“You like my pants set? It’s new.” Toot does her version of a model’s twirl, pointing her right foot out in front of the left and holding her arms out waist high like a milkmaid. The sweater is a disaster, an enormous white pilgrim collar on a cable-knit orange cardigan. (I can see that the wool is a fine cashmere, but what good is it when the eye sees round, round, round instead of sleek? My sister needs length, not width.) The brown slacks have a wide bell hem. She looks like a piece of candy corn. “It’s a St. John knit,” she says, giving me an in-the-know wink.
“Only a saint could get away with such a color combination,” I say.
Like all Mediterranean girls, my sister is aging well. By soft candlelight or with the help of a dimmer switch, she has the look of a plump Natalie Wood. In broad daylight, she’s a dead ringer for our great-grandmother, the pleasantly round Bartolomea Farfanfiglia, whom we never knew, but who stares at us with disgust from a sepia photograph on the television set.
“I’m going to get my teeth capped,” my sister announces.
Keep in mind, it is always something with Toot. Self-improvement is her Holy Grail. If she isn’t going on a diet of Metrecal shakes or installing an in-ground pool (inspired by the Summer Olympics), there’s some other project under way that, alas, she never sees through to completion. I’ve learned to play along. “Why would you touch your teeth? You have a lovely smile.”
“Only when clenched. In repose, I’m a knockout.” Toot looks at her reflection in the oven window. “But when I throw my head back and laugh, it looks like I’ve been eating black jelly beans for a living.”
“So get the caps.”
“Darn right. I’m fifty-one years old and I’ve been grinding my teeth all my life. That’s how I work off my nervous energy, and now I’m biting my tongue all the time. See? ” Toot pulls the sides of her mouth open with her forefingers. “I’m afraid the constant gnashing is gonna give me mouth cancer. Not my fault though. I use the Waterpik. My oral surgeon said everything shifts when you go through the Change.” Toot motions for me to sit down. “Another reason to throw myself out the attic window and not look down.”
Toot goes to the sink and washes her hands while I display the re-covered boudoir stool on the window seat for her appraisal. “Well, do you like it?”
“It’s cute,” she says. “I’ll put it next to the chaise lounge.”
“Toot, how many times do I have to tell you it’s chaise longue, not lounge. Longue means ‘long’ in French.”
“When I’m lying on it, I’m lounging. What’s the damn difference what we call it?”
“Because it’s wrong. I don’t make these things up.” I try not to snap. “These are historical terms we use in the design field. Please respect them. Make an effort.”
Toot shrugs as she pries open a large Tupperware cookie saver and carefully lifts iced coconut cookies out onto a plate. “I’ve got so much on me, B.” She breaks off a corner of a blue frosted cookie and eats it, then hands me a pink cookie. Soon our blood sugar reaches a comfortable high and we relax into the soft booth like spoons in cake batter. Toot pours hot coffee into two red-and-white polka-dot mugs. She scoots the sugar bowl and creamer toward me and places a small silver spoon on a red-and-white gingham napkin next to the mug.
The crease between her eyes relaxes as she takes a larger piece of cookie and dunks it into her coffee. I can’t count the number of times in my life I have sat at my sister’s kitchen table and dunked something sweet into a mug of something hot. The ritual always brings me great comfort. Toot picks up the cookie like it’s the sacred Host at Mass and says, “After the new year, I’m giving these up for good.”
“It’s April.”
Toot chews. “I need a few months to practice.”
My sister has delicate hands for her size. Her given name, Nicolina, means “Little Nicky,” but I don’t remember her ever being small. I remember my mother taking us shopping for bathing suits when I was little, and Toot weeping behind a muslin curtain, saying, “The size sixteen is too tight.” Of course, I was young during the final sputtering of the Great Depression. The girls wore one-piece, black wool bathing suits to the shore, and the only embellishments were buttons. Toot had her heart set on a boat-neck maillot she’d seen Myrna Loy wearing poolside in Modern Screen magazine. No one had the heart to tell her that the only thing she had in common with Myrna Loy was the occasional freckle. My mother, God bless her, kept steering her toward the old-lady styles and away from the Young Sophisticates, knowing that Toot wouldn’t fit into the fashionable suits. Toot kept arguing, telling Ma, “I’m young! I want a girlish suit!” Finally my mama lost patience and said, “Non puoi uccidere una mosca con un cannone,” which, loosely translated, means, “You can’t stuff an olive with a drumstick.”
“Good, huh?” Toot watches me chew. I give her an okay sign with my fingers so as not to choke on the crumbs. “So are you with me on the teeth?”
“Whatever you want to do is fine.”
“It’s not just cosmetic, B. Though, at my age, you look for little avenues of self-improvement even if they lead you up a blind alley of ugly. I wish it were just naturalism—”
“Narcissism.”
“Uh-huh. But it’s medical. I can’t chew. I have to chop my salad so fine it’s like soup. What the hell, maybe I’ll lose a couple of pounds.”
It occurs to me that my sister has grown larger over the years out of necessity. Without a man around she had to stay the size of her sons to keep order in this crazy home. I did all I could to help, but it wasn’t enough. My nephews, Nicholas and Anthony, are, sadly, gavones. Yet there’s a ray of hope: Her youngest son, my namesake, Bartolomeo the Second (whom we call Two), seems to have my artistic eye. He’s a theater major at Villanova.
“Well, who are you going to?”
“Dr. Pomerance. The man is a genius. They say he did Hubert Humphrey’s teeth.”
“He had his teeth capped? It doesn’t look it.”
“Old pictures.” She shrugs. “Listen. I need a flavor.”
“Uh-huh.” My sister, who doesn’t know “longue” from “lounge,” has always said “flavor” instead of “favor,” and I’m not about to start correcting her now.
“It’s my Nicky. He’s moved into a house in Freehold with … her.”
“The girlfriend?”
“Ondine Doyle. Sounds cheap, doesn’t it?”
“Actually it sounds like a flounder special at the Mayfair.”
“That’s not even slightly funny.” Toot fans herself. “It makes me sick. Rosemary Callabuono has loved my son since high school, and he won’t give her a tumble.”
“Rosemary With The Lupus?”
“Yeah, but it’s in remission. Better a woman with lupus than a woman with no virtue. Of all the girls in the world, he chooses that. Please.”
I try to picture Ondine. It’s not easy, as my nephew changes girlfriends as often as he changes pants. I recall a curvy, petite blonde with short legs and an upturned nose. “Is she the one who sat in his lap at the Feast party?” I ask, remembering her grinding into my nephew like a drill bit while the band played “Louie, Louie.”
“That’s the one! She hooked him with sex. They’re not kidding me. Nicky said, ‘I love her, Ma.’ I said to him, ‘You love your ass.’ ”
“Why is it fast girls always have French names?”
“How the hell would I know?” Toots’s eyebrows weave together, the lines quizzically forming the shape of a bird in flight.
“If Nicky’s moved out, that means you have an empty room.”
“Don’t get any ideas,” she warns. “I’m not ready to redecorate. I think I’m going to put an exercise bike in there.”
“Wonderful!”
“Maybe I can build up a little muscle tone.”
“Good idea.” I am nothing if not supportive.
“What? I look flabby?”
“No, no, it’s just that exercise gives you pep. And who couldn’t use a little
extra pep?”
“You have a point.” Toot smiles.
I’ve learned over the years to stay mum on the subject of physical fitness with my sister. She’s never broken a sweat in her life, yet the basement is filled with every new piece of exercise equipment that comes on the market. A couple of years ago Woolworth’s carried the revolutionary Tummy Chummy, a small wheel with two handles for toning the stomach muscles. Toot bought it, took it home, got down on her knees and commenced rolling, but her abdominal muscles were so weak she collapsed on the wheel, hit her head on a chair, and gave herself a black eye. Ciao, ciao, Tummy Chummy.
“I’m so ashamed of my son. Shacking up in Freehold like he was raised in a barn. They live in the nicer section, but still … it looks like a rat hole.” Toot holds her nose. “Everything about it is stashad. Mark my words. Nineteen seventy is the beginning of the end of civilization. Morality has gone right out the window.” Toot sips her coffee. “They need curtains—”
“Draperies,” I correct her.
“Draperies. Furniture. Lonnie said he’d pay.”
“Good. Because I’m busy. I don’t have time to run around shopping for deals.”
“Believe me, if she was a quality individual I could trust her to do the decorating, but she’s from the side of the tracks where the houses shake when the trains go by, so she doesn’t know from nice. She doesn’t even wear foundation garments. I know for a fact she doesn’t own a slip because I saw France when she climbed into Nicky’s car after we visited Aunt Mary Mix-Up at the home.”
“At least she visits the infirm.”
“Nicky dragged her. Oh, I could cry. No class. She wears open toed sandals in December without stockings. You get the picture. Everything about her clings.”
“She’s young.”
“Seven years older than Nicky. No prize there, I’m telling you. She’s well on her way to wizened. You don’t know. You don’t have children. How could you know the disappointment, so deep I get a shooting pain in my pelvis—”
“Stop,” I interrupt. Toot has a terrible habit of getting pains in places men would prefer never to hear about.
“My pelvic bone. Right here.” She points south. I don’t look. “No wonder it became inflamed when Nicky passed through the birth canal. It was like an omen. Nine pounds of him dragged through me like a wagon wheel. And didn’t the little bastard bring me pain for the rest of my life?”
“Come on. You adore him.”
“I know. I hate him and I love him so much I could kill him. Why would my first born son waste himself on that?”
“Maybe he loves her.”
Toot gives me a look as though the stench from the Carbone paper factory in Hazlet were right here in Peppermint Candy Land. “If only Ma was here.”
“If Ma were here, what? She’d commiserate, but neither of you would say or do one damn thing to fix it, because you’re Italian mothers.” I feel my face flush as I raise my voice. Toot looks startled. “That’s right, Toot, you’re all talk. You have these sons—you treat them like kings, waiting on them hand and foot, spoiling them, coddling them, worshipping them, never expecting them to lift a finger to help you in any way—then you’re surprised when they fall for these come-hither French maids instead of nice Catholic girls. You want to know why they end up with harlots? Because your boys know easy, that’s why!”
“I suppose it’s all my fault!” Toot says, banging the table and beginning to weep. Her mascara runs. Big navy blue tears roll down her face like ink from a dropper. She wipes the streaks away with a white moppeen.
“Partly!” I yell back. “But not all! Mama raised me like you raised your boys, with one difference. I knew better! I wanted to take care of myself. I took pride in my surroundings. I tried to build upon what our parents taught us. When I watched Ma iron, I thought, I can do that collar better, and I’d shown her how. When she made soup, I thought, I can chop the celery finer, and I’d take the knife from her hands. When she decorated the Christmas wreath, I thought, That bow is too big, and I’d fix it. Mama was never my maid.”
Toot wearily opens a cabinet neatly filled with extra utensils from Chinese takeout, a stack of paper plates from last summer’s Fourth of July party and plastic cups that say HAPPY EASTER. She pulls out a Santa and the reindeer paper plate and stacks cookies on it. “What can I do now? They’re men. The ship has failed.
“Sailed, sis. Sailed.”
“I want you to take these over to Nicky. God knows if he gets enough to eat over there. Of course, that’s probably my fault too.”
“Probably. If your Mother Guilt was paint, I’d have enough to put a coat on Yankee Stadium. You did the best you could. Fini.”
A buzzer blasts from the laundry room.
“That’s the dryer.” Toot wipes away her tears, then gets up and goes into the next room. She returns with a basket of freshly laundered whites. She pulls a pristine undershirt from the pile and folds it.
“Whose laundry is that?”
“What?” she asks innocently.
“Whose is it?”
“Nicky’s,” she says softly.
“He’s living in his own home and you’re still doing his laundry? What kind of nonsense is that?”
Toot ignores the question and tilts her chin toward heaven. “Do you think Ma knows her favorite grandson is living in sin?”
“Of course she knows, and she doesn’t care. She’s flying around up there like an angel, probably at the speed of sound to avoid running into Pop.”
“That’s where all this started. It started with their sick marriage. I didn’t have a good example.”
“We’ve been through this,” I tell her firmly. “Don’t start.”
Toot grows pensive. Despite my eagerness to change the subject, she goes on a diatribe about our immigrant parents and their arranged marriage and how that scarred her for life and I’m not excluded because “Look at you, you’re almost forty and you’re not married.” I let her talk while I have another cookie.
I never feel the need to defend my bachelorhood. In fact, when I look over the landscape of my life, it’s the best choice I ever made. I love living alone—knowing there’s exactly enough milk in the fridge for cereal, always knowing where the roll of Scotch tape is, sleeping in the buff, waking up to silencio instead of bells and yells. I don’t miss a thing about living with family. I had eighteen years of it with my parents and my sister, and that cured me of any desire to repeat the experience.
“This is the crux.” Toot thumps her chest in the vicinity of her heart. “We’re a couple of love cripples, you and me. We can’t shake the past. I had a good marriage that went sour, and now look at me; I can’t move on. Everybody in the world seems to move on but me. Lonnie’s had two wives since he left me, and I’ve barely had a date. A little dinner and a show, is that too much to ask?”
“No, it’s not too much to ask.” But even agreeing with her can’t stop the onslaught.
“I’m besmirched.” She takes a stack of Nicky’s briefs and smoothes them flat with her hand before returning them to the laundry basket. “No one wants besmirched. Ma married a lousy cheater and I did the same. Shame on me for being sucked into the flume of infidelity and spit out the other end like charred rubble. Why couldn’t I see what was happening under my nose? I shoulda known better. Or, at the very least, I should’ve known something. If my ex-husband walked through the door right now, I’d throw a chair at him.”
“Which is probably why he doesn’t visit.” And probably why he left, but I won’t say that out loud. Why pile on?
“Maybe it’s the end of the road for me, but not for you. You should marry Capri Mandelbaum.” Toot places the laundry basket on the window seat.
“I do not like the word should.”
“You can afford to be cavalier. If you want to marry”—she snaps her fingers—“you can. A man can always find a woman, but a woman after a certain age can only find heartache. Lucky you. You don’t know what it’s like wh
en loneliness is thrown on you like a burlap tarp and you can’t breathe some nights from the regret.” Toot refills my coffee mug.
“I doubt I’ll regret anything.”
“I’m older than you. I know all about it. The day comes when your youth leaves you like a dying whiff of Jean Naté. You still have your hair and your waistline, B. Look at Capri, she’s turning forty. God knows she’s lonely too, with that myopia so bad she can’t even see her own hand without glasses. She needs you, you need her.”
“I know what I need,” I say quietly.
“Take Capri away for a weekend. It’ll be like throwing two old cats in a closet—something will happen. You’ll either kill each other or mate.” Toot burps the Tupperware cookie saver.
“What a lovely proposition either way.”
“Go on, joke. I don’t understand you. She’s rich! The Mandelbaums have more money than Onassis, and it’s even better because it’s American dough. Can’t you see? You could redecorate the entire state of New Jersey; the old lady would write the check. You could be hanging chandeliers in the men’s room at the Shell station on Route 9, for godsakes.”
“That’s not my goal. I want to make the world elegant. Decorating homes is satisfying, but I have a bigger dream.” The moment I say it aloud, I’m sorry I did.
“What?”
“It’s bigger than just being rich or decorating gas stations.”
Toot sits down. “You don’t want to move out of town, do you? ’Cause if you moved, I’d kill myself.”
“I’m not moving.”
“Thank God.” Toot exhales. “What is it then?”
“I want to renovate and redesign the Fatima church.”
Toot waves me away like a gnat. “You’ve spent your whole life there. I don’t see why Father Porporino wouldn’t give you the job. You’re the only decorator in town.” Toot cups her hand at the edge of the table and scoots a couple of crumbs off the tiles.
“I should get the job because I have a vision for the church, not because there are no other candidates.”