by Rita Ciresi
WHEN I GOT HOME for Mother's Day, forest fires were raging in southern California, a blizzard had buried the Midwest, and my father was snoring on the couch with the Weather Channel blaring on TV. During the week Babbo lugged crates of bottles through the rain, slush, and snow for the Dixon Park Soda Company. On the weekends, he experienced the great outdoors by watching the weather station for hours on end, gathering information on cold fronts, heat waves, hurricanes, and floods that never would reach his corner of Connecticut. Just look at that, he'd comment. That's some frost they got there in Florida. Or Holy Mo, get a load of those houses. Twister smashed ‘em to bits.
He always smiled and folded his hands over his stomach as he reported the news, happy to have avoided another disaster. Then he sat back and let the weatherman take him to places he never had seen and never would visit: the Texas Panhandle, the Great Plains, the High Sierras, the Rockies. I liked to think he had a secret craving for adventure that hadn't been satisfied by his annual Knights of Columbus bus trip to Yankee Stadium. Lina said he was just too lazy to get up and change the channel. She got him a remote for Christmas once. He never figured out how to use it.
The morning of Mother's Day, Babbo's heavy body sagged the couch cushions, and his belly rose and fell as he snored. I crept past him to get a drink of water. Stepping into my mother's kitchen was like entering a time warp. For years the decor had been as static as a diorama in a natural-history museum—but instead of moth-eaten buffalo, desiccated tortoises, and black snakes that had lost their shine, the kitchen was full of tasteless ceramic objects, none of which would bring more than fifty cents at the local flea market. The refrigerator was studded with Pope John Paul and Pizza Hut magnets. On the stove were planted empty salt and pepper shakers in the shape of two ears of corn. On the counter loomed four majolica canisters in the shapes of a winter squash, an artichoke, an eggplant, and a pumpkin. All of these worn and chipped items were the object of a game Lina and I used to play called Name That Ugly Thing. Lina began by identifying one of the least offensive knickknacks in the house. I countered with yet another more hideous thing. Then the race was on to top each other.
The pink porcelain baby shoe with the purple pincushion in the middle.
The condiment dish shaped like a Venetian gondola.
The plastic Pietà on top of the T V.
The crucifix studded with seashells.
The coconut with the painted face that says, Welcome to Miami Beach!
The lamp that has a great horned owl on its base.
The Last Supper plate with the heads of the apostles worn off!
Most of the ugly things had been gifts—souvenirs from relatives who had dared to venture beyond the borders of New Haven to pay pilgrimages to shrines, visit fourth and fifth cousins in Florida, or take a Perillo tour (transportation, lodging, and meals included) to Italy. Every Saturday, Mama used to dust these reminders of other people's travels, always ending with a peach-colored conch shell from Sanibel Island that sat on top of the radio. She held it to her ear to listen to the pounding of the surf (nodding as if satisfied that the sound was still there) before she blasted it with Lemon Pledge and swabbed out the dirt.
I took a glass from the cabinet and drew some water from the tap, then swallowed the water in one gulp. I put the glass down in the sink. The house always had been spotless before. Now dust covered all the knickknacks, coffee stained the counters, and white mineral deposits dulled the faucets. Upstairs, the shower curtain was spotted with mold, and the hardwood floors were littered with dust bunnies. Babbo refused to get a cleaning woman after Mama had the stroke. “Phil and I offered to send someone over,” Lina said, “but he wouldn't go for it.”
“Maybe he's afraid someone will walk off with the family heirlooms,” I said.
Lina snorted. “More like he thinks I should clean it.”
Lina lived in Wallingford, only twenty minutes out of New Haven. I lived two hours away in Poughkeepsie. Although I drove home only once a month, I usually ended up scrubbing the floors and wiping down the bathroom tiles. Part of it was due to boredom. Babbo and I had nothing to say to each other, and after five minutes of watching those cheesy-smiled weathermen chatting about air currents, wind speed, and relative humidity, I was ready to do something. But more than anything, guilt inspired me to get out the mop and broom. Mama would die if she saw this mess, I thought.
Babbo was still asleep. I bypassed the broom closet where Mama always kept the buckets, disinfectants, and scrub brushes. I went upstairs and took the hall phone into the bedroom Lina and I used to share, curled up on my twin bed, and dialed Lina's number. She answered on the first ring.
“Oh, it's you,” she said.
“Who were you expecting?”
Lina paused. “Is it springtime in the Rockies over there?”
I got up and closed the door to block out the sound of the TV. “Yes, and the Southwest is suffering from drought,” I said.
“So,” Lina's voice turned suggestive, “what was the temperature like in Florida?”
I had spent the previous weekend in Captiva with a company sales rep. “Oh, you know,” I said, “the kind of hot and heavy that quickly turns to chilly.”
“In other words,” Lina said, “you hate this guy's guts now that you've slept with him.”
“Bingo,” I said. “I got a terrible sunburn too. My face feels paralyzed it's so tight.”
“What did Babbo have to say about that?”
“He's asleep.”
“Better expect thunder,” Lina said.
“I've got my umbrella.” I twirled the phone cord around my hand, then let it go again. “What's the outlook on your home front?”
“Phil took the kids to the park,” Lina said. “That's my Mother's Day present, not to be Mommy for a day.”
“What does that say about mommyhood?” I asked.
“Not much.”
I clicked my tongue at her.
“Oh, I don't care,” she said. “I'm sick of frosting cupcakes. And I'm tired of reading bedtime stories. I don't care if Curious George flies a kite or rides a bike. I wish he'd throw himself off a bridge.”
“Then the Man in the Yellow Hat would get lonely,” I said.
Lina paused, then assumed Mama's stiff, disapproving voice. “It's about time somebody put an end to that weird relationship. A man and his monkey. What kind of fool example is that for kids?”
I kept up the imitation. “Crazy nuts.”
“Kooks,” Lina said.
“Sick heads.”
“Perverted turkeys.”
We laughed. Lina and I always had mimicked Mama, but we had been doing it more and more since she had the stroke. It was as if someone had designated us to do the talking for her now that she had been robbed of her voice.
“Babbo and I are going to see Mama in about an hour,” I said. My voice turned wheedling. “Meet us there?”
“Sorry,” Lina said. “We already went this morning. We have to take Phil's mother out to brunch.”
“You stink.”
“I'll have a Bloody Mary for you,” she said.
“Have two,” I answered, thinking of the long afternoon ahead.
“Cheer up,” Lina said. “The whole place is decked out for Mother's Day.”
“What did you get Mama?” I asked.
“I made Phil go to the florist and pick up some mums. I couldn't handle doing it myself.” Lina paused. “What's the use? She can't even see or smell them. She doesn't even know we're there.”
“You don't know that for sure,” I said.
“She doesn't even bat an eye when you sit down next to her,” Lina said. “She just sits there in her wheelchair like—like a stuffed owl, her body all stiff and her eyes all glassy.”
To me, Mama looked like a photograph of a nearsighted woman who had taken off her glasses. She didn't seem to be really there. Her face was as flat and impenetrable as the face painted on a mummy's coffin. Her body seemed as cold and hard as
a whole chicken removed from the freezer, one that would take hours to defrost.
“It's creepy,” Lina said. “I get scared looking at her. I know it's stupid, but I'm afraid if I touch her I'll turn to stone. After I visit her I want to run away and do everything I've ever wanted to do before it's too late.” She hesitated. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Who do I have to tell it to?” I asked.
Lina's voice swelled with self-importance. “I'm having an affair.”
I looked around the bedroom, suddenly reminded of the time I sat on this very bed and Lina swore me to secrecy before announcing she had smoked her first cigarette.
“Well?” Lina demanded, when I didn't answer.
“Well what? With who?”
“He's a lawyer.”
“What kind—divorce?”
“He specializes in health-insurance claims,” Lina said.
“Maybe he can help us with Mama.”
“Fool,” Lina said. “He already has. How do you think we met?”
I hadn't gotten very involved in the family finances. But I knew the insurance company had been holding back payments on some of Mama's hospital bills, and Babbo—who never questioned authority—practically had wiped out his savings trying to cover the charges. When Lina found out, she insisted on seeing a lawyer about the unpaid claims. Babbo was dead-set against lawyers. He called them lupini, a pack of wolves. But Lina went anyway, apparently ending up with one who was more of a wolf than Babbo ever could have imagined.
Lina spared me the complete story. Breathless as a teenager, she said she would save the specifics until she could talk to me in person. The gist of it was, she met the lawyer twice a week, at motels off the highway. He was on his second marriage and had a teenage boy who lived with his first wife.
Lina didn't mention—and I didn't ask—his name. I didn't want to know it. A name went with a face, and I didn't want to imagine him any more than I already did. I saw him as the kind who had a prominent collarbone and weathered neck, broad shoulders, heavy arms, and a stomach that quivered on the borderline of flabby. The whole thing made me feel sick.
“What about Phil?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“Don't you love him anymore?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. “On one level.”
“Then how can you?”
Lina clicked her tongue impatiently. “You don't know. You can't even begin to imagine what it's like being married. How boring it all is, how much you feel like you're in a cage!”
“You should try to work things out,” I said.
Lina was quiet for a moment. Then the tone of the experienced older sister came back into her voice. “You just don't understand. Phil doesn't do me the way Bob does.”
Bob. I immediately pictured heavy cheeks that smelled of aftershave, a thick mustache going gray, and a full mouth that called my sister baby. Then I saw the darkness of the motel room, the cut-glass ashtray on top of the T V, the Gideon's Bible—never opened—in the nightstand drawer, the rumpled white bedsheets, the turquoise and orange bedspread, the shaft of light that came from under the bathroom door. I was sure Bob was the kind who didn't close the door all the way, who thought the whole world was delighted by the sound of his pissing.
“You better be careful,” I warned. “Phil isn't stupid.”
“That's what I wanted to tell you. I slipped up last week.”
“Lina!”
“Relax, it wasn't Phil. It was Babbo. He caught me.”
Lina left the Howard Johnson's off I-95 around two-thirty. Just to be safe, she always parked in the back of the motels and came and went through the rear door. But as she crossed the lot to her car, a Dixon Park Soda truck rumbled up the driveway. Babbo was making a delivery.
For a moment, Lina was paralyzed. She stood in the middle of the lot with the car keys in her hand. Babbo had to stop the truck to keep from running her over. He stared at her. Then he turned the wheel sharply and pulled the truck parallel to the rear door of the motel. He continued to stare at her through the truck window.
“So what'd you do then?” I asked.
“What the hell could I do? I got in the car and drove away.”
“Why didn't you make up some excuse?”
“Like what? Hi, just dropped into HoJo's to buy the kids some saltwater taffy?”
“Anything would be better than letting him think—”
“Oh, what's the point,” Lina said. “He knew. He knows. I just wanted to warn you. Things are pretty ugly between us.”
“Did Babbo say anything to you?” I asked.
“That's not his style. It's the old freeze-out, remember? The stonewall effect?”
I remembered it well. Both Mama and Babbo met most everything they didn't like with the icy silence of disapproval. When Lina and I were young, our primary goal in life had been to get away with things. If we got caught, as we often did, Mama and Babbo turned their backs on us, like God was said to turn away from unworthy souls at the final judgment.
I didn't know what to say to Lina. The whole thing sounded seedy and gross to me. Before I knew it, I found myself lapsing into Mama's voice.
“You kids are rotten to the core,” I said.
“Heading for trouble,” Lina said.
“Gone to hell on a handcart.”
Lina laughed bitterly. “Bad eggs,” she said.
After I hung up the phone, I lay on the bed for a while, staring up at the ceiling. Lina had so many things that I wanted—an old-fashioned house so quaint it looked like it should be dusted with glitter and stuck on a Christmas card, sharp-looking clothes, and two cute little kids whose faces, throughout the course of the day, reflected a fascinating gamut of emotions, from contentment to greed, disappointment to sheer bliss. Phil made enough money so Lina didn't have to work. Twice a week she went to the gym or took classes while someone else watched the kids and cleaned the house. She went on swell vacations—to Hilton Head, Lake Placid, and Nag's Head—once a year. Why anyone would want to throw all that away for an hour at Howard Johnson's was beyond me. But when I thought about the kind of person Lina was, it wasn't surprising. Although everything eventually had worked out, as Mama and Babbo put it, Lina had married Phil for one reason: because she was pregnant. From the moment the hasty wedding arrangements had begun, we all had been holding our breath, waiting for something like this to happen. It wasn't in Lina's nature to box herself in, and it was beyond our expectations that once there she would be content.
Wallingford was no place for Lina. The women who lived there frosted their hair and painted their nails. They walked the malls in split skirts and crisscross sandals and did lunch in pairs at least once a week. Their husbands wore lime-green polo shirts and khaki pants and played eighteen holes every Saturday. Phil, in part, fit that mold. After graduating from Trinity and studying nights for his master's degree, he had become a hospital administrator. He often worked late. Weekends he spent puttering around the yard. The Lawn Doctor, Lina had referred to him last time I visited.
“Keep your eye on that man,” she said, as we sat on the back porch, watching Phil trim the hedges. “I fear for his soul. All that 2,4-D is going to his head. He donates on a regular basis to his alumni association. The doorbell rings after dinner, and he buys candy bars and raffle tickets from every goddamn kid. The other night he actually went to a Rotary Club dinner.”
Phil stopped trimming. “I didn't say I would join.”
“Let me know when you do,” Lina said, “and I'll go stick my head in the oven.”
“Sweetheart,” Phil said mildly, “you wouldn't dare mess your hair.”
Phil let Lina's barbs bounce off him. He was incredibly easy-going—the sort of decent, affable guy people always were fond of. Unless, of course, they happened to be in love with him. Which, for the past few months, I had happened to be. Just a little, I told myself. Just a little. I told myself it was a passing thing, some sort of wild crush that spun itself out of
boredom, spiraled like a funnel cloud, mashed you flat, and then whipped away just as fast as it came. It was as ridiculous as the desire in summer for a fire and hot cocoa, a lust in winter for bare legs and lemonade.
I lay still on the bed, trying to forget about how much my sunburn itched and how tight I felt inside my own skin. I remembered the dream I had, just a couple of nights ago, in which Phil and I were making love on Lina's new lawn furniture, or the one from a while ago, when we were rolling over and over on the grass—in slow motion—against a sunset as drippingly pink and yellow as the ones pictured on the condom packages. I had those dreams once every few weeks. They made me feel warm and wonderful inside. Then my alarm went off, and I woke up in my dark, stuffy apartment, having to face another day at a job I hated, or staring at the bare back of some man I hardly knew, hoping he wouldn't stick around for breakfast.
It made me want to laugh with despair to think of how much trouble Mama and Babbo had gone through to raise us as good girls. Was it because of that, or in spite of it, that we had turned into the types who went into bars and hotels, ordering double drinks and double rooms for the afternoon, without the slightest hint of guilt or unease?
Just look at the two of them, I could hear Mama saying. One carrying on with a lawyer, the other a hot pants over her own brother-in-law. Madonna, what a crazy family.
I got up from the bed. Thinking about how low Lina and I had sunk made me want to scrub down the house. In the hall closet, I found a jumbo can of Lemon Pledge and a box of rags Mama had fashioned from Babbo's worn-out underwear. Mama never had believed in wasting good money on paper towels. Once a year she used to gather up all of Babbo's worn-out boxer shorts, cut snips in the legs, and pull the shorts, with great loud ripping sounds, into neat little rags. She wore a tiny, grim smile on her face. “Jesus Christ,” Lina once said, “what in the world could she have been thinking of while she did that?” I didn't want to know, so I didn't answer.
I couldn't handle using my father's old underwear to dust the house, so I grabbed an extra box of Kleenex. I started to clean Mama and Babbo's bedroom, which had been forbidden territory when we were growing up. I still felt like I was breaking rules by going in there. The shades were down, making the room look as musty as it smelled. I popped them up to the top of the windows, flooding the room with sunlight, and opened one of the panes a crack. Outside, robins dotted the lawn and the smell of lilacs pervaded the air. It would be a perfect Mother's Day, I thought, for any mother who went out to enjoy it. But Mama never went outside now. And Lina had passed up her chance to go to the park, waiting for her lawyer to call.