Ordinary Hazards

by Anna Bruno

  “Let’s say I’m passed out cold.”

  “Too many whiskeys?”

  “Yeah, let’s say I had too many whiskeys and I passed out.”

  “Want me to make a salad?” We had a bag of super greens in the keeper that I had purchased at the farmer’s market. Kale and chard were the kinds of greens we forced ourselves to choke down because I insisted on a nutrient-rich diet while we were trying to get pregnant. “I’d just throw you over my shoulder and run out. Addie follows us wherever we go.”

  “You do know I weigh more than a sack of potatoes, right?” He shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder how I ever fell for you in the first place.”

  I crouched down next to him. Addie stood next to me, ready to play. I bent his body over my shoulder. The front half of Addie’s body bounced up and down. She positioned her face as close to mine as possible and then inched closer, trying to steal a lick. Lifting Lucas’s feet about two inches off the floor, I attempted to stand upright from my squatting position so I could make a move for the door. “Damn, Lucas, packing on some extra pounds, eh? Well, I’d have adrenaline pumping through me. Or! Addie and I could roll you out together.”

  “Down the stairs?”

  “Bruises beat death.” For salad dressing, I mixed mustard, fresh lemon, and a little bit of olive oil in a jar.

  “Let’s just say you are forced to choose,” he said. “Me or Addie. Who will it be?”

  “Furry love bug or chiseled hunk?”

  “You just said I put on some pounds.”

  “Yeah, pounds of muscle.” I squeezed his arm. He grabbed my ass.

  “I’d have a moral obligation to save you,” I said.

  “Classic speciesism,” he said.

  Our whole house smelled of olive oil, onions, and garlic. It was the smell of hygge. “Also, Addie can’t cook. Point, Lucas,” I said.

  “But she can lick the dishes,” he said.

  “True. She definitely does her part cleaning dishes.”

  “But she sheds everywhere.”

  “That’s why I need you both.” I pointed at her and then at him. “She sheds and you love to vacuum.”

  “I do not love to vacuum.” He poured salt into the boiling water and added the noodles. Lucas would have just winged it, waiting about as long as he thought the noodles would take and then scooping one out with a spoon to test its consistency, but I read the package and set the timer on the oven: eight minutes.

  “Then why are you always vacuuming?”

  Lucas had this enormous, industrial Shop-Vac with a long nozzle. He stuck it in nooks and crevices and sucked up dog hair.

  “Okay, I’ll admit I find it satisfying.”

  “I’m going to tell everyone at the bar,” I said. “You’ll catch hell.”

  Making fun of the guys at the bar was Lucas’s favorite pastime. Most times the jokes were spontaneous but I suspected they planned the particularly biting repartee in advance.

  “Maybe I love vacuuming more than I love you.”

  “It’s me or the vacuum. You have to choose.”

  “The vacuum doesn’t put out.”

  “You could try putting your dick in the nozzle?”

  “Suction, no friction,” he said.

  “Gross,” I said. “Point, Addie. She can’t talk.”

  We had a case of red wine in the dining room, left over from the wedding. I took out a bottle, opened it, and poured two glasses. This was my primary responsibility for the evening. Lucas still had whiskey left in his glass, but he took a sip of wine anyway.

  “Take it easy, man,” I said. “You can let it breathe for a minute.” I took a huge swig from my glass. “How’d the fire start, anyway?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I just need to know if it was your fault or Addie’s. Was it your faulty electrical wiring? Or did Addie turn on the gas stove with her paw when she tried to reach an old pizza box so she could lick it?”

  “My wiring is not faulty,” he protested.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to do it yourself, though. Maybe I should call the inspector.”

  “No one calls the inspector on themselves,” Lucas said.

  I can’t remember what the pasta tasted like. When I imagine this night, my mind inserts a facsimile of taste but I am aware it is an amalgamation of all the pasta that has touched my lips over many years—Uncle Nic’s spaghetti, Antolini’s fettuccini, the sauces Lucas and I made together, and some he made on his own. This bothers me—the fact that I cannot remember the specific pasta that Lucas made on this specific occasion. I recall the exact way he cut the onion: starting with the knife pointed toward the root, using the top knuckle on his left middle finger to guide it, slicing, then rotating the onion and dicing. I can close my eyes and smell the aroma in the house. But I cannot taste the true flavor in my mouth, try as I might. This inability to taste my memory is the thing that always tips me off to its falseness, the idea that I may have made some of it up, that my reporting of the words that passed between us may not be entirely accurate, that the way he looked at me might have been less passionate and more world-weary, that Addie might not have put her nose to my face as I stooped down to lift Lucas from the floor. Knowing this act of remembering is, at the same time, an act of misremembering is the reason every time I imagine this moment, I experience loss—not a single loss but an infinite series of fractional losses, invisible in their minuteness but known entirely to me—a side effect of my addiction to these memories, my need to relive them. Each time I return, I rub away a bit more, but I still must return, again and again, out of fear that losing them is losing everything.

  If memory serves, the conversation ended like this:

  “I’ll wait ’til we break up, and I’m a jilted lover. That’s how I’ll get back at you. I’ll call the town and tell them you put in faulty wiring.”

  “We’re married,” he said. “You can’t break up with me.”

  * * *

  CAL IS RUMMAGING THROUGH his wallet. He’s only a few feet away from me, and I can see he’s carrying a big wad of cash, maybe a thousand bucks, by the looks of it.

  He hands me a new business card: FINGER LAKES CONSTRUCTION. Under his name his title reads GENERAL CONTRACTOR, followed by his cell phone number.

  “Can I keep this?” I ask.

  “Today I did some work for Veronica Lewis,” Cal says.

  “Old Lady Lewis?” Jimmy says. Veronica Lewis is a widow in her seventies.

  When Cal isn’t pulling in fifty or sixty K for a kitchen remodel or home addition, he moonlights as a handyman, helping out people around town whenever he can. If he knows the person is hard up and can’t pay, he does work for free. Most of the time, people throw him cash. There are a couple of old ladies in town who enjoy his friendship in addition to his handiwork, and I have it on good authority that on multiple occasions he’s been offered a hundred dollars for an hour of light work.

  “Whooeee, I bet she wanted some of this.” Short Pete reaches out and tugs Cal’s beard.

  “Don’t touch my beard, man. If you must know, her hot water wasn’t working. She asked me to take a look.” He strokes his beard into place with his thumb and forefinger. He can’t think of a snappy comeback. Everything’s a competition of no consequence for these guys—who can get in the sharper dig? Who is right? Most important, who’s funnier?

  “Lemme guess,” Yag says. “The pilot light was out.”

  Cal tilts his head and smiles. “No, guy. The control panel was melted out. I replaced it. Then I hung a mirror for her.”

  “You hung a mirror for her?”

  “A heavy mirror.”

  “Did you charge her for that?”

  “She tips real well but I don’t need the money. That’s not why I do it. She lives alone. Needs the help.”

  Just about everyone in town has been on the receiving end of Cal’s kindheartedness at one time or another. He’d spend half a day helping any regular at this bar m
ove furniture for a six-pack of beer. Before he left Veronica’s house, she probably offered him something to eat, and regardless of whether he was hungry, I have no doubt he sat with her for a while and asked her how she was getting along.

  I’m glad to have his business card.

  “You really know how to hang a mirror,” Short Pete says.

  “Cal sure can hang,” Fancy Pete says.

  “That’s why the old ladies pay him the big bucks,” Yag says. “Did ya hammer the nail in the wall with your big dick?”

  Cal turns his back and walks to the front to check on Summer. His rain jacket hangs over the chair across from her—the only other seat at the table—as if he’s reserving it, though I doubt he will sit down. He slides his bulky wallet into the pocket of the jacket before rubbing foreheads with Summer. She rotates gleefully, keeping her head pressed against him—a kiss and an embrace all at once. It strikes me as so personal, so joyous.

  Cal is still nursing the same Bud Light. He has to drive Summer home by ten. By then he won’t be drunk but he won’t be entirely sober either. He’ll be just sober enough that no one here, including me, will think he’s a piece of shit for getting behind the wheel with his little girl in the car.

  “My dick joke would’ve gotten a laugh three years ago,” Yag says. He drops his head and tilts his glass toward his eye to observe the bubbles, disappointed in us all.

  Once, sitting outside in the garden at the bakery with Samantha—our entire friendship centers around the bakery (there’s only one), the juice bar / broth bar (juice in summer, broth in winter), and the salad place (a chain called Leaf for obvious reasons: Who said the corporate yuppies didn’t get their grubby little fingers this far upstate?)—lattes and almond croissants laid before us, Samantha’s baby sleeping, snug in her bassinet, I mentioned that Cal brought Summer to the bar. I made some mistake of phrasing, a comparison implicit, something like, “It’s cool that you can just bring the kid along.” Samantha’s nose crinkled and her upper lip turned up: disgust evident. “What kind of parent would bring a child to a bar?” she said. “That’s so… sad.”

  * * *

  MY DAD WAS THE second person I profiled in The Breakout Effect, after Pamela Randolph Walsh. His name was the reason the book sold in the first place. I have no delusions about that.

  Growing up, I heard bits and pieces of his story. His father, my grandfather, was a tailor from a hilltop town in southern Italy. When my grandmother fell ill, he used all of his savings and all of his time to care for her, and when she died, there was nothing left. Along with my grandmother, their town had slowly begun to die too—the shops closed one by one, first the cobbler, then the baker, then the tailor. The younger generation moved to Rome; the old lived on government subsistence. My father, then only twelve, and his brother, Nico, were sent to live in America. Dad chose to believe the reasons were economic, but based on old pictures, I think he was sent away because he looked so much like his mother.

  He was taken in by his aunt and uncle who owned land near Albany, where he was made to work the farm and rarely permitted to attend school. He might have suffered other abuse, though he never spoke of it. It was on that farm that he started dreaming of city skyscrapers, beautiful women, and Italian suits—suits made of the finest wool and silk, materials his father once admired.

  At the beginning of his career, my dad purchased a business with warehouse space in New York City’s Garment District. To do this, he borrowed money from wealthy investors. Upon consolidating the business, introducing automation, and laying off well over half the workforce, he realized he had something very valuable: space.

  My father’s foray into real estate was not especially interesting. The thing that captivated me was how an Italian immigrant from outside of Albany with no college degree convinced a cohort of wealthy investors to back him in the first place. This, I came to learn, had everything to do with a hilltop town in Italy and a love of fine Italian suits.

  The warehouse space was converted into residential lofts and sold off at a fantastic premium. The investors were over the moon. They took my dad and all the wives out to celebrate. According to my mom, when one of the investors was good and drunk, he leaned back in his chair and said cheerfully, “Hell, I can’t even remember why we agreed to give you the money in the first place.”

  And the other guy said, “You couldn’t figure out how this kid from Albany got his hands on a nicer suit than yours.”

  And the first guy laughed and said, “I figured it was a Mafia thing.”

  Then my mom told them my dad’s story, about his father, the tailor from Calabria who sent him to live with his aunt in America.

  And one of the investors said, “Well, I’ll be. Son of a tailor spins gold in the Garment District.”

  Dad never wanted for capital again. He quickly transitioned from buying buildings, renovating, and managing them, to investing in other people who did all that. Investing in things was a much better gig than actually doing things. He didn’t have to get his hands dirty (no more gloves-off fights with general contractors and tenants). And the best part: the benevolent IRS taxed his income at capital gains rates, so while every other loser punched the clock and shelled out their earnings at much higher ordinary income rates, guys like my dad, who had the money to make money, amassed enormous wealth. This was how the son of a tailor became a private equity mogul. God bless America.

  I wanted to know how he had acquired that beautiful suit, perfectly tailored, the best suit in Manhattan. When I called to ask him about it, he said, “What do you remember about your grandfather?”

  “He was a short man with small shoes. He wore a tweed coat. His eyes filled with tears when he saw me—I couldn’t have been older than six. He sat with you in the lobby of our hotel while I played by the fireplace. He spoke mostly Italian, and you, mostly English.” That was all I had. “Why didn’t Mom go with us on that trip?” I asked.

  “She was in one of her blue periods,” he said. “She couldn’t care for you at the time. I spent our last dollar on airfare for the two of us.”

  “I wish I could remember more,” I said. “My grandfather—”

  “I asked him to make me a suit,” my dad interrupted. “Before we made the trip to see him, he went to Naples to get the material, the finest in the world. He traded his labor, sewing for a much younger man who had more work than he could handle, making suits for Swiss bankers and German executives, French actors and Italian musicians. Your grandfather worked three months for three meters of material. He’d touched nothing like it before: a luxurious vicuña blend, invented by a French cloth maker. I still say that cheap Napoletano got the better trade. A quarter year of labor from one of the best tailors in Italy. Younger men don’t stitch with the same skill. But the old man returned with the material he needed. Mine was the last suit he ever made. In all my years, I’ve never found another that fits to such perfection.”

  Picturing my father and grandfather in that hotel lobby, I realized there must have been an intimacy between them that I could not understand as a small child. The old man would have pulled out his tape measure and recorded my father’s every dimension. The process probably took a long time. I could only imagine the care he put into every stitch.

  There was a question on the tip of my tongue, the only question that mattered, the question I could not ask: Did we go to Italy so your father, mio nonno, could meet his only grandchild before he died, or did we travel all that way to pick up a suit?

  My father transitioned the conversation back to me.

  “What do you want to write a book for, anyway?” His tone was gruff.

  “Because that’s what I want to do, write and teach.”

  “Your little teaching job has been a nice break from the real world.” I pictured him in a fine suit as he spoke these words.

  “In what way is it little?”

  “I’m sorry, your current teaching job.”

  “Because it pays little?”

&n
bsp; “Well, yes, for one thing.” He wasn’t speaking into the receiver when he said this. His voice began to trail off.

  “Because it carries little status?”

  “You used to be so ambitious.” When he said these words, he spoke directly into the phone, loud, abrupt, with a certain righteousness, which came across almost like anger. There were many things my father said to me over the years that annoyed or offended me, which I have long since forgotten, but these words stayed with me. They were with me when I read my first negative review; they were with me when I moved into my one-bedroom, garden-level apartment; they are with me here, at The Final Final. You used to be so ambitious.

  “This is ambitious, Dad,” I said. “This is the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done.”

  “It’s not too late to go back to finance. Use those degrees I paid for.”

  That’s what it always came back to with him: a transaction. He’d invested in me and I wasn’t paying off.

  Dad didn’t bother to read the book until it became a best seller. Then he told me it wasn’t half-bad.

  * * *

  I HAVE THIS OLD picture of my parents in their twenties: my dad with his carefree coif of thick, black hair, skinny with tan legs, and my mom in a bathing suit and big sunglasses. I use it as a bookmark for whatever I happen to be reading. From time to time, I examine the photo and try to imagine how they were back then. The picture was taken on their honeymoon, before they had any money. They are standing in front of a tiny, rustic cabin, which apparently had no electricity or running water. For a full week, they washed by swimming in the lake. The people in the photo aren’t touching but there is an energy between them, apparent in the way they look at the camera while maintaining awareness of each other, and they are at ease with themselves and the world, which anyone would notice in the looseness of their bodies, the way they appear to dance even when still. They look like completely different people—different from the people I know now and different from the people who raised me. I don’t recognize these happy people, so to imagine them as they were is a completely speculative act, a construction based partially on the anecdotes of my youth but mostly on pure fantasy. If I could not distinguish my dad’s watery, calabresi eyes, or my mom’s small, celestial nose—features I see in the mirror—it would be easier to assume these people were not my parents at all. Knowing who they are now creates cognitive dissonance that, try as I might, I cannot reconcile. How did the happiness of youth, and, beyond happiness, the characteristics of the self, existing in relation to another human being and to the world, undergo this titanic shift, such that the landscape of being is fundamentally altered and essentially unrecognizable but for a couple of lingering, ancestral features?