“Where’s Jack?” she asks as we walk arm in arm toward the baggage-claim area.
“He went up to Bedford last night so he can help his mother set up.”
“His father doesn’t help?” my father asks disapprovingly.
“Frank, they’re dee-vorced.” That’s my mother, masking her own disapproval with a big happy mother-of-the-bride smile.
I can tell she’s decided to embrace the Candell family, deevorce and all, this weekend. She promised me she would. Good for her. Good for me. Good for everyone involved.
It takes almost as long to get their luggage as it did for the actual flight from Buffalo. When it finally comes rolling out, I swear every other bag on the conveyer is marked with a bright red, white and green striped ribbon. Yes, like the Italian flag. These, apparently, are the colors for Team Spadolini, cleverly selected by my mother so that their bags would be readily identifiable.
Never mind that no other living soul would possibly mistake most of the Spadolini luggage for their own. My parents have matching suitcases they got years ago at a garage sale—the kind with the hard sides. I’m sure the last owners were a flapper and a bootlegger, and God knows they didn’t fill them with rocks as my parents must have, because it takes three of us to hoist them off the belt. They’re covered in something my mother insists is “Gen-u-ine walrus leather,” though I have never seen a walrus in quite that shade of green. Or any shade of green, come to think of it.
Oh, and did you know that walrus skin, according to the Conster, is reportedly the heaviest, thickest leather in the world? Which is why these days it’s probably used to cover, say, armored trucks, black boxes and nuclear-bomb shelters. As opposed to a matched set of luggage.
My sister, on the other hand, is traveling ultra-lightly. She’s packed her stuff in the boys’ bright blue-and-red Thomas the Tank Engine duffel, which reads Choo Choo! in a big white dialogue bubble emblazoned on the side. Wouldn’t you know, Vinnie the cheating louse got all the grown-up luggage in the divorce because, as Mary Beth put it at the time, “Where do I ever go?”
In addition to blessedly ordinary-looking rolling bags—four, mind you, and they’re large—Joe and Sara have checked a car seat and a shiny red tricycle with a rubber horn and handlebar streamers.
Yeah. You read that right.
They said Joey Junior screamed bloody murder when they tried to leave it behind, so they gave in and brought it along. Yes, that’ll show him who’s in charge: the tyrannical toddler himself. Brilliant move.
And then there’s Grandma.
Grandma seems to think she’s spending the summer abroad, because it looks like she’s brought a steamer trunk.
Oh. My. God.
I gape at the towering heap of…stuff. “How are we going to get all of this to the hotel?”
“Is there a nice big limousine?” my grandmother asks, looking around as if expecting to see one parked right here in the baggage-claim area. “They always take a big limousine on my stories.”
I’m trying to be patient here, really I am, but I hear myself barking, “Who? Who are ‘they’?”
“Well, Desiree and Destiny—they’re twin sisters—”
“They’re characters on one of her soaps,” my mother cuts in.
“Yes, and Desiree’s husband, Vlad, is—”
“I’m sorry to interrupt, Grandma,” I say, “but we’ve got to get moving. There’s a bus that goes right to your hotel—” they’re staying at the Grand Hyatt, which I chose because it’s right near both the airport bus and Grand Central Station, where we’ll be catching the train up to Bedford later “—but we can’t get on a bus with all this luggage. We’re going to have to take a cab.”
“I’ve always want to take a real New York City taxi,” Sara says excitedly, then screams, “Joey, noooo!” as he runs down an elderly couple on his tricycle.
“Do they make a taxi big enough for all of us and all the luggage?” my sister asks dubiously.
“That would be a bus,” I say crisply. “Listen, we’re going to have to split up into groups. Let’s go.”
I attempt to hustle them through the crowd out to the taxi stand: Grandma in her heels, my mother clinging to me in sheer intimidation, little Joey veering left and right on his trike, everyone else pushing rented carts piled high with luggage—at a mere three dollars per cart, “highway robbery” according to my father.
As we stand on the world’s longest line, I give them a crash course in overall taxi etiquette, tipping and the hotel’s location.
When we reach the top of the line, I dispatch Joey, Sara and little Joey in the first cab, with my nephew shrieking at the driver, who insists on stowing the trike in the trunk with the rest of their stuff. Unfazed by the tantrum, the driver shrieks right back at him in Pakistani, then gives him an affectionate belly tickle and Joey laughs hysterically in response.
As they drive off, it occurs to me that if my overly indulgent brother and sister-in-law sent him to live with Abdul-Hakim for a week at Camp Tough Love, Joey’s terrible twos would be tamed in a hurry.
“Next!” the taxi dispatcher bellows, and I shove my parents toward the open doors of the waiting cab, shouting after them, “Don’t forget to tip twenty percent!”
“Twenty!” my father echoes. “I thought you said fifteen to twenty. Now it’s twenty?”
Glancing at the sweating elderly driver as he struggles to lug those prehistoric walrus bags into the trunk, I resolutely tell my father, “Twenty. Maybe twenty-five.”
Away they go, with my father grumbling and my mother, God love her, swatting his arm and saying something about “when in Rome.”
And then there were three.
It takes me, Mary Beth, the driver, the dispatcher and a Good Samaritan traveling businessman to wrestle Grandma’s chest into the trunk. And for once, when I say “Grandma’s chest,” I’m not talking about the famous bullet boobs, which are resting sedately in the backseat along with Grandma.
I tip the dispatcher and thank the businessman profusely before settling into the seat with Grandma, Mary Beth and Mary Beth’s choo-choo duffel, which didn’t fit into the trunk.
As we careen toward the Belt Parkway, reggae music blasting from the radio in the front seat, my grandmother holds on to me for dear life and insists that we all say a rousing rosary.
“She did this on the plane, too,” my sister hisses into my ear.
She does it on the Metro-North train, too, six hours later. Well, she starts, anyway—the moment the lights and ventilation system turn off in the tunnel as the train picks up speed.
“It’s okay, Grandma,” I cut in. “This happens all the time.”
And then there was light.
And ventilation.
And a clear view of my nephew standing on his seat in madras shorts and a preppy Baby Gap polo, staring down a pair of rough-looking tweens in the seat behind him.
“Sit down, little Joey,” I coo, reaching across the aisle and past my sister-in-law to touch his shoulder.
“No!” he shouts, bouncing wildly on the seat.
“I don’t want him to get hurt,” I tell Sara.
“Hmm? Oh, he’s okay. He’s holding on to the seat.”
Yes, I think, turning away from potential bloodshed, but the tweens might be armed.
And it’s a good thing I don’t carry a firearm around in my purse because by late afternoon, after showing my family around Manhattan, I’d have been tempted to turn it on myself.
It was hard enough to keep from diving off the observation deck of the Empire State Building when my father asked where the twin towers used to stand, then loudly announced that it was too bad our country hadn’t learned its lesson yet, and kicked out all the “foreigners.”
Keep in mind that his own parents were Italian immigrants, that he spouted this gem within earshot of a virtual melting pot of tourists, and that he had complained just five minutes earlier that we wouldn’t have time to see the Statue of Liberty until tomorrow.<
br />
Why is he so anxious to see it? Does he have a can of spray paint and a diabolical plan to change the inscription to “Keep your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…”?
Then again, at least he didn’t request a stop for coffee and danish every five minutes despite a hearty lunch at the hotel restaurant. No, that was my mother, the bottomless pit.
My father was the one who complained nonstop about the cost of coffee and Danish and everything else in Manhattan.
For her part, my sister spent most of the afternoon on her cell phone, fielding frequent calls from Nino and Vince Junior, who have been bickering and needier in her absence than they are when she’s around, which I didn’t think was possible. Keep in mind that she dropped them off at their father’s apartment just this morning and she’ll be picking them up again tomorrow afternoon.
Her end of the conversation always tends to go something like this: “Hi, sweetheart…I know, I miss you so much too…He did what?…Did you tell him to stop?…Put him on…Hi, sweetheart, what did you do to your brother?…You didn’t?…He did what?…Where’s Daddy?…Well, go wake him up…(or knock on the bathroom door, or tell him to get off the phone with his girlfriend…”
You get the picture. Poor Mary Beth, who has never spent a night away from her children, gets a little weepy whenever she hangs up after talking to them. But her phone invariably rings again five minutes later and she’s right back in it.
And then—once again—there’s Grandma.
Wouldn’t you know, her steamer trunk contains twenty pairs of shoes—all of them skinny high heels? She was limping five minutes into our sightseeing jaunt, and by the time I dropped everyone back at the hotel to get ready for the party, her feet were bloody stumps.
But she turned down my offer to pick up a pair of sneakers for her—she’s got a pair of “gorgeous gams,” as Grandpa used to call them, and dammit, she’s going to show them off. So now she’s wearing tall, strappy hot-pink sandals that perfectly match her hot-pink well, hot pants is the best way to describe what she’s wearing, though she prefers to call it a “skort.”
Mary Beth, who is sharing a room with Grandma and a train seat with me, assures me in a whisper that this outfit is preferable to the “Batgirl getup” Grandma was planning to wear.
Um, Batgirl getup? Dare I ask?
“It was shiny, and long, and…skintight,” my sister informs me with a shudder. “She made it herself out of some bargain fabric she got at Joanne’s.”
“She still sews her own clothes?”
“Yup.”
I should probably be thinking, “God bless her.”
Instead, looking at her sitting there across the aisle in those hot pants, I’m thinking, “Holy varicose vein, Grandma. You’re an octogenarian!”
I don’t dare say it, though. She prides herself on looking great for her age—and great for anyone a few decades younger, too. I just wish she wouldn’t flaunt so much skin in front of my future in-laws. Or people in general.
Grandma is lugging along a mysteriously bulging Hens and Kelly shopping bag, filled with God knows what. She won’t tell me, just keeps insisting it’s “for the party.”
I’m sure it’s safe to assume she didn’t buy whatever it is at Hens and Kelly, a blue-collar Buffalo department-store chain that vanished before my allowance days. Then again, you never know, because when I ask her if she made her hot pants, she says, “No, I bought them down at the Montgomery Ward.”
Which pulled out of Brookside at least a decade before I was born.
My mother, who goes nowhere empty-handed, actually asked if we could stop at a supermarket this afternoon; turned out she wanted to throw together a “dish to pass.” She was thinking a nice salad. She even had the foresight to pack a paring knife, a Tupperware container and “good” olive oil because we must not have “good” olive oil here in the most vast and diverse metropolitan area in the country.
“Station stop…One Hundred and Twenty-fifty Street, Harlem,” intones the mechanical voice.
“Did they say Harlem?” Grandma asks loudly. “Is it safe here?”
Dear God.
I pointedly ignore her. So does my sister, whose cell phone is ringing again.
“Off!” Little Joey bolts from the seat and makes a mad dash for the doors as they open.
My brother the superhero leaps forward in a single bound and snatches his son just inches from the platform.
“Off!” protests little Joey in a piercing voice.
What a far cry from “On!”, which is what he was screaming back in Grand Central when we were waiting for the doors to open. “On!” It echoed through the cavernous tunnel and everyone else on the platform gave us a wide berth.
“Joey, you love trains,” my sister-in-law claims as my brother marches little Joey back to their seat. “Choo choo! Remember?”
“No! I hate choo choos! I want my bike!”
Terrific. I had to force them to leave it back in the hotel room. Yes, they were planning on bringing it to the party. They thought it would keep him entertained, and who doesn’t know that a toddler zipping around on a shiny red trike would be a welcome addition to any engagement party?
Honestly, it’s scary the way parenthood has challenged Joey and Sara’s common sense. Between that and Kate’s miserable pregnancy, I’m seriously thinking Jack and I need to wait a good two or three years before we even consider having children.
“Biiii-iiike!” Joey howls.
Maybe four or five years.
“Here, have a treat, honey.” That’s my mother saving the day as only an Italian grandmother can: by shoving something sweet—this time, a chocolate doughnut—into Joey’s mouth. It immediately shuts him up, of course.
No, Ma doesn’t carry doughnuts in her purse in case of emergencies.
I assured her earlier that the party food was taken care of, but she showed up in the hotel lobby toting two boxes of Krispy Kremes she had sent my father out to pick up for the party.
When I protested, “Ma, you don’t have to do that,” she shrugged and said, “Oh, I wanted to.”
I mean…what do you say to that?
I’ll tell you.
You say: “Really, Ma, it’s not necessary. Go put them back in your room and eat them later.”
But then she looks wounded and asks, “Why? You don’t think Jack’s family likes Krispy Kremes? Are they some kind of health nuts?”
Some kind of health nuts. In my family, that is the ultimate insult, right up there with some kind of liberal.
“Everyone likes Krispy Kremes, Connie,” is my father’s response. “And they were selling them four for a buck.”
Ah, his first New York bargain: day-old doughnuts.
Luckily, I’d had the foresight to visit the Grand Central ticket kiosk earlier this week and pick up a bunch of off-peak round-trip tickets to Bedford. I can just imagine what my father would say to spending almost twenty bucks a head just to get to the party. Needless to say, he’s still freaked out about the forty-five-dollar cab ride—not including tip and toll—from the airport this morning.
So here we have it: Mom and her twenty-three remaining donuts; Dad and his perpetual sticker shock; Grandma and her inscrutable shopping bag; Mary Beth and her long-distance bickering boys; indulgent Joey and Sara and their unruly toddler, whose face is now smeared with chocolate icing….
A far cry from the Candells and people of that ilk.
Still, regardless of everything…
They’re my family and I love them. I’m glad they’re here to celebrate my engagement. All of them.
Even Grandma.
11
Yes, I’m thrilled Grandma came all this way to celebrate my engagement…until the moment she pulls me aside to ask me in a loud whisper why Jack’s family is protesting the wedding.
Which occurs pretty much the moment we walk through the door into the private party room at Toute l’Année.
Protesting? What can she possibly be talking a
bout? I look around, half expecting to see Jack’s siblings sporting Down With Tracey sandwich boards.
Nope.
In fact, no one has even glanced in our direction yet, including Jack, who is helping himself to a tasty morsel from a passing tray, and Wilma, whom I spot conferring with a tuxedoed waiter.
The party is under way and the guests are elegantly mingling, munching and sipping Candelltinis, the signature drink Wilma and the bartender created just for tonight. A pianist is playing a jaunty version of “Just The Way You Are” on a baby grand in the far corner beside a tall window. Beyond that is a view—yes, sweeping—of the blooming garden against a backdrop of stone walls, rolling hills and a tangerine sunset.
I turn back to my grandmother, flummoxed. “What makes you think anyone is protesting the wedding, Grandma?”
“Look at them! They’re all in black from head to toe! They look like they should be at a wake!”
Yes, and you’re in hot-pink hot pants and spike heels. You look like you should be hooking by the Lincoln Tunnel.
Aloud, I say only, “Grandma, this is New York. Everyone wears black. It doesn’t mean they’re protesting anything. I promise you.”
“It’s just so…somber,” my mother comments in a stage whisper. Balancing her Krispy Kreme boxes in one hand, she reaches up to nervously pat her hair, and I glimpse an unfamiliar vulnerability in her black-lined eyes.
“Ma—” I put an arm around her “—come on. Let’s go meet Jack’s mother.”
“Which one is she?”
I point out Wilma and feel my mother stiffen beneath my grasp.
“Do I look all right?” she asks anxiously, and I see her seeing Wilma’s flattering black sleeveless dress, her youthful haircut, her real jewelry.
I look at my mother. She’s a head shorter than me, her roly-poly figure draped in a silky red dress with a cowl neck. She’s wearing a new cubic zirconia pendant and matching earrings she ordered from QVC especially to wear to the party.
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