by A. J. Benza
“It’s just weird to me,” he said above the neighborhood noise of ice-cream trucks, lawn mowers, and boys working under the hoods of cars. “I guess I’m homesick, but I wish I could figure out why my sisters and father couldn’t take care of me at home while my mom got better.”
“Well, you told me how busy your dad is and all,” I said, trying to smooth things out. “And, well, you know how much my family loves having people over.”
“Yeah . . . I guess.”
“Just don’t think about it so much,” I said. “In an hour or so, a blue car with your mom will drive up and you’ll see how much she loves you.”
“God . . . these allergies,” Gino said, wiping his wet eyes.
“They’re not allergies,” I said, punching his shoulder. “You cry when you’re sad. So what? Big deal.”
“No . . .”
“Yes, ass!”
Gino laughed a little. “I’ll be fine. I’m fine.”
It wasn’t ringing true to me, so I called in some reinforcements. I had the Rossitto girls come over from next door and make the driveway look a lot more crowded and fun. I figured a bunch of pretty girls would put Gino more at ease and make the eventual mother-and-child reunion go smoothly. Plus, I was always up for having Debbie around me.
“Here’s the thing,” I said to the Rossitto girls—Debbie, Yvonne, Eileen, Julie, and Diane. “Gino’s mom is coming from Jersey to make a surprise visit. But my mother ruined the surprise, so now we have to act shocked when she drives up.”
“Okay . . .” Debbie said. “What do you want us to do?”
“I don’t know. I’m thinking we can all play basketball together so Aunt Geneva sees Gino has been having a good time and all.”
“Why hasn’t your mom come by sooner, Gino?” Julie said. She was nine.
“She had an operation and she had to get better first,” Gino replied, taking the ball away from me, dribbling to the basket, and shooting a layup with decent form.
“What kind of operation?” Julie asked. “My mom’s a nurse, so I know a lot about diseases and cancer and stuff.”
Gino gave me a look, begging me to take over.
“She had, uh, you know, lady surgery,” I said. “Same as my mom did last year.”
“Was it cancer?” Yvonne asked.
Gino stayed tuned out, throwing up shots at the hoop.
“I don’t know. Probably. Maybe,” I said.
Then the youngest Rossitto, Diane, piped up. “Is she gonna die?”
When Gino heard that question, he didn’t even bother catching his rebound. He stomped back to the fray. “No,” he said. “She’s already home and getting better. She’s not going to die.”
“She ain’t gonna croak,” I told the girls, loud enough for Gino to hear. “My mother made it. So will Aunt Geneva. It’s no big whoop.”
“I know,” Julie said slowly. “But I always hear my mom talking about cancer. And that’s pretty serious.”
I gave Debbie a look that begged of a boy needing help, and she quickly rounded up her sisters and calmed them down.
“All right, enough of this crap,” I said. “Nobody’s dying. Matter of fact, she’s driving right now and will be here any minute. Can we all just play basketball and have fun? What else do you have to do?”
It was as desperate a plea as I had ever made. But I had to, seeing how every turn in the conversation, every mention of surgery or death, was wreaking havoc with Gino’s fragile emotions. This was supposed to be a happy time. Deep in the folds of my heart, where my father’s words played like a calliope, I knew I had to keep him stable and strong.
We had been playing hoops for a few minutes and, sure enough, a slow-moving blue Impala pulled up to our curb. And Aunt Geneva stepped out wearing a loose-fitting, floral print muumuu.
“Ma!” I yelled through the screen door. “Aunt Geneva’s here.”
It turned out all the plans Gino and I had discussed went to waste because the moment Aunt Geneva walked up the driveway, Gino ran to her and hugged her hard around her waist.
Her first words were: “Oh, honey, don’t squeeze Mommy too tight. Gently, gently.”
I stayed back by the basket and watched.
“How are you?” she said to him. “Let me look at you. I swear you look taller! And we’ll see about getting you a haircut.”
“Hi, Aunt Geneva,” I hollered.
“Hello, hello, A.J.,” she said. “Look at you. So tan. So lean. My God, you really are your father’s son.”
“I missed you, Mom,” Gino said, trailing her up the lawn.
“Well, I miss you too. And who are all these pretty young ladies?”
The ever-polite Rossitto clan ran up and introduced themselves.
“Well, I have to say, you are all such beautiful girls. Are any of you Gino’s age?”
Julie put up her hand. “I’ll be ten in ninteen days.”
“Wow. That’s wonderful. Gino, did you know that?”
“Yeah. That’s my friend Julie.”
I finally walked over and gave my Aunt Geneva a proper kiss and hug. “It’s great to see you,” I said. “We’ve been having a lotta fun.”
“I bet you have,” she said, wiping Gino’s forehead. “Why are you all so sweaty?”
“We’ve been playing basketball, Mom,” Gino said. “Wanna see me shoot a basket?”
“Well, let me get situated. I’ve been driving in traffic for over two hours. Let me bring Aunt Lilly these pastries first.”
“Later on, I’ll show you how I can dive now,” Gino said.
“That’s news to me,” I said flatly.
My mom finally popped out of the front door. “Geneva!”
“Hiya, Lil.”
“I hope you’re hungry and you brought a bathing suit in this heat,” my mother said.
They embraced on the front porch while we all watched from the driveway.
“It might be too soon for me to swim,” she said, “but maybe I’ll get my feet wet.”
And with that, the women walked into the house filled with sounds of barking dogs and the smell of a meat sauce slow-cooking on the stove.
Gino was hanging his head, so I suggested we all take a dip in the pool. While the girls all went to change, Gino and I went into the backyard and set up the rafts and the water guns we were going to use for what we had come to call the Godfather Game. It went like this: You jumped off the deck of the pool onto a giant raft and tried to recite lines of dialogue from the movie. All the while, you were getting shot at with high-powered water guns. And when you didn’t make it across the thirty-two-foot pool, you had to stick the death scene just right and drop in the water as if you had just been whacked. And what made it easier was that my father had a thick book lying around the house called The Mafia at War, which had all the gory snapshots of the best rubouts of all time. We used it as a reference book.
My father was out back picking grapes from the arbor, with yellow jackets all over his arms.
“Daddy!” I said. “That’s too many. You’re gonna get stung!”
“Nah.” He laughed. “How many years have you seen me do this? They’re more afraid of us than we are of them.”
“Jesus . . .” I said.
“Gino, did you hug and kiss your mother?” he asked.
“Yes,” he said, and paused. “Uncle Al . . . ?”
“Yes?”
“You’re not going to tell her about all those pills we buried, are you?”
My father stopped plucking grapes for a moment and shook the bees off his arms. “Hell no. A deal’s a deal. I don’t go back on my word. Go have fun in the pool.”
With Gino and me playing in the pool with all the Rossitto girls, it wasn’t long before Pete and his sister Tracy came by too. No one had fences back then. Everyone could see whatever
their neighbors were up to.
Aunt Geneva sat in the kitchen with my mother and Aunt Mary, but her eyes seemed glued to the activities in the pool. I had slipped out for a few minutes and was sitting on a lawn chair outside the kitchen window.
“Lilly, what sort of game are they playing?” I heard Aunt Geneva say. “I see them shooting guns and the little girls act like they’ve been shot or something. Is that what I’m seeing?”
My mother and Aunt Mary laughed. “They play it every day. It’s about The Godfather. They shoot each other with water guns like they’re gangsters.” My mother laughed.
“Has Gino seen The Godfather since he’s been here?” she asked.
“Sure,” my mother said nonchalantly. “Al took them a couple weeks ago.”
“Oh God, no.”
“What?” my mother said, clueless to my aunt’s anxiety. “Was I supposed to call and ask you?”
“Lilly, a ten-year-old boy is not ready for that kind of violence.”
My mother had a way of defusing things with a wave of her hand and also by walking away to tend to her sauce. “Well, Geneva, they saw it and they loved it. No harm done. It’s a beautiful story about family.”
“That’s one way of looking at it. But it’s not something I would have ever approved of,” Aunt Geneva said to Aunt Mary, sitting across the table.
“Okay,” my mother yelled out to the backyard, through every screen door and open window. “Sauce is done. I’m putting the pot up. Ten-minute warning!”
Those simple sentences, those arrangement of words, were a big type of structure in my life. With the meat sauce being slow-cooked since 10:00 a.m. and my mother telling two households that the pasta she was cooking would be ready to eat in ten minutes, that meant that all our loves and differences were about to be aired out at the big dining room table. And when she finally poured the macaroni into the scolapasta and the steam rose up all around her upper body and gathered at the framed portrait of Frank Sinatra above our sink, it was as close to religion as we ever got.
As we all gathered in the dining room and found our chairs, Gino began to tell his mother how much he enjoyed Aunt Mary’s artwork. Whether it was a ceramics project or a clay sculpture or her tiny oil paintings inside giant, empty clamshells, Aunt Mary’s work was fairly accomplished, despite the fact that she had been pretty much blind as a bat since birth. The unfortunate fact being, she was delivered while my grandmother had caught a case of syphilis on account of my grandfather stepping out one night too many. Anyhow, she never complained about it. Never even got mad at her father. She just decided it wasn’t going to slow her down, and, as a result, she spent her life traveling the world, and her artwork was a testament to the things she could best remember that flashed before her eyes—a charging elephant in Africa, sunsets in South America, hula girls in Hawaii. Many of those sights got the large-canvas treatment, but a hundred more ended up delicately detailed on ordinary clamshells we dug out from the bay. And they were all over our house. It was like living with a far-sighted Dalí.
“Aunt Mary has been teaching me how to draw better,” Gino said to his mother, holding up a drawing of a turkey that he had traced from his handprint.
“Well, look at that. I remember when you did the same thing when you were five or six years old,” she said.
As my mother brought out the big pot of pasta and meat sauce, that comment took on a mean tone. And, as if on cue, her eyes met my father’s at the same exact moment.
“Yeah, but Aunt Mary told me how to make it more special,” Gino said. “She said to use my imagination so that the turkey can stand out from all the others.”
Aunt Geneva grabbed his drawing and adjusted her glasses to get a better look. “Let me see,” she said, as her jaw started to drop and her eyebrows furrowed. “Are these pearls around the turkey’s neck?” she asked him.
“Yeah,” Gino said with excitement. “A.J. drew his turkey with an Italian horn around its neck and high-top sneakers on its feet. I gave my turkey pearls.”
“I see that. And it looks like you gave it high heels too,” she said without any enthusiasm.
“Yeah. Isn’t that funny? A boy turkey wearing pearls and high heels.” Gino laughed, along with my sisters.
“I think it’s hysterical,” I said across the table.
“Why’d you stop there?” Aunt Geneva shot back. “Why not give him earrings?”
“That wouldn’t look believable,” my father piped up, as he sat in his chair at the head of the table. “Where would you hang ’em?”
Whether Aunt Geneva liked it or not, it became immediately apparent that my father—my whole family, in fact—accepted Gino’s quirks without judgment. As a matter of fact, we began to celebrate them.
As usual, our table was overflowing with food. The meat sauce was just the start. And even though the sauce had meatballs, sausage, and braciola inside, that didn’t mean my mother didn’t also serve a London broil. And then there was always a big garden salad and some roasted peppers for good measure too. It was endless. As my mother and sisters began plating the food for all the men seated, my father was flipping through his albums, trying to find the right Sinatra song to go with the meal.
“Maybe we’ll give Ol’ Blue Eyes a break tonight,” my father said. “I’m taking requests for dinner music. Anybody have anything they want to hear?
Lorraine was first to speak up. “Daddy, please play the West Side Story sound track.”
“Hell no. Why? So you can hear Rita Moreno sing about wanting to live in America? Of course they want to live in America. We took them in and look where it got us. Every day there’s another Puerto Rican murder in the papers.”
“I guess the Jackson Five is out of the question?” I asked.
“No colored music,” he mumbled. “Especially from the most fucked-up family in America. All of you will see one day. That family is just not right, and it starts with the father.”
Aunt Geneva’s cheeks were growing more red by the second. “Does this kind of talk go on all the time? My God, Al. Your language.”
“It’s nothing he hasn’t heard before,” my father said. “Or, if he wasn’t hearing it . . . maybe he should have been.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Aunt Geneva said, pushing her plate aside.
With the grown-ups on full tilt, and everybody about to spill their guts about the one sensitive topic we were all biting our tongues over, it was Aunt Geneva who threw the first blow.
“I’m okay with no music at all during dinner,” she said. “Dinner is a time for talking about your day, and I haven’t seen Gino in many, many days.”
It was impossible not to make eye contact with my entire family seated around me. And that comment was unfathomable for us. No one came to our house for quiet chitchat and casually catching up with each other. My house was a coliseum of emotions. And the dinner table had all the passion of an Italian opera. And you don’t turn down the sound at the opera.
It didn’t matter long, anyway, since my father paid Aunt Geneva’s comment no mind and got back to work thumbing through his albums.
“Uncle Al . . . you know what I would really love to hear?” Gino said, quietly. “Do you have any Liza Minnelli records?”
I never remembered seeing any Liza Minnelli albums in the big green stereo console on those nights when my father was quizzing me on who were the world’s “real” musicians, so I wasn’t sure how he could make Gino’s out-of-the-blue request come true.
“Ah, shit,” my father said, genuinely disappointed, since Gino never asked for much. “I don’t have any Liza here.”
He turned to my sister Rosalie. “Ro, do you or Jack have any Liza at your house?”
Jack and Ro were a bit taken aback by the request and my father’s true desire to make Gino’s idea come to life. “No, Daddy,” Ro said. “I’m sorry, Gino.”
“Ah . . . it’s okay,” Gino said. “I just felt like hearing Liza.”
My father was obviously intrigued. “How did you come to like Liza?” he said. “You know her mother, Judy Garland, was a real nut, right?”
“Yeah . . .” Aunt Geneva said. “Since when do you like Liza Minnelli? That’s kind of random.”
“Larry listens to her a lot,” he told the table. “Sometimes he calls me in his room and plays her records and it helps me go to sleep. You remember, Mom?”
“I remember you falling asleep in Larry’s room, yes,” she said. “But I don’t remember hearing the music.”
And it was almost as if the memory of what his mother had just confirmed lifted his spirit right there at the dining room table. “I remember the music. I remember the words,” Gino said. “I can still hear it in my dreams.”
“Well, I’m sorry I can’t get you Liza today,” my father said. “But I think I have the next best thing right in here somewhere. Do you want to hear some of the songs from the man she was married to until a few weeks ago?”
There were a lot of men on album covers, so I had no idea which one of them might have been Liza Minnelli’s former husband. I was just as confused as the rest of the table. I knew my father loved music and that he also had a fascination with all performers from the UK and Australia. He just thought that part of the world had a better sense of humor. But I didn’t think his interest stretched into a song-and-dance man who wore sequined shirts with three buttons undone on the album sleeve.
“This is Peter Allen,” my father said, holding up the record. “He’s a helluva writer and a great performer. He’s gonna be big.”
“I’ve heard of him,” both my sisters said.
“Well now listen to him.”
The first song he dropped the needle on was “Tenterfield Saddler,” as sad and syrupy as it gets, where Allen sings about his grandfather being an old, wise man who made saddles for people in a tiny Australian town, a father who found it easier to drink than go mad, and a little boy who grew up to marry a girl with a pretty face. Three generations of family delicately explained, whose dilemmas made ours seem like a walk in the park.
