Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  “No, we just always had a feeling,” she said. “Like you did.”

  Rita had visited at least a dozen times when I was growing up. How could they have kept it a secret? How could my mother not suspect? It seemed preposterous that his daughters could pick up on his sexual tension with Rita but my mother couldn’t. I wanted to go back to believing it hadn’t really happened, and without a smoking gun, it almost felt like I could.

  When I got back to New York I spent a few days at my mother’s apartment in Staten Island and successfully pushed my conversation with Angie out of my mind. I plugged my new camera into the computer—an Olympus digital my mother had bought me for Christmas—and showed her my photos from the trip, jabbering on about how the water in Grand Cayman was as blue as 2000 Flushes, the pointlessness of cruises in general, and the staggering amount of room charges I’d been saddled with—$600, on her credit card, incidentally, which she’d given me to use on an emergency basis.

  “Goddammit, Jenny!” she cursed. “I just got credit again and now it’s gonna be shot to shit.”

  “Ma, don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll pay you back, you know I will.”

  “Yeah?” she shot back. “With what job?” She had me there. I’d been fired from my last waitressing job that winter and my unemployment benefits were about to dry up, signaling an end to my leisurely holiday from toil.

  “I’ll get a job,” I said. “I’m going to look next week.” And I did, when we met after her therapy session on Fifty-seventh Street, right next door to Carnegie Hall. As we crossed the avenue I noticed a spacious restaurant with floor-to-ceiling windows on the corner. I walked in, and while my mother waited, I interviewed with the general manager and was hired on the spot. My experience had spoken volumes, which made me profoundly sad—I did not want to be a professional waiter. Plus, I was dismayed when I saw what I would be wearing, as servers passed by in tuxedo pants, bow ties, and vests with enormous airplanes ironed on the back. I swore to myself that this would be my last waitressing gig, even if I had no idea what could possibly take its place.

  My colleagues at the Redeye Grill were your typical actor/student/ career waiter mix. Whenever any of them asked me what my aspirations were I muttered “actress” and slunk away, ashamed that I had done nothing to further the only goal I’d ever really had. Meanwhile, my passion for current events was coming to a boil, thanks to my disenchantment with the Bush administration, and I felt increasingly restless spending eight hours a day among people who didn’t place much value on the news. So I’d fold napkins while quietly reading my copy of the Times and remind myself that there was a world outside this one, and that one day I would join it.

  “That Kristof is a genius, isn’t he?” said a voice from behind me as I sat at the back of the dining room between shifts, poking at my pasta. He was dark and lanky, with thin, perfectly groomed black hair, searching brown eyes, and a peanut-shaped face.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Nicholas Kristof. Don’t tell me you don’t read him?” His accent was Bengali with a distinctive British tinge. He was wearing a red vest, which meant he was a food runner. I’d seen him around the restaurant, effortlessly lifting hulking trays of food with just the tips of his long, slim fingers.

  “No,” I was sorry to report, “I read Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman, mostly.” He gently shook his head back and forth, clicking his tongue and feigning disappointment.

  “You’re really missing out,” he said, pulling out the chair next to me and taking a seat at the table. “This man is amazing. I’ve been following his career since before he became a columnist. He and his wife won a Pulitzer for their reporting from Tiananmen Square. Did you know that last year he bought two Cambodian prostitutes their freedom and gave them money to start a new life? He’s going to win a Pulitzer this year, mark my words.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked. “Sorry, I’ve had to remember so many this week.”

  He held out his hand. “Tutul,” he said. Too-tool.

  “Jennifer,” I said, and shook it. “So you read the Times?”

  “Every day,” he said. “Do you read Somini Sengupta? She writes from India and Pakistan, and she’s brilliant. She will be a columnist one day, you just watch. I predicted Kristof would be a columnist one day, too. I’m usually right about these things.” Thus commenced an intellectual alliance bursting with discourse and debate about world affairs that was sweeping in its scope and would go on to change the course of my life. Whenever we worked together we would parse the issues of the day from hot spots around the world while the restaurant whirred around us. The Orange Revolution: covered. The Oil for Food scandal? Check. FARC, Chechnya, Musharraf and Arafat: analyzed, dissected, and digested. Co-workers began to notice our mutual admiration society, as I was the only waitress who hung around the kitchen killing time with the food runners. The kitchen boasted a decent-sized television, oddly enough—the line cooks depended on the bleached blondes of Telemundo to get them through each steamy, exhausting shift—and the two of us spent most of the fall glued to the presidential debates. It seemed like we were the only people in the place who cared.

  “What do you want to do with all this?” I asked him during a slow dinner shift, referring to his vast stores of knowledge. Surely he didn’t want to be a food runner much longer; he was already thirty-four.

  “I am going to be a professor,” he declared. “I’m going to sharpen and challenge young minds.” To that end, he was taking graduate courses at City College. “And what about you?” he asked.

  I hesitated; what did I want to do? Wait tables and talk politics all day long? That sounded nice, but I needed to be going somewhere. I certainly wasn’t going to turn thirty with a check presenter in my pocket and an apron tied around my waist. He recognized my ambivalence.

  “I think you should go to Columbia School of Journalism,” he said.

  “Eh, I always thought I was done with school,” I said.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “You really should consider it.”

  “Well,” I said, my mind slowly embracing the concept, “I used to edit the arts section of my college paper. But I never thought I’d make a career out of writing. How do you know I’d be a good reporter? You’ve never seen my stuff.”

  “I can tell just by reading your emails,” he said. “You’ve got what it takes. Consider it.”

  More school? More loans? I hadn’t even paid off my loans from Hunter, and I only owed ten grand. But perhaps grad school would save me, put me on a track that led to something. And unlike law or med school, journalism school didn’t sound like it involved memorizing hundreds of pages from dusty tomes. By the time I’d cashed out that evening I was certain Tutul was right. I’d already subconsciously absorbed the writing styles of the journalists I admired, so why not apply that rudimentary education toward an actual career? I was tired of breathing the rancid air in my claustrophobic little world populated with lobster forks and Bordeaux glasses. I longed to care about someone else for a change. There were people suffering in silence, screwed by poverty and their governments, and I could write about them. I could use my talent for good, instead of auditioning until I was forty and praying for a husband to rescue me from terminal uncertainty. My future had chosen me, and Tutul had given it a voice.

  “Mom,” I said when I called my mother during my walk home that evening, “Guess what I decided? I’m going to go to Columbia School of Journalism and become a reporter.”

  “Really?” she said. “But Jenny, are you sure you want to give up acting? You used to make your father cry whenever you were onstage.”

  “Ma!” I protested. “That’s not real! This is!”

  The application was due in eleven days; I emailed it in ten. Now all I had to do was wait.

  “HEY, MA?” I SQUEAKED. It was chilly, so we were sitting in her car where we waited for the express bus that would take me to work. She had finally ditched the beat-up Subaru and charged a 1998 Honda Accord on her Discover card
; the afternoon she came back from the used car dealership she proudly showed off the detachable radio she didn’t even know how to detach.

  “Ye-es?” she replied in her loopy singsong. I’d wanted to broach the topic many times, but we’d been discussing Rita and now I couldn’t chase it out of my mind. My mother had just vowed never to speak to her youngest sister again—“I get on the phone and all she wants to talk about is Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie! Who cares why he left Jennifer Aniston? Someone should tell her that there’s other news in this world”—and if that was truly the case, then there was something I needed to know.

  “Ever since I was a kid,” I began, “I’ve always thought—and I don’t know why or how or when this started—but I’ve always kind of suspected that, maybe, um, did you ever get the feeling that … somethinghappenedbetweenDaddyandRita?”

  She stared straight ahead, seemingly stuck in a never-ending pause. She turned to me, her eyes flat. “Why would you say that?” she asked slowly, carefully.

  I shrugged. “Just something I’ve always felt,” I said. “And, well, I brought it up with Angie, you know, to see if she also felt that.”

  “And what did your sister have to say?” she asked in measured tones. Your sister.

  “Well, she said that she and Tina always kind of suspected, because he took so many trips down there, and they were so close when they were together, you know, they acted very familiar with each other.” I felt like I was ganging up on her. I didn’t want her to feel cornered, but how else was this information supposed to make her feel? I was selfish to bring it up, I knew it, but I had to know. Perhaps she already knew and had forgiven Rita, though that seemed unlikely. If I truly knew my mother, there was only so much she was willing to forgive.

  “Did they?” she said. “Is that what she said?”

  “Mom, I basically forced it out of her,” I explained. “She didn’t want to tell me. She loves you so much. She has no proof. It’s just that I was so certain, dating from childhood, that I was right.”

  She inhaled resolutely, her jaw clenched. “The only thing your father and Rita ever did was sell drugs together,” she said. “They were in business together. I knew all about it, so your sisters don’t really know the whole story.”

  So there was more she hadn’t told me about my father. “Angie mentioned that, about the drugs,” I said. “She said that Daddy would come down to Florida and prepare packages with Rita and ship them off, or whatever.”

  “That’s all that was happening,” she said, her lips pursing. She seemed lobotomized, and as she spoke her eyes robotically moved from me, to the windshield, and back.

  “So, wait, Daddy sold cocaine?” I asked. My mother sighed; this was clearly another subject she had never wanted broached.

  “When we were struggling in California—do you remember all those times we went bankrupt?” she started.

  “Yes, busting out the credit cards. That was fun,” I said sarcastically.

  “Yes, busting out the credit cards. Well, we’d just lost the contract at Chapman, and your father was panicking. You were in private school, and that was expensive, not to mention the dance lessons and the cheerleading and the clothes and—”

  “I get it,” I snapped.

  “We were living way above our means,” she said. “I was guilty of it, too. Your father once pulled me aside and told me he was going to divorce me unless I got a job and contributed, because he was breaking his back cleaning carpets.”

  I’d known he and my mother split when he was drinking, but I didn’t know about this. “When was this?” I asked. “Before he went to rehab?”

  “Yeah, maybe, ’eighty-six or ’eighty-seven,” she replied. “Right after we lost Chapman. And he called Rita and she helped us. She helped us by giving him drugs to sell. We made quite a lot of money that way and we lived on it for a long time. And the reason he went to rehab was because he started taking more than he was selling.”

  “What do you mean?” I said, shocked. “I remember emptying the liquor bottles into Daddy’s sink.”

  “Yes, well, he had a drinking problem, too,” she said. “But he did coke because it enabled him to drink more.”

  How was that possible? The one time I’d chased coke with rum I’d nearly vomited an internal organ. “So that was the real reason he went to rehab?” I asked. No wonder he was able to drink after he got out. “And Rita became addicted as well.” I began putting it together. Couldn’t my mother see the images in my mind, of Rita and my father doing coke and fucking like rabbits?

  “Yes, Jenny, don’t you remember breaking up that fight between us?” she asked. “Remember? He took the box of bills and threw it up at the ceiling? And you came downstairs and told us to shut up? I’ll never forget that. Oh, we were so embarrassed. He was acting that way with his big fucking mouth because of the coke.”

  I remembered that night. He kept telling her to “Shut up!” and I couldn’t stand it. I knew my mother was more than capable of standing up to him with her own sizable mouth, and she never cowered before him, but still.

  “What eventually sent him running to rehab was this one night when he ran out of coke and could only get his hands on crystal meth,” she continued. “He snorted it and went on to hallucinate for something like eight hours. He scared the absolute shit out of himself.”

  “Christ,” I said.

  “Angie had a problem with coke at one point, too,” my mother revealed. “When she was young. And your father did nothing to help the situation—and I was very mad at this—because he did it right along with her. With Tina, too.”

  “He did drugs with his kids?” I asked, feeling icky.

  “Yes, and it got so bad that at one point Angie brought him to her therapist, and the therapist told him, ‘You cannot do drugs with your children.’”

  “Um, I would assume that’s Parenting 101,” I said, still reeling.

  “Well, your father didn’t raise them, Jenny,” she said in his defense. “They didn’t have that bond. He would never have done that with you—he didn’t do that with you. But I never understood how he could have done that with them. There are some lines you just do not cross. That’s one of them.”

  “When was this, when he got out of jail? Before we went on … the lam?” I couldn’t get over that one.

  “Yeah, around then,” she said. “It was what a lot of people did then, and in Miami, especially.”

  “Did you?” I asked. My mother had a glass of wine maybe once every six months.

  “No,” she said unequivocally. “Maybe a little hit of a joint every once in a while, but no.”

  “Well, thank god he went to rehab,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, staring off into space.

  “So Rita and Daddy were just in business together, nothing more?” I asked. “You’re sure?”

  “There is no way he would do that to me, Jenny, and my sister wouldn’t, either. She’s helped us so much, whenever we needed it. I may get angry with her, but she’s my schvesta. Whatever Tina and Angie told you, they misinterpreted what was going on between Rita and Daddy. It was just business, and I knew all about it.”

  “And you’re sure that guy in the sixties was the only guy he ever killed?” I asked. I threw that in once every couple of years, just to keep her on her toes.

  “I’m sure,” she said.

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  And that was that.

  CHAPTER 13

  December 2004

  • • •

  “JENNY, SHUT UP. THEY FOUND SOMETHING.”

  I was seated on the couch in my living room, glued to coverage of the recent tsunami in an effort to deflect the argument she was having with me, an argument that came to a full stop with these six words. She’d just had a small carcinoma removed from her nose and her pre-op lung X-ray picked up something that shouldn’t have been there.

  I don’t know why I was surprised. My mother and father smoked for fif
ty years, and for half of that they treated each other to secondhand doses of each other’s smoke on top of their own. It seemed silly to assume my mother was exempt from developing lung cancer—maybe I figured her ordeal with my father somehow made her immune? Perhaps I subconsciously credited my father’s demise with faulty genetics: His parents had both died of cancer, and in the decade after his death, lung cancer would go on to claim his brother and his sister. I believed my mother would be around for as long as her mother had been, dying of that old saw “natural causes” at the age of ninety-five.

  But that wasn’t to be. “They” had found “something,” and she didn’t have to elaborate—I knew exactly what she meant. Two years of Oncology Studies at Memorial Sloan-Kettering University had taught us that “something” meant “cancer” and that “they” meant the white coats. At first I thought she was being overly dramatic, because if anything was seriously wrong, wouldn’t she have told me about it the moment she got off the phone with her doctor, voice trembling and hands shaking?

  “So I got a referral for a doctor at Mount Sinai,” she told me, “and I need you to go with me. I’m getting more X-rays so they can figure out what this is.” She sounded levelheaded. Sane. A much different reaction from the one that followed Dr. A.’s oddly cheerful “Your husband has cancer!” phone call from five years earlier.

  “It’ll be fine, I’m sure,” I managed.

  Later that week we entered the East Ninety-eighth Street office of Dr. T., internal medicine and pulmonary disease specialist. Dr. T. was in his late seventies, with a craggy, wizened face and raspy voice. The preliminaries were mundane—consultation (“I stopped smoking after my first heart attack eight years ago,”

  “My husband died of stage IV non-small-cell adenocarcinoma in 2001”), checkup (“Okay, Eleanor, breathe in, hold it, okay, now breathe out”), X-rays, and the verdict.