Slightly Engaged

  If that’s not the case, then I have to say I have serious concerns about what kind of husband he’d be. I understand that these are extraordinary circumstances, but I wonder how he’d behave under ordinary circumstances. How many times has my father pulled over at a rest stop five miles into a trip so my mother could visit the ladies’ room?

  Would Jack do that for me?

  I think not.

  I shift my weight and shiver. It might be easier not to think about going to the bathroom if a cold rain weren’t falling on my face. What if that triggers a biological reflex? Like the old slumber party prank where you put somebody’s hand in a bowl of warm water while they’re asleep so they’ll wet the bed.

  It never happened to me, but that’s only because I refused to ever go to sleep at a slumber party. I spent many a restless night on faintly mildewed indoor-outdoor carpeted basement floors out of sheer urination dread.

  “Come on,” Jack says, suddenly turning back to me and taking my hand.

  “Where are we going?” I pat my hair with my other hand. Is this it? My big moment? I look around for the cameras.

  “To pee,” Jack says. “You have to, right?”

  That depends.

  Is he telling the truth?

  And if he is, will peeing now postpone or preempt my engagement?

  Then again, do I really want Jack to engage me while I have a stream of urine trickling down my legs?

  I look into his face, trying to read his inscrutable expression.

  What to do, what to do…

  Then I spot it.

  A crumb.

  A bread crumb!

  Holy Hansel and Gretel, Batman, there’s a bread crumb in the corner of Jack’s lip!

  It all falls into place then, just like that.

  J’accuse!

  I stare at him in disbelief, disappointment, maybe even disgust.

  “What?” he asks, all innocence.

  So it wasn’t a ring in his pocket, and it wasn’t a lizard.

  It was a ham-egg-and-cheese, smuggled away from the deli counter while I was trying to keep my butt cheeks from making contact with toilet-seat muck.

  I just know it, the way I knew last night, right from the start, that it was Colonel Mustard in the Conservatory with the Lead Pipe.

  My hopes sag like a Bullwinkle balloon. How could I have gotten all worked up over a stupid sandwich?

  But, to keep things in perspective, this doesn’t mean it’s never going to happen for us.

  It just means Jack was hungry.

  And sneaky.

  He’s only human, and humans get hungry.

  And sneaky.

  I can’t hold that against him.

  Anyway, maybe we’re going to get engaged later, at his mother’s house.

  If not, I remind myself that I’ll still have plenty to be thankful for this holiday…starting with the fact that I didn’t wet my pants in the bleachers on Central Park West.

  Chapter 11

  Wilma Candell moved last year into a brand-new two-bedroom condo not far from the huge Bedford Colonial house where she and her soon-to-be-ex-husband raised Jack and his four sisters.

  Don’t get me wrong; the condo is really nice. It’s much larger and brighter than our apartment, with a deck, a fireplace, an attached one-car garage and access to a community pool, tennis courts and golf course. The fixtures and appliances are brand new and the decor is pleasantly neutral, the better to accentuate her beautiful antique furniture and artwork.

  But when you think about the drastic change in Wilma’s lifestyle these past few years, you can’t help but feel a little sorry for her. At least, I can’t. It must be depressing to go from six thousand square feet to a fraction of that, and there’s just something unsettling about valuable oil paintings hanging on a gypsum wall that has strangers living on the other side.

  Wilma greets us looking elegant in a pencil-slim tweed skirt, black cashmere sweater and pearls. She’s made up and perfumed, and her shoulder-length dark hair looks as though she just brushed and sprayed it. I can’t help but immediately compare her to Audrey Hepburn.

  Then to my own mother.

  I do that every time I see her, but today, the contrast is more stark than ever because I know that at this very moment, my mother is flushed and exhausted, wearing either an apron or a gravy-and-grease-spattered double-knit pantsuit because she was too frazzled to remember to put on the apron. She always wears the same brown double-knit pantsuit for Thanksgiving. Or maybe it’s different brown double-knit pantsuits every year but they always look the same.

  Still, she’s my mother, and I love her. You can’t get more maternal than Connie Spadolini. In the maternal market, she’s easily got Wilma Candell beat.

  Not that Wilma doesn’t love her kids, because she obviously does. She’s just quieter, and less traditional about it. She’d never dream of spit-cleaning somebody’s face. Not a child’s, and certainly not an adult’s. Meanwhile, my mother dabbed at my cheek with a saliva-slicked finger the very last time I was home, thinking a freckle was, who knows, dirt or something.

  When it refused to budge, she decided it was a precursor to skin cancer and that I’d better wear robes and veils in the sun from now on.

  Okay, not robes and veils. But long sleeves, and hats. Not baseball caps, either. Hats. I know this because when I put on my brother Joey’s Yankees cap to appease her, she informed me that it was not sufficient protection. I guess she expects me to traipse around Manhattan decked out in a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang motoring hat or something. Like that’ll ever happen. But I promised her to take heed against the big, bad, scary sun.

  Meanwhile, here’s Wilma, all aglow with a natural-looking salon tan in the middle of November. Jack mentioned she’s been going daily in anticipation of her Christmas trip to the Caribbean, because she doesn’t like to hit the beach looking pasty.

  Who does?

  And there it is again, the drastic difference between Wilma and my own mother. I can no more imagine my mother in a tanning salon than I can imagine her…well, lying on a beach at a Caribbean resort. Especially at Christmastime.

  No, Christmastime is meant to be spent making dozens upon dozens of cucidati to give away to family, friends and fellow parishioners under the assumption that what everyone really wants from the Spadolinis this year is a tin of homemade fig-filled cookies that might actually be appetizing if they weren’t filled with fig.

  My mother hands them out to carolers, mails them to far-off acquaintances, tucks them into my father’s lunch pail to share with co-workers, leaves them on shoppers’ windshields at the mall parking lot. Okay, I made up that last part but trust me, it’s not a stretch.

  Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t imagine why a person would work herself to exhaustion making hundreds of unappetizing cookies from a centuries-old, pain-in-the-ass-to-follow Sicilian recipe, and then give them all away with a vengeance. But that’s my mother’s yuletide mission and by God, she, like her mother before her, is going to bestow cucidati on the masses if it’s the last thing she does in this life. Even my sister Mary Beth is on board the cucidati train, wholeheartedly pitching in every year to help with the complicated mixing, rolling, stuffing and baking. She even gives tins of them to her babysitters and the boys’ teachers, who would probably actually prefer a handy white ceramic World’s Best Teacher mug or freshly sharpened pencil.

  I’m sure I’ll be the one who breaks the family tradition, barring a brainwashing experience or a sudden onset of more intense guilt than I already have.

  “Come in out of the rain! How was the parade?” Wilma asks, greeting both Jack and me with hugs.

  I’m afraid to squeeze her too hard because she feels thinner than usual and I don’t want to inadvertently snap a bone.

  “We didn’t really stay for the parade,” Jack tells her.

  “I don’t blame you. The weather was terrible.”

  “It was,” I agree, hoping Jack won’t tell her how we were forced to f
lee the VIP stands, leaving our flirtatious neo-Pilgrim pal behind.

  We reached the Porta Potties on Amsterdam Avenue in the nick of time. Afterward, Jack offered to return to Central Park West so that we could watch the parade from the sidewalk, but by then the crowd was enormous. The closest we could get was half a block down West Seventy-seventh Street. From there we could see a sea of people’s heads and shoulder-riding toddlers, the tops of a few distant trees in the park, and a floating, bobbing Garfield the Cat as it passed several stories above street level.

  Talk about anticlimactic. Jack didn’t have to talk me into going home, where I threw together my famous green bean casserole—the one with the Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup and canned french-fried onions—before we caught an early train to Westchester.

  “You beat everyone here,” Wilma informs us, taking the foil-covered casserole out of my hands and carrying it to the kitchen area as we slip out of our shoes on the mat before setting foot on the plush ivory carpeting.

  She doesn’t ask us to take off our shoes; I just know by now that it’s expected here and was expected in the Bedford mansion as well. The first time I met her I was wearing a sock with a hole in it and I spent the entire visit trying to keep it folded under so my big toe wouldn’t pop through. Now I always wear my best socks when we go to Wilma’s.

  I wear my best everything, in fact, because there’s just something about her that makes you want to be dressed up. I changed into a nice black sweater and I traded my sneakers for boots, but I still have on the same jeans. I could barely button the slimming black pants I intended to wear, much less imagine consuming a feast while wearing them.

  “What time is everybody else coming?” Jack asks as his mother leads the way into the spotless living room.

  “Jeannie won’t be coming until dessert—she and Greg had to go to his parents’ house in Rockland to eat with them first. Kathleen and Bob and the twins will be here soon, and they’re picking up Rachel on the way.”

  Plopping onto an antique sofa the way he sprawls on the lovely Ikea couch at home, Jack asks, “What about Emily?”

  His mother doesn’t make a face or squirm, but she’s not exactly making eye contact with him—or me, for that matter—when she admits, “Emily isn’t coming.”

  “Why not?”

  That came from Jack, of course. I say nothing, because I don’t feel comfortable actively getting into family-based personal business in front of his mother. Maybe I would if I were his wife. Or even future wife.

  Which is a status I’m starting to think I may not achieve before this day is over, because Jack seems much too relaxed for a man who’s about to pop the question.

  He casually helps himself to a handful of mixed nuts from a crystal bowl on the marble-topped coffee table, damn him, and asks again, “Why isn’t Emily coming?”

  “Because she feels sorry for Daddy. She’s going there instead.”

  “To his apartment? He’s cooking?”

  “Who knows? Do I know anything?” From the helpless gesture Wilma makes, she does not.

  “When did she make this decision?” Jack presses on, oblivious to his mother’s heartbreak. At least, I’m assuming it’s heartbreak. If I were her and one of my kids blew me off for Thanksgiving, I would be heartbroken.

  Then again, I blew off my own mother for Thanksgiving.

  I can’t help but wonder if, at this very moment, she’s helplessly throwing up her hands while talking about me to one of my brothers’ wives.

  “Because I talked to her last night,” Jack goes on, chewing mixed nuts while reaching for a second handful, “and she said she was coming. She said she was bringing two pumpkin pies from some great bakery in Brooklyn.”

  “She decided this morning, I guess.”

  “What about the pies?”

  “They’re coming anyway,” his mother zings at him.

  Go, Wilma. Go, Wilma.

  Jack blinks. “You don’t have to be sarcastic.”

  “Well, what do you mean, ‘What about the pies,’ Jack? What about them? Do I look like I’m concerned about pies?”

  Jack says nothing.

  I say, because I have this overwhelming need to fill the strained silence, “Don’t worry about the pies, Wilma. I’m on a diet anyway.”

  Why I felt compelled to share that, I have no idea. It makes it sound as if I thought the pies were solely for my benefit.

  Not that I don’t love pumpkin pie. In fact, I love it so much that the thought of Thanksgiving without it makes me homesick all over again.

  My mother always makes homemade pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving dessert. From a real pumpkin, not from a can. She makes six of them, actually. And she serves big slices with real whipped cream that she beats herself with her old handheld mixer that splatters tiny drops of heavy cream all over her hair, her face, the walls, the counters.

  She serves the pie from the kitchen but she always brings the whipped cream right to the table in a big yellow earthenware bowl, the same one every year.

  She has a green one just like it, a size bigger, in which she always serves the candied yams. I don’t like candied yams, but the thought of them in that bowl is putting a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  Or maybe that’s just acute starvation.

  After all, I haven’t eaten anything since last night’s pizza with Buckley and Sonja. I really could have gone for a turkey dinner with all the trimmings topped off by a quarter of a pumpkin pie slathered in whipped cream.

  Or, instead, a cigarette to stave off the hunger pains, because simultaneously going cold turkey on nicotine and food is enough to send a normally sane person over the edge.

  Yes, I’m normally quite sane, thank you very much.

  Meanwhile, Jack, who so far has had not just the purloined ham-egg-and-cheese but cold pizza and several tablespoonfuls of peanut butter before we left home, has resumed gobbling mixed nuts like a protein-deprived reward challenge winner on Survivor.

  “Do you think the supermarkets are open today, Tracey? Because if they are, we can buy some frozen pies,” Wilma offers lamely, apparently having sensed my secret pumpkin-pie-deprivation trauma.

  “Don’t worry about it, Wilma,” I say. “We don’t need pie.”

  That was a little presumptuous, don’t you think? Why I feel compelled to be the spokesperson for the entire Candell family when I’m not technically one of them is beyond me. Who am I to decide that a Thanksgiving dinner sans pumpkin pie will suffice for all?

  But Wilma doesn’t seem fazed. Maybe she thinks I’m using the royal “we.”

  “Can I get you a glass of wine?” she asks, and I think she’s talking to both me and Jack. I’m careful not to answer for him, even when he doesn’t answer for himself. I don’t want her to think I’ll be the kind of pushy daughter-in-law who’ll take over her son’s life.

  I wait for Jack to tell his mother that a glass of wine right now would really take off the edge.

  But Jack, who apparently shed his edge at the door, just shakes his head.

  “Tracey? How about you?”

  “No, thanks,” I say reluctantly.

  A glass of wine on an empty stomach might lead to my sloppily professing my love for Jack in front of the entire Candell clan—or, even more frighteningly, it might lead to my sobbing on his mother’s shoulder in the kitchen because he hasn’t given me that diamond ring yet.

  “How about a mixed drink?” Wilma persists, the question nearly drowned out by the ferocious growling of my empty stomach, which I cleverly attempt to cover by swiftly changing my position on the sofa. Alas, the shifting cushions do little to drown out my gastro-pandemonium.

  “I can make you a vodka and tonic,” Wilma goes on, ever the charming hostess. “Or a rum and Coke?”

  I’m thinking something more along the lines of a spicy Bloody Mary garnished with plenty of celery and olives: the drink that tastes like a meal.

  But she doesn’t offer, and I’m afraid to ask, lest I come off
as a gluttonous lush.

  Instead, I say, “Thanks anyway, but I’m all set. Is there anything I can help you with in the kitchen?”

  “No,” she says, smiling, “but thank you, Tracey.”

  I smile back at her.

  As I’m smiling, the strangest thought occurs to me.

  Speaking of cold turkey…

  I smell new paint, Lysol, flowers and Jack’s nut breath.

  Just new paint, Lysol, flowers and Jack’s nut breath.

  Shouldn’t I also be inhaling the succulent scent of roasting turkey, at the very least?

  Not to mention golden gravy bubbling on the stovetop, starchy potatoes boiling in preparation for mashing, savory sage-laced stuffing baking in the oven…

  I shoot a questioning glance at Jack, wondering if he can read my mind.

  In response to my questioning glance, he says promptly, “Cowboys game doesn’t start until four,” leading me to conclude that A) mind reading isn’t among his many talents and B) his idea of a bended-knee conclusion to Thanksgiving dinner most likely involves pigskin and goalposts.

  “Are you sure you don’t need help in the kitchen, Wilma?” I ask again, shifting my attention back to the lady of the house in an effort to solve The Mystery of the Absent Cooking Fumes.

  “No, thanks.” She flashes me a curious look.

  “Are you sure?” asks the intrepid Tracey Spadolini, Girl Detective.

  “Ye-es,” she says, frowning a bit. “I’m positive.”

  Okay, I’ll admit it: I’d make a lousy sleuth despite last night’s Colonel Mustard in the Conservatory with the Lead Pipe triumph. But I can’t come right out and ask Jack’s mother why she hasn’t started cooking dinner, can I?

  Maybe I can.

  Maybe these Candells don’t know that it takes six hours to roast a turkey. Maybe somebody should warn them before it’s too late.

  Maybe that somebody should be Tracey Spadolini, Girl Detective/Kitchen Slave Apprentice.

  “Um,” I say, always a charming opener.

  “Yes?” Wilma asks.

  Jack cordially stops munching and leans forward a bit, seeming to sense a provocative note in the scent-free air.