The intervention was dysfunctionally lovely, everyone much too civilized and polite—with minor exceptions—to mention “the unpleasantness,” as Juniper liked to call it. Church walked through the crowd, smiling and nodding, speaking through his teeth like a politician: “No Piper?”
“Nope,” I said. “She thinks you’re an asshole white male, et cetera, undeserving of an intervention.”
“Oh, and she’s right. Who could deserve all this?” he said, waving across the room to a clot of whispery women. “Did she say someone cut my meat for me till I was twelve?”
I nodded sadly. It was falling apart, really melting. I felt like a sucker, and I was—taken in. I wanted to blurt out, “Kitty Hawk will turn around and bite you. She wants your money, a green card, something. And everyone agrees with me. Right?” But I knew I’d be met by blank stares, people maniacally searching out crab-stuffed mushroom caps. Really, I thought that Church was head-over-heels for Kitty and I knew it was just a setup for a fall. Yes, I still wanted Church to adore me, to comfort me—that part of me was looking for a savior at the punch bowl as my mother had at Juniper’s wedding—but also I genuinely cared about him. I didn’t want to have to shovel him up off the floor.
Church’s father, Guy, was there with Daisy and their kids, Littlebit (a nickname for Laurabeth) and the twins Chippy and Chuck. Littlebit was ironically a fat eleven-year-old, sulky and rude, hovering by the marble-slab cheese cutter, eating what seemed like block after thickly sliced block. The twins were taking turns punching each other as hard as they could in the arm, identically freckly redheads in matching tan wide-wale corduroys and argyle sweater vests. Daisy looked flawless, each tiny wrinkle spackled smooth, and Guy looked old, paunchy, exhausted. He was staring into a scotch that he was swirling in a tumbler when Church walked up, breaking his distant focus. He smiled, shook Church’s hand, and clapped him on the shoulder.
Daisy gave Church a stingy hug, then said, “There’s Littlebit,” pointing at the girl’s broad, hunched back, “and you remember the boys.” She put one hand on each of their shoulders and tilted her head, smiling as if this were the moment we were supposed to snap the photograph, at least mentally.
One of the boys said to Church, giggling, “I hear your wife gets naked on stage.”
Daisy gave a fake little shocked expression and then apologized, her voice full of pity. “Oh, Church, I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, yes,” Church said, sarcastically. “A naked wife. It’s such a tragedy. Send flowers. She’ll paste them to her tits for the next show.”
“Well, I see you have your usual way with words,” she said, pushing the twins toward their sister at the cheese tray.
“Church,” Guy said in a chipper tone, obviously not having overheard the last comment. “Your Grammy wants to talk to you.”
Grammy was a tiny, birdlike woman with a sharp, beaky nose and tightly pursed lips outlined shakily with pink lipstick. Once upon a time, my mother had spent a lot of time at her house. Grammy had been a very proper uptight debutante mother, a Shriver after all. But age had washed that austerity away. She was sitting in her wheelchair, wiping her nose with a tissue, when we walked up; then she stuffed the tissue up her sweater sleeve, where it joined an enormous bulge of tissues, both of her frail forearms bulging like Popeye’s.
“SO THIS IS THE LITTLE CHICKIE.” Grammy was fairly deaf and shouted everything at the top of her birdlike lungs and was old enough not to be too precious about what she said. It was a crowd-pleasing combination. The room fell absolutely quiet aside from the click, click of Littlebit at the cheese cutter and the fierce wrestling of Chippy and Chuck who were under a buffet table. Grammy was eyeing me squarely, evidently confusing me with Kitty; it was, after all, more like a wedding reception than an intervention. “YOUR GRANDFATHER HAD MARRIED A STRIPPER, A FRENCH GIRL FROM THE WAR. BEFORE HE MET ME, THAT IS. WHEN HE WAS DRUNK, HE’D TELL ME THAT HE UNSNAPPED HER BRA WITH HIS TEETH.” She paused. “I TELL YOU THIS BECAUSE HE WAS THINKING WITH HIS JOLLYWAGGER.” She wiggled a finger, pointing unsteadily at Church’s crotch.
“WHAT HAPPENED TO HER?” Church asked.
“DON’T KNOW. I ENDED UP WITH THE OLD CODGER TILL HE FINALLY DRANK HIMSELF TO DEATH.” Grammy seemed unfazed by what she was saying, just being factual.
“I’m not his wife,” I said interrupting.
“WHAT?” Grammy said.
“I’M NOT THE STRIPPER.”
“LOOK, I DON’T CARE IF YOU SHAKE YOUR BOSOM ON A STAGE WITH THE AMERICAN ANTHEM ROARING AWAY. I’M TELLING CHURCHIE HERE THAT HIS GRANDFATHER WAS A SON OF A BITCH. AND MEN THINK WITH THEIR JOLLYWAGGERS.” She lowered her voice to a loud whisper. “Your father, for example, Churchie. And that tramp he’s taken up with.”
We heard a rustle beside us, Daisy huffing out of the room.
“But women, Church, are thinking of other things.” Again she lowered her voice. She pulled Church down close to her wizened face. “She’s not stupid, Church. You might be, but she’s not. For God’s sake, Church, look at her.” And Church turned and looked at me, smiling.
I stared back at him, wide eyed.
“She isn’t even an Oriental.”
“MY GOD,” Church shouted. “YOU’RE RIGHT!”
Grammy rolled her eyes and dismissed us, shooing us away with her wrinkly, spotted hands.
Church talked to a few other people. A group of country-club ladies cornered him at the little bar. They caught him up on how all of their children were doing, a list of Ivies and corporate positions, the occasional Peace Corps. And then they’d ask about him. “So, Church, how are you paving your way in the Big Apple?”
“For a while there, I wanted to write a book with a colon in the title,” Church said. “You know the type: Intimate Terrorism, colon, The Deterioration of Erotic Life. But now I have seen the light. I think I’d like to be one of those guys on the construction crew who turns the stop-slow sign, but a dancing one—or a traffic cop, the gloves, the whistle, the complete control. Or a UPS job. They pay over $10 an hour. And Kitty makes a lot of money, you can imagine. Guys just shove the money down her G-string. Couldn’t be easier.”
But Juniper had been keeping a keen eye on the situation and whisked him away before he could say more. “Remember Margaret Porter? From the stables? She just stopped by to pick up her mother.” And she wrangled Church out to the patio, where she planned to have him fall in love with an acceptable girl.
I talked with the country-club ladies. They seemed at first to want to know about Kitty, but actually they wanted to talk about Asian culture. One had been on a guided six-day tour of Japan that she enjoyed mostly because, as far as I could tell, the natives made her feel tall. The others enjoyed sushi from the gourmet deli. They all agreed that Asians seemed to excel at math and violin, which was followed by a short intellectual discussion of the right and left divisions of the brain.
Church’s conversation with Margaret Porter was also brief. He told me later that she’d been a weird kid and that when he saw her again he was surprised. He’d said, “Wow, you look totally normal. I’d have thought you’d be the type of meek loner who lives alone and puts her cats’ names on her answering machine.”
She’d answered, “And what’s wrong with that?”
Church had responded, “And your cats get a lot of phone calls?”
She’d told him that her cats were family and that she’d never thought he was at all normal.
Church was ready to call it a day. We were stopped only by one more guest, a neighbor, Mr. Wiggins, who’d served in the Korean War and, quite drunk, wanted to reminisce about a little shop in Seoul where a woman would rub his feet. Wiggins rested his hand on his wide belly and chatted on dreamily.
But Church broke up the story with a comment on the glories of war, something extremely patriotic. And Wiggins snapped to with some strong affirmations about the country and God. We shook hands all around.
Church waved to his mother from across the room, where she was
laughing with the country clubbers. She waved back absently, at first, and then she realized he was leaving. She looked around the room, in a momentary panic. I felt sorry for her. It was as if she was looking for the exact thing that wasn’t quite right, the flaw held accountable for her failings. Her eyes reached Church again. Suddenly, she looked overwhelmed, tired, fragile. She blew him a kiss, her hand lingering in the air for a moment as if she were touching his cheek. Church looked tired, too, exhausted. I thought, for a second, he was going to cry. He tilted his head, as if giving in to her touch. He closed his eyes. And then abruptly, he opened them, pinched his nose, and stepped outside. I gathered our two light overnight bags that hadn’t made it past the oversize coat closet.
It was dusk and cold, the stars just starting to surface in the darkening sky. Church shut the door behind him, stepped into the clipped yard, unzipped his fly, and peed on a bush with a loud sigh.
And I had to ask myself at that odd moment, Do I love Church Fiske? He’s self-centered, sarcastic, insincere, irreverent. He’s improper and asocial, meaning he doesn’t abide by social laws. If you look fat in the dress, he’ll say you look fat in the dress. On the other hand, he’s honest, surprising. He has an internally logical integrity. If I admitted that maybe I loved him, then I had to look at the circumstances: Did I love him one summer because my father disappeared on me, because I confused him with Anthony Pantuliano? Did I love him when he showed up in New York because Peter Kinney dumped me? Because he fell in love with Kitty Hawk and I hated Kitty Hawk? Did I love him because—like Peter—it wasn’t possible to have him? Did I want him to love me? Or did I simply want to be him, that sure of everything, that composed and confident?
I could have chosen that moment to tell him. I could have said, “Church, I’m pregnant. What should I do?” And waited for his reaction, breathlessly. But it seemed ridiculous, suddenly, that I would want so much from anyone, much less Church Fiske. It dawned on me that life, in general, isn’t always elevated to a series of perfect moments, elemental still points, but sometimes it’s a series of smaller moments that we let pass. I decided not to tell him and I rested my hand on my stomach. I could feel the multiplying cells, the folding and unfolding, a curled being, flexing inside of me, taking shape.
And then Church, as if hearing my whirring mind and agreeing with my decision not to tell him, jiggled his penis and zipped up and said, “I love Kitty Hawk, Lissy. What can I say?”
14
My grandfather, Wladyslaw Verbitski, attended his daughter’s high school graduation, sitting in the row of wooden folding chairs, nodding from his seat. But after a half hour at the cookies-and-punch reception in the school’s gym, he began to get nervous, glancing up at the caged clock. He looked much smaller than my mother remembered him, his fingers more oddly angled and scarred from years of handling sharp knives and fish guts, bones, and meat. His suit jacket hung down from his shoulders, which seemed now to be as narrow as a woman’s. He left shortly thereafter, saying he couldn’t leave the store for so long alone, but really she knew it was her mother he couldn’t leave. That was the only time he visited, and my mother never went home. If my grandmother answered the phone when she called, my grandmother would say nothing. There would be a silence until my grandfather’s voice came on the line, or worse, if he wasn’t home, just a click. Sometimes she’d ask about my grandmother. “How’s Mother feeling these days?” And my grandfather would say, “ ’Bout the same. ’Bout the same,” meaning “She hasn’t forgiven you. She still thinks you’re a dirty kurwa.”
My mother had spent holidays with an elderly widowed aunt who’d married a military man who passed away in Dover, Delaware, at the air force base, where she lived on alone for the rest of her days. My mother never said too much about her, only that she was bossy, like a military colonel herself. The summer after my mother’s graduation, it had been arranged that she stay on at the convent to help out in the library. And then at the end of the summer, her father appeared again, looking even more frail, to drive her to Simmons in Boston to study nursing, where in between her second and third years she would end up marrying Bob Jablonski. She met Juniper Fiske, whose primary objective was to become a doctor’s wife. My mother claimed to have been keenly interested in the body, how it all worked, blood, tissues, muscles. But despite themselves, Juniper married a dentistry student and my mother married a med student. They got married halfway through the four-year program, and although both finished their degrees eventually, neither ever practiced nursing.
By the time my mother was in nursing school, the old military aunt had begun to leave the oven burners on and had been put in a nursing home. And so my mother spent the holidays at Juniper’s family’s home. My mother learned to play tennis and ride horses. She was given presents by Juniper’s equally high-strung mother, whom I’d later meet as the straight-shooting Grammy at Church’s intervention. My mother got cashmere sweaters, once a little pearl necklace. That first summer between her freshman and sophomore years, she worked with Juniper in the children’s unit of a hospital as a candy striper in a pink-and-white-striped uniform, and Juniper met Guy at a party in Boston. He didn’t come from as much money as Juniper did, but his family was definitely well off. The facts that he was studying only to become a dentist and from only moderately well off stock were overlooked (they played up the fact that he was a Harvard man), mainly, my mother suspected, because Juniper wasn’t easy to get along with or beautiful, and her parents were slightly desperate. They simply avoided any conversation that had to do with teeth and matters of high society. Juniper complained about her parents’ snobbism and was proud of Guy and optimistic about the future importance of dentistry in American life.
It was hard for my mother because Juniper was absolutely obsessed with Guy. She spoke of nothing else and spent as much time with him as he would allow. He liked his buddies (one of whom was a med student named Bob Jablonski) and his parties. In the end, Juniper won. She grew pouty and sullen and threatened to break it off altogether if he didn’t propose. She told him it was to ease her mother’s mind and that it would be a long engagement, years maybe even, before they’d actually tie the knot. But once he gave in, the wheels were in motion and a date was set. There was no going back.
Juniper read books on wedding etiquette. She’d make precise notes in a little notebook. From Emily Post’s Etiquette she copied, word for word, things like “If the bride customarily wears makeup, naturally she will for her wedding but skillfully applied in moderation. Nothing could be more inappropriate than a bride and her attendants coming down the aisle of the church made up as though they were in a chorus line in a musical comedy.”
Juniper was not nearly as pretty and likable as my mother. But the wedding to Guy had given her another edge over my mother (in addition to money and class and upbringing), and she used it.
“Will you wear white on your wedding day?” my mother remembers Juniper asking her. “What with your tawdry affair with Anthony, you might want to go with a pretty cocktail dress in a pastel shade.”
“You aren’t a virgin.” My mother made the claim on the basis of little information. Unlike her, Juniper kept quiet about anything the least bit sexually explicit.
“No, but I’m marrying the man who . . . well, I don’t have to say it. You know what I mean and you know that it’s a different case altogether. You wouldn’t ever marry Anthony Pantuliano!”
My mother didn’t like Juniper’s invoking his name. She disliked Juniper fiercely at times and then she wished she could be more like her, in innumerable ways—the sturdy family, the sweet holidays, all the things her money could buy, including Guy. Not that my mother even particularly liked Guy; he was loud and oafish, a bit too happy. But she wanted someone like him who could ensure a certain lifestyle that seemed not just materialistically better but gentler and more loving, the golden life.
When my grandfather’s heart seized in his chest, as he was hunkered over some dead fish, my mother blamed my grandmo
ther for years of wearing-and-tearing abuse. It was a month before Juniper’s wedding day. He hadn’t made it up for a visit that summer. He’d said he was feeling weak, like he was coming down with something, but my mother had assumed that it was an excuse that my grandmother had forced him to create. My mother had been frustrated, but she was used to it by now. She’d learned to want less and less from him and nothing from her mother.
It was a relaxed summer, the two girls living together in a cute little apartment that Juniper had spiffied up with the help of her mother’s decorator. Dotty was helping Juniper with wedding plans, despite Juniper’s snooty comments. My mother liked sorting the details: shoes, white satin or moiré? Gloves or no gloves? Guy’s clothes: wing collar with a cutaway and waistcoat? Hat or no hat? They fretted together over the bridesmaids’ dresses, whether to go with paired unmatching colors: two in green, two in chartreuse, two in lemon yellow, and the maid of honor, Dotty, in pale yellow. Or should they be arranged in varying hues of the same color, from American beauty rose to my mother in the palest flesh pink? They worked still as candy stripers—my mother putting in many more hours than Juniper—and studied occasionally, a little ceremony of reading textbooks and eating popcorn while in hair curlers. When my grandfather died, the head nurse had allowed my mother as much time as she needed to help her mother, especially because Dotty was an only child.
It was the summer of 1969, the day before Woodstock, the day before my conception. She hadn’t stepped foot in Bayonne for a total of three years. All that time she’d tried not to think about Anthony. She’d tried to replace him first at the convent school with Jesus, the beautiful long body hanging everywhere she looked, eternally dying for her, a lowly, penitent sinner, his love for her as strong as his love for Mary Magdalene, the whore he fell in love with—my mother had sneaked a copy of Kazantzakis’s Last Temptation of Christ. And then at the nursing school, she replaced Anthony and Jesus with the idea of a doctor, a husband, someone triumphantly rich and strong whose father had taught him golf, whose mother played tennis and the piano.
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