We take the escalator up to the street. I don’t know what we would have done if she had to climb the stairs. I might’ve had to throw her on my back like the shepherd carrying the sheep in our Christmas crèche.
We emerge on the sidewalk facing Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church where I attended mass every Sunday until I went to college. Gram takes my arm as we walk the two blocks to my family homestead.
“You know, sometimes I can’t believe I grew up here,” I say as I take in the old neighborhood.
“When your mother told me that she was moving to Forest Hills after she got married, I almost died. She said, ‘Ma, the fresh air.’ Now, I’m asking you-is this air any better than our air in Manhattan?”
“Don’t forget her pride and joy-her garden and her very own attached garage.”
“That was your mother’s highest aspiration. To park her car where she lived.” Gram shakes her head sadly. “Where did I go wrong?”
“She’s a good mother, Gram, and a fine member of the Forest Hills bourgeoisie.” I take Gram’s arm as we cross the street. “Did she ever rebel?”
“I wish!” barks Gram. “I hoped she’d become a hippie like all the other kids her age. At least that showed some moxie. I told your mother that every generation should take their culture by the collar and shake it. But the only thing your mother wanted to shake were martinis. To tell you the truth, I don’t know where she came from.”
I know what Gram means. I used to pray for a feminist mother. My friend Cami O’Casey’s mother, Beth, was a lean broomstick of a woman, with gray hair at thirty-six, who wore Jesus sandals and pounded her own oatmeal. She worked in a government agency in Harlem and wore cool buttons that said things like KILL YOUR TV SET and I LOVE YOU WITH ALL MY KIDNEY. Instead, I got Hollywood “Mike,” with her wiglets and her tackle box full of makeup and that damned dressing room mirror surrounded by Greta Garbo lightbulbs. Cami’s mother marched for peace while my mom sat around and waited for fishnet hose to come back in style.
To this day, my mother holds up current fashion trends like barbells. She knows when to shelve lime green because purple is the color of the moment. When big hair was huge in the eighties, Mom went for perms. She’d come home kinked, frizzed, and puffy, and when the curls weren’t big enough, she’d throw her head upside down and spray her hair from the roots out until it stood away from her scalp like the rays over the head of Jesus on the Holy Sacrament tabernacle. Sometimes her hair was so big we worried that she might not fit into the car.
I prayed a novena in 1984 so my mother wouldn’t get emphysema from all the hairspray she used. I did a science project on the devastation caused by aluminum chlorofluorocarbons, the powdery stuff in aerosol cans, especially Aqua Net. I showed my mother scientific proof that her beauty regimen could actually kill her. She just patted me on the head and called me “My little Ralph Nader.”
When I wasn’t praying to God to spare her life, I prayed my father wouldn’t get asthma or worse from the secondhand hairspray inhalation. I imagined the entire family dead from the fumes and the police finding us on the floor like a clump of Lincoln logs. When I told my mother my deepest fear, she said, “But when the authorities find us, I bet my hair looks good.”
“Your mother’s been landscaping again,” Gram says as we stand at the foot of the front walk of 162 Austin Street. “It looks like Babylon came to Queens.”
The Roncalli Tudor is freshly painted and shellacked with chocolate brown and off-white trim over the entry porch. There are three brand-new, glossy holly bushes on either side of the entrance. There are two small English-style flower beds where plain grass would ordinarily grow. The plots are crammed with decorative pumpkins, squat autumn cabbages, and the last of the purple impatiens, hemmed in by a slanting brick border on either side of the walk. Three hanging baskets spilling with shiny green leaves are suspended from the portico like the chickens in Chinatown. Over the front windows there’s a United States flag unfurled next to the flag of Italy. The window boxes beneath them are stuffed with red, white, and green foil pinwheels that spin in the breeze. Cars are to Queens Boulevard what flora, fauna, and foil are to my mother’s front yard. Everywhere you look, something is growing or spinning or swaying. My father may be a retired urban park ranger, but my mother has yet to allow him to put down his trowel.
“She doesn’t know when to stop.” Gram takes a step onto the walkway. “I wonder what she spends a year on Miracle-Gro.”
“A lot. The Burpee seed catalog is my mother’s porn.”
“Hi, kids!” Mom pushes the front door open and runs down the sidewalk to greet us. “Ma, you look like a jillion.”
“Thanks, Mike.” Gram gives Mom a kiss on the cheek. “Your garden looks-”
“You know I hate grass. It’s too country.”
Mom wears a long, white, raw-silk tunic with matching white slacks. The deep V neckline of the tunic is studded with flat turquoise beads. Her brown hair is blown straight to her shoulders, revealing extra large, silver hoop earrings. Her shoes, winter white suede mules with four-inch chunky heels, show off her slim ankles. Her left arm, from wrist to elbow, is covered in silver bangle bracelets. She jingles them. “Very Jennifer Lopez, don’t you think?”
“Very,” I tell her.
“I’m making custom omelets. Daddy is doing the French toast thing,” Mom tells us as we climb the stairs. “Everybody is here.”
The interior design of my parents’ home is an homage to the glory of the British Empire and a direct poaching of every room ever depicted in the Tudor style in Architectural Digest since 1968. Anything English is coveted by Italian Americans, because we respect whoever got there first. As a result, my mother adores cheery chintz, braided rugs, ceramic lamps, and oil paintings of the British countryside, which she has yet to visit.
Gram and I follow Mom to the kitchen, with its mod white appliances and white marble counters trimmed in black. Mom calls the color scheme “licorice and marshmallow,” as nothing in Mom’s life could ever be referred to as black and white.
Jaclyn has spread the photos from her wedding on the kitchen table. Alfred sits at the head of the table, but it’s Tess, who sits on his right, who captures my attention. Her nose is red; she’s been crying.
“Come on, you can’t look that bad in the photos,” I tease Tess, but she looks away.
Amid the commotion of double cheek kisses and hellos, I motion to Tess to meet me in the bathroom. We stuff ourselves into the half bath, off the kitchen, that used to be a pantry. The floor-to-ceiling wallpaper in pink, green, and yellow polka dots in this tiny space makes me feel as though I’ve landed in a bottle of pills. “What’s the matter?”
Tess shakes her head, unable to get the words out.
“Come on. What is it?”
“Dad has cancer!” Tess begins to wail. My mother opens the door to the powder room, revealing Dad, Mom, Gram, Alfred, and Jaclyn crammed in the doorway as though we are in a moving train and they’re on the platform saying good-bye.
One look at Dad’s face tells me it’s true.
“Air, I need air!” I shout. They disperse as we fan out into the kitchen. Dad grabs me and hugs me hard. Soon, Tess and Jaclyn are embracing him, too. Alfred stands back and away from it all with a grim expression on his already pinched face. Mom has her arm around Gram, big tears rolling down her face, yet miraculously, her mascara doesn’t run.
“Dad, what happened?”
“I don’t want you to worry. It’s not a big deal.”
“Not a big deal? It’s cancer!” Tess fights to regain her composure, but she can’t. The tears continue to flow.
“What kind?” I manage to call out over the weeping.