“Okay, that’s the headline. Get to the story. Where’d ya’ meet him?”
“Volume,” Renny says.
“What does he do?”
“He’s a disc jockey.”
“Where? At one the clubs?”
“No. He does the morning show on Q92.7.”
“Georgie?” Lucy says, her jaw bouncing off her lap.
“Yeah,” Renny nods. “How’d you know that?”
“That was you?” Lucy asks.
“What was me?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“Hear what?” Renny leans toward Lucy wishing she could reach into the woman’s mouth and pull the story out.
Lucy’s flickering hands punctuate her words. “He was talking about you on the radio this morning. I heard it as I was waiting for the bus, right around eight. Well you could knock me over with a bialy right now, because when he said he slept with a hottie last night, the last person on this planet that came to mind was not even you. So, is he as sexy as he sounds?”
“Oh yeah! Did he say anything else?”
“Sure, it was filthy. You know, their show is so raunchy. I listen all the time. I love it.” Lucy laughs. “You and Georgie, now that’s a riot!”
“Hey!” Renny says, offended.
“Sorry, but come on. The guy’s practically married to a supermodel. You didn’t think you’d hear from him again, did you?” Lucy asks.
Renny shrugs off the question.
“Oh my God, you think he’s going to call.” Lucy pats Renny’s hand. “Sweetie, I hate to be the one to burst your bubble, but last night was, you know, wham-bam, thank you ma’am. You shoulda’ heard him this morning. Guys like that, they never call. I’d bet my next paycheck on it, and you know I’m as tight as they come. But look on the bright side. You got your fifteen seconds with fame, right?” She gets up to leave. “Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“You just crossed your appendix,” Renny says, pointing to her chest.
Lucy gestures toward the laundry bag. “What’s all that? Doesn’t your building have washing machines?”
“I’m going to my parents tonight. My mother’s going to do it.”
“You’re thirty years old and your mother still does your laundry?”
“She likes to,” Renny adds in defense.
“The last time my mother did my laundry, she made me go to confession every Sunday for a month.”
“How come?”
“I had a pair of that underwear your friend used to make. My mother took them out of the dryer and read the password.”
“What did it say?”
“The other white meat,” Lucy deadpans.
***
Renny stares out the passenger side window of her father’s green Taurus at the warehouses and billboards that dot the landscape along the New Jersey Turnpike. Her father hums along to his favorite CD, a show tune collection sung alternately in Hebrew and English by an Israeli singer. It is a soothing accompaniment for her Georgie saturated daydream.
“When your mother and I saw him in Florida last year, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Some voice, huh?” Her father asks, breaking into his daughter’s reverie.
“Great.” Renny reaches in her bag to check that the volume on her cell phone is on high. It is and so far Lucy is right—Georgie hasn’t called. “What’s with the yarmulke?” Renny casts an eye at the navy blue religious cap perched on her father’s gray hair like a doily on a coffee table.
“I wear it when I go to Brooklyn. My customers there are Lubovitch. They’re more comfortable dealing with someone who they think is as religious as they are.” He takes the yarmulke off his head and passes it to Renny. “Put it in the glove box.”
She opens the compartment door slowly and shoves the yarmulke in, slamming the latch shut before anything can fall out of the overpacked space. For the last seventeen years, Renny’s father has worked for a food distributor selling kosher foods to supermarkets and grocery stores all over the tri-state area. “We’ll never go hungry,” her mother would say inspecting the cans of tuna or sardines her father brought home on a regular basis. She never forgot the Spartan year and a half they had weathered when her father was out of work. Her mother viewed each freebie case of Matzos or soup mix that found its way to her kitchen as if they were an insurance policy against hunger. She’d stack them in the pantry, aligned in neat rows of equal height, as though she were building a brick wall and mortaring out any future hardship.
“I almost forgot; go back in. There are bus tickets in there,” he says.
“For what?” Renny opens the glove compartment and a flashlight and various papers fall on the floor.
“There they are,” her father points. “By your foot.”
Renny is strangled by the seat belt as she bends and picks up the ten-pack of round-trip bus tickets.
“Your mother thought you might need them. Maybe you’ll come home a little more often.”
The tickets ignite Renny’s temper. “I come out as often as I can, Dad. Why can’t she understand that I’m busy?”
“She knows you’re busy. Just tell her thank you, okay? For me.”
“Fine.” Renny tosses the tickets in her bag and turns her sights back out the window. She spots the back of the old Two Guys department store in Hillside. As a child, she and her mother used to go shopping there at least once a week. When she was six, Renny witnessed a little boy getting lost in the store. The store manager announced the lost boy’s name over the Two Guys PA system. His name was Brian. Renny’s mother was trying on silver metallic sandals in the shoe department, while Brian waited nearby with the store manager. Renny remembers the little boy’s mother running into the shoe department with tears streaming down her face. She scooped Brian up in her arms and showered him with kisses. Renny overheard his mother say, “Don’t ever scare me like that again.” The warning was drowned out by more kisses.
Renny thought that having your name called out across the store made you famous and she thought that was very cool. The next time she and her mother went to Two Guys, Renny purposely wandered away. Hiding in a circular display of men’s trousers while her mother picked out boxer shorts for her father was all it took to become lost.
After they announced her name over the PA system, Renny waited with the store manager in the shoe department just as Brian had done the week before. Her mother flew past the rows of summer sandals, just as Brian’s mother had. Only the twisted expression on her face let Renny know that she was not about to be scooped into her mother’s arms. In the parking lot moments later, the hard slap of her mother’s hand across Renny’s face made it clear that she didn’t share her daughter’s vision of cool or fame. The red mark left on her cheek for the rest of the day made sure she didn’t forget.
After being smacked, Renny climbed into the family’s maroon Impala and stared up at the series of pointy peaks that lined the roof of the building. Her eyes stung with unshed tears. She imagined the peaks were ocean waves and wished that she could climb up to them. She wanted to float on them, staring up at the sky, allowing nothing between her and the soothing blue ceiling.
“Not a dry eye in the house I tell ya.” Her father hits the replay on the CD, calling Renny back to the present.
“That’s what I heard,” Renny says, watching the Two Guys’ roof line dissolve in the evening sky.
***
“You should try a piece of this apple strudel,” her mother says while chewing. She is standing over the sink, crumbs raining down with each carnivorous bite.
“No thanks, Ma. I’m full from dinner.”
“It’s delicious. Are you dieting again?”
“No, I’m just not hungry.”
“Who says you have to be hungry to taste something?” The faint smell of hairspray wafts past Renny from her mother’s beauty parlor blond hair, which is religiously washed and set every week. She chuckles to herself, remembering how every nigh
t as a child she would watch her mother put curlers in the front pieces and wrap ‘the do’ in a hairnet to keep ‘the set’.
It’s been twelve years since Renny first left home for college and transformed from an insecure coed to a neurotic city girl. In that time fashionistas declared navy, grey, brown and even white as the new black. The Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall collapsed.
Her parents’ central New Jersey split-level, however, remains rooted in a mauve time warp. The blue and white Corning tea-kettle from Renny’s childhood and the collection of miniature ceramic pitchers still decorate the kitchen counters. Renny ate dinner in the same spot she held as a child, across from her father and to the right of her mother. Even the furniture, though faded, sits in the exact same places, verified by the immutable carpet depressions throughout the house.
As always, her father retreats behind the newspaper as soon as dinner finishes, while her mother moves between the sink and the table clearing dishes, wearing one of a lifetime supply of floral housecoats.
Renny feels her mother’s scrutinizing gaze behind her. “What?”
“You look tired.” Her mother comes over and rubs Renny’s back. “Maybe you need iron. You should give Doctor Friedman a call. He can prescribe some iron pills.”
Her mother believes a pill exists for all of life’s ailments. “I don’t need iron pills; I’m just a little rundown. I’m working on a big project right now and I’m under a lot of pressure.”
Her mother walks away and turns on the water at the sink. “Pressure, schmessure. Try raising two kids, you’ll know pressure. You’re thirty years old now. You have to take care of yourself. If you don’t, how are you ever going to—”
“Don’t say it, Ma.”
“I don’t have to.”
“That’s because you’ve said it so many times it keeps reverberating over and over again in the air.”
“Don’t be fresh. You may be thirty, but I’m still your mother. So tell me, what do you have against it?”
“Nothing. I have nothing against it.”
“Look at your father and me. It’s been thirty-seven years, and we’re still happy.” Her mother waves a sudsy yellow-plastic-gloved hand in the air.
Her father sits silently engrossed with his newspaper. Over the banner of the Sports section, Renny can make out her father’s side part. As always, he wears a plaid button down shirt with a pair of dark trousers, laid out the night before by her mother like a set of adult Garanimals.
Her mother prattles on. “It’s already been five years for Ira.”
“Here we go.” Renny rolls her eyes.
“Shirley, for god’s sake leave her alone already,” her father says from behind the newspaper.
“What?” She waves a dismissive hand at him.
“Why do you always have to compare us?” Renny grabs a dishtowel and starts drying the dishes her mother hands her. “I love my brother, but he’s my brother, not my Siamese twin. I don’t have to do what he does. By the way he forgot my birthday.”
“He’s very busy. You could take a lesson from him. He’s a good boy. At least I have two grandchildren. You know your father and I aren’t going to be around forever. A mother needs to go into the here after knowing that her children are taken care of. Who’s going to take care of you if something happens to me?” Her mother’s voice trembles.
“I’m not five; I wipe my own ass now, Ma,” Renny jokes.
“Herb, do you hear your daughter?”
“Uh-uh,” her father grunts from behind the newspaper. It occurs to Renny, that he uses the newspaper like an argument proof shield.
Her mother grips the sides of the sink for a moment, fingers tightening on the white porcelain. The white lace curtains hanging on the window above the sink ripple from the night breeze.
“Ma, are you okay?” Renny asks, suddenly concerned.
Her mother slams the window shut, stifling the flow of fresh air into the room. She whips around, pointing her finger at Renny as if it were a sword. “You’ll be alone,” she says with an efficient nod as if her daughter’s fate has just been printed on some biblical tablet. “Do you think that it’s fun to be alone?”
Monday night with Georgie flashes in Renny’s mind and she smiles wickedly. “I’m doing okay.”
“You’re not okay.” At this point, her mother erupts into a fit of coughs. “You only think you’re okay,” she chokes out, her face turning red as she struggles to gain control of the spasm that rocks her body. Pulling out a wad of tissues from the pocket of her housecoat, her mother coughs into it and spits a wad of red tinged mucus into the tissue. Renny stands nearby, feeling both helpless and revolted. “Is that blood?”
“It’s nothing,” her mother chokes out and continues in a hoarse whisper, “remember, Miss Shmirna?” She takes a black cough drop from her pocket and pops it in her mouth, crinkling the wrapper in her fingers.
Renny and Ira loved Miss Shmirna. She was their childhood babysitter and always brought them homemade cookies.
“Why do you think she was a babysitter?” her mother asks and answers, “Because she never married. There, I said the word. Married! Miss Shmirna was a babysitter because she never married and couldn’t have any children of her own. She was so sad really. I always felt sorry for her.”
“Things are a little different today, Ma. First off, I have a job and I don’t need to be a babysitter. And, if I want to have a baby, I could go to a sperm bank. I don’t have to get married to have a baby.”
She throws her hands up sending dishes and silverware clattering in the sink. “What are you talking? That’s crazy. Don’t say that, you’re gonna upset your father.”
He is silent behind his paper.
“Has it ever occurred to you that I’m happy with my life?” Renny throws her towel down.
“You call what you have a life? What you have is no life, missy.”
Friends, boyfriends, hair, and clothes–you name it and her mother has an opinion. That slap years ago in the Two Guys parking lot was the one and only time she ever lashed out physically at Renny. However, the verbal strikes have forever been a daily occurrence.
Her mother narrows her eyes. “Is that old man still calling you?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Is he?”
“He’s harmless, Ma.”
“Harmless. Pfjsh,” she blows out air and hands Renny a wet platter. “That’s what you think, until he comes to your apartment and chops you into tiny pieces. I’m too old to mourn a daughter.”
Renny can’t take any more of her mother’s nagging. She puts the wet platter on the counter and walks over to where the avocado colored phone is mounted on the wall, picking up the receiver.
“What are you doing? We’re talking,” her mother chides.
“I have to call my machine. I’m expecting an important call.”
She mutters disapproval just loud enough for Renny to hear. Renny wonders if in her mother’s day they gave voice lessons on how to achieve this particular inaudible yet very audible decibel level. She stretches the phone cord from the kitchen wall into the adjoining dining room and turns away from her mother’s disapproving glance. She hangs up the phone disappointed. Georgie still hasn’t called.
Back in the kitchen, Renny finds her father and mother talking quietly near the sink. Startled by Renny’s reentry, they both jump back. Renny is struck with the feeling that she has caught them at something. Her mother snaps at her father, “Why are you hovering near me. Go read your paper. So,” her mother inquires of Renny, “did this important call, call?
“No. But he will.” She pauses, “What’s going on with you two?”
They ignore her question. Her father sits back down and starts reading the paper again as her mother sniffs, “another shmendrick, I’m sure.”
“He’s a deejay in New York, Ma. He’s nice, very successful and he likes me. ”
“Speaking of successful,” her mother says, using G
eorgie’s credentials as a launch pad. “I was on the phone yesterday with Mrs. Myerson.”
“Forget it!” Renny clamors.
“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
“Yes I do, and now I know why you started this.” With deliberate enunciation Renny adds, “I told you Ma, no more blind dates! Don’t you listen to me?”
“Her nephew is a very prominent podiatrist in the city. New York City. Just like you. Maybe you’ve heard of him? His name is Marty Toezoff?”
“A podiatrist named Marty Toezoff. That’s classic! It’s almost as good as the last guy you fixed me up with.”
“You were in high school then.”
“No Ma, I was twenty-seven. He was in high school! Remember? His mother had to pick us up from the movies because he didn’t even have his driver’s license yet.”
She shrugs, “His mother forgot to mention how old he was. You live, you learn. But Marty is thirty-two, and they say he’s very handsome.”
Which Renny knows translates into one of three bachelor categories: Nerdo, Psycho or Cretin.
“Not gonna happen, Ma.”
“Fine,” her mother says, flinging a cabinet closed. “If you don’t want to go out with Marty, you can tell him when he calls.”
Renny bangs her hand on the counter. “You didn’t! You gave him my number already? I told you never to give out my number!”
She feigns ignorance. “You did?” Defensively she adds, “Someone’s got to straighten your life out. Your father and I worry about you. Look at him. He’s very upset.”
They look at her father, oblivious to the verbal battle on the other side of his newspaper.
“He’s fine,” Renny says. “Besides, the only way you’re gonna get Daddy to my wedding is if you print the invitation in the sports section.”
Her mother wags her finger, “That’s not true.”
Suddenly Renny’s father slams his newspaper on the table, silencing their argument. “Your mother’s right! After all, I read the comics, too.” He winks at Renny. Then he picks up the sports section and heads off to the bathroom, having realized that he needs more than paper to block out this argument.
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