cold, hard stares. “Daddy!” I said louder. He finally broke his gaze and looked in my direction.

  “Jennifer, what your mother doesn’t realize is that a lot of my business is tied to real estate, and the real estate situation has been very bad lately,” my father said.

  “It’s true,” my mother chimed in. “The market is terrible.” A lot of my father’s jobs came from real estate agents who had to gussy up a property before renting or selling it, so they hired carpet cleaners and domestics to make it spotless. California was a tenant’s market, unlike, say, Manhattan.

  “Also,” my father said, steering the conversation his way, “my father is getting older, and I’m getting older, and I want to be closer to Florida to see my kids and my grandchildren, and if you and your mother don’t want to go to Miami, then New York is close enough.”

  “I’m not gonna live in Brooklyn,” my mother said, anxiously running her hand through her hair.

  “El!” my father huffed.

  “It’s too depressing,” she concluded without missing a beat. I felt like telling them they were acting like children again, but I think they already knew that.

  “Guys,” I said, trying my best to rise above, “I have a year of school left. I cannot move to New York right now. I am not going to New Utrecht High School. No offense, Dad,” I said, trying not to slander his alma mater.

  “You won’t have to go to New Utrecht, Jenny,” my mother said, her eyes lingering on my father. I realized they must have discussed this without me, many times.

  “Oh, really?” I asked, relieved.

  “No,” she said. “Because we’re not going with him.”

  “What! You’re splitting up again?” I asked, fearful.

  “No, Jenny, we’re not splitting up,” my father said. “Calm down. You and your mother are going to move into a cheaper place around here and I’m going to move to New York this summer, and when you graduate, you two are going to join me. By that time, hopefully, I will have set up the business there.”

  “We’re moving again?” I asked, deflated. I knew the house on Yolanda was too good to be true. I took it all in. This latest plan was impulsive, poorly thought out, and destined to failure. In other words, typical Yonny and Swellenor.

  “So you’re telling me that this time next year, we’ll be living in New York?” I asked.

  “Haven’t you always said you wanted to move to New York?” my mother asked me, sounding slightly accusatory. If there was anything she hated more than my father’s economic instability, it was anyone doubting him.

  “When did I say that?” I asked.

  “Remember? When you were a kid?” she replied. “You said you wanted to move to New York for college? And I remember you said you wanted me and your father to come with you.” She smiled.

  “Yeah, I remember that,” I said. “Didn’t I say that when I was six? When I decided I wanted to go to the Yale School of Drama because Meryl Streep went there? That’s New Haven, Ma, not New York.”

  “Very funny,” she said, lighting a cigarette.

  “I also distinctly remember a project in second grade involving red construction paper and a list of my favorite things,” I said, “and one of them was red nail polish, but the other was living in Southern California, and I wrote that I never wanted to leave.” My mother had kept all of the birthday cards and Christmas cards the three of us ever gave one another, and many of my school projects, something I’d discovered when I’d gone through her night table the week before. I’d cried looking at them, because we’d all seemed so happy before we grew up.

  “What are you gonna do, Jenny, huh?” my mother asked, her cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. “Ya gonna go to Saddleback Community College with all your little friends?”

  “Hey, that’s not fair,” I protested. Even though I knew she was trying to break me down, she was right—Saddleback was where I was headed, given my recent performance in school. At this point I would have been perfectly happy withdrawing tomorrow and getting my GED. I’d gone from the girl who loved school to the girl who was wasting her life—and her figure—at the Carl’s Jr. drive-through.

  “Jenny, we’re gonna need your help,” my father said. He looked at my mother.

  “What?” I asked. “Whatever you need.” There was no point in fighting this. I was outnumbered.

  “Jenny,” my mother said, “you might have to get a job.”

  “Your mother is, too,” my father said. “She knows she has to contribute.” How many years had he been waiting to say that?

  I’d never worked before; my one foray into babysitting, at the age of twelve, ended with me starting a small fire by roasting a marsh-mallow over a pilot light. “I guess it’s time I did get a job,” I conceded.

  “You’re going to finish the school year first,” my mother emphasized, looking at my father. He nodded. Just then the doorbell rang.

  “God, that guy is here now?” I asked. “This is all happening so fast.”

  And it did—too fast. Ron didn’t buy the business that day, but he came back later that week with a wad of bills: $10,000 for fourteen years of sweat and toil. My mother and I were sitting on a bench outside South Coast Plaza—what else is new—when she called home on our new brick-sized cell phone and got the news.

  “Did he sell it?” I asked.

  She nodded. I started to cry.

  “Oh, Jenny, it’s gonna be okay, stop crying,” she said purposely into the phone so he could hear. I was only sixteen and I knew this was a bad decision—why couldn’t he see it?

  CHAPTER 6

  Summerfield Street

  Aliso Viejo, California

  May 1994

  • • •

  MY FATHER MOVED US INTO A CONDO IN ALISO VIEJO IN mid-May and lived there with us until just after Memorial Day, when he left. My subtle way of protesting the situation was by not lending a finger to pack up the house, instead hanging out with my friends the night they loaded the moving van. It was such a disorganized move that by the end of it my parents were simply dumping the contents of drawers into boxes. The next morning when I woke in our new place I stayed home from school and read in bed all day in a near-perfect imitation of my mother. I was upset that we were breaking our lease—the Yolanda house had been one of my favorite houses and we had to move. Again.

  If Summerfield was a step down, at least we were slumming in style—it was a two-story, two-bedroom townhouse with two full bathrooms, a small dining room and living room, and a decent-sized kitchen. The development was so new that our “backyard” view consisted of tractor-adorned sand hills awaiting mini-malls and movie theaters that were at least three years away from being built.

  Not all of our furniture would fit into our place on Summerfield, so we had to sell some of it. This made me more furious than anything. We had to part with the big cushy brown chair I tumbled on as a kid, the Henredon dining room set with the matching buffet, our rustic wooden kitchen table—it was all sold off to well-intentioned couples who perused, smiled, and handed over their cash.

  “This sucks!” I announced when the last of our furniture was gone.

  “Quiet, you,” my mother said sternly. But I felt nothing but bitterness—my parents had failed financially, and it had tanked us as a family. It would take me years to forgive them.

  But wit
h my father’s departure looming I decided that I couldn’t let him leave with animosity between us. Since he had already made up his mind to start over in New York without us—using flawed logic, but whatever—I wanted him to believe we were behind him. Because, let’s face it, if he pulled it off he’d be the man of the hour, wouldn’t he? I needed to believe as well, and why not? The first time he had to leave us, when I was five, didn’t he come back? He appeared at Rita’s door as if he’d never left, and I had to embrace the possibility that history could repeat itself. After all, this was a man who had taught himself to sew carpets by reading a book. The business had been very good to us, until it wasn’t. I was still angry at their inability to plan, but I couldn’t be a fair-weather daughter. I would need to stick by him through the bad times, too. My mother had taught me as much. So I drove into the hills above Laguna Beach and parked on a dusty side street and took out a pen and a piece of notebook paper and managed to subsume my anger long enough to compose a letter to my father detailing the sacrifices he’d made for my mother and me, and how brave he was to venture into the unknown to save our family, and how grateful I was. I stuck it inside his slim gray phone book the night before he left.

  The next morning he stood at the garage door and said, “Well, kids, this is it.” My mother had a present for him: a compass, “so you never lose your way again,” she explained, pinning it to the yellow T-shirt on his sobriety teddy bear, the one he’d received after completing his twenty-eight-day detox stint. We hugged him and wished him the best, and he was gone.

  He called us every night from the road, Charles Kuralt–like, to report the details of his zany sojourn—like how every Motel 6 from Tulsa to New Orleans was crawling with prostitutes—and each night we begged him to turn around and come home. His absence seemed to bring his miscalculation into stark relief, and perhaps we felt braver pleading our case through a phone line than to his face.

  “Can’t Daddy just get a job here?” I asked my mother. “Like, with a carpet company? Or maybe doing something else? Why does he have to start his own business?”

  “Jenny, your father is losing his teeth,” my mother said bluntly. “He doesn’t have a college degree—he doesn’t even know how to type up a résumé. How can he go around to employers who are so much younger than he is”—he was fifty-seven—“and expect to get a job? This is the only kind of work he can do.”

  “Why?” I asked, frustrated. “Why must he always stick to this menial blue-collar shit?”

  “Jenny!” she snapped, irritated. But she wanted him to come home, too, and one of our wealthy friends even offered to buy him a one-way plane ticket and ship the van back to California. He refused, but he did admit to my mother that when he spotted my letter sticking out of his phone book, just the words “Dear Dad” brought tears to his eyes and very nearly made him turn around.

  “Why didn’t you, Johnny?” my mother asked when he’d arrived safely in Brooklyn.

  “Lemme talk to Dad,” I said, and she gave me the phone. “Hey, Daddy. How you doin’?”

  “Good,” he said. “How yous doin’?” He always used this plural of “you” when he addressed more than one person; it was old-school Brooklyn, my mother said, a variant of colloquial Italian that had been poorly translated in America.

  “Fine,” I said, my stock response. “Why don’t you come home now? We miss you so much. We’re no good without you.”

  “Jennifer,” he said sternly, “I am already here, I am not going to leave, I am going to do what I came here to do …” I didn’t hear the rest because I’d placed the phone on the carpet so he couldn’t hear my crying. My mother grabbed the phone.

  “Johnny,” she said, “don’t you see what this is doing to your daughter?”

  But he didn’t leave New York, and I gave up trying to turn back time. I focused instead on what remained of my youth, holding court at the local coffeehouse and blowing my mother’s money on frozen espresso drinks. She resented this, and I’m sure she was lonely—even though I was either too angry or too myopic to empathize at the time—and my going off every night and leaving her in an empty apartment must have depressed her. But I insisted on going—even the night my toilet regurgitated excrement all over my bathroom floor.

  “Jenny, ya gotta stay and clean this up,” she said as she searched for a plunger.

  “Mom, I’m going to be late!” I argued as I settled on an outfit.

  “You’re leaving me here to clean up your shit?” she yelled, outraged. I paused and watched as she knelt on her hands and knees, sopping up the overflow with paper towels.

  “Yes,” I said, and headed down the stairs, something I’ll never forgive myself for.

  That summer I got a job at a local burger joint, and my mother got a job at Budget Carpet, a vast showroom right off the 5 freeway in Laguna Hills. She clashed with her Middle Eastern bosses more than once, not over her religion—we’d never even had a menorah in our house—but over her loopiness. Though she could recite the major factors that contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire, she sometimes suffered from spells of flakiness that robbed her of her ability to add or subtract small amounts on a calculator, or—god forbid—use a computer. She was also getting older—she was now fifty-five—and her social skills seemed to be eroding. She talked a little too loud, for a little too long, and I’m sure this grated on her bosses, who faced an empty showroom most of the time. But at least she was earning $10 an hour, plus my check, which I handed over without complaint each week.

  My father wasn’t able to restart his carpet business from Brooklyn that summer, and the $10,000 he’d left us from the sale of the business wasn’t enough to cover our rent, car insurance, gas, and bills. One day my mother approached me with my red savings account booklet in her hand.

  “Jenny …” she began.

  “It’s fine—take it,” I said. I’d been expecting as much. The account, my “college fund,” contained every birthday check I’d ever received, plus a few $50 bonds Grandpa Frank had purchased for his grandchildren. It had recently topped out at $2,500, but that wouldn’t even pay for a semester at a university; it would maybe cover a single semester at a community college, once books were factored in. If I was going to college one day, it certainly wouldn’t be financed by that little red booklet.

  ——

  WHEN WE’D LIVED at Summerfield for only five months, my mother invited me to the house of an old Catholic-school friend to talk to her parents. “We’re going to Maria’s house?” I asked, annoyed. “Why?” I’d seen Maria a few times in the three years since eighth grade because her mother, Marge, occasionally tutored me in geometry, but we said little to each other, as she’d grown a little too arrogant for my taste. But my mother had maintained a friendship with the openhearted Marge, who was very concerned about our situation.

  “Jenny, just come,” my mother insisted. So one night in October, after we had dinner, we sat in Marge and her husband Akbar’s sprawling Laguna Hills living room and they made us an offer: We could live in their downstairs bedroom, for free.

  “We have relatives in from Iran all the time,” Marge said spiritedly. “It really makes no difference to us.”

  “Well, why don’t I give you my new washer and dryer and refrigerator in exchange,” my mother offered. They represented the few purchases my parents had made during their last credit card “bust.”

  “Wait—Mom, what is going on?” I asked, interrupting the negotiations. Had they all gone mad? Not only had we lost our breadwinner, but now we were going to lose our privacy?

  “Marge, clearly we have some discussing to do as a family,” my mother explained and bade the couple good night.

  “Mother, what the fuck?” I asked once we pulled out of the driveway.

  “Jenny, we have to be realistic here,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “Even though we’re both working, we can’t afford the apartment anymore. I’m a month behind on the rent.”

  “What?” I asked, angry. “Daddy�
�s leaving was supposed to help us! And now we’re going to be—” I couldn’t even say it. This was Orange County. People like us didn’t become homeless. We were once the reigning queens of South Coast Plaza! I thought back to this time last year and remembered passing my driver’s test, cheering at football games, grilling vegetables on the barbecue in the snug backyard of the Yolanda house, surrounded by palm trees. Now we were fighting to keep a roof over our heads. How had things devolved so quickly?

  “Ma! Stop smoking!” I shrieked, braking and shifting the car into park. There was no one behind us, so I knew we wouldn’t be rear-ended, but the jerking motion sent my mother into a tizzy.

  “Jennifer!” she yelled. I opened her window from the panel by the driver’s seat.

  “Put. It. Out,” I commanded. We had one rule when we got the Camry—which had suddenly become a painful reminder of my father’s shortcomings—and that was: no smoking in the car. Certainly not with the windows closed. When everything was falling down around us, I wanted my mother to hold this one thing sacred. Also, I was sick of everyone I knew—including teachers, embarrassingly enough—telling me I smelled like smoke, especially since I’d never put a cigarette to my lips.

  She reluctantly put it out, and I took slight comfort in the fact that Marge probably wouldn’t let her smoke in the house—I’d be the first to narc on her if she did. After that night I began to notice that streetlights frequently went out as I drove by. I refused to believe it was a coincidence—bad luck was clearly following us.

  On the night my mother planned to vacate Summerfield under cover of night, I again refused to help her pack, opting instead to attend the homecoming football game.