“Cindi, I need a turkey roaster,” I tell my sister on the phone.
“I’ll be right over,” she says. “The brat’s driving me crazy.”
“Isn’t Franny’s visit working out?”
“I could kill her. I think up ways. How does that sound?”
“Why not send her home?” I’m joking. Franny is Brent’s twelve-year-old and he’s shelled out a lot of dough to lawyers in New Jersey and Florida to work out visitation rights.
“Poor Brent. He feels so divided,” Cindi says. “He shouldn’t have to take sides.”
I want her to ask who my date is for this afternoon, but she doesn’t. It’s important to me that she like Ro, that Mom and Dad more than tolerate him.
All over the country, I tell myself, women are towing new lovers home to meet their families. Vic is simmering cranberries in somebody’s kitchen and explaining yin and yang. I check out the stuffing recipe. The gravy calls for cream and freshly grated nutmeg. Ro brought me six whole nutmegs in a Ziplock bag from his friend, a Pakistani, who runs a spice store in SoHo. The nuts look hard and ugly. I take one out of the bag and sniff it. The aroma’s so exotic my head swims. On an impulse I call Ro.
The phone rings and rings. He doesn’t have his own place yet. He has to crash with friends. He’s been in the States three months, maybe less. I let it ring fifteen, sixteen, seventeen times.
Finally someone answers. “Yes?” The voice is guarded, the accent obviously foreign even though all I’m hearing is a one-syllable word. Ro has fled here from Kabul. He wants to take classes at NJIT and become an electrical engineer. He says he’s lucky his father got him out. A friend of Ro’s father, a man called Mumtaz, runs a fried chicken restaurant in Brooklyn in a neighborhood Ro calls “Little Kabul,” though probably no one else has ever noticed. Mr. Mumtaz puts the legal immigrants to work as waiters out front. The illegals hide in a backroom as pluckers and gutters.
“Ro? I miss you. We’re eating at three, remember?”
“Who is speaking, please?”
So I fell for the accent, but it isn’t a malicious error. I can tell one Afghan tribe from another now, even by looking at them or by their names. I can make out some Pashto words. “Tell Ro it’s Rindy. Please? I’m a friend. He wanted me to call this number.”
“Not knowing any Ro.”
“Hey, wait. Tell him it’s Rindy deMarco.”
The guy hangs up on me.
I’m crumbling cornbread into a bowl for the stuffing when Cindi honks half of “King Cotton” from the parking apron in the back. Brent bought her the BMW on the gray market and saved a bundle — once discount, always discount — then spent three hundred dollars to put in a horn that beeps a Sousa march. I wave a potato masher at her from the back window. She doesn’t get out of the car. Instead she points to the pan in the back seat. I come down, wiping my hands on a dish towel.
“I should stay and help.” Cindi sounds ready to cry. But I don’t want her with me when Ro calls back.
“You’re doing too much already, kiddo.” My voice at least sounds comforting. “You promised one veg and the salad.”
“I ought to come up and help. That or get drunk.” She shifts the stick. When Brent bought her the car, the dealer threw in driving gloves to match the upholstery.
“Get Franny to shred the greens,” I call as Cindi backs up the car. “Get her involved.”
The phone is ringing in my apartment. I can hear it ring from the second-floor landing.
“Ro?”
“You’re taking a chance, my treasure. It could have been any other admirer, then where would you be?”
“I don’t have any other admirers.” Ro is not a conventionally jealous man, not like the types I have known. He’s totally unlike any man I have ever known. He wants men to come on to me. Lately when we go to a bar he makes me sit far enough from him so some poor lonely guy thinks I’m looking for action. Ro likes to swagger out of a dark booth as soon as someone buys me a drink. I go along. He comes from a macho culture.
“How else will I know you are as beautiful as I think you are? I would not want an unprized woman,” he says. He is asking me for time, I know. In a few more months he’ll know I’m something of a catch in my culture, or at least I’ve never had trouble finding boys. Even Brent Schwartzendruber has begged me to see him alone.
“I’m going to be a little late,” Ro says. “I told you about my cousin Abdul, no?”
Ro has three or four cousins that I know of in Manhattan. They’re all named Abdul something. When I think of Abdul, I think of a giant black man with goggles on, running down a court. Abdul is the teenage cousin whom immigration officials nabbed as he was gutting chickens in Mumtaz’s backroom. Abdul doesn’t have the right papers to live and work in this country, and now he’s been locked up in a detention center on Varick Street. Ro’s afraid Abdul will be deported back to Afghanistan. If that happens, he’ll be tortured.
“I have to visit him before I take the DeCamp bus. He’s talking nonsense. He’s talking of starting a hunger fast.”
“A hunger strike! God!” When I’m with Ro I feel I am looking at America through the wrong end of a telescope. He makes it sound like a police state, with sudden raids, papers, detention centers, deportations, and torture and death waiting in the wings. I’m not a political person. Last fall I wore the Ferraro button because she’s a woman and Italian.
“Rindy, all night I’ve been up and awake. All night I think of your splendid breasts. Like clusters of grapes, I think. I am stroking and fondling your grapes this very minute. My talk gets you excited?”
I tell him to test me, please get here before three. I remind him he can’t buy his ticket on the bus.
“We got here too early, didn’t we?” Dad stands just outside the door to my apartment, looking embarrassed. He’s in his best dark suit, the one he wears every Thanksgiving and Christmas. This year he can’t do up the top button of his jacket.
“Don’t be so formal, Dad.” I give him a showy hug and pull him indoors so Mom can come in.
“As if your papa ever listens to me!” Mom laughs. But she sits primly on the sofa bed in her velvet cloak, with her tote bag and evening purse on her lap. Before Dad started courting her, she worked as a seamstress. Dad rescued her from a sweatshop. He married down, she married well. That’s the family story.
“She told me to rush.”
Mom isn’t in a mood to squabble. I think she’s reached the point of knowing she won’t have him forever. There was Carmine, at death’s door just a month ago. Anything could happen to Dad. She says, “Renata, look what I made! Crostolis.” She lifts a cake tin out of her tote bag. The pan still feels warm. And for dessert, I know, there’ll be a jar of super-thick, super-rich Death by Chocolate.
The story about Grandma deMarco, Dad’s mama, is that every Thanksgiving she served two full dinners, one American with the roast turkey, candied yams, pumpkin pie, the works, and another with Grandpa’s favorite pastas.
Dad relaxes. He appoints himself bartender. “Don’t you have more ice cubes, sweetheart?”
I tell him it’s good Glenlivet. He shouldn’t ruin it with ice, just a touch of water if he must. Dad pours sherry in Vic’s pottery espresso cups for his women. Vic made them himself, and I used to think they were perfect blue jewels. Now I see they’re lumpy, uneven in color.
“Go change into something pretty before Carla and Brent come.” Mom believes in dressing up. Beaded dresses lift her spirits. She’s wearing a beaded green dress today.
I take the sherry and vanish behind a four-panel screen, the kind long-legged showgirls change behind in black and white movies while their moustached lovers keep talking. My head barely shows above the screen’s top, since I’m no long-legged showgirl. My best points, as Ro has said, are my clusters of grapes. Vic found the screen at a country auction in the Adirondacks. It had filled the van. Now I use the panels as a bulletin board and I’m worried Dad’ll spot the notice for the next meeting of Amnesty International, which will bother him. He will think the two words stand for draft dodger and communist. I was going to drop my membership, a legacy of Vic, when Ro saw it and approved. Dad goes to the Sons of Italy Anti-Defamation dinners. He met Frank Sinatra at one. He voted for Reagan last time because the Democrats ran an Italian woman.