Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  “Jenny,” he said, sounding pained. “I am telling you everything.” Then he told me the rest. He’d driven up to our apartment building in his big powder-blue Ford van, the one he’d used for carpet cleaning jobs in California but now used for painting gas stations with his crew, and Brian was standing outside waiting for him, along with our landlady, Flo. I could picture my father, healthy and tan, bounding up to the circular drive like a panther and flashing his signature jack-o’-lantern grin when he encountered Brian and Flo looking concerned but trying their best to appear casual.

  “Johnny,” Brian said. “We have to tell you something.”

  My father probably paused and looked from one to the other, sizing them up in his laserlike, street-smart manner. It was the same gift that could discern which of my boyfriends were just harmless nincompoops and which were complete and total fuckups.

  “What?” he asked them. “What is it?” Realization crept into his voice. I was in California; he knew it must be Eleanor.

  “Johnny,” Brian had continued, “Eleanor was making dinner and she … she had a heart attack, we think. The ambulance came and took her to St. Vincent’s. She’s there now.”

  And without a word, he hopped right back into his truck, peeled out, and sped west on Bay Street, probably running lights the whole way.

  “Is she going to be okay?” I started to ask, plopping myself down on one of the uneven grassy hills that dotted the backyard, but I found that I couldn’t speak because I was crying too hard. I shoved the phone at Maria. She took it, confused but unflappable as always.

  “Hello?” she asked. “Mr. Mascia?” I didn’t stay sane enough to follow their conversation; I’d begun rolling around on the jagged knolls sobbing and howling.

  “Jenny,” Maria whispered loudly, her hand over the receiver. “Come on, calm down!” But I couldn’t control it. It was pure pain, centered in my chest and erupting from my vocal cords, serenading the houses below like a murder victim moments before extinction. I had never given myself over to grief this way. It wouldn’t be the last time.

  I’d often wondered which one of my parents would die first, and imagined that perhaps this was the way it was supposed to play out. I was closest to my mother, as girls often are, but I sensed that there were gulfs between me and my father. I mean, the two of us always said we loved each other, and being Italians, we got teary-eyed at the same sentiment, the same nostalgia. But though we never spoke of it, I always got the sense that we both marked time in the same way: by measuring what was lost. Regret colored our emotional life, though I hadn’t really earned any regret yet. It must have been something I’d absorbed from him.

  Because of our mutual distance, our reluctance to discuss what I sensed he held in the chambers of his heart, I felt my mother might die first, and that it would be appropriate somehow, because without her glue to hold us together, my father and I might finally have to get to know each other. It was perverse—sacrificing one parent for the acquaintance of another—and it was a thought that I didn’t even realize I’d fantasized about until now. Was this how it would go down? Me three thousand miles away and rolling around on the grass in agony? Would I at least get to say goodbye?

  After a few more minutes of screaming and crying—Maria had taken the phone back into the house and away from my display—I lay on my back and took in the night sky. Just as in New York, suburban sprawl had turned the sky orange and stolen the stars. I panted for a few moments, hearing only my own breath whooshing in and out of my lungs. I felt tiny blades of grass stab my sweaty legs, and it was a jolt—I suddenly realized that all the functions that I relied on to confirm that I was alive, like hunger and fatigue, were on autopilot. I was no longer aware of or connected to my basest bodily reflexes; adrenaline had overwhelmed my receptors. I couldn’t tell if my bladder was full, I couldn’t imagine ever being hungry again—it was as if someone had removed my stomach. My body had crossed over into some tentative new reality, and as my senses slowly returned, it was as if I was exercising them for the first time. When the dust finally settled, I knew I’d have to take my hunger and my fatigue and my urge to urinate and adapt my senses to this new world, just as I had first adapted, all those years ago, to the old.

  Maria was standing over me with her hand extended; the phone was in it. I nodded and climbed to my feet. “Daddy,” I said, finally calm. “Are you okay?”

  “Well, I have my scotch,” he said, with a grunt/laugh.

  “I’m coming home,” I assured him. “Tomorrow. The next flight I can get.” I remembered my parents driving me to the Continental terminal at Newark Airport exactly thirteen days before, walking me all the way up to the gate—you could still do that then—and waving excitedly as I left to return to their Golden Paradise, the one they reluctantly left, the one neither of them would see again. When was the last time I’d spoken to my mother, told her I loved her? Probably that morning. We might have chatted as she chewed her morning toast, and I might have apprised her of my plans for the day, reminding her that I’d be home in two. Now I didn’t know whether I’d be greeting her in a hospital or a mortuary.

  “Okay. Good,” my father said, sounding relieved. What was my mother thinking, trying to keep me out of this loop? Why do that to my lonely father, who had no one else to lend him support? He didn’t have friends, he had co-workers; his family was Sicilian and mired in one grudge after another. We three were all we had, and we knew it.

  I emerged from the call to a sea of concerned faces: Maria’s mother, almost naïvely optimistic and devout; Maria’s father, stern yet loving; and Maria, hardheaded yet always sifting and analyzing in her never-ending quest for self-awareness. They were generous and well-meaning people; they’d opened their home to me and my mother when our family unit had collapsed under sudden poverty. It wasn’t so long ago that these people were breaking up three A.M. battles between the two of us in this very spot; now I faced them alone, the fragile foundation I’d always taken for granted once again in peril. We’d been so vulnerable before this family, so exposed, and I didn’t think we could get any more naked. I was wrong.

  Maria and I ambled to the kitchen to talk quietly. “You know,” I said, pulling out a chair with unsteady hands, “my dad makes, like, a hundred dollars a day painting gas stations. And last year he broke his arm and was out of work and didn’t qualify for worker’s comp because he was paid off the books. And my mom is probably going to have to leave her new part-time job at Macy’s.”

  “My parents have health insurance and all that, and if we needed it, god forbid, we could liquidate one of the houses,” Maria remarked. She wasn’t being snobby; her parents had a safety net and mine didn’t. But I felt they deserved one, and I thought about what incredible people they were—so witty, so much fun, so smart, each in their own way, so loving. They didn’t deserve to be destitute, not at their age. All they could look forward to was Social Security, and that was still several years off. What would they do until then?

  “You don’t understand,” I told Maria. “If my parents get sick, if one of them dies, they have nothing.” Panic seared my voice, but I soon realized that all the imploring in the world couldn’t make her understand our predicament. Maria’s parents were engineers, they owned property. They weren’t ostentatious by any means—if anything, they downplayed their wealth—but they had a solid foundation that my parents had somehow forgotten to build for themselves.

  Once again I was filled with outrage: Why did everything happen to us? We went broke, went bankrupt, endured multiple separations from my father, and for what? I still didn’t really understand. Why couldn’t our lives just proceed normally, like the lives of my friends and their parents in California? Why were there always bumps in the road for the Mascia family?

  WHEN I LANDED in Newark I spotted my father at the baggage carousel. I was terrified of what he had to tell me, but before I could say anything I saw his face sag with relief. I embraced him, and he collapsed into my arms. I hung on his
lean, muscular frame, relieved I had rejected my mother’s wishes to stay in California and enjoy the rest of my vacation.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” he choked, breaking down, his whole body quivering. “I can’t do this alone.” I had only seen him cry like this once before, a couple of years after his own mother had died. I was ten or eleven, and he was looking through his dresser for the first time since Grandma Helen had succumbed to lung cancer. He pulled a pristine white diaper out of the bottom drawer. “You see, they put her in diapers in the hospital, because she was so sick,” he explained, and revealed what was wrapped inside: the rosary that been placed into her hands during her wake, the rosary she worshiped with as a child, and a head scarf she had used to cover the bald patches created by chemotherapy. He held this treasure in his hands, rosary beads spilling from between his fingers, and mid-sentence his words became inaudible, garbled with sobs. My mother had swooped in to rescue the scene, comforting him and explaining to me that my father was very close with his mother, and these things reminded him of a bad time in her life, when she was very sick. Now my mother could be dying, and he cried those same tears of helplessness. This time I understood exactly how he felt.

  He grabbed my suitcase and ushered me into a taxi and we braved rush hour traffic to get to St. Vincent’s in Manhattan, where she had been transferred overnight. Turns out the “episodes” she’d suffered were actually small heart attacks, and the Staten Island branch of St. Vincent’s wasn’t equipped to perform angioplasty. The procedure had been completed while I was in the air, and now she was resting comfortably in a hospital bed in the West Village with a stunning view of downtown Manhattan. My father hadn’t seen her yet because he’d had to fetch me, but he had been told that her chances for recovery were very good. But we still hadn’t heard her voice or laid eyes upon her, and now we were stuck amid a sea of cars in the Lincoln Tunnel. I had never cursed traffic so vehemently in my life.

  “Jenny, there’s something you need to know,” he said as Manhattan emerged on the other side.

  “What is it?” I asked, wondering what could be worse than my mother nearly dying.

  “Your mother, well, she’s older than we thought.”

  Older than we thought? Than we thought?

  And then I remembered. About a year earlier, I had been sitting at the kitchen table and my mother was on the couch watching her beloved Law & Order when she tested something out on me:

  “Jenny, what if I told you I was older than you thought I was?” The scenario seemed ridiculous, as I’d seen her driver’s license and birth certificate umpteen times. I wondered how many Xanax she’d taken that day.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “Is this a joke?”

  “No,” she said carefully, “but what if I told you that I was older? How would you react?”

  “Well, how much older could you be,” I asked, playing along, “since I am nineteen and obviously not adopted?”

  She thought about it, and dropped the subject with, “Never mind.” And now a second source had confirmed that her experiment with the truth wasn’t just a benzo-induced yarn.

  “The reason I’m telling you,” my father explained, “is so you don’t see it on her hospital bracelet and get scared.”

  Scared? “Geez, Dad, how old is she?”

  My father told me that my mother was born in 1934, not 1939 as she’d always claimed. That made her sixty-four, not fifty-nine. And with that, I was cheated out of five years of her life. Frankly, it pissed me off. I knew she was older than everyone else’s parents, but now I had even less time with her than I thought I did. My father looked bewildered; this was new to him, too. I didn’t ask why she had changed her age; since she was in fact two years older than my father, I assumed that was the reason. So my mother had given birth to me right after her forty-third birthday, not her thirty-eighth. I suppose this boded well for my own fertility.

  When we arrived at St. Vincent’s my mother was paralyzed by the sandbags placed over her legs, rooting her to the spot. She looked very tired but managed a weak smile as she saw my father, and then me, an unexpected surprise.

  “Hey, how are ya?” I asked like a game-show hostess, all wide eyes and teeth, pretending I wasn’t scared to death. And there it was, wrapped around her wrist, the white hospital bracelet that revealed her true age in purple letters and numbers: 10/12/1934. It was a shock, even though I’d been warned, but I decided to roll with it. If I dwelled on this loss, I’d spend five hours crying in my closet because I was scared my parents were going to die.

  In a whisper, my mother insisted that my father and I grab a bite to eat, and even though I was certain we could easily go another two days without food I took him to Artepasta on Greenwich Avenue, a frequent haunt of mine and Jeff’s.

  “Glad I came home?” I asked as I surveyed the humid gray summer day from Greenwich and Bank.

  “Oh, Jenny, you kiddin’ me?” I knew this rhetorical fragment conveyed miles of gratitude.

  “So, Mom’s an old lady, huh?” He laughed, as relieved as I was. I examined his smile, and figured that as long as we were on a roll …

  “It’s okay,” I said. “She told me your secret, too.” He stiffened, almost imperceptibly. But I noticed.

  “She did?” He barely glanced at me, keeping his gaze straight ahead. I can still see his distinguished profile, with his almond eyes and naturally bronzed skin that crisis had tinted gray.

  “Yes,” I said, trying my best to sound like an understanding adult, though at twenty I was still struggling to keep pace with his long-legged stride. “I know all about you.”

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON my father slowly led my mother into the apartment, and I noticed that she still had the offending hospital bracelet around her wrist revealing her true age. I tried not to look at it as she very slowly craned her neck and smiled at me.

  “Hi, Jenny,” she said, and I leaned in and gave her a barely-there hug, afraid of hurting her.

  “If you wanted me to come home early, Ma, you could have just called,” I joked, and she laughed, for exactly one second.

  “Ooh, it hurts,” she said, grimacing in pain. The three of us led her to bed, where she stayed for the next two weeks. No more smoking, no more fatty foods, and lots of Xanax were the orders from her cardiologist. She recovered very quickly, even if she never returned to work, and when she described her heart attack I realized how much worse it could have been.

  “I had just leaned down to take the chicken out of the oven,” she said from bed that first afternoon, “and just as I was about to lift up the broiler pan I felt this crushing pain, like an elephant was sitting on my chest. Oh, Jenny, it was awful. But I thought, ‘Maybe I’m overreacting,’ because I’m thin, you know? I picked the phone up to dial 911 but only pushed 9 before I hung up. Then I started sweating—just pouring out of me, Jenny, like a faucet—and I got so nauseous. That’s when I knew, because I read somewhere that people sometimes throw up when they’re having a heart attack. So I called 911 and the dispatcher told me to unlock the front door, and I waited.”

  “Were you scared?” I asked, on the verge of exhaustion but kept awake by the anxiety that coursed through me.

  “No, actually, I wasn’t scared,” she said. “I felt sad. I wasn’t ready for my life to be over. It made me sad to think that it would be. There’s so much else to do. I haven’t seen Paris yet.” She was joking; we knew she’d only set foot on a plane when she could be placed in a medically induced coma before boarding. “So now I guess you know the truth,” she said. “Your mama’s an old lady.”

  “Very funny,” I said, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d lost five years of her life, even though I really hadn’t. “So you’re three years older than Dad?”

  “Two and a half,” she corrected.

  “And I guess you weren’t thirty-eight when you had me, but forty-three,” I said.

  “Forty-two,” she corrected.

  “Uh, no—I was born in Novemb
er, and your birthday is October 12, so that would make you forty-three,” I said.

  “Oh, shut up, you little stinker.”

  “Did your obstetrician at least know your real age?” I asked.

  “You know, I’m not sure,” she said pensively. “I don’t think he did.”

  “So who else knew?” I asked.

  “Everyone,” she said.

  “Everyone!”

  “Well, except your father,” she said.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said. “So Rita isn’t seven years younger than you, but …”

  “Twelve,” she said.

  “Is Arline still two years younger?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Why did you lie about your age?” I asked, bewildered.

  “Well, your father was younger than me, and, I don’t know, it was impulsive,” she said. “And after we’d been together for so long I couldn’t exactly change my age.”

  “So you’re human after all,” I said drowsily.

  “Looks like it,” she said, holding up one of her wrists, which was bandaged where the IV had been inserted. That afternoon I let her sleep, tiptoeing in and out every hour to watch her chest move up and down, proof that she was still alive. I caught my father doing the same thing.

  “Hey,” he said when we met in the hallway. “Are you—”

  “Yeah,” I said, leading him to the bedroom. “You?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted, and I watched as his eyes landed on her chest and stayed fixed there. “I just wanted to check on her, see if she’s …”

  “Breathing?”

  He nodded.

  “Me, too.” Our eyes locked for a moment and I remembered how he’d fallen into my arms at the airport. He could tell me he wanted to leave her every day until the end of his life, but he’d be lost without her. He really truly loved her, in ways I didn’t even understand.