Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  “Jenny, need I remind you, you are the one who begged me to take care of myself because you didn’t want to be an orphan—”

  “What does this have to do with anything—”

  “Let me finish! And when I told you I wanted you to have your own life, what did you tell me? Huh?” I shrugged. “You said you didn’t want to leave me. But now all of a sudden when your father is being treated for cancer, a cancer he will probably never recover from, when just physically taking care of him is going to be almost impossible for me alone, now you don’t want to miss out on finding yourself and all that shit. What’s the matter? Can’t you wait a few months? I need someone to help and support me, not someone who is still living in the past, someone who’s acting like a seventeen-year-old, who is afraid she might have to help with a few bucks, who has the nerve to scold me about how we didn’t handle our finances properly to make things right for you. I made things as right as I could, and I’ll never let you put me in the position of feeling guilty again. You did help when we were in California for a while by ourselves, and I was very grateful. We were in real trouble, but I did the best I could and you never forgave either of us, or, obviously, forgot.”

  “Mom, we’re not having that argument again—”

  “Your aunt Rita certainly thinks your leaving would be incredibly insensitive,” she quickly countered.

  “Rita? You mean, the person you’re selling drugs to?”

  “Don’t you dare talk about my sister that way! She’s done nothing but good for us, tried to help us whenever we’ve needed it—”

  “Mom, why don’t you just let me leave! It’s obvious we’re not getting along here—”

  “Because you’re a selfish bitch and your timing is so shitty it’s unbelievable,” she spat. “I’ve been trying to tell you that your father is dying and you’re in denial—”

  “Au contraire, mother, it’s you who are in denial,” I countered, “always asking the doctors, ‘Are you sure you can’t operate? Are you sure it’s bone cancer?’”

  “I’ll tell you something, kids,” my father said as he walked out of his bedroom, his hair slicked back from a recent shower. “I’d rather die in peace than live with this shit.”

  We both froze and turned to face my father. “See?” my mother said, breaking the silence. “This is your fault.”

  “This is not my fucking fault!” I screamed.

  “What did you say to your mother?” my father asked, approaching me menacingly.

  “I was just saying that if I think about moving out it’s not because I don’t love you guys or because I’m unhappy,” I stammered, clearly not prepared to argue this in front of my father. “And she told me my feelings were bullshit. I am so sick of being invalidated by that woman!” I turned and addressed her next. “You have no right to tell me my feelings are bullshit! I am so tired of this!”

  “Hey, don’t curse at your mother,” my father warned.

  “Her?” I asked, nearly laughing. “Don’t curse at her? Fuck her.” I’d meant to say “Forget her,” but my true feelings emerged. My father ran up to me and kicked me in both shins. He had terminal cancer and kicked me in the shins.

  “Look what you made your father do,” my mother hissed as she slipped out of the room. My father flipped off the lights and followed after her. I stood there, shocked. I was twenty-one years old; I wondered, should I still be getting hit?

  Later that night I found my father sitting in the darkened living room, stirring his scotch with one of his meaty fingers. “Your mother’s getting worse as she gets older,” he said, shaking his head slightly and staring off into space.

  THAT FALL, BECAUSE WE all thought my father was mere months away from dying, our apartment became a revolving door of visitors. My father’s cousin Camille came, and cried the second she saw my father, even though he wasn’t even thin yet. “God damn her, he doesn’t need that right now!” my mother privately hissed. Tina flew in a few days before my twenty-second birthday, which she, Jeff, and my parents celebrated at Trattoria Romana, our favorite Italian restaurant on the Island. Even though Tina had to leave the house once or twice to let me and my mother scream at each other in peace, all was forgotten by the time we sat down to dinner, when my parents gifted me and Jeff with a verbal promise for an all-expenses-paid trip to London. We never ended up going, but the gesture was nice. It turns out we were the benefactors of the sale of my grandfather’s house, which left my parents with $25,000 in cash. In typical fashion, they stored it in a suitcase under the bed. Coupled with their grassroots pharmaceutical operation, they now had enough money that I didn’t need to worry about them. It was a relief.

  “Dad,” I began one weekend when the three of us sat down to a lunch of cold cuts. “I was reading in New York magazine how Long Island City is the next neighborhood to gentrify, and I was thinking if we bought some property there, something small, it would appreciate over the next few years.”

  “Jenny, we need that money,” my father said. “We can’t spend it on a house.”

  “Yeah, besides,” my mother chimed in, “twenty-five thousand dollars isn’t nearly enough to get anything, even around there. Haven’t they been saying that about Long Island City for years now, anyway?”

  “Guys, you can’t just keep that money under the bed,” I argued. “Why not invest it in something so we don’t go through it so fast, like we always do? I mean, it’s not like you guys don’t have other money coming in.”

  “Jenny, can you keep your mouth shut?” my father huffed. “This is our money, not yours, and we will do with it what we see fit. Okay? Thank you.” I nodded and concentrated on my salami. Later when my father was out of earshot my mother explained why they wouldn’t be Donald Trumping their loot.

  “I may have to live on that money,” she whispered. “After. That will be all I have.” I never brought it up again.

  Our final visitor was Rita, who called and told my mother that she hadn’t been really selling all that OxyContin and Percocet, she’d been taking them herself and paying for them with money she’d stolen from her daughter, Kara. Also, she was addicted to cocaine, and could she come to New York to “dry out” with the help of my mother’s stern discipline and famous chicken soup? It would be her first visit since we’d moved to New York five years before—in fact, it was her first visit to the Mascia family in seven years. My mother was bewildered. “My sister is a drug addict,” she said sadly. It was unbelievably shitty timing, and it meant that she would be caring for two sick people at once, but she relented.

  My mother had specifically asked Rita not to cry when she saw my father, who was hardly the stick figure most cancer patients are reduced to; mostly he looked troubled by something in the middle distance that neither my mother nor I could discern. But despite my mother’s orders, Rita cracked as soon as she crossed the threshold. My mother and I ushered her into the bedroom before she could wail in front of him and begged her to keep her composure, which she did, but just barely. I spent the next five days massaging her cramped legs and tight temples and feeding her Jell-O, which she spilled on my mother’s sheets, leaving a permanent stain that was somehow blamed on me. All the while Rita whimpered, “I don’t want to be addicted to cocaine anymore. It’s terrible, Jenny.” I’d never heard her utter the word aloud; it seemed beneath her. She was my idol growing up, but all along she’d been an addict. I felt bad for her, but not as bad as I felt for my father. I couldn’t understand how Rita received the princess treatment while my father had poison flowing through his veins. Neither could my mother, who finally came to her senses a week later when Rita missed her flight back to Miami; the next one wasn’t for another three hours. She turned to my parents, helpless, and asked them if they could take her in to Manhattan with them, where my dad was scheduled for chemo, and then drive her back to Newark for the next plane. My parents refused, and in lieu of a goodbye they gave her a handful of OxyContin just to shut her up. A few days after she left I sat with my parents i
n the living room and shook my head at what she had devolved into. “She’s nothing but a selfish drug addict,” I spat. Without warning, my father flipped his rage switch and went from zero to incensed.

  “Don’t you ever say anything like that about your aunt!” he shouted. “You have no idea what she has done for this family!”

  “Uh, okay,” I said, backing away. I looked at my mother, who sat silently. Had I missed something?

  THE UPCOMING NEW YEAR’S EVE was a special one, and not just because it was the turn of the millennium. New Year’s meant that my father had surpassed at least one doctor’s expectations: He had lived longer than three to six months. That night we went to Uncle Joey’s daughter Linda’s house on the Island, but the celebration was bittersweet. Joey had just been told that his cancer had returned, meaning he and my father would be carpooling to chemotherapy. Joey’s wife, Emma—my father referred to her as “my favorite aunt”—acted cheerful as always, though we knew her heart was breaking. We had that in common. We weren’t sure if this would be the last New Year’s for either of them.

  At least my father had finally quit working, which thrilled my mother, as she no longer had to worry about his bones breaking. “Do you miss it, Daddy?” I asked, mistaking his diligent hard work for actual love of carpet cleaning and painting.

  “You kiddin’?” he asked, shaking his head and smiling. “No way.”

  “Do you miss smoking?” I asked.

  “You kiddin’?” he replied. “Every day.” I certainly didn’t miss his smoking, and I didn’t miss his working, either—he no longer had to drag himself out of bed at seven, and for the first time in memory his hands were soft, not rough like the sandpaper he’d worked with. His face was relaxed and his gut persisted, which my mother and I took as hopeful signs. But he looked older than he had six months ago; worry lines now threatened to drown his eyes. I, on the other hand, look at photos of myself from that night and cringe: My waist was expanding by the month, and even though I cried about it to my therapist I felt powerless over what was happening to me. My mother had also gained weight, and she insisted on wearing her sunglasses indoors, which baffled me, as I thought they looked ridiculous, but she took great pains to hide the bags under her eyes and no one could convince her to stop.

  When the clock struck midnight, the revelers arrayed around Linda’s spacious, smartly appointed house and toasted while my parents and I gathered into a tight circle and hugged each other, weeping in disbelief that we had made it this far. My father nodded repeatedly, which he always did when he cried, as if each nod would dry up his tears. “We made it,” my mother said, her eyes watering. What I didn’t know then was that the three of us would see one more New Year’s before cancer came to claim my father, and that the coming year would be one of the worst of my life.

  IF MY FATHER’S illness taught me anything about myself, it was that (a) I was more than capable of finding comfort in food, and (b) all I needed when the shit hit the fan was a romance in which to drown myself. Kareem was a fellow student who’d appeared with me in a play that fall, and though I knew he liked me I didn’t feel the same way. But by winter I’d begun to warm to him slightly: He was energetic and witty, with a flair for writing and excellent comic timing. I recruited him to review films for the school paper, and he in turn recruited me as an on-air personality for the radio station. One day a mutual friend of ours whispered in my ear, “You know, I bet you and Kareem would be a good match,” and that was all it took. I was in love—it happened that fast. Before long he was my sun, my earth, and my stars. I discovered that love could be a decision I made, and once I opened my mind to it, my body followed. So deep was my need to escape that logic was bypassed completely. By February we were officially a couple, in the throes of full-blown emanating-from-our-pores lust; two months later we were talking about moving in together. This perplexed my mother, who knew I wasn’t initially attracted to him. There was also a cultural divide: His parents were Egyptian Muslims, who’d immigrated a short time before Kareem was born. His mother wore the hijab, as did his younger sister, who tattled on her brother and his “slutty” American girlfriend at every turn.

  When Jeff and I went to San Francisco that spring to visit my high school chum Natalie, the two of them wanted to kill me because every time they turned around I was on the phone with Kareem. The eight hours we spent driving up the coast was the longest I spent without talking to him and I cursed myself for not having a cellphone. In his absence I opened up to Jeff and Natalie about the situation with my parents, even recounting the heated argument that ended with my shins getting kicked.

  “Whoa, Jen, what are you saying?” Natalie asked. “Your father kicked you?”

  “Yeah,” I said sheepishly. “What, your parents don’t hit you anymore?”

  “No,” Jeff and Natalie said in unison.

  “Not since I was a kid,” Jeff said. “Jen, you didn’t tell me this was going on.”

  “Wait—you’re telling me your parents don’t hit you anymore?” I asked. I was driving and it was getting dark and I struggled to keep my eyes on the road.

  “Uh, no,” Jeff said. Natalie shook her head in the passenger’s seat.

  “Jen, I think it’s time to move out,” she said.

  “Yeah, Jen, you need to move out as soon as you can,” Jeff echoed.

  “I didn’t realize that your parents didn’t hit you anymore,” I mumbled, wondering if I could possibly afford an apartment by the summer. I returned from California to find that Uncle Frankie had moved out. With my parents in the master bedroom I now had two rooms to myself. My mother bought me a new computer desk from Ikea in a last-ditch attempt to keep me on Merle Place, but it remained in a corner, unassembled. I hadn’t wavered in my goal to branch out on my own, and it was all I thought about—until an afternoon in June, when I picked up the New York Post and turned to page 24.

  With a few keystrokes, worried victims and survivors can get information on 500,000 past and present inmates of New York’s 70 state prisons—through the state Department of Correctional Services web site. Just visit www.docs.state.ny.us and click on “inmate lookup.”

  My eyes were glued to the page. I reread the sentence over and over until it stopped making sense. On the train, on the express bus, in the privacy of my bedroom, my eyes kept wandering back to the article, which explained how to find criminal records online. It was what I’d been waiting for. I sensed it would only be a matter of time before my father’s information would be accessible to me somehow, and now I could finally confirm whether my mother had, in fact, told me the whole truth five years earlier.

  It was late afternoon when my mouse hovered over “Inmate Lookup,” and the shades filtered the sun so my bedroom was bathed in amber. Despite the fact that I was closer than I’d ever been to an answer that had eluded me for seventeen years, I didn’t realize that this could be one of the defining moments of my life; I don’t remember my heart pounding or my breath quickening or any of that. I just typed his last name—my last name—and waited.

  He was the only Mascia, John listed—if there was in fact another John Mascia in the Bronx with whom my father had been confused, he never did time—and I clicked on his department identification number. Date of Birth: 04/10/1937; check. Race/Ethnicity: White; check. Date received: 01/16/1964. Latest Release Date: 10/16/1975. Almost twelve years, like my mother had said. The table below was labeled “Crimes of Conviction,” and there was only one entry.

  Murder.

  It couldn’t be. My father had killed someone. No wonder my mother had lied to me. As I sat there staring at the screen I heard my parents preparing dinner in the kitchen—innocuous, everyday sounds—and all I could think was, “Gotcha.” I was now in the loop. No longer did I feel shame for wondering—this was real. I hadn’t just been overdramatizing, as my mother suggested scornfully whenever I broached this topic. My father—my funny, selfless, streetwise father—had killed someone. He had shot them or strangled them or stabb
ed them until the life drained from their body. And soon he would lose his life. Some might say that he deserved his fate.

  His crime opened up a new line of thought: Why? How did he do it, how could she have married him, how could I have lived with someone who had taken life and not known it? I had been prepared to find a slew of charges for thievery that added up to a twelve-year sentence. But this, the only item on his rap sheet—at least, the only item that had survived the transformation from paper to digital—caught me off guard. Next to “Murder” it said in parentheses, “Deg’less prior 9-1-74.” What did that mean? Twelve years meant he’d missed out on raising his children; twelve years meant he’d missed the sixties and all that entailed; he’d been in jail for the Kennedy assassination, women’s lib, free love, both Godfather films. Thank god he’d been released when he was, or I never would have been born.

  So now what? Should I waltz into the living room and ask my father about this? I had a feeling, bolstered by my mother’s past sentiments, that he would wither under my questioning—me, his only child unburdened by the truth. In my eyes he wasn’t a murderer. How could I take that away from him?

  I called Kareem and told him everything; I had to tell someone. I knew I was going to confront my mother, but I didn’t know when. She might very well react in anger—I could almost hear her yelling, “How could you do this when your father is so sick!”—but she had been using his imminent death to keep me in line for the past year. When he died she’d find another way to discourage my curiosity, then another. I had to cut through all that while he was still alive. Even if I never spoke with him about it, at least the option would be there.