James, with hefty bag in hand, was prepared to do the heavy lifting downstairs. Our plan was to rid this apartment of trash, whether it was plastic, glass, or paper at this point. If we didn’t move something out quickly, we three would have no area in which to pack, much less stand or sit. Our major negotiation revolved around the bags. She had amassed hundreds of plastic grocery bags that she insisted were “good” bags.
“They can still be used,” she pleaded.
James grabbed a handful of plastic Urban Outfitters bags and started filling them with plastic bottles.
“Not those bags. Look how nice they are.”
“Hon, they are really nice, but you have hundreds more in the kitchen. Can we agree that some of these can be recycled?”
“Only if you take them to the front of Trader Joe’s and put them in the plastic bag recycling center.”
“Okay, let’s agree to do that.”
“And maybe from now on, you can use the reusable canvas bags, so you don’t have to deal with the plastic ones at all,” I added, craning my neck to see if there really were hundreds more of these plastic bags in the kitchen.
It felt like I had just cured cancer. Tara was giddy. She opened a nearby closet to reveal a bag full of those canvas reusable bags I had just mentioned. Apparently she had been saving those bags as well. Well, today was the day to use them. James gave me a high-five, encouraging my help. I thought the two of us were enthused about finally getting Tara to throw something, anything, out. It was a small victory, but as the ancient philosopher Lao Tzu says, “The journey of one thousand steps begins with one step.” At least that’s what the quotation of the day had been on the MFB bulletin board at today’s session.
My practical side was tempted to camp out until this job was done, but my emotional side was cautioning me to go slow. I really liked Tara. She was a kind person, a funny person; she had just gotten a little misdirected and needed some help from a best friend for hire to get back on track. Our group therapy was showing real results. The entryway was soon clear of the bag graveyard and the sad broken umbrella collection. None of the garbage that crowded the doorway had made it into the “pack” pile, but was instead dispatched downstairs to the labeled recycling bins.
“Our building is really environmentally conscious,” Tara added.
Near the kitchen was a small bookcase, which was being used as a room divider. On that shelf were Tara’s financial records, bank statements, credit card statements, and a good deal of personal documents. The only thing missing, for someone who wanted to steal her identity, was a sign that said “robbers welcome.” For paranoid city people, identity theft is a huge concern. And for someone like Tara, the uber-recycler and separator of address labels, these obvious oversights made me wonder what other things she had overlooked.
“Do you have a paper shredder?” I asked.
“No, I usually just put all my personal papers in a bag and then do it by hand. I store the bags in the bathroom.”
With a sinking feeling, we moved over to the bathroom, where, with a flip of the shower curtain, was revealed a mountain of bundled shopping bags, the “to be shredded” backlog of several months. James immediately grabbed his coat and headed to the office supply store on the corner to buy the most durable shredder he could carry. Tara and I continued to wade through the items on the floor. The way in which Tara was storing things was also peculiar. Twenty or so CVS bags of varying sizes lined every surface from dresser to desk to refrigerator to floor.
In each bag was a little time capsule from each purchase. Instead of placing the change she was given from each trip for gum or Advil or a greeting card, she simply put everything in the bag. Inside a bag could be a pack of Chiclets less one Chiclet and 36 cents or two greeting cards and $3. It would have been much easier to gather all the bags and chuck them sight unseen into the trash, but many of them had not only coins, but also dollars in them.
Each bag needed careful inspection. Go through; find money, recycle bag, place usable contents in “pack” pile. Repeat as necessary. Bag by bag, we were reconstructing Tara’s last year of purchases. People could be messy, but there had to be more to this. Why would someone simply not take the time to put things back where they belonged and beyond that, why would someone throw things so carelessly around the apartment?
With James out of the apartment, it was just the two of us standing in this two-by-two-foot area, trying not only to figure out how the apartment got this way, but also the all-important why. Tara stopped and moved a pile of books and DVDS to locate a chair.
“You must be exhausted, Jessie. Maybe we should take a break.”
“I’m good,” I replied.
Even though my body was aching from the awkward movement of pulling things off the floor and shuffling them over to their new homes, I did not want to stop. This was a job I knew I could finish, and it was making me feel useful. Perhaps the reason the place was like this was because Tara could simply not have done this alone. She needed help from a cheerleader to spur her on. I was willing to be that person.
“How about I hand you things and you can tell me where they belong,” I suggested.
As she sifted through armloads of books, magazines and mail from the floor, Tara’s decisions now became pointedly clear.
“Oh, this is interesting…this is a letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield canceling my health coverage.”
Now, the thing about making someone slowly come to the realization that they are losing control of their lives is to make them think that they are actually in control of their lives. Authors teach you that. Because even though we had spent $50,000 to put an author on tour and advertise in women’s magazines, there was no guarantee that the book would hit The New York Times bestseller list. Managing expectations is key to crisis management. And this apartment situation was no different. It was just that Tara’s problems were all around us. In a way, this made it easier.
“Pack, shred, or toss?” I coaxed her.
“Shred. I don’t even have Blue Cross Blue Shield. And wait a minute, this envelope isn’t even addressed to me, it’s addressed to the person that lived here before me.”
“Wow, Tara, you are even keeping other people’s garbage.”
The absurdity of the situation struck us both and we began to laugh. Not just a little giggle, but one of those maniacal laughs that would not end and rendered both parties helpless to do anything else but ride it out. I guess you could say that was our “icebreaker.” The rest of the afternoon continued in much the same way. Tara made decisions, I dispatched the items and James ran garbage, recycling, and shredding. By the end of the day, we had cleared the entryway, the floor of the living room, most of the horizontal surfaces, and the bathtub.
There was still much to do, but we were all pleased with the start and were confident that within a day or two we would be able to pack up Tara and her now streamlined belongings. Exhausted, triumphant, and hungry, we headed downstairs to discuss our next session at a German tavern. Once seated in the large wooden booth, our blonde waitress, clad head to toe in a gunmetal gray cat suit and blond chignon, looked like she just had stepped off the fashion runway and into the bar. “The spaetzle here is awesome,” she explained.
“Like she ever eats spaetzle,” Tara looked at the model-thin waitress, and laughed.
Sunday dinner at my parents’ house was never the relaxing, fun-filled Italian feast that you see in the movies. My family had a very different idea about what constitutes a good time. I had been avoiding this meal, for the last few weeks, since being laid off. My parents were not happy about that; they wanted me to visit more often during the months of my unemployment. And by visiting them, they meant, being at their disposal to perform endless house maintenance. They acted as if they lived on a palatial farm, instead of a small ranch-style house on a cul-de-sac in suburban Scotch Plains, New Jersey. I had preferred to call th
e court where I grew up a “cul-de-sac,” as opposed to what my mother called it: a “dead end.” I applied the law of positive thinking here and chose a more attractive spin. This attitude was in direct contrast to the overt suspicion that my mother tried to instill in her kids. She thought a healthy amount of skepticism would keep us on our toes and safe from the dangers of the world.
Providing service to my parents was expected of me. My childhood house, where my parents still lived, was a place that needed constant upkeep. Especially now that Nana had moved in since my grandfather (or as my mother referred to him, “the saint”) had died. With three of them in residence, there were even more things for people to do around the house. My father did all the yard work himself, my mother cooked every day and my grandmother, in an effort to do her part, insisted on ironing anything she could get her hands on, including my father’s underwear. It kept her busy and helped her feel needed. My father complained that she did such a good job that he often felt like his pants were on fire. Apparently my grandmother would go back and re-iron some of them, giving them a hot off the press feel, literally.
Sundays followed the same routine, like a well-oiled machine or factory assembly line. Every person had a role to play. My mother woke up early to start the meatballs, before heading to mass. By hand, she would mix a blend of veal, pork, and beef specially ordered from the butcher. She did not trust meat from the supermarket. “You just don’t know what goes on back there,” she would say as she pointed at the glassed-in meat department at the Shop Rite. I recalled the innocent butcher’s wounded looked as she waved him off dismissively. While the meatballs browned, she prepared the braciole (we mispronounced it Brajoel, an Italian flank steak rolled with garlic and seasoning. Along with sausage (another special order, without fennel), the meatballs and braciole would cook to a golden brown before taking a languid dip into the tomato sauce, bath that simmered in a vat on the stovetop. We often referred to this sauce as Sunday gravy and we did not mean brown meat and potatoes gravy, but red sauce with a variety of hearty meats.
Before she grabbed her purse and her weekly mass envelopes, she told my father, who was stationed at the kitchen table, “Don’t forget to stir the sauce, Ton.” (Short for Tony.) She would usually whisper to me, on the side, “Please remind him to stir the sauce. You have to tell them everything, Jessica. EVERYTHING.” At that point, James and I would be out of bed, with a promise that we would be at noon mass, when all we wanted to do was eat fried meatballs with a large heel of Italian bread. That was our typical Sunday breakfast.
My mom’s gravy was a complicated process. She used the tomatoes that she canned the summer before, sieved them twice, added fresh basil from my father’s garden, a bit of garlic, and some tomato paste before finally leaving it to simmer over a low flame all day on, Sunday. The house filled with the most spectacular tomato-potent smell you could imagine. The home-canned tomatoes were a seasonal ritual that was labor intensive and exhaustive, but netted fabulous results. In August, she called the local farm stand to find out when the tomatoes would arrive. She wanted to ensure the ripeness and the freshness of the plum tomatoes looking for just the right combination. “How do they look?” she asked. “I don’t want a lot of waste.” She would keep abreast of the weather reports as well, to see how rain conditions might affect the crop. Since she would need several trips to the farmer, she demanded the best of the season.
Next, she set up an appointment to see the tomatoes, hand select them, and make sure they were good enough, before purchasing several bushels. My father would haul in tens of those light, wooden round baskets and line them up all over the kitchen floor.
After being hand washed and picked through again, each pristine tomato, the chosen ones, would be laid out to dry on the dining room table, which was now covered in the same dishtowels that my mother had used for 20 years. Bunches of those tomatoes would be brought over to Nana, perched on the same kitchen stool she had taken from her house, a red metal affair that had been covered and recovered in contact paper with pictures of grapes and vines. This was one of the few items that came with her from her old house.
Like a jeweler with a loupe, she would give them one final inspection before they were to be cut and quartered, sieved, and puréed, and then finally put into Mason jars and canned in an old-style, black-and-white flecked canner that held eight quarts of the summer tomatoes at a time. The summer before, they had set a house record by doing 243 jars. And still, my mother was concerned about getting through the winter with enough.
At this particular Sunday dinner, Ma had prepared one of my favorites, eggplant parmigiana, which she made better than anyone in America or Italy. I know, because I made it a habit to order it wherever I was in a restaurant, in an effort to find one that tasted as good. I never did. The other staple was macaroni with gravy. Yes, we call pasta, macaroni. Tomato sauce with meat is gravy. Marinara sauce is plain tomato sauce. And this week, my mom had put in my favorite—bones. Bones are not for the faint of heart. Perhaps, in a recipe adopted from the Sicilian side of the family, in every Sunday sauce was an array of grisly looking parts, like neck bones, ribs, and shoulders, always pork, never with a lot of meat, but the meat that you did get off of them was the most tender meat you could hope to taste. My mother and I were the best bone eaters. When my father and his mother would eat them, they always left meat or cartilage (we also ate that; Ma said it was the best part) on the bone.
“You call that a clean bone?” Ma would say in disgust and then registered another indignation at my father’s side of the family.
Since I had not been home since being laid off, I was apprehensive about the dinner. I knew I had to provide an alibi for my whereabouts and an acceptable progress report. Approval-seeking was part and parcel to being the dutiful daughter in a traditional Italian family.
As far as my father was concerned, he was still confused as to why I never became a teacher, since I had majored in English in college. Teaching was a good profession for a nice girl. “Just look at your Aunt Cookie,” he would say, “she was a teacher for years.” Aunt Cookie taught in the local elementary school for 20 years and had received a wonderful pension. “It’s a nice job for a girl like you, a nice job for a nice respectable girl like you, nice job, nice girl. Done,” he added.
I was concerned about how to explain my “not so nice” new job to my family. I knew it would be a tough sell. My mother, who was the harshest critic, was still holding out for my return to publishing and still thought that one day, any day now I would get that call from Dr. Ursula and that she would help me out. Don’t hold your breath there, Ma.
Nana would be there in one of her signature blue-and-black checkered dresses complete with a broach. Her doppelganger, my father’s mother, who was called Na for clarity, would also be there along with Pop, my grandfather. There was a constant competition between the two grandmothers. I could never understand why. Both had come from Italy, neither of them wore pants, English was their second language, and they both were excellent cooks. But rivalrous feelings are not to be explained, especially where my family was concerned.
It took very little for Na to get her nose out of joint, which had started when James was born and an argument ensued about which grandmother would be called Nana. They both could not be called the same name, for reasons I still don’t understand. Since Sicilians always win in these types of showdowns, my mother’s mother claimed “Nana,” leaving my father’s mother with the less elegant “Na.”
Truthfully, my father’s mother did not care what you called her, as long as you called her. She was the more gregarious of the two women, one of those people who was always on the phone. She loved real-life gossip as opposed to my mother’s mother, who loved television gossip.
My mother frowned upon mixing both sides of the family, keeping them separate as if they were the rebel forces or the Taliban, a meeting where the outcome could never be predicted. Since Nana now lived wit
h my parents, there was no choice but to have everyone together at all family events. Na and Pop would need to be picked up, as would the identical twin uncles, Cheech and Pep, two of her six brothers. Cheech is a nickname for Frank from the family’s early days in the Bronx. Pep, I thought, was a nickname for Peter, but I recently discovered that Pep’s real name is Victor, which confused the issue. People just always called him Pep.
Neither brother married, but they did live together in the same town along with the rest of their siblings. This was common among Italian immigrants. Once Italian families left their farms in southern Italy, they would choose a random New Jersey town and take over an entire page in the phone book. Once entrenched in Scotch Plains (or in their dialect, Scotcha Plain, which sounded like they were ordering a drink rather than telling somewhere where they lived) the Mastros sent for the rest of their family in the Old Country. One by one, each emigrated until the entire family was set up in a parallel American universe.
I picked up James at the PATH station, completing a routine that we had perfected in the last 10 years since both of us had moved to our respective cities. We stopped at Carlo’s for pastries and grabbed six cannoli and six sfogliaitelle; which most people would know as a “lobster tail” shaped pastry, I ordered a bag of my favorite sesame cookies for the ride. We headed toward the turnpike for our familiar ride home. The prodigal daughter had returned. I still called my mom every day to talk, but this was our first in person meeting since my change in employment status, and I was anxious.
With the recent activity at the bar, our conversations had been shortened to highlight reel length. She filled me in on the “stories,” asked about my interviews, and I would agree with everything she said until she finally rushed me off the phone to watch a soap opera. We rarely shared substantive information on these check-in calls anyway. And most days, I was preoccupied with Dave and our comeback so that I was only half- listening anyway. We had never gotten along better.
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