I’m a total fashion victim as far as what I put on my back is concerned. Inexplicably, despite the fact I buy my underwear at drugstores, I can nail the cost of an outfit within fifty bucks. This is probably more a tribute to the issues of GQ I’m forced to read while waiting in dental offices than any real innate ability, but I must say being a fashion idiot savant has come in handy, earning me many a dinner invitation and a goodly portion of my Christmas checks from Uncle Dom. I once told him that a potential business client was skimping on the make of his suits; therefore, any deals should be scrutinized. The man went bankrupt three months later.
Silence. Goddamned trucks. Stupid cell phone.
“Uncle Dom? You there? Am I losing you?” I leaned as far as I could toward the street. “He knows you.” Again, I left out minor details. Like Martin went apoplectic at the mention of Uncle Dom’s name.
“I am here. Wait, Baby Mary. I need to take this in the study.” A hand covered the mouthpiece, but I could still hear him call to my aunt, “Mary, do not disturb me.” I heard the click, click, click of his handmade brogues—he and Prince Charles have the same shoemaker—then the sounds of a door being shut and the squeak of his study chair as he sat down. “Now. This, this Martin. How do you know him?”
Only the family can hear this, but when Uncle Dom is upset he doesn’t yell, he doesn’t threaten; he sounds Italian. The vowels become more pronounced, lengthen and round out; the cadence of his sentences begin to rise and fall, to sing a little. Although he grew up in San Francisco, he was first generation, and I imagine it’s a throw-back to his childhood and the loud, angry arguments between his parents. When upset, the clipped baritone he’d spent a lifetime cultivating, a voice meant to be listened to and obeyed, doesn’t become eclipsed, but the singsong patois of his youth creeps in. Most people miss it. But with his family, when you hear his sentences start to sing, it’s time to start sweating bullets.
“I have a student. Her father, Martin, wants her to quit the school. He threatened me with termination if I didn’t ask her to leave. He’s on the Board of Directors.”
Silence again. I stood on my tippy toes to keep the signal.
“Uncle Dom, you there?”
“Mary, I am here. You must stay away from this man. This student—”
“Coolie—”
“You cannot involve yourself with this girl. Martin’s daughter. This is not negotiable.” He had used that same dismissive and abrupt tone with me when he’d reamed me seven ways to Sunday when I told him I’d abandoned college for cooking school. Discussion closed. Well, it might work for MBAs who are a little wet behind the ears, but not on me.
“I need a restraining order. To keep him away from her,” I insisted.
Silence. Then….
“A restraining order against a man like Martin?” he scoffed. “You will not involve yourself with this girl,” he repeated, pausing ever so slightly between each word. Like there were periods between each one.
I lost it.
“This is not going to turn into one of our power struggles, Uncle Dom.” I tried not to yell, but, goddamn it, I was done with being the niece who forever was treated like she was six. Who didn’t even rate an adult name. “He struck her. She’s got a black eye covering half her face. If you’re not going to help me, fine.” My legs finally gave out, and I crumpled into a heap on the bench. “There are twenty million lawyers in this town. I should have no trouble finding one to get me a simple restraining order.” I snapped my phone shut, not even caring if he’d heard the last line or not.
Why has every man in my life failed me? From my father to my husband to my uncle…My watch began to beep signaling the hour. Curt the maitre’d, with menus tucked underneath his arm, would be showing the first patrons their seats. I tucked my phone in my back pocket and shuffled to the elevator. It was time for lunch.
Chapter Twenty-two
I found Coolie secreted in the corner of the student’s locker room, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, arms wrapped around her knees, sunglasses firmly in place.
“Does he know where you live?”
She nodded. We both knew who “he” was.
I handed over my car keys, house key, and address, lied about the restraining order (I’d take care of it in the morning), and told her that we’d make a trip over to her place sometime tomorrow to pick-up her clothes. She’d stay with me until we could find her a new apartment. That got another nod and a quiver of her bottom lip. Once I saw her step into the garage, I went back to the kitchen to finish up lunch service, and then it was another seven hours of teaching until I could finally call it a day. It was probably a blessing that I’d given Coolie my car because I was so tired by the end of the night that I wouldn’t trust myself to drive; I took a cab home.
“Is this it, young miss?”
The cab driver’s sing-song accent, a reminder of his birth in some horribly impoverished Caribbean island, woke me up. I had fallen asleep before we’d even hit the bridge.
It looked like my neighborhood. Yeah, the trikes of the triplets next door littering the sidewalk, the twinkle of Mrs. Harmon’s Christmas lights (she confessed to me once that they’d been up for ten years now because she was too lazy to take them down), and, oh, my uncle’s Town Car, parked right in front of my house.
“Yeah.” Even though the meter said forty-two seventy-five, I handed him my sixty bucks and told him, “Keep the rest.” I doubt I could have handled change my hands were shaking so much. Merely because I was exhausted, I told myself.
One doesn’t hang-up on my uncle. Not that I regretted it. But I was also not in any physical or mental shape to butt heads with him after a mere eight hours sleep in the past thirty-six hours. I walked up to the car. The driver’s side window slid silently into its sleeve.
“Evening, Luciano. My uncle?”
He pointed to my house. I had never heard Luciano speak in the twenty years he’d worked for my uncle. The house was completely dark except for the kitchen.
I let myself. Might as well get this over with.
***
My uncle and Coolie were sitting at my kitchen table, a pot of tea in front of them. Little wisps of steam rose from newly filled coffee mugs. Coolie still had her sunglasses on; her head was bowed.
Uncle Dom said quietly, “Good evening, Mary. We shall talk. But first, you should go to bed, Melissa. You’ve had a long day. My driver, Luciano, will pick you up tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. and take you to your apartment to get your clothes. I think you can miss one day of school. Yes?” I suppose that was said for my benefit. I nodded. “You will come back here?”
She looked at me for confirmation. At my “Sure, sounds good,” she hoisted herself up from her chair and held out her hand. “Thanks so much, Mr. Porcella.”
“Uncle Dom,” he insisted and didn’t shake her hand so much as grab her hand in both of his and squeeze.
“Uncle Dom,” she repeated, with a trace of her natural charm.
“Second bedroom on the right,” I called after her. “I’m pretty sure the sheets are clean. Towels in the hall closet.”
“Thanks, Chef Mary. Don’t know what I’d do without you.” Her teeth worried her bottom lip, as if she were trying not to cry.
“Bed,” Uncle Dom reminded her and with another nod she was out of the room.
“Anything left in the pot?” I yawned, trying to forestall our confrontation.
“Sit, Baby Mary, you look exhausted.” Uncle Dom fetched me a coffee mug and then filled it with herb tea. Based on the aroma, I guessed peppermint. Not that it mattered, I was so tired I could have had injected espresso I.V. and still be asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. He sat down at my table with an ease suggesting he’d lived here for twenty years.
He’s like that, a person who physically dominates any situation, despite being only five feet five inches tall. I towered over him. One of those shrimpy Italian men whose physical limitations
lead people to underestimate him—always a fatal mistake—it was years before I realized he uses that to his advantage. He actually likes it when people underestimate him because it gives him an immediate edge. The thought of his butting heads with Martin, who could have been a Ralph Lauren model for the older man, was amusing. No contest. Uncle Dom would wipe the floor with him.
We sat there for a couple of minutes in silence. I blew on my tea, coughed, fiddled with the salt and pepper shakers, noticed my tablecloth needed changing, coughed again, sipped my tea, crossed and recrossed my legs, determined not to be the first one to talk.
“She’s a lovely child.”
I nodded.
“Martin is an idiot.”
I took a sip of tea.
“Your aunt will adore her.”
I nodded again.
“You were right and I was wrong.”
Dear God. The sky was falling.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper, “The restraining order,” he grimaced, and laid it on the table. “Melissa will stay here.” It wasn’t a question.
I raised my eyebrows.
“I have spoken to Jim,” he paused, “and others in the police department. Your neighborhood will have extra patrols.”
Which in Uncle Dom-speak I took to mean that my house was now going to be staked out. That woke me up.
“Do you really think that is…”
“You have no idea who you’re dealing with, Mary. None. I trusted you on Melissa’s situation. You must trust me on this. This is beyond whatever…” he paused, “…remaining unpleasantness between you and Jim. I will not remind you that I told you repeatedly that marrying him was a mistake…—gee, despite my nearly terminal case of exhaustion, it sounded like another reminder to me—“…but that is done, and you must move on. It’s a blessing you didn’t get married in the church.”
I began to giggle. As if I was ever going to be married in the church. The candles would melt, the stained glass would break, the hand of God would smite me down…A look stopped me mid-chortle.
“Martin and I aren’t on the best of terms, but I will call him in the morning. And make things perfectly clear. To bed, Baby Mary,” he admonished.
I shoved back my chair and had braced myself on the table to haul myself up, but then stopped. A healthy dose of being so exhausted my defenses were kaput, combined with burning curiosity of “why me,” so I asked.
“Why do I always feel I’m failing you, Uncle Dom? You don’t do it to anyone else in the family. Not like me.”
He covered my hand and gave it a tiny squeeze.
“You always underestimate yourself. I…” he paused, to pick his words carefully. “You take the easy way. Always. You cook because you are good at it. You married Jim because he loved you.”
“I loved him,” I protested and pulled my hand away.
“Perhaps,” he admitted. “But you let him go so easily. The fact is that he didn’t know how to fight for you. He let you bully him. He lost respect for you and himself. What sort of relationship is that?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted and groaned. “I only know it hurt like hell, and it still hurts.”
Was it was more the life we’d mapped out that I had lost, not Jim himself? I honestly didn’t know how to separate Jim from that scenario. We were going to have the kids. We were going to have stints on the PTA. Christmas Eves were going to be spent assembling tricycles and bikes. We were going to spend a third of our lives picking-up six metric tons of Legos off the floor and debate whether Barbies were politically correct. It wasn’t like I had a million men auditioning for the starring role that he played in that fantasy reel. No one was storming my front door for the chance to date me. We’re not even talking about a measly coffee here, and my tryst with Marc in the back of his van demonstrated I couldn’t even orchestrate a pity fuck with any success.
My therapist had suggested that my resulting depression after the divorce wasn’t about losing Jim so much as my general issues with abandonment. The headache that dogged me for three days after that therapy session told me that perhaps there might a grain or ton of truth in that suggestion. But I wasn’t remotely ready to face that issue any time this century.
“You are tired. Mary. Go to bed. I will let myself out. You think I’m over-bearing and preemptory, but it’s the only way I know to fight for you.” He squeezed my hand hard. “Otherwise, you would ignore me like you do most other people. And do not sneer. You know it’s true.”
I squeezed his hand back, too tired to either agree or refute him.
“To bed,” he chided me.
I kissed his forehead, and as I staggered down the hallway to my bedroom, the lights behind me were doused, and I heard the click of the front door before I fell into bed. Just before I went under I murmured a “thank-you” into my pillow, grateful. Grateful that as over-bearing and irritating as he was, he’d listened to me. Grateful that he had trusted me enough to come here and humble himself, admitting to me he was wrong. And finally, oh God, so grateful that at least one man in my life hadn’t abandoned me.
***
That cup of tea saved my bacon. Without my bladder screaming in six different languages for relief at eight that morning, I’d have probably slept through breakfast and lunch. As I tried to scrape off a few sheets of a new roll of toilet paper with non-existent nails, something began nagging at me. Goddamn, what was it? I muttered to myself as I stumbled back into bed, bringing the covers up over my head, as if the dark would shut down my brain.
Shit! The jewelers. Today was the day Allison was supposed to pick up her wedding ring! I scrambled out of bed, dragging half the covers with me, took a two-minute cold shower to wake me up, and gave my teeth a frantic brush. Running into my bedroom and leaping over the obstacle course of heaped bedclothes on the floor, I made a beeline for my dresser and I tried to get dressed. Clearly, a lesson in futility.
Laundry hadn’t been a top priority lately. Okay, laundry is never a top priority with me; I’m one of those people who will buy cheap underwear and socks if only to put off running the washing machine for yet another day—and I was down to the dregs. The clothes you wear when you have no choice. The sort of clothes that demand you slap on a pair of oversized, dark sunglasses because you don’t want people to recognize you.
I shimmied into my last pair of clean jeans, the pair I’d bought in an emergency when I was late to an important meeting, and, because I was nervous about this meeting, I had spilled coffee all over my lap. Not wanting to look like I was in denial about an incontinence problem, I’d sprinted into an Old Navy and had grabbed the first pair of jeans I saw in my size. Little did I realize these were low-rise jeans, exposing a three-inch strip of my underwear peeking out over the top of the waistline. Thirty dollars wasted. Or nearly, because these pants were the last defense against wearing the seersucker plaid pedal pushers my mother had bought me last Christmas in an attempt to convince me to join them on a cruise they were planning. “And look, you’ve got a start on your wardrobe!” And, oh, shit, no clean underwear again, and the only shirt left in my dresser drawer was a joke tee-shirt from a former classmate that said, “Chefs do it with whips.”
Memo to self: next therapy session discuss near psychotic hatred of doing laundry because you also hate going commando.
That jeweler wasn’t going to give me the time of day dressed like this. Was I going to have to resort to an actual dress? No! Commando and dresses do not co-exist in my world. A quick rummage through my drawers confirmed that no nylons were to be had, and it was January so bare legs were out, even ignoring the commando factor.
Time for the big gun.
I unwrapped from its plastic a hellishly expensive tailored jacket my uncle had bought me several years ago. So classic that it never went out of style, so beautiful that I was afraid to wear it because if I ruined it I’d never own anything so perfectly made ever again. It was the sort of garm
ent hand-stitched by ancient nuns who believed that every pass of the needle was a step closer to God. The sort of jacket that screamed gigantic fraud, but if you’re going to cop to being a fraud, at least do it in cashmere.
Naturally, the tee-shirt was too short and didn’t meet the rise of the pants, so I had to button the jacket. Which, considering what the shirt said was a given anyway. Topped with the jacket, I didn’t look too bad. Perhaps the jeweler would take me for the eccentric, wayward daughter of some long-suffering rich family. Someone who had money, but who wore inappropriate clothes just to tick her parents off.
“Coolie,” I shouted on my way out the door. “Wake up! Luciano will be here in under an hour.” I didn’t wait for reply but sprinted to my car. Breakfast would be a quick trip to the drive-in coffee place where you ordered the latte because you needed the milk to cut the flavor of lousy coffee, with the added bonus of helping to wash down an over-priced, dry muffin. The people who make money are the people who capitalize on other people’s incompetence or laziness. Welcome to yet another breakfast with me driving over the bridge, eating hunched over the wheel of the car, trying not to spill coffee or get crumbs on my clothes.
Chapter Twenty-three
North Beach is dying.
Fifteen years ago, Chinatown began its slow but inevitable march across Broadway. In its heyday, Broadway wasn’t only the strip club Mecca of the West Coast, it was also the impregnable divide between Chinatown and North Beach. In my childhood, you’d walked Grant shielding your eyes from the doomed crabs swimming in cramped aquariums, then crossed Broadway plugging your ears to muffle the shouts of the strip club barkers trying to lure tourists in with the jaunty patter, and a few steps up Columbus and you’d immediately see rolls of salami hanging from shop fronts instead of duck carcasses.
Now, there are as many Chinese-run businesses in North Beach as there are Italian-run ones. Italian shopkeepers who had worked like dogs to put their children through school were gone, and their children had become investment bankers and doctors; they weren’t interested in selling ravioli or working an espresso machine. Combined with the ever-escalating price of real estate, family-owned businesses are falling to the wayside, if not to the Asian shopkeepers, then to chains like Starbucks. Even the U.S. Restaurant has closed its doors.
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