Jules had brought Mike home to Akron on summer break, during a body-melting heat wave. It was her grandma’s birthday. Reaching up with her pale, doughy hands to cradle Mike’s face, her grandma had stared up into his blue eyes.
“Such a beautiful boy,” her grandma had purred in her velvety Sicilian drawl. “Oh, so beautiful, and a wonderful boy to marry.”
Mike had grinned.
Grandma had been very busy making her specialty dishes the day before. Jules’s mother had said nothing, leaving the kitchen to Grandma’s culinary magic. To show what a good daughter she was. She hadn’t wanted to relinquish control at first.
“I’d like to cook for my own birthday,” Grandma had said.
“Nah, Ma, I’m going to cook,” her mother had yelled. “It’s the least I can do to celebrate your birthday.” She’d raised her arm, as if to strike her own mother—something Jules had seen her do many times before, to her and Joanne and Andrew—but at the very last second she had bitten her forearm, then lowered it as a welt formed, and tied her apron tighter.
“I should be able to have what I want for my own birthday, now shouldn’t I?” Grandma had said, and everyone else had nodded. They were all hoping for a break from their mother’s cooking or frozen TV dinners.
“Mother, why can’t Grandma eat something else besides lamb chops?” Jules had asked later, casting a sympathetic glance at her grandmother. Soaked with the juices from the meat, the cutting board had a solitary gray raw chop resting on top of a fresh red stain.
“She’s diabetic.” Her mother’s jaw clenched. She could see a little knob of bone where the mandible bulged below the earlobe. “She can’t eat carbohydrates—white foods.”
“Not even for her birthday?” Jules asked, hoping for a different answer.
“I’m not an all-night diner. Lincoln freed the slaves,” her mother replied, voice higher, wringing her red-and-white dishtowel as if it were sopping wet. Then she bit her arm. Hard. Drew blood.
Jules thought of the animals that got caught in her father’s traps when he and Andrew went hunting. Some bit off their own paws to survive. She glanced at Mike, who’d seen the whole thing. He looked stunned.
After pasta—for everyone except Grandma—Jules carried in a tiny pink box. Mike gave her a quick hug, encouraging her, as she slipped out a cupcake with pink icing and “Grandma” written on it. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you,” Jules sang, feeling giddy, as she brought it to the table with one lit candle on a paper plate borrowed from her friend Deirdre.
“What do you think you’re doing, young lady?” her mother said, yanking the plate away. The candle sputtered and went out.
“I know she can’t eat it, but I thought she could have the fun of blowing out the candle and watching us eat tiny mouthfuls,” Jules said.
“What’s all the fuss about, anyway?” her mother said, picking up the paper plate and dumping it in the trash can. “Birthdays are just a reminder you’re getting old.”
Jules could smell the faint Parmesan cheese residue on her grandmother’s housecoat, which revealed her ample décolletage. A warm, motherly woman. The closeness felt good. No one else she knew looked at all like her Grandma. She belonged in some old movie as a background extra with Sophia Loren or some other Italian diva, stealing the scenes. Grandma was a plump, sumptuous cupcake.
Sarah blew out the stubs of the candles before they melted into the white icing, like miniature snowmen collapsing, melting into the letters that spelled out “Grandma.” Giggling, she pulled a candle out and started sucking the icing off it.
After the Crab Pot celebration, Sarah and Megan wanted to walk to the boardwalk and look out over the water at the Mukilteo lighthouse. Jules looked back to see the girls shivering in their short-sleeve, satiny dresses. Typical kids, oblivious to the frigid weather in the name of fashion. They wandered off in another direction, near some souvenir shops. Jules was left alone with Al.
“You know, I think seeing how your mother gnaws away at your father would frighten anyone. All that marital flesh eating,” he whispered, as if it were a secret.
Jules’s mother crossed her arms tightly and leaned heavily against the railing, watching the movement of the waves in the dark. A dim light or two shone on the water for safety reasons. The chamber of commerce wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt.
Jules had chanted to herself the Buddhist mantra of mindfulness and loving-kindness: “May you be happy, may you be healthy. May you be free from worry. May your life be filled with loving-kindness.” She uttered this meditation in reverse order. Instead of friends and family first, acquaintances second, enemies third, and then the world of strangers last, Jules started with human beings she would never know. She chanted “May you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be free from worry” to those she disliked. She chanted “May your life be filled with loving-kindness” to acquaintances. Then she chanted all four wishes to her family. Why did she have to work hard placing her parents in the same category as strangers, let alone friends? Would helping her parents through this make her feel less like an outlier? Did anyone ever truly know their mother and father?
It was the same mantra she had silently chanted before on other festive occasions. May you be happy—her mother had wanted to be happy, hadn’t she? Didn’t everyone?
A DIVA ON TAPE
All she’d ever wanted to do was sing.
As a student nurse at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, Aida would pass by her Uncle Gino’s restaurant/dinner club on Gun Hill Road after classes were over. Nothing fancy, but there was a little stage, and she loved being on it. She was always hoping against hope that the regular waitress-singer had called in sick so she could fill in.
“Hello, my singing princess,” Uncle Gino had said that day, kissing her with heavy tobacco breath, smelling of sweat. Aida knew that her uncle was a dirty old man. She could put up with the groping, though. For an audience. For a pathway to a singing career.
“Any chance I’ll get to sing tonight?” she asked him. “I’m always ready to do ‘Someone to Watch Over Me.’ ” That was her torch song.
Uncle Gino shook his head, regret in his eyes. “Sorry, sweetheart. Not tonight.”
Aida always wore the black crepe dress, the one that made her look like Elizabeth Taylor, when she sang at the club. Low-cut, sultry; stiletto heels to make her stand out even more. To be a nightclub singer at a New York restaurant and bar—that’s what she had really wanted, she thought as she dragged herself home. Not to be some drudge cleaning up blood and shit, taking temperatures, and looking at old, sickly bodies ready to die. She was the best-looking nursing student at Montefiore Hospital, after all. And even her name destined her for a better life—a life of beauty and song, like the opera Aida but without the tragedy. Her fiancé, Steve Seigel, a psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital, had said she could do whatever she wanted after marriage. He wasn’t good looking. He wasn’t even the smartest psychiatrist at Bellevue. I could do so much better, she thought as she opened her front door.
The dorm phone rang and she picked up.
“Hello, this is Bob Whitman, calling for Nancy Sanders. Is she in?”
“Nope, she’s out.” Nancy was the head nurse and her nemesis, a prissy know-it-all, plain if not downright homely, with no fashion sense whatsoever. “Don’t know when she’ll be back.” What was her instructor, Dr. Whitman, doing with that spinster? Was he her fiancé?
“Well, could you take a message for me? I was hoping to take her out for a drink and dinner.”
Aida could hear the disappointment in his voice. He always blushed so easily in front of the students, and seemed shy. He wasn’t as boring as some of her instructors. No great personality either, though. Yet he was rather handsome. For a doctor, that is.
“I’m not doing anything right now, if you want to go for a drink. That is, if I’ll do?”
She heard a gulp at the other end of the phone. Shortly after that drink, they had both broken off their enga
gements and gotten married.
Aida remembered how excited Bob had been a week after the wedding. They were moving to Akron, Ohio.
“You’ll love it,” he told her. “Akron’s offer to open a medical practice near the tire companies is too good to refuse. A great place to raise a family, too.”
Of all places: Akron, Ohio. No nightlife. No nothing. Just dreary suburban doctors’ wives sitting around all day with their brats, gossiping on the phone to each other and making perfect cakes and lunches for each other. Never, never.
Akron was in its heyday then—a rapidly growing city, a boomtown. So Aida shopped with the other doctors’ wives after the kids were dropped off to school. She had an unlimited bank account, or so it seemed to her. That’s the least her husband could do with all she had to put up with. And the automobiles. Two of the most expensive cars on the market sat in their garage, provided as gifts by the CEOs in appreciation for the medical services her husband provided to their factory workers. Aida knew that her parents had photographs of those cars plastered on their refrigerator, as evidence of their daughter’s living the dream. She always drove the pink Cadillac.
Aida had pretended to like Akron. Their home—a white Dutch Colonial clapboard with green shutters, a screened-in porch, and a solarium surrounded by dogwoods—was the standout on the block. Perhaps that was her consolation prize. She was so proud of the dogwood trees framing the solarium that she’d had custom draperies embroidered with their blossoms. She never replaced them. They eventually faded until the dogwood blossoms were virtually obliterated, just weathered white blotches on washed-out blue linen. Those curtains now hung in their apartment at SafeHarbour.
That house had only one bathroom—huge, but impractical. Over the years, there were bathroom fights between Jules and her brother. One fight was so bad that when Andrew blocked the door, Jules threw up on the floor in front of her brother, some chunks spraying all over him. Aida never had been able to understand what Jules was thinking. So opaque. Not like Joanne. Andrew was somewhere in between, but a mother knows most of the time what her son is thinking.
That morning, before her little Julia’s first big day in kindergarten, Aida had struggled to help her get dressed in her brand-new white starched blouse with a Peter Pan collar and navy-blue pleated skirt. How that kid hated to get dressed. The school uniform would be a blessing. No arguments or decisions about what to wear. Julia stiffly walked into the classroom with her, trying to hold her hand. It was so tiring, Aida kept dropping it: such a sweaty little hand, soft and spongy, almost boneless.
“Darling, you’re a big girl now. No need to cling on to me. Teachers don’t like that. Do you see anyone else holding on to their mommies?”
Her little girl looked around. Some of the little girls were already sitting at low round tables, looking at the art supplies in the center and picking out the best colors for themselves. Aida spotted another little girl, shorter than her daughter, clasping her mother’s hand. Her mother was trying to let go, too, but the girl was holding on with both hands, walking sideways and bumping into other chairs and toys in the room.
“Hi,” Julia said, walking up to the other little girl, tugging Aida with her. “I’m Julia.” She didn’t adopt that ridiculous nickname, “Jules,” until she was a teenager. Her little girl did it to reject her good taste. Aida was certain of that.
“Hi, I’m Deirdre,” the small child said, her light brown hair clipped back with two little Bambi deer barrettes. Deirdre smiled right up at her little Julia.
“Oh, your name sounds like a deer—is that why you have Bambi barrettes?” Julia asked.
Deirdre clapped her hands, jumping up and down, laughing and bouncing. Aida could see that Julia liked her already.
“You think I’m a deer like Bambi, because of my name? No one’s ever said that to me before.”
“Yep, and your hair’s Bambi color.” Julia touched Deirdre’s hair, then reached for her hand and they walked off to sit down at a corner table, away from the other mothers and girls. They became best friends, and remained so until they were both married.
That birthday dinner last night had been an obligation. Family matters. Celebrations for her were now long gone. Some quiet time would be nice, Aida thought as she pulled out her tape recorder and her old tapes, some wrinkled and partly unwound, from where they were carefully stored in a shoebox under the bed. She had loved playing those old recordings before her kids came home from school. A familiar ritual. She had been red hot and in her glory back in the day. It didn’t seem that long ago to her. Certainly not yesterday—not a flash ago. She had been so light hearted in those days. A pretty little thing. But now, she was only a diva on tape. Her signature song … how she loved the sound of her own voice. Singing was her meditation. It seemed like her kids had just left for Our Lady of Sorrows hours ago. Not almost forty years ago.
Aida had always tried to hide the shaker, cold and metallic, sweaty on the sides, before the kids got out of school.
“Mommy, where are you? Mommy, Mommy!”
Aida hated hearing Julia and Deirdre’s feet clambering up the stairs. Every day, incessantly.
“I’m in here, darlings.”
She saw her daughter look at her face, puzzled, perhaps a bit scared.
“What are you doing on the floor, Mommy?”
“Listening to my favorite song.” She knew her daughter could see the tape recorder before her, her legs curled under her. Her muffled voice singing “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly.”
“Oh,” Jules muttered. “Me and Deirdre are hungry. Can we have ice cream?”—and then Aida couldn’t make out what her daughter was trying to say after that. She felt a bit woozy, head spinning.
“What did you say?” she remembered asking, but her daughter looked blurry and kind of weird. She never could figure out how they were related. But her Jules did love to sing—just like her mama.
Singing with her friends at the annual talent show and theater productions at SafeHarbour—that’s what she had to look forward to now. How times had changed! With their debts, they would be lucky to have money to pay for dry cleaning soon. But Jules knew what to do—and Aida could count on her daughter. Her sense of obligation. Her duty. There was time to sort all that out later.
All those birthdays over the years, and what gratitude had been shown? Birthdays, birthdays—just a marker for the passage of time.
SHADOW DAD
He had deserved better, so much better. Looking down at the beginnings of a potbelly, cultivated for over two decades now, Bob Whitman slumped over his chrome and red Formica kitchen table, hearing the crunch of the plastic seat cover as he shifted his weight. That kitchenette table and chairs reminded him of the diners in LA, the ones where he could only peek in the windows, watching diners eat hot turkey sandwiches on Wonder bread, the white gooey bread all soggy and covered with rich light brown gravy the color of candy caramels. When he first had the money to eat in a diner—in the Bronx, when he was a hospital resident—he had thought he had died and gone to heaven. Now, he wasn’t the moneymaking machine he had been for his family. The sacrifices he had made. If they only knew. Looking around the table at his teenage kids and wife in those days, no one ever made eye contact. Not even his wife. Especially not her.
Everyone should follow his passion. That was his mantra. Money hadn’t been an obsession. It had been his passion. There was a difference.
And now what did he have to show for a lifetime of hard work? Eighty-four years of life, reduced to this.
Bob sat at the computer, tapping rhythmically on the calculator side of the keyboard. The numbers just didn’t add up. Scrolling down through the pie charts from Fidelity Investments, the right-hand column, “Change Since Purchase,” was all in red. How had all his stocks gone south? Two thousand and eight was the worst year on record for him. The Great Recession had become the Great Depression, and he certainly felt depressed. His wife’s birthday dinner at the Crab Pot hadn’t been worth celebra
ting either.
He hoped Jules could help. Aida was a liability: “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours.” Bob had little that he could call his own.
It wasn’t easy to admit that he had become a doctor for the lifestyle—not to heal others. His mother had died while giving birth to his youngest brother in a ramshackle hovel near the Los Angeles oilrigs of the 1930s. He was only three. His drunk of a father mostly ignored him and his three other brothers, so the baby brother was sent to live with an aunt. Bob became the youngest who still lived at home, with his older brother Wilson watching over him. His father didn’t waste any time getting a housekeeper/stepmother who dressed him up in starched pastel-pink pinafores with lacy hems and hair bows, a stale memory. Soon all his friends called him “Barbie,” and that was way before Barbie dolls. His brothers had trouble saying “Bobby,” and the dreaded nickname stuck. Ever since, he had never been very comfortable around girls and then women. Only guys.
After their father died from an alcohol binge, Bob’s brothers took out huge loans to pay for his medical school tuition at UCLA, even though they themselves were living from paycheck to paycheck. Bob promised to pay them back by covering the tuition of any nephew who was accepted into a medical program. Charlie, his brother Wilson’s son, had only been an infant at the time, so no one knew, of course, if he would have to make good on his promise.
At Montefiore Hospital he became engaged to Nancy Sanders—not good looking by anyone’s standards, not even by a close girlfriend’s generous and kind opinion, but she was refined and came from a good family. So he would be happy enough with her. Besides, she was the head nurse, and studious. She was good company. Not too quiet, not too noisy. Like Goldilocks. And not dumb, like some of the others. She would be a fine mother for his children. With his intellect and her slightly lesser one, their kids wouldn’t be just average in the smarts department.
Things Unsaid: A Novel Page 3