The Side of the Angels

by Christina Bartolomeo

  “How much did you pay for these?” said my mother.

  “I’m not telling you,” I said.

  “You’d better not. I think the price would make me sick. Who shops in these gourmet stores? Who pays that kind of money?”

  At this point the kitchen door opened and Michael came in. He was wearing a deep blue fisherman’s sweater and brown tweed trousers with loafers and argyle socks. He looked handsome and windblown. He was carrying two large apple pies with the juice bubbling out over the crust.

  “I thought you might need extra desserts so I baked these this morning while the parade was on,” he said, giving my mother a kiss and lifting me in the air in an exuberant hug.

  “Look, Ma, your problem’s solved,” said Joey. “Nicky has no domestic skills, but Michael more than makes up for her.”

  He seized the pies from Michael and ripped off an edge of the crust to stuff in his mouth.

  “Don’t be a pig, Joe,” said Michael. “You’re such a godawful pig, you know that?” Michael made pig noises, grunting and oinking, and Johnny threw a roll at Joey, who continued to pretend to dig at the pie with his fingers.

  “Joseph,” said my mother, and Joey subsided.

  “Your mom’s just nervous because she has a new boyfriend, Nicky,” said Johnny.

  “A boyfriend!”

  “Louise calls him her ‘beau,’” said Michael.

  “You don’t have to sound so surprised,” said Ma. “Louise knew a gentleman in her salsa class who has free evenings since he lost his wife, and she thought we might want to meet. So we had dinner at O’Donnells, and it was a very pleasant evening.”

  “And you’re seeing him again?” The last time I’d mentioned the possibility of dating to her, she’d implied I was spitting on my father’s grave.

  “Yes, I am. He was polite and attentive and a wonderful storyteller, and I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in a long time.”

  “Why shouldn’t Ma get a little action?” said Joey, who’d balanced himself on my mother’s cooking stool and was fishing sausage out of the huge pot of sauce she had simmering. Joey broke all the rules of my mother’s house with impunity.

  “Have some respect for your sainted mother,” said Michael in a phony brogue, and grabbed the fork out of Joey’s hands. They began singing a song Ma hated, “Mother McCree.” Ma always winced at the line about Mother McCree’s brow being “all wrinkled and weathered with care.” Her own brow was smooth and unclouded, as befitted a woman who made her children’s lives a misery with her nagging and thus slept every night with a sound and untroubled conscience.

  “Louise has Aunt Maureen in her sights,” said Johnny. “Louise won’t be happy until she marries off the entire Western world. Except for herself. She’s too busy hanging around with rock singers.”

  There was an unaccustomed sour note in his voice.

  “Hub’s not a rock singer, he’s a poet of the people,” said Joey. “That’s what Louise says. I asked her if they elected him poet, or what, and she got pissed at me.”

  Joey and Louise disagreed on everything, but I think Louise actually found Joey soothing to be around. He saw through what he referred to as Louise’s “Glinda the Good Witch routine.”

  “Leave Louise alone,” said Michael. “She’s not hurting anyone.”

  “She’s hurting herself,” said Johnny.

  “I appreciate your concern,” said Louise, coming in unexpectedly from the hallway, as if we were all in a play and she’d been scripted to enter at a dramatically awkward moment.

  Louise, like my mother, looked different from when I’d last seen her over lunch. Usually for these occasions she showed up disheveled and late, with flour in her hair. Today she had piled her hair on her head with a few curls drifting around her face and neck, and she wore a deep plum, Empire-waisted dress of thin wool with a low scoop neck, extremely becoming in its simplicity and rich color. Where was my hippie cousin with her gypsy garb and her tinker’s jewelry? Where were Ma’s sleeveless polyester mock turtlenecks printed with daisies? I left town for three weeks and look what happened.

  “What’s your boyfriend’s name?” I asked Ma.

  “It’s Ira,” said Louise, as my mother didn’t answer.

  “Ira? That’s not a—”

  “Ira is Jewish,” said my mother, as if she were admitting that he was married or worked for the CIA.

  “And there’s nothing wrong with that,” said Louise firmly, ignoring the fact that for twenty years my mother had referred to Louise’s parents as “a mixed marriage” because Aunt Pamela had converted from Methodism.

  “You’re surprised,” said my mother defensively.

  Shocked was more like it—not that Ira was Jewish, but at the suddenness with which my mother was breaking her own rules. This was the woman who’d once told Jeremy he’d have to convert if he wanted to marry me.

  “I had a few older Irish Catholics on file,” said Louise, “but none of them seemed just right for your mom. Ira isn’t settling into his sixties, he’s busting out of them.”

  “I guess you’d know about busting out,” said Johnny. “Some dress. You’ve got a date later?”

  I was speechlessly impressed that my mother hadn’t taken a pass on the Ira opportunity in order to be set up with a dour Irish widower with sixteen grandchildren and a crumbling family cottage in County Meath that he visited every other year just to prove that six decades in America hadn’t caused him to get above himself.

  “Ira finds the difference in traditions intriguing,” said Louise, pretending Johnny wasn’t present. “It’s such a myth that couples have to have everything in common.”

  “I bet that’s not what he finds intriguing,” said Joey. “It’s Ma in her slinky new clothes.”

  “Enough,” said my mother. “All of you, get out of the kitchen.” She placed Michael’s pies tenderly on the sideboard, shoving mine on top of the icebox and stuffing the cheesecake into the freezer, where it would be ruined.

  To my mother, homemade pies were tribute, and I’d refused to pay it. That was the whole problem with us: I wanted her to like me for qualities she had never admired in women, and she wanted me to pay homage, the way the rest of my family did, to her never-unfeminine spunk, her efficiency, her immaculate housekeeping, her pep. I thought Ma could do with a lot less pep, and as a child had envied friends with dreamy, distant mothers who took tranquilizers or painted watercolors.

  We dispersed—Michael and Joey to go outside to hold their weekly argument about whether or not the pine tree in front of my mother’s dining room window should be cut down because it blocked the light, Louise and Johnny and I into the living room to eat black olives and hot peppers from the partitioned appetizer tray my mother put out every holiday. From upstairs we could hear Joey’s wife, Maggie, babbling loving baby-nonsense as she put the little one down for his nap. In the kitchen my mother switched on the easy listening station she liked to cook to. Strains of “The Days of Wine and Roses” floated through to us, though not loudly enough to cover the uncomfortable silence between Louise and Johnny.

  “So where’s Betsey?” I said.

  “Betsey is with her family in Stamford.”

  “Why aren’t you there?” said Louise, in a cold tone I’d never heard from her before, at least not aimed at Johnny.

  “I have six jobs waiting for me at the shop,” said Johnny. “Not all of us can just leave what we’re doing to go hang around backstage at the Swamp Hole.”

  The Swamp Hole was a local club where the floor was sticky with beer and you didn’t want to use the ladies’ room. Acts on the verge of making it played there. Sometimes groups that had hit it big came back out of sentiment. I hadn’t been to the Swamp Hole since I was twenty-one.

  “Hub’s band played at the Swamp Hole?” I said. “Wow.”

  “Not yet. He’s booked there for the Friday before New Year’s,” said Louise.

  “Yeah,” said Johnny, throwing an olive up in the air and catching i
t in his mouth. “He wrote a special song for it. It’s all about how he didn’t like the Mercedes his mommy and daddy bought him last Christmas.”

  “It’s about the loneliness of a consumer society,” said Louise. “It’s called ‘Christ Child in Suburbia.’ I played it for you. Just because Hub’s family has money doesn’t mean he can’t have a keen sense of social justice.”

  “It must be a nice life, writing about poor people and clipping stock coupons,” said Johnny.

  “You know, I’ve been nothing but supportive of your relationship with Betsey and all the ones before her. You could do the same for me for a change.”

  “I don’t call it very supportive when you won’t even be a brides-maid,” said Johnny. “She’ll have to ask her cousin now.”

  “What a tragedy,” said Louise. “Why can’t you understand that I don’t want to take on anything more right now? I’m really busy. I’m even thinking of hiring an assistant.”

  “An assistant? Where is an assistant going to turn around in all that clutter? You don’t need an assistant, you need to get rid of some of that mess,” said Johnny. “How hard can it be to set people up on blind dates that you suddenly need an assistant? It’s not rocket science.”

  “What is your problem, Johnny?” I said. “Louise works as hard at her job as you do at yours. She puts a lot of flair and insight and imagination into it.”

  “I can see she has imagination,” said Johnny. “She’s got Aunt Mau-reen all tarted up until I don’t even recognize her. We’ll be lucky if one of those earrings Louise bought her doesn’t fall into the spaghetti sauce.”

  Louise flushed, the deep angry flush we had learned to dread as children, the sign of one of her very rare tempers.

  “If it does,” she said, “I hope you choke on it.” And she left the room.

  I sat at the other end from Johnny on my mother’s long sectional couch, a couch that would have been comfortable if it hadn’t been covered in a rust-brown “French country” fabric whose strawlike fibers dug through to your skin. My mother refused to replace this upholstery hair shirt with chintz or linen “because it was still perfectly good.” I put Johnny’s feet up on my lap.

  “What in the world is going on with you guys?”

  “I don’t know. Louise is angry because I won’t come see her skanky boyfriend play on his little guitar in a few weeks. Like that’s how I want to spend New Year’s Eve.”

  He was picking twiggy bits off the couch cushions, not looking at me.

  “Well, Louise goes places for you. She went with you to pay all those D.C. parking tickets a few months ago. That took all day, as I recall.”

  “She wouldn’t go with me when I got measured for my tux. All of a sudden, she doesn’t have ten minutes for me.”

  “Johnny, did you think about what we talked about on the way to the train station?”

  “I figured you had PMS or something, talking crazy like that.”

  “In the first place, I hate it when men act as if PMS is some sort of excuse to avoid electing a woman president or taking female opinions seriously. A few slightly off days once a month is nothing, I repeat, nothing, to the eighty million testosterone surges you men have addling your brains every single hour. In the second place, it wasn’t crazy of me to tell you that you don’t have to marry Betsey.”

  “Of course I don’t have to marry her. It’s not like she’s pregnant or anything.”

  No, when Betsey got pregnant it would be because Betsey planned to get pregnant, at just the right moment to take a pause in her career and devote herself to hunting up organic baby food and non-gender-determinant baby clothes.

  “Betsey’s good for me,” said Johnny defensively.

  “She’s like a giant bowl of Brussels sprouts, huh?”

  “No, she’s a woman who has a little vision about where she wants her life to go. Unlike your idiot cousin.”

  “Louise has a vision. It just doesn’t drive her like an engine.”

  “Nothing drives her. She just goes along, la-la, la-la, la.”

  “Since when has that bothered you?”

  “Since all of a sudden this guy Hub comes and takes over her life. Just like David Dent.”

  Louise had wasted her senior year of college on David, who attended law school at Georgetown and spent twice as much energy making Law Review as he did on Louise. David wore his fair hair slicked back from his forehead, tortoiseshell glasses, and starched, expensive oxfords that always looked fresh from the dry cleaner’s. His quaint formality, which the rest of us found unbearably mannered, charmed Louise. His Presbyterian forbears must have bequeathed him an unalterable sense of Calvinist responsibility, because I never saw him sway from his path of complete devotion to worldly success.

  All of David’s social activities were aimed at advancing his prospects. He engulfed Louise in tennis (at which she was clumsy), sailing (which made her seasick), and cocktail parties at pretentious little rooftop bars that David’s well-connected, sheltered friends thought were edgy and daring. During the David era, Louise confined her lovely hair in unbecoming headbands and bought a number of unflattering outfits in the category that used to be called “sportswear.”

  When David tired completely of being youthful, at the age of twenty-three, he dumped Louise. She was left with a closet full of clothes that looked horrible on her and shelves of books she would never read again, books with titles such as The Origins of Property Theory in British Common Law.

  “David was a pill, Johnny, but by now it should be no big surprise to you that, left on her own, Louise has bad taste in men.”

  “Her taste seems to be getting worse, which I didn’t think was possible.”

  I pressed my palms against Johnny’s toes. He pushed his feet against them, trying to force my arms to buckle, an old habit of ours from the days when he was a weedy fourteen-year-old and I was a fifteen year-old girl as strong as he was.

  “Are you maybe jealous of Hub, Johnny?”

  “Jealous? Are you kidding?”

  He sat up and glared at me.

  “Jealous of that little poser? Why would I be jealous?”

  “Geez, I guess because he has such a big amplifier.”

  “If Louise went for me at all she wouldn’t be running around after this singer, talking about him as if he were the best thing since Neil Young.”

  “Louise isn’t very good at admitting to unhappiness. I doubt Hub is making her happy. How could he? I’ve never even seen him smile. The man is melancholy personified.”

  “Louise has always treated me like a brother.”

  “Did you ever give her any other cues?”

  “It’s the girl who gives cues,” said Johnny.

  “What are we, still in high school?”

  “Just forget it, Nicky. I’m not exotic enough for Louise. I shave every day, and I have a regular job.”

  “Louise has never judged your job. Your card is right on her desk, next to that massage therapist’s she refers clients to.”

  “It’s no problem for Hub to be exotic. He doesn’t have to earn a living. None of the guys Louise hooks up with ever seem to have to earn a living. But some of us have to work for our money. We can’t all have rich daddies.”

  Or even daddies at all, I thought to myself, remembering that Johnny’s father had contacted him exactly twice since divorcing Johnny’s mother when Johnny was eight. No wonder it galled Johnny when Louise mentioned that Hub’s doting parents had built a tiny recording studio onto their house when Hub was still in high school, in order to nurture their son’s fledgling talent.

  I changed my tack.

  “When you described Betsey just now, you sounded like a personal ad. You don’t love someone because of a list of qualities.”

  “Can you leave me alone, Nicky? I know ten guys who’d give their teeth for Betsey.”

  “Let them marry her, then.”

  I doubted that there were ten guys who yearned after Betsey, but I did not doubt that Betse
y would not have to search long for a man who wanted to be mothered, managed, and prodded into everything from regular physicals to retirement planning. There are many such men out there, which is one of the things that sometimes makes the life of a single woman so depressing.

  “The thing is, Johnny, is it really fair to Betsey to marry her if she doesn’t make your head spin? If you marry someone, you should feel that you’d rather, oh, I don’t know, go pay parking tickets with her than go to a five-star restaurant with anyone else. Do you really find Betsey interesting, Johnny? Is she fun?”

  I thought I’d gone too far, but it is one of Johnny’s sweetest traits that, much as he might argue with those he loves, he rarely becomes truly angry with them. As Doug’s disposition defaulted to nastiness and pettiness, Johnny’s defaulted to a lighthearted flexibility that forgave me more, perhaps, than should have been forgiven me.

  He got off the couch in a swift spring and kissed the top of my head.

  “You try, Nicky. I know you try.”

  In a minute I saw him outside, tossing a football with my brothers. In playing Cupid, I had failed on every count. It seemed that Louise’s talent for matchmaking did not come from the paternal side of her family.

  My mother stuck her head in.

  “Nicky, I need you to fill the ice bucket. And what did you say to upset Louise like that?”

  Right about now, I thought, Father Peter would be carving the first turkey. Margaret would be lifting trays of rolls from the yawning industrial ovens in the church hall’s kitchen and arranging them in attractive piles on the platters she’d brought from home. Clare would be walking from group to group like a conscientious bride. Tony would be cracking up the old ladies with his imitation of Bennett Winslow doing the lambada. Eric would have spilled something, broken something, accidentally sat on something, or all three. Perhaps he’d have dumped grape juice on one of Suzanne’s designer dresses, and I’d missed it. I could have been there, part of all of it, lost in a group that didn’t care that I couldn’t cook or that I wore pants to family occasions. Instead I was filling the ice bucket for my mother.