What Remains (4 page)

Millie possessed a number of traits that I have since learned are peculiar, but when I was ten, nothing she did seemed unusual. She seemed like anyone’s grandmother, a huge, huggable mass of unconditional love who slipped us cigarettes and pocketed things from Waldbaum’s.

The police were called to the house once, to fish a dead deer out of the creek, and there was a brief panic about the pot. Millie saw the black-and-white car with roof lights snaking down the road, and she called for backup.

“Maryann, get out there quick. The cops are coming! Get Freddy!”

Johnny and Freddy ran out and propped an old pickup canopy against the side of the house to cover the crop, and when the officers pulled up, Millie sauntered out the front door in her muumuu with a fly swatter, swatting the air at imaginary flies. Painting a picture, in her mind, of a woman with nothing to hide.

She led the officers around to the creek, where they found the deer, chatting them up like a southern belle. After that, she replanted the marijuana on a remote patch of the Boises’ cornfield directly across from our driveway. It wasn’t on her property, and she had room for a bigger crop. My aunts and uncles were making a nice side income by this point, selling pot to the Mount Marion summer population.

Kingston was a town where the same dramas repeated every payday somewhere along Route 9W—at People’s Choice or Partners or the Dew Drop Inn. Women left their boyfriends, then went back, and then clung to another man in the bar. There were fistfights, tears, and whiskey with beer chasers. Led Zeppelin played on the jukebox, and my aunts and uncles were in the middle of all of it. My grandparents’ house was at the dead end of a winding dirt road, and all the walls between adulthood and adolescence dissolved behind their door—especially the year I turned ten, when I was allowed to stay for the whole summer with my older sister, away from the watchful eyes of our parents.

The loft was the best place to be. I liked to sleep there, because I could lie down on the floor, lean over the edge, and have a front-row seat to the theater going on below. Wide-eyed and fascinated, I watched the Knotty Pine group passing out six-packs of Schlitz and smoking up cartons of Marlboro reds or Larry’s cigarettes. Maryann kept everything in check; she oversaw nighttime operations, which was when everything important happened. She set their schedule, loose as it was. She decided where, when, or even if they’d go out. There were nights that the group of them sat so long at the oak table—getting up only to pee in the bathroom by Grandma’s room, if it was working, or off the back porch—that the bars would close, and they’d stay up all night in the house, getting drunk and playing cards. Those were the best nights. If they remembered anyone was in the loft, they would shout up, “You better be asleep. Don’t make us come up there!” Then back to their roundtable. On the nights Maryann bartended they all followed her to People’s Choice, where the drinks were strong and often free. We’d hear them stumble in as the sun was rising and watch them wake up in the afternoon—bloodshot and bleary-eyed, and ready to start all over again.

Sometimes they’d let us tag along, and then Jeannie would drive us to the bar and we’d dance by the jukebox while Maryann finished cleaning up. She’d turn the music up loud and teach us to two-step to Donna Summer and Sister Sledge.

Our days were spent in or on the creek, in cutoff jeans and T-shirts—swimming, jumping off the rope swing, and fishing for dinner. We didn’t care when the board of health condemned the creek one summer. My uncles just took down the sign. Each of the houses along the creek had a dock, and sometimes I spent entire afternoons sitting on ours with a fishing pole. There wasn’t much to catch—mostly catfish and eels—but I loved the simple ritual: picking earthworms out of a can, stringing them on a hook, and waiting for a tug on the line. The dock was also where the rowboat was tied up, and the rowboat led to the cabins.

A boy drowned in the creek one year, just off the falls on a sunny day—the only kind of day I remember. He was older than I was, in his twenties probably, and not a local. The sun was straight over us like a spotlight, and he and his friends were swimming around the deep spot that the rest of us knew to avoid. I saw him go under. I saw my brother Anthony and Matt Nucci running from the cabins. I saw Uncle Freddy diving in.

They said the boy screamed, but I don’t remember that, just my brother running so fast and then diving into the deep, muddy spot with Freddy. Their heads crashing the surface to gulp air, and diving down again. The ambulance came, and my brother climbed up on the bank. Silent minutes crept by while the rescue crew put their diving gear on, the rest of us staring at the water, frozen, picturing the body on the bottom of the creek.

We watched from the bank, my brother and Matt still dripping, while the rescue workers combed the bottom for his body. When they pulled him up, twenty minutes had gone by, and he was splotched purple and blue, and bloated—his stomach stretched out like he was pregnant. They pumped his chest and then took him to The Kingston Hospital.

“Twenty-two feet,” one of the men told my brother. “You never would have gotten down there, and if you had it wouldn’t’ve helped. He filled up like a Coke bottle and sank. Wasn’t a thing you kids could’ve done.”

“They kept him hooked up to life support, but they never got him back,” I heard Aunt Marsha tell Maryann the next day. “They said it was his sneakers. Those big leather high-tops. They pulled his feet down just like weights were tied to his legs.”

Uncle Freddy had almost drowned once, too, in the creek. It was one of the stories about him that ended with, “That was before Marsha.” There was a group on the dock one night dropping acid, and Freddy jumped into the creek. He started thrashing and screaming, and a nameless man—one of the strays who was staying at the house—jumped into the water and pulled him out.

Neither of these events changed the routine of the Kingston summers.

I learned everything I needed to know about growing up in that cluster of farms and houses and summer cabins. It had the way that some small towns do of harboring eccentrics, like us. We were an unusual assortment of adults and kids, lined up like tipsy ants, weaving in and out of my grandparents’ house. We lived exactly on the fray. It was the kind of place where everyone knew what you bought at the Pink Store, the brand of cigarette you smoked, whose car was parked at your house.

Millie’s was a house of firsts: first cigarettes, first drinks and petty crimes, first crushes—mine was Frankie McGarrigal.

The McGarrigals rented a cabin across the creek where the other summer kids all stayed. The cabins were one- and two-bedroom shacks painted army green. There were a dozen of them on the opposite side of the creek. They had plumbing and screened-in porches and a big room for playing cards and drinking beer. A flurry of kids ran in and out of the cabins—Kevin Anderson, Matt and Chris Nucci, Judy Pilger—and we followed them, crossing back and forth in a rowboat. But it was Frankie and Chris Nucci my sisters and I had crushes on, and mostly Frankie. Frankie had a speedboat and took his friends waterskiing up and down the creek. He sat on the top of the seat back to drive, one leg propped on the dash, coolly checking the skier behind him. He had silky hair and brown eyes and trickled a sultry cool through our world.

The boys were more interested in my older sister than in me. She knew how to smoke and inhale. But I tagged along anyway wherever they went. We hiked down the falls to Tarzan’s Pit and spent the afternoon jumping off the cliff into the water. Then we’d climb up to the rickety wooden trestle that hung over the tiny waterfall to drink beer and wait for the trains to come. We’d show off for one another and stand up as the trains came roaring by with their whistles screaming in our ears. We hung on tight, absorbed in our own danger, the wooden beams vibrating so hard I was sure they would collapse under the weight of the train.

Maryann was my role model, since she seemed to know something about boys. I remember watching her from the loft, getting ready to go out at night. She had a General Electric plug-in vanity mirror and all her makeup arranged on the table in front of her. The mirror had three light settings: daytime, nighttime, and office, and she always had it set to nighttime. The sun had barely set, and she was already drunk but painstakingly precise. She painted herself like a portrait—not a streak, smudge, or uneven spot. She had beautiful skin, a perfect complexion the way heavy women sometimes do—dewy-looking and smooth.

She started at the corner of her eye near her nose and wiped a bold blue shade across her lids with the foam-padded wand that came with the eye shadow. Then she spread it in a slow, even sweep to a point toward her ear, beyond her eyebrow—a solid band of vivid color. And then she repeated it for the other eye. She penciled her eyebrows into a perfect arch that framed her eye shadow. Then she brushed on a straighter line of thick black along the tops and bottoms of her lids and pasted on long black lashes. Her hand was always steady, even when she was holding a whiskey and soda in the other.

She unrolled the pink foam curlers from her hair and combed it into waves and then attached her thick, black hairpiece, teasing it up so that her hair was as big and exaggerated as the rest of her. She wore tight, stretchy pants, tapered at the ankles, and a clingy, low-cut knit top that outlined huge breasts floating like pontoons across her chest. Smooth orbs of flesh pressed against each other, a sharp line plunging down the middle.

It was mesmerizing to watch her routine, ending in time to get to the bar before midnight, pausing at stages to refill her drink and check in on the other rooms in the house. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I was too young to be aware of sex, but I knew there was some secret Maryann knew that I guessed I’d learn later.

I snuck into her room once and tried to mimic the long, even streaks of color on my eyelids. I thought I would learn something if I could get it just right. I’d find out what it was, this secret. I wiped the blue eye shadow onto my narrow lids, around the small hazel eyes, and in the filtered light of her mirror, I thought I’d done a pretty good job.

I followed my sister to the trestle that night to meet the boys and drink beer. She didn’t say anything while we were walking up to meet them, but when we got there, Frankie pointed a flashlight in my face.

“What’s on your eyes? They’re all blue!”

“What do you know?” I said, trying to sound cool.

I don’t know what I had expected; I just thought that grown-up girls wore makeup, and I wanted to be grown-up for Frankie. I tried to shrug it off, act tough, drink a sip of beer, but I knew the moment he pointed the flashlight that I had made a huge mistake. I knew this couldn’t be what Maryann spent hours at that table for. I scrubbed it all off with cold water in the bathroom as soon as I could sneak back to the house, leaving them to drink Budweiser and sing along to Zeppelin on the cassette player.

Our lives then were free of horizons; aunts and uncles represented everything I thought life would be. It caught up with them later, of course. Some of the guests of the Kingston house divorced, or died, or were defeated by alcohol and stifled dreams. Our summer days, for many years, were deceptively simple, but everything is different played back on the sober screen of adulthood.

You can drive up to Kingston now in a summer month, follow the winding exit road to Mount Marion, and it’s a sure thing you’ll catch Ruth Nucci in cabin 5 sitting in a nylon lawn chair drinking a Dr Pepper on her screened-in porch. My grandparents are buried in Mount Marion cemetery off Old King’s Highway. After they died, my father and my uncles sold the house to pay off tax bills, and the new owners tore it down to build a quaint Cape Cod. There is a paved driveway with two cars, and a flower garden where the Knotty Pine room was. The willow tree is gnarled but still standing by the side of the house where Grandma Millie’s marijuana plants grew.

I took from Kingston an attitude I am still able to summon, though I do so less frequently: The heady, youthful buzz of beginnings and possibilities. Like Hemingway’s Paris. The times we came to life.

Life begins with one random and fleeting moment, my first memory. I build the whole story from here. It starts with a road trip, Labor Day 1967. I was riding in the cab of a moving truck on the Palisades Parkway, wedged between my father and my uncle Freddy. I had just turned four. My mother followed behind us in a black Olds 88 with my two sisters, my brother, and our dog, Gigi. My mother was twenty-three and pregnant with her fifth child. Behind the Olds was Grandpa’s station wagon, with a mattress tied to the roof and the back packed with boxes.

We were colluders in the cab, the three of us—me, Dad, and Freddy. Trucks weren’t allowed on the Palisades, and here we were in the late afternoon sun, zipping along without fear. My father occasionally checked the rearview mirror, grinning. Beating the system, never mind the insignificance.

Behind us was a cramped, thin-walled apartment in Queens next door to the Silvercup Bread Factory and its sour smell of yeast. Ahead of us—the suburbs.

Just two weeks earlier my mother and father were driving to the suburbs in the same black Oldsmobile, looking at model homes in the new neighborhoods. It was what everyone did on the weekends. There was a “For Sale” sign at 15 Madison Hill Road. My dad knocked on the door and handed the woman who answered a hundred dollars to hold the house, or so it’s told, and two weeks later we rented a moving truck.

Rockland County was changing dramatically in the late sixties. City families were chasing the American Dream through towns named Nyack, Spring Valley, Tuxedo. They were looking for houses separated by neatly combed lawns on streets with pretty names—an oasis of driveways, garages, swing sets, and picket fences. Suburbia was not yet a caricature of life, but a status. It was for my parents a bold leap into adulthood, a $22,000 mortgage from Dime Savings Bank and $10,000 lent from Grandma Binder.

It was dark when we arrived, and the electricity hadn’t been turned on. Grandpa was a handyman by trade, the super of an apartment building on Fifty-Eighth Street—but he had a sort of slapstick way of fixing things. He was like a cartoon character who pulls the plug stopping one leak, uses it to stop another, then steps back and dusts his hands off, oblivious of the water swallowing his feet. He took the meter apart, and when he put it back together, the lights came on. But the meter was broken, and for three years the O&R bill was exactly the same each month, $3.04.

We were unpacked into bedrooms: my two sisters, Elaine and Terri, and me at the end of the hall; my mother and father in the room to one side of us; my younger brother, Anthony, in a crib on the other side. When Richard was born six months later, he moved in with Anthony.

Suffern was an ordinary suburb, filled with ordinary mothers who served pot roasts in CorningWare. Their husbands carried briefcases on the bus from their jobs in the city. Their children set their places at the table. They all bowed their heads for grace.

By this measure, we weren’t ordinary. My father worked as a cook. It was my mother who dressed up to go to work in the city, my mother who got a college degree. Her mother, Grandma Binder, came to live with us when I was six, after she retired from the cafeteria at New York Telephone & Co., and was put in charge of a loose arrangement. My parents popped in at odd hours, around various jobs and my mother’s school. Grandma tried to impose a sort of structure, but she was no match for five slippery grandkids, and we ran as unchecked as the dandelions and black-eyed Susans that grew wild in our backyard.

In a sense it was a life every kid dreams about—unruly, wild, unhampered. We had a baseball diamond worn into the side yard, where you could always find a game. We ran through the woods that edged our backyard at all hours of the day and into the night. We were dressed and fed and pointed toward school and the rest was more or less up to us. There was no quiet stretch of time when we were called in for dinner or told to wash up. No hours set aside to do chores or homework. No one checked our report cards, watched the clock when we were out, made sure we brushed our teeth at night. There were no bedtimes or story times except for the few weeks one winter my mother read us the first half of
Treasure Island
.

There was an infrequent and arbitrary use of discipline and attempts at order. One year family meetings were introduced, a sort of family court run by my mother, during which our shortcomings were pointed out and we were allowed, in turn, to point at one another. There was a chore chart and a meal schedule laid out. There were a handful of these meetings at best, so they were quickly forgotten, and disorder resumed.

I developed two traits as a result of my childhood: an obsession with order and a devotion to detail. I line up details and study and rearrange them until they please me. The simplest task is thought out, well-ordered, planned. I am unable to leave a thing to chance.

We turned our basement into Grandma Binder’s apartment—a cramped bedroom with a living area and kitchenette. Her Singer sewing machine, the kind with a floor pedal, was wedged in by the TV, next to a clear plastic sewing box with fabric scraps and hundreds of spools of colored thread that she used to make aprons, splurging only on the s-shaped rickrack she sewed around the hems. She hung picture puzzles of Austria on the wall and grew pots of African violets on the windowsills; they thrived somehow in that basement. She was known in the neighborhood for her green thumb. Mrs. Merrick showed up at our door one day with a pot of dirt and a limp stalk and Grandma Binder had it back to life in a week.

There was no furniture in the house to speak of, outside of Grandma’s apartment. There were beds to sleep on and a couple of mismatched chairs and a bookshelf, but the rooms gave an overall impression of emptiness. The previous owners left gold satin floor-length drapes in the living room, and they looked extravagant in the empty space. For years we posed for pictures in front of them closed so that the bare wood floors, the empty room, made it look like a small theater. As though we had just ended the school play and were crowded around my mother taking a curtain call.

We ate downstairs at Grandma’s, arranged around her table. She cooked Austrian foods that our friends had never heard of—boiled pig knuckles and kraut nödel. She had a thick, clotted accent and struggled with English. She watched
Guiding Light
while we were in school, hoping to improve it.

Grandma lived in New York City for thirty years on Seventy-First Street, the Upper East Side. When she arrived, Seventy-First Street was not an address people dropped at dinner parties. It was called Yorkville then, a name that went the way of the rotary phones and rabbit ears in their apartments. She raised my mother alone in a small ground-floor apartment. Her older sister Johanna lived across the street. We called her
Tante,
the Austrian word for
aunt
. They were linked by blood, by relatives in Austria, and Tante was loyal but not warm. She was not a woman who forgot mistakes. She thought it a duty to preserve them. She was small and firm like my grandmother, and she came to America first and respectably, with a husband. Grandma Binder left behind a son in Austria and a cloud of secrecy surrounding my mother’s father. His identity was never discussed. For this, Tante kept my grandmother in a perpetual prison of atonement that she neither resented nor shunned. There was a distinct pecking order: Tante, then Grandma Binder, then my mother. This was simply how it was. Grandma Binder and Tante were quiet and serious—staid women from a generation that expected difficulties and hard work. There was pride about owning things, admonitions to be careful. They parceled out information in tiny bites on a need-to-know basis, and there was little, in their view, that anyone needed to know.

The DiFalcos were cheap wine, cigarettes, loud laughter. Their faces were colorful, their movements exaggerated. They told big stories and filled up space. They were unable to leave a room without marking it somehow. My mother’s family, on the other hand, was quiet and resolute. They drank coffee in cups with saucers; they sat up straight in their chairs. They were in constant struggle, these temperaments, from where we kids stood: the DiFalcos’ clamorous simplicity, the Binders’ stern wall, and my mother parked uneasily between them.

My father grew up on Fifty-Eighth and Second Avenue with his brothers—Sal, Benny, and Joey—and Maryann. It was the kind of city block that was typical then: self-contained like a small town. A tight neighborhood at a time when you counted on the kindness of strangers—on other adults, the neighborhood policeman—to watch out for the kids. He was handsome—muscular and square-jawed, always with a cigarette dangling from his lips. He was one of the gang on Fifty-Eighth Street and had a quiet, James Dean kind of cool.

He was twenty-two when he spotted my mother on Sixty-Ninth and First Avenue, sitting on the corner next to Julia Richman High, from which she had just graduated with honors that spring. She was brainy and pretty, drawn to the guy in the leather jacket. I like his stories because he doesn’t tell them much, and when he does they’re casual but vivid. Nothing is left out. We know about the years busing tables at the Copa, with Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra hanging out in the kitchen. We know about motorcycles and street fights and hotwiring cars from Potemkin Cadillac on Sixty-Ninth Street with his buddy Vezzie. We know about Eddie Nine-fingers and the fight with Duke for my mother. We know he and Sal and Benny enlisted in the army in 1962 and that he was promoted from private to sergeant, which made him practically a war hero in my family.

My father was a high school dropout with a motorcycle and a leather jacket, a pack of Marlboros rolled up in the sleeve of his T-shirt. And he was the first person to give my mother information she could do something with. “You’re smart, Helen,” he told her. “You should go to college.” Then they walked hand in hand through Central Park singing, “two lost souls on the highway of life…” and she married him.

I think my mother had a different sort of life in mind, a more complicated one that she had expected but thought had missed her. Girls on Seventy-First Street were to get married and have children and it was assumed that was enough, a vague sense of respectability that always involved a man, and children, and very little of the woman herself. My mother made her choices early, before she was ready to, perhaps. At a time when there was a slight shift in what was expected of women. The idea of a career, a college education, was possible yet seemed just beyond her reach. She had a baby when she was eighteen, an age for trying things on, and four more before she started supposing a life for herself. She was caught between the pretty picture and this other thing that was yet to be defined.

I think there was a point in the beginning when she was thrilled with this family she had made. When she loved the madcap drama of five babies, a handsome husband, a pretty new house in the suburbs. The paint peeled faster than she expected, of course.

She was good with occasions. Our birthdays were filled with neighborhood kids and balloons and a Betty Crocker marble cake. We carved pumpkins every Halloween and picked from a chest full of costumes. On Easter we dressed up and drove into the city to Tante’s.

At Christmas she put together an extravaganza of food and toys. There was an improbable number of presents under the tree, and there was food in the house for weeks. Neither of which we could afford, but reality was put on hold. The empty house filled up magically, with furniture in the living room and a life-size poster of Santa Claus tacked to the wall. There was a big fir tree, borrowed chairs, stackable plastic tables draped with red-and-green tablecloths. Boxwood garland hung from the ceiling and wrapped around the banister; a wreath went up in the hallway. Cars crowded our driveway by noon on Christmas. My father started cooking on Christmas Eve and finished Christmas night. There were giant aluminum trays of baked ziti, calamari, and eggplant parmigiana. Food appeared like the miracle of the loaves. The sensation lasted through New Year’s, until all the food was eaten and all the needles were off the tree. We were characteristically late in taking everything down.

Then, however, there was the rest of the year to get through.

I was seven when my dad bought a restaurant in Yonkers and called it DiFalcos. It was on Kimball Avenue, three blocks up from Yonkers Raceway. It was a family restaurant, where you could get a chicken parm with a side of spaghetti for $2.50, cheese lasagna for $2.25, and free refills on soda. My mother waitressed here at night and on weekends. Sometimes on Sundays I would go with her to help. She would let me carry the baskets of bread to the tables, clear the dishes, fill up sodas. They struggled to keep the restaurant open and never seemed to save a dime, no matter how hard they worked. There was a flush of optimism one year when they bought a brown-velvet love seat, fancy teak bookshelves, and a brass tea cart with wheels. But DiFalcos didn’t survive, and then there were years of unpaid bills, foreclosure notices, and food stamps. My father took a job at Stella’s Deli. He moved easily within his space, wherever his space happened to be, like a man who had planned it all.

My mother was different. She wasn’t like the other mothers on the block, exchanging casserole recipes and sewing patterns. Like all little girls, I watched my mother carefully. If she had been the sort to bake cookies or play bridge, I am certain that I would have played bridge, too. But she wasn’t.

My mother wore short skirts with go-go boots, which were the style then. She was a
pretty
mother. She had Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
and
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare,
and they were both marked up in the margins. She was a
smart
mother. She was inconsolable when my father took the car to work one Saturday and she missed the Sears white sale. She was a
sad
mother. She screamed, furious, if towels were not washed, when the toilet paper ran out. She was a
mad
mother. I can’t find an adjective to hang onto.