Chapter Thirty-nine
September, Boston
S
eptember in New England is surprisingly summerlike, though some of the oppression of August has lifted. In Boston, the streets suddenly teem with college students back from summer break and even those of us who are long past studenthood feel the energy of a fresh start. A new beginning.
Of course, September is also a time of endings.
The four of us met for drinks and appetizers at Mistral.
JoAnne had just gone to the funeral of a neighbor. She hadn’t wanted to go but it seems the block association strong-armed every home owner along Bunker Hill Street to attend. JoAnne had hardly known Mrs. Murphy but she’d had the privilege of seeing her decked out in her Sunday best. Dead.
It had put her in a very bad mood.
“Funerals and weddings! I don’t know which are worse.”
“Uh, I’m going with funerals,” I said, hoping to divert a tirade.
I failed. I went with the flow.
JoAnne tore on. “They both cost the guests a fortune. There’s the new dress and the gifts and God, then there’s the people you’d never spend time with unless someone had croaked or was getting married. Which in some cases is worse than croaking.”
Abby, Maggie, and I mumbled our agreement.
JoAnne turned to me.
“Erin, what do you say when some numbnuts at some horrible family function asks you why you aren’t married yet? Like creepy Uncle Floyd at fat Aunt Marge’s funeral.”
“I say: Because no one’s asked me yet. That usually shuts them up. Except,” I added, “when Uncle Floyd chuckles, leans in with his cigarette breath, and says, ‘Well, girlie, if I weren’t already taken, I’d fix that.’ ”
“Well, I say: I’m not married because I’m a nymphomaniac and require lots of sex with many partners—sometimes many partners at the same time—and no one man could ever satisfy me.”
“What’s the reaction to that?” Maggie said, laughing.
JoAnne grinned. “Stunned silence. On occasion, a look of longing.”
“I just tell the truth,” Abby said. “I say, I’m waiting for Mr. Right. I’m waiting for my soul mate.”
I resisted the sudden temptation to ask Abby if she thought she’d found her soul mate in my father.
“And the answer to that,” JoAnne said, “is a look of pity and, ‘There, there, dear, I’m sure everything will be just fine.’ ”
“I wish I could tell the truth,” I admitted. “I wish I could say: ‘I’m not married because the man I love is married to another woman and I love him so deeply I accept the situation.’ ”
“Yeah, that would go over big,” JoAnne said. “You’d be labeled a hussy. You’d be known as ‘the delusional one.’ You’d be another object of pity.”
“See?” I said. “The truth is just too ... uncomfortable. There’s a decided value to social lies.”
Maggie’s turn. “No one’s ever asked me why I’m not married, but if they did I’d say: I don’t believe in marriage. Marriage is not for me. I like my independence. I ...”
JoAnne lowered her voice and frowned, probably like the mythical fat old Aunt Marge. “Independence doesn’t keep you warm at night, missy.”
“It does if it buys you flannel sheets and a down comforter.”
“Touché!”
“All I have to say is that if I’m not married by the time I’m forty I’m never going to another wedding or funeral ever again.” And I meant it. “They can say anything they want about me. I’m rude, I’ve cracked up, I’m on drugs, I’m gay ...”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” Maggie added, per our post-
Seinfeld
culture conversational rules.
“Of course,” I agreed.
“Well,” JoAnne said, “if I’m still single by the time I’m forty, I’m celebrating my good sense and buying myself a mondo diamond ring. Not that I couldn’t afford it now, but I think I’ll hold off and treat myself later. And then we’ll all have a fabulous party and jet off to an exclusive spa for the weekend.”
“Are you paying for that, too?” Maggie asked. “I’ll be happy to go if you foot the bill for me.”
Abby shuddered. “If I’m not married by the time I’m forty I think I’ll die.”
“Oh, come on.”
“No, I’m serious. I think I’ll just—die.”
“No one dies from lack of marriage,” JoAnne drawled. “Oxygen, yes. Marriage, no.”
“What about dying of a broken heart?” Abby pressed. “Don’t you believe people have died of broken hearts?”
“Dying of a broken heart is synonymous with suicide through self-starvation, i.e., anorexia. It’s a Victorian conceit for ‘Mary is morbidly depressed and won’t snap out of it.’ It’s a joke. I’m a doctor and I can tell you, it’s not possible to die of a broken heart.”
“Sometimes I don’t think you have a heart to break,” Abby snapped.
“Where did that come from?” Maggie murmured.
“Didn’t you ever pine for someone?” Abby pressed. “Didn’t you ever long for even a glimpse of someone?”
JoAnne squinted at Abby as if pondering this question. Then: “Uh, no. Don’t believe in pining. Sounds consumptive. I believe in active pursuit or cutting the cord. Neat and clean.”
“You’re such a doctor!” Abby huffed. “I can’t imagine your bedside manner.”
“My bedside manner is perfect,” JoAnne replied, a hint of real anger in her voice. “Kids don’t like to be lied to. They handle the truth a lot better than most adults I’ve known.”
See? Funerals are far worse than weddings. They put everyone in a very bad mood.
“Hey,” I said, stupidly trying to lighten the topic of conversation, “has anyone been to that new restaurant at Fanueil Hall, uh, Kingfish Hall? Hank, from work, says it’s good. Well, okay.”
JoAnne gave me a look of disdain. She’s very good at giving looks of disdain. “No real Bostonian hangs out at Fanueil Hall,” she said. “Please.”
“Oh, it’s not so bad,” I replied, still attempting to make things—nicer. “It’s a good place to take out-of-town visitors. And there are some cute shops. Like April Cornell and that Irish goods store.”
Abby nodded. “I love that Christmas shop! Two stories of tinsel and treasures. It’s so beautiful. I could just live there.”
“Gives me a headache,” JoAnne said. “Too many flashing lights and pwetty wittle kitties.”
“Has anyone ever been to Durgin Park?” Maggie asked.
“I prefer Morton’s,” I said.
Maggie smiled. “You have an expense account.”
“I like Union Oyster House,” JoAnne admitted. Ah, her mood was finally softening. “Though it is pricey and I’ve never met a man there. A man I’d want to date, I mean.” JoAnne considered. “I did once meet a few guys from Connecticut in town for some big golf tournament. But they weren’t my type. Too much kelly green.”
“But you can sit in the booth JFK used to sit in!” Abby said. “Upstairs. It’s very exciting.”
“I’ve sat in that booth,” I said. “All I ever felt was hard wood under my butt.”
“Oh, no one pick up on that, please!” Maggie moaned.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Try their Oysters Rockefeller,” I suggested to all. “Un-believable.”
“Speaking of Rockefeller,” Maggie said, “I want to go to New York for that new show at MOMA. Frank Lloyd Wright drawings and notebooks, and photos of the projects and Wright’s family. Anyone interested in making an excursion?”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
JoAnne shook her head. “Count me out. Not a big fan of Mr. Wright’s work. But maybe I’d go along for some shopping.”
“Abby?” Maggie asked.
Abby hesitated. “Well, I’d have to check with John first.”
“What!” That was JoAnne.
“I mean,” Abby rushed on, “that maybe he’d prefer if I—uh, maybe he won’t want me to go to New York alone. Without him, I mean.”
“I’m out of this one,” I said, putting my hands in the air in the universal sign of surrender.
“I’m not saying I wouldn’t go anyway,” Abby said lamely, turning away from JoAnne’s glare. “Even if he didn’t want me to go.”
“Since when do you need permission from your boyfriend to go on a road trip with your girlfriends!” JoAnne demanded.
Abby opened her mouth but no words came out.
“Wait. You know what?” JoAnne said to no one and everyone. “It’s been a freakin’ long day. I’m tired and grumpy and I’m just going to let this slide. If Abby wants to be a ...”
“JoAnne,” Maggie said sternly. “You said you were going to let it slide. Okay?”
JoAnne went back to glaring.
I decided to change the subject. Again.
“Hey, speaking of New York, I just heard that old joke again: A nuclear explosion hits New York and devastates everything and everyone for miles. The next day the headline of
The Boston Globe
reads:
HUB MAN KILLED IN BLAST
.”
“Ah, the provincialism of the Bostonians,” Maggie said.
“Yeah,” JoAnne said, “how can the Yankees suck when they’re destroying the Red Sox? How exactly does that work?”
“It’s the curse of being a second city and knowing it,” Abby said wisely. “You feel you have to ignore the truth and flail away at the big guy. What we should do is accept reality gracefully.”
“Right. New York is still the ruling city, even after September 11, 2001,” I said.
“It’s still the ruling city because of September 11th.”
“It’s because New York is the ruling city, that September 11th happened in the first place.”
“So, what are we doing living in Boston?” I said.
“Oh, Boston’s lovely,” Abby said. “It’s got its own charms. I like living here. But I love visiting New York. Forget about what I said before about John; I’ll go with you, Maggie. I love going to New York for the museums and the galleries and the music, I really do, but it’s a bit too—frantic—for me. I could never live there.”
“Too dirty for me,” JoAnne said. “But the men are fine.”
“Not all of them,” Maggie pointed out. “New York holds too many bad memories for me. You know, like of my disastrous marriage. I can visit but I’d never move back.”
“What about you, Erin?” Abby asked. “Would you ever want to relocate to New York?”
I thought about that. Certainly, the idea had crossed my mind before... . But now there was Doug. Maybe he wouldn’t want me to go to New York alone. Without him.
“No, I like my life here,” I said. “I’m not into change for the sake of change. Maybe someday, I don’t know, if I get some amazing job offer ...” If Doug and I get married and decide to leave Boston together... . “I’m not going anywhere, though, for a while.”
“Good.” JoAnne raised her glass in a toast. “Here’s to us, four fabulous Bostonians.”
The evening got better from there.
Chapter Forty
Erin—sorry. I forgot Mrs. Cirillo died last year. More later. M
The conversation—one part of it, anyway—we’d had at Mistral stuck with me. I thought later about the notion of leaving Boston, of moving away not only from Doug but from my father, my one true remaining tie to family.
This train of thought, of course, got me thinking about family in general. About families.
Is any one family better than the other? It seems everyone considers her own family to be the worst and sometimes, also the best. So how can you really evaluate craziness? Leaving aside the obviously criminal families, the parents who lock their kids in basements and feed them canned slop; the Munchhausen-by-Proxy mommies; the daddies who mistake their kiddies for sex slaves.
Take JoAnne’s family, for example. Or, rather, what we’ve heard of her family, because JoAnne’s the only Chiofalo we’d met. There was the brother in LA and JoAnne thought there might be a cousin or two somewhere in a trailer park in Schenectady, otherwise JoAnne was it. Parents first divorced, then dead. No aunts or uncles living. Just JoAnne and her older, estranged brother, Robert.
Then, there was Maggie’s personal hell. I believed all of what I’d heard her say, which wasn’t much, Maggie being both scrupulously to-the-point and generally unwilling to say anything bad about anyone unless it’s totally unavoidable. What I knew was that there were too many kids, too little money, and too much alcohol by far. And where there’s too much alcohol there’s almost always violence. Maggie had the scars to prove it. But she got out alive and now has nothing at all to do with her siblings—both parents having succumbed to liver and heart disease—except for the annual Christmas card. I suspected even that token attachment would fall away before long.
And, of course, there was Abby’s unusual circumstances, her mother married to a guy fifteen years her junior, a guy with no visible income other than his new wife’s monthly allowance; one cousin in jail for trafficking in child porn; another in and out of a “drying out” facility; an eccentric grandfather who spoke only in rhyming couplets. The funny thing about Abby was that she claimed not to see anything unusual in the Walkers and the Howards, as if eccentricity and a certain constitutional delicacy—i.e., weak mind, no will power, amoral standards—was just part of what being a Walker and a Howard meant. Abby didn’t seem to resent being the offspring of trouble. That was probably a healthy way to get through life.
Sometimes, when I look at my own family in comparison to others, they seem pretty normal. The Westons and the Morellis. It’s a fairly small bunch now and if I don’t get moving and have some children, it’s going to be seriously smaller come the next generation and the one after that. It’s me, all alone, in my thirties, no cousins I can—or want—to track down, no siblings. My father had an older sister who went into what I like to call the Nunnery—the convent—when she was only a teenager. Though nuns are generally reported to have unusually long life spans—something about lack of stress due to lack of demanding husbands and children—my aunt Mary, also known as Sister Dominic, died when I was a small child. She was about twenty-five. It was a ruptured appendix, a horrible accident. Her fellow sisters didn’t get her to the hospital on time. Her parents—my grandparents, Dad’s parents—had both died in their early fifties, victims of one spectacular car accident. To this day my father keeps a white rabbit’s foot in his desk drawer. So far, he’s been remarkably healthy—and lucky.
My mother’s family is mostly gone now, too. There were a few cousins, living somewhere in New Hampshire, but it had been years since there’d been any communication. For all I knew they were dead or living in Wyoming.
My maternal grandparents had died within months of each other, five or six years earlier. First she died, then Grandpa. Everyone said he’d died because he couldn’t live without her, the woman to whom he’d been married for almost sixty years. Maybe that’s true; I’ll never know for sure. Grandpa did have a bad heart; maybe Grandma’s passing finally broke it.
My mother’s sister, my Aunt Margaret, was, in my memory, an unpleasant woman. She was nasty and mean-spirited and judgmental. The last I’d heard, she was living somewhere in the Midwest, seemingly determined to keep her distance from her sister Marie, as she’d sworn to do after their last horrible fight. It was no great loss to me or my father. But I thought it must be to my mother, on some level. She never mentioned Margaret, though, hadn’t since Margaret had gone away. When a mutual friend informed me of my aunt’s general whereabouts, I’d told my mother that I’d heard Aunt Margaret was alive.
“Not to me,” she’d said.
After that, I kept my mouth shut.
My mother, clearly the most rebellious and status-quo-breaking of the bunch, isn’t a horrible person. She’s just—unique. I mean, she was never physically abusive to me and while she was married to my father, she never cheated on him. Okay, so she did disappear once for three days when I was four and returned home with no explanation and looking none the worse for the wear—I was later told by my sneering Aunt Margaret—which should have given my father at least a clue that there would be trouble ahead. Which there was when at the age of fifty-five she filed for divorce without a word of warning and trotted off to An Unnamed South American Country to pursue a life dedicated to “social work.”
Her latest postcard:
Erin—Met the most adorable young man in jail. (There was some unpleasantness, but that’s over now.) He’s a Ricky Martin look-alike! He’s wonderful to me and doesn’t at all mind that he’s thirty years my junior. I’m supremely, gloriously fulfilled as a woman at last!—Ciao! (I know that’s not Spanish, but it sounds so right!)
It was amazing to me how anyone could actually get and stay married, what with each person bringing, inevitably, his or her own enormous Family Story, good, bad, or both.
From the minor but annoyingly important daily habits like the toilet paper flap being outside or in, over or under, (“We always did it
this
way at home!”), to the larger, lifestyle issues like vacationing without the kids (“But my parents
never
went anywhere without us!”) ... It seemed a constant struggle, a continual negotiation of ideas and actions.
Family. I was exhausted just thinking about the notion.
Especially when my thoughts wandered, as they inevitably did, to Doug’s own birth family, then to his wife’s, finally to the family they’d created in their ten-room, three-bath, two-fireplace house in Newton.
Family.
It was a part of Doug from which I was excluded then and from which I knew I would always be excluded, even if the amazing happened and we wound up married someday.
And when my thoughts projected themselves into the future, which they invariably did, I’d try to see Taylor and Courtney as teens, then young adults. I’d wonder what they’d be like. How they would think of their parents. And if I were still in the picture ... Well, would they even know I was there? Would I be their official stepmother or still a dark, lurking presence in their father’s life, someone kept apart from the Spears clan like rat poison is kept in a locked cabinet under the sink? And if I was the Stepmother, would Taylor and Courtney hate and despise me for breaking up their own best-and-worst family unit? Would I have to stay home when Doug went to big family functions like weddings and funerals because Carol, the Mother, now sainted by her husband’s perfidy, would be there and my presence would be just another humiliation to her?
What about the humiliation to yourself? Reason routinely asked sharply at this point in my ruminations.
Yes, I’d respond. What about the humiliation to me?
I had no answer to that.