Italian for Beginners (2 page)

I braced myself, took a deep breath, and turned around.

“I’m here, Grandma,” I croaked. My voice seemed to echo off the cold stone of the altar.

“Cat, dear!” Grandma exclaimed, her face lighting up. “I hardly recognized you, love! You’re wearing a dress! And you’ve done
your hair!”

A small ripple of laughter ran through the church.

“Er, yes,” I said. “Listen, do you think we could discuss this later, possibly? Rebecca’s in the middle of getting married,
and we’re causing a bit of a disruption.”

“But that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, dear!” Grandma exclaimed, coughing once again to punctuate her words. One
slim, bony hand flew to cover her mouth, and the other smoothed down her kelly green dress, the one she wore to every family
wedding, despite the fact that it had gone out of style approximately fifty years ago.

I glanced at my father. Dad, towering over his mother at six foot one, was staring at me helplessly with eyes full of apology.

“Everything’s fine, Grandma,” I soothed. “Let’s talk later.”

“But, Cat!” Grandma exclaimed. She paused to cough violently while Dad rapped on her back. “Cat, dear!” she resumed, after
the coughing fit. “Your sister is much younger than you! And now she’s getting married? What about that nice young man you
were dating, dear? Keith was it? Did you screw it up?”

A fresh wave of snickers ran through the church. I felt my mouth dry out, as if someone had filled it with a handful of cotton
balls. The room began to swirl around me—just a little, not as if I was about to pass out, but the way it does sometimes when
you’re dreaming.

That’s it! Perhaps this was all a dream. Of course it was! I mean, in what kind of twisted world did a thirty-four-year-old
woman attend her twenty-nine-year-old sister’s wedding and have her grandmother ridicule her in front of 120 friends and family
members? Obviously, this was some sort of devious trick on the part of my overactive imagination.

Just to be sure, I pinched myself. Hard.

Ouch.

Right. Well. Evidently, this was a
deep
sort of dream, the kind in which a pinch didn’t always work. So I pinched harder. Still nothing. I turned to glance at Rebecca.

“This isn’t really happening, is it?” I whispered. “I mean, this is obviously some kind of nightmare brought on by my subconscious
reaction to you getting married before me, which, by the way, I’m
very
happy about. Right?”

Becky looked at me strangely. “Noooo,” she said slowly. “We’re all very much awake. Now, please, Cat! Do something!”

“Right,” I muttered, horror finally beginning to set in. “Um, Grandma,” I said gently. “Let’s talk after the ceremony, okay?
I promise we can have a full discussion about just how grandly I’ve screwed up my life. Okay?”

My father was bent toward Grandma, trying to shush her, but it was clearly too late. She had something to say, and she was
going to say it.

“I just don’t understand, dear!” she said loudly, pushing my father away with surprising strength. “You’re not ugly.”

“Thanks,” I said, glancing around at the faces of the congregation, some amused, some horrified.

“You’re not a dimwit,” Grandma continued.

“Thanks,” I repeated through clenched teeth.

“I’m sure you’ve held on to your virtue, if you know what I mean,” she said quite seriously. She winked and added in a theatrical
whisper, “I’m talking about
the sex
.”

“Errrr,” I said, my face turning bright red. The snickers in the church seemed to get even louder, and Father Murphy cleared
his throat. I closed my eyes for a moment, wondering about the odds of spontaneous combustion, which sounded like a lovely
plan at the moment.

“So what’s the problem?” Grandma demanded after I had not, in fact, burst into flames on the spot. I glanced from side to
side, seeking some escape, but of course there was none.

“Um,” I began again.

“You’re nearly an old maid, dear!” Grandma chirped as I contemplated how nice it would be to simply die on the spot at that
very moment. She paused. “You’re running out of time!” she shrieked, flapping her arms suddenly above her head like a demented
bird. And then, just as quickly, she sat down in the pew, smiled sweetly at me, and waved, as if we hadn’t just had a lengthy,
revealing exchange in front of all my sister’s wedding guests. “Hello, dear!” she said brightly after a moment. “When did
you get here?”

The congregation sat in stunned silence for a moment until Father Murphy cleared his throat.

“Um, right, then,” he said awkwardly. “That was, um, enlightening. Now if we could just return to the wedding?”

Becky glanced down at me with concern in her eyes and mouthed, “Are you okay?”

I nodded and forced a smile. “Of course!”

But the truth was that I was mortified, disgraced, and humiliated. But I’d felt that way before Grandma even opened her mouth.
After all, when you’re six weeks away from turning thirty-five and your little sister has found the man of her dreams while
you’re remaining steadfastly single after yet another emotionless breakup, it’s difficult not to feel like a failure. Even
when you’re so happy for her that you could burst, there’s always a little voice in the back of your head that sounds suspiciously
like your grandmother, asking, “What’s wrong with you? Why doesn’t anyone love you?”

T
hat was a silly question to ask, of course. When you got right down to it, I had plenty of people who loved me. My dad did,
and Grandma. And since Dad was a first-generation Irish American, I had the requisite seven uncles, five aunts, and several
billion (okay, twenty-five) cousins on his side alone. And then there was my only sister, Becky, my best friend in the world.

I suppose our close relationship was unusual, especially given our five-year age gap. But our mother—a fiery, temperamental
Italian woman—had left us without so much as a note just a week and a half before my twelfth birthday, and major events like
that have the effect of bringing people together. Dad had fallen apart for that first year or so, and it had been up to me
to keep things together.

I had quit the soccer team, my ballet classes, and my dream of playing the trumpet in the high school band, and I’d become,
in effect, an adult before I was even a teenager. I’d taken Becky to all her lessons and classes, cooked meals for the three
of us every night, and even kept the apartment clean when Dad worked overtime. I hadn’t minded; I had always figured it was
my job.

Then our mother came back, a few months after I turned seventeen. And she’d expected to pick up just where she left off.

She’d been there for my senior year of high school and for Becky’s seventh-grade year. She had lived in an apartment just
down the street at first, and she and Dad went out on dates with each other and seemed to be falling in love again. Becky,
who had been too young to truly feel abandoned the first time around, had been thrilled when she came home. I’d felt the opposite;
in the five years she’d been gone, I’d grown to hate her for leaving us.

So when she returned, I kept waiting for her to break our hearts again. I wanted to strangle my father every time he’d shrug
helplessly and say in that fading brogue of his, “But, Cat, girl, she’s my one true love. And she’s your mum. Can’t you give
her another chance?”

She moved back in with us three months after coming back. And every day, I waited for her to leave again. I knew she would.
I knew it in the core of my soul.

And then, one day, she did. But not the way I thought.

She died. A massive heart attack at the age of forty-nine.

For the second time in my life, I’d been left by my mother. But this time, it was for good. And it wasn’t her fault, which
was the hardest part of it to wrap my mind around. I couldn’t hate her for leaving this time. But I could hate myself a little
for failing to let her back in when I still had the chance.

Dad sank into depression. Becky locked herself in her room and refused to talk to anyone. And I quietly changed my plans to
go off to UCLA for college and instead stayed home to go to NYU. When I’d graduated with my degree in accounting, I’d taken
a job at a tax firm in the city. I’d been there ever since, old reliable Cat Connelly.

It was better that way. I could take care of Dad and Rebecca. And that’s what I did. It was in those next several years that
the three of us grew inseparable. We had all been changed by Mom’s leaving. Dad had learned that sometimes you have to let
go of the people you love the most. Becky had learned that there would always be people there to take care of you.

And me? I learned to trust my instincts and to know that even the people who are supposed to love you can leave you one day
for no reason at all.

“I miss Mom,” Becky whispered to me a few minutes after we’d sat down for dinner at her reception at Adriano’s Ristorante
on the Upper West Side.

“Yeah?” I asked noncommittally.

Becky made a face at me. “Don’t do this, Cat,” she said. “Not today.”

“Do what?” I asked innocently.

“The Mom thing,” she said.

Becky remembered all the good things and revered our mother. It was the one thing in our lives we’d never been able to see
eye to eye on.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I won’t.”

Becky looked at me for a moment and nodded. “Thank you,” she said. She took a deep breath. “It would have been nice for her
to be here. I think she would have been proud.” She paused again and added, “She would have liked this.”

“Yes,” I agreed after a moment. “I think she would have.”

I meant it. The reception was beautiful. Not that I’d expected it to be any other way.

The Roma Ballroom at Adriano’s, Becky’s favorite Italian restaurant, was packed to capacity with Becky and Jay’s family and
friends. Exposed brick walls gave a warm, intimate feel to a room dotted with high-backed chairs covered in clover green,
and the fireplace in the corner crackled brightly, lending a glow to one end of the room as crystal chandeliers bathed everything
else in soft light.

While most of the wedding guests continued to eat and chat, I got up and walked to the back of the room, where I’d left my
tote bag tucked under the gift table. I pulled out my camera, one of my most prized possessions. It was a Panasonic Lumix
DMC-FZ50S, the only major purchase I’d made in the past five years, a thirty-fourth birthday present to myself, and I’d meant
to use it more. In fact, I’d spent many mornings wandering my neighborhood, photographing people in their normal environments,
sitting on their brownstone stoops, walking their dogs, taking out the trash. I’d caught couples arguing down the block, mothers
fixing the collars of their young children’s jackets, grandchildren helping elderly grandparents out for a stroll. I somehow
felt most in my element when I could capture the world inside my lens, anonymous, unobserved, blending into the scenery while
life happened around me.

I had taken Becky’s engagement photos, and she’d loved them, but she told me not to worry about shooting the wedding. “That’s
why we hired someone to take pictures,” she’d said. “Just relax for once, okay?” I had agreed at the time, but with Becky
fully absorbed in Jay, I couldn’t resist sneaking in a few shots. I knew she’d appreciate them later. Becky loved having her
picture taken, and she looked more beautiful tonight than I’d ever seen her.

“Hey, kiddo,” Dad said, coming up behind me and squeezing my shoulder after I’d shot a few dozen frames. “How you doing?”

I turned around and lowered the camera. He looked so handsome in his dark suit, his crisp white shirt, and his clover green
tie that perfectly matched my maid of honor dress. I smiled. “Good,” I said. “This is beautiful, isn’t it?”

“I thought you were on camera probation for the wedding.” He winked. “Bride’s orders.”

“I couldn’t resist,” I said. “She looks beautiful, doesn’t she?”

He nodded and we both looked at Becky for a moment. “Listen, kiddo,” my dad finally said. “I’m sorry about your grandmother.”

I shook my head. “It’s not your fault,” I said. I swallowed hard. “I just hope Becky’s not too upset.”

My father fixed me with a stern look. “Your grandmother humiliated you in front of more than a hundred people, and you’re
just worried about your sister?”

I glanced away. “Whatever.”

A few minutes later, after I’d put my camera reluctantly away, I headed toward the bathroom to touch up my makeup. I was stopped
by well-intentioned aunts who told me, “Your time is coming, dear,” and, “You look beautiful today. Don’t worry about what
your grandmother said,” and cousins who said things like, “That color is great on you!” and, “When are
you
getting married?”

I smiled and gave the appropriate responses, issued the proper excuses. I’d almost made it safely to the back of the restaurant
when my cousin Melody, a tall, plump woman with bad hair, stopped me with a firm, icy hand on my arm.

“So where’s Keith?” she asked, her eyes boring into mine. Melody was only a year older than me, but we’d never been close.
She lived just outside Boston, like most of my relatives. She had been married for a decade and was heavily pregnant with
her sixth child.