Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo? Page 7

  “No, you cannot.” I tossed it into our basket.

  He wasn’t listening because he was homing in on a package of flatbreads. “Flatbreads for $14.99?” he said, frowning. “What the hell is in them?” He threw it down. “Ooh, samples! Mm, rosemary crostini.” He popped one in his mouth.

  “I can’t believe you would eat something sitting out for public consumption,” I said with a shudder.

  “Get over it.” He brightened. “Look, they have burrata.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s like a thin pouch of mozzarella filled with cheese and cream. God, it’s so delicious. If you were Italian, you’d be genuflecting right now, trust me.” His eyes roamed sharply over the shelves. “Blue-cheese dip, bring it on. I would eat that entire container. Cheddar cheese spread with port wine. I mean, there’s no wrong time.” A tattooed girl with platinum hair reached around Lou to get some artichoke dip, and he gave her a black look. “What’s with the pushing and shoving?” he said. She moved away, unconcerned.

  “Yes, but you were just standing there,” I said. “She was actually buying something.”

  “Still, she didn’t have to be rude. God, I hate everyone.” Uh-oh. Lou’s mood could plunge if he started his harangue about the culture’s decline in civility. More than once, he had fumed through an entire movie because a patron did not move his feet as we struggled past him to a pair of empty seats. I had to distract him.

  “Look, a new product,” I said, pointing to a tasteful pyramid of cracker packages.

  He ran over. “Ooh! Raincoast Crisps!”

  I shook my head. “You don’t even know what that is, so why are you excited?”

  As Lou perused the shelves, he also browsed some of the male customers. “Red shirt,” he said quietly. A husky guy with an open, friendly face was picking up a package of chicken franks.

  “He’s cute,” I agreed. Lou’s preferences ran to what he called “jamokes”—big, clean-cut guys. “I like regular Joes,” he said. “Unfortunately for me, they’re usually not gay.” Lou, whom any Italian grandmother would call “a nice-looking boy,” had a touch of the jamoke himself, preferring to wear baggy plaid shirts, jeans, and running shoes.

  We inspected the dessert bar, with its troughs of bread pudding and apple crisp, then moved on to cookies and candy. “Nothing’s screaming ‘Eat me,’” Lou said. He held up a pack of cookies. “Although I do like anything with the word crème on it. It has to be spelled that way because then you know it’s junky and good.” He moved to return the package and was blocked by a chiseled man who was clearly a model. “I love the way he puts his carriage in the middle of the aisle!” Lou barked as I hustled him away.

  An hour and a half later we were lugging our bags into Lou’s apartment, a dark, comfortable cavern with honey-colored Mission furniture and a giant couch with a slight but unmistakable butt-shaped indentation situated on the right side. He closed the living room curtains to block out every particle of the cheery afternoon sun, swept aside the teetering pile of entertainment magazines on the coffee table, and we set out our repast.

  “And now,” Lou announced, producing a custom DVD folder from a nearby shelf, “what to watch?” With a frown of concentration, he flipped through the pages, stuffed with dozens of Lou-vies, his term for his beloved Lifetime and made-for-TV “films” starring television stalwarts like Judith Light and Valerie Bertinelli as women in peril. The golden age of Lou-vies—and certainly some Lifetime film scholars will debate this—was approximately 1979 to 1996. A few constants tied them together: The lead actresses were thrown into grave danger of some kind; the movies were inevitably shot in Toronto, which stood in as a sort of Everycity; and any actor of color was usually consigned to the role of sympathetic cop or concerned caseworker.

  In the late nineties, some progress was made when the lead actress would have a skeptical black friend who just had a bad feeling about her pal’s new boyfriend and was thus able to graduate to slightly meatier lines such as “Courtney, what do you really know about him?” and “I just think you’re moving too fast, that’s all” before she is last heard on an answering machine: “Courtney, I’m going through Cole’s desk. Seems like you don’t know everything about this guy. It turns out he k—(gasping and strangling sounds).”

  “Hm,” Lou said absently. “Maybe we should watch Maid of Honor, with Linda Purl, where she’s crazy in love with her brother-in-law? Her sister dies and she moves in to take care of the family, and wants to be the new wife. But the guy gets a girlfriend. As it happens, the new girlfriend is allergic to peanuts, so Linda secretly feeds her peanuts by mixing them into a recipe. Classic.”

  “I saw that one already with you last year. Remember?”

  He flipped past Sins of the Mind, The Horror at 37,000 Feet, and Touched by Evil. “Okay, what about this one, one of my all-time favorites, called Who Will Love My Children?”

  I nodded. “Keep talking.”

  “Dying farm woman, played by Ann-Margret, has to give away her thirty-seven kids. And her farmer husband is a drunk, played by Fred Ward. Or maybe it was Frederic Forrest.”

  “That sounds too dark,” I said doubtfully.

  “Whatever. See Jane Run—oh, I loved that one. Starring Joanna Kerns, who finds herself wandering through a supermarket wearing a trench coat, and underneath, she’s covered in blood. Or maybe A Time to Live, starring Liza Minnelli, and Corey Haim as her dying son. Absolutely hilarious.” He flipped another page. “Oooh! Lady Killer with Judith Light and Jack Wagner. That could be good. Bored rich housewife has an affair with Jack Wagner, who turns out to be insane. He ends up shtupping her daughter, played by Tracey Gold.”

  I considered it. “That seems more upbeat, but somehow it’s still not quite right.”

  “Picky. Let me think. I know! Let’s do a Tori Spelling film festival. We can start with Housesitter, where she takes care of a house and meets some gardener, and it turns out that her husband is really a piece of shit. I think.”

  “Lou, what are you talking about? Whose husband? What gardener? That sounds like a disjointed plot, even for Lifetime.”

  “I actually don’t remember, I’ll have to watch again. Ah. Here’s a classic, Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? Tori’s a track-star over-achiever who falls in love with some guy who turns out to be an abusive, possessive boyfriend. And we need to watch Co-ed Call Girl, definitely. She’s this studious girl who becomes an escort when someone plays a practical joke on her or something. At first she thinks she’s going to be an escort, like a regular escort that goes to parties as a date, as if that even exists. Then she finds out it involves blow jobs.”

  “Done.”

  He put in Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? and lowered himself into his butt-shaped indentation while I took the left side of the couch and loaded some artichoke dip onto a cracker. As we watched Tori go through the motions of being a bookworm, Lou suddenly heaved a gloomy sigh.

  I looked over at him. “What? Is this not funny enough?” We were permitted to chat if there were no high-drama scenes taking place on-screen.

  “No, it’s not that. This dip is just not cheering me up the way I thought it would. I saw my parents last weekend, and I don’t know, I just can’t shake this depression.” Lou often visited his folks in Hoboken, New Jersey, where his father was born and raised. His mother had come to America from Molfetta, Italy, when she was fourteen. They met when they were both working in a ladies’ coat factory. Now in their seventies, they still lived in the brownstone where they had raised Lou and his two siblings.

  The habitual banter between Lou and me had taken a somber turn in the past year as his father weathered kidney trouble. During a series of late-night phone conversations we tried to contemplate a future without our parents, but for the most part our imaginations—usually a little too florid—failed us completely. It was inconceivable, even as it happened to people we knew and we witnessed their sadness and blind shock, even as I found myself, more and more, making
tactful corrections when I talked to friends such as “Are you spending Thanksgiving with your par—with your mother?” I remember, years ago, seeing a co-worker return to the office two weeks after her mother had died of cancer and being shocked. How could she walk and talk?

  So Lou and I cautiously tried to discuss it, thinking that with a frank conversation, somehow we could prepare ourselves mentally for the day that our parents would not be there, but after many attempts we were no closer to acceptance. I would watch my folks as they talked about the death of their own parents and see the bewilderment creep onto their faces, decades later. I noticed the almost imperceptible hesitation when my mother would say, “When Mama … died …” and knew that saying the word died would never, ever come naturally. As my parents reminisced, the years fell away and they looked like wistful children, and it was then that I knew there was no real preparing.

  “What happened?” I asked him, alarmed. “Did your dad have a health setback?”

  “No, it’s just more of a general realization. They’ve gotten older and it’s difficult to watch. The roles are shifting a little. You understand their need for you as opposed to it always being about you needing them. And it’s not because they’re telling you but because you’re seeing it, you’re feeling it.” He sighed and reached for a Raincoast Crisp.

  “And I want to be there for them, after everything they’ve done for me. Which they did joyously. They really wanted me around, enjoyed giving me food off of their plate.” He snorted. “Which I would never do. Eat your own! And I really don’t think it was a front. I like kids, but from a distance. I just don’t have the patience.”

  “I don’t know how people do it,” I said. “And unfortunately for me, my favorite things to do require a calm atmosphere. My idea of a perfect afternoon is reading a book from cover to cover without anyone bothering me.”

  “Right. If I had a kid, I would constantly be like, ‘Leave me alone, I want to watch Lost.’ But you know, both my parents were working-class—my father started out doing construction, my mother was a seamstress. So you can’t think of them like parents today. There were no playdates, no ‘Mommy and Me.’ It was a blue-collar upbringing. I was disciplined, and there was yelling and the occasional spank. But I do not wake up screaming because of it.”

  I nodded. “I was spanked, too. It’s hard to think of my folks that way now, because their personalities have softened so much.”

  “Mine, too. My father used to be a sterner man. Now he’s a lot more gentle. And I can’t even remember when it started, but now my mother is saying ‘I love you’ a lot. You know, at first it was kind of weird. Even though Italians are stereotypically demonstrative and emotional, it’s sort of a bullshit cliché. We can be just as WASPy, in the sense that there are not a lot of intimate conversations about the subtlety of feelings. It’s black and white. It’s either ‘I’m very angry!’ or ‘I’m full of love!’”

  He dipped a Mucho Nacho baked tortilla chip—our “healthy” snack—into a jar of queso blanco cheese dip. “But I’ve gotten used to it and now I say it right back. Although it makes me hyperventilate because I think it’s a sign of my mother coming to terms with her mortality.”

  I just let Lou talk, while I inwardly adjusted to seeing him so vulnerable. He was easily my most caustic friend, but he always argued that if you scratch a cynic, you’ll discover a disappointed idealist.

  I told him that I had begun to give my parents little gifts, and to quietly pick up the tab for various excursions, despite their discomfort in accepting it.

  “My mother’s always giving me coffee money,” said Lou. “I’m always like, ‘Ma, I don’t drink that much coffee.’ And my father is constantly asking me, ‘Is there anything you need?’”

  I loaded some port wine cheese onto a cracker and absently watched Tori screaming and running down a dock. I’ve always had a soft spot for Tori, whom I had once interviewed for Harper’s Bazaar. She was no Phi Beta Kappa, but so sweetly friendly, so game to my request to open her purse and show me what was inside (Child perfume, a strawberry Lip Smacker). During our lunch at Cravings in Los Angeles, she vowed never to do another cheesy TV movie. Tori did not yet understand how much comfort and pleasure her Lifetime legacy would bring to thousands—millions, even.

  I gently returned to the subject of Lou’s father. Lou sighed again and told me his health was stable, but not what it had been. “Look, they’re both in their seventies, and my obvious fear is losing them. There’s an obsession with death among Italians.” He imitated his mother, somber. “‘Lou, guess who died. My nephew’s cousin’s best friend—you met him at Vito’s confirmation.’” He shook his head. “They’re always going to a wake, the way some people go to sporting events. Where I grew up, death was discussed, but when it comes to my parents …” He trailed off. “If I lose them—”

  “I like that you say if,” I broke in.

  “You never know. I could go first. That would be horrible for them. And for me, depending on how.” I looked at his face and could see that he was imagining gruesome TV-movie-style ways to die—being trapped in a burning car that sails over a cliff, falling from the roof of an abandoned warehouse while being pursued by an obsessed ex-husband played by Richard Grieco. He shook himself out of it. “As you get older,” he went on, “your parents ultimately become the best, most loyal friends you’ve ever had. And then you have to think about losing them.” He scowled. “Which is annoying.”

  I scraped up the last of the artichoke dip. “And the irony is that when you get older, your world gets smaller,” I added. “When I was in my twenties, a close friend was any girl who held my hair back as I threw up my eighth Jell-O shot. Now that I’m older, I don’t have room for friendships that aren’t real.”

  “And at our age, it’s just so easy for people to vanish,” he said.

  We both stared, unseeing, at the television screen.

  “Not that I’m playing the violin, but after losing my parents, it will just be me, alone in my apartment,” Lou continued. “My sister will be there, but she has two kids and a husband.”

  I looked over at him, and his stricken expression was too much for me. I needed to see a glimpse of the Artist Formerly Known as Lou.

  “Stop it,” I snapped. “You act like you’re some sort of friendless, forgotten octogenarian, parked away in some nursing home. You’ve got a million people around you. And having a mate, or kids, does not automatically inoculate you against loneliness.”

  He shrugged, the classic Italian What are you gonna do gesture. “Yeah, but you and I both know it’s not quite the same thing as being single.”

  We sat for a while in silence as Tori bashed her abusive boyfriend’s head in with an oar.

  Lou heaved himself up. “I’m so bloated,” he announced. “Well, should I put in Co-ed Call Girl?”

  I reached for an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie. “You know what? I think I’m bloated from too much Tori. Maybe we need something lighter. If that’s possible.”

  Lou consulted his DVD collection. “How about Face of Evil? Tracey Gold murders a girl in an airport bathroom and assumes her identity at art school, where she ends up getting it on with her dorm-mate’s father, played by Perry King.”

  I settled back on the couch. “Perfect.”

  You Can’t Go Wrong

  with Puppies

  Julie makes her usual phone call to me en route to the gym. On this particular morning, she has just dropped her daughter, Violet, off at a new school. Violet has recently transferred there.

  JULIE: My kid told me something yesterday that no parent wants to hear. She said, “I don’t want to go to that school anymore. The kids in the class don’t like me.”

  JANCEE: Oh, Lord. She’s been there, what, three weeks?

  JULIE: And I said, “Wh-what?” So today I talked to the teacher at drop-off, and she said, “I don’t know why they wouldn’t like her.” Then she remembered that Violet tried to sit down with some girls in the cafeteria,
and they pushed her away from the table. But the thing Violet told me had to do with another incident. A kid told her she was mean because she was playing with the Magna-Tiles wrong.

  JANCEE: What are Magna-Tiles? I’m not familiar with kid items.

  JULIE: They’re these magnetic plastic tiles and you can build things. I’m not quite clear how she was playing wrong in a mean way, and it’s also not like her, because she shares everything. And as a parent, what you find yourself doing when you hear this is that you want to tell her why each of these kids is inferior. “Well, that girl has very thin, mousy hair, and it’s not easy for her to see the goodness in people.”

  JANCEE: Well, good for you for taking action and going to the teacher.

  JULIE: Please, I’m so on top of this. But of course the other thing I always think is, What’s the thing I’m going to do that’s going to put Violet in therapy? I just picture her saying, “Mom, why didn’t you just back off? Everything that happened to me, you had to run and talk to the teacher.” And the truth is that at this age, they do forget and move on. At five, they’re not in the grudge years yet. So I know that tomorrow she’s probably not going to come in and have the same thing happen.

  JANCEE: That makes sense. But I can absolutely remember that sick-making feeling of being frozen out. Can’t you? Although I must say, it takes a while to call up those feelings because I’ve tamped them down so thoroughly over the years. You spend your entire adulthood trying to forget them.

  JULIE: Oh, sure. And now I think, How do I arm my kid? The best thing to do is to make sure they have a strong-enough sense of self that they can get through these things. Because that’s life, and the best way is to be able to be tough enough to stand up to that kind of thing. If you can do that, you can do anything. I mean, before eight hundred years of therapy, I was the kind of person who, if anybody would look at me funny, I would get a stomachache and think, What can I do to fix this? Should I buy them a present, maybe?