Girl Talk

by Julianna Baggott

  Dear Mrs. Jablonski,

  (“Again with the Mrs. Jablonski?” my mother said. “You’d think sleeping with my husband would make our relationship a little less formal.”)

  Hello. How are you? I’m surprised to find myself writing you. Bobby (my mother rolled her eyes) doesn’t know I’m writing this. I want you to know that he is fine. And we are in Arizona, but I can’t say where. Not because I don’t know but because I don’t think I should tell. We may open a small business here. I’ve always wanted to write for a newspaper. (My mother said, “Please—she can’t even write a letter!”)

  Anyway, we will not be needing any more money. I’m sorry about that. And Bobby misses Lissy terribly. It’s hard for him sometimes. There’s a lot to consider. I may write again.

  Sincerely,

  Vivian S. Spivy

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” my mother said. “They’ve got the name of the town right on the envelope—Tucson, they’re in Tucson.”

  I imagined Vivian in the post office, having driven my mother’s station wagon—complete with my mother’s box of Wetnaps and lipstick and coffee mug—into town for the day. I guess she didn’t expect the clerk to stamp the envelope. I imagined she felt a little panic as she saw the stamp and then the letter swooshed away into a canvas bin on wheels, and, being shy, she didn’t ask for the letter back but half jogged, shifty eyed and flustered, to the car. It was a mistake my mother never would have made. The letter was nice, though, thoughtful, with graceful simplicity, childlike sincerity. I found Vivian Spivy touching and sweet and sad.

  Grandma Tati and Aunt Bobo’s letter was much more ominous. They wanted to know why my father wasn’t there when they made their regular Sunday night phone call, why no one was answering the phone. They stated their intentions to visit the following weekend if they heard nothing from us and possibly even if they did hear from us—which sounded like a threat. But I saw no prospect of our leaving anytime soon. There was no place else to go, really. I got the impression that my mother didn’t want to be alone in Keene, her marriage failing publicly, and there was no one else that my mother felt she could be relaxed around, without their prying and gossiping about her. And the visit seemed to work well for Ruby, a terribly bored housewife who’d never had any children, because, she said, her “tubes were bad.” She took my mother and me on as projects, the daughter and granddaughter she’d never had. Evidently, Jacko had been her only maternal outlet for years; the guest bedroom closet was filled with little multicolored doggie sweaters and bow ties. She had garish taste and a penchant for euchre, a card game pronounced yooker, that had seen its heyday in Bayonne in the 1940s, its players having since dwindled to a small core of embattled, loyal euchre pros. She was grooming us with a motherly frenzy for our euchre coming-out party at Marianne Focetti’s house in downtown Bayonne—Marianne being a long-time sworn social enemy of Ruby’s. By week two, my mother was wearing Ruby’s leopard-print leggings, which seemed to suit her in some strange way, and there were similarly horrific outfits purchased for me. She’d convinced my mother to throw away her Weight Watchers scale, letting Ruby fatten her up. Ruby teased our hair. I was a little scared of it all and spent long hours in the pool, taking the occasional poolside instruction from my mother to put my face in, to blow bubbles—things she’d heard but never mastered. Mainly I was trying to keep a safe distance from the teasing comb and Aquanet. And on rainy days, I watched television and patted Jacko’s narrow rump. I’d never had a dog, and I liked the way he appreciated my touch, arching, foot jiggling, when I hit the spot he couldn’t get at with his head in its plastic cast. When Ruby watched her soaps, I practiced my clarinet. I was lonely and bored.

  “Listen,” I said one rainy afternoon. “Jacko sings along!” I played a few bars of “Danny Boy” and Jacko howled.

  “No offense, hon,” Ruby said. “I think he’s in pain.”

  Ruby dumped the dog out the back door and plopped herself down in front of the television. It was disheartening. I was planning on asking Ruby to show me old photo albums in hopes of spotting my real father, but I hadn’t quite worked up the courage. I didn’t know what my mother would think of it, so I held back for the time being.

  The one thing I could not escape, ever, was Ruby’s daily euchre lessons. The three of us hunched over our playing cards while Ruby lectured on how to keep a man. She’d surmised early on that my father was gone. She’d guessed with a younger woman, rolling her poppy eyes. She knew little tricks of the trade, and when she wasn’t endlessly chronicling the ailments of aging from which she suffered, she lectured on romance. She said, “The things they don’t print in Good Housekeeping, if you know what I mean.” I certainly didn’t and didn’t particularly want to hear Ruby’s take on human sexuality. She believed lingerie should always be red, because it incited the appetite. “It’s scientifically proven,” she told us. “That’s why Italian restaurants always have red booths. It makes you hungry by setting off chemicals in your brain.” I imagined Ruby sashaying around the house in a teddy made of restaurant-booth vinyl. I thought about the guest bedroom my mother and I were sharing and how it was decorated all in red and felt a little squeamish, wondering if Ruby had seduced Dino in my bed. There was no escape in sight. At any mention of our departure, Ruby would stomp her Charo shoes and, in her hoarse smoker’s voice, say, “Dino! Tell them they can’t go!” And Dino, from the dark recesses of his study, where I think he spent most of his time watching the New York Yankees, dozing off, would say, “You can’t go!”

  And so I imagined my Grandmother Tati and Aunt Bobo taking the spare key from the hook in the garage, opening our side door and walking through the empty house, wandering room to room, arm in arm, Bobo frightened and Tati pissed. My mother tore up both notes and threw them in the garbage.

  My mother handed Church’s letter to me and said, “Don’t get involved with a Fiske. They’re a little fragile, don’t you think?”

  I said, “It’s just a letter.”

  It went like this:

  Lissy,

  My Dad’s got a girlfriend named Daisy, for Chrissakes, and Juniper is wigging out. She bought me a shirt with an Eton collar and wants me to actually wear it. Piper is hormonally imbalanced. I told Juniper that your mother soothed me and that you get straight A’s. I just assumed that. (He was right.) Anyway, I’m N.I.B., you know, from the boarding school in Delaware. See what I’m getting at? What do you think?

  Sincerely,

  C. F.

  In the P.S. he scribbled his phone number, adding, It’s Piper’s private line, but I’d rather her know you’re calling than Juniper. This has got to be a covert operation. No shit.

  I didn’t dare ask my mother what ‘N.I.B.’ was. I assumed it was something perverted. The letter actually made me a little queasy. I was giddy over the fact he’d written, but I didn’t know what it meant and I wanted it to mean a lot. That afternoon I excused myself from our euchre lesson on the patio to go to the bathroom, and I called Church.

  Piper answered, “Yes? Piper Fiske here.”

  “Hi, it’s Lissy. Is Church around?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Churchie is masturbating in his bedroom and can’t talk right now.”

  “Look, Piper, I can’t bullshit around with you.” I realized as I was speaking that I was scared of Piper. My kneecaps were jiggling. “I’ve only got a minute here and I need to talk to him.”

  There was a puff of air and stomping feet and then Church said, “Hello?” He sounded a little sleepy or breathless and I wondered if he had, in fact, been masturbating. I was flustered, my cheeks hot. “What’s ‘N.I.B.’?”

  “Lissy?”

  “Yeah. What’s ‘N.I.B.’?”

  “Oh, it means I got kicked out of my boarding school. ‘N.I.B.’ stands for”—he said the rest with a clenched jaw, faking a British accent—“not invited back.”

  “What did you do?”

  “They didn’t like me. The headmaster had it in for me, really. One time I
asked the French teacher if I could eat her velvet underwear. One time, that’s it. She all but busted an egg over it.”

  “In French?” It seemed important.

  “Of course I asked in French. Provincial French—maybe the grammar was a little off. But, yes, in French. I thought it was clever.”

  “What does your letter mean, Church? It’s in, like, code. What are you talking about, covert operation?”

  “Look, I couldn’t spell it out because it might have gotten intercepted. C’mon, Lissy. Add it up. My dad’s got a girlfriend. My mother’s intensely neurotic, borderline breakdown. I’m N.I.B. They’ve got to think of something to do with me. Right? Why not send me to a nice, stable, loving, middle-class environment? Like yours.”

  Church could be a real asshole. I was a little pissed off by the whole middle-class Happy Days impression he had of us. “We’re not exactly stable, Church.” And then I lowered my voice. “I think Dino’s in a drug ring.” I’d been suspicious of the vague import-export description of his vitamin business but was also trying to play it up to make my life sound more exotic and dangerous than it was.

  “Look, nobody’s stable. You know what John Lennon said about the sixties? ‘Nothing happened except we got dressed up.’ I’m just fucking dressed up, in an Eton collar, no less. It might as well be hooked up to a leash. Nobody knows what to do with me.”

  “What about Piper?”

  “She’s too good for everybody except maybe William Burroughs and Mahler and Eric Clapton every once in a while. She just sulks around her room. My parents think she’s an angel.”

  “I thought you guys did tennis camp.”

  “I got ‘nibbed’ there, too. In my defense, I was doing a flawless impersonation of John McEnroe and they kicked me out. The instructor, some blond asshole named Thad, said, ‘Yes, McEnroe, if McEnroe were an abysmal tennis player.’ See? I’m in hell.” His voice got shaky. “My dad’s talking military academies. Everybody’s lying to me!”

  Ruby had tottered into the house, but I hadn’t seen her. “Holy shit,” I said about the military academies, and Ruby answered, “You’d better be praying.”

  I hung up the phone and looked at Ruby.

  “Am I gonna see that on my long distance?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I’ll pay you back.”

  “Your boyfriend?” She squinted her pop eyes, smiling sheepishly.

  “Not really,” I said. “No, I don’t think so.”

  When I finally mustered the nerve to ask about photo albums, Ruby was delighted to oblige. She loved my passion for photo albums. I sat through hours of pictures of strangers, Aunt Angela before the goiter, babies squalling through baptisms, and the young and lovely Ruby on a roller coaster, as a bride, one in Italy with her hands posed to make it look like she was holding up the Tower of Pisa.

  “What about Dino before he met you?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. There’s a shoe box somewheres. But it’s the old country mostly, black and whites of olive pickers scrubbed up for Sunday mass.”

  “I want to see everything!”

  My mother was in and out. I think she knew that I was looking for a picture of Anthony, but she didn’t seem interested. She paced around on the patio, smoking cigarettes, staring into the pool, up at the sky, and then back to the pool where the stars were reflected.

  Ruby handed me the shoe box. “He scribbled on the backs of them,” she said. “I got to fix up dinner.”

  She’d been right. A lot of the pictures were ancient photographs of dark-skinned farmers and farmers’ wives and lots of children, their faces hard and fixed, proud. I flipped through them as quickly as I could, looking for something American, a man and a boy on a ship. And then finally I saw a picture of a young Dino and a little boy with a big head, topped by a man-size hat and a white patch taped over one eye. On the back, he’d written out: Anthony and Dino Pantuliano, May 17, no year. Shuffling through the stack, I watched Anthony grow up, always the smallest kid in the class picture, the baseball uniform bagging at his knees, its numbers more on his fanny than his back. He wasn’t scrawny like me but short and broad. Finally there was a shot of him alone, something you’d see taken in a boardwalk booth, his thick wave of shiny black hair swooping down his forehead, the fixed gaze of his one dark eye, the eyebrow arched, the other eye hidden behind a black patch, his beautiful full lips, thick knotted nose, and tight jaw. He looked handsome and determined. I’d always thought my full lips and dark eyes and hair had come from my mother, but they could have come from him, and I’d always thought my nose came from the Jablonski side of the family, but it was plainly Anthony’s. Bob Jablonski was a fairer, plain, soft-featured man with unattractive sisters, Tati and Bobo being dull, pasty women. You’d think it would have almost been a relief not to be genetically linked to them, but the reimagination of my genes felt strange, a physical achiness actually as if I were being taken out of one body and put in another. It was at this moment that I realized that I was not from my father, not half calm, half quiet, half steady, and plain, perhaps sterile—despite our unmatching anatomy. But I realized that half of me came from a giant, potent cock, that the sexuality stirring in me was not an aberration but somehow genetic, ingrained, truly me. And the other half of me, from my mother, someone whom I’d always envisioned as more New England nursing school than Bayonne fish shop, was beginning to change on me, too. I felt like I was no longer who I thought I was but something darker, sexier, more mysterious. I stole the picture, put it in my pocket, and later slipped it under the mattress of my bed.

  My mother didn’t sleep well at Dino and Ruby Pantuliano’s. Soon enough, she was waking me up for girl talk. Of course, she couldn’t bang around the house to rouse me, so, instead, she would whisper my name from her single bed, and as soon as she knew I was awake, she’d start talking. My mother seemed to tell me her story with a purposeful sense of duty. She told me everything. She didn’t hold back. She was as loyal to setting forth the truth as she’d been to her lies. Sometimes I felt like a priest listening to confession, as if she thought omitting a detail were a sin. The first few nights, she told me about her courtship with Anthony Pantuliano as we lay under our thin sheets.

  “I loved the way he held me in Uncle Dino’s car parked in the Hudson County Park at night, overlooking the tankers on Newark Bay docked in the seaport on the other side. I loved even the smell of animals on him. No matter how much he washed, you could still smell them, a kind of death smell, not fishy like my father, but more like blood, the smell of our blood. I loved the way his one good eye bore down on me. I can’t describe it . . . like . . . like the single light on a train. I came to love the sealed eye, too, a quiet place, like a calm lake or something right there on his face.” She paused. “And I loved his big head with his firm jaw and wild, dark hair. I loved his enormous penis, the way it rose and grew, so tight with blood it was almost blue, shining.” She admitted then that they had sex in the backseat of Uncle Dino’s Pinto, her feet braced on the headrest, the seat belt bruising her ribs.

  “He was magical. I loved him,” she said. She seemed a little hesitant to continue, but she did continue. It helped that it was dark, that we could look at the ceiling and not each other. “He got his hands on some rubbers from a guy at the rendering plant, but they were too tight, like a tourniquet.” I remember my cheeks were hot with embarrassment. I rustled nervously in my bed, twisting the sheets with my feet. But I didn’t say anything. I just let her talk.

  “And so we did it with nothing. We were stupid, of course; it was only a matter of time before I’d get pregnant.” And she did get pregnant, eventually, but not with me. I came later, after she’d nearly left Bayonne for good. “He knew the world was turning upside down. He had dreams and the dreams came true. He dreamed about JFK, a year before it happened, and Buddy Holly. He knew where Dino was headed, too.”

  “And where was Dino headed?”

  “Well, I don’t think he’s in the import/export vitamin business.”
<
br />   I whispered fiercely, “Do you think he’s a part of a drug ring?”

  “He’s a nice man. You don’t ask questions about a nice man.”

  We lay there quietly for a minute and then a question dawned on me, a question about the magical powers of Anthony. “Did he know you were going to get pregnant and have his child? Did he dream that up? Did he dream up me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I certainly never in a million years could have dreamed you up. I never could have imagined someone like you,” she said. “You’re a little like him, you know.”

  No, I didn’t know. “How?”

  My mother was drifting off to sleep.

  “How am I like him?”

  “Oh, just listen to you. The way you ask your questions. You have passion.”

  I was surprised to hear that I had passion and that my mother was aware of it, that it was obvious to her. Now, I’d have to agree that, yes, I do have a certain amount of passion. Back then, however, it was a surprise to me, but I liked the idea that I was like him. And if it wasn’t really true and I didn’t have as much passion as my mother said I did at fifteen lying in the Pantulianos’ guest room, I was from then on bound to acquire passion. I could feel the spot under the mattress where I’d hidden his picture, burning up into my stomach.

  9

  Church talked to Juniper. Juniper talked to my mother. My mother talked to Ruby. And Church Fiske arrived on the Pantulianos’ doorstep in an authentic green-striped rugby shirt three sizes too big and with real rubber buttons, khaki shorts, and a huge mountain-climber’s backpack strapped over one shoulder as if he were heading into the wilderness, which in a way he was. I assume that the chain of events that led him to the Pantulianos that summer hinged on his mother’s fragile mental state, my mother’s difficult situation, and Ruby’s new role as mother. Church capitalized on the fact that everyone was feeling a little bit weak, and he got what he wanted—an escape.