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“You don’t think that’s wrong?” my mother chimed in, giving the sauce one last stir before she joined us at the table. “He’s been to this house I don’t know how many times, and he doesn’t invite Angela into his own home? To meet his parents?”
Nonnie shrugged, grabbed up some more chopped meat, rolled. “Don’t his parents live in, whatsit—Massachusetts?” she said. The way she said Massachusetts made it clear that this wasn’t as desirable a location as, say, Brooklyn. Because in Nonnie’s world, there really weren’t too many places outside of Brooklyn she felt it necessary to be. Her own mother had moved here from Naples as a teen, and Nonnie had grown up right on Delancey, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. In all these years, she’d never really seen any reason to go anywhere else. According to her, Brooklyn had everything a person could need: Al’s Butcher had the best Italian sausage, and there really wasn’t a better bagel to be had anywhere in New York than at Brooklyn Bagelry, never mind the rest of the country. And with Kings Plaza a short walk away and packed to the brim with shops that kept her in polyester and high-heeled Cubby Cobblers, what more did a woman need?
“He’s not serious about her. And I don’t like that,” my mother said, putting up the water for the pasta.
“Serious. Who needs serious? There’s plenty of time for that,” Nonnie said with a wave of one ringed hand.
She was right, I realized. Why was I in such a hurry, anyway? Kirk and I hadn’t even been together two years yet. Getting all worked up about marriage seemed a bit…premature. Didn’t it?
Returning to the table and grabbing a hunk of chopped meat, my mother eyed me and Nonnie with a shake of the head. “Did you bring up the sausage from your freezer?” she asked my grandmother.
“No, I didn’t have any,” Nonnie said lightly. “But don’t worry. I asked Artie to bring it.”
“Artie?” my mother said, “Gloria Matarrazzo’s husband?”
“Gloria’s dead,” Nonnie said, rolling the meat between her hands. “Has been for a good year now, God rest her soul. You should know that, Maria. You went to the funeral.”
“So why’s he coming here?” Ma asked.
“I invited him,” Nonnie replied, as if this should come as no surprise to anyone.
“You what?” my mother said, pausing midroll.
“What?” my grandmother replied, eyes wide with innocence. “We’re friends. We’ve been playing poker together on Friday nights for fifteen years now. I can’t invite the man to my home for dinner?”
But as Nonnie turned her attention to the meat once more, I could swear her cheeks were slightly flushed.
“What are you up to?” Ma demanded, putting words to the suspicion that lurked in my own mind.
But before she got her answer, the doorbell rang. “I’ll get it!” my grandmother announced, rushing to the sink to rinse her hands. Then, checking her reflection in the microwave door, she gave her curls a quick pat and headed to the living room and the front door, leaving my mother and me staring after her in surprise.
“Artie! Glad you could make it,” we heard her exclaim from the next room. And within moments, she was leading Artie Matarrazzo into our kitchen. “Look who’s here!” Nonnie announced, gripping his hand. “You remember my daughter, Maria, and my granddaughter, Angela?” she said to Artie, who looked somewhat unsure how he had wound up in our kitchen, much less by my grandmother’s side. I might even have thought he’d stumbled to our house by accident, judging by his somewhat rumpled attire and bewildered brown eyes beneath bushy gray brows, if it weren’t for the sausage he pulled out of the shopping bag he carried.
“Oh, Artie, you remembered,” Nonnie gushed, gazing at the package as if it were a dozen roses, and leaning over to kiss his fleshy cheek.
Oh, my, I thought, exchanging a look with my mother.
Nonnie had a beau. And if the size of that sausage he was sporting was any indication, it was serious.
No less than an hour later, my brother Sonny arrived, with his wife, Vanessa. Of course, dinner was pretty much done by this point, and even the table had been set, leaving Sonny and Vanessa with nothing more to do than stand in the middle of the living room, while both my mother and my grandmother oohed and aahed over Vanessa. Or more specifically, Vanessa’s abdomen, which was round and bursting with her and Sonny’s first child. My mother’s first grandchild. “First grandchild from birth,” my mother would always clarify. My brother Joey had fraternal twins that came with his fiancée, Miranda, and once my mother had accepted the fact that her oldest son was not likely to give her any grandkids unless he married Miranda, she embraced little Tracy and Timmy as her own.
“There is nothing like it when your own son is having a baby,” she declared now, as she often exclaimed when Joey and Miranda weren’t around.
Vanessa, of course, ate it up. Standing before my mother, she ran one well-ringed hand over her abdomen, pressing the fabric of the pink maternity top against the swell, as if to show it off, as she said, “I can’t believe how big I am—and I’m only in my fifth month!”
It was true that Vanessa was huge, but I don’t think it was all baby. At five-nine, with a mane of blond hair sprayed so high it practically hit the woodwork on the way in the door, she still wore her trademark four-inch heels. Huge hunks of gold jewelry dangled from her ears, neck and arms, which somehow added to her girth in an oddly glamorous way. Her overwhelming size made her pregnant state seem all the more glorious. When Vanessa was in the room, she literally took it over. You couldn’t not talk about her.
“How are you feeling? Still getting that morning sickness?” Ma asked. Then, “You really should sit down. Especially in this heat. Summer’s barely begun and already the humidity is unbearable. Angela, get Vanessa one of those nice armchairs from the dining room.”
There really was no escaping Vanessa’s reign over a room, I thought, heading to the dining room for an extra chair as I heard Sonny begin to regale Nonnie and my mother with story of Vanessa’s latest sonogram. “I saw something on that screen. I swear it’s gonna be a boy….”
There was only one thing that could dispel the Vanessa obsession. Well, actually two things. Tracy and Timmy, the Twin Terrors, who had just now exploded through the front door and into the living room, practically barreling Vanessa down in their six-year-old exuberance.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Joey called out in admonishment, as he came through the door, his hand firmly around Miranda’s tiny waist.
It still amazed me to see Joey in “dad mode,” as he’d taken on the role rather abruptly when he met Miranda a year earlier. Up till then, he had devoted all his time and energy to running the auto-parts empire my father had left to him. And whatever spare time he’d had was spent waxing and detailing the ’67 Cadillac that was his pride and joy. Now, suddenly, Tracy and Timmy were his pride and joy. Miranda, his raison d’être.
My mother should have been satisfied with this turn of events. For years, she worried Joey wouldn’t lift his head up from the Caddy long enough to settle down and give her the grandkids she craved. But somehow she couldn’t swallow down the idea of Miranda. It was as if she saw Miranda only as some destitute single mother scheming to get her hands on the dough from our family’s business.
Fortunately, Miranda didn’t notice—or at least acted as if she didn’t. “Hi, Mrs. Di,” she said, leaning in to embrace my mother. I saw my mother’s arms go around Miranda’s petite frame, though I could tell she refrained from her requisite squeeze until she moved on to Joey, whom she not only hugged but gave a firm swat on the butt. “He gets better looking every time I see him!” she said to Nonnie, a wistfulness in her voice that indicated to the more astute observer, like myself, that she felt all that magnificence was somehow being wasted on Miranda.
“He’s all right,” Nonnie responded, with a wink that said Joey was more than all right in her eyes, as she engulfed him in a hug that practically swallowed his six-foot frame. “You remember Artie Matarrazzo, right, Joey?” Nonnie said, dragging Joey to Artie, who sat obediently on the couch. “Hey, Mr. Matarrazzo,” Joey said, shaking the older man’s hand with the same surprise my brother Sonny had displayed at the sight of my grandmother, flushed and beaming over a man other than Grandpa, who had been dead a good ten years now.
But no one had too much time to wonder over Artie, now that Tracy and Timmy had launched a full attack on the living room. They had already pulled all the cushions off the couch and were about to proceed with a pillow fight when my mother swooped down to hug them and shower them with the gifts she kept handily beside the sofa they had all but destroyed. It was as if she would gladly have taken on Tracy and Timmy, who with their big blue eyes and curly brown locks were irresistible, and put Miranda, who stood by gazing on the scene with love, out to pasture.
But whatever lingering animosity there was, it was immediately dispelled when, moments after Nonnie went into the kitchen to check on the sauce, she returned and announced, “Dinner’s ready. Let’s eat!”
Once we were all settled around the table, with me sitting between Tracy and Timmy to keep them from tearing at each other’s hair while we were eating, it suddenly occurred to Sonny that my other half was missing.
“Hey, where’s Kirk?” he said, between mouthfuls of eggplant and linguine.
“Who’s Kirk?” Tracy asked, completely forgetting the guy who had kept her giggling all afternoon with his silly little jokes the last time we were here.
“You idiot,” Timmy declared. “Kirk is Angela’s boyfriend.”
“I’m not an idiot, you’re an idiot,” she said, reaching behind me to yank her brother’s hair and sending my head jutting out neatly over my plate, giving my mother an easy aim as she set about taking it off.
“He went home to see his parents,” my mother supplied, eyebrows raised as if inviting speculation about Kirk’s intentions.
“Oh, yeah?” Sonny said. “I didn’t think that guy had a home, judging by how often he eats with us.”
“Doesn’t his family live in Massachusetts somewhere?” Vanessa said, clearly proud of herself for remembering the details of my boyfriend’s life. For whatever you wanted to say about Vanessa, she really did make an effort when it came to family.
“Newton, Massachusetts,” I replied, leaning back and neatly frustrating Tracy’s effort to get a grip on her brother’s head in turn. With a glance at my mother, I continued in what I hoped was a matter-of-fact voice, “It’s about six hours by train.” Not that Kirk ever took the train. He had so many frequent flier miles, he could probably take us both on the shuttle out of LaGuardia without making a dent in his considerable savings account. The jerk. Still, I had an argument to win here. “So it’s not exactly a hop, skip and a jump from New York.”
“I didn’t say anything!” my mother protested, completely denying the subtext her raised eyebrows were sending everyone at the table.
And just in case anyone missed the subtext, Miranda innocently laid it out for all to see. “Have you ever met Kirk’s parents?”
As I stumbled toward an answer, my mother declared, “No, she hasn’t. Don’t you think that’s wrong?”
“Wrong?” Joey said, as if he weren’t following.
“I just think that if a man is serious about a girl…” my mother began.
“What? You thinking of marrying this guy?” Sonny said, as if marriage for his baby sister was an option he had yet to think of.
“I don’t know what I’m—” I began.
“Why shouldn’t she be thinking of it?” my mother chimed in. “She’s thirty-one years old.”
“Believe me, you’re better off waiting,” Miranda said. “I married Fred when I was twenty-five, and look where that got me,” she continued with the habitual roll of the eyes she made whenever she referred to her ex-husband.
My mother’s mouth dropped open, then she shut it soundly. But her expression, as it roamed over her prized firstborn son sitting next to his bride-to-be, said that she didn’t think Miranda had done too badly in the long run.
“Hey, Vanessa was only twenty-five when she married me. And you’re happy, baby, aren’t you?” Sonny said, turning to his wife, who scrunched up her nose and rubbed it against his, as her hand roamed over her ever-present abdomen. Somehow the sight of them made me feel…wistful. But only for a moment.
“Well, I was a young bride, too,” Nonnie said, “and all that made me was a young widow,” she continued, giving Artie a significant look. “But things are different today. Women today like to date around. Test-drive a man before they take him home for good.”
“What? I was wrong to marry my husband at twenty-two?” my mother said defensively. “We were in love. We wanted to be together.”
And there, I thought, lay the thing that stabbed most about Kirk’s weekend away. Did he even want to be with me? Really be with me?
“Tell you the truth,” Sonny said now, “I always liked that first guy you went out with. Vincent Salerno. Whatever happened to him?”
“Married,” my mother said, as if whatever point she was trying to make was already proved. “For over nine years now.”
“Whoa-ho,” Sonny said with a barely contained laugh. “Another one bites the dust. And didn’t you recently go to the wedding of that guy you went out with in college? What was his name? Randy?”
“That was five years ago already,” my mother said. Clearly she was a stickler for details tonight.
Oh, God, please don’t let them ask about Josh next….
But Sonny didn’t even need to ask about Josh to make his point. “Hey, you wait any longer, Ange, and all of the good ones will be taken,” he said.
“Not all of them,” Nonnie said, giving Artie a look that stopped his fork midway to his mouth.
Even my own grandmother was going to beat me to the altar, I realized now, judging by the blush that was crawling up Artie’s neck.
“Angela’s different,” Vanessa said in my defense. “She’s artistic,” she declared, her thick Brooklyn accent making the word sound more like “autistic.”
“Hey, Angela, can you do that headstand for us again?” Tracy asked, remembering a Rise and Shine routine I once demonstrated for her in my mother’s living room.
“No headstands,” Joey said as Tracy began to scoot out of her chair. “You gotta eat first. Then Angela will do her tricks for you.”
Tricks? Oh, brother.
When had I gone from “artistic” to circus sideshow freak?
I sighed. Maybe there really was something wrong with me.
4
I just called…to SCREAM…I LOVE YOU!
There is only one thing worse than returning to an empty apartment on a Sunday night—that’s returning to an empty apartment littered with the remains of someone else’s good time. Specifically, Justin’s and—judging by the two wineglasses nestled cozily together on the dining room table—Lauren’s. Apparently they’d come home early from the Hamptons. Candles littered the windowsill; the smell of burning wax was still in the air. A note left by the answering machine indicated in Justin’s loopy scrawl that he had taken Lauren to the airport. Which meant, since Justin didn’t have a car, that he was taking an expensive round-trip cab to LaGuardia, just so he could spend an extra hour with the woman he once described to me as “the best thing that ever happened” to him.
I sighed. When was I going to be anyone’s best thing?
As I headed into the living room and saw that sofa #3 had been maneuvered from its position in the middle of the room to a less prominent place in front of sofa #2, I realized I did have something to be thankful for. At least Lauren had used her considerable influence over Justin to persuade him that his most recent sofa acquisition was atrocious enough to warrant a slip-cover, which Lauren had no doubt created from one of Justin’s bedsheets, I deduced from the pale blue covering that now disguised sofa #3’s threadbare expanse. Since the two sofas faced the largest of our four TVs, their positioning created a movie-theater effect that satisfied my inner actor on some levels, despite the sacrifice of a good three feet of living space. I plopped down in the front row, grabbed the remote from the marble-topped coffee table (all the French provincial castoffs were Aunt Eleanor’s) and clicked on the TV, my eyes roaming to the clock on the far wall. Seven o’clock. Kirk’s flight landed at 7:50 (I saw the ticket on his dresser—not that I was checking). No luggage (Kirk always carried on), so he’d head straight for Ground Transportation. Give him five minutes to land a cab. Twenty minutes to the Midtown Tunnel. Ten minutes through the tunnel (after all, it was Sunday night, there was bound to be traffic). Kirk lived six minutes from the tunnel (he actually timed it once). That would put him in front of his building at precisely 8:31 p.m. Two minutes up the stairs, twenty minutes settle-in time (Kirk couldn’t relax until his bag was unpacked and his toiletries safely tucked away in his medicine cabinet once more. I found it cute at first. Annoying later, when I was waiting to hear from him after one of his frequent weekends away.) That took us to 8:53. By nine o’clock he would be on the phone, proclaiming how much he had missed me.
I only had to wait two hours for a reminder of why I had been in the relationship with Kirk for twenty months despite the fact that he hadn’t felt it necessary to bring me home with him. We loved each other, dammit. Had declared it so in month three. Reveled in it until month eight. Settled into things at the year mark. And now…now we sometimes took it (love, that is) and each other for granted. So what that he hadn’t asked me to come with him? It didn’t really mean anything in the face of all we had. Why, I bet if I just opened my mouth (because Grace always told me I was guilty of not communicating what I wanted) and told him how much it would mean to me to go home with him next time around, he’d happily invite me along. In fact, he might regret he hadn’t brought me along this time. He might even want to schedule a trip home within weeks just to make up for it!
And so, with this soothing thought I settled in to watch a round of mindless TV, starting with a rerun of Friends, which seemed to be on six times a day now that it had gone into syndication. I studied Jennifer Aniston with renewed interest, imagining this cheerful blond goddess settling in at home with her golden-blond god, Brad. Surely there was something to Michelle’s tight-lid theory if this woman who had had trouble attracting the attention of David Schwimmer in her fictional life had landed Brad Pitt in reality.
So much for my reality, I mused, quickly changing channels once Rachel et al’s coffee-shop existence was wrapped up with a rousing laugh track. One hour to go, I thought, with another glance at the clock. I spent it watching a news program on the deadly bacteria that resides in common household objects. And just as I was absorbing the fact that I had greater things to worry about than whether or not I will one day marry (like that I will certainly one day die), I realized it was just about nine and anticipation warmed me, reminding me that I was at the moment very, very much alive.
I jumped off the couch and headed for my bedroom to throw on a pair of boxers and a tee. Might as well get comfortable, I thought, with a vision of myself curled up cozily with the phone while Kirk whispered how much he’d missed me. Admittedly, he wasn’t usually so demonstrative, but I had begun to look forward to a certain heightened display of intimacy whenever he returned from one of his business trips. Once I even lay in wait at his apartment, wearing a black lacy bra and thong. You can imagine what kind of amazing sex we had that night.
With a glance at the clock, I realized it was 9:10 already—so where was my phone call? My hey-baby-missed-you-so-much-I-could-die speech? Maybe there were delays at the airport….
I heard a key slide in the door. Or maybe he decided to drop by!
“Hey,” came the sound of Justin’s voice in the hall. What was I thinking? Dropping by wasn’t the kind of thing Kirk did, after all. It wasn’t that he was unromantic, just…orderly.
“Hey,” I said, joining Justin in the living room, where he was toeing off his sneakers and settling in on sofa #3. “Lauren get off the ground okay?” I asked, my face a mask of concern. The subtext of my question was: Any delays at the airport that I should know about?
“Without a hitch,” he replied, his gaze falling on the dining room table with the two wineglasses. “God, I hated seeing her go.”
My stomach plummeted at his forlorn expression, and I remembered suddenly what it was like to really miss someone. The look on Justin’s face was the kind every girl pines for.
But it was only momentary, that look. For, suddenly, Justin glanced at the clock and snapped to attention. “Hey, mind if I put on the game? I just heard in the cab that the Yankees are up by three against the Red Sox.” He grabbed the remote.
I had my answer. The Yankees were playing the Red Sox. Kirk was a Red Sox fan. Was it possible he got home and immediately flipped on the TV to catch the rest of the game?
I glanced over at Justin as he pounded a fist in the air. “Yea!” he roared along with the crowd on TV.
Oh, yeah. It was not only possible, it was probable.
Despite the fact that I was annoyed at being beat out by baseball, I joined Justin on the couch, never mind that I was a Mets fan, mostly by birth rather than from any true allegiance to game watching. Yeah, I could sympathize. I had watched the subway series with great trepidation. But it wasn’t something I worked up a sweat about on a regular basis. Wasn’t something I ignored friends, families and people I allegedly loved for.
The clock ticked on. Justin became more jubilant with every pitch. The Yankees were up by five now. By the time I did talk to Kirk, he wasn’t exactly going to be Mr. Happy. I thought about calling him during the game, but didn’t want him if his attention was going to be divided. I decided to wait until the seventh-inning stretch.
When the seventh inning finally arrived and a Yankee win was all but secured, Justin decided this called for an all-out celebration. “I’m going down for beer and chicken wings. Want anything?”
“No, no. I’m good,” I said, making my way casually over to my bedroom, where I hoped to make my long-awaited phone call with Kirk in privacy. I was so high-strung at this point, I feared I might do something I’d later regret—like yell.
Kirk picked up on the second ring. “Hey, Noodles, I was just about to call you….”
Ah, if I could only have waited thirty more seconds, I would have had the upper hand. Still, I was glad to hear his voice. I missed him. “The lure of baseball was too great, huh?” I joked.
“You kidding? I couldn’t bear to watch that travesty once I saw the score. I shut it right off.”
Oh, brother. Then, as if to answer my unasked question—What exactly have you been doing in the one hour and fifteen minutes you’ve been home and not calling me?—he said, “I’ve just been settling in, unpacking.”
Uh-huh. “Did you have a good weekend?” I asked, trying to rise above it all.
“Great,” he said, his voice perking up. Then he proceeded to tell me, in lavish detail, all about it. Playing touch football with his cousins in the legendary acre lot his parents lived on (legendary to me, who had never actually seen it); holding his sister Kate’s baby; meeting his other sister Kayla’s boyfriend. All the children in Kirk’s family had first names beginning with K. His mother’s idea, according to Kirk. I wonder if she realized that she had created KKK with her alliteratively named progeny? The funny thing was, Kate had married a guy named Kenneth, and their new baby’s name was—guess what?—Kimberly. I wondered now if the other sister had managed to line up a K-man with this new boyfriend. Hey, wait a second. New boyfriend? Kayla’s new boyfriend was there?
