Girl Talk

by Julianna Baggott

  I was surprised by this news, too. I’d heard Anthony Pantuliano was a visionary, an angry god intent on changing the world. I’d heard he’d read The Making of a Counter Culture, but now I thought maybe he’d just carried it around. I agreed with Dino that he’d sold out. I wasn’t angry but sorely disappointed. If he’d sold Volkswagens, even—but Buicks? I felt sorry for him a little and for myself, too: he already had a daughter, an adorable toddler, an entire life.

  “What’s this?” Marianne snapped, the cigarette sticking to the inside of her lip like it was attached to flypaper. “Look, I’m up two games. Are we going to play here or not?”

  But one of the chubby women from her entourage asked, “Who’s Anthony Pantuliano?” She asked my mom, because that’s who everyone else was watching—Dino and Ruby and Church and I were all fixed on her now.

  My mother was sitting there, her back straight, her eyes filled with tears that didn’t spill onto her cheeks but were just poised on the brim of her lids. And she told them an unsorted, jumbled version of her life, almost poetic in its ellipses. As she spoke, she blinked back tears, wiping them with the back of her hand. She told them about falling in love on a downtown bus, about a fire, my grandmother polishing silver until she collapsed. She told them about a boy with a camera—the penned animals he smelled of and his mythical penis, about having sex in Uncle Dino’s Pinto. She told them about a crippled nun with a drunk father, and a dead baby, and a swimming pool, about beautiful, beautiful nuns. She told them about a plain-faced rich girl and frilly wedding plans with chorus girls. She told them that her father died and the man she loved showed up, and they made love in a hot tent, and how he walked away from her into a crowd. She told them about her husband and a punch bowl. She told them about having a daughter, and the old women turned to me, their faces streaked with mascara, each blowing her nose into a cocktail napkin. It seemed to make no sense, and yet every woman understood her.

  Marianne Focetti was crying, too, her whole face screwed into a tight knot. She said, “I loved a man like that once.” And every woman nodded, sobbing.

  The euchre party broke up quickly after my mother’s long, impassioned speech. Not one of the women could have reaffixed her makeup properly, and it would have been impolite to go on without any, all pale pucker, lashless, their bald faces staring at each other like bloated fish, more uncomfortable, it seemed, than if they’d been sitting there completely naked. And so they all went home, but not without first hugging my mother, then hugging me, lightly petting our hair. They hugged Ruby, too—both camps. Even Marianne kissed Ruby lightly on the cheek. “She’s an angel from heaven,” Marianne said about my mother in that way one mother compliments another on her child. Ruby shrugged modestly.

  After the room emptied out, the five of us stood there awkwardly.

  Dino said, “Should I get the car?”

  “No!” my mother almost shouted. “Look at me!”

  Ruby translated. “It’s been . . . what, fifteen years? She’s got to get spiffied up.”

  “But today?” Dino asked.

  My mother nodded. “But I want to drive. Just me and Lissy. It’s family business.”

  Dino nodded. Ruby, too. Little Jacko looked around at all of our concerned expressions. Only Church protested by rubbing his hands through his hair and sighing with agitation. He was ignored.

  I had no idea what to imagine and I didn’t really understand my mother’s intentions. She wanted to look good, of course, but I knew she didn’t really expect to rekindle a flame, even with my putative father gone. Bob was coming back. She was sure of this, and she seemed sure that she would be there when he did. But, looking back, I assume that my mother didn’t know what to expect either.

  While my mother was in the shower, I fished Anthony’s picture out from under my mattress and put it in my pocketbook. My mother wore a white sleeveless dress, the least flashy of Ruby’s new wardrobe for her, and I wore a miniskirt and a paisley shirt, something she’d picked up for me at The Limited in one of her outings with Ruby, paisley being the rage. Ruby was a little disappointed that we didn’t wear the euchre-party uniform, but she was still beaming about the party’s success. My mother could do no wrong.

  Once again, my mother and I were on the road, this time in Ruby’s Cadillac Coup de Ville. It was a cool evening for midsummer, and we buzzed the electric windows down only an inch or two, the wind just kicking around lightly, not messing up our hair. Queens was only twenty minutes away over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. I didn’t say anything until we were off the highway and it looked like we were almost there.

  “What do you think he’s like?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are you going to say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think you still love him?”

  My mother didn’t answer for a long time. “He’s a father,” she said finally. “I’m not a twenty-four-year-old bank teller from Walpole. I know better.”

  “Are you going to tell him about me?”

  She stopped the car at a red light. “What would I say? How can that make things better?”

  And she saw my chin start to crumple like I might cry. I’d come all this way. I was so close. I had his picture pressed together in my hands. She put her hand on my head. But I didn’t cry. I refused. A car behind us honked. The light had changed. My mother took her foot off the brake.

  We found the car dealership where Anthony Pantuliano worked in 1985 and where he still works today. It sits on a corner, the last in a long row of dealerships, all waving enormous American flags. It was six o’clock when my mother pulled into the parking lot of Tucker Buick. A representative was there to help her out of the car, but she just buzzed down the window.

  “Is Mr. Pantuliano here?”

  “No,” he said. “He leaves at five every day.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Can I help you with something? We’ve got great trade-in deals right now.” He was an older man, but with one of those chubby, sweet faces that never ages and could sell you anything.

  “No,” my mother said. “No, thanks.” But he insisted on giving her his card, slipping it through the window to her before she’d buzzed it all the way up.

  I was disappointed. My mother gave out a little gust of a sigh.

  “We have his home address,” I said quickly. I thought she might be fading, losing her gumption, giving in to better judgment, something.

  “I don’t know, Lissy.”

  “We’ve come this far,” I said. I didn’t mean just that night, but far from Keene, New Hampshire, and our nice house on Pako Avenue. “It’s a long way to come.”

  “Okay,” she said, the energy in her voice rising. “Okay.”

  We started the hunt for his house somewhere in Queens. I had a map spread on my lap, one of Dino’s, an ancient collapsible paper accordion of a map, anything in the folds absolutely lost forever as fray and eventually the air of dime-size holes.

  “I hope he doesn’t live in a crack,” I said, joking, but my mother didn’t laugh. She didn’t hear me.

  We found the house tucked into a modest row of houses, much like Dino’s house in Bayonne, with a small, well-kept yard, a kid’s slide parked in the middle of the grassy square, an old shaggy dog asleep under it. We parked across the street. My mother scooted down in her seat and sighed.

  “What do I want?” she said.

  I knew what I wanted. I wanted desperately to see him, to put together piece by piece what my life could have been. Not that I really thought it possible, but I had already begun to imagine this as my house, that as my dog, what it would be like to have a little sister, the alternate reality. We sat for a long time, our eyes fixed on the metal screen door.

  “Your father—Bob Jablonski—loved me,” she said. “When you were born, too big for premature, everyone knew it. The nurses, the other doctors, his colleagues. I remember one joking in front of us, ‘Was there a shotgun at your wed
ding?’ Your father smiled. He looked at me. He said, ‘Can you believe she made this little miracle?’ Like I’d made you all by myself. He was a man of science, and he turned his head. He looked the other way. You see,” she said, “he took me in. It was an act of love.”

  Sitting there across the street from Anthony Pantuliano’s house, my mother told me the rest of the story of the summer of my conception, 1969. She was a bridesmaid in Juniper’s wedding. Juniper finally decided on the gradation of pink hues, my mother’s as the maid of honor, the pale flesh pink, which made her feel completely naked, as if the white boutonniere were pinned directly to the skin of her chest. Juniper’s mother paid for the dress.

  My mother’s period was late. She thought she was pregnant, maybe, she told herself, but she would always echo, “Probably.” She was scared but was trying to have fun. If she had been a good dancer, she would have danced to prove she was enjoying herself. But my mother has no rhythm.

  Bob Jablonski wasn’t dancing either. He’d lost his leg early in the war—in fact, he’d joined up, taking leave from Harvard’s med school to enlist. He’d traded in his life with women, their pantyhose slung over the tub, the whole house smelling of lilac powder, the conversation always turning to decoration and gossip, for men and war. In any case, he’d met Guy when he’d returned to med school, always limping along now with his one fake leg, the memories he never talked about, the war still trudging on. If war was mentioned at all even later when I was growing up, my father would leave whatever room he was in; he’d push his chair away from a friend’s dinner table mid-fondue. He never talked about it. I knew he’d carried stretchers in from the field, that he’d helped administer some first aid, assisting nurses and doctors, but that’s all he ever said.

  He was a shy young man, not the type to go crazy cutting a rug even if he’d still been all in one piece. He fell in love with my mother. And she fell in love with him. It might be the hardest part of her story to believe—his love is easy to believe—but her love wasn’t as simple. After losing Anthony a second time, could she fall in love again so readily? It’s easier to believe she was a little desperate, already thinking she was pregnant, and along came a med student, shy, quiet, who so easily fell in love with her that she could coax him into an amazingly short courtship, a speedy wedding two weeks later. But I maintain that she did fall in love with Bob Jablonski, that he was exactly what she was looking for, especially on the heels of Anthony Pantuliano. Both of the loves of her life were lame, only three eyes and three legs between them. In the end, my mother wouldn’t choose the one she’d have to follow, but the one she could lead, her mother’s daughter after all. Bob Jablonski was steady, loving, predictable, and deeply sensitive. Most of all, he loved her unconditionally and he didn’t need anything else. It all fit together and my mother got her second chance. This time, the baby swelled inside her and she pushed it, screaming, into the world. A daughter.

  Anthony Pantuliano’s door opened, just an arm at first, a thin arm, someone talking over a shoulder to whoever was still in the room. And then a woman stepped into the yard, wearing a man’s T-shirt that hung down to the middle of her thighs. Her long, dark hair was pulled back loosely, uncombed, into a ponytail, although she was almost too old for a ponytail. She clapped her hands, calling to the dog, “Dulcie, Dulcie.” The dog lifted its head slowly and staggered a bit to stand up, but then its legs folded beneath it. The woman came out and picked the dog up from under its belly and struggled back to the door. A man’s arm opened the door for her. She bent over to drop the dog onto the floor, her white underwear glowing for a second. She disappeared inside.

  And then the man stepped out. I could tell by the way my mother drew in her breath that it was Anthony. He was short, broad. He had no patch and his eyes, from a distance at least, looked normal, perfectly matched. He had a little gray in his hair and was wearing a T-shirt, too, a V-neck, and khakis. He tucked a folded newspaper under one arm. Both hands in his pockets, he looked up at the moon for a moment and then turned back to the house, staring at the gutters, it seemed, the slant of the roof. I wondered if he ever thought of my mother, how much he loved her, of those paralyzed sheep. If he still checked the sky for Fetucci’s Flying Circus plane, finally coming for him after all of these years.

  Now, when I think of Anthony Pantuliano as a grown man, when I try to envision what he might be doing at this or that very moment, I see him in his yard, looking at the moon and then at his gutters, trapped somewhere between the two.

  He bent down and picked up a garden hose that had been hidden in the grass. He wound it, elbow to palm, elbow to palm, dropped the circle of it beside the house, and then went back inside. The screen door clapped, and he shut the heavy door behind him.

  The night didn’t end there. My mother took a different route home, driving this time straight through Bayonne’s downtown. We ended up in front of the video store that had once upon a time been Verbitski’s Fish Shop. My mother pulled Ruby’s car over and parked it by the gutter. It seemed inevitable that we would find ourselves here. I knew better by now than to ask my mother if she was going to go up to the door. It was not her nature, and yet my mother was always surprising me.

  “This is where I end up,” she said, “the nights I’m out alone in this car.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You know who lives here?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at her watch. “She’ll be calling for the cat soon out the alley door. She’ll scoop it up and take it upstairs. She’ll sit there, drinking from a coffee cup—vodka, no doubt—and she’ll fall asleep in front of the television.”

  My mother and I sat there, waiting, and then she picked up her pocketbook. “C’mon,” she said.

  I was shocked. I jumped out of the car and followed her down the alley, which was lit by a street lamp. She paused about twenty feet from an alley door to light her cigarette.

  “Why does she hate you?” I asked her.

  “She can’t love anyone,” she said. “It makes her sick. It’s a weakness. She hates weakness. She hates herself.” She paused a minute, looked up at the side of the building, its dimly lit windows. She took a drag on her cigarette, held it, then exhaled. “We took you to see her once as an infant. Your father and I rented a car. We called from a pay phone downtown. I said, ‘I’m married. I thought you should meet my husband and the new baby. You’re a grandmother.’ I thought that would fix everything. You were in the car with your father. I said, ‘I married a doctor. We’re here in Bayonne visiting.’ It was early afternoon, but I could tell she was drunk, disoriented. She said I was too good for her with my schooling and my doctor husband. ‘Why bring him here?’ she asked me. ‘To show him your terrible mother, an imbecile, an old Pollack.’ ”

  My mother stopped to listen for my grandmother, but there wasn’t a sound. “She wanted to know one thing,” my mother said, “if you were a boy or a girl. And when I told her that I’d had a daughter, I thought I heard her cry, a small sharp sob. She said, ‘Throw her in a river,’ and she hung up the phone.”

  We waited in silence for another few seconds, and then the door opened and an old woman stepped out, scolding, “Kitty, kitty, kitty,” with its sharp k’s and t’s. She turned quickly when she saw our shadows and stepped back inside, closing the screen door. She squinted at us through the mesh. “Who are you? What do you want with an old lady?”

  My mother was calm. She said, “It’s me. Dotty.” She paused. “And your granddaughter, Lissy. But you two have already met.” It was the coldest I’d ever heard my mother. She tossed her cigarette to the ground, twisting it into the grit with her shoe. “Are you going to invite us in?” But her tone seemed to indicate that she knew the answer would be no.

  My grandmother said, “I’m getting my cat. It’s a good cat.” At this, she opened the screen door and stepped into the light. She was a small, heavy-breasted woman, with rolls under her chin. She wore a gray dress, her white hair pinned up on her head. Sh
e put her broad hands on her knees and called, “Kitty, kitty, kitty,” this time more gently, more sweetly, and a cat appeared at the end of the alley and padded to her. She bent down, with one hand still on her knee, and scooped the cat up with the other.

  I looked at my mother. Her eyes were filled with tears. “Well,” she said, “that’s that. I guess you have nothing to say to me. To Lissy.”

  She was stroking the cat, a yellow tabby, and she looked at me then. “Yes,” she said. “To the girl.” She pointed at me. “It’s better this way, for you,” she said, “that you do not know me. On this,” she said to my mother, “you and I would probably agree.”

  My mother said nothing. Her eyes level, she stared at my grandmother. I thought that she must want to answer both yes and no, angrily. I saw a stitch in her eyebrows, her eyes flooded, her mouth opened just slightly. My grandmother opened the door and walked inside. When the door shut, my mother clutched her pocketbook to her chest and fell back against the brick wall of the alley. She stood that way for a minute or two, her eyes squeezed shut. She shook her head, chiding herself, I assumed, for feeling so much. Her pocketbook slid down her stomach. She straightened and tucked it under her arm.

  “Now you know,” she said.

  I said, “I guess I do.” But, of course, I couldn’t really. I figured that my mother had been right, that love made my grandmother sick, the weakness of it, the giving in, and guessed, too, that the alcohol helped numb her to it. I knew that I wanted to reach out to my mother just then at that moment, but I couldn’t. I followed her, unsteadily, back to the car. Once inside, I glanced up to the window. I could see my grandmother’s profile, lit blue from the television. I could see the tabby, too, in her arms, nuzzled up to the folds of her neck.

  16

  My father, Bob Jablonski, started having chest pains on the tenth hole at the Keene Country Club. I got the news on my answering machine when Church and I got back from the intervention. We’d driven home that night, a four-hour trip. Halfway through, I said, “Look. I feel terrible about this whole thing. I’m sorry I lied to you.”