by Mira Ptacin
After Poland, we went to Italy. One night, our Fodor’s Travel guide led us to an Italian restaurant with the most delicious spaghetti carbonara but the least pleasant waitress. She did not like Americans. She reeked of contempt, practically throwing the menus down onto our table. She seated us outside, then proceeded to ignore us. The weather grew cooler outside, and then cold, but my mother insisted we ride it out. The longer we waited for water, for wine, for silverware, the more the tension grew. But my mom dug in her heels. That European waitress did not like my European mother’s family, but my mother was not going to let her win. So we waited. And waited. The food finally arrived and we ate quickly. Mom had us order dessert. Once we finished and paid for our meal and were leaving to go back to our hostel, Mom stopped suddenly, remembering she’d forgotten something back at her seat. We all turned to look back at her. Her broad back. The small, white lightbulbs on the wicker awning surrounding her like stars. The dark sky above. We stood there and watched as she returned to the table, reached for the unfinished glass of wine she’d been drinking, and with a silent but palpable anger, lifted and poured its red contents across the white linen tablecloth. Then she calmly set the glass back down in its place and returned to us, said nothing, grabbed my hand, and led us away.
My mother takes her money and her food seriously because her money and her food—really, her sustenance—have been hard earned. She has labored. She has suffered. She has a rope-thick callus of work ethic. It does not matter if you’re in Italy or at the McDonald’s drive-through. What matters is principle. “How you do sometimes is how you do all the time” is what she likes to say.
My mother is also a sophisticated and complicated woman, practically impossible to decode. For example: Despite having retired over ten years ago from owning and operating a restaurant, and despite there now being only two mouths to feed at home, she still keeps four fully stocked refrigerators in her house. Whatever she can’t fit in the refrigerators, she stores on top of the two doghouses in the garage. Whatever doesn’t fit on top of the doghouses, she will put out on the deck. And if there still isn’t a place to store the food, she might put it on a fancy plate, garnish it with chopped parsley from her garden, cover it in aluminum foil, and deliver it to one of the neighbors as a gift.
And those are just the perishables. The dry goods that don’t fit in the kitchen cabinets will hibernate in the downstairs laundry room, the wine cellar, Dad’s workbench. At least twice a year, my mother will send identical care packages to my sister and me with a combination of boxed quinoa, oatmeal, wine, a personalized clip-art card that she and my dad made on the computer, a bundle of neon-colored anklet socks, unsweetened baking chocolate, and on occasion, vegetables—like three green peppers, which will have already begun to rot by the time we fetch our care packages from the post office.
The food hoarding bothers me. I’m a minimalist. I hate waste. I need order. Shoes neatly in a row. Squeezing always from the bottom of the toothpaste. Books organized by color. Chairs always tucked into the table. Folded fitted sheets. White holiday lights. I live by deadlines. Expiration dates. Control. Often, the entropy within my mother’s four refrigerators paralyzes me. Like when I come home to visit and just want a quick bite to eat, I’ll open one of the refrigerators, stare at nothing in particular, then close the door. I’ll repeat this several times: open, stare, close. Unless you enjoy snacking on mango chutney or raw Brussels sprouts, there are no ready-to-eat things in my mother’s kitchen. “Snacks” are an American concept. You want a meal? You go make yourself a meal, a real meal. It’s all in there. Just dig around. But I am overcome by choice, so I just eat stale water crackers dipped in chutney.
However, if it’s Christmastime and I’m preparing my Dad’s birthday cake—my father shares a birthday with Jesus—I never have to run to the grocery store. Thanks to my mother, we have all the ingredients for anything. Molasses, pistachios, dried cherries, buttermilk? Check. Spumoni bûche de Noël ? Done. My mother’s kitchen, which has tentacles extending through the entire house, is fully stocked. She has prepared us for blizzards, tornadoes, heat waves, post-funeral potlucks, forgotten anniversaries, unexpected dinner guests. Yes, 40 percent of the “pieces” in the fridge are spoiling and blanketed by velvety green mold, but how is that any different than having a garden? My mother, as usual, has everything covered.
Depending on how you look at it, one of us is being logical and one of us is being neurotic, but it doesn’t really matter who’s what. After years of arguments about those damn refrigerators, I’ve finally let the issue go. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I cannot persuade my mother to get rid of at least two of the refrigerators and donate them to a homeless shelter or soup kitchen, just as I can’t convince her—I mean, my mother (she will not let us address her as “her”)—to join my father and my sister and my husband and me in our vegetarianism. Sure, my mother loves to cook. Sure, she is not a terribly neat person. Sure, her excuses are plausible (“Why drive fifteen miles to the grocery store and waste gas and an hour to pick up a few things when everything can already be here?”), just as mine are (“What’s the point of all that wasted electricity and those watery bags of decomposing baby carrots?”). We have debated it more times than I can count, each time the dispute ending with my mother’s reminder that this is her house, and if I don’t like it, then I can leave. End of story. But at the end of the day, what we both comprehend is this: the four refrigerators are not about avoiding a trip to the store or saving gas or time. They have to do with the Poland of her youth. They have to do with standing in line once a week for over an hour to possibly get a chicken. They have to do with fear: of not having enough, of losing what you have, of things falling apart. With those damn four refrigerators, in her own way, my mother is defending and protecting us.
The wedding dress she picked out for me was a beautiful white gown that looked like it belonged to a Greek goddess or an angel, regardless of the fact it was a maternity dress. I was surprisingly pleased with my mother’s choice. Before, when I’d typed in the key words that described my current situation—“maternity wedding gown”—the experience of hunting for a wedding dress with my mother felt less cathartic than I imagined something like this would. It felt more like confronting the cold, hard, frightening fact that this wasn’t the type of wedding we had planned, or had much time to plan. “And it’s only three hundred dollars!” we later cheered to my father as he handed us the credit card. “Only?” he’d responded. “How much do those things usually cost? Like, the normal ones?”
More than feeling pregnant, I couldn’t shake feeling guilty. No one in particular was making me feel this way—my mother called me all the time with her favorite baby names (Louisa, Camilla, Will, Brogan) and rejected the ones I suggested (Harper, Harry, Oscar, Theo); we narrowed it down and agreed on Lilly or Henry.
My parents also arranged a weekend trip to meet Andrew’s parents, and the four of them made a baby tote bag with their handprints on it. They picked out their grandparent names and gave us a framed picture of the four of them. Our families finally seemed excited about the new addition and were finally showing us. The night of July 4th, my mother pulled me aside and told me that this was a good thing: “Finally!” she said. “Finally, something good is coming into our lives. Not a funeral, but a baby! No more news of death or dying for once!”
My parents’ support made me feel somewhat better, maybe even proud, but something still felt dissonant. I didn’t feel the pregnant-mother glow I had heard about from others, and I still hadn’t felt the baby move. I hadn’t seen any images of the baby, either. It didn’t feel real, and I was waiting for this feeling so I could believe it and start getting excited.
Right on time, straight from LaGuardia, the cab drops us off in Union Square, at the steps in front of Phillips Family Practice. Even though Dr. Reich said that I didn’t have to come in for this and that it’s probably really nothing to worry about, I just want to
hear her tell us that in person. I need to read her face when she explains exactly what she found.
“Are you worried? I’m not worried. Are you worried?” I ask as I close the door to the exam room and slouch into a chair.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Andrew says, standing above me, his chest straight, offering a hearty, masculine reassurance. “Even if there was, what can we do about it right now?” he says, then begins opening up drawers and digging through cabinets and pulling out rubber gloves.
A knock on the door and in comes Dr. Reich. “Well, well, well,” she says. “If it isn’t Mr. and Mrs. America.”
“Hey, Danya.” Andrew snaps a rubber glove around his wrist. “I asked the nurse who took Mira’s blood pressure who her favorite doctor at the clinic was.”
“Oh yeah? What’d she say?” Dr. Reich and I look at each other and roll our eyes.
“Well, it wasn’t you,” Andrew continues. “But do you want to know who it is anyway?”
Dr. Reich explains her findings: “Just a little bit of elevated alpha-fetoprotein levels, nothing too unusual, nothing you’ve done wrong.” But this alarms me.
I’d been seeing the world through a haze of guilt and regret and extreme superstition. Since becoming pregnant, I’d been interpreting things in a new way—not quite from the perspective of a parent. Not quite that. But from the perspective of my parents. Or any parent. How awful it must be to constantly worry about the safety of your child—even before your child is born, and then be conscious of the fragility of your child’s life for the years and years that follow. To wonder whether or not you’re being a good parent. If your behavior, your actions, your inactions, your thoughts, the karma of your past was shaping your child’s life.
I was a rude daughter; I knew I’d been that to my parents. I’d been a terrible teenager. I ran away all the time. How terrible it must’ve felt for them to lose control. To have a child take the independence they so yearned for. What it would feel like to essentially lose your child. This realization, and the realization of the part I played in their particularly painful parenthood, nearly paralyzed me with fear. What a fool I’d been.
As Danya talks to us, fragments of my youth begin to bubble to the surface of my brain: I am fifteen years old and in the car with Mom, Sabina, and Jules. We’re puttering down Raymond Road, a shabby, gray stretch of potholed pavement that runs past Cornwell’s Turkeyville & Dinner Theatre and an old cornflakes cereal factory. To the left, there’s the Optimist Club, a senior picture photography studio, a Beanie Babies outlet, and Mount Ever Rest Cemetery. To the right we have a train depot, a trailer park, Hots Gentlemen’s Club, and litter—lots of litter, like empty McDonald’s bags and broken 40-oz. malt liquor bottles. And a few doors down from Hots, perched atop a hump of dead grass and patches of brown mud is a little yellow house with four tinted windows and a sign out front that reads: Happy Spa.
Jules and I rib jab each other and attempt to make risqué jokes; the Happy Spa is the launching pad for our one-dimensional puns.
“They say it rubs people the wrong way,” says Jules.
“Hands down, they’ve got all you knead !” I say.
Sabina rolls her eyes. And Mom, gripping the wheel of our Chrysler minivan, furiously threatens to write a letter to the community board. “It is not okay,” she says. “What happens to those women is not okay.”
Every time we drive past the Happy Spa, Mom’s heart seems to sink, as if the massage parlor were a personal insult. Something about the place upsets her, bothers her more than it bothers other people—she sees parts of herself in those women. Women who have fought to move forward, but who were now stuck. But there is little she or anyone can do. The entire stretch of I-94 from Kalamazoo to Detroit has more of these “Oriental massage parlors” than gas stations. The Velvet Touch. The Lion’s Den. China Garden. They’re like dandelions: when one gets crushed, another pops up. And we all know what’s going on in there. The local police, the community board, even my Old World, Catholic mother knows what a “happy ending” is. Any place that claims to be an “exotic massage parlor” is really just a place that gives rub-’n’-tugs, and probably more.
She is driving us to my orchestra rehearsal. My high school is performing Man of La Mancha, a musical about the mad knight Don Quixote and I’m the concertmistress. They’re expecting me to direct the string section tonight, but that’s not gonna happen. Once my mom drops me off at W. K. Auditorium, I’m going to leave. After depositing me, she’ll take Jules to football practice, then Sabina to Science Olympiad, then head back to her restaurant to work for a couple of hours, assuming we are all getting rides home like we said we would. Mom will leave RSVP around 9 p.m., drive home, go into the kitchen and reheat dinner—leftovers from the restaurant—because by 9:30, Dad, Bean, Jules, and I are expected to be scooting our chairs closer to the dinner table, taking hold of each other’s hands, bowing our heads, and saying grace before we begin another late-night dinner of lobster bisque and whole-wheat rolls. But I won’t be there. Nobody knows this yet, not even me, but soon, I will thrust myself forward and keep on running and nothing will ever be the same. I will run away.
Looking in the rearview mirror with eyes both sympathetic and angry, my mother declares, “The Happy Spa is slave quarters.” I don’t quite get what she means by that—slave quarters. Why so dramatic? Why so offended? Why can’t she just laugh at these kinds of things like everyone else? I don’t understand because I’m still a kid, a girl in her first bloom of adolescence. I am wild and unworldly, inexperienced and addled with hormones. A moist constellation of youth.
My response: “You knot like a massage?”
Everything is new. The hair on my armpits. The scent of my armpits. The routine of gliding antiperspirant over the surface of them after I shower. I’ve started shaving my armpits, my legs, sometimes my crotch. I steal my dad’s razor. Now, once a month, I get my period. My parents have purchased metal for my mouth that is now glued to my teeth; each month, Dr. Grubka tightens the strip with a tiny screwdriver, forcing my teeth to shift painfully into obedient rows. My body is chaos, a figure in hideous transition.
Also: my parents have pulled Julian and me out of St. Philip Catholic and enrolled us into the public school systems, saying we needed more culture, something about a “bigger aquarium.” Jules goes to Pennfield, the rural school, because they have a good football team, and I’m at Battle Creek Central because they have an orchestra. Sabina is staying at St. Phil; she’s almost graduated and she spends half her day at the Math and Science Center, a school for exceptionally bright, young academics. (Jules and I did not make the cut.) What Jules and I do is leave a class of twenty-five students we’ve known since kindergarten and enter one of up to three hundred. And with our parents working all the time, we hardly see one another. A team that used to be inseparable now behaves more like neighbors: Dad installed locks on our bedroom doors and gave the three of us our own set of keys after we complained about lack of privacy; our bedrooms are now like our very own apartments. We weren’t prepared for the sudden shift. This independence: new. This loss of routine: also new. We’ve been thrust outward. We’ve been pushed upon ourselves. But I am not afraid.
At my new school, I’m considered “weird” but “hot,” a combination that puts me under the microscope. “Did you see what she did after that hall fight? She picked up a piece of weave from the floor! Homegirl holds it up in front of her face and goes, ‘THIS IS SOMEONE’S HAIR.’” They look at my last name and can’t pronounce it, or catch my mother’s voice when she does pick me up from school and assume I’m an alien. “What country you from?” they ask.
At school there are no uniforms. Now we can wear jeans to class, and now we are not reading about Jesus. Now my class doesn’t go to church together. Now kids do fight in the hallways, in the bathrooms, in the cafeteria. There are security guards. I’ve seen a gun on several occasions. It belonged to a
student. All the time, the energy is wild, close to bursting. It’s like being inside a piñata.
I make some new friends like Amanda, a wholesome girl from a wholesome family. Amanda is nice and smart, very sincere and very short; she leads me around the school like a museum guide, narrating the place with resentment and cynicism. I meet other kids, kids with no rules—“bad kids,” Amanda warns me, and tries to steer me away like a voice of reason, but it doesn’t work. The Bad Kids are so interesting—independent thinkers, I think—so they become friends, too. They remind me of unpruned gardens.
Some of them have nonexistent parents. Some of them are addicted to drugs. Some of the Bad Kids smoke weed with their families. I get invited to a sleepover at my new friend Molly’s house and get stoned for the first time with her mom and dad. We watch Big Top Pee-wee and I end up sleeping in a closet because I’m too high and it just feels like I should be surrounded by shoes. My parents have no clue because they’re working all the time. Plenty of my classmates know my dad because he delivered their babies. Sometimes, at home around the dinner table, Dad tells me he delivered so-and-so’s baby. “I believe she is in your Spanish class.” He’ll bring it up and I won’t know what to think, or how to respond. Often my mom chimes in, giving her two cents or shaking her head disapprovingly. Dad asks me in an emotionally tone-deaf way, the way he might ask his patients, “Are your friends sexually active?” Some are. “Are you?” I am not.
We’re at a point where we only catch glimpses of one another. At the start of each new week, before we scatter to our separate schools, my parents write down instructions on a notepad and then they leave for work. No TV on school nights, get your homework done before you play, dinner is in the fridge. Without the buoy of my family’s togetherness to keep me afloat, I dive deep into the aquarium. From there, everything becomes improvisation. I get a skateboard. I become the girl who isn’t afraid to try things. The girl who dyes her hair red with Kool-Aid and pierces her own nose.
