Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  I shot up and ran to my mother. I grabbed her shoulders, looked her straight in the eyes, and said, “It’s okay, Ma, I am not scared anymore. Do you hear me? I am not scared anymore.”

  Tears soaked her cheeks and snot dripped from her nose; she nodded, looking lost. I held her close and walked her back into the living room, where my father’s body lay. She took one look at him and buried her head in my shoulder. “Oh, Johnny,” she cried, and reached out toward him. She kissed his cheek. “I’m so sorry, Johnny,” she said, and turned to me. “I should have gotten into bed with him, I should have—”

  “Mommy, it’s okay,” I said. “We were with him.”

  “No, I fucked it up,” she said, kneading her forehead.

  “Ma, he knows we were here. He waited for us. We did not let him down.” I glanced at the clock; it was 10:40. I noted the time and, struck by a thought, calmly walked into the kitchen and fetched a pair of scissors. I went back into the living room and, with only slightly trembling hands, snipped a lock of his hair. I looked around and grabbed one of his pill bottles, emptied it, and inserted the gray snippet.

  “I have to call the mortuary,” my mother said, but climbed into bed with him and held him for a moment. When she finally rose I noticed that Yaw was gathering his things. His shift had ended two hours before.

  “Yaw, thank you so much,” I said. “For everything.”

  “God bless you, Jennifer,” he said, and left.

  My mother decided she’d wait downstairs for the mortician, and I figured it was because she didn’t want to stay with my father’s body anymore. When she left I sat back down in the chair and studied his still chest. I was struck by how white his lips were; I didn’t know that could happen, but when I thought about it, it made sense. His mouth was partly open and I could see all his broken teeth and the spaces between. I considered climbing into bed with him but I didn’t want to disturb his body, so I sat at the foot of the bed and hugged his bony legs. The tears came fast, and with each heave I clutched the sheets, until my cries turned to screaming.

  “I love you so fucking much!” I screamed. “I love you SO. FUCKING. MUCH.” I sobbed over my father’s dead body until I heard the door open, and I quickly rose and threw on my poker face. There were two morticians, a man and a woman, and they lifted my father, sheets and all, and placed him in a long red bag that looked more like a duffel than a body bag. He seemed like a rag doll, his limp limbs jutting out at odd angles. When they zipped the bag over his head my mother gasped.

  “You’re sure he’s dead?” she asked the morticians, who paused and nodded, businesslike.

  “Mom,” I said gently, “we know he’s dead.” The man and woman left, and for the first time in months, the apartment was quiet. We looked at each other and pressed our foreheads together. He was gone.

  “Ma?” I asked. “Where is he, do you think?”

  “I don’t know, honey,” she said, “but wherever he is, he has all the answers now.”

  CHAPTER 11

  May 2001

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY WAS A BLUR, SPENT EITHER IN FRONT OF THE TV or running errands, but I can’t remember a minute of it. I do remember Tuesday, when my mother and I drove to Brooklyn to pick up my father’s death certificate, and then to a funeral home in Staten Island to receive his ashes. After that we headed into the city to pick up Arline, who’d hopped a train to Grand Central.

  “Oh, Eleanor,” she said, hugging my mother under the painted constellation in the Main Concourse. Then she reached out to me and brought me in for an embrace; it was the first time we’d met. She was short and squat, with a curly light-brown bob. “Oh, Jenny,” she said. “Look at you. You look just like your mother.” Her words were carried on a deep, husky whine, just like Rita’s when she was upset. “I brought babka?” she said, elevating the word into a question, and my mother and I laughed for the first time in two days.

  On our drive back to the Island my mother said, “Hey, Jenbo, you want to see where Arline and I grew up?”

  “Sure,” I said, eager to see a piece of my mother’s past I’d only heard about. I checked my watch; I should have been in my honors Roman architecture colloquium—not that I cared. I was restless and raw, keenly aware that I’d crossed the line from B.C. to A.D.

  “That’s Abraham Lincoln, where I went to high school,” my mother said as we passed an official-looking building visible from the expressway. “And we used to play hooky at the sweet shop across the street, but that’s closed now.”

  A few minutes later we were coasting down a wide, tree-lined boulevard called Oriental, and from there we made a right on Hastings.

  “Yep, that’s it,” Arline said, pointing to the house on the corner. “375” was emblazoned on the front.

  “It looks like it’s been redone,” my mother said, surveying the façade.

  “Don’t you want to go in?” I asked, thinking that I’d want to if I had lived there.

  “Nah,” my mother said. “Arl, how much do you think it’s worth now? Half a million? Three-quarters?”

  “Oh, Eleanor, millions,” she said. “I still can’t believe he made her sell it. What an asshole.”

  “Wow, I can’t imagine calling my father an asshole,” I said, popping my head into the front seat.

  “That’s because your father wasn’t,” Arline said.

  “Did you ever meet Daddy?” I asked her.

  “Once, before you were born,” she said. “At my father’s funeral, actually.”

  “What did you think of him?” I asked Arline.

  “Handsome,” she said quickly. “So handsome, and so nice, and funny. He was so funny.” She turned to my mother. “You were so lucky, Eleanor.”

  My mother shook her head. “I didn’t do what I was supposed to do.”

  “Ma, enough with that! Just because you didn’t climb into bed with him when he wasn’t even lucid—”

  “Eleanor,” Arline interjected, “the way you took care of him—you kept him alive. They gave him six months and you got on the computer and extended that by two years. It was you, finding clinical trials and doctors and second and third opinions—”

  “Lotta good it did,” my mother mumbled.

  “He would have been dead a long time ago if it wasn’t for you,” Arline said. “You gotta stop blaming yourself.”

  “All right, enough,” she said with a wave of her hand, but I could tell it wasn’t an angry gesture. She just wasn’t ready to hear it.

  The next afternoon I started going through my father’s drawers. My mother wasn’t ready to clean out his closet—“I just can’t part with his clothes, not yet,” she said—but his nightstand seemed harmless enough. I opened the familiar black-lacquered drawers and found pens, pencils, a few Stephen Kings, and the white cardboard bookmark I’d made him in sixth grade with “This Bookmark Belongs to Daddy and No One Else” written in puffy paint at the top. He’d saved it all these years, and still used it, apparently, because it was holding his place in The Dark Half. I thumbed through his wallet and found two driver’s licenses, one current and one expired. I couldn’t help but notice the expiration date on the current one: 04-10-2003. He expired two years before his license did. Because I knew my mother would want to keep the current one, I stuck the expired one in my wallet. I also found his slim gray telephone book, the one he’d carried for years, and when I set it aside I spotted a roll of undeveloped film. I jumped up and grabbed my mother’s keys.

  “Be right back,” I said, and sped to the CVS on Bay Street, which had a one-hour photo. As soon as I opened the photo envelope the girl at the counter offered me a roll of paper towels. “Thanks,” I said through heaving sobs. Judging by the contents the roll was from 1996—there were a few shots of his broken arm, replete with the metal contraption; a few exteriors of Burger Kings and Taco Bells; a photo of him, and a few of me, taken on a day long forgotten. It was the day my parents took me into the city, the first time we all went together, when my m
other lamented the Village’s transformation into “one big mall.” There were a few photos of me smiling and posing in the parking lot of New Lane, my long brown hair blown pin-straight and flecked with red highlights from the sun. In my father’s headshot he’s facing the camera and smiling with a slight shrug, except he wasn’t really shrugging; the camera caught him just as he was raising a cigarette to his mouth. It’s classic John Mascia, a photo depicting him at his zenith. Two years later his bones would start aching, and we all knew how that story ended.

  As I cried at the CVS counter—harder than I ever remembered crying—I decided that I would focus on the way he looked in the picture, as opposed to the way he looked when he was sick, which was the only way I could remember him now. I peeled myself off of the counter and threw myself behind the wheel of the Subaru and scream-cried the whole way home. As I looked for parking on Merle Place I also decided this would be the last time I cried with abandon over my father, because if I gave myself over to the horror of what I had just experienced I wouldn’t be able to function.

  As per my parents’ computerized “Last Wishes,” my father didn’t want a showing or burial, but I insisted on a memorial service. My mother oscillated between embracing the idea and decrying it as an unnecessary hassle, but I couldn’t live with the fact that my father would die without at least a few people sitting in a room and acknowledging it. So after Arline left we began scouting locations. My mother mentioned that David’s memorial service had been at the Ethical Culture Society on the Upper West Side, and she wanted to have my father’s there, too, but we couldn’t afford the fee. “You should try our Brooklyn location,” they suggested when we called. So my mother and I drove to Brooklyn and located the Gothic mansion across the street from Prospect Park. We decided on the ground-floor space that led to a lovely garden out back. We scheduled the service for June 6, exactly a month after he died, and, true to form, every time my mother and I argued she threatened to cancel it. “Yeah, Mom, because this is a party I just have my heart set on attending,” I zinged. She gave it a rest after that.

  The one-week anniversary of my father’s death fell on, of all things, Mother’s Day. It was oppressively hot that weekend and my mother came up to my apartment. “Well, happy Mother’s Day, I guess,” I said as she made coffee. My mother snorted and waited for the water to boil. “Look at it this way,” I added, “at least today’s not your anniversary. Especially this year.” He’d died six months shy of their twenty-fifth.

  “Yeah, well, whaddya gonna do,” she said.

  “I’m so sorry, Ma,” I said. “But at least you had a good marriage.” I was romanticizing a little, but they really did love each other. I’d seen how close they were at the end, how she’d conquered the enigmatic world of computers to try to find him a cure, how he wouldn’t take medicine from anyone else. I’d be lucky to find a love like theirs.

  “He cheated on me,” she said.

  “What?”

  She nodded. “With this white-trash waitress he met when he was painting on the road,” she revealed. “We almost broke up over it, but I forgave him because, well, he was your father. And really, he wasn’t about to start over with someone else, not at his age.” Her jaw was tense and her lips pursed, just like when she’d been forced to admit his crimes to me.

  “You said he never cheated on you!” I said, rising from the couch.

  “Well, he did.”

  “Mom, hang on,” I said. “You mean, when I was living in the same apartment with you guys, you were, like, embroiled in a love triangle and I had no idea?”

  “It was hardly a love triangle,” she said. “You didn’t see that skank dropping morphine into his mouth.”

  “Well, what—how … what happened?” I stammered.

  “She followed him up here after he broke his arm,” she said. “Daddy told me everything—he had to, because she was going to tell me.” A mischievous grin appeared on her face; I tried to imagine my mother kicking Britney Spears’s ass.

  “This sucks,” I said, collapsing into my futon. “I feel like he cheated on me, too.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” she said. “I was married to him, not you.”

  “True,” I conceded. “But he spent all that time away, and he was with some chick probably not that much older than me,” I pointed out. “He was enjoying his time away from us. That, to me, is cheating.”

  “It’s over now,” she said, pouring half & half into her coffee and slurping away.

  Graduation wasn’t for another couple of weeks so I returned to Merle Place with my mother. We had to prepare for the memorial service and decide what to do with my father’s things, an obligation that called attention to itself every time we opened the refrigerator.

  “Jenn-n-n-y,” my mother whined when she found herself face-to-face with a dozen bottles of applesauce. We took pleasure in trashing them—“I never want to look at applesauce again as long as I live,” she muttered—but we decided we couldn’t throw away my father’s eye-drops, which he’d been taking to control an eye infection for the last eighteen years. He’d transferred herpes simplex to his eye when he was in prison in 1983, and he almost lost his cornea, so he had to take drops for the rest of his life. I remembered how he used to come home from work and lean his head back and blink rapidly as they hit their target. “Not yet,” my mother said. In fact, she was never able to throw them away; I was the one who ultimately had to part with them when she died four years later.

  Then there was the matter of his wardrobe, which he’d been wearing with few variations since the late seventies. My mother began removing his good suits and laying them on the bed, but she stopped. “Jenny, I can’t do this,” she said, her face crumpling.

  “We don’t have to do it now,” I said. “We can wait.”

  “But I want you here to do it with me,” she said. “I can’t do this alone.”

  “And you won’t be,” I said. “I’ll be here.”

  “You promise?” my mother asked me, hanging up his suits. On a whim she reached into the pocket of one of them and produced a small glass vial. It was empty. “What is this?” she said, examining it.

  “Hell if I know,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.” She reached deeper into the pocket and pulled out another one.

  “Jenny, it looks like a crack vial,” she said, holding it up. While I was well versed in marijuana, I’d seen cocaine exactly once.

  “Mom, it could be anything,” I said.

  She closely inspected the suit. “This is the suit he wore to Grandpa’s funeral,” she said. “And there’s no way anyone was doing coke at Grandpa’s funeral. Jenny, I bet these belong to Rita,” she said, holding up the vials. “Remember? When she came here to ‘dry out’?”

  “You think she did drugs here?” I asked. “But how would she get drugs on the plane?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and cased the bedroom. I could almost see the wheels in her head turning. “If she was standing here, maybe,” she said, pointing to the space where the bedroom door hit the closet, a design flaw, “and she heard someone coming, she could have stuffed these in his pocket. Yeah, that’s what must have happened.”

  “Really?” I asked. “You think?”

  “Well, how else would you explain why there’s a crack vial in the suit your father wore to his father’s funeral? Nothing else makes sense.”

  “I can’t believe Rita, man,” I said. I felt like she’d sullied my father’s reputation by infecting his clothing with her drug paraphernalia. My mother didn’t tackle my father’s suits for a year after that, and when she did I wasn’t there. I broke my promise to her, probably because I wasn’t ready to revisit his death yet. And as punishment I had to hear about how she lugged the garbage bags to the Salvation Army by herself, and how I didn’t really love her. “Right, Ma, I’m just here for the fresh-squeezed orange juice,” I joked.

  But there was something else I helped her with whenever I came over, a chore that se
emed to rise above all else. The scene played out the same way every time: I’d unlock her door and she’d grab my arm, frantic, and lead me into her bedroom. She’d get on her knees and reach under the bed and pull out the suitcase of money left over from the sale of my grandfather’s house.

  “Count it,” she’d command, dumping the bundles of cash on the bed. I’d give her the same wary look each time.

  “Really?” I’d ask.

  “Really,” she’d answer. “I have to know how much I have, if I’m running out.” And I’d count it, bill by bill, until I reached a number. “Thirty thousand,” I’d announce; later, “twenty-five thousand,” then “fifteen thousand.” She lived on that money for two years after my father died, just as she predicted she would.

  The memorial service drew twenty-five people, mostly my college friends. Aunt Emma and her daughter Linda came, along with a few of my father’s cousins I didn’t know. A couple of my father’s painting buddies showed up, but neither his sister nor his brother was invited. My mother had asked my father as he lay dying if he’d like to see them, but he said no, probably because they hadn’t called him in years. Frankie’s disappearance was the most baffling, as they hadn’t had a falling-out; Frankie just seemed to disappear when my father got sick. Tony, Angela, and Tina didn’t fly up, instead sending a bouquet that we set in the center of the table in front, along with his ashes, which had been placed in a dark wooden box from Bombay Company. My mother bought a wrap dress for the occasion, black and sleek, and it marked the beginning of her “mourning in style” phase. Instead of donning a baggy black schmatte like a Sicilian widow, over the course of the next few years she fashioned herself after Juliette Binoche in Trois Couleurs: Bleu, the 1993 film in which Binoche loses her daughter and husband in a car crash. Throughout the film Juliette is a picture of neat, low-key casual, and my mother’s emulation prompted her to buy a tan leather messenger bag, cut her hair into a short brown bob, and wear smart little blazers over her jeans. I must say, she looked great.