“Look at this hair, Matty!” my mother shouts delightedly. “Just like a baby’s!”
My father smiles. “You got your baby back, Mama.”
Angie positively glows in my mother’s arms. “I can’t get over how good you look, Ange. I think I’m in love,” I say.
“Will you stop already?” She wiggles away from my mother, still smiling.
“Plus I’m not used to you looking so much better than me. You look like theafter picture and I look like thebefore.”
“That’s because you work too hard.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Did you make a partner yet?”
“No, they decide in two months. I’m going crazy. I hate life.” I wish I could tell her about the partnership rumors and the strange car, but we won’t have any time alone unless I waylay her.
“And it’s a hit! Out to right field! Might be deep enough…It is!” screams the Phillies announcer, Richie Ashburn, but my father’s too excited at seeing Angie again to look at the television. My parents miss Angie, even though they’re proud of her decision. They’re proud of both their twins, the one who serves God, and the other who serves Mammon.
We troop into the kitchen to talk and drink percolated coffee from chipped cups. That’s all we’ll do today, as Richie Ashburn calls a high-decibel double-header to an empty living room. I start the ball rolling over the first cup, whining about my caseload, but my father quickly takes over the conversation. He can’t hear when others talk, so his only choice is to filibuster. None of us minds this much, least of all my mother, who footnotes his narrative of their courtship.
My father takes a breather after lunch and my mother holds forth about the new butcher, who doesn’t trim off enough fat. She tells a few stories of her own, mostly about our childhood, and I realize how badly she needs to talk to someone who can hear her. Angie must know this too, for she doesn’t look bored, and, truth to tell, I’m not either. But we both draw the line after dinner, when she launches into the story of a maiden aunt’s gallbladder operation. Angie seizes the opportunity to head for the bathroom and I follow her upstairs, hoping to get her alone. I reach the bathroom door just as she’s about to close it.
“Ange, wait. It’s me.” I stick my foot in the door.
“What are you doing?” Angie looks at me through the crack.
“I want to talk to you.”
“Move your foot. I’ll be right out.”
“What am I, the Boston Strangler? Let me in.”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Number one or number two?”
“Mary, we’re not kids anymore.”
“Right. Number one or number two?”
She shakes her head. “Number one.”
“Okay. So number one, you can let me in.”
“It can’t wait two minutes?”
“I don’t want Mom to hear. Will you open the goddamn door?”
So she does, and I take a precarious seat on the curved edge of the tub, an old claw-and-ball-foot. Angie stands above me with her hands on her hips. “What is it?” she says.
“You can pee if you have to.”
“I can wait. Why don’t you tell me what you have to say.”
A little ember of anger starts to glow inside my chest. “What’s the big deal, Angie? We took baths together until we were ten years old. Now you won’t let me in the bathroom?”
She closes the lid on the toilet seat and sits down on it with a quiet sigh. The old Angie would have snapped back, would have given as good as she got, but that Angie went into the convent and never came out. “Is something the matter?” she asks patiently.
By now my teeth are on edge. “No.”
“Look, Mary, let’s not fight. What’s the matter?”
I look down at the tiny white octagons that make up the tile floor. The grout between them is pure as sugar. My father, a tile setter until he popped a disc in his back, regrouts the bathroom every year. The porcelain gleams like something you’d find at Trump Tower. My father does beautiful work.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Angie says.
I smile. We used to be able to read each other’s minds; I guess Angie can still read mine. “What was it Pop always said?”
“‘It’s not a job, it’s acraft.’”
“Right.” I look up, and her face has softened. I take a deep breath. “I don’t know where to start, Ange. So much is going on. At work. At home. I feel tense all the time.”
“What’s happening?”
“It’s the last couple of weeks until they decide who’s partner. I heard they’re only picking two of us. Everything I do is under the microscope. Plus I’ve been getting these phony phone calls. And last night I could swear a car was watching me from across the street.”
She frowns. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“But why would anybody be watching you? You’re not involved in any trouble, are you? I mean, in the work you do?”
“I don’t do any criminal cases, if that’s what you mean. Stalling would never touch anything like that.”
From downstairs, my mother calls, “Angela! Maria! Dessert!”
Angie gets up. “Maybe it’s your imagination. You always had a vivid imagination, you know.”
“I did not.”
“Oh, really? What about the time you hung garlic in our room, after that vampire movie we saw? It was on our bulletin board for a whole year. A foot-long ring of garlic.”
“So?”
“So my sweaters smelled like pesto.”
“But we never got any vampires.”
She laughs. “You look stressed, Mary. You need to relax. So what if they don’t make you partner? You’re a great lawyer. You can get another job.”
“Oh, yeah? Being passed over isn’t much of a recommendation, and the market in Philly is tight. Even the big firms are laying people off.”
“You need to stay calm. I’m sure everything will turn out all right. I would tell you that it’s in God’s hands, but I know what you’d say.”
“Girls, your coffee’s getting cold!” calls my mother.
“She’s waiting for us,” Angie says. “And I still have to go to the bathroom.”
I get up, reluctantly. “I wish we could get time to talk, Ange. We never talk. I don’t even know how you’re doing. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she says, with a pat smile, the same smile you’d give to a bank teller.
“Really?”
“Really. Now go. I have to pee.” She ushers me out the door. “I’ll pray for you,” she calls from inside.
“Terrific,” I mumble, walking down the stairs to a darkened living room. The double-header is over, and my father is standing in front of the television watching the Phillies leave the field. Red, blue, and green lights flicker across his face in the dark. Despite the carnival on his features, I can see he’s dejected. “They lose again, Pop?”
He doesn’t hear me.
“They lose, Pop?” I shout.
He nods and turns off the ancient television with a sigh. It makes a small electrical crackle; then the room falls oddly silent. I hadn’t realized how loud the volume was. He yanks the chattery pull chain on the floor lamp and the room lights up instantly, very bright. They must have a zillion-watt bulb in the lamp; the parchment shade is brown around the middle. I’m about to say something when I remember it might be because of my mother’s eyesight.
“You want some cannoli, honey?” my father asks tenderly. He throws an arm around my shoulder.
“You got the chocolate chip, don’t you? ’Cause if you don’t, I’m leaving. I’ve had it with the service at this place.”
“What kinda father would I be that I don’t have the chocolate chip? Huh?” He gives me a squeeze and we walk into the kitchen together.
My mother clucks about the cold coffee as we sit down, and Angie joins us at the table. My father’s soft shoulders slump over his coffee. We carry on the conversation around him, and my mother chatters anxiously through dessert. Something’s wrong, but I can’t figure out what it is. Angie senses it too, because after my father declines a cannoli for the second time, she gives me a discreet nudge.