Julie and Romeo (14 page)

“What?”

“I don’t know, a present. Something from CVS. I mean, I think we should support the place. It’s been so good to us.”

I thought about it for a minute. “Licorice. Black licorice.”

He nodded solemnly. “For you, two packages.”

We went back to the candy aisle, dazed by the bright assortment, the shiny possibilities of sweetness. I decided on a package of Switzer and one of Nibs. Then we went outside and got into his car. He held the door open for me. You would have thought we were in the South.

“So, where are we going?”

“Surprise,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

The thought of food was impossible at the moment. I shook my head.

“Me neither.” Romeo was a good driver. “So, you met my mother, too. You know everybody.”

I looked out the window and watched Somerville shooting past me. All of the McDonald’s and Pay-Less Shoes, the endless stream of Dunkin’ Donuts, they looked brighter to me now. Forgive me my sentimentality. It was suddenly a better-looking town. “I didn’t kill her, did I?”

“She’s fine. Just a little scratched.”

“She poked me once. Then the second time I dodged it. I swear to God, I never touched her.”

“She poked you?”

“She did, see?” I pulled down the neck of my sweater to show him the round purple bruise up high on the left side of my chest, showing also the strap of the champagne bra for good measure.

He looked while driving. “The Cacciamani stigmata!” he said. “You’ve been initiated. I’ve had that exact same bruise for probably fifty percent of my life. She has it perfected. She doesn’t even have to look anymore and she hits right in the soft spot between the bones. It hurts like hell. None of us are ever smart enough to duck. We just stand there and take it. Boy, she must have been really surprised.”

“It was hard to tell,” I said. “She was going down. You’ve got a tough mother, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“I have a tough mother,” he said with gravity. “She was a good mother in a lot of ways. She worked so hard for the business, she took good care of me and my dad. I think about what it must
have been like for her, a pretty girl coming over from Italy all by herself, not speaking a word of English, but she just took it on. I don’t think anything ever stopped her. But I’ll tell you, she rules. I think she wanted to have a ton of kids and it was too bad she wound up with just me.”

“That’s not so bad, just you.”

“She really was too much mother for one person,” he said cryptically. “So, then when I married Camille and we had so many kids, she was in heaven. We bought the duplex underneath my parents’ place—how’s that for genius? I don’t know how Camille even stood it. My mother just took over everything she touched. It was like my kids had two mothers, one who was really sweet to them and one who kicked their butts into line.”

“She poked your kids?”

“She poked the kids. She poked my father. She poked the dogs. She even poked the mailman once for being late. He tried to sue her.” He laughed a little. “I always thought it would stop someday. She’s pretty old, you know, I thought she was going to be winding down. Now she’s poking you.” He shook his head. “I really am sorry about that.”

“I’m sure if my daughter Nora had seen you, she would have done more than poke. How much trouble are your kids giving you?”

“I have to tell you, it’s been a real surprise to me. There was a time the whole Cacciamani-Roseman thing was of great interest to me, but I dropped it so many years ago. I never would have imagined they’d keep the torches burning.”

“So it’s bad?”

“I’d say very bad. Except for Plummy. She absolutely doesn’t get it, and she’s not particularly interested, either. She just shrugs the whole thing off and goes to school.”

“Did you ever ask your mother, you know, what it’s all about?” Not that I would blame him for a minute if he hadn’t.

“She poked me and told me to mind my own business.”

I fished my sunglasses out of my purse and stuck my elbow out the open window. I loved having somebody else drive. “I don’t care,” I said, leaning my head back. “Tomorrow, yes. Today, I am through with the whole thing.”

Romeo reached over the gearshift and squeezed my hand.

“Would you like a Nib?” I asked him.

He nodded. I opened up the package and we ate them thoughtfully, one at a time. We commented on the price of blossoming cherry boughs as we took the expressway north to New Hampshire. We told each other stories of vacations we had taken as children and the vacations we had taken years later with our own children. We talked of the years we were broke and the years we were flush. We talked about how to raise a first-rate orchid. It was just past nine-thirty in the morning, and I thought that if nothing else were to happen from now until sundown, it would still be one of the happiest days I had had in years.

After crossing the New Hampshire state line, we took the first exit to Salem and drove on to Canobie Lake Park. Although I had promised to take Tony and Sarah there this summer, I hadn’t been to the park myself since the girls were in grade school.

“I know this may seem crazy,” Romeo said, “but it’s totally different coming here if you don’t have kids.”

“What, you just come out here with no kids?”

“No, I bring my grandkids, but I always imagined it would be really different without kids.”

Everything was different if you didn’t bring the kids. I was always nervous in amusement parks—the revolting food you ended up eating, the creepy-looking carnies, the kids shooting off in every direction. It took exactly one second to lose them for good. I thought of it as a dangerous place full of dark hazards I had never imagined.

But in the daylight, my two girls grown and my grandchildren safely at home, Canobie Lake Park seemed remarkably wholesome, if slightly tattered. The sawdust was clean. The ticket taker was a chubby woman about my age who wasn’t exactly warm (it was New Hampshire, after all) but was hardly menacing. The sky looked especially bright over the wooden spine of the roller coaster. In short, Canobie Lake Park appeared to me to be beautiful and romantic, which just goes to show it’s not where you’re at, it’s who you’re with.

“We don’t open till ten,” the woman said from inside her booth. It must have been true. We seemed to be the only ones there. “You can go ahead in, but I don’t want you stirring up any trouble.”

“What kind of trouble, exactly?” I asked.

The woman leaned forward and gave us each a bracelet to wear that would entitle us to go anywhere and do anything, absolute freedom. “There’s no kind of trouble I haven’t seen in this place. I want you to stay clear of all of it.”

We went in. We were getting away from trouble, not looking for it.

“Does your family know you’re here?” I asked Romeo.

Romeo shook his head. “I just snuck out. Sixty years old and I’m sneaking again. I haven’t had any reason to sneak in a long time.” He kissed me.

“I wonder what would have happened if we had met when we were young,” I said, staring out at the beautiful day in front of me—the blue sky, the white dipping clouds, the cotton-candy smell of the air. “I mean, what if you had come up to me at that party in eighth grade? It could have happened. We lived in the same town, our families were in the same business. What would have happened if we had fallen in love in high school?”

“The same thing that happened to Tony and Sandy, only worse. We didn’t handle it well with our kids, but our parents, they were from another generation. They would have killed us. Your father would have killed me and my mother would have killed you.”

“Poked to death.”

“I’m not even sure if I’m kidding. That was very serious hate. My mother had a hard enough time with Camille, who was Italian. Her mother played hearts with my mother. Her father was our butcher, and she still didn’t think Camille was the right girl for me.”

“But she was,” I said.

He smiled. “Camille was the right girl for me. There will never be another Camille. Just like there’ll never be another Julie.”

I felt a pang of jealousy, not that he had loved her so much, but that my marriage hadn’t been like his. I wished I could say something kind about Mort. I wished I could say, Boy, there were years we were great. It just wasn’t true. There were plenty of years we were fine, maybe even good, but Mort and I were never great.

“So, it was better that we didn’t meet then.”

“My family doesn’t like you now, but at least they don’t want to kill you.”

I thought about mentioning his son Joe, who certainly seemed capable of killing me if he took a mind to, but why spoil the day? “Do you ride the rides?” I asked him.

Romeo stood behind me and put his arms around my waist. He bent over to put his chin on my shoulder. “I think about it,” he said softly into my ear. His voice made me shiver. “I used to when I was a kid. One of us would steal our parents’ car keys and we’d drive up here late at night, jump over the fence. We’d buy one ticket for the roller coaster and then we’d just refuse to get off. We’d hold on to the bars and dig in our heels. They would have had to get a saw and cut us out of that thing. Then after the first couple of rides they’d quit trying to fight us and they’d just leave us on all night. We’d ride over and over and over again. I’d go until I couldn’t feel my hands anymore.”

“Bad kids,” I said, feeling strangely breathless as his hand slid under the back of my sweater. “My father would have been right to keep me away from you.”

“You want to try it?”

“She told us at the front not to make any trouble.”

“I’m not talking about staying on forever, I’m talking about once.”

I’d never been on a roller coaster. I had always been the one to stay on the ground and hold the popcorn bags. Not that anyone made me do it, it was just the role I chose for myself. They scared the living daylights out of me, but not as much as sushi. “Sure,” I said. “Anything once.”

THAT WAS HOW THINGS STARTED. IT WAS THE ROLLER
coaster and then the Scrambler, the Zipper. There were only a handful of Nibs in my stomach to contend with and I held them down bravely. We took it all on. When we wanted to scream, we screamed. We held each other’s hands and raised them over our heads. We went back to the roller coaster. The world spun in dazzling colors—yellow tents, black-haired children, dull grass, gold streamers. All of it merged, separated, reconfigured. We stumbled to the Paratrooper. We did loop-de-loops and hung upside down suspended from our harnesses. We did not care. Gravity had no effect on us. My inner ear gave up and stopped trying to fight me. I no longer knew when I was right side up or upside down; even after the crowds came and we had to stand in lines, there was nothing in my head that was still. And it felt right. Now my physical self matched my life. My body became the metaphor. I was reckless, disoriented, thoroughly spun. I was drunk with confusion and licorice and desire. As soon as the young man with the dagger and heart tattoo and the ten
A.M
. whiskey breath locked us in our cage, we were at each other like two mammals that
deserved to be locked in a cage. We pawed and groped our way across each other’s bodies for as long as the price of admission allowed. Sometimes when the ride was over the guy would leer at us through the bars and yank back the controls that shot us up again toward the sun. One time the Zipper jerked backward twenty feet above the ground and I cut my lip on Romeo’s forehead. There wasn’t a lot of blood and it did not slow us down.

By noon I could no longer put together full sentences. “I think I need …” I tried to say what it was I needed, but I no longer knew.

“Rest. I need to rest,” Romeo said. There was a little bruise coming up on his forehead.

He took my hand and we stumbled to the far side of the park. “Do you play Fascination?”

“What is it?”

“All you need to know is that you sit down and nothing moves.”

The idea sounded so wonderful that tears actually came to my eyes.

The Fascination Parlor was some combination of skee ball, tic-tac-toe, and bingo. We cashed in bills for a handful of quarters and took two red vinyl stools at the end of long steel cages.

“This is where you win me cheesy stuffed animals that I keep in my bedroom,” I said. “Nora always had a hundred of those things. Every guy she ever met won her a highly flammable stuffed dog.”

“I’m not going to win you anything,” he said, feeding two quarters into the slot. “I’ve always been rotten at Fascination, and
right now my head is so screwed up I don’t think I could tie my shoes.”

“Good.”

He tossed a rubber ball up the rubber ramp and into the cage. Sure enough, it hit one wall and then the other and then came bouncing back to him.

“That’s something,” I said. “Do you bowl?”

“About like this, except the ball never rolls back to me.” He threw up another, which reached the same conclusion by following a completely different path.

“Are you doing this to be amusing?”

“Nope.” He threw again, this time whipping his wrist to the side to get a spin on the ball. It dropped into a hole on the bottom and disappeared. “I’m just unbelievably bad. I’m not just pretending to be bad so you’ll feel sorry for me.”