Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  “In Brooklyn we call it Mafunzalo disease,” my mother cracked one day.

  “Oh, my … What’s that?” I asked, all concerned.

  “My … funds … are … low,” she said slowly. “Get it?” She cackled.

  “Ha ha,” I said, hardly amused. It really wasn’t funny. We were eating meals on my slender writing desk because we hadn’t replaced our rustic kitchen table, and we’d traded our sturdy Henredon chairs for folding chairs. All the bills were in my name because my parents’ credit had tanked too many times, and watching them go unpaid became so excruciating that I just started mailing checks, even after my parents told me not to.

  “I don’t want them to cut off the phone,” I argued. But there were things I couldn’t afford, like a full set of dental implants for my father. I could smell his rotting, infected teeth from the passenger’s seat when he drove me to work every day, and even though I begged my mother to force him to see a dentist, she’d always respond, “With what money?” What made it all the more tragic was that a dentist occupied the ground floor of our apartment building, this sleazy guy from New Jersey who whitenened my teeth nearly for free because he wanted to sleep with me. “I love collecting toys,” he bragged as he pointed out his Lamborghini in the parking lot, and I couldn’t decide whether to puke or pursue dentistry.

  Around this time we began getting suspicious phone calls from a woman who said she was from Con Ed asking for Eleanor Mascia. Since the electric bill was in my name, my mother immediately became suspicious. On a whim she called Celie, who revealed she’d also been getting suspicious calls from a woman saying she was from LILCO, the electric company out on Long Island, and asking for my mother. Next my mother called Maria’s mother, who said that she’d gotten similar calls from a woman who said she was from San Diego Gas and Electric. There was only one thing in my mother’s name: the Camry. My mother was forced to reveal how we’d been affording the monthly payments and insurance.

  “We haven’t been making the payments,” she said quietly.

  “Excuse me?” I asked, wondering whose house we were going to live in next. Our next-door neighbor Brian already had a roommate in his second bedroom, so that was out …

  “We haven’t been paying for the car, Jenny,” she repeated. In fact, she said they’d left California with no intention of ever making another payment.

  “How long did you think you’d get away with this?” I demanded to know. A few weeks later my father gave in and engaged the mysterious Queen of the Utilities, who admitted that she was a private investigator from Toyota Motor Credit and she’d be happy to pick up the car. We left it on a side street during one of the horrific storms that buried us in twenty-six inches of snow. At least my parents had a sense of humor.

  My mother had been toying with the idea of substitute teaching at a local high school, but without a car she couldn’t get around the Island. And my father had anticipated spending the week after Christmas and before New Year’s in Florida, where he was supposed to be painting, and he figured he would use the trip as an excuse to attend his son Tony’s wedding on December 31. He’d spent hours with Tony on the phone all fall, asking him about his plans and sounding excited for the big day. We hadn’t seen Tony since he came to visit us in the eighties and I wanted to go, too, but I couldn’t afford a plane ticket. Now that work wouldn’t be taking my father down there, neither could he, and he spent a week in bed, depressed. But instead of calling one of his children and telling them about his money problems, he simply stopped calling. And because he never said he wasn’t going, they had no reason to think otherwise.

  “Daddy, you’ve got to tell Tony!” I said, as angry as if Tony was a brother I’d grown up with.

  “Stay out of it, Jenny,” he said from under the covers.

  “Yeah, Johnny, it isn’t right,” my mother echoed.

  “Shut up, Eleanor!” he yelled, which forced him to sit up, which was the most he’d moved in days.

  “Don’t tell her to shut up, Daddy,” I said, fearing that our fragile peace was already eroding. Sometimes when he drove me to work he complained about my mother’s laziness, claiming it had bothered him for years. He was partly blaming her for our financial situation, and it wasn’t the first time. One evening on the way home he even told me he “didn’t know” if they would stay together or split up. I gently argued that she was probably chemically depressed and described all that that entailed, but he didn’t seem to understand that such a thing could be biological.

  “You can’t help the way your mother is, Jenny,” he’d told me as we pulled into the mall parking lot one night. “No one can.” I became furious, surprising even myself.

  “Did I ask you to apologize for my mother?” I yelled. “No one has to apologize for my mother! How dare you!” I was crying, but yelling so loud he barely noticed. He looked shocked. “Don’t you ever do that again!” I went on. “I don’t want to hear about my mother’s shortcomings from you ever again!” I flushed at the memory.

  “Guys,” I said, standing at the foot of the bed with my mother at my side, “I know you’re depressed because of money. I get it. But it doesn’t have to make us all like this,” I said, gesturing to my father lying prostrate in the bed.

  “Yeah?” my father asked. “Jenny, you can’t do anything in this world without money. Nothing.”

  “But, Daddy,” I argued, “not everything in this life demands you spend money. We could go to the city and just walk around …”

  “Really, Jennifer?” he asked, his nostrils flaring. “And what happens when you get hungry, or your mother gets hungry? We have no money. None.” At that moment I remembered how my father always arranged the money in his wallet so it was crisp and straight and facing the same way, and if he ever caught me with a wad crumpled in my pocket he would lecture me: “You should always have respect for money, Jennifer.” I wondered what that Daddy would have to say about this.

  “But wasn’t the whole point just to be together again?” I asked, my voice cracking. “As long as we’re together, what does it matter what we do?” I was being naïve, I knew it. I was also crying. I caught sight of myself in the mirrored closet doors: I was still wearing a towel from when I’d stepped out of the shower minutes before, and splotchy red hives covered my chest. My lips were swollen from crying; I looked like a duck. My father said nothing, just sank into the pillows.

  “Now, do you think we can stop this stupid fighting about stupid money?” I asked through my sobs. “Because I, for one, am just happy to be out of Maria’s house.” That night we managed to get my father to agree that he wasn’t going to lock himself in the master bedroom and never come out—as a concession, we said we wouldn’t complain if he ran out to get a case of beer, which he promptly did—and my mother agreed to get a job. But I got another one first. One day my mother and I drove past a mini-mall on Hylan Boulevard, the Island’s main thoroughfare, and noticed a Starbucks being constructed, the first on Staten Island. By the time my father finally got the long-awaited call that he was returning to work in February, I was a barista. Even though I had to wake up at 5:00 A.M. and grab a bus for the morning shift, I was glad to be around people my age again. After I was working there for a few months my mother decided she was going to be a barista, too.

  “You?” I asked. “You? Who’s manually retarded? Mom, you can’t even work the VCR. How is this going to work?”

  But she was undeterred. “I’ll learn, that’s how,” she insisted, and called my general manager for recommendations. The store at Seventy-eighth Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan was hiring, so every morning she commuted for an hour and a half by bus, ferry, and train to grind coffee for eight dollars an hour. My heart ached for her because she was always tired and this kind of work was demeaning, considering what she was capable of, but she felt she was “contributing” and making my father happy. With three incomes, we pulled ourselves out of the muck.

  One night I was making espresso drinks when I heard my
co-worker Jenny calling to me, “Hey, do you know anything about … who was it again?” she asked the person at the counter, a tall guy with brown hair and penetrating blue eyes.

  “Emily Dickinson,” he said. “I’m supposed to be writing a paper on her and Walt Whitman but I’m procrastinating real bad.” His accent sounded like my parents’.

  “‘Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me,’” I recited. “‘The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.’” It was the one unit I hadn’t slept through in junior year English.

  His eyes lit up. “I’m impressed,” he said.

  “I’m Jennifer,” I said, holding out my hand and cursing my green apron for existing.

  “Jeff,” he said. He worked at Pathmark a couple shopping centers over but admitted he was unhappy in the supermarket industry, despite being named employee of the month several times.

  “So apply here,” I said, handing him a pad of applications. He filled one out.

  “I’d love to work here, are you kidding?” he said. “They give you health insurance, don’t they? I actually applied once before but they never called me.” I noticed that his handwriting was barely legible.

  “I’ll make sure they get it this time. Where do you go to school?” I asked.

  “Brooklyn College,” he said, “but I might go to CSI next year.” He was referring to the College of Staten Island, part of the city university system, which I’d also been considering until the car was repossessed.

  “My mother went to Brooklyn College,” I said. “My parents are from Brooklyn, but I’m from California.”

  “I’m from Brooklyn, too. Sunset Park,” he said. “We moved here five years ago. My mother is from Cuba, though. My Dad’s Irish.”

  “Interesting combination,” I remarked. “My Dad’s Italian and my mother’s Jewish. So I guess that makes me a pizza bagel.” One of my regulars had recently called me that, and it took me a second to realize what it meant.

  “I’m a McSpic,” he joked.

  “Funny. Do you speak Spanish?”

  “Some,” he said. We talked until the store closed, and after he left, my co-worker, Jenny, started jumping up and down.

  “He was so into you, Jennifer!” she said, her glasses nearly falling off her face. “You should go meet him after work and help him with his paper!”

  “Trust me, he was not into me,” I insisted as I Windexed the pastry case. But I put Jeff’s application on the top of the pile. The next time I saw him he was wearing a green apron and receiving a toilet cleaning tutorial.

  “Ew, pubes!” he commented from the inside of the bathroom. I was immediately turned off by his immaturity—he was twenty-three and fond of imitating Beavis and Butt-Head—and by his conservative views, which were slightly to the right of Rupert Murdoch. I regarded him with overdramatic eye-rolls, until Maria announced that she was coming for a visit and I desperately needed a ride to Newark Airport to pick her up. Jeff told me he might be able to help me out “if you make it worth my while.”

  “Gross,” I said.

  Having Maria around for a few weeks lured me out of the dark corner I’d been living in since we left Laguna Hills. Her natural curiosity about my little Italian neighborhood on the water meant I was forced to become acquainted with the church next door, the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum two streets away, and the park under the Verrazano Bridge in order to fulfill my duties as tour guide. And when we wanted to venture into the city, Maria forced me to call Jeff and take him up on his unexpected offer to show us around. I did so only reluctantly, and one night Maria and I donned our short skirts and tight tops and painted our nails and joined Jeff and his friend Carmine as we drove over the Verrazano and through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and came out the other side, parking in the Village. There we had dinner and walked all the way down to the ferry, making time for a detour over the Brooklyn Bridge. On our way we proceeded to get blindingly drunk on kamikazes at a bar at the South Street Seaport. I was so tipsy I barely noticed when Jeff handed me a rose he’d bought on the street and kissed me; I leaned in to kiss him back and fell right off the sidewalk. But I loved every minute of it, even the smell of the subway, which didn’t smell like urine at all, but had a faint industrial scent. It took Maria’s visit for me to finally appreciate the island that beckoned every morning from my bedroom window.

  “It’s just magical,” she said on the final day of her trip as we stood on the balcony watching the sun set. Now that I decided I didn’t hate Jeff anymore we hung out regularly after Maria left. Not that our bickering over politics ever ceased, and whenever he came over to pick me up my mother made a point to tear herself away from her Law & Order marathon to engage him in a ferocious political debate.

  But my father loved Jeff, as he was from Brooklyn and, like my father, he had the accent to prove it (“ask” became “ax,” and don’t even get me started on how he pronounced “Massachusetts”). Dad liked Jeff so much he even offered him a job painting buildings all summer so he could pay off his considerable credit card bills, but even though it would have grossed him $17,000 he turned it down, as he was on track for management at Starbucks. But my father still trusted Jeff with his daughter, as he was frequently fond of saying, and sometimes took Jeff’s side, but my mother never really changed her mind. Whenever Jeff called she would make a point to talk loudly in my free ear, frustrating me to the point of tears. Here I was trying to carve a life out of ice and there she’d be with a blowtorch trying to melt it. I explained that Jeff’s slightly militant views were part role-playing and part attention seeking, and his tirades were kind of like epileptic seizures that just had to be waited out. Mostly he was just trying to get a rise out of everyone.

  But in fact, he drove me crazy with his use of the n word, which he swore everyone from his neck of the woods used. And it was true—his family used it, his friends used it, and no one thought there was anything wrong with it. But there was one person from his neck of the woods who didn’t ever use it: my father.

  “Yeah, that’s because your mother is such a liberal,” Jeff pointed out. “I’m sure she beat it out of him.” But my mother had confessed the real reason for my father’s expanded horizons, something I could never reveal to Jeff.

  “You know, if we got married, you’d have to become a Republican,” he added.

  “Jeff!”

  That fall he turned to me and said, “Why don’t we just be boyfriend and girlfriend?” It seemed rather perfunctory, but if he wanted me in his life, that was one way to keep me there. But despite my many attempts to forge a more intimate connection, he’d refuse, and we weren’t intimate until nearly a year after I met him. When I’d ask him why, he had a number of reasons at the ready, like “I don’t want a serious relationship,” or “I want to wait until I have my life together, I don’t really know what I want to do yet.” What Jeff wanted was to be the next Rupert Murdoch, but without doing any of the hard work that that entailed. He was obsessed with people who had attained power, whether it was Hitler or Murdoch—or Madonna. As I soon came to discover, his Madonna obsession dwarfed any other passion in his life. I didn’t assign his devotion to the Biggest Icon of Our Time much significance until he took me to see the film version of Evita, starring Madge herself. Not just once, but seven times.

  “Jenny, listen to me,” my mother lectured one evening as she diced carrots and celery for her famous chicken soup. “And I know what I’m talking about. Jeff is gay.” I’d heard it from our co-workers, too, when I caught snatches of conversation that mysteriously evaporated as soon as I approached.

  “He’s just artistic,” I argued.

  “Oh, bullshit,” she countered. “You’re with him because it’s safe, and you don’t like taking risks.” Judging from the ups and downs she’d had with my father, it was clear that she preferred risky.

  “He’s not David,” I said. “He doesn’t fit into some category. He’s just in a rough place right now, and he doesn’t want to commit to me
until he has his life together.”

  “Look, spend time with him,” she said, “do what you want, but remember that I warned you: Sex is the glue that holds two people together. If that intimacy isn’t there, then you’re just friends.” And she would know.

  But I ignored my mother and continued throwing myself at Jeff, though the rejection started to grate on me. I’d come home crying when one of my advances had been refused, and my parents would comfort me. “Maybe he really isn’t ready for a serious relationship, Jenny Penny,” my father said, stroking my back as I sobbed into my pillow.

  “Jenny, you know you just like the chase,” my mother said after he stood me up one night, “and if he ever gave in you’d probably lose interest.” She was partly right—sitting on the balcony and anticipating his red Dodge Neon pulling in to the circular driveway below was one of the biggest thrills of my life, mostly because I never knew if we’d still be dating by the end of the night. His unpredictability was stressful but also kind of exciting, and it drew me in, despite the constant rejection.

  During our three A.M. breakfasts at Yaffa Café on St. Marks Place, he would regale me with tales of his goth, black-nail-polished East Village days after high school and tell me how my insistence on commuting in to Manhattan each night reminded him of how totally he’d immersed himself in Staten Island life.

  “I need to get off the Island,” he said one night.

  “What, and miss the Can-Can sale at Shop Rite?” I cracked.

  When the summer ended I found a way to get off the Island, enrolling at Hunter College at Sixty-eighth and Lex. When it came time to pay the $1,600-per-semester tuition I had to rely on my parents, who had only recently agreed to stop confiscating my paychecks. They enrolled in a payment plan and we had until the end of the term to satisfy it. The week before school started I was enjoying an afternoon nap—one of my guilty pleasures—when the phone rang. It was my father.