Let Me Tell You Something (15 page)

Love can triumph over tragedy.

My engagement was a triumph of love over horrible tragedy. Al and I had been dating for two years. Every day after work, Albert would come pick me up and he'd take me home. We had discussed getting married, and of course, we'd been planning our engagement ring with Al's father. One night after work, I'll never forget, we were driving along Totowa Road, in Paterson, on our way to The Brownstone. As we got to the underpass that goes beneath Route 80, Al suddenly pulled over and parked the car.

I was confused until I saw him fumbling in his pocket and pull out some tissue paper. He unwrapped a gorgeous engagement ring, and held it out to me.

“I love you,” he said. “I want you to be my wife!”

I couldn't believe it. I burst into nervous laughter “Are you kidding me?” I replied. I looked around at the dirty underpass and the cars zooming by. This was not exactly where I'd imagined our proposal would take place. And then I looked at his face, and I saw how much he loved me, and I saw that he just couldn't wait one more second to ask me. I burst into hilarious laughter. “Yes, of course, yes,” I said. Then I cracked up some more and added, “Is this a joke?” And then we kissed. I was so happy, and my heart was bursting because his love for me was so strong that it had forced him to be so spontaneous, to ask me right there on Totowa Road.

Al's dad bought The Brownstone in 1980 for quite a bit of money. Five months after we got engaged, Al tragically lost his father, in August 1983. They only had the place three years, and with his father's passing Al and his family inherited The Brownstone—and the responsibility to make it work.

In many ways, we were lucky. We had a huge engagement party at The Brownstone before Al's dad passed, and he had the chance to see us so happy. It was a beautiful night, and it became all the more special since he did not live to see our wedding.

For Albert, the loss of his father was the most horrible time, especially considering the tragic way it occurred. We were engaged, and everything in our lives was supposed to be special and romantic and easy. But on August 18 of that year, just four months after we were engaged, Al's father disappeared.

They searched everywhere for the next four days, and found nothing. At 4:00
AM
on August 23, which also happened to be my birthday, the doorbell rang. It was the police, and they had found my future father-in-law's body.

Al is the oldest of his siblings. He was twenty-three at the time. He had to go to the police station and be questioned about his own father's death. He was gone all day. I stayed at his house, and people started arriving immediately. When Al finally got home, the house was chaos already. There were people everywhere, there were news crews out front all over the lawn. Literally hundreds of friends and family arrived at the house. But I couldn't find Albert.

I searched everywhere. I asked if anybody had seen him, and nobody had a clue as to where he went. I was worried sick, running all over the place looking for him. He was gone for about an hour and a half. We didn't have cell phones back then, so I was panicked.

When he showed up again, he took me outside to the yard. He led me to a quiet corner, out of sight of everybody, and he put his hands on my face. He looked me in the eyes, with all the hurt and loss on his face, and he said, “Happy birthday.”

I was so shocked. I had completely forgotten it was my birthday. It was the last thing on my mind that day.

Albert took me in his arms and gave me a huge hug and a kiss. As he held me, in the middle of all that was going so horribly in his life, he apologized for ruining my birthday. The day they found his father dead, he was concerned about me. And then he gave me the most beautiful ruby and diamond ring. Albert had designed the ring as my birthday gift that year. He had been dropping hints, and I knew that he'd gotten me something cool, but I didn't know what it was. It was a beautiful special ring that he wanted to reflect this amazing time in our lives, and how much I meant to him.

I'll never forget it. We were sitting outside by the pool. My heart burst; I couldn't believe the honor of this man, the man I was engaged to. What kind of guy, at that age, with that horrific thing going on in his life, thinks of somebody else? Albert, that's who.

To this day, the circumstances around what happened to Al's father are a mystery to us, and the years that have passed haven't made it any easier to accept. We spent the rest of our engagement getting stronger and stronger as a couple. The adversity of this time brought us closer together. After it happened, Al told me that he would understand if I didn't want to marry him anymore, but I told him to quit being stupid. Some people told us to postpone our wedding, but we decided to push ahead and stick to our original plan.

That ring that Al gave me for my birthday meant the world to me, and I'm sick to my stomach that I don't have it anymore. My house was robbed just after we were married and it was stolen.

As the years went by, I always teased Al that he never got down on one knee and actually said “will you marry me?” So, as viewers of the show saw, in season three, Al had secretly had my engagement ring redone—same gold, same jewels—and he took me back to that Route 80 underpass. He pulled over, and this time, he got out of the car. As soon as he got down on one knee, I knew what he was up to, and I burst out laughing, exactly the same way I did the first time.

I remembered the clumsy kid in jeans and a short-sleeved plaid shirt who had nervously proposed to me thirty years ago, and then I looked at the handsome, well-dressed, successful man on his knee thirty years later, still loving me just as much. It was probably the best feeling in the world. And Al said the magic words. For that moment, that dirty underpass became the most romantic place on earth, for the second time in my life.

Don't become a Bridezilla!

I never lost my mind as a potential bride. I loved being engaged and I loved planning a wedding, but I was never obsessed with any of the details. In fact, I wanted it all to be simple and modest. My father-in-law couldn't get over how I acted when we were choosing an engagement ring. He had a friend who was a jeweler, and he'd come home with all these diamonds, wrapped in tissue paper, for me to look at.

They were huge. Some of them would come up to my knuckles. He would show them to me, hoping I'd choose one. And I'd just shake my head. He'd be so shocked; he would tell me that any girl in the world would die to have a ring with such a large diamond. I'd just keep shaking my head.

I'm a tiny woman. A huge diamond would look stupid on my hand. One time, after I had rejected an entire bag of absolutely gorgeous, huge diamonds, my father-in-law got so angry he snatched them off the table and shoved them into his pocket. He stormed over to Albert and told him he wouldn't bring any more diamonds home for me.

“Good,” Albert said. “I'll get my own ring.” Albert knew what I wanted, and he went and got me the exact perfect ring.

That set the tone for my approach to the whole wedding. I knew that people I loved could be trusted to do things the way I liked. We were engaged in April, and after we dealt with the loss of Albert's father that August, we decided to not change our wedding date for the following July.

I was never a Bridezilla. That wasn't how I wanted to approach my own wedding. I wanted to be carefree—well, almost. I kept myself involved in the planning, but we had never done a big, crazy wedding in my family at that time. My oldest sister had eloped, and the next sister had married so quickly we didn't have much time to plan anything special. My brother had had a big wedding, but we didn't really plan it. We consciously downsized our wedding due to what had happened to Al's father. If he had still been alive, we would have had six hundred people at our wedding. As it was, we had three hundred, and I managed it without a single screaming fit or headache.

Everyone around me helped make my day special. Albert asked what I wanted for our wedding meal. “It's our wedding and I want meat loaf,” I told him. He was surprised, but he knew I was just joking to make a point about how little I cared about details like that. I was pleased when the menu for the wedding was veal rollatini and fish. That worked just as well as anything I could have spent hours agonizing over.

I went to buy my gown with my mom and my dad, and I chose the first gown I tried on. I fell in love with it the minute I laid eyes on it—it was a Sposabella gown from Italy. There were two versions, one with sequins, one without sequins. The version with the sequins was double the price. My mother and I looked at each other, knowing how crazy it would be to buy the one double in price, so we bought the plain one and put the sequins on ourselves.

I have such great memories of the night before my wedding, my mom and all my sisters and my sister-in-law, all sitting around, putting the sequins on that dress. We laughed and talked and beaded my entire wedding gown.

My mom made silk flower arrangements, and I let her do whatever she thought would look good for the floral centerpieces. And she did—it looked great. I didn't worry about a single thing and it all worked out perfectly.

If you just got engaged, or when you do, remember that nothing else matters on that day as long as you are happy. A wedding needs to be fun, and it needs to be about love. You can have a great wedding using paper towels for napkins and plastic tablecloths if the room is full of love.

The problem now is that a lot of women are losing sight of what a wedding is. A wedding is a wonderful party; it's a time for a woman to shine and have the moment she's dreamed of all her life. But at its core, a wedding is two people coming together to begin a shared life. I've seen so many kids waste hundreds of thousands of dollars of their parents' money on stupid things like flowers that cost ten thousand dollars and will be dead in two days, or two thousand dollars on linen tablecloths that will never be used again. Guess what? People go home and say they went to a great wedding if people were laughing and dancing all night. Nobody has ever said a wedding was great because the tablecloths were awesome.

I was calm all the way right up to my wedding. Honestly nothing mattered, and I knew the thing I wanted out of that day was to become Albert's wife. Everything else was unimportant. I even let my mother-in-law plan our honeymoon. She suggested San Francisco and Hawaii, and we said, sure sounds good, book it. I just didn't care about anything. I was the furthest thing from a Bridezilla on the planet.

The only thing that has to be perfect on your wedding day is your love for each other. A good wedding needs three things: Good food, good music, and lots of love. If you have those three things, nothing else matters.

Marriage is a marathon;
you gotta stay in shape!

My children have been my priority since I became a mother, but I've always made sure to be a wife first and Mommy second. My marriage is the foundation that supports my whole life, and I have always been conscious of keeping it healthy.

The secret to a long marriage is in the details. Always take the time to be thoughtful, always take time to make sure that your partner feels loved, appreciated, and special. If you do that, then it's easy.

The details are small, and they mean the world. Al has to take a bunch of pills every day, for blood pressure and whatnot. And every night before I go to bed, I lay out his pills, and I put a little handwritten note for him to see in the morning. The note will say something along the lines of “please take these pills, I love you and I like having you around!” And when he sees the note, he can smile and know how much he means to me.

It's crazy to me when I look at photos of us when we started dating. I see two kids who had not much of a clue what they were doing. And then I think of him and me these days, how embedded we are in each other's soul. We've been through the best of times together and the worst of times. And we're still here.