“Your mama thinks a man should have an office to drive to every day. I sat at a desk for thirty-eight years and what did I get? Ask Doc, I’m too embarrassed to say.” Dad told me once Doc — his real name was Frankie, though no one ever called him that — had been called Doc since he was six years old and growing up with Dad in Little Italy. There was never a time in his life when Doc wasn’t Doc, which made his professional decision very easy. Dad used to say, no one ever called me Adjuster when I was a kid. Why didn’t they call me something like Sarge or Teach? Then I would have known better.
I wish I had something breakfasty in my kitchen cupboard to offer him. He wants to stay and talk about Mom, which is the way old married people have. Let’s talk about me means: What do you think of Mom? I’ll take the turkey over means: When will Rindy settle down? I wish this morning I had bought the Goodwill sofa for ten dollars instead of letting Vic haul off the fancy deck chairs from Fortunoff’s. Vic had flash. He’d left Jersey a long time before he actually took off.
“I can make you tea.”
“None of that herbal stuff.”
We don’t talk about Mom, but I know what he’s going through. She’s just started to find herself. He’s not burned out, he’s merely stuck. I remember when Mom refused to learn to drive, wouldn’t leave the house even to mail a letter. Her litany those days was: when you’ve spent the first fifteen years of your life in a mountain village, when you remember candles and gaslight and carrying water from a well, not to mention holding in your water at night because of wolves and the unlit outdoor privy, you like being housebound. She used those wolves for all they were worth, as though imaginary wolves still nipped her heels in the Clifton Mall.
Before Mom began to find herself and signed up for a class at Paterson, she used to nag Cindi and me about finding the right men. “Men,” she said; she wasn’t coy, never. Unembarrassed, she’d tell me about her wedding night, about her first sighting of Dad’s “thing” (“Land ho!” Cindi giggled. “Thar she blows!” I chipped in.) and she’d giggle at our word for it, the common word, and she’d use it around us, never around Dad. Mom’s peasant, she’s earthy but never coarse. If I could get that across to Dad, how I admire it in men or in women, I would feel somehow redeemed of all my little mistakes with them, with men, with myself. Cindi and Brent were married on a cruise ship by the ship’s captain. Tony, Vic’s older brother, made a play for me my senior year. Tony’s solid now. He manages a funeral home but he’s invested in crayfish ponds on the side.
“You don’t even own a dining table.” Dad sounds petulant. He uses “even” a lot around me. Not just a judgment, but a comparative judgment. Other people have dining tables. Lots of dining tables. He softens it a bit, not wanting to hurt me, wanting more for me to judge him a failure. “We’ve always had a sit-down dinner, hon.”
Okay, so traditions change. This year dinner’s potluck. So I don’t have real furniture. I eat off stack-up plastic tables as I watch the evening news. I drink red wine and heat a pita bread on the gas burner and wrap it around alfalfa sprouts or green linguine. The Swedish knockdown dresser keeps popping its sides because Vic didn’t glue it properly. Swedish engineering, he said, doesn’t need glue. Think of Volvos, he said, and Ingmar Bergman. He isn’t good with directions that come in four languages. At least he wasn’t.
“Trust me, Dad.” This isn’t the time to spring new lovers on him. “A friend made me a table. It’s in the basement.”
“How about chairs?” Ah, my good father. He could have said, friend? What friend?
Marge, my landlady, has all kinds of junky stuff in the basement. “Jorge and I’ll bring up what we need. You’d strain your back, Dad.” Shot knees, bad back: daily pain but nothing fatal. Not like Carmine.
“Jorge? Is that the new boyfriend?”
Shocking him makes me feel good. It would serve him right if Jorge were my new boyfriend. But Jorge is Marge’s other roomer. He gives Marge Spanish lessons, and does the heavy cleaning and the yard work. Jorge has family in El Salvador he’s hoping to bring up. I haven’t met Marge’s husband yet. He works on an offshore oil rig in some emirate with a funny name.
“No, Dad.” I explain about Jorge.
“El Salvador!” he repeats. “That means ‘the Savior.’” He passes on the information with a kind of awe. It makes Jorge’s homeland, which he’s shown me pretty pictures of, seem messy and exotic, at the very rim of human comprehension.
After Dad leaves, I call Cindi, who lives fifteen minutes away on Upper Mountainside Road. She’s eleven months younger and almost a natural blonde, but we’re close. Brent wasn’t easy for me to take, not at first. He owns a discount camera and electronics store on Fifty-fourth in Manhattan. Cindi met him through Club Med. They sat on a gorgeous Caribbean beach and talked of hogs. His father is an Amish farmer in Kalona, Iowa. Brent, in spite of the obvious hairpiece and the gold chain, is a rebel. He was born Schwartzendruber, but changed his name to Schwartz. Now no one believes the Brent, either. They call him Bernie on the street and it makes everyone more comfortable. His father’s never taken their buggy out of the county.
The first time Vic asked me out, he talked of feminism and holism and macrobiotics. Then he opened up on cinema and literature, and I was very impressed, as who wouldn’t be? Ro, my current lover, is very different. He picked me up in an uptown singles bar that I and sometimes Cindi go to. He bought me a Cinzano and touched my breast in the dark. He was direct, and at the same time weirdly courtly. I took him home though usually I don’t, at first. I learned in bed that night that the tall brown drink with the lemon twist he’d been drinking was Tab.
I went back on the singles circuit even though the break with Vic should have made me cautious. Cindi thinks Vic’s a romantic. I’ve told her how it ended. One Sunday morning in March he kissed me awake as usual. He’d brought in the Times from the porch and was reading it. I made us some cinnamon rose tea. We had a ritual, starting with the real estate pages, passing remarks on the latest tacky towers. Not for us, we’d say, the view is terrible! No room for the servants, things like that. And our imaginary children’s imaginary nanny. “Hi, gorgeous,” I said. He is gorgeous, not strong, but showy. He said, “I’m leaving, babe. New Jersey doesn’t do it for me anymore.” I said, “Okay, so where’re we going?” I had an awful job at the time, taking orders for MCI. Vic said, “I didn’t say we, babe.” So I asked, “You mean it’s over? Just like that?” And he said, “Isn’t that the best way? No fuss, no hang-ups.” Then I got a little whiny. “But why?” I wanted to know. But he was macrobiotic in lots of things, including relationships. Yin and yang, hot and sour, green and yellow. “You know, Rindy, there are places. You don’t fall off the earth when you leave Jersey, you know. Places you see pictures of and read about. Different weathers, different trees, different everything. Places that get the Cubs on cable instead of the Mets.” He was into that. For all the sophisticated things he liked to talk about, he was a very local boy. “Vic,” I pleaded, “you’re crazy. You need help.” “I need help because I want to get out of Jersey? You gotta be kidding!” He stood up and for a moment I thought he would do something crazy, like destroy something, or hurt me. “Don’t ever call me crazy, got that? And give me the keys to the van.”
He took the van. Danny had sold it to me when the Marines sent him overseas. I’d have given it to him anyway, even if he hadn’t asked.