When I was little I’d watch her transform in front of the mirror before a night out with Dad. Efficient and organized, she stood at her makeup table and surveyed her tools. She’d snap open compacts, unscrew the tops off tubes, and shake vials. Then she would think as she twisted the eyeliner pencil in the sharpener. Eventually, a waxy chocolate brown S would fall into the wastebasket. She’d take the pencil and smudge it under her eye in preparation for the broad strokes. She would select a brush and dip it into a palette of powder, and then, as if she were Michelangelo painting the eyelash of a saint on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, she’d make tiny brushstrokes on her brow bone.
“Is something wrong, Valentine?”
“No. I just love you. That’s all.”
“I can’t wait-,” my mother begins, then stops to think. “You know what, if you’re my only child who remains single until old age, I will stand proudly with you all the days of your life. If that’s what you want.”
This might be what I like most about her. Mom believes being single is an infirmity, the equivalent of missing a hand, but she never makes me feel I have to agree with her. “Mom, I’m happy.”
“You could be happier.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“Aha!” She points her finger at me. “You can reinvent your life on your own terms. You don’t have to live with my mother and make shoes.”
“I love my job and I love where I live.”
“I’ll never understand it. All I ever wanted to do was move away. And I never wanted to be a shoemaker.”
Mom and I walk arm in arm back into the reception, looking like two asteroids, one pink, the other bright orange, skimming through this Tiepolo-blue sky. Then I realize that’s not why the guests are watching us. It must look like I’m holding my mother up-therefore she’s either had too much to drink or, God forbid, she’s old enough to need assistance. I can practically hear the gears in my mother’s brain spin as this realization dawns on her, too. Mom lets go of my arm with a flourish, and does a full 360-degree pirouette in the center of the empty dance floor. I bow from the waist as though we planned the move. Mom gives me a youthful wave as she sashays over to the Parents’ table, leaving me to return to the tyranny of the Friends.
My sister’s brand-new mother-in-law, Mrs. McAdoo, wears a fussy corsage of purple roses, which hangs off her lilac crepe dress like a ruby red tire. Mrs. McAdoo’s pale skin blends into her hair, cut to her chin in a simple bob. My mother would never allow a strand of white hair on her head. The only gray you will ever find in direct proximity to my mother’s person is the terrazzo floor in the foyer of our family home. “Matrons belong in prisons! Besides, I don’t believe in going gray,” my mother would say. “It’s an advertisement for death. Go gray and you might as well say”-as she beckons off in the distance-“come and get me, Grim Reaper!” No, Mom is rich sable brown, now and forever (or for however long L’Oréal makes it).
I look around the room, 312 guests strong. Last night they were a bunch of Post-its on a board in my mom’s kitchen, and today, they’re at the table they have earned in our version of Italian-American hierarchy. First tier: Parents, Close Friends, Professionals, Coworkers, Cousins, Kiddies. Second tier: In-laws. And third: the Island (relatives we aren’t speaking to because something bad went down, never mind that we don’t remember what); Rude (late responders); and Dementia (don’t ask).
I must look lonely on the dance floor. Why didn’t I bring a date? Gabriel offered, but I didn’t want him to feel obligated to flap to the chicken dance with cousin Violet Ruggiero in this heat. How can it be that out of all the people in this room, I remain the only single person under forty? Sensing the inert shame, my brother, Alfred, takes my hand as the music starts. It’s a little weird to waltz with your only brother, with whom you share a strained relationship, to “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” but I make the best of it. He is, after all, a dance partner, even if he is a blood relative. We take what we can get. “Thanks, Alfred.”
“I’m dancing with all of my sisters,” he says, as if he’s ticking off a to-do list for the mechanic at Midas mufflers.
We sway for a few moments. I have a hard time making conversation with my brother. “You know why God invented brothers in Italian families?”
He takes the bait. “Why?”
“Because He knew that the single sisters needed someone to dance with at weddings.”
“You’d better come up with a better joke for your toast.”
He’s right, and I’m not happy about it. My brother is thirty-nine years old, but I don’t see a middle-aged father of two, I only see the persnickety boy who made straight A’s and had no friends in school. The only time his cranky mood would lift was when the cleaning lady came on Thursdays and he’d help her scrub the tile. This was when Alfred was the happiest-when he had a brush in his hand and ammonia in a bucket.
Alfred still has the same cowlick on the crown of his head and the same serious countenance of his youth. He also has Mom’s old nose and the thin upper lip of Dad’s side of the family. He doesn’t trust anyone, including family, and he can talk for hours about the evils of the Media and the Government. Alfred is at the ready with a doomsday report any day of the week. He’s the first to call when a house is burning live on New York 1 and the first to send mass e-mails when the bedbug infestation on the East Coast is announced. He’s also an expert on all diseases that run in families of Mediterranean descent (autoimmune disorders are his specialty). We spent last Christmas dinner listening to his tutorial on prediabetes, which really made the baba au rhums go down smoothly.
“How’s Gram doing?” he asks.
I look over at our grandmother, my mother’s mother, Teodora Angelini, who got stuck at the Dementia table so she might sit with her cousins and her last living sister, my great-aunt Feen. While Gram’s peers are hunched over their plates, sorting through the walnuts on top of the salad, she sits upright, with military posture. My grandmother is the lone red rose in a garden of gray bramble.
With her bright red lipstick, two-piece red linen summer suit, coiffed white hair, and large octagon-framed glasses in jet black tortoise, she looks like a gracious Upper East Side lady who has never worked a day in her life. The truth is, the only thing she has in common with those society matrons is her tailored suit. Gram is a working woman who owns her own business. We’ve made custom wedding shoes in Greenwich Village since 1903. “Gram is doing great,” I tell him.
“She can hardly walk,” Alfred says.
“She needs knee replacements,” I tell him.
“She needs more than that.”
“Alfred. Except for her knees, she’s in excellent shape.”
“Everything is always rosy with you,” Alfred sighs. “You’re in denial. Gram is almost eighty years old and she’s slowing down.”
“That’s ridiculous. I live with her. She runs rings around me.”
“That wouldn’t be hard.”
And there it is. The Jab. I don’t want to fight at my sister’s wedding, so I let go of him, but he goes on.
“Gram won’t be around forever. She should retire and enjoy the kids. There’s a nice assisted-living place out by us.”
“She loves the city. She’d die in the suburbs.”
“I’m the only person in this family who can face the truth. She needs to retire. I’m willing to buy her a condo.”
“Aren’t you generous.”
“I’m not thinking about myself.”
“Then it would be the first time, Alfred.”
The law of the sibling jungle springs into effect. Alfred’s tone, the look on my face, and the fact that we’ve stopped dancing sends a silent alert out to my sisters. Tess, sensing a fight, has come to the edge of the dance floor and locks eyes with me. She shoots me the Need me? look.