Authors: Richard Russo
“Is this a new rule, Tessa? I don’t get to talk?”
“No, it’s an old one,” she said. “I just haven’t been enforcing it. I wish the three of you would quit ganging up on me every time we discuss something.”
“It
takes
all three of us to argue with you,” my uncle objected, “and we still lose.”
“She
had
a good time,” I repeated weakly, causing my mother to spin her attention on me.
“You’re sure about that?” she said. “You can tell the difference between affection and gratitude?” But even she seemed to realize that this was a low blow.
“You seen how she was—” my father began.
“Okay,”
my mother interrupted. “Okay. She enjoyed herself over the holidays. My point is that it’s no kindness to offer security to somebody who’s learning to love independence. Sarah is a
brave girl.
She’s just beginning to understand she doesn’t
need
a safety net.” She turned to me now. “Don’t play on her fears. That’s not what you do when you love somebody.”
Later that night, my parents were still arguing, their voices coming up through the heat register just as they’d done when I was a boy.
“You have to think of her, too, Lou.”
“I ain’t sayin’ that, Tessa. I’m just sayin’—”
“I know what you’re saying.”
“He ain’t had a single one of them spells since—”
“I
know
what you’re saying.”
“She’s been good for him. That’s all I’m—”
“I
know
what you’re saying. I know, I know, I know.”
B
UT FOR MY FATHER’S ILLNESS,
the conflict over Sarah’s spring break would’ve been even more heated. My mother knew that the last thing he needed was worry. While his chemo dosage was supposedly low, it made him sick to his stomach and weak for days afterward. He’d just start feeling better, and it was time for another round. His appetite disappeared, and he continued to lose weight. For a while it looked like Uncle Dec would have to postpone his trip, but then in late February my father’s system seemed to adjust. He began to eat again and regained a little weight and some of his former strength and stamina. A visit from “our girl” in March, he decided, was just what the doctor ordered, even if
his
doctor hadn’t ordered it. A few days before Sarah was to arrive, the argument surfaced again when my mother gave my father strict orders not to pressure her about where she’d be going to school next year. “If she doesn’t bring the subject up, leave it alone. Let her make up her own mind. She’s got her whole future ahead of her, and she doesn’t need you telling her what to do.”
“Hell, I ain’t gonna say nothin’,” my father said. “She can do whatever she—”
“Spare me,” she snapped. “You know perfectly well what you’re going to do, and so do I. When she walks in that door, your face is going to light up like a Christmas tree, and you’re going to say,
Welcome home, sweetness,
just like you always do. This is
not
her home, Lou. Her home is a dorm room in New York. Saying otherwise just confuses the poor girl.”
“A person can have two homes,” he said. “Look at Louie here. He’s home with us half the time and down to his school home the other half.”
But of course this wasn’t true. I spent half my
time
at the university, but
home
was Thomaston.
Home
was Third Street.
Home,
when you came right down to it, was Ikey Lubin’s. This, after all, was what my mother and I had been fighting about.
But over spring break Sarah again became part of our family, though instead of working with my father and me in the store, she spent most of her time helping my mother renovate the upstairs flat. On the weekends they went to garage sales and flea markets all over the county looking for good fixtures and other odd items. During the first week they pulled up the ratty carpet, rented a sander to do the hardwood floor underneath, then put down two coats of varnish.
“There ain’t no point in talkin’ to your mother once her mind’s made up,” my father told me one afternoon when, thanks to a lull, we had the store to ourselves and the leisure to listen to the droning activity overhead. I could tell he was trying to puzzle it through—why she was spending money sprucing up the flat when it was just Dec living up there. But his March trip, he’d confided to my mother, was a trial run designed to prepare us for his final exit. He’d already stayed longer than he planned, and after all this time anything he hadn’t been able to teach us about butchering a pig, we were probably just too stupid to learn.
Of course I knew, or thought I did, what the renovations upstairs were really all about. I just didn’t have the heart to explain it to my father, who was still weak, still trying hard to get his strength back. Not wanting to undermine his recovery, I held my tongue and tried to ignore my rising rage every time I thought about what my mother was up to, that she’d do something like this now, when my father was too feeble to offer any opposition, that she refused to come clean about her intentions even to me, that she’d stoop to using Sarah against me.
M
Y PARENTS HAD PROMISED
each other not to pressure Sarah about her decision, and in each other’s company they stuck to their pledge of neutrality. But my mother knew it would be impossible for my father not to convey to Sarah his fondest hopes—that she and I would marry, that we’d settle down in Thomaston, that he’d be able to pass Ikey’s on to us and to the grandchildren we’d give him. His cancerous brush with mortality had concentrated those hopes, and expecting him not to voice them was like asking him not to breathe. He knew better than to do so when my mother was around, but if she wasn’t and I happened to be working out of earshot in the back room, he’d tell Sarah he wished her school wasn’t so far away, that Ikey’s wasn’t the same without her, that I was never so happy as when she was around, that she never had to worry about not having a home and family as long as Ikey’s was there, which he figured it would be for a good long time. People would always need things—a half gallon of milk, a four-pack of toilet paper—things they wouldn’t make a special trip to the supermarket for. They liked coming into a store like Ikey’s, he reiterated, where they knew people, where they could find what they were looking for and there was somebody to ask if they couldn’t.
Upstairs, I was certain, a very different conversation was going on, and a very different picture of Ikey’s being painted. My mother did Ikey’s books every month and knew what a shoestring operation we ran, how small fluctuations and surprises could throw us for a loop, how hard we had to work for the slender living we made, how we ordered close to the bone so we wouldn’t incur losses. Even when we did everything right, we were often flummoxed by unforeseen and unforeseeable circumstances. Yes, we were making a go of it, but each year it was getting harder, not easier, and now there were rumors of a new supermarket coming to town, one that would obsolete the A&P. Ikey’s wasn’t the kind of star any sensible young person would hitch a wagon to.
Nor was Thomaston. In the years since the tannery closed, no other industry had come in to give hope to those who’d lost their jobs there.
FOR SALE
signs, more of them every year, bloomed on West End, East End and even Borough properties. The Beverlys, who could afford to, had finally sold their house at a loss. Those who couldn’t afford to bail out consulted one demoralized realtor after another, plotting doomed strategies to sell their homes, first at “fair” prices that represented the owners’ diminished hopes and expectations, then at “reduced” prices designed to show how “motivated” they were. But only fire-sale pricing attracted serious buyers, of whom there were precious few, and fierce competition for them drove desperate sellers to slash prices further.
So did the now-conventional wisdom that Thomaston had, in fact, been poisoned. Even our local newspaper had finally given up running editorials to counter the Albany whistle-blowers on the pollution of the Cayoga Stream and our tainted groundwater, instead arguing weakly that we weren’t that much worse off than our neighboring communities. On weekends, to reassure residents that the Cayoga now ran clean and pure, the paper printed photos of men fly-fishing in the shadow of the abandoned tannery. The problem was that people remembered their poisoning fondly. Back when the Cayoga ran red, they had money in their pockets. Now jobless, once their unemployment was exhausted, they signed up for welfare and drank their government checks in gin mills like Murdick’s. Division Street wasn’t really even the boundary between the West and East Ends anymore. The poverty and lack of opportunity that had once characterized everything west of Division was now encroaching on formerly respectable East End neighborhoods. Before long, my mother predicted, the banks would own every house and business in town, and then even the banks would leave. Of course Sarah already knew most of this, but I was sure my mother, fearing that her time away might’ve made her nostalgic, took every opportunity to remind her.
To be honest, what tormented me most when they were alone together was what my mother might be saying to Sarah about me. My mother loved me, I knew that. Why, then, did I suspect her of warning my girlfriend against me? Though we’d never discussed them, Sarah knew when and how my spells had begun and that I’d battled them throughout my adolescence. My father believed they were a thing of the past, that I’d outgrown them like an ugly sweater forgotten in the back of the closet. Would my mother share with Sarah her fear—and, I confess, my own—that I’d never be free of them? Why did I imagine her warning Sarah about what she’d be in for if we married, that she’d spend the rest of her life trapped by not just my condition but also my temperament? “Do you really want to spend the rest of your life in that store?” I could hear her saying. At night, unable to sleep, I cataloged all the things my mother knew about me that I’d rather Sarah didn’t: how as a boy I’d been afraid to walk home from school alone after Bobby moved away from Berman Court, how I’d failed to call the turn in the milk truck and gotten Bobby’s wrist broken, how devastated I’d been when the Marconis moved to the Borough, how I’d allowed Karen Cirillo to steal cigarettes from Ikey’s.
I knew that these were paranoid fears, evidence merely of self-doubt that at times bordered on self-loathing. These were the very things I should’ve been telling Sarah myself, if I hadn’t been so terrified of losing her. One night I worked myself into such a state that I actually made myself sick and woke my parents by retching violently into the toilet.
The last day of her spring break, my father presented the two of us with a gift certificate to a fancy restaurant located out on the old Albany–Schenectady road that sat on a hill overlooking the canal. Below, in the waning light of evening, dense squadrons of winter birds dove in rigid formation at the water. It was late March, but spring came slowly upstate, its only signs of approach were the snow that had turned brown and water that could be heard tunneling underneath it.
We were given a table by a window through which we could watch the diving birds. How beautiful Sarah looked that night. I can still see her, across the long years, in that lovely, high-necked navy-blue dress, and I remember everyone turning to look at her when we were seated. Our waitress mistook us for newlyweds, which I normally would’ve taken enormous pleasure in. But I’d been feeling out of sorts all day, as if I might be coming down with something, and conflicted, too, wishing Sarah weren’t leaving the next day but glad that my mother wouldn’t have further opportunities to poison the well of her affections against me. Also, I was afraid. It had occurred to me that this would be the perfect occasion for Sarah to confess that she was having second thoughts, that maybe we’d been unwise to commit ourselves so young.
When she finally asked why I was so glum, I muttered something about wishing she didn’t have to leave tomorrow, and she responded that it wouldn’t be that long before we saw each other again, to which I replied spitefully that maybe it would seem a lot longer to me than it did to her. She then reminded me that I could visit her in the city anytime I wanted. In fact, there were people she wanted me to meet, and she’d like to show me her school, as well as all the sights. We could go to the top of the Empire State Building, take a cruise around Manhattan, see Radio City Music Hall. She rattled on like this for a while, her cheer causing my spirits to plummet even further. Of course she could make such offers safely, knowing that I couldn’t take her up on them, not with my father still weak from his treatments and Ikey’s needing me.
Eventually she ran out of ideas, and when she did I asked what I’d been wanting to all week: what had she and my mother found to talk about up in the flat for the last two weeks? And just that quickly, her eyes were full. “Your poor mother,” she said. “She’s terrified, you know. She’s afraid the doctors aren’t telling the whole truth. She doesn’t trust Lou-Lou’s surgeon because a woman she knows said he lied about her husband, told her there was nothing to worry about, and six months later he was dead.”
I’m afraid what I did then was give a harsh, bitter croak that tasted of last night’s vomit. “You don’t get it, do you? If that’s what happens, she gets her way. If they find another tumor, she’ll sell the store. She hates Ikey’s. She’s always hated it. Right from the start she said it would fail, that my father was stupid to buy it. Now she gets to be right. She’ll tell him there’s no choice. They either have to sell the store or lose the house. She doesn’t care what he wants or I want. Why do you think she’s spending all that money renovating the flat? Because she thinks that if it’s fixed up nice, Ikey’s will sell. Then, with the store gone, she’ll get her way with me, too. If I don’t have Ikey’s to come home to, I won’t have any choice, will I? I’ll have to do what she wants. Stay in school. In Albany. She gets her way about everything.”