Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  “This was the summer before he got sick, so it must have been 1987,” he said. “Because he died in 1988.”

  “On my father’s birthday,” I said. His fifty-first birthday. What a day that had been. Birthday candles in his bagel, what was I thinking?

  “We went to funerals all the time in those days,” Donald said. “A dozen of my friends died. Why I didn’t get AIDS, I don’t know.” Donald told me how David got angry and hostile when he became sick enough to enter the hospital, cursing his visitors, including my mother. He had developed dementia, and when my mother visited him the week before he died she slept in the hospital room with him, just as she did years later with my father.

  “He cursed me for leaving him,” she’d told me all those years ago, “blamed me for making him live a gay life, because that’s what made him sick. I didn’t take it seriously. I knew he was dying.” She described wiping the feverish sweat from his forehead and then, when she left the room, asking a nurse if it was okay that she had come into contact with his bodily fluids. “It was still early,” she’d said in her defense. “We weren’t sure then exactly how it was transmitted, and rumors abounded.” During David’s lucid moments they’d tease each other and laugh, as they had on the phone for the last ten years. David was one of the few people who knew where we were when we’d gone on the lam. “He told me, ‘Eleanor, I always wanted to be thin, but not like this,’” she’d recounted, smiling sadly.

  “His father did not visit him at all in the hospital because he was so ashamed and embarrassed that his son had AIDS,” Donald said, pulling me back into the present. “David’s cousin Shari and I, we got the plug pulled.” We were back on the couch now, and darkness was falling. “He was on a respirator, and there was no hope. None of the doctors wanted to pull the plug. You know, so many specialists have to be in the room for them to do it. I ran up and down the corridor looking for someone to do it, and I finally found one, a very young, cute one. I kept thinking, ‘David would be so happy to know that this gorgeous young doctor was the one who pulled the plug.’ The nurse overdosed him on morphine while Shari and I cradled him in our arms until he slipped away. Afterward I had to go ID him, and he was wrapped in cotton, like a mummy.”

  I remembered running up and down the halls of Staten Island University Hospital, searching for someone to take the machinery out of my mother’s body, and being told after five hours of waiting that all of the necessary specialists couldn’t be assembled until morning. My friends probably had no clue how close I’d been to rushing past the hospital administrator and yanking the tubes out myself. I knew just how Donald felt.

  “He didn’t even leave a will,” Donald said. “He didn’t think he was going to die.”

  If Jeff and I had been adults in the eighties, would I be mourning him now? The idea crushed me; I’d be bereft beyond words. I’d be just as my mother was in our little makeshift apartment in Marge’s house a few months before we moved to New York, the stage upon which my mother’s marriages to David had played out.

  “David’s dead,” she had said, sitting on the edge of the bed and staring into space, reacting to the news as if she’d just heard it. “I can’t believe David’s dead.” And her face crumpled, and she cried, and I held her, not even sure that I knew what grief was.

  But I did now.

  I slept ravenously that night, drinking in every minute, and when I awoke I could easily have slept some more.

  TAMARAC IS A SLEEPY pocket of Fort Lauderdale that is primarily home to seniors and the Jamaicans who provide their services. Development after development of condominiums line the main artery, side by side with a plethora of drugstores, doctors’ offices, and opticians. It took me twenty minutes to find a supermarket, and I cursed, thinking how I couldn’t go two blocks in Manhattan without finding a Korean deli that sold goat cheese. But I was showing up without warning after not seeing or speaking to Rita for a year and a half and I didn’t want to come empty-handed, so I gritted my teeth and found a Publix, where I bought a feast of Brie, vanilla pound cake, prosciutto, and Italian bread. My hands full of plastic bags, I rang the doorbell with my elbow. Nothing. I knocked. Nothing. I paced for a bit and considered driving away, regifting the food to Angie when I got back to West Palm. I was barking up a tree that in all likelihood even my mother would have told me to ignore. How could I be here, dredging up ancient history?

  The door opened. Rita stared at me for fifteen long seconds with her face frozen, like she was trying to place who I was. Then: “Jenny?”

  “Surprise!” I held up the bags. “I brought you stuff.” She opened the door another crack and I slipped in. I tried not to gasp as I took in her bloated face, all but obscuring her deep, dark eyes, and her grown-in toenails, the top halves of which were painted purple, betraying the amount of time that had passed since her last pedicure. Her stomach had grown into a big, round beach ball. She didn’t seem to have endured a lumpy weight gain, replete with cellulite; hers was the type of smooth, shiny overweight that happened suddenly to people who’d been thin their whole lives. She hugged me slightly reluctantly, and when she let go she remarked testily, “Why haven’t you called me for a year? Where have you been?”

  I wasn’t prepared for her to dig right in. What could I say? “I found out that you slept with my father and lied to me about it, and I was pissed”?

  “I mean,” she continued, “you knew I was getting a lump removed from my breast, and you didn’t even call to find out if I was okay.”

  I remembered that trip, two months after my mother died. I was supposed to see Rita but she called and said she had an emergency biopsy and we never rescheduled. I should have called her, but I didn’t. I spent the rest of the trip dozing on the beach, still in a haze from what I’d just been through. There were others I fell out of touch with around that time, some I neglected unfairly and some I cut out of my life altogether. What can I say? Death draws a line and everything in your life falls on one side or the other.

  “I asked Arline about you all the time,” I started, “and I knew the lump was benign—”

  “But it’s not the same as asking me, Jenny,” she said. “But I’m so surprised to see you, and I’m happy to see you! I just can’t understand why you didn’t call.”

  “I—I thought you were mad at me. For not seeing you that time.’” Partly true. “And you didn’t call me either, and Arline said you never mention me, so I figured you were.”

  “Yes, but Jenny, even if we are mad at each other, we’re family. You could have called me at any time.”

  My aunt Rita, holding me, circa 1978.

  “I know,” I said. “You’re my favorite aunt.”

  “If I was your favorite aunt, then why didn’t you call? Wasn’t I there for you when your mother died?” Actually, I thought she had flown up because her sister had died, not for me. Arline told me that Rita didn’t observe the anniversary of my mother’s death, or her birthday, instead absorbed in her own problems. But now I saw why.

  Rita’s body looked as if it was weighing her down. She had undergone hip replacement surgery after driving into a tree, high on Percocet. She needed the other hip replaced, she was telling me, but the doctors weren’t sure they could do it because she had badly broken her arm. Indeed, her left arm hung limply at her side, victim of a recent fall in her house courtesy of her bum hip. She was but a shadow of what she’d been, the gold-plated goddess of south Florida. My heart wrenched—her physical state was a stark reminder of all that I’d lost. As she ticked off her maladies, my eyes welled with tears. I wanted to tell her the real reason I had stayed away for as long as I had, but I didn’t. I felt terrible that she thought I had neglected her when she was so literally broken, when I’d actually thought of her often, though it was usually in anger. When Arline told me that Rita was depressed and nearly an invalid, I knew I had to see her. For so long we’d been a foursome, and now we two were all we had left.

  I could see so much of my mother in Rita’s fac
e and mannerisms. A quick sweep of the kitchen revealed the same teakettle my mother had always owned—and exchanged when she was done with it, sometimes a year after its purchase. I spotted the same wooden block of Henckels knives that I had inherited from my mother. I saw how Rita kept her spatulas, serving spoons, and garlic press in a big round ceramic canister, just as my mother had—and as I now did. They had borrowed so much from each other, and not just Vuitton bags and St. John Knits.

  “You look so much like my mother,” I said, and began to cry like a baby. I felt weak and slightly paralyzed from the encounter, which I had impulsively initiated on just four hours of sleep. Rita hugged me and took me over to a painting hanging on the living room wall. Stuck in the bottom right-hand corner of the frame was a photo of my mother, with her short, smart haircut, holding her sunglasses up to her mouth and sucking on the end of the earpiece. My mother always thought Rita was the pretty one, but she was wrong. I have a feeling that Rita at seventy will not appear as milky and fragile and lovable as my mother was at that age, her final year of life.

  We ambled back toward the kitchen, and while I took the food out of the bags I told Rita how I’d seen Donald a few days before, and relayed his disbelief at the fact that my mother and David had married twice. Rita said the instant their father met David he pronounced him a fagalah.

  “You want coffee?” she suddenly asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I make it strong,” she warned me.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I take it iced. So strong is good.”

  While it brewed I took our spread to the coffee table, where she had lined up her pill bottles. She had plenty of Zetia and Xanax, and a bottle of OxyContin. Well, she was visibly injured. Maybe she really was in pain. Perhaps she’d finally moved past her addictions, something my father was apparently never able to do.

  The Game Show Network was playing on mute, and according to the captions, men with mullets were talking about making whoopie with Chuck Woolery. It was fitting; just the decade I wanted to discuss. But how? As if on cue, Rita said, “All I do all day is sit here and think about the past.”

  We had that in common. “Me, too,” I said, my eyes wandering down the hall to her bedroom, where I spotted a faded oak dresser, a lamp placed on the carpet sans nightstand, and unremarkable factory-created art hanging on her wall. I glanced through the open shades to the patio, where a beaten-up baby’s car seat sat on a table. The setup was a shock to anyone who had seen her spread in North Miami Beach, replete with shiny modern furnishings, a walk-in closet bursting with clothes, and a bathtub the size of a swimming pool. I thought of my mother’s Henredon dining set and resplendent white velvet couch and how they hadn’t made it to the end of her life, either. Very little of what they’d prized had survived.

  Rita’s phone rang. It was Kara. “You’ll never guess who showed up at my door,” Rita excitedly reported to her daughter. “Jenny. Yes, Jenny Mascia! I know, it’s been almost two years. Well, Arline said I was mad at her, so she didn’t call.” I bristled when I heard Rita lay the blame on Arline, as if her comments alone had prevented me from calling Rita. I had to tell Rita the truth. I waited until she hung up.

  “Rita, I have to tell you something,” I began. “The real reason I stayed away for so long … it was because I know you had something with my father, and when I asked you about it you lied to me. It would have hurt my mother so much, and I was angry. I’m not angry anymore, I just want to know. Don’t ask me how I knew, but I always sensed it, since my childhood. I mean, I saw the chemistry you two had—”

  “Yes, we did,” she said, and transformed before my eyes into someone calm and centered. “Jenny, I wanted to tell you when you asked me that night, but your mother had just died.” She looked away for a second and cocked her head to the right, and for a moment she was the Rita of 1987. “It wasn’t an affair, Jenny. It wasn’t. It was a onetime thing. You have to understand, your mother and I weren’t getting along very well at the time. Our relationship was … not so good.”

  And so she began. She told me everything.

  ——

  IN THE SUMMER of 1983, my father was reluctantly extradited from New York and tried in Broward County on the five-year-old cocaine and gun possession charges. Rita hired a lawyer, a friend of one of her crooked boyfriends. Rita figured he must have had some kind of a deal with the judge, because before either of my parents could blink, my father was released.

  “He should have gotten fifty years,” Rita said. “Especially since your mother and I started laughing hysterically when we saw the judge. He was paralyzed. The judge was paralyzed! And he rolled up in his wheelchair, and in order to get himself situated on the bench he had to lift one leg, then the other. Oh, my god, your mother and I started laughing and couldn’t stop. ‘You stop, Eleanor,’ I told her, and she said, ‘No, you stop,’ and we had to leave the courtroom. When we told your father later—forget it. He was hysterical, too.” I imagined the two of them laughing during one of the worst crises of my mother’s life, essentially mocking the man who had the power to put my father away for a long time, and I remembered what I loved most about her, and Rita—black humor in a crisis. Rita said the three of them went to dinner afterward like nothing remarkable had happened, except that my father had gotten a second chance. Again.

  Kara, then sixteen, had just married Miguel, and one day Miguel asked Rita if she’d like to sell cocaine to bring in some extra cash. “I told him I didn’t know what to do—who do I sell this stuff to? He said, ‘Sell it to your friends, it’s not hard.’” Enter my father, who knew his way around a kilo. “He took me aside and showed me what to do, how much to cut, how much to put in a bag,” she said. “I didn’t even do coke then; grass was my thing. So he taught me what to do.” Afterward he went back to cooking eggs and pancakes at Bagels and Donuts, but not for long. “Your mother approached me and told me they were broke and asked me if I could do Johnny a favor and cut him a piece of Miguel’s stash to sell.”

  “My mother? But he had just gotten out of jail!”

  “Yes, your mother. I said sure, why not.” But my father didn’t exactly have a client base in Florida, so when we went back to California, Rita would send him the cocaine by Federal Express and he’d break it up, bag it, sell it, and send Rita her cut. “I gave him a big break, not charging him up front for the coke,” she said. “I let him pay after he sold his cut, and sometimes not at all. He still owes me money, come to think of it.”

  “Good luck getting it,” I said. So they borrowed money from Donald, Rita, David, Arline—where did all our money go? “You weren’t afraid FedEx would find out what was really in those packages?”

  “FedEx doesn’t scan packages, unlike the postal service,” Rita said. “We found a source in California, this guy I dated called Igloo. We were always giving people these names! We named him that because he kept his coke in an Igloo cooler that he carried around. Igloo found a guy who bought ounces, and we made a lot of money. A lot.”

  “Hey, Rita,” I asked her, “is it true that Grandma was the one who gave the FedEx guy the packages of cocaine when he came to pick them up?” Arline had told me that.

  Rita shrugged and grinned. “Yeah, she handed it off when the guy came.”

  Amazing. “Because who would suspect an eighty-five-year-old woman, right?” I said, playing along. “Did she know what it was?”

  “Yeah. I mean, she knew it was coke, but didn’t really know what ‘coke’ was. You know, I only sold it to my friends, I only had four or five people I knew who came to get it from my house, and Grandma would say, ‘Why do these people like this stuff? They’re always buying so much!’” I pictured Grandma Vivian, shuffling around in her floral housedress and Coke-bottle eyeglasses with a package of cocaine in her leathery, manicured hand, wondering why all the kids these days were doing it.

  “Did my mother know? About Grandma?” I asked, giggling at her unlikely role as in-house drug mule.

  �
�Of course,” Rita said, laughing now, too. “She thought it was funny. What? It’s funny!” It was funny. What’s funnier was that family participation in drug deals didn’t seem all that strange to me. I remembered volunteering to sell my mother’s Vicodin for her when she had cancer, just as she and my father had sold his OxyContin. In the end she refused to let me sell the pills to some willing friends, but I didn’t think it was illegal—I thought I was helping her. God, I needed therapy.

  “What did you cut it with, just out of curiosity? I’ve always wanted to know.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, “it was cut by the time I got it. Mostly vitamin B, maybe baby laxative, that sort of thing.”

  Curiosity satisfied. “Did Kara know you guys were selling her husband’s coke?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Rita said. “She wanted me to make money.”

  That explained the BMW, not possible on a diner manager’s salary, and the manicures, the hairstylists … “So what happened when they broke up?” I asked.

  “Well, Kara started dating Miguel’s best friend, Juan,” she said, “and Juan, who was also a dealer, sold to us.”

  “So Dad gets out of jail, and you guys are mailing coke and money back and forth?”