Not Exactly a Love Story (2 page)

It can’t be read as a personality conflict either. Having an insider’s view of both a Jewish and an Italian family, I can reliably state that in the face of overwhelming happiness or unbearable sorrow, their reactions are clinically identical.

Further, my mother and father agree on all the important issues: which political candidate deserves their vote, child-rearing, women’s rights, and whether the toilet paper sheets should come from under or over the top of the roll.
And they agreed on my name: Vincenzo. So what, you ask, would they find to fight about?

The root of all differences. Money.

Dad is an actor, and consequently doesn’t make it very regularly. He took on the role of househusband. He’s like Mary Poppins with a strong dose of that dog from Peter Pan, all wrapped up into one tall, thin, neurotic-looking individual in glasses that are too large for his face. But he doesn’t have a neurotic bone in his body. He doesn’t even have a lot of anger that his talent hasn’t been recognized.

Mom breadwinningly brings home the bacon as a stock market consultant. She saw to it that I took swimming lessons Saturday mornings at the Lexington Avenue Y. That I wore braces when my front teeth wanted to overlap. That we all took ballroom dancing when the trend swept New York City, for Pete’s sake!

Mom was behind this, I just knew it.

She dragged me along on a weekend shopping trip. My role: to carry the bags. “I’ve been thinking about you and Dad,” I said as we crossed the street.

“I can’t hear you over the traffic, Vinnie.”

She stepped up her pace, and I matched my stride to hers.

“Dad doesn’t seem to be into this divorce thing, Mom!” I shouted as she whipped through a revolving door. Mom shopped at the speed of light.

“It’s upsetting him,” I said a little too loudly as I saved our bags from the accelerating door, then hurried to catch
up to her. It’s embarrassing to lose track of your mother in a store at my age.

“Of course he’s upset,” she said, climbing the escalator like a flight of stairs. “I’m upset.”

I saw that I was going about this all wrong. When I was a little kid, I got my finger pinched in a car door and the tip of it swelled to the size of a Ping-Pong ball. I was still blubbering about it when we got home an hour later, and when Dad asked what was wrong, Mom said I was “upset.” It’s better to appeal to Mom’s softer side with logic.

“I know divorce is upsetting, Mom,” I said. “My point is, Dad seems to be upset because he doesn’t want one.”

“I’m not asking for a divorce the way I’d ask for a microwave oven, Vinnie,” Mom said, stepping up her speed a couple of notches as she headed across the floor. I hitched up the shopping bags and followed her at a dogtrot as she said, “I need to move on.”

“Move on?” I figured she was trying to sound hip. “You want to live in Paris or Rome?”

“I’m saying I need to improve my life.”

“We’ll get you a Jacuzzi. How does divorce improve your life?”

She said, “I want to live my life, not just work my way through it. There’s mystery out there, romance. I want to feel taken care of—”

Romance?

“Taken care of?” I cried as we hurtled through the cruise-wear department. “You mean by a man?” I said.

“Not
kept
, Vinnie,” my mother said to me and to whomever else might be listening as she snatched outfits off the clearance rack. “Taken care of. There’s a lot I’ve been missing.”

“You’re not going to get married to somebody else, right?”

“Being married is not my problem—”

This was good news. “I think you ought to talk this over with Dad. You don’t need a divorce—”

“Let me decide what I need, please.”

“All I’m saying—”

“Don’t say any more.” Mom disappeared into the fitting room.

I thought when a marriage was over it caused a kind of explosion.
I expected a lot of yelling and door-slamming. Tears and recriminations. But all that really happened was, I stopped bringing friends home. I hung out a lot in front of the TV. Dad started looking for a regular job and an apartment.

Even as the days grew longer, the sunshine warmer, and everyone I looked at appeared to be walking with a lighter step, a sense of things coming to an end hung over us at home. We spoke in sober, hushed tones and acted way too considerate. Divorce was just the next step this family was taking.

I got home from school at the end of March to find Dad in the kitchen. This was usual enough—Mom wasn’t much of a cook. Dad and I love cooking, and I always helped with dinner. But there weren’t any onions frying, and there was
no smell of meat browning. No vegetables laid out on the counter. Not a good sign.

“Hi, Dad.”

“ ’Lo, Vinnie.” He was sort of hanging out in front of the refrigerator, whistling a shaky rendition of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” I got the feeling he was hiding.

My stomach started tying itself up in knots. “You always tell me not to stand in the refrigerator.”

He shut the fridge. He’d been crying. “Dad—”

“It just hit me, I guess. Really hit me. I found a place.”

I swallowed hard. He’d be living someplace else. I couldn’t even imagine what that would be like for him.

He said, “It won’t be so bad. I have roommates. And I got a job.”

Roommates. Well, okay, at least he wouldn’t be living alone. “What kind of job?”

“Taxi driver. I can work late afternoons and in the evenings, leave myself time to do rounds in the morning. A lot of actors drive taxis.”

“I didn’t know you could drive.”

“Sure I can. But who needs to drive in New York?”

In a weird way, I could see this could be a good move for Dad. Not that I was enthusiastic about it. We ate cereal and left the bowls in the sink. I helped Dad pack his stuff and saw him off.

Mom was late getting home, and when she did, she seemed to have lost her footing. As if her new status loomed
larger and somewhat too free for her tastes. Her discomfort was something I felt compelled to test. “So what kind of guy have you got in mind, Mom?”

“Don’t start,” she said. She was cleaning up the kitchen, something that was usually not on her radar.

“The professorial type,” I suggested as she put an open box of uncooked rice into the fridge. “No, not enough income. An advertising executive, a little older, maybe, and moving in faster circles—”

“Vinnie, leave me alone.” She wedged a tall cereal box into a cabinet full of pots and pans. “What time is it?” The batteries in the kitchen clock had been dead for days. “Do you have the time?”

My mother took a plane to Haiti. She was back in three days with a light tan, a supply of grass place mats, and a piece of official-looking paper that ended my parents’ marriage.

Mom hooked up with a circle of girlfriends after she got home. Singles and divorcées. All of them compact—in build, in mannerism, in personality. No waste. Mom got stronger, sharper around the edges, humorless, even. It was scary.

Schedules and chores were printed on a chart that hung in the dining room over Dad’s place now that Dad wasn’t present to act as a receptacle for appointments, plans, requests, etceteras. After a couple of failed tests and then a
warning note from my guidance counselor, Mom made me hit the books hard.

She was aiming for straight As. I was looking to pass. When third-quarter report cards came out, I stared at the print until it shimmered like water had spilled on the page. I had skated by with Bs and a C except for one real shocker.

Failing gym had never even occurred to me.

I couldn’t seem to recover from one blow before another followed. No one tells you how things really are. Everything coming in waves, one rolling in after the other, and in case you’re thinking that doesn’t sound so bad, keep this in mind: that’s how huge rocks, boulders, become sand on the beach.

Mom did the required school conference. She could say
Mr. Buonofuoco’s name with a straight face, despite the fact that I’d already told her he’d been dubbed Mr. Goodfuck. No one claimed to have any firsthand experience. His nickname was the student body’s revenge for enduring his boot camp–level gym classes.

In class, I played it cool, saying to anyone who asked about it, “Good thing I don’t plan to major in gym in college.” Laughter all around. I didn’t think it was funny. Or cool. I was flunking phys ed,
flunking gym!

I had to talk to Dad about this. It was his busy time, the weekend. But I couldn’t wait for our regular Tuesday-night supper. I was sitting with him about two hours later.

“Dad, can you afford this?” I asked as we parked ourselves
in an Italian pastry shop. A waitress came up to stand at Dad’s elbow.

“Are you ready to order?” she asked. She was a knockout, and I noticed Dad noticed. Big dark sparkling eyes in a pretty face, lush in all the places that counted. Classy-looking, too. A guy could wonder what she was doing waiting tables when Hollywood was only a few thousand miles away. We ordered cannoli.

“I can afford it, I just did a dog food commercial,” Dad said when the waitress had gone. He looked a little embarrassed. “It’s not a speaking part, the dog got that part.”

I filled Dad in on the gym problem. He said I’d either have to be good at something athletic or be enthusiastically bad, but I’d pass fourth quarter if I was one of the two.

Feeling companionable in our failures, we both laughed.

Dad looked healthier, like he was enjoying life more. He’d never acted like a man who could make a living in the ordinary way, nine-to-fiving it, nose to the grindstone. So I didn’t see him that way either. In the same way that I was convinced that Mom and I needed Dad’s emotional support, I figured he would always be short of money. But he’d landed on his financial feet in only a few short weeks.

He liked driving the taxi. He worked the rush hour, he worked the airports, he worked the conventions and the trade shows. When he answered his phone, he quipped, “NYTD.” He even got a couple of movie parts, actor-with-taxi. He’d grown into a success story.

When the waitress came back, she had mixed up our
order with another table’s. She straightened things out pretty quickly, smiling and apologizing. Who could be upset with her, with those dimples? Not the men at the other table. Not us.

The weeping pustular eruptions took nearly three months to clear up. Most kids won’t say anything about acne to your face, even at the cost of speaking to you. In a group they’ll talk around you, over you, about you. You might as well be dead.

You don’t realize the seriousness of your situation until some girl comes up to you in the hallway. The wrong girl. You don’t look her in the eye. You strike a pose that suggests you’re in a headlong rush to get someplace. This spares her feelings. And anyone passing you in the hall can see that you were moving right along when she buttonholed you.

When that doesn’t work, you look her in the eye, trying not to see a constellation you might be tempted to stare at. But as she’s telling you what an interesting science project you turned in, you notice how pretty she is. Really pretty. You notice her skin is clear.

She had terrible acne. Last year.

And then it hits you. Being approached by her means you’ve been accepted into the leper colony. The only kids who’ve noticed your acne has cleared up are your fellow sufferers. But she’s still looking like she hasn’t seen that you’re poised to run. It doesn’t help that you both know she’s older than you and she’s still interested.

That’s when she mentions the junior dance.