“Cacciamani!” she said. She was laughing so hard that she finally had to put the phone down and get herself a glass of water.
“I’m insane.”
“You were insane for hating the guy all those years. You aren’t insane for going out with him. I think he’s nice. He’s good-looking.”
“You know him?”
“I don’t
know
him, but I’ve bought flowers from him. I’ve talked to him—‘Hello, how’s the weather?’ sort of thing.”
This seemed inexplicable to me. “What were you doing buying flowers at Romeo’s? I thought you bought your flowers at Roseman’s.”
“I always buy them at Roseman’s now and I usually did before but, honey, I’ve got to tell you, Mort drove me insane. The man could not stop talking. If I was in a hurry, it was just so much easier to go to Romeo’s.”
“You have a point there. So you don’t think I’m awful? The girls are going to hate me.”
“The girls will never know if you have an ounce of discretion in you. You’re an adult, after all. You deserve to go out. Besides, I never could figure out what in the hell this family feud was all about, anyway. Why did all of you hate them so much? I can remember when we were kids, your dad used to go on about the
Cacciamanis so long I thought he was going to rupture an artery.”
“That’s the weird part. I don’t know why we hated them. And Romeo doesn’t know why they hated us. Just a tradition, I guess.”
“So the tradition is over. What are you going to wear?” Gloria had more experience in the world of dating than I did, which is to say she had some in comparison to my none. “Where are you going?”
“We’re meeting at the CVS in Porter Square.”
“That pretty much leaves all of your options open, though I’d say nothing too fancy for a drugstore. Do you know what he likes to do?”
“He likes to walk.”
“So flat shoes. We’re not getting very far.”
I sat down on a stool and rested my head against the corkboard. “Maybe I should call him, tell him just to forget it.”
“Put perfume behind your knees. Men love that.”
“I don’t think he’ll be coming in contact with the backs of my knees.”
“What about birth control?” she said soberly.
I laughed. “Nonissue, thank you very much. Isn’t it enough that I’m worrying about dinner? Do you have to make me worry about the things that aren’t going to happen, anyway?”
“You’re better off if you’re prepared, emotionally speaking. You have to think through all of the scenarios.”
But I couldn’t think through any of them. Not even the one where I made it to the drugstore. Suddenly I was paralyzed with a kind of fear I hadn’t known since Mort told me about Lila.
“Listen, Gloria, be a best friend, will you? Come over tonight and pick me up. Show everybody that we’re going out to dinner and then drive away with me. The girls will get suspicious if I go out again tonight.”
“What am I? The beard? You want me to drive you to the drugstore?”
“If you could,” I said. I was ashamed of how small and pathetic my voice sounded.
“Sure, Julie,” she said. “I’ll be your alibi any day.”
I closed the shop a half hour early and went home to go and sit in the tub. The house was miraculously empty and the quiet gave me a false sense of peace. Maybe it would be all right. Maybe we would have a nice dinner and nobody would find out. Gloria was right. This was not a crime. The only thing I disagreed with her about was the perfume. Florists never touch the stuff. We understood there were too many beautiful smelling things in the world to even try and compete.
SANDY, TONY, AND SARAH CAME BACK FROM MCDONALD’S
at six o’clock, the contents of their Happy Meal boxes still proving to be a great source of entertainment. At six-fifteen Nora walked in. I would have bet money on it.
“I was just showing a house down the street,” she said, perfectly cool. “I thought I’d drop in and say hello.” Nora had on an emerald green suit with an Hermès scarf tied loosely around her neck. My little Harley girl. She would have had a real future with the CIA.
“You look awfully nice,” I said. Sandy, who was playing the role of the poor relation in her jeans and sweatshirt, looked like she had divided her day between plants and motherhood, which she had. She sulked off toward the kitchen, encouraging the children to sit in chairs while eating some ice cream.
“You look nice yourself,” Nora said. “Going out?”
“I am, actually. Gloria and I are going to dinner.”
“In the middle of the week?”
“We eat during the week.”
“I was just wondering,” Nora said.
“Well, don’t.”
“Maybe I’ll stick around for a minute. I haven’t seen Gloria in ages. She’s happy with Buzz, isn’t she?”
“Things turned out very well for them.”
Nora paced around a little, smoothing down her skirt, readjusting a lamp shade. She didn’t want to be there. She wanted to get home to Alex, but she still had to check up on me. I couldn’t be too mad at her considering that her worst suspicions of my character were exactly correct and I planned to betray my promise to her in a CVS just as soon as I could get there.
“What was the house like?” I asked. I would have liked to have had the extra time to look at my lipstick, to wipe it off and reapply it a half a dozen times, which I remembered to be the classic predate ritual. I wanted time to be nervous instead of having to sit in my living room and make small talk with Nora.
“What house?”
“The house you were showing. Was it near here?”
Nora tilted her head slightly toward the east. “Over there.”
“Sounds lovely,” I said.
Nora sighed and threw herself into a recliner, forgetting all about the careful positioning of her skirt. “What about the shop? How are things going?”
“Not good—you know that.”
“I don’t see why you just don’t give it up. Take the capital out and get yourself a condominium. Maybe something in Florida. You know that Alex and I will help you out.”
“I want to make this work.”
“It’s not
going
to work, Mother. The business falls off every year. You’ve got to walk away while you still have some assets left
in the place, otherwise the whole thing is going to be a bust. Everything Daddy worked for is going to be for nothing.”
“It was never your father’s work. It was my father’s work.” I had made a solemn vow to myself never to talk Mort down to the girls, but where business was concerned, I failed. Mort had done a good job. He made the place thrive. But he never cared about flowers, and in the end he didn’t care about me, either. I was in no mood to hear about how I was ruining his hard work.
“Call it whatever you want to call it,” Nora said. “What I’m worried about is you. I want to see you come away with something. It’s the Cacciamanis—you know that, don’t you? That’s the reason the business is failing. They poison our name in the community every chance they get. The big weddings, the fund-raising dinners, that business is all going to Cacciamanis.”
“We do plenty of weddings. In fact, I’ve even been thinking about starting a little wedding planner business on the side. I’m always helping girls find a caterer and pick out their bridesmaids’ dresses. I think it could be a great expansion.”
“I think they’re anti-Semitic.” Nora never listened to me.
“That’s crazy. Why would you say such a thing?”
“Oh,” she said, looking absently toward the candy dish on the coffee table. “I’m out with people all the time. I hear things.”
“You hear things from your father and they aren’t true.”
“You’re sticking up for them.”
“I’m not sticking up, but you can’t call someone anti-Semitic just because they don’t like you. Are we anti-Catholic?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, what’s the difference?”
Nora stood up and somehow managed to look down at me
slightly even though I was taller than she was. “You just don’t understand.”
“Jesus,” I said. Then the doorbell rang and I was awash with gratitude. “I’m going out to dinner. If you want to wait here for me, fine.” I went into the kitchen and kissed Tony and Sarah good night. Sandy looked at me wistfully for a minute and so I leaned over and kissed her, too.
Nora had let Gloria in and they were standing in the living room laughing, the best of friends. “Time to go,” I said.
“Maybe I could come,” Nora said. “Alex has a meeting tonight and I don’t have any plans. It could be fun, just the girls.”
Gloria took a deep breath and put her hand on Nora’s shoulder. “Honey,” she said, “forgive me, but I need your mom all to myself tonight.”
“Is everything okay?”
Gloria shrugged and managed to look both hopeless and brave. “I’ve just got some things I need to talk to her about. She’s such an angel to me, you know. You’re lucky to have such a wonderful mother.”
“Hi, Gloria,” Sandy called from the kitchen.
“Hi, sweetheart. Kiss the kids for me, we’re running.” Then Gloria put one arm around my shoulder and manhandled me out the door before any further discussion could evolve.
The night was crisp and clear, but there were never many stars to speak of in Somerville. We threw out too much light of our own and washed them away. I got into Gloria’s Plymouth and she all but floored it getting off my street. “I thought you were just being a wimp wanting me to pick you up tonight, but that felt like a regular jailbreak.”
“They’re watching me.”
“I should say so. I think we should drive around for a while just to make sure Nora isn’t having us tailed. Do you know where she got those cute shoes?”
“I have no idea. I haven’t even had enough time to be nervous.”
“Well, you look good.”
Gloria was the one who looked good. She had had her eyes done last year, and while I swore I had no interest in plastic surgery, I had to admit the results were impressive.
“I remember I used to tell my mother I was spending the night at your house in tenth grade when I was sneaking out with Jerry Shapiro. You were such a good cover. My mother always thought you were a wonderful influence on me.”
“I was once a wonderful influence,” I said.
“I’m just glad to be able to return the favor. You need to have a little more fun, Julie. You look pretty boxed in, if you ask me.” Gloria pulled up in a red zone in front of the CVS. It was ten minutes until seven. “Do you need me to pick you up?”
I shook my head. “I’ll get home fine.”
“Or maybe you won’t.” She leaned over and gave me a kiss. “Think positive.”
I wondered what I could have been thinking of, asking a man to meet me in a store with fluorescent overhead lighting. Slowly, casually, I began to make my way up and down the aisles, trying not to look so incredibly suspicious that I would be arrested for shoplifting before he even got there. In the makeup aisle bottles of tan foundation claimed to make your skin young and dewy. There was a line of nail polish called Fetish. I picked up a tube of
lipstick called French Kiss and then put it back in its plastic slot. Skin creams offered the miracles of youth, the overnight face-lift, and an age-recovery complex. The magazine aisle was not kinder. “What Your Mother Never Told You About Multiple Orgasms,” “How to Make Him Beg for More,” “Great Sex at 20, 30, and 40.” I stopped and picked that one up. What happened to great sex at fifty? And what about sixty? Why was there no “Great Sex at 60”? Were we finished? Unentitled? Too thrilled to be taking our grandchildren to swim practice to even think about sex? Too awash in the fulfillment of our golden years to want a piece of the action? I put the magazine in the rack with its back cover facing out, a girl and a boy, all wet and sand smeared, running through the waves with their surfboards and cigarettes. It didn’t make me feel any better.
By the time I had wandered over toward the pharmacy, I was ready to call it a night. Lubrication creams next to adult undergarments. A wall of condoms in every conceivable color and texture, all promising protection from sexually transmitted disease. I had forgotten about those. Lambskins and Magnums. Condoms that came packaged like the gold chocolate coins of my youth. The magazine was right. I was over, out of business. I was standing there staring at the boxes, reading the hideously depressing slogans (“For Feeling Like Love”), thinking that sex was a sport for the young, when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“Shopping?” Romeo said.
I wasn’t wearing my glasses and so my nose was approximately three inches away from a box of condoms. “I think this may be the single worst instant of my life,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Then things can only go up from here.”
Romeo smiled at me and I thought he must be right. He took my hand and led me out of the contraceptive aisle, which was considerate because if left to my own devices I would have simply tried to claw my way out through the floor.
“I was thinking we could go into Harvard Square and have sushi for dinner. Do you eat sushi?”
“Raw fish?”
“I know, I couldn’t believe it, either. Plummy got me into it. It’s what college kids eat. It’s really good once you can get past the raw part, but if you don’t want to do that, we can go someplace else.”
“No,” I said. “Given the circumstances, I would say raw fish is exactly what we should be eating. It’s reckless food, don’t you think?”
“I do.”
As we left CVS and walked toward the car, Romeo kept holding my hand. It’s a wonderful thing to have somebody hold your hand. Mort held my hand as we were walking back down the aisle after our wedding, but that was the last time. After that I held hands with my daughters when they were little, crossing the street and walking through parking lots until one day they got too big for it and pulled away from me. I missed that, the sweet and slightly clammy contact between us. I was glad to have Tony and Sarah to hold hands with again. I was gladder still to be holding hands with Romeo, especially since I knew he had picked mine up not because he was afraid I might dart out into traffic but because he liked the way my hand felt inside his own.
A piece of dating advice for the out of practice: If you’re nervous about a date, especially if it is a date with your sworn
enemy, try shaking off that nervousness by doing something that you would feel even more nervous about, say, skydiving, armed robbery, or eating sushi. The restaurant was pretty, very quiet, with paper walls and soft lighting. The music seemed to be a flute accompanied by a brook, and there was an ikebana arrangement at the hostess station that Romeo and I both admired. I let him order because not even the most enlightened feminist knows how to order sushi if she’s never eaten it before. The waitress brought us a bottle of cold sake, but when I picked it up, Romeo took it away from me. “Never pour your own,” Romeo said, filling my glass. “It’s bad luck. Plummy told me that.” Then he handed me the bottle and I filled his glass. “To the most beautiful florist in Somerville,” he said.