by Liza Rodman
Tony and Christine spent the weekend stoned to the gills on LSD and barbiturates, with some Thorazine here and there to bring them down when they’d taken too much speed. They reportedly professed their love for each other and Tony went one step further, telling people they were to be married. The weekend ended abruptly when Christine’s mother drove up to Provincetown and took her daughter back to Fall River, and Tony returned to Dedham. Christine was scheduled to move to New York City the next day.
Disappointed at missing Tony in Provincetown, Susan returned to Dedham on Tuesday, September 3. The next day, her girlfriends brought her the green army duffel bag of clothes she’d wanted. They all went to the Boston Common, where they scored some drugs before returning to Tony’s apartment. Since her friends had to be back in Provincetown for school the next day, they headed home in the early evening. As their car pulled out of the driveway, Susan and Tony stood on his front porch waving goodbye. Susan had her arms around his neck, kissing him.1 They never saw her again.
Two days later, Tony himself left Dedham and headed back to Provincetown. He was “going like hell,”2 heading north on Route 6 in Truro, when he got pulled over by state trooper Edgar Thomas Gunnery because his muffler was loud enough to cause a disturbance. Tony got out of his car and walked toward Gunnery, something Gunnery thought odd and a sure sign the driver didn’t want police to look inside his car.
“Evening, Officer,” Tony said, putting out his hand and giving Gunnery his best Eddie Haskell smile as the officer approached him.
Gunnery’s instinct told him the guy was hiding something, but he didn’t have a warrant or just cause to search the car, so he gave Tony a warning to get the muffler fixed and sent him on his way.
“That kid’s a real smoothie,” Gunnery said to himself as he walked back to his cruiser.
After Tony got back to Provincetown, he borrowed a car with a less noisy muffler and several tools, including a shovel, from a friend’s parents. When he returned the car, the tools and shovel were missing and the car was full of sand. Tony never accounted for either.
30 LIZA
A few days after Labor Day, Mom and Joan decided they needed to have one last “fun run” to Hyannis before the end of the summer season, to shop and linger over martinis after a long and lazy lunch of fried clams and coleslaw at Baxter’s Fish N’ Chips on the wharf. Louisa and I sat on the edge of her bed while she tried on one outfit after another, tossing the rejects into an ever-growing pile on the bed. She was in a rare good mood—happy and cheerful—and we both sat as still as we could, hoping it would last. After many combinations of clothes, Mom finally selected what she thought was the perfect outfit: a simple red skirt, a white cotton blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a checkered scarf around her neck, and a wide white leather belt tying it all together. She clipped big red plastic earrings onto her earlobes and pirouetted through the room checking herself out in the mirror over her dressing table. Satisfied, she sat down in front of the mirror and applied her trademark blue eye shadow, black eyeliner, black mascara, and a dab of rouge on each cheek. Then she picked up her lip liner and began drawing a careful pink line around her mouth.
“Girls, I know I’ve said this before,” she said, her lips stretched taut over her teeth. “Do you remember what I told you is the most important piece of makeup?” Without waiting for our answer, she continued, filling in the pink boundary around her mouth with Yardley’s “Pink Plus” lipstick as she spoke.
“Lip. Stick,” she said, making it two distinct words and patting her lips together with a smack smack smack. “Because not only can you use it on your lips”—she then touched the lipstick tip to each cheek and gently smoothed the small pink smudges into her cheekbones—“you can also use it for rouge.” She turned her head in the mirror this way and that, admiring the result.
“And, finally,” she said, again pausing for effect before putting a tiny dab of it on the tip of her index finger and then putting the finger to her eyelids, “in a pinch you can use it, but only sparingly, as eye shadow.”
Louisa and I exchanged a look, not at all sure of her all-makeup-in-one tutorial; I was just happy to be near her and not feel afraid.
“There!” she said, capping the lipstick with a satisfied click and throwing it into her pocketbook. She stood up with a final admiring glance in the mirror and put the pocketbook straps over her arm. “Okay! Joan should be here any minute, and then we are outta here!”
It was Sally’s day off, and I knew Bob was feeling poorly (Mom had laughed that maybe it was his time of the month, which I didn’t think was very nice), so I wondered who she was corralling into looking after us. Just then, she saw Tony heading out of the Royal Coachman with a load of garbage.
Bingo, I thought, and ran outside. He saw me and pulled into the Bayberry’s driveway.
“Looks like you’re dressed up for a night on the town,” Tony said to Mom, “but it’s only ten o’clock in the morning.” He gave a short laugh that wasn’t cheerful at all.
“Joan and I are headed to do some errands and have a little lunch in Hyannis,” she said, tying the checkered scarf around her head. “Now that you’re here, can you watch the kids for a few hours?”
He didn’t answer her immediately, and I was worried he’d say no, that he was busy or that he just didn’t want to. He sure didn’t seem like he wanted to. But then he looked away from Mom and down at me and smiled.
“Sure, I’d be happy to. I always like company out to the dump. How long do you think you’ll be?” he said.
“Oh, you know Joan and me! Once we get started on errands, we lose all track of time! But we should be back before suppertime.”
Just then, Joan drove up in her bright yellow Karmann Ghia convertible, and Mom hopped in.
“Okay then! Thanks, Tony. You’re a doll.”
Tony muttered something, but I couldn’t hear what.
“I gotta make a run to the dump. Let’s go,” he said.
I pushed Louisa up onto the truck, then climbed in after her, pressing her against the door so I could sit, as I always did, next to Tony. When we got to the dump, Louisa and I stayed in the truck while he threw the motel’s trash into the open pit and then poked through a pile of old radios and televisions, looking for ones he thought he could sell. They appeared pretty broken and rusty to me, but occasionally he found one that looked brand-new, and I wondered why anyone would throw out a perfectly good TV. Tony never seemed surprised at finding the shiny, clean radios and televisions; he just wrapped them in an old blanket he kept folded under the front seat and placed them carefully in the back of the truck.
After he was done digging around, he got back in the truck and started the engine.
The seagulls were swarming above us; their caws were so loud Tony had to lean toward me to be heard. He lit a cigarette while he focused on the bumpy road out of the dump.
“Do you know what seagulls eat?” Tony said.
“I dunno,” I said. “Maybe garbage?”
He blew a string of perfect smoke rings before answering.
“That and a lot more. Especially fish. Watch ’em sometime. They fly just above the ocean’s surface and then use their claws to reach down and grab their dinner right out of the water. It’s wild.”
He downshifted the truck, and it lurched. I grabbed for the dashboard to keep from being thrown off the front seat. Louisa lunged for the armrest near her. He didn’t seem to notice the rough ride.
“Did you know a seagull can eat an entire rabbit, whole?” he said.
I wondered how he knew such a thing, but I didn’t ask.
“I’ve got to check on my stuff in the woods, okay?”
“Sure,” I said, knowing Mom wouldn’t be home for hours.
Once again, we headed down to Truro, but instead of entering the woods on the dead-end road off Route 6, Tony drove around and approached his secret garden through the cemetery at the other end. He drove past a few rows of tombstones and stopped the truck at the edge of the cemetery. H
e told me we were going to walk from there. He seemed anxious. I got out, told Louisa to stay put, and followed him to the woods. As we approached the clearing, which I now knew the kids called lovers’ lane, I smelled something like burning leaves and could hear music filtering toward us. Then I saw that there was a party going on. There were two VW buses with flower power decals on them parked in the clearing, and a bunch of kids not much older than I was stood around smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. The air was hot and clammy in the woods. Someone had made a sort-of lean-to, so I had some shade out of the sun. It was a good thing, because Tony told me to stay with the kids while he disappeared into the woods.
He was gone a long time.
31 TONY
Tony never again stepped foot in Dedham. He didn’t even bother to call his boss at Starline Construction; he just didn’t show up for work. Instead, he returned to Provincetown, landing on Vinnie and his girlfriend’s couch. Often “inconsolable,” Tony offered no explanation for his dark mood and he spent the next couple of weeks stoned to near oblivion.1 When he walked the streets of Provincetown, they felt deserted now that Labor Day had come and gone and nearly all the tourists and summer people had left.
The silence seemed to unnerve Tony. He took a handful of Nembutal to quiet the voices in his head, voices that became screams in the empty streets. “You promised… you promised!” one of them cried.2 But the drugs didn’t work; the voices only got louder, so he did something he hadn’t for a long, long time. He went to confession at St. Peter’s. He needed penance. He needed salvation. He needed forgiveness. His only hope, he thought, was to confess his sins and emerge absolved. Totally absolved. That sounded right. But when he got to the church, a group of faithful parishioners was practicing the ancient ritual of walking the stations of the cross, and their shuffling feet across the stone floor of the sanctuary sounded to him like a chorus of those accusatory voices. Tony looked around, expecting to see angry faces looking at him, their shouts of defamation echoing through the pews. But all he saw were the bowed heads of the pious, and he fled, unforgiven.3
Later that day, he was walking down Commercial Street and saw Davy Joseph, one of Susan’s friends who’d crashed in the Dedham apartment the week before.
“Hey, Tony,” Davy said. “How’s Sue?”
Tony shrugged. “I dunno. She’s gone. Just took off for Mexico with a bunch of druggies. But she left this,” Tony said, and reached into the front pocket of his white corduroy jeans. He pulled out a ring and handed it to Davy. “She said to give it to you.”
It was a class ring that Susan had finagled out of a boy she’d been hoping to date, but it held no sentimental value for either Susan or Davy.
Davy held it out on his flat, open palm and looked up at Tony. “I don’t want this. Why would she want me to have it?”
Tony shrugged again. “No idea, Davy. Gotta run. See ya,” he said as he walked away, heading toward the west end of town. Dave stood in the street, still looking at the ring.
When asked, Tony told Susan’s friends what he had told Davy—that she “had split for Mexico” with some “cats” she’d done drugs with on the Boston Common. He offered nothing more, and no one asked. She had become so estranged from her family that her parents didn’t even report her as missing. And so, the sad girl who so desperately wanted to find love simply vanished, and no one seemed to notice, or much care.
With Tony out of the Dedham apartment, Cecelia told Vinnie to go and clean the place, but not simply to empty out the refrigerator and sweep the floor. He was sent primarily to retrieve Tony’s gun from the bedside table as well as check what condition Tony had left the apartment in. Vinnie did as he was told.4
32 LIZA
Now that we were going to be living on the Cape full-time, Mom did two things to get us ready for our new life. First, she enrolled me and Louisa in the Provincetown elementary school, and then she gave away Louisa’s puppy, Holly Berry, to a friend of Auntie’s. Mom said the dog would probably get hit by a car anyway, so better to give her away before that happened.
“People who live on busy streets shouldn’t have dogs,” was all she would say as we drove away from the new owners’ house and Louisa sat, inconsolable and sobbing, in the back seat. I guess Mom never thought of putting up a fence.
Provincetown was building a new grade school that wasn’t finished yet, so at the beginning of the school year they put us in the basement of the high school. Right after school started, I saw Tony talking with some high school kids on the playground and waved to him. He finished up his conversation, stuffed something in his pocket, and came over to where I was watching some of the kids play dodgeball.
“Hey, Tony, what are you doing here? At school, I mean,” I said.
He looked over his shoulder, then back at me. “Aw, nothing. Just checking in with some cats and chicks of mine.”
Tony was a grown-up, and I thought it was strange that he had friends still in high school, but I didn’t say anything. I was the new kid in my class and hadn’t made any friends yet, so I was just happy to see a friendly, familiar face.
* * *
Toward the end of October, Louisa had her first Holy Communion. Mom broke her own rule and attended the mass, and Dad said he’d come down for it too and then take us all to lunch. I spent the entire mass turning around in my pew, looking at the door, waiting for him to show up, until Mom pinched my ear and told me to sit still and behave. I settled in and watched the parade of little girls in their miniature white bride dresses and veils float down the aisle to Father Duarte, who put the holy host in their tiny mouths. They looked like baby birds in a nest—little pink open mouths raised up to Father Duarte. Body of Christ, amen. I knew it by heart and looked around the church, bored. Tony’s son Peter, who was two years younger than Louisa, sat in a nearby pew with Cecelia, looking just as bored as I was.
After the mass, we sat on the front steps of the church, waiting for Dad. Peter and Cecelia were also there, I supposed waiting for Tony, but he had been a no-show for the service. Same as Dad.
“He’s such an asshole,” Mom said to no one in particular as she paced in front of the church, smoking her little cigars, one after another.
It was a chilly day, and even though Louisa and I were dressed in our best Sunday wool coats and little gloves, we got colder and colder sitting on the stone steps as the wind picked up. I had a wool hat on, but Louisa refused to take off her white veil, so she was even colder. Below us on the sidewalk, Mom stomped back and forth, muttering.
After about a half an hour, Cecelia and Peter stood up and she brushed off the seat of his pants.
“Well, we better head home,” she said, bowing her head against the cold and wincing a little as she walked Peter down the steps. I never knew who they’d been waiting for, but if it was Tony, he was nowhere in sight.
Mom nodded at them and continued her pacing. Whenever a car approached from down the street, she stopped and squinted at it until she saw that it wasn’t Dad and started pacing again. Finally, she stopped in front of us, her hands on her hips, blocking the sun and what little heat it offered.
“It’s noon. C’mon, get up off those steps. He’s not coming. Obviously.” Then to herself she added, “I shoulda fucking known he wouldn’t show. Asshole.” She grabbed Louisa’s hand and pulled her down the steps. Louisa stumbled after her, her free hand trying desperately to hold her veil on her head. I followed them down the stairs and across the church’s parking lot to Mom’s car, the only one still there.
“Get in,” she said, fishing the keys out of her purse. When we had closed the doors behind us, she put the key in the ignition and started the engine, giving one last look toward the church and down the empty street. She gritted her teeth, revealing her famous fangs, then banged the steering wheel with both hands. “Shithead!”
She put the car in gear and it lurched forward, its tires squealing as she accelerated out of the parking lot and through the narrow streets and toward the Bayberry
Bend.
Louisa and I hung on to our doors, trying to avoid sliding all over the back seat as Mom took most corners on two wheels. Louisa quietly cried and used her free arm to wipe her nose on the sleeve of her coat. It was a beautiful coat, light blue wool with pearl buttons that Mom had sewn herself. I worried Mom would yell at her to stop wiping her snot all over the coat, that she would ruin it. But Mom didn’t yell. She didn’t even look at us. She just drove, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. Under my coat, I could feel my arms start to itch.
That night for dinner, she plunked plates of cold canned spinach and barely boiled hot dogs in front of me and Louisa. We looked at the thin green water leaking toward the hot dog and then up at her. She stood over us, a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other.
“What?” she said. “Not good enough for my little princesses?”
I knew I should keep my mouth shut, but I was afraid if I tried to eat what was on the plate, I’d throw it right back up and then she’d be even more mad.
“Could we have some ketchup?”
She looked at me, and I watched her eyes narrow into a dangerous squint. She slowly opened the fridge and pulled out the ketchup bottle. Then, while holding the cigarette between her teeth, she poured the ketchup until it covered my hot dog and spinach and just about the entire plate. When the bottle was almost empty, she slammed it down on the table, hard enough to make my glass of milk jump.
“There you go, Little Liza, just like you requested. Is there anything I can get you, Your Highness?”
I shook my head but didn’t dare speak or look up at her; tears were dripping onto the red mess, and I knew my crying would only make it worse.
“Okay, then. You sit there until you’ve finished every last bite. Food costs money, you know.” She stormed out of the tiny efficiency kitchen by the office.
But I couldn’t finish dinner; I couldn’t even start it. Long after Louisa had finished hers and gone to our room, I sat at the table waiting for it to get late enough for Mom to have gone to sleep, before I dared get up and go to bed.