Engaging Men (6 page)

“I don’t like that, Angela,“ my mother said, standing over a sizzling pan of eggplant on the stove. It was Sunday, and after an utterly uneventful weekend spent mostly alone 0ustin and Lauren had disappeared to the Hamptons on Saturday, thank God, to celebrate their happy reunion), I had gone to my mother’s house early, ostensibly to help her cook, and was now being subjected to the third degree while chopping garlic. It was my own fault, really, for admitting that Kirk had gone home to see his parents. And for saying it with a less-than-cheerful expression.

“How many times has he been here?” Ma said now, flipping the eggplants with barely contained indignation. “It’s not right.”

For once I had to agree with her. She was from the old school, where a man treated a woman with the utmost deference. My father was one of those men. It seemed when I was growing up, there was never a moment when he didn’t put my mother’s concerns above his own. Even up until the moment he died, as he lay on his sickbed, where my mother had permanently stationed herself, he begged her to go to sleep, knowing he would be up and in pain for the rest of the night. Of

course, my mother didn’t dare close her eyes during those last few days. In fact, she still blames herself for succumbing to exhaustion the night he passed away. “I closed my eyes for one minute, and he was gone!” she laments, as if the fact that she couldn’t stay awake had ultimately done him in. Even four years later, she still wore mourning clothes, and judging from the way her knit skirt was starting to fray around the edges, they were the same ones she’d bought in her first year as a widow.

“Ma, how come you never wear the dress I bought you?” I said now, hoping to get her off the subject of Kirk. “What did you do, throw it out?”

“I have it. It’s in the closet.”

I bet it was. Along with sheet sets she had gotten on sale and never used and the tablecloths from Italy she was saving for a “special occasion” that never seemed to come. Hence the one flaw in the Old World ways: You never enjoyed anything while it was fresh and new. “I don’t know what you’re waiting for,” I said.

“Don’t worry about me. Worry about yourself,” she said, starting to pull the eggplants out of the pan and placing them on a plate.

“Who’s worried about Angela?” Nonnie said, coming through the kitchen door from her apartment downstairs.

“Hey, Nonnie,” I saidjumping up to enfold her in my arms. I breathed in her flowery scent and leaned back to gaze at her soft, smiling features with relief. Cheerfully attired in a bright red blouse and a pair of polyester capris—like most of her peers in the eighty and over set, she couldn’t resist synthetic fabrics— my grandmother was a breath of fresh air in the gloom that permeated my mother whenever she thought one of her children was in danger of unhappiness. Since I was the one who usually fell into that category, I had come to rely on Nonnie to keep things on an even keel.

“You gonna cook in that?” my mother said, turning from the sauce she stirred momentarily to take in my grandmother’s festive outfit and made-up face.

“I sure am,” Nonnie said, then defiantly grabbed a bowl of chopped meat off the counter. After dumping in the garlic I had just finished dicing along with breadcrumbs and myriad other ingredients so secret she claimed she was taking their names to

her grave, Nonnie reached into the bowl of red meat and spices and, rings and all, began to mix the ingredients by hand.

“So what’s your mother worried about now?” Nonnie asked, addressing me as if Ma weren’t standing two feet behind her at the stove.

“Oh, you know. The usual. Me and Kirk.”

“Hey, that’s right,” my grandmother said, as if it just occurred to her I was without my other half. “Where is the Skinny Guinea?” she asked, using her nickname for Kirk. It was Non-nie’s way of accepting Kirk as a permanent fixture in my life despite the fact that he had no relatives whatsoever who hailed from the boot of Europe. She believed that all the meals he had eaten in our home qualified him as an honorary Italian, albeit a thin one.“I don’t know where he puts it!” she would say after he cleaned a plate heaping with pasta and red meat.

“He went home.r I admitted now, watching her face carefully as she grabbed up a clump of meat and began rolling it into a meatball.

“Oh, yeah?” she said, plopping the meatball into the pan my mother had laid out on the table and grabbing up another clump of meat. “Too bad. He loves your mother’s eggplant. He’s gonna miss out, huh?” she said with a wink as she finished up another meatball.

I smiled. Leave it to Nonnie to turn things around and make it seem as if Kirk were the one missing out on something. Reaching into the bowl before her, I started to roll meatballs right along with her.

“You don’t think that’s wrong?” my mother chimed in, giving the sauce one last stir before she joined us at the table. “He’s been to this house I don’t know how many times, and he doesn’t invite Angela into his own home? To meet his parents?”

Nonnie shrugged, grabbed up some more chopped meat, rolled. “Don’t his parents live in, whatsit—Massachusetts?” she said.The way she said Massachusetts made it clear that this wasn’t as desirable a location as, say, Brooklyn. Because in Nonnie’s world, there really weren’t too many places outside of Brooklyn she felt it necessary to be. Her own mother had moved here from Naples as a teen, and Nonnie had grown up right on De-lancey, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. In all these years, she’d

never really seen any reason to go anywhere else. According to her, Brooklyn had everything a person could need: Al’s Butcher had the best Italian sausage, and there really wasn’t a better bagel to be had anywhere in New York than at Brooklyn Bagelry, never mind the rest of the country. And with Kings Plaza a short walk away and packed to the brim with shops that kept her in polyester and high-heeled Cubby Cobblers, what more did a woman need?

“He’s not serious about her. And I don’t like that,” my mother said, putting up the water for the pasta.

“Serious. Who needs serious? There’s plenty of time for that,” Nonnie said with a wave of one ringed hand.

She was right, I realized.Why was I in such a hurry, anyway? Kirk and I hadn’t even been together two years yet. Getting all worked up about marriage seemed a bit…premature. Didn’t it?

Returning to the table and grabbing a hunk of chopped meat, my mother eyed me and Nonnie with a shake of the head. “Did you bring up the sausage from your freezer?” she asked my grandmother.

“No, I didn’t have any,” Nonnie said lightly. “But don’t worry. I asked Artie to bring it.”

“Artie?” my mother said, “Gloria Matarrazzo’s husband?”

“Gloria’s dead,” Nonnie said, rolling the meat between her hands. “Has been for a good year now, God rest her soul.You should know that, Maria.You went to the funeral.”

“So why’s he coming here?” Ma asked.

“I invited him,” Nonnie replied, as if this should come as no surprise to anyone.

“You what?” my mother said, pausing midroll.

“What?” my grandmother replied, eyes wide with inno-cence.“We’re friends.We’ve been playing poker together on Friday nights for fifteen years now. I can’t invite the man to my home for dinner?”

But as Nonnie turned her attention to the meat once more, I could swear her cheeks were slightly flushed.

“What are you up to?” Ma demanded, putting words to the suspicion that lurked in my own mind.

But before she got her answer, the doorbell rang.“I’ll get it!” my grandmother announced, rushing to the sink to rinse her

hands.Then, checking her reflection in the microwave door, she gave her curls a quick pat and headed to the living room and the front door, leaving my mother and me staring after her in surprise.

“Artie! Glad you could make it,” we heard her exclaim from the next room. And within moments, she was leading Artie Matarrazzo into our kitchen. “Look who’s here!” Nonnie announced, gripping his hand. “You remember my daughter, Maria, and my granddaughter, Angela?” she said to Artie, who looked somewhat unsure how he had wound up in our kitchen, much less by my grandmother’s side. I might even have thought he’d stumbled to our house by accident, judging by his somewhat rumpled attire and bewildered brown eyes beneath bushy gray brows, if it weren’t for the sausage he pulled out of the shopping bag he carried.

“Oh, Artie, you remembered,” Nonnie gushed, gazing at the package as if it were a dozen roses, and leaning over to kiss his fleshy cheek.

Oh, my, I thought, exchanging a look with my mother.

Nonnie had a beau. And if the size of that sausage he was sporting was any indication, it was serious.

No less than an hour later, my brother Sonny arrived, with his wife, Vanessa. Of course, dinner was pretty much done by this point, and even the table had been set, leaving Sonny and Vanessa with nothing more to do than stand in the middle of the living room, while both my mother and my grandmother oohed and aahed over Vanessa. Or more specifically, Vanessa’s abdomen, which was round and bursting with her and Sonny’s first child. My mother’s first grandchild. “First grandchild from birth,” my mother would always clarify. My brother Joey had fraternal twins that came with his fiancee, Miranda, and once my mother had accepted the fact that her oldest son was not likely to give her any grandkids unless he married Miranda, she embraced little Tracy and Timmy as her own.

“There is nothing like it when your own son is having a baby,” she declared now, as she often exclaimed when Joey and Miranda weren’t around.

Vanessa, of course, ate it up. Standing before my mother, she

ran one well-ringed hand over her abdomen, pressing the fabric of the pink maternity top against the swell, as if to show it off, as she said, “I can’t believe how big I am—and I’m only in my fifth month!”

It was true that Vanessa was huge, but I don’t think it was all baby. At five-nine, with a mane of blond hair sprayed so high it practically hit the woodwork on the way in the door, she still wore her trademark four-inch heels. Huge hunks of gold jewelry dangled from her ears, neck and arms, which somehow added to her girth in an oddly glamorous way. Her overwhelming size made her pregnant state seem all the more glorious. When Vanessa was in the room, she literally took it over. You couldn’t not talk about her.

“How are you feeling? Still getting that morning sickness?” Ma asked. Then, “You really should sit down. Especially in this heat. Summer’s barely begun and already the humidity is unbearable. Angela, get Vanessa one of those nice armchairs from the dining room.”

There really was no escaping Vanessa’s reign over a room, I thought, heading to the dining room for an extra chair as I heard Sonny begin to regale Nonnie and my mother with story of Vanessa’s latest sonogram. “I saw something on that screen. I swear it’s gonna be a boy…”

There was only one thing that could dispel the Vanessa ob-session.Well, actually two things.Tracy andTimmy, the Twin Terrors, who had just now exploded through the front door and into the living room, practically barreling Vanessa down in their six-year-old exuberance.

“Hey, hey, hey,”Joey called out in admonishment, as he came through the door, his hand firmly around Miranda’s tiny waist.

It still amazed me to see Joey in “dad mode,” as he’d taken on the role rather abruptly when he met Miranda a year earlier. Up till then, he had devoted all his time and energy to running the auto-parts empire my father had left to him. And whatever spare time he’d had was spent waxing and detailing the ‘67 Cadillac that was his pride and joy. Now, suddenly, Tracy and Timmy were his pride and joy. Miranda, his raison d’etre.

My mother should have been satisfied with this turn of

events. For years, she worried Joey wouldn’t lift his head up from the Caddy long enough to settle down and give her the grand-kids she craved. But somehow she couldn’t swallow down the idea of Miranda. It was as if she saw Miranda only as some destitute single mother scheming to get her hands on the dough from our family’s business.

Fortunately, Miranda didn’t notice—or at least acted as if she didn’t.“Hi, Mrs. Di,” she said, leaning in to embrace my mother. I saw my mother’s arms go around Miranda’s petite frame, though I could tell she refrained from her requisite squeeze until she moved on to Joey, whom she not only hugged but gave a firm swat on the butt. “He gets better looking every time I see him!” she said to Nonnie, a wistfulness in her voice that indicated to the more astute observer, like myself, that she felt all that magnificence was somehow being wasted on Miranda.

“He’s all right,” Nonnie responded, with a wink that said Joey was more than all right in her eyes, as she engulfed him in a hug that practically swallowed his six-foot frame. “You remember Artie Matarrazzo, right, Joey?” Nonnie said, dragging Joey to Artie, who sat obediently on the couch. “Hey, Mr. Matarrazzo,” Joey said, shaking the older man’s hand with the same surprise my brother Sonny had displayed at the sight of my grandmother, flushed and beaming over a man other than Grandpa, who had been dead a good ten years now.

But no one had too much time to wonder over Artie, now that Tracy andTimmy had launched a full attack on the living room. They had already pulled all the cushions off the couch and were about to proceed with a pillow fight when my mother swooped down to hug them and shower them with the gifts she kept handily beside the sofa they had all but destroyed. It was as if she would gladly have taken on Tracy and Timmy, who with their big blue eyes and curly brown locks were irresistible, and put Miranda, who stood by gazing on the scene with love, out to pasture.

But whatever lingering animosity there was, it was immediately dispelled when, moments after Nonnie went into the kitchen to check on the sauce, she returned and announced, “Dinner’s ready. Let’s eat!”

Once we were all settled around the table, with me sitting between Tracy and Timmy to keep them from tearing at each other’s hair while we were eating, it suddenly occurred to Sonny that my other half was missing.

“Hey, where’s Kirk?” he said, between mouthfuls of eggplant and linguine.