Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway?

by Stevi Mittman

“I could have more children,” I make clear as I ease myself tentatively back down into her beige leather chair. “If I wanted to.”

  She nods, but the look on her face says I need more children about as much as the Old Woman in the Shoe does, and she’s right. And I don’t want more kids, so why I’m so offended I’m not sure. Except that I don’t want her thinking I’m old. That old. I remember an Archie Bunker episode where Edith is going through her changes and Archie demands that she change immediately, and as I am recalling it, Archie morphs into Rio. He will not be one of those doting, understanding, let-me-turn-on-the-air-conditioning-for-you-in-February husbands. “You can give me HRT then, right? And that’ll fix it?”

  She hands me a sheet from her prescription pad with a name on it and tells me that if it turns out to be hormone-related we can try HRT. And that, in fact, she wants me to see this ob-gyn specialist.

  I put it in the pocket of my purse. “And if it’s not perimenopause?”

  “Then I can help you.”

  And if it’s a tumor, or one of the other things she’s mentioned?

  Unlikely, she tells me, but that we’ll face it if that’s the case.

  “Well, any of those things would be better than going crazy. Maybe even my dying of something would be better for the kids than…”

  “Mrs. Gallo, you are going to be fine. Your kids are going to be fine….”

  “I am the most important thing in my children’s life,” I say as I rise to leave. “I want to be the best thing.”

  “Believe me, Mrs. Gallo,” she says. “I understand.”

  Behind her on the credenza are two smiling teenage faces. I believe her.

  CHAPTER 6

  “I don’t want that man here,” I tell Rio as I try to find the holes in my earlobes that have been there for twenty-some-odd years and have chosen the night of my daughter’s Awards Assembly to close up.

  Rio reminds me that that man is (a) my dad, and (b) in my living room. “And three,” he adds, switching to numbers and holding up some fingers, “he’s your husband’s boss.”

  I ask if he’s trying to cheer me up.

  “I don’t know what I’m trying,” Rio says, sitting down on the bed and throwing up his hands. “I just thought it’d be nice to have a normal evening around here for a change—one that’s normal for the rest of the world, not normal for you Bayers.” Lately it feels like we are all scaling Everest, and the mountain gets higher and colder every day. Like Sisyphus. The mere fact that I can remember the name of the myth heartens me.

  “Grandpa’s here!” Alyssa shouts from downstairs. Well, so much for feeling heartened.

  “We’re coming,” Rio yells back. “Will you forget the freakin’ earrings? We’re gonna be late.” He starts out of the room.

  “Wait!” I press my hands down the front of my skirt. For a week Rio has been looking at whatever I put on, cocking his head and asking if something is new, or why in the world I am so dressed up, or look so grungy, or why I am dressed so…something. “Do I look okay?” I ask. We’ve long ago passed the stage where I try to look perfect for him, and somewhere along the way he has become, instead, my mirror. Do I have lipstick on my teeth? I’ll ask him. Does my panty line show? Questions that only a few years ago would make me perfect for him now reveal all my flaws to him, so that they won’t be seen by the rest of the world. Why does this happen?

  Without even looking at me he tells me I look good, and I now know the answer. A wife asks her husband because she doesn’t want to know the truth.

  And if he can tell me I look good without even looking, what else can he lie about that I’ll be perfectly willing to accept, rather than know the truth?

  He stands by the door to our bedroom and waits for me to pass him.

  “Well, don’t you look pretty?” my father says as I come down the stairs. “You don’t look old enough to have a daughter going into junior high.”

  “It’s middle school, Grandpa,” Dana corrects him. In her little heels she is able to reach his cheek, and she gives him a peck that sours the cream I had in my coffee. I keep my eyes glued to Dana, my head turned away from the adulterer who used to be my father.

  “Such a shayna punim,” he says, looking, I suppose, at Dana, at what he thinks is her pretty face. “I wish your Grandma June could be here to see such shayna punims,” he adds, trying to include me, though I’ve turned so that he can’t see my face at all.

  “Where’s Angelina?” Dana asks. “Isn’t she coming?”

  “No,” I say, ending the discussion before it can begin. I’ll be damned if I’ll let Angelina fill in for my kid’s grandmother the way she filled in for my mother with me. Before I knew she was filling in for a wife with my father, too. God, it’s all so confusing. “There isn’t room with Bobbie and the twins joining us. Find your brother and tell him to get his nose out of whatever he’s reading and get down here. Alyssa, if you’re bringing any babies with you, you’d better get them.”

  We wait in silence for the room to empty of children. When they are gone, I wish they were back. I can’t look at my father. If I look at him, I won’t be able to keep myself from imagining him hovering over Angelina, knowing that the lips that have kissed my forehead a thousand times have nibbled at Angelina’s breasts.

  I actually think I may be sick, standing here in the hallway with the man I have grudgingly admired for most of my life.

  Before I can think of how I can get him to leave, he asks Rio how his back is doing.

  Carefully angled so that my back is to my father, I address Rio. “What’s the matter with your back?” He hasn’t said a word to me about anything hurting.

  “I musta pulled something moving some furniture or something,” he says offhandedly. “It’s nothing.”

  “Is that what the doctor said?” my father asks.

  “What doctor?” It’s like watching an interview on Sixty Minutes. You hear Morley Safer ask the questions, but you only see the man being interviewed.

  “He says I need a little therapy,” Rio says. “He does this thing, this traction, and it helps.”

  “When did you go to the doctor?” How can he not have mentioned it to me? Suddenly he isn’t telling me things?

  “Thursday afternoon,” he says. “I told you, it’s nothing for you to worry about. I need a few treatments is all.”

  “You told me?”

  He waves the conversation away. “Okay, I’m telling you now. There’s nothing you gotta worry about. The doc says a month, tops, and I’ll be good as new.”

  “And you didn’t tell me because…?” I ask, trying not to look as put out as I feel. A mother is supposed to be the linchpin of the family, the sun around which everything orbits and by whose force it all stays together. What will keep my family together if I cease holding on so tightly?

  He raises an eyebrow at me as if to ask if he has to spell it out. “You got enough doctor worries,” he says, glancing at my abdomen as if the fact that the ineffective new estrogen patch I got from Dr. Benjamin’s ob-gyn is somehow a reason to keep this from me. “And it’s not like you’d remember if I told you, anyway,” he says, and adds a laugh to show he’s joking. And then he touches the tip of my nose as if I am one of his children instead of his wife.

  Just what I want my father to see—that I still haven’t grown up.

  “And finding out I don’t know things is supposed to stop me from worrying?” I snap at him, though I am really talking to them both. “That ought to work great.”

  “Sor-ry,” he says, as if I’m being unreasonable here. He looks at my dad and adds that he hates to see me all worried and upset and starts talking about how lately I haven’t been my old self.

  Well, duh! Let me pull the rug out from beneath you and see if you can keep all the crystal in the air!

  His voice trails off and everyone seems to be waiting for the person next to them to break the silence. I, dying to be anywhere but between my father and Rio, take off for the kitchen. Both men fol
low me. I wonder if I start cleaning, will they both follow suit? It is too tempting not to try, so I pick up a sponge and start cleaning the ceramic stovetop. Naturally the men just watch.

  Finally my father clears his throat. “So, almost the birthday girl, huh?” he asks. I ignore him, throwing the sponge toward the sink and picking a rubber band up off the floor.

  “Yup,” Rio agrees when I don’t answer for myself. “The big three-seven.” He has to remind my father what year it is?

  “Thirty-seven?” my father asks. Not surprisingly, he looks momentarily stricken, as if he is remembering my mother at thirty-seven, but he just asks about the big birthday plans as if we are flying to Paris for lunch.

  “Breakfast in bed,” Rio says proudly. And I’ll be cleaning this kitchen for an hour.

  “Then all the gifts,” he adds, gesturing toward the kids, only they aren’t even standing there. Dana will have bought me whatever Bobbie, who has shepherded the outing to the mall, has deemed essential to my fashion development. Jesse will have insisted on paying for his gift himself, which means as many things as he can buy for under eight dollars in the makeup aisle at Genovese. Alyssa will pretend for the rest of the week that one of her forgotten Beanie Babies is now her most favorite and then present me with it as her greatest sacrifice.

  And from Rio there will be something from Victoria’s Secret so hot that I won’t even be able to open it in front of the kids and which I’ll return on Monday.

  I am an ungrateful wretch. No one should buy me anything.

  But, if they are going to, anyway, maybe they could get me something they think I’d actually like? A good book from Dana? Tickets to a show from Rio? Something handmade from Alyssa? And from Jesse? Twenty minutes of his undivided attention to talk about anything that interests him.

  “Then we’ll head on over to my mother’s place,” Rio continues, while I daydream. It’s clear that even he isn’t thrilled about going to his mother’s for my birthday dinner. “My sister Gina’s birthday is Sunday, too, so my mother makes a big fuss or something.”

  “Well, here’s a big fuss from me,” my father says, pulling out a small robin’s-egg-blue Tiffany’s box from his pocket. “And your mother.” One thing I’ll say for my mother, even if she is in South Winds at the moment, she’s got my father trained well.

  He pushes it toward me, but I can’t take it. I raise my hands and twirl away from it, backing out into the foyer. I want nothing from him except a denial that I can believe. And that is something he can’t give me, not even wrapped up in a robin’s-egg-blue box from Tiffany’s.

  My father puts the gift on the little shelf of the hall tree. I will have Rio give it back to him on Monday.

  “And Angelina sent you this,” my father says, picking up a party bag and trying to hand it to me in the foyer. I back away as if the bag contains ricin.

  “Great,” I say. It is the first word I have uttered to my father since finding Angelina’s nightshirt on the back of his bathroom door. “Please return it to her.”

  “Now, Teddi,” my father starts, but the girls have come back into the hallway and are standing around where they can hear everything.

  “We won’t discuss this,” he says firmly, in a tone I remember from my youth. Authoritarian. In control. “You’ll keep the gift because what’s between your mother and me has nothing to do with you.”

  I roll my eyes, take the party bag and hand it to Dana, telling her to put it in the trash on our way out. My father accepts the bag back from my confused daughter just as Jesse bounds down the steps, Harry Potter in hand. “Hi, Grandpa,” he says, his face radiating joy at the one grandparent he actually likes.

  “Hey, Jesse! You all set for the big game tomorrow?” my father asks, ruffling my son’s hair as he hugs him against his chest.

  “It’s just a practice,” Jesse tells him. “I guess you can’t come, huh?”

  My father looks confused and shoots a glance at Rio. “She changed her mind?” he asks, but Rio only shrugs.

  “Curt Schilling—just a practice?” he asks Jesse. “What? Only the World Series counts with you as a real game?”

  Jesse scrunches his nose, and I have the uneasy feeling that if I were married to Robert Klein he’d be doing that spooky “wooo-oooo” sound right about now.

  “Didn’t your mom tell you about the game tomorrow? Yankees and Red Sox? You and me sitting in the Mickey Mantle Legends Suite? Now, how’s that for big news?” There is silence in the hall. “Your mother didn’t tell you?”

  “His mother didn’t know,” I say, not confining my annoyance to my father, but directing it at Rio, too, who has clearly agreed to this little grandpa-grandson trip without so much as informing me, never mind consulting me.

  Again my father and Rio exchange looks.

  “No one told me,” I repeat through clenched teeth, and if Rio says he did, he is out and out lying because he wants me to let Jesse go.

  “You don’t remember the phone call last Saturday?” my father asks. God, he is getting older by the minute. I look away, afraid I might soften toward him if I look too long, too close. “You said as long as I didn’t let him eat too much crap he could go? Rio told you to put it on the calendar?” Jess is all but doing backflips, slapping his forehead, exchanging high fives and low fives with his grandfather.

  “I spoke to you on Saturday?” I ask. Impossible. How could I have spoken to him if I’m not even speaking to him?

  “On me you hung up. You spoke to Rio. You don’t remember? It was the day he came home early.”

  “What day he came home early?” I wish Jesse would calm down for a minute and that the girls would stop arguing over whether or not Alyssa can bring Bratz and Beanie Babies to the assembly.

  “Saturday,” my father says. “I sent him home early because you were upset. You feeling better?” He looks damn proud of himself, as if he’s fixed everything.

  “Rio did not come home early on Saturday,” I say, feeling my husband come up behind me and watching my father look over my head at him.

  “I’m getting her one of those Palm Pilot things tomorrow,” Rio tells my father as the kids begin to get restless and Dana starts yelling at Alyssa for touching her.

  “It was Saturday,” my father says. “Don’t you remember? What? Is there something in the water in this house?”

  Rio is trying to signal my father to drop it. “I’m getting her a Palm Pilot tomorrow and teaching her how to use it. It’ll be fun. She’ll love it. It’ll fix everything.”

  “He did not come home early,” I say, telling Dana to take Alyssa to the bathroom, make sure she goes and get her hands clean, and telling Jesse to calm down, no one has told him yet that he can go. “And no one has to ‘teach me’ how to use a PDA.”

  “Okay, Teddi,” Rio says, adjusting the top button on my blouse. “You know how to use everything with buttons.” He winks at my father. “How ’bout you tell Jess he can go, and let’s get to the assembly.”

  I nod at Jess, and nod again when he holds up Harry Potter and raises his eyebrows. “Can I take this to the assembly?”

  “But not to the game,” Rio tells him. “Or you’ll tune it out like your mom does when she’s reading and all.”

  “I don’t tune out,” I say. “And you did not come home early any night this week.”

  “Okay, Teddi,” he says agreeably. “And I didn’t bring home McDonald’s, either.”

  Unfortunately this does have a familiar ring to it. (We are, singlehandedly, trying to save McDonald’s stock by upping their sales.) But it wasn’t early, was it? “At dinnertime,” I agree, waving away the gift my father is still trying to give me. When it is clear he isn’t going to give up, I take the stupid bag, set a good example for the children by telling him he should be sure to thank Angelina, and place it on the floor next to the hall tree—where I will retrieve it on Monday and send it right back to Angelina by certified mail. And that will be that.

  “Because I was fixing the gri
ll on the Expedition,” Rio says, after asking Jesse if he doesn’t know how to tie his own sneakers, and threatening to get him ones that close with Velcro if he can’t tie his ninety-eight-dollar Adidas T-MACs.

  “The grill’s fixed?” I ask, opening the door and looking at the car in the driveway. “When did you do that?”

  There is silence behind me. I turn and look at Rio.

  “Saturday afternoon. You don’t remember that?” This time Rio makes no attempt to hide the glance he exchanges with my father.

  Everyone is staring at me. Rio’s leg is shaking. His eyes avoid mine.

  Sheesh! Who can keep track of everyone’s schedule? Especially with the week I’ve had? Dr. Benjamin told me not to let these things throw me, not to make mountains out of molehills, not to look for things that aren’t really there. But what about not seeing what is before my eyes?

  Rio’s right. I need a Palm Pilot. One of the ones that can communicate with my home computer, my cell phone, my voice mail, my answering machine, the TiVo in the den, the VCR in the bedroom, the alarm system, the sprinkler system and beings from other planets. That’ll fix everything. There’s nothing like gadgets to simplify life.

  Everyone is still staring, waiting.

  “Oh, yeah, last Saturday,” I say, nodding my head and watching Rio let go of the breath he is holding, as if his life depends on my remembering he came home early. “McDonald’s. I remember now. The same day you fixed the grill and told me about the ball game.”

  CHAPTER 7

  “What did you ask me?” I ask Rio as I sign a paper for Jesse saying that I am aware that he has lost his math textbook (which I’m not, or wasn’t, but they don’t have a box to check for that, and besides, it is almost a relief that someone else has lost something) and that attached is $18.43 so that his last report card isn’t held up.

  “Milk?” Rio says, as if that is a question and he is waiting for the answer.

  “White. Comes from cows. High in cholesterol. Kids drink it,” I answer, figuring that ought to cover it.