As soon as we were home, my mother reverted to her old self, her Izod shirts, Bermuda shorts, and her pulled-back hair. She cut back on cigarettes and gum, bought a new Weight Watchers scale, her old one beaten up from travel, and began weighing her food again. She gardened. She told neighbors about my father’s prestigious conference in Arizona.
Meanwhile, I called up Louisa Eppitt. Her slovenly father, of course, hadn’t given her the message that I’d called, just as I had suspected. But she didn’t really carry a grudge. She had changed considerably during the summer. In my absence she’d taken up with the prettiest-girl clique in school, led by its founder and president, the breathtaking Julie Milty. Louisa had quit clarinet and went from awkward to stunning, finally shaving her legs, painting her toenails. She wore lip gloss, hair spray, padded bras, et cetera. I began to try to fit in with her new group of friends, thinking that obviously they took on charity cases, Louisa Eppitt having set a glowing precedent, and what with the return on their investment in Louisa, maybe they’d accept me, too, in that same way Juniper must have first taken my mother on as her own personal responsibility, her social charge. I told Julie Milty and Louisa that I’d lost my virginity with a rich kid named Church Fiske while visiting family friends in Bayonne, which took on a dirty, inner-city feel. I’d lost it in a swimming pool, no less, with my mom only moments from walking through the front door. I played up the mafia suspicions. All of this was a big hit. Julie Milty screamed over each new twist.
Although I enjoyed talking about my sordid summer, I was aware that it had changed me, that my mother’s girl talk had given me a weird perspective. Deep down, I had the inkling that I was a strange person who knew too much about something in an area where I should have remained ignorant. I envied Louisa ever so slightly for having a dead mother, although I loved my mother—don’t get me wrong. But Louisa was a clean slate, and I wondered if I would be normal, like Louisa, if my mother had never decided to go after my father that summer night to catch him in the act with the redheaded bank teller, if she’d decided instead to confront him one night in bed and go to marriage counseling at our cinder-block church, if she’d decided that it was not her maternal duty to tell me every sexual detail of her youth. I tried to fit in. I bought bangles, like Madonna, and I blow-dried my bangs so they stuck up and I rode around in the backseat of Julie Milty’s Rabbit convertible singing along to the Smiths.
So when my father appeared, magically, one morning at the breakfast table a week before school was to start again, our lives were already back to their regular patterns. When his head popped up from behind the newspaper, I didn’t even flinch.
He said, “How’ve you been?”
I said, “Fine.” I looked around for signs of Vivian, but there were none. His face was suntanned, yes. His nose still a little pink. I looked at my mother, calmly pouring me a glass of orange juice.
She said, “Well, your father’s Ivy League education finally paid off.” She smiled and he smiled.
“Yes, yes,” he said, sipping his coffee.
I had no idea what they were talking about—to this day, it’s a mystery—whether his Harvard education had helped him find his way home, had given him the sense necessary to dump Vivian, or whether it had helped him get invited to the bogus conference, and at the same time, I didn’t really care. I was friends with Julie Milty. I was going to be taking driver’s ed. I had my own life and was tired of sorting through the muck of theirs. Once he’d come back, it was as if his absence had been planned. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d given me a little souvenir from his trip, as he had once before when a real conference had taken him to Florida for three days and he came back with a can of Florida sunshine.
My mother had packed up that summer of her truth-telling spree, stuffed it into an unlabeled box along with her metallic leisure wear and her teasing combs, and shoved it into a crawl space in the attic. And I followed suit. I slipped the picture of Anthony Pantuliano at sixteen into the thinnest Nancy Drew mystery, put the books in a box along with my clarinet, and shoved them into the back corner of my bedroom closet.
She said to me two or three days before my father showed up, “It never happened, did it?”
I said, “I guess not.”
“You can choose to be happy,” she said. “You can pick it up, like a dress from a hanger, and slip it on. Don’t waste your time, Lissy,” she said. “If there’s a spot of milk, don’t stare at it all day long. Wipe it up and go on.” That was our pact; that is what we did for years.
17
The last time I saw my father, he was dressed as a gardener, standing over a row of shrubs with a rusty pair of clippers. It had looked like rain all afternoon and he’d paced nervously by the bay window while my mom and I chatted on the sofa. I had arrived early the morning after the intervention and stayed at my parents’ house just two nights. I ended up sleeping most of the time. Even after long naps, I woke up exhausted and nauseated. My father insisted that he was absolutely fine, that he’d be out on the links in no time at all, better than ever in his yellow golf shirt and matching golf pants with geese stitched into them; he was kidding, seeming chipper. And so I was getting ready to leave.
My mother had just given me a present, rug mats. “So your throws won’t slide on the kitchen floor,” she said. I didn’t have throw rugs in my kitchen and so I took it to mean that I should have throw rugs in my kitchen the way she has throw rugs in her kitchen. In that silent language between mother and daughter, she was saying, Be more like me, although if I’d called her on it—the whole idea of a daughter becoming her mother—she would have said, No, don’t become me.
My father was a little bit deaf—despite his denial of deafness—and so I spoke up. “Go on out and get at that hedge before the rain comes on. I know you want to. We can say our good-byes now.”
“Oh, please,” my mother said with a sigh, and then raised her voice. “Let it wait till tomorrow. It won’t clip itself between now and then.” She was a little angry at him for having chest pains. It wasn’t rational or fair, but it was a threat, and she didn’t respond well to threats.
My father had barely spoken. He rubbed his hands together and watched them fold over each other. For the first time, he looked quite old to me. He cleared his throat and said, “But the rains here can last a good long bit. Once a rain starts, it can settle in and then you’re up to your hips in snow: It’s winter in New England.”
My mother relented. “Do what makes you happy!” she said. But it wasn’t the type of thing she’d normally have given in on, and I knew she was afraid he might die on her and that she didn’t want to feel guilty for not allowing him his little pleasures. It was a current beneath the conversation, as usual, an entire language they’d invented for communicating without communicating. She was actually, in her own weird way, telling him that she loved him.
Before I zipped out of the driveway, my mother waved from behind the glass door, and my father, from the hedgerow. He shielded his eyes with his hand and looked up at the dark sky. He then curled over the hedge and went back to work, snipping the stray branches, which then collected at his boots. I wish now that I had gotten out of the car and told my father, there in the front yard under the cloudy sky, that I was pregnant, that everything was unclear for me but that there was one simple fact: He was going to be a grandfather. But I didn’t. I pulled the car out of the driveway and lightly beeped the horn.
Two weeks later, my father came inside from yard work on a similarly gray afternoon and had a piece of peach pie. He took off his work boots, placing them neatly beside the sofa, lay down, and died.
I drive a Buick bought from Tucker Buick in Queens. I bought it after I’d worked a couple of years and saved some money. No one knows that Anthony Pantuliano sold it to me. Anthony doesn’t even know that he sold a car to his daughter. I drove it right off the lot. The coincidence wasn’t overlooked completely. My mother raised her eyebrows, saying, “I didn’t think you were the Buick type
,” and Church commented on it, too—“A Buick, huh?” But I said I loved the car, and it was left at that.
Sometimes I stop in the dealership to take a look around. If Anthony is there, I talk about possible trade-ins. He writes down figures, neat numbers stacked up in tidy rows, and pushes them to me across his desktop. He’s been working there for almost sixteen years. His daughter is seventeen years old, a beauty, Maxine. He keeps a family photo on his desk, a picture of Maxine and Josephine, now his wife, and himself in front of a fake fireplace. I imagine myself, sometimes, stuck into the picture, pasted in, but it’s a tight snapshot with little background. I don’t really seem to fit anywhere.
The last time I was there, I told him that I was pregnant and that I would be needing a safe, reliable, family car. I told him that it was a girl, although I haven’t had any tests. I told him, “I can just tell.” He congratulated me. “I love kids,” he said, and I could tell it was true. He showed me around the lot, and I let him take me by the elbow, guiding me gingerly in and out of wide-bodied cars, as if I were suddenly breakable.
I’ve had to make peace with my mother’s deceit. Omission, I’ve decided, is a sin only if, in the process of deceiving, you forget the truth. Lying is a sin only if, in the process, the lie becomes the only truth. Anthony is one version of the truth of my life. There are many truths to each story. Take the Bible—Judas’s death, for example. Catholics prefer the version in which he commits suicide by hanging himself. But there is the other version in Acts of the Apostles where he buys a field with the blood money and one day falls into that field and explodes. I believe both are true. I know that people have a difficult time with this. People love truth, but no one can really offer the truth; and if someone does insist something is true, don’t believe it. Trust me on this; I hand over truths for a living.
I have tried to imagine my life without the summer that never happened. If my mother hadn’t decided to confess, if she hadn’t switched the cars, if my father hadn’t fallen for Vivian Spivy, if Vivian Spivy had had a normal upbringing, if my mother had had a normal upbringing, if Anthony had never been compelled to take her picture, if my grandmother had never started that fire, if a landowner in Poland had never raped her and turned her bitter on life . . . maybe I wouldn’t have my fears, my problems. I wouldn’t have taken up with a married man. I wouldn’t be pregnant. Regardless of my close attention to detail, my years of poring over the moments of my mother’s life, I have never been able to step inside. There was no intervention, divine or otherwise. And now I’m not so sure I would have intervened if I could have. What would I have changed? Would I rather not know my mother’s life? Isn’t the series of sad events what led to my creation? I am my mother, stamped with her DNA. If her decision to tell the truth was like a gangster opening violin cases to show his kid his guns, then wasn’t it also an initiation? A gangster’s kid doesn’t go off to become a dentist. A gangster’s kid is a gangster. That kid has got to know that unchangeable truth about himself. My mother wasn’t just showing me guns; she was showing me what I’d need to arm myself.
Before my father, Bob Jablonski, returned and my mother informed me that that summer hadn’t happened, she was cautioning me; she told me to choose my truth and move on. That’s what I have been trying to do. I have decided in the end to see Dotty and Bob as two kids who fell in love at a wedding, that during their marriage there was give and take, but their love is what saved them. And Anthony? I couldn’t return him to the mythological figure that he was before I saw him at the end of that summer in Bayonne. I knew too much about him, and yet I want him to remain pure, the way my mother first tried to describe him. It isn’t completely possible, and yet I try to hold the thought in my mind: He is my pure father.
My child will have to make peace with me one day, too—that’s a fact of growing up. One day I may have to lay my decisions down in front of her, but I will say that the decision to have her, to raise her alone, was my own, and that it was the most important decision of my life. I’ll tell her that no one is just one person. I’ll explain who I am, let her decide who she is, and, when she’s old enough, I’ll let her decide whether that definition includes Peter Kinney or not. Until then, I’ll drive her around in Buick after Buick sold to me by Anthony Pantuliano—sturdy, reliable, inelegant Buicks, big safe family cars built with the American dream in mind, but I’ll be alone behind the wheel.
Every time I visit Anthony in his office, I carry the picture of him that I stole from Dino’s shoe box of family photos, the one of him at sixteen with his firm jaw and his black eye patch. One day I might say, “If we were on a downtown bus in Bayonne, I would pull out a picture of you as a young man—this picture—” and I’ll hand him the picture, “and I would say, ‘I am Lissy Jablonski, your daughter.’ ”
I imagine now what it might be like, that he’ll start to cry. He’ll wrap his arms around me. He’ll say he’s been waiting for me all these years, that he knew all along that I was his. He’d been expecting me. He knew I’d come.
Vivian Spivy didn’t come back from Arizona with my father. My mother had heard through the underground network that she stayed out there, taking college classes in journalism, waitressing to support herself. Once when I was in my senior year of high school, I saw her mother, Ruth Spivy, loading twenty-pound bags of dog food on the flat bed of a truck in front of the O.K. Fairbanks, our grocery store. I was there with Louisa Eppitt, picking up mint gum, zinc pink lipstick, and a pint of cream for my mother’s penne pasta dish, an old recipe from Ruby. Louisa was asking me about the checkout boy, someone she had a crush on despite the fact that he was a checkout boy.
“Do you think he bags like that for everyone? I mean, we only had three things. We didn’t, like, need a double bag!”
Ruth Spivy’s husband, Dudley, was slumped behind the wheel, and a kid, whom I took to be the once unweanable Tig, was hanging out the window. I stopped and stared for a moment, and she looked up at me, arching her back. But she didn’t seem to recognize me. At least she didn’t say anything.
“What?” Louisa asked. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” I said. And we scurried across the street and drove off quickly in my mother’s Mazda, the station wagon having disappeared shortly after we’d returned from Bayonne.
Vivian Spivy did, however, show up at my father’s funeral. I was there with Church, who was glum, having gotten his second message from Kitty, something like, “I divorce you, Churchie, okay? We get divorce now.” But she never left a number, so technically, he was still married and not inclined as of yet to do much about it.
He was, in many ways, the same sad little boy of the night we lost our virginity together in the Pantulianos’ swimming pool just before he was shipped back to Cape Cod, to his increasingly disenchanted sister, his mother recovering from a nervous breakdown, and Dinah, the only one who kept the family grounded. He was scared momentarily but also determined, always optimistic about his search for an out.
He said, “I think I’d like to be a priest when I grow up. Not Catholic or something, not Buddhist, really—maybe Hindu. A Hindu priest. Is there a vow of chastity involved in that?” Church is somehow ageless.
Despite Church’s prediction that Dino would die of a heart attack swimming away from his exploding boat, Dino was in good health. He and Ruby showed up, too, which brightened everyone’s spirits. (Jacko had long since passed, a combination of old age and asthma.) Although Church and I hadn’t kept in touch with Dino and Ruby ourselves, my mother had maintained contact over the years with occasional phone calls and Christmas cards. The couple had shown up at my graduations from high school and college, and because no one was really able to talk about who they were exactly without breaking certain unspoken agreements, they were always treated as distant relatives, so distant that it wasn’t worth trying to make out the lineage. I had always passed along to Church any news that my mother gave to me. Once Sal’s kid had given Dino Anthony’s addresses, Dino tucked them away, he told me,
probably in the shoe box. He sends Anthony’s daughter anonymous presents sometimes, giant stuffed bears, money. “If he wants to talk to me,” Dino says, “I’m here. He cashes the money orders, though, I tell you that. A stranger’s money.” I knew he never talked to him, but I still half expected Anthony to show up, to know by instinct, like in some old-fashioned romantic story line. He’d shown up once before right on cue, but not this time.
Dino and Ruby were a good balance for the grim presence of Tati and Bobo, both still alive—Tati, the older sister, now valiantly, if not aggressively, pushing Bobo around in a wheelchair, Bobo chirping “Excuse me’s” for her stern older sister. In her dotage, Tati had become what my mother and I call inspirationally senile, meaning that she’s senile when it suits her. She enjoys mistaking my mother for people that she’s openly hated for years—her next-door neighbor, her sister-in-law Eloise—once she looked my mother right in the eye and said, “Oh, you—you remind me of my son’s ill-bred wife who thinks she’s the Queen of Sheba.” I was trying to keep Tati as far from my mother as possible.
It wasn’t a huge crowd, not like my grandfather’s funeral in ’69. People in general are more likely to attend their fishmonger’s funeral than their gynecologist’s. But it was a respectably sized gathering of neighbors, golfers, a smattering of relatives. Louisa Eppitt did show up, surprisingly. She’d retreated back into her drabness, however.
“Do you keep up with the clarinet?” she asked. Evidently she played with an auxiliary band somewhere in Keene.
“No,” I said, “I never went back to it.”
She seemed embarrassed suddenly, as if she’d just realized it was my father’s funeral, not a high school reunion. She apologized for the death of my father, the way everyone seems to, as if we are collectively responsible for death, and then she walked quickly away. My mother had kept me updated on her anyway. I knew that she worked at a florist and still took care of her dad. I was amazed, really. I’d once been jealous of her, because of the fact that her mother was dead and that she didn’t have to become her mother and yet there she was, fulfilling her mother’s role, unavoidably.
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