Authors: Regina Calcaterra
And just like I thought, Ms. Van Dover goes on to tell me how special I am to her. “The only thing that will get you out of your situation is to stay in school, Regina,” she says. Then she looks at my hand clasped tight around Rosie’s, and tells me, “Make sure you teach Rosie what you’ve learned—she needs a teacher who cares about her as much as I care about you.”
This time I just smile.
Then Rosie reaches up to be held . . . and again, we’re gone.
1977 to Summer 1980
T
HE FIFTH WEEK
of my sixth-grade year, the temperature reaches ninety-eight degrees, which feels even more suffocating in the back of Cookie’s station wagon. I wish Long Island’s scorcher Indian summer were our only source of discomfort. In the driver’s seat, with a beer between her legs, Cookie stays mum about our new destination, only directing us to smoosh ourselves and all of our belongings into the car: garbage bags stuffed with clothes, our black transistor radio, towels, sheets, cups, silverware, pots, coffee, beer, sugar, vodka, peanut butter, whiskey, jelly, flour, five kids, and one Cookie. We know the drill.
With all the bedding, housewares, and food, this is by far the most crowded our car has ever been . . . and this brings me to wonder whether Cookie ever thanked Karl for being such a good provider for us. She made me leave my phonograph, records, and books behind, but inside my shirt I hid my two Jesuses and my fifth-grade autograph book, plus some picture books for Rosie. I also grabbed a deck of cards for Cherie, Camille, Norm, and me to play with.
Cookie pulls into a gas station and parks next to the Dumpster. “This is humiliating,” Cherie says. We watch our mother approach drivers as they’re sliding the nozzle inside their tanks to fill up. However, we quickly learn our cue: When Cookie points to us fanning ourselves with hands of cards, we wave and put on expressions of misery and desperation . . . which is not all that challenging, under the circumstances. Finally, her shameless strategy gets us a full tank of gas.
As she takes the expressway ramp, Cookie announces: “We’re going to meet your grandparents.”
“Our grandparents?” I ask her. “You mean the ones you fibbed to Karl about?”
“You mean I have grandparents?” Norm says.
“I thought they lived in another state,” Camille says.
“What’d you think,” Cookie says, “that I was born from apes?”
I watch Camille dig her knee hard into Cherie’s, and with all our might the three of us try not to explode into laughter.
Forty-five minutes later we pull into the driveway of a blue ranch house with a garage attached and small, trimmed evergreen bushes lining the front bay window. Cookie puts the car in park and stares at the house with an awareness I’ve never seen her have before. “Get out,” she finally says, her eyes still fixed on the house.
We sit silently.
“I said,
get out
,” she growls through her teeth. “This’ll be a lot easier if they see you.”
The four doors of the car slowly move ajar, and simultaneously the house’s front door opens, too. With the help of a walker, a thin woman in a pink floral muumuu shuffles onto the porch. With dark, slanted eyes she stares at us, and at her side arrives a wrinkled, tanned man with navy Bermuda shorts met by knee-high black socks. My eyes are drawn up to his belly, which is as round and bare as a newborn elephant’s. There’s a showdown of eyes until Baby Elephant Belly speaks up. “Get the hell out of here,” he says.
We all look at Cookie, paralyzed to budge.
“Nobody move a muscle,” Cookie says. “We’re gonna do this my way. Kids, these are your grandparents—the grandparents who turned their backs on you, especially when you needed them the most.” She turns her gaze toward the two elderly figures on the porch. “Mom, Dad, meet Cherie. She’s fourteen. Camille is thirteen, Regina is ten, Norman is nine, and Rosie is four. These are your grandkids . . . do you get that? They have no place to stay, and unless you stop acting like careless fucks, they’ll be sleeping on the street tonight. Is that what you want?”
From the stoop, they peer at us, and the muumuu wearer tells her, “For God’s sake Camille, put your children in the car. Kids don’t need to witness all this.” Hearing Cookie called by her real name makes me curious about how she must have been raised. I can see that she and her mother share the same strong cheekbones and wide hips, but my grandmother appears much less combative than Cookie. I’d like to call her Grandma and ask her why she thinks Cookie is so mean.
“I have to go potty!” Rosie cries, and when everyone pauses to look at her, I whisper to Cookie: “I need to go, too.” The muumuu wearer looks at her husband and reluctantly opens the front door.
We all file inside.
When Camille approaches the bathroom with Rosie, Baby Elephant Belly takes her shoulder and says, “What the hell are you doing? That baby’s four years old now, she can go peepee on her own.” Rosie runs for the bathroom, then Baby Elephant Belly turns to me. “And you,” he says, piercing me with his eyes. “You better not take anything.”
“Oh sure,” I reply, surprising myself with my sass. Whatever this guy did to make Cookie turn out so nasty, there’s no way I’ll let him push me around. “You want me to give back the piece of toilet paper I use, too?”
“No,”
he says squarely. Then he straightens up. “You can place that where it belongs.”
Their living room is a museum of wooden and glass curio cabinets featuring shelves and shelves of cherub-faced porcelain collectibles. On one wall I spot a photograph of a man who must be my mother’s brother, Nick, who once invited us to his Lions Club holiday party for poor kids. I nod toward his wedding picture. “Is that Nick?”
“Yes,” Cookie’s dad says.
I look back at the picture. “Any kids?”
“Nope.”
Darn.
I was hoping for cousins.
“Lots of attempts,” he says, “but so far nothing’s stuck. Better off, if you ask me. They got a pack of Doberman pinschers . . . real handfuls.”
I push myself to pee fast, anxious to exit the bathroom’s unloved, soiled motif. Now I see where Cookie gets her lack of taste in décor: Her parents’ bathroom boasts the color brown from floor to ceiling, plus a sliding glass shower door so covered in film you can’t see into the tub.
Suddenly I think of my uncle’s photo again and get a shiver. It occurs to me that with his sharp chin, black eyes, and short but ear-to-ear facial hair, it seems almost possible he could actually father a Doberman.
Cookie’s mom stands nervously inside the front door. “Thanks for the bathroom,” I tell her.
Baby Elephant Belly watches from the stoop as we surf over our belongings, squeezing into the car again. Cookie stuffs the twenty her mother slipped her inside her pocket, satisfied that our presence helped her seal the deal. She backs out of the driveway and drives just a few blocks before pulling into the back of the Waldbaum’s supermarket parking lot off of Sunrise Highway. She waddles into the store and emerges a few minutes later with a six-pack of cold Budweisers, two packs of Virginia Slims Lights, a loaf of bread, a jar each of peanut butter and jelly, and a roll of toilet paper. “We’ll sleep here for tonight, kids. Don’t worry. I’ll hit up their friends tomorrow . . . turn up the heat a little. They’re not going to get away with ignoring me that easy.”
Cherie, Camille, Norm, and I move a few garbage bags out of the station wagon to make room for all six of us to sleep. “Leave the important ones in here,” Cookie says from the front seat, “just in case we need to make a quick getaway.” Rosie climbs into a backseat floorwell, and Norm tucks himself in the other. Cookie relaxes against the headrest of the driver’s seat and cracks open a beer, and I huff silently when my sisters decide I should sleep on the passenger-side floor. “I’d rather sleep in the trunk with the bags,” I whisper to Camille, who uses her eyes to suggest I go with the flow. Then she and Cherie stack heads-on-shoulders in the backseat, lounging against each other with their eyes closed.
We wake to a car stinking of perspiration and cigarettes. Cookie rubs her eyes and announces, “I gotta go pop a squat.” After we’ve hauled all the bags back inside the car, she takes off down the highway and pulls into a McDonald’s.
“Mom, are we eating here?” Norm asks, his eyes wide as pancakes.
“What do you think, Norman? Huh?”
He says nothing.
“Are we eating here?”
she mocks him. “Please. It’s for the bathroom and free napkins. We’ll need them later when we’re out of toilet paper.” She holds the restroom door open for us to file inside. “Try to look nice,” she says. “We’ve got a real important mission today.”
When she pulls into a post office, we all pile out and into the building. “Is Mike here?” she yells up to the clerk from the line. The clerk looks at Cookie like she’s a madwoman. “Mike Calcaterra?”
“He’s out on his route,” the clerk replies.
“Well let him
know
,” Cookie says in defiance, “that his grandchildren were here today, looking for him.”
At the butcher, she props her elbows high on the deli counter. “Hey, any of you guys seen Rose Calcaterra?” When the men working the slicing machines turn to her with bewildered eyes, she continues her pursuit. “I’m Cookie, Mike and Rose’s daughter.”
Her explanation does nothing to aid their understanding of what she’s doing there.
“I know, it’s been a long time since I’ve been in here. See, I stopped by their house earlier, and they weren’t home. I’m just trying to track them down— Oh!” she says. “And by the way, these are their grandchildren. I wanted to introduce them to their grandparents.”
Camille whispers to Cherie. “What in the world is she doing?”
“Just watch her,” Cherie says, and before long we begin to see the point. We troop into every grocery, deli, and liquor store in town, watch Cookie snow the workers with her harebrained story, and retreat to the aisles when they set us loose, telling us with pity to get what we need. Soon we have enough cigarettes, vodka, deli salads, beer, soda, bread, and toilet paper to last us days. At each stop, as the bell jingles to mark our exit, Cookie tells the clerk: “Just put it on Mike and Rose’s tab.”
O
N
N
OVEMBER
9, I imagine that one day, when I’m an adult, a friend or my husband will ask me, “So, Regina, tell me: How’d you celebrate your eleventh birthday?”
“Oh, you know, like any kid,” I’ll answer. “Living as a parking lot gypsy and bathing in a gas station sink.”
We’ve spent the past two months sleeping in Cookie’s car, while she’s been cruising all over Suffolk County to stay under the cops’ radar since she never registered us for school this year.
But just as the stores and houses we pass are putting up Christmas decorations, Cookie finds a landlord who will rent to us with a welfare housing voucher. The problem is that his property is close to our grandparents’ house, and by now, our food supply in their neighborhood has already been cut off—except for the butcher, who feels sorry for my mother. He tells her to come in either first thing in the morning or at night, when there’s no rush of customers. Then, with clean white paper, he wraps up pigs’ knuckles, liver, and tripe.
“What’s tripe?” Norman asks.
“It’s cow intestines,” Cherie says.
“At least we’re eating healthy,” I joke with my sisters. Norman looks like he’ll vomit. But when we set the food on the table, we’re so hungry that we inhale tripe in its broth, and liver smothered in ketchup and mustard. This helps get it down without gagging.
The most thrilling feature in the new house is its portable washing machine. Cherie and Camille wheel it up to the kitchen sink and attach a hose to the spigot while Norman and I search the house for every piece of clothing we’ve worn since September. The excitement fades, of course, when we see how many times we have to run each load before our clothes actually look clean; and it takes no time to learn the washer’s other issue: The water inside never gets hot enough to kill the lice we picked up from one of the gas station restrooms.
Thanks to the lice, none of us pass the health exam that’s required to register for school in West Babylon. We spend our days at home with our heads under the sink, sudsing up with the lice killer we lifted from the pharmacy, then combing the eggs out of each other’s hair. When the neighbors learn the reason we never seem to be at school, we pack up yet again . . . leaving behind our clothes, blankets, towels, socks, and any ounce of self-respect that wasn’t compromised by lice and liver. I wonder how any landlord will ever house us again if word gets out how we left the place.
As their 1978 New Year’s resolution, Cherie and Camille have decided to make a change. “We want to move out,” Camille informs Cookie.
“Out where?”
“Out of the
car
!”
Cherie tempers the conversation by adding, “I would like to go back to school.”
I would like to go back to school, too,
I’m seething to say, but I don’t dare utter a sentence that could leave me without allies.
By late January they’re both living at Kathy’s and it’s clear I’ll probably miss the sixth grade altogether on account of the fact that we’d need an address to register for school. While Cookie spends her afternoons in bars, Norman, Rosie, and I take short walks in the snow or stay huddled together in the car with garbage bags of belongings piled on top of us and layers of socks covering all our limbs for warmth. Sometimes the bar owners invite us inside to sit in a booth as long as we don’t run around; other times they let us split a hamburger if we wash dishes and mop the floors. One of them tells me, “You’re a good big sister, you know.” At first I’m confused when she slips me a five-dollar bill and puts her finger to her lips . . . then I get her point: If I don’t protect the money meant for the kids and me, Cookie will spend it on herself. “I like to work,” I tell the owner, delighted by her praise. It’s true—it keeps us warm and occupied, and we get to eat for free.
There’s also something in it for us when Cookie meets a guy at the bar: Either we get to sleep in his living room (taking savvy advantage of the chance to squeeze toothpaste onto our fingers for a long-awaited brushing) or we get the whole car to ourselves while our mother spends the night in a hotel.
Around town Cookie hears there’s a deli in Commack with an open cashier position. She agrees to take the job for less money than usual, since her new boss is giving her a perk by allowing us to move into the apartment upstairs, and for me the perk is that Cherie and Camille have agreed to move back in with us now that we live in a normal place again.