by Rita Ciresi
“All I can say is, Al better come through on Christmas, or he’s fucked.”
“Or not fucked,” I said, and Carol and I both screamed with laughter. We split the chocolate into bite-size pieces, which we dipped into the peanut butter and chewed quickly and stickily. In two minutes flat, only slivers were left behind on the foil wrapper. As I picked up the wrapper and licked it, I wondered what Al was like in bed.
In the back room, the baby started to cluck. Carol sighed, went to the refrigerator, and got out a bottle of formula, which she parked in a small saucepan of water on the stove. She turned the burner on low, then went to get the baby. While she was gone, I examined the bottle of pills on the table. So this was why she stopped breastfeeding, I thought. Well, more power to her. A happy mother made for a happier baby.
That half of a pill sure made me feel happy. It also made me hungry. I dipped one of my fingers into the jar and licked the peanut butter off my top knuckle and fingernail. Then I stuck two fingers in, and before I knew it, my whole hand was in there, all five fingers, pulling up the peanut butter like I was back in one of the Sarah Lawrence art studios on the first day of sculpture class, drawing out from the corrugated barrel covered in damp plastic a handful of cold, wet clay. The art teacher urged us to use our imaginations. Some girls, obviously lacking in creativity, made Girl Scout—style pinch pots. Some made delicate sleeping kitty cats; others did big bruising dogs along the order of Siberian huskies and Newfoundlands. The majority, most of them city girls whose closest encounter with a horse probably came from walking past the old nags who dragged the carriages around Central Park, made lean and muscular wild stallions. I made a male nude. His penis fell off when we baked it in the kiln. The teacher couldn’t find it in the oven. Still, I got an A.
“It’s a man, isn’t it?” Carol asked, after she came back in and I did my duty of admiring the wiry hair, sturdy legs, and smooth, pink cheeks of Al Dante Junior.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean, isn’t it a guy?” Carol sounded hopeful. “A guy you’ve gone crazy about?”
“Don’t tell Mama.”
“Are you nuts? I don’t tell her nothing.”
Carol sat across the table from me, one arm cradling the baby and the other hand tilting the bottle toward the baby’s fast-sucking mouth, and waited for me to tell my story. This she could deal with: a woman going bonkers over a man. What she probably couldn’t grapple with were the specifics—that is, of who Strauss was, or how we came together, or how we broke apart—especially all the stuff that had to do with Dodie. I already had vowed, and I would keep my promise, that I would not tell Carol—nor Auntie Beppina, nor my mother—anything about Dodie.
“So,” Carol said, “who is he?” To tempt me to talk, she gestured with her chin over at her own famed Christmas Whitman’s Sampler, which sat under a stack of mail on the kitchen table. I pulled out the yellow box, took off the top, and folded back the brown tissue paper to reveal a plastic tray—already half picked over—of nuts and creams and turtles. I contemplated long and hard, deliberately avoiding the dreaded cherry bomb—before I made my choice, a dark chocolate mound full of gooey orange cream. Then I watched Carol’s eyes light upon a caramel, which I picked out and leaned across the table to slip between her grateful, expectant lips.
“It’s my boss,” I told Carol.
“Oh my God!” Carol garbled, biting so hard on the caramel it split in two. A gooey-stringed half fell onto Al Dante Junior’s diaper. She rescued it before it bounced to the ground. “Is he married?”
I tried to sound indignant. “No.”
“How old—”
“Not that old—”
Al had nine years on my sister. “Seven, eight years’ age difference I can understand,” Carol said. “But don’t you think it’s weird when women go with guys who could be their fathers?”
I laughed—slowly, lazily, carelessly—because Carol’s magic pill really was starting to kick in.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do think that’s weird.”
“I mean, we already had one father,” Carol said. “And look at what a disaster he was.”
“Daddy wasn’t that bad,” I was surprised to hear myself saying. “At least he never walked out on us.”
“This guy walked out? Screw him.”
“That’s my problem. I still want to.”
“Lisa! You screwed him? I mean, he screwed you?”
“And how—”
“I can’t believe it,” Carol said.
“What do you think I did with him? Tucked him in for nighty-night with a kiss?”
“You should wait until you’re married—or at least engaged.”
I shrugged. “You were the one who just asked me if I was pregnant.”
“But that was before I knew it was your boss.” Carol also shrugged. Maybe her pill was kicking in too. “You sure know how to pick ’em, Lisa.”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you do this shit to yourself?”
I laughed again. “I honestly don’t know.”
And Carol, obviously, didn’t care. “Damn, this caramel is good,” she said. “Find me a turtle.”
“There aren’t any left.”
“Go down to the next level.”
This seemed like the height of decadence. Mama never let us go onto the second tray of a Sampler until we had finished every single last piece—including that noxious cherry bomb—on the first.
In between coconuts and creams and nuts, Carol told “Mama stories”—which usually consisted of Carol’s complaints and grudges against our mother, but which sometimes also contained choice anecdotes about how Mama had butchered, once again, the English language. We laughed and laughed. Then I held Al Junior while Carol pulled out the stuffed peppers she had prepared for dinner. Junior was a warm and milky bundle. After I patted him for a few seconds on my shoulder, he let out a humongous belch. “Like father, like son,” Carol said—for Al was known for how loud he could let it rip. “He does it just to schif me out.”
As we sat there giggling, I thought of how Strauss probably would disapprove of this low-class humor, and I thought I was much, better off without his uptight self sitting there judging Al’s killer burps (which, truth to tell, would have been a lot better than his judging Al’s equally famous farts). I wondered what Strauss would make of my family. Not much, I thought, and then I added, Oh, fuck him. Just fuck him. Although of all the men I had ever gone with since leaving home, Strauss was the only one who did not require a translation for the word schif or the adjective schifato. He even knew that you could grammatically glad-hand the verb schif. “I schif men” or “Men schif me” both meant “Guys gross me out.” If there was an equivalent Yiddish verb, I would never discover it.
Carol got me a big sweater—one that she wore when she was pregnant—and told me to put it on so Mama couldn’t see how skinny I’d gotten. I stayed there past dark, and finally Mama turned up at the back door.
She took off her coat—without Carol’s invitation—and glared at me. “I come home and find there’s one of those jeeks—”
“Jeeps,” I said.
“—sitting in my driveway.”
“You bought a Jeep?” Carol asked me.
Mama didn’t give me time to answer the question. “Who do I know’s got a Jeep, I’m thinking. I look in the backseat. I’m about to call the police—”
“Didn’t you see the New York plates?” I asked.
“So I look in the backseat. But you’re not in this Jeep.”
“Why do you think you’d find me in the backseat of a Jeep?” I asked my mother.
“So I go inside. I wait and wait for you. But you don’t come home. And there’s this Jeep in the driveway—”
My teeth started to hurt. “Mother, I told you what time I was coming, and then I get here and find the house locked.”
“You know where I am, at three o’clock—”
“I’m not going over to the Stop & Shop and look for you
in the frozen peas—”
“I gotta do my shopping.”
“So I’m supposed to sit in the driveway and freeze to death?”
“Your sister’s got a phone. It’s too much for you to pick it up and tell me you own the Jeep in the driveway?”
Bentornato! Welcome home. Mama pointed her chin at me. “What do you think of this baby?”
“What’s to think?” I said, as I ran my finger over the baby’s soft, plump cheek. “He’s a-wonderful. He’s a-marvelous.”
Mama nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “You got the right attitude.” She pushed up her glasses and squinted at me. “You look different.”
“I just ate a lot of chocolate,” I said. “It makes my eyes look wild.”
Mama squinted even more. “Too skinny. Is that supposed to look chick?”
“Sheeeek,” I pronounced it for her, and Carol, to save me from yet another argument with Mama, said, “You can never be too rich or too thin.”
Then I laughed, and Carol laughed, and with the hand that wasn’t cradling the baby, I blew Mama a big kiss.
She glared at me. “You girls. Crazy.” She reached across the table and picked up the pill bottle. “Somebody got a bladder infection?”
At the risk of dropping Al Dante Junior, I slid down in my seat and kicked Carol under the table.
“Yeah, I do,” I said.
Mama adjusted her bifocals and inspected the label. “What do they give you nowadays for that?”
“An antibiotic,” I said, holding out my one free hand.
Mama clutched the bottle closely. “This must be a new kind, I’ve never heard of this kind before—”
I kept my hand extended. “You know how they’re always developing new drugs—”
“Is this made by your drug company—what’s the name of that outfit you work for? But why’s it got your name on it, Carol?”
I reached across the table—squeezing Junior far too tightly—and snatched the vial from Mama, then put it into my pocket. “Those pharmacists,” I said. “More and more, they’re like the alcoholic druggist in It’s a Wonderful Life.”
“I gotta see that movie this year,” Mama said. “Last year they played it opposite Chipmunks’ Christmas on Ice. I had to miss it.” She turned to Carol. “So where’s your husband?”
Carol was looking edgy—probably as much from this close call with Mama as from her fear that I was going to steal her pills forever. “How should I know where Al is? Working late.”
“Maybe he went Christmas shopping for you,” I said.
“Yeah, maybe he went to Tahiti too.”
Mama shook her head. “This Christmas stuff. All this wild shopping and all the money getting thrown around—”
“There’s nothing wrong with a present every now and then,” Carol said, pointedly adding, “especially a present bought at full price.”
When we were small, Mama used to claim the Easter bunny was still working his way around to our house and wouldn’t arrive until the following night. Then she went out to the drugstore on Monday and bought us cellophane-wrapped baskets, full of hollow chocolate rabbits and marshmallow chicks, for half price. Did she think we were too stupid to notice that the bunny had made it to Jocko and Dodie’s house, just two doors down? Did she think we wouldn’t notice the big red fifty-percent-off sticker that she forgot to detach before leaving the baskets on our bed, where they greeted us, twenty-four hours too late, after we returned from our first dreary Monday back at school?
I lowered Junior to his carryall and offered him his choice of objects to hold. He sat at my feet, his head bent down and all three of his baby—fat chins pudged out as he kept examining—and dropping—a cardboard toilet-paper roll, as if to prove my mother’s theory that children didn’t need expensive toys. I knew that for Christmas Mama probably had wrapped up for Junior a few more empty toilet-paper rolls, an egg carton minus the dozen eggs, and a couple of carefully washed tins that once held chicken pot pies, on sale four for a dollar.
For Christmas, I had spent fifteen minutes browsing through a catalog titled HOLIDAY FEVER! provided by Boorman’s own top Avon Lady. For my mother I purchased a tin of violet talcum powder that she would sniff once (long and hard as an addict sucked up the last long line of coke) before she relegated it to her bottom drawer. For Carol, I bought a silver hairbrush-and-comb set. For Al, a bowling-ball-on-a-rope soap. For Junior, a stuffed polar bear wearing a ski cap and sunglasses. But the bear came with a label warning AGES 3 & UP. Madame Avon showed displeasure when I asked if I could return it. “There are strict return policies on seasonal items,” she told me. “I’m afraid the answer is no, but I hope that won’t keep you from ordering with me again.”
I felt like telling her to take her Skin-So-Soft and her Pretty Feet and her Silicone Glove and shove all three of them—simultaneously—right up her buttinski. Instead, I put the polar bear in the office Christmas grab bag. Imagine my delight when her soft, greedy hands pulled it out.
Carol married Al Dante knowing he was wedded to last-minute shopping, the infamous Christmas Eve blitz through one of the mall’s jewelry stores, where he would pick out something very heavy and very gold, probably vastly overpriced. While Mama (with all the insistence of those bold bumper stickers that commanded REMEMBER THE REASON FOR THE SEASON!) went on and on about how people no longer valued the religious significance of the holiday, I looked down at my chapped hands and wondered what Strauss might have gotten me. In the Frick he had told me he hated the mall. But for his wife, I knew he’d walk it.
Christmas passed in the same old depressing way. Mama didn’t want to stay up late for midnight mass, so I went with her in the morning, half an hour early so we could get a decent seat. Mama did two rosaries and gave dirty looks to the holiday-only Catholics who flocked to fill up the church. She probably thought there ought to be a lock on the door to keep them out, or maybe even some sort of traffic cop who stood in the vestibule and pointed to the left or the right side of the church to seat the faithful or the unfaithful, just as wedding ushers seated guests according to the categories of friends of the bride or friends of the groom. Even when I was small, I always thought it was unfair that the groom’s family and friends got the privilege of sitting on the right, while the bride’s family got relegated to the unlucky left.
Before mass I amused myself by imagining what would have happened if I had brought Strauss home with me. He would have accompanied us to church—after Mama asked him, “Sei certo? Are you sure you want to come, you know this is a Catholic event.” When the ushers came around before Communion to collect for the parish, Strauss—who did not have a preprinted collection envelope—would have reached into his wallet to make a healthy donation. Mama would have gasped at the size of the bill he dropped down and stopped the usher to make Strauss change from the basket.
“What does your family do on Christmas?” I once asked Strauss, and until he gave me a mischievous pinch on the cheek, I believed him when he said, “We go eat kosher Chinese in Crown Heights.” The truth was, his family did celebrate it in their own way. He went home to his parents’ house, but his sister didn’t. Strauss and his dad had a tradition of putting on their boots and hats and going for a long, mostly silent walk in the afternoon, and when they came back his mother—who’d been cooking up a storm all day—served salmon and roasted red potatoes and homemade egg noodles, and his father always praised the food too much, which made everyone sad, although everyone tried not to show it.
The organ hummed and started up. Mass began. I left my hymnal on the rack. I didn’t sing—I had a lousy voice—but I recited all the responses and the prayers, which I knew by heart even though I no longer said them on a weekly basis. My mother glared at me when I didn’t get up to receive Communion. I shifted my legs to the right to let everyone else pass by, and a little boy accidentally kicked me so hard in the shins I muttered a blasphemous “shit!” At the end of mass, not trusting the choir to do its duty, my mother accompa
nied them on “Angels We Have Heard on High.” But she just couldn’t cut those top—of—the—staff glorias, and so she delivered them in an alto monotone that annoyed me.
We went home. Carol and Al and the baby came over, the baby clutching a foam bowling ball and a bright red plastic pin—a present from his father, obviously. Carol had on a getup worthy of my former boss Karen—a checked smock complete with rickrack—lined pockets and a Peter Pan collar. Al had on a white dress shirt, brown textured slacks, and no tie. Instead, he wore too much after—shave, in a musky scent probably marketed under the rude name of Brut or Homme. Wait until he gets hold of my smelly soap—on—a—rope, I thought. Carol might have to fumigate.
“Nice to see you again, Al,” I said—for in my heart, I really did like my brother—in—law. Although he was hardly my type, I could see why Carol had married him. Al exuded a certain primitive sensuality that became evident when he leaned over to kiss me on the cheek and his gut grazed my thin hip in an interesting way.
Al sat on the La—Z—Boy that used to belong to my father.
“What’s new?” I asked.
“Nothing much,” Al said, picking up the newspaper, and in response to my question, Carol took over. Five minutes and two rolls of developed film later (“Here’s Junior tasting his first rice cereal.” “Here’s Al trying to slip him some beer”), Al came up for air from behind the sports page. With a sly look that revealed Carol already had informed him I was screwing my supervisor, Al asked what was new with me.
“I got a promotion,” I said, surprising even myself—for I suddenly remembered that although I had hinted I would be moving up, I had never actually told my family I’d been promoted.
“Oh, yeah?” said Al, and Mama said, “Don’t let that get to your head,” and Carol sniffed the air and said, “Ma, those smelts from last night still stink, and I mean totally!”
And that was it. No one asked me about my new responsibilities. No one asked when I was promoted or—thank God—how I got there.
While my mother trimmed artichokes in the kitchen and Al flipped the TV channels back and forth between the Pope giving mass in Rome and the first dull quarter of a football game, I sat silent on the sofa—all 103 pounds of me wrapped in a pilly sweater my sister wore when her weight almost topped her husband’s. I had nothing to say to anyone. The subject of Strauss was off limits. And here in my family home, where the very thought of Dodie always had been a source of contention, I could not venture onto that topic, nor would I even want to, knowing that Dodie hadn’t come home for Christmas in years. He was planning to spend the day with some new friends who also had tested positive.