Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  THAT DECEMBER, AS PER TRADITION, Brian threw his annual Christmas party next door. My father treated himself to more than a few fingers of scotch and boasted about me to all of Brian’s LGBT friends, whom my father had come to embrace. “You see, this is why I love New York, Jenny,” he said as we sat on Brian’s couch while everyone socialized around us. “There are so many people from different cultures and races who have so many different lifestyles, and they all come together here, you know?”

  “Okay, Daddy,” I said, close to cutting him off. If his Brooklyn family heard him they’d probably laugh at the liberal he’d become.

  “Hey, everyone,” he announced. “My daughter is an honors student! She’s in the honors program! This one is going to go far in life.”

  “Daddy, stop,” I said, though I couldn’t contain my smile. He rarely got tipsy anymore and I wanted him to enjoy it. After a while I got tired and headed back to the apartment to watch TV on the couch with my mother, leaving my father to drink with Brian. He seemed to be in a good mood and only had to commute about ten feet to get home, so I wasn’t worried. Until he walked in.

  “Hey, girls,” he said as he opened the door. He closed it behind him and paused in the front hallway, studying the two of us.

  “What is it, Johnny?” my mother asked with a half-smile.

  He began to rub his arms, spending extra time on his right shoulder. “I’m always hurting, Eleanor,” he said, still drunk and still smiling.

  “Really, honey?” she replied, dropping the smile. “Where?”

  “Everywhere,” he said.

  “Everywhere, Daddy?” I repeated, wondering if this was a joke. “Like, pain how? Like, from painting? Maybe you’re just sore, Daddy. Maybe when you fell off the ladder you hurt yourself worse than you thought you did.” Or maybe you’re drunk and you’re about to throw up and in that case, yes, everything would hurt.

  “Johnny,” my mother said, rising from the couch, “what’s wrong with your shoulder?” He was rubbing it almost exclusively now and grimacing in pain. As she approached he turned and headed toward the bedroom, and I stood outside and eavesdropped as my mother put him to bed. “Johnny, this doesn’t look good,” she murmured from behind the door. “We have got to get you to a doctor.” I knew that would be as difficult as getting him to a dentist.

  “Eleanor, no,” he said, trying to put up a fight but lacking the energy for much more than a word or two. “It’ll be fine. Just need ice.”

  “For your shoulder?” she asked, speaking so softly I could barely hear.

  “Yes,” he said. Then: “Ouch! Stop it, Eleanor!”

  “Johnny, it’s the size of a golf ball,” my mother said. I gripped the wall for support. When she emerged from the bedroom her face was white, which was saying a lot—she was so pale that my father had a special nickname for her legs: “milk bottles.”

  “Mom, what’s wrong with him?” I asked, wondering if I should give in to my default state of panic or ignore this scene in the hope that it would just go away.

  “I don’t know, Jenny,” she said, closing the bedroom door. “But it isn’t good.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Merle Place

  Staten Island, New York

  March 1999

  • • •

  THIS TIME IT WASN’T OUR FAULT WHEN WE HAD TO MOVE. FLO called right after Christmas and told us she had to reoccupy my beloved abode on the water. My parents asked for a little more time on account of my mother’s heart condition, and in February we found a three-bedroom just up the road from Flo’s apartment in the shadow of the Verrazano Bridge. The apartment was quite large, and cheap—$900, which was $200 less than what we were paying on New Lane—but I hated the green carpeting and the worn linoleum that I just knew I’d never be able to get a hundred percent clean, no matter how hard I scrubbed. And there was this:

  “Uncle Frankie might live with us,” my mother told me.

  “Okay …” I said.

  “He’s splitting from Paulette and needs to live very cheaply in order to demonstrate his eligibility for disability,” she explained. “He isn’t even telling his kids where he lives because he doesn’t want Paulette to know.”

  “Well, that’s not so bad,” I reasoned. And the more I thought about it, the more appealing a monthly rent of $450 sounded. I was relieved; my parents could finally relax and stop worrying so much about money. And aside from the few times he emerged from his bedroom in the middle of the night to get ice for his scotch, Frankie mostly kept to himself, fashioning the master bedroom into a miniapartment where he kept produce, alcohol, and his prized parakeet.

  The day of the move I found my father and one of his painting buddies moving us without the benefit of movers, just a rented truck. “Johnny, please hire someone,” my mother begged. “You’re in such pain.” He still hadn’t gone to a doctor, and had taken to painting with ice packs on both shoulders.

  “Eleanor, please,” he said gruffly and continued loading our lives into the U-Haul. When we’d moved to New Lane I had vowed never to move again. This is the last time I move anywhere with them, I promised myself as I fell asleep that night, surrounded by boxes. In another not-so-subtle demonstration of my discontent, I refused to unpack for two months.

  “Jenny, please clean your fuckin’ room,” my father commanded over dinner one night.

  “Leave me alone,” I said.

  “What?” he asked, slamming his fork down so hard it nearly broke the plate.

  “Easy, Johnny,” my mother said as she stood over us, scooping and serving.

  “No, she will not disrespect me like this!” he boomed, turning to address me next. “Do you have any idea how fucking hard I worked to move us all in here, when the whole time I’m in pain …”

  “Then go to a fucking doctor!” I screamed. The three of us sat there for a moment and regarded each other: my father, his face molded into anger and disbelief; my mother, watching my father to see how he would respond; and me, aware that there was a foreign presence in our new apartment, and I don’t mean Uncle Frankie. After a moment I broke the standoff by retreating to my room without clearing the table. The next week I told my parents I was going to see a therapist.

  “Something’s just wrong, I don’t know what it is,” I said from the doorway of the kitchen, where they were rinsing dishes and loading them into the dishwasher.

  “Why do you think there’s something wrong with you?” my mother asked, barely looking up from her task.

  “I don’t know, I just feel so empty,” I said. Things weren’t registering the way I thought they should. I felt numb. For a girl who’d lived her life in a hypersensitive state, this was troubling.

  “I don’t know why you have to see a therapist,” my father snapped. There was an edge to his voice I found strange; he’d been to a therapist before, before rehab, and so had my mother. Why were they suddenly against therapy?

  “To complain about her horrible parents,” my mother snarled. I was taken aback but undeterred.

  “I just feel like I do,” I said, sliding down to the kitchen floor like the ten-year-old I once was.

  “Then go,” my mother remarked, “if it will put a stop to your complaining. But you’re going to have to pay for it yourself.”

  The next week I found a sliding-scale therapist named Susan and began seeing her once a week. Her hair was sandy blond and brittle and she liked to wear big, beefy necklaces. We didn’t tackle anything particularly heavy, as I didn’t think I had any real problems, just a general feeling of malaise. “I mean, nothing has really happened to me,” I began dismissively. “My dad had a problem with alcohol once, but he went to rehab and that was that. My mother has always been a tad controlling, but I do what I want to do, even if she nags me to death.”

  “Really,” Susan said. She didn’t write anything down, which led me to wonder if she secretly tape-recorded our sessions. “And your father—what is he like?”

  “He’s Italian,” I began, “an
d yells a lot. But he can also be mushy and sentimental. He was my favorite for a time when I was a kid. He’s so good with children. I should probably tell you that he was arrested in front of me when I was five and taken to jail for five months before he was released. I missed him a lot.”

  “What was he in jail for?” she asked.

  “I don’t actually know,” I said. “My mother later told me he was an associate of one of the criminal families. He was in jail for twelve years before I was born. He was a thief, but apparently not a very good one.”

  “Why is that?” she asked.

  “Because he got caught. Also, we’ve been on welfare, so there you go.”

  THAT WINTER I was so desperate to escape our cramped, brooding existence on Merle Place that I spent most of my time at my new friend Sarah’s sprawling rent-controlled pre-war apartment on the Upper West Side. Sarah and I had just returned from a weekend trip to Boston when I called home to check in, and I was alarmed at how nervous my mother sounded. “What is it, Ma?” I asked, memorizing all the spices in Sarah’s glass kitchen cabinets as we talked.

  “Your father is in so much pain and I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  “Ma, he needs to go to a doctor.” Paprika, thyme, saffron … oh, look, dried apricots!

  “I can’t force him, Jenny,” she said. “He is so stubborn.”

  I had pushed our dinnertime outburst out of my mind, as well as his Christmastime complaint, because I figured that if he was really sick he’d be in the hospital. But his pain hadn’t evaporated just because I’d forced myself to forget about it. It wasn’t going away on its own, I realized: It was getting worse. I stopped studying Sarah’s jars of jam and sat up straight. Something was happening and I couldn’t ignore it anymore.

  “Mom, how can we get him to do this?” I asked. “Now I’m starting to worry. But wait—his lung scan, from when he fell off the ladder, was clean, remember how he told us?”

  “Jenny, that was almost two years ago,” she said. We didn’t even have to say what we thought it was; my mother sometimes tossed around terms like “bursitis” and “arthritis” in a hopeful tone of voice, but we both knew cancer was the only real possibility, given his two-pack-a-day Pall Mall habit. Just then I remembered a quote I’d once heard and remembered because of my father: “Pall Malls are a classy way to commit suicide.” Was it Kurt Vonnegut?

  “I don’t know what to say, Ma,” I said. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Jenny,” she said. After I hung up I went back to staring at the glass cabinets, but this time my head was swimming with frightening possibilities.

  Yet my father refused to see a doctor, which became a source of major hostility between my parents. It came to a head that summer, not long after my mother and I hopped a train to Florida to visit Rita, Kara, and Grandma. Rita and Grandma were now living together in an apartment complex complete with an exercise room and pool, but they couldn’t enjoy it because they drove each other crazy. Grandma was ninety-two and her prime objective in life was watching Bonanza and screaming “Quiet!” if we dared laugh too loud; this naturally made us laugh harder.

  But we didn’t enjoy ourselves for long, because my mother and father engaged in a war of words over the phone that began the day we arrived and continued until the night we returned. “I told him that if he doesn’t go to a doctor I’m going to leave him,” she reported, “and he tells me to shut up. Well, fuck him. I’m gonna leave him, Jenny, I swear.” Back on Merle Place, I watched as she slammed her suitcase into her nightstand and swore she wouldn’t sleep in the same bed as “that asshole.” Strangely enough, remembering the way she looked that night—tan and not looking a day over fifty, her perfectly highlighted bronze waves topped by my straw hat—makes me long to journey back there, even though she was so mad she was spitting bullets. That night we were all still innocent; that night was one of the last before we knew for sure.

  HE FINALLY WENT in for a lung scan that week, nine months after he’d confessed to persistent bone pain; it was anyone’s guess as to when the pain had actually started. My mother had sent him to her general practitioner, who produced the results in a matter of days. One afternoon I came home from summer school to find the elevator broken, a problem that would plague the building as long as my mother lived there. I lugged myself up four flights of steps, and just as I was approaching my floor I ran into my mother in the stairwell.

  “Hey, what’s up?” I asked her. “Elevator’s broken again. We should call the management company.” I seemed to remember that the results were due that day, but for some reason I hadn’t been stressing over it. It still wasn’t real for me, maybe because my father had denied it for so long.

  “Oh, hi, how are you?” she replied cordially. “Yes, someone should.” She nodded in farewell and continued down the stairs. She was wearing her sunglasses and holding her keys. To this day I still don’t know where she was going, or whether she even knew.

  “Um, where are you going?” I asked.

  She stopped and looked at me blankly. “Excuse me?” she asked.

  “Mom, where are you going? Are you mad at me or something? Hey, weren’t Dad’s test results supposed to be in today?”

  She squinted and took a long, hard look at me. “Jenny? Is that you?” she finally said. “Oh, my god, Jenny, I didn’t recognize you.”

  That’s how I knew it was bad.

  We walked downstairs and sat on the steps overlooking the street so he’d see us when he walked home from the bus stop. “So I picked up the phone,” my mother said, “and you know what Dr. A. tells me? ‘Well, Mrs. Mascia, your husband has cancer!’ Like he was happy about it or something. ‘It’s cancer!’ What an asshole. He nearly gave me another heart attack.”

  “Oh, Ma,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Do you know what this means, Jenny? If they found a tumor in his lung, then the bone pain is caused by cancer. Jenny, he’s got metastatic lung cancer. We’re going to lose him again,” she said, sobbing into my shoulder.

  “We’ve got to call his kids,” I managed before dissolving into sobs myself. “Do you want to tell him, or should I?”

  “Oh, you tell him, Jenny,” she decided. “You have theater training.” And that’s how my father found us, leaning on each other for support on a bright summer afternoon. He was muscular and tan and wearing a white T-shirt with paint-splattered jeans, and just before he spotted us I’d spied him bounding up the leaf-strewn sidewalk like the picture of health. It seemed such a shame to shatter his innocence the way mine had just been. I nudged my mother and stood up.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, still smiling.

  “Daddy, I have somethingtotellyou,” I spat out before exploding into hysterical sobs. So much for the Meisner technique.

  “Johnny, the results came back,” my mother said, rising.

  “Yeah? And?”

  She nodded. “It’s what we thought,” she said. “You need a biopsy to make sure, though.”

  “Okay,” my father said, nodding as if he was bracing for a heavier blow but was instead told that we’d have to move again. “Okay,” he said again, and grabbed his Pall Malls. The second the red wrapper became visible my mother knocked it out of his hand. Hard. In the process she hit his arm, which had cancer growing inside it. He flinched.

  “Ouch, El,” he said, irritated, but stopped just short of angry. He didn’t instinctively lunge for her, though, just nodded again, perhaps absorbing her violence as a necessary punishment for fifty years of smoking.

  The following week was filled with tests and X-rays, all conducted at St. Vincent’s on Staten Island, where he’d have to stay for a full week to qualify for Medicaid. Once he was covered he’d never have to worry about another medical bill as long as he lived. I visited every day after my summer school class ended, and on the final day a doctor pulled me and my mother into the hall. “It’s very bad,” he said. “It’s stage IV. The primary tumor is in his lung, with metastases to his bo
nes and adrenal gland. The gland doesn’t seem to be a threat, and it doesn’t seem to be spreading to his liver or brain yet, but the bones are worrisome. There is a rather large lump on his shoulder that can be radiated to relieve the pain, but I must tell you, any treatment he stands to receive will be palliative.”

  Palliative. Pain relief.

  “How long do you think he has?” my mother asked as I absent-mindedly focused on the charts stacked up on the counter at the nurses’ station.

  “I’d say three to six months,” he said, and immediately I felt a falling sensation, except I wasn’t falling. My center of gravity had shifted, moving from my head down through my stomach and resting somewhere at my feet. This lopsided feeling was pulling me down to the floor and I had to grip the counter in order not to end up there. I now knew what it meant to be “floored” by something. This was the worst news I’d ever received.

  “Ma, this can’t be happening,” I said, straining to focus on her face. “What are we going to tell him?”

  “The truth,” she said, moving wordlessly into his room, where he was putting on his pants, then his socks. “Let’s go home,” she said, hugging him.

  “Just a sec, gotta go pee, meet you out front,” I spat, and moved as quickly as I could out of the hallway where I’d received my family’s death sentence. Because like it or not, our lives as we knew them were over. My family was finished. After my father died it would be like the spring of 1983 all over again, except this time he wouldn’t come sashaying through Rita’s front door. This time he was going to die.

  I walked quickly toward the front of the hospital with my tears still in check. I spotted the gift shop and went in, choosing a pack of gum with little awareness of what I was doing. Now I knew why my mother hadn’t recognized me in the stairwell. In this state of pitched panic I might not have even recognized my own face in the mirror.

  “Thank you,” I said, paying for the gum. The lady behind the counter looked older than my father. He had just turned sixty-two; it seemed like such a young age to die. I realized that he’d never reach the age belonging to the lady behind the counter. It didn’t seem fair that he should die so young when there were so many old people in the world. I started crying; I couldn’t hold it in anymore.