Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  “You like?” she asked, modeling the wrap dress in the dressing room in Macy’s.

  “Looks great,” I said. I, on the other hand, had outgrown all my clothes, so I picked out some sleek black pants in multiple sizes. “These fit,” I said as I slid into one pair. I looked at the tag: size 16.

  “Jenny—” my mother started.

  “Don’t say it,” I said. I was disgusted at the way I’d neglected myself, but it would be a few months before I cared again. For the entire week before the service I focused on my eulogy and the printed program, which we passed out in lieu of a mass card. My mother and I took some ideas to my college newspaper office and one of the designers created a double-sided white card, the front of which was decorated with a portrait of my father from his prison days, though the location isn’t evident. He looks Roman and distinguished, and he’s gazing at a point just beyond the camera lens. Next to that my mother placed a stanza from the Song of Solomon—“Set me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm, for love is strong as death, jealousy as cruel as the grave.” The back of the card featured the photo of my father that I’d found on that undeveloped roll—with the cigarette cropped out, of course—arranged next to the death notice I’d called in to The New York Times the day after his death:

  Beloved husband of Eleanor and father of Jennifer, Angela, Tina and Tony. A man who lived his life with vitality and grace, with intelligence, wit and an incredible sense of humor. He had the nobility and strength to turn his life around for his family and create a loving home. A hard worker who gave everything he had to his wife and youngest daughter, he was a cut above, a class act. He will be mourned by his daughter Jennifer for the rest of her days.

  I’d originally called in a brief four-line death notice, but I wanted something more personal on the record about my father. At the service, my mother read the W. H. Auden poem popularized by Four Weddings and a Funeral: “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, / Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone …” My eulogy was next. I took a breath and ignored the constant opening and closing of the massive front door and soldiered on through my strained crying. I told the group how my father had made mistakes, lots of them, but also how he had moved past them, with wisdom and strength of character, “with a grace and elegance unmatched in the most moral of citizens.” I recounted how badly he’d wanted to be respectable, and how highly he was regarded by everyone he encountered, from the nuns at my Catholic school to the guys on his painting crew. I told them how in love he was with my mother, and how he’d climbed seventeen stories to give her an ice cream cone when the elevator in her apartment building was busted. I told them how he treated me like a little princess, fixing shoes I didn’t even know needed fixing and patiently hanging around the video store for hours, waiting for someone to return Dirty Dancing so I could watch it again and again.

  “We don’t get to choose our own parents,” I said in closing. “But if I had been given the choice to pick my father, I would have chosen him without question. And even if I wasn’t his daughter, I would still think it a tragedy that John Mascia has died.”

  I stepped down and reached for a cassette player. “I’m going to play a song for you now,” I said to the group, “that my father would play in bars all over the country when he’d go for a drink after a long day of painting buildings. He said it reminded him of the good times he had with his crew. It’s called ‘Friends in Low Places.’” As Garth Brooks’s voice filled the cavernous space I felt bad that there weren’t more people there to mourn him. He’d lived to sixty-four—where were his friends? The answer, of course, is that he didn’t really have any. It was then I realized the extent to which my father had kept himself in reserve. No wonder his children weren’t there—he didn’t give, so he didn’t get.

  My mother had specific plans for the disposal of my father’s ashes: She wanted to sprinkle two-thirds at his parents’ grave site at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, and she planned to keep the other third. But I remembered that he once said he wanted some of his ashes to be placed in the Pacific, so my mother reluctantly set aside a third for that purpose. The portion she planned to keep was poured into a blue and white Crabtree & Evelyn jar and placed in her linen closet, nestled among the blankets and the towels. Whenever I took a shower I made sure to say hi.

  Graduation a few days later was a long, sticky affair in Central Park, and in the photos all four of my chins are on display. Afterward Aunt Adele and her daughter and granddaughter took me and my mother to Orsay to make up for my father not being there. “I’m so proud of you for graduating,” my mother told me over crème brûlée, “after everything you went through this year.”

  Though I’d wanted to be an actress for as long as I could remember, I didn’t go on one audition. Instead, the day after graduation I donned all black, printed out a résumé, and hit up a dozen restaurants for a server position. I was hired at the first place I interviewed, a seafood restaurant called Lundy’s at Fiftieth Street and Broadway. It was the Times Square offshoot of the venerated Sheepshead Bay seafood house where my mother and her family had eaten every Sunday back in the day. But the week I started they were hit with a blistering review from the Post, and when I’d been on the job three months the entire restaurant industry took an economic hit, thanks to September 11. That day and its aftermath reopened a barely healed wound for me and my mother. Fortunately, we didn’t know anyone who died, but to walk outside and see grief etched on everyone’s face was devastating. It meant there was nowhere for us to hide from ours.

  It was right after the attacks that I started running. The impulse actually began with a dream I’d had when I was still with Kareem, in which I effortlessly sprinted through the city streets, darting from sunlight to shadow. My dream felt like freedom, which is what I’d desired in my waking life. I found a park on the Upper East Side riverfront called Carl Schurz Park, which featured a pier-shaped deck jutting out over the water, and it stuck in my memory because I thought it peculiar, even Californiaesque. That summer I began walking there in the middle of the night when I was grieving and restless. Once in a while I’d project arias out over the black water, and when my throat was ragged, I’d plant myself on the towering steps nearby and watch the sunrise, which was something to behold: The eastern sky moved through sapphire and turquoise and lime and the rest of the spectrum until each color was represented by a stripe in the sky. Soon I began walking there in sweatpants, then with a Walkman in my ears, and within a month I’d begun alternating walking blocks with jogging blocks. Before I knew it I was running three miles, then four miles, then four and a half miles, then five miles, from my apartment to the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and back, every night after I got home from work. I blazed a path through the Upper East Side, trailing fat cells in my wake, and I kept it up through shin splints, sprained ankles, blisters, and a strange popping sensation in my right hip.

  “Are you sure it’s safe to go running after midnight?” my mother asked me. “Yes,” I’d assure her, “it’s perfectly safe, I’m usually the only person in the park.” Of course, I didn’t mention that that was because I was the only person in New York crazy enough to go running as late as 2 A.M. I’d tried running during the day but I felt freer when cloaked by darkness; under the sun I felt the eyes of the world upon me and I couldn’t handle the scrutiny. But by running so late it was almost as if I was issuing a challenge: Go ahead, I dare you to fuck with me. I can outrun you. I finally took back some control—over my body, my mind, my broken heart. All I had tethering me to the earth was the sound of my breath in the dark, and a ritual: Whenever I reached a certain part of the park I’d whisper, “Love you, Dad.” I hadn’t been to church in years, but that became my church.

  Within six months I had melted down to a size eight, and my progress impressed me even more than it impressed my mother. I didn’t tell her I’d started running until the weight began dropping because I knew she’d appoint herself my personal exercise coach and essentially
take over my project with her suggestions, and with blistering criticism if my stamina ever failed me. I’d gone from a bit of a lump to running thirty miles a week, but in my vulnerable moments I began to question whether I had, in fact, done it alone. I began to fantasize that maybe I’d somehow inherited my father’s considerable physical strength when his spirit departed, and this process had transpired on some cosmic physiological level that living humans can’t see or understand. How else could I have acquired this remarkable strength? Maybe there is something out there, I thought. Maybe he can see me.

  Or maybe some things in this life aren’t supposed to mean anything at all.

  THAT WINTER MY MOTHER and I took a trip to Florida to see Rita and Grandma Vivian. Arline joined us and refereed when my mother and Rita got into a huge fight over her drug use. Rita had a habit of leaving the house every few hours and my mother suspected she was smoking crack, and when she confronted her about it, Rita acted like a typical drug addict in denial.

  Meanwhile, Grandma Vivian was still addicted to Bonanza, and I noticed she hadn’t lost her signature spunk. When I sparked a conversation with her about my mother’s teaching career, which ended at age forty-two when she married my father, Grandma griped, “She could have made more of her life. She could have been a principal.”

  “Oy, Ma,” my mother snapped, and it was refreshing to see that my mother had issues with her mother, too. Grandma would die that October, on the day before my mother’s sixty-eighth birthday. She took it pretty well, but admitted, “Sometimes I still wish my mom was around to kiss my boo-boos, so to speak. I guess you never grow out of that.” I shuddered and hoped that wouldn’t be me.

  The last two days of the trip I spent with Angie, just like I’d promised my father on his deathbed. I still hadn’t met two of her three children, and my failure to keep in touch made me feel awkward and slightly ashamed. A year before my father died my mother gave me Krissy’s and Joey’s wallet-sized school pictures with an admonishment: “You really should get to know your nieces and nephews, Jenny. You know how nice it is to have a good aunt.” She was talking about Rita, who had gifted me with diamond earrings and gold hoops and frequent visits. But it was hard to start a correspondence with my nieces and nephews when my father wasn’t communicating with their mother. After he died I finally had my entrée.

  My mother drove me to Angie’s house in Royal Palm Beach, and we were late because we nearly got lost in the Everglades. When we finally turned onto her dusty road it was pitch-black outside, but Angie and Frank waited for us to start dinner. And there we sat around the dinner table, two sides of a shattered family: Nicole was sixteen and tall, somehow blessed with ample breasts but slender hips; Krissy was eleven, hyperactive and prone to fits of giggles, just as I’d been a decade earlier; and Joey was six, rambunctious and a human garbage disposal when it came to sour candy, just like me. “I’m not satisfied till my tongue is burning,” I told him.

  “Me, too!” he chirped before turning his attention to his toy helicopter. As Angie and the kids cleared the table, tears sprang to my eyes; I couldn’t hold them back. “I can’t believe he missed all this,” I whispered in my mother’s ear.

  “She okay?” Angie asked her. I could feel my mother nodding as she held me. Angie gently rubbed my back.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” she said. “You’re here now.” My mother didn’t stay that night but I did, enjoying a midnight game of Monopoly with Krissy and her cousin David, who was Cindy’s son. Oddly enough, the entire Florida branch of the Mascia family was littered with first and second marriages that produced half-siblings, just like the one that had produced me. I felt like my situation wasn’t so odd, then, and this feeling was bolstered by Angie’s immediate acceptance of me, her long-lost little sister. Her kids seemed thrilled to have another aunt and welcomed me like they’d last seen me the day before yesterday.

  My mother came to get me the next afternoon, and she walked headlong into a quasi–family reunion, complete with Tina and Cindy’s families, though I’d come to learn that these gatherings were commonplace. Even Marie, my father’s first wife, was there, and I finally got to see the inspiration for my father’s tattoos up close: She was tan as a deer, with shoulder-length white hair and a welcoming smile—the same one my father had, actually. In fact, her laid-back manner reminded me of a side of my father’s personality, the one that was affable and soft-spoken and a product of the old neighborhood. She was a semiretired nurse who’d taken up painting in recent years, and her creations, which adorned the walls of Angie’s one-story house, were quite good. “Just like Daddy,” I whispered to my mother, struck by the coincidence.

  Though my mother and I said our goodbyes that night, I’d return a dozen times over the next several years, joining the gang on camping trips and eighteenth-birthday celebrations, and laser hair removal appointments with my sister Tina and her strong-willed daughter Veronica, now fifteen. A recovering tomboy with an almond tan and naturally white-blond hair, Veronica was happiest spending her days on fishing boats and chasing after golden retrievers, and I envied her fully formed sense of self, something I desperately could have used at fifteen.

  After a camping trip late that summer I spent a few days at Tina’s house in Fort Pierce, which featured less activity than Angie’s but proved more conducive to probing conversation. The first thing I noticed when I walked in was the card my mother and I had created for the memorial service taped up on one of Tina’s kitchen cupboards. “Wow,” I said, pointing to it.

  “Yeah, it reminds me of him. This way I see his face every day,” she said with tears in her eyes. Tina had appointed herself the family historian, and as such she had amassed photo albums and letters sent between family members over the years, some not even addressed to her. I opened one of her albums filled with photos, many of them Polaroids, taken right before I was born.

  “A lot of people are doing things they’re not supposed to be doing in these pictures,” she said with a smirk, and I spotted a birthday cake adorned with a gigantic marijuana leaf. It was rumored that Tina enjoyed the occasional joint, and even though we had that in common I didn’t dare mention it. I flipped through the years and there were my parents, looking young and happy, and stoned.

  “Tina, did my mom smoke pot?” I asked, making a mental note to rake my mother over the coals for her hypocrisy.

  “Miss Ellie did enjoy the occasional joint,” she said, “but it was probably because she was always around it, because Dad smoked so much.”

  “My dad—I mean, Dad smoked a lot?” I felt embarrassed for my slip; I had to remember that he was Tina’s father long before he was mine.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Everyone did then.” The photos of my parents were few and far between, which was an accurate representation of their appearance in Tina, Angie, and Tony’s lives.

  “Tina, when are these from?” I asked when I reached a set of photos depicting my father in what looked like the early 1980s hurling snowballs at his brother, sister, and cousins.

  “Oh, that was Grandma’s funeral,” she said, and on the next page was a photo of Tina with Grandma Helen right before she died; Tina’s eyes are red and full of tears. I looked at the pictures of my father from that day and recognized the black mustache, later shaved off; the mole on his cheek that he later removed because it turned out to be cancerous; his salt-and-pepper hair before the white had taken over; and his smile, which was all teeth and took over his face without betraying the deep crow’s feet he’d go on to develop. It was too much—I ran into the bathroom and locked the door so I could weep in peace. At Tina’s house I would come to feel my father’s presence more acutely than anywhere else—other than on Merle Place—and whenever I returned I went back to those photo albums so I could see another side of my father, the side his older children had glimpsed. And then there were the letters.

  “He wrote these to Tony when he was away,” she said, and the first letter she handed me brought back a flood of memories: drawi
ngs of Snoopy and Linus, just like the cards he’d sent me from behind bars when I was five.

  “Hi Tony,” the first typewritten card read, “I send you pictures of a…” and on the inside were precise renderings of a squirrel, a dog, a billy goat, and finally, a “Dad,” and here he’d inserted a photo of himself from the early seventies, a profile shot most likely taken in prison. I turned to her with tears spilling down my cheeks.

  “I had no idea they were ever close,” I sobbed.

  “Oh, they weren’t really,” she said. “Dad tried for a while, but it didn’t really work out. At first my stepfather resented Dad so much that he destroyed every picture we had of him. When he left, Dad reached out to Tony, who was about ten. My mother was always worried that Dad would disappoint Tony, so she was apprehensive about letting him write, and later, letting him visit.”

  “Disappoint?” I asked, already skimming the second letter in the pile.

  “He’d come around and then fall out of touch,” she explained, “and he had a habit of doing that with everyone and Mom didn’t want Tony to get hurt. In the end, of course, he did.”

  “Oh, Tina,” I sighed, and read the second letter, also typewritten: “‘I received your letter and I was very happy to hear from you. I have heard a lot about you from your Nanny, and I think she is so impressed with you because of all your little friends.’ Little friends?” I asked.

  “Oh, Tony was really into snakes and bugs and things,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said, and read on.

  Your poor Nanny comes close to having a heart attack every time you show her a bug or a snake, but the truth is, she tells me you’re a fine boy. She thinks you look a lot like me when I was your age, and judging from your pictures, I do see a little of me in you. This isn’t the worst thing that could happen, as I don’t think I am that ugly. Well, maybe a little ugly. Anyway protect your nose with your life. As you can see from my picture, if I followed my nose I would walk in circles.