Keely stands before the microphone in the curve of the baby grand piano and taps the beat on the waxy finish with her long red fingernails as she sings. She makes time with her feet in gold stiletto sandals with inlaid tiger’s-eye straps. Her toenails are painted maroon. She notices that I’m staring at her feet, and smiles. The song ends, the crowd bursts into applause. She takes a step downstage and looks at me. “You like my sandals?”
“Yes. They’re gorgeous,” I tell her.
“A woman cannot live by shoes alone. Though there have been times in my life when I had to. I’ve walked many miles in my lifetime. I’m going to be eighty years old.”
A ripple goes through the crowd.
Keely continues. “Yep. Eighty. And I owe it all to…” She points heavenward.
“Me, too!” Gram waves to her.
“Today is her birthday,” Tess shouts.
“It is?” Keely says and smiles.
“Yes it is.” Gram didn’t need the creams at Elizabeth Arden, she’s getting a total rejuvenation right here. “You’re my gift.”
“Stand up, sister,” Keely says to Gram.
Gram stands.
Keely shields her eyes from the stage lights overhead and looks down at Gram. “You know the secret, don’t you?”
“You tell me,” Gram says, playing along.
“Never go gray.”
My mother whoops. “Tell her, Keely!”
“And the big one: younger men.”
“I hear you!” June, three straight-up whiskeys down, waves her napkin like a flag of surrender, to whom I’m not sure, but she keeps waving.
Keely points to June. “Now, not for the reason you think, Red. Although that’s important.” She continues, “I like a younger man because the men my age can’t see to drive at night.”
The drummer snares a rim shot. “I want to sing something just for you. What’s your name?”
“Teodora,” Gram tells her.
“Hey, you really are a paisan.” Keely makes the international sign for “I’m Italian,” making a slicing motion with her hand without a knife. “You got a boyfriend?”
Her grandchildren answer for her. “No!” we holler. Then, a man wearing trifocals, at the next table, whistles like he’s hailing a cab. “Lady didn’t say she was looking,” Keely chides him. “Tay, you got a man?”
“I’m with my family tonight,” Gram says with a giggle.
“And the less they know, the better. Take it from me.” Keely smiles and waves her hands over us like she’s a priest giving the final blessing. “Anybody who gets in the way of Grandmom’s fun will have to deal with me.” Then she extends her hand forward to Gram. “This one’s for you, kid. Happy birthday.”
Keely sings “It’s Magic.” Gram leans forward, puts her elbows on the table, and props her face in her hands and closes her eyes to listen. My father puts his arm around my mother, who nestles into his shoulder like it’s an old pillow. Tess looks at me with tears in her eyes, Jaclyn reaches across and squeezes Tess’s hand. Their husbands smile, sip their drinks. Pamela sits ramrod straight and blinks as Alfred picks the parsley off the mini crab cake before sampling it. My phone vibrates in my purse. As the magic song ends, the crowd bursts into applause and Gram stands and throws Keely a kiss. I look into my purse and check my BlackBerry. The text message reads:
Flood in the kitchen. Can’t make it.
So sorry. Kiss Gram.
Roman
Tess leans over and whispers, “Are you okay?”
“He’s not coming.”
“I’m so sorry.”
I feel my cheeks flush. I built up this whole evening in my mind. I pictured Roman sailing in to meet my family, handsome and glib, charming them, and pulling my father aside to tell him how much I mean in his life, and then later, my father would tell me that he’s never been more impressed with a suitor, and I’d have that feeling of security in the pit of my stomach, the kind that allows you to surrender to love when it comes your way. Instead, I’m embarrassed. No wonder Alfred believes I’m unreliable. It seems things never work out the way I plan. Of course the kitchen flooded, and of course Roman had to stay and take care of it, but to read the words: CAN’T MAKE IT means so much more than Can’t make it tonight. Can we ever make it? At all? Will Ca’ d’Oro always come first?
Keely sings “I’ll Remember You,” Gram’s eyes fill with tears, June gets misty, and even Aunt Feen’s face relaxes in a smile as she goes back in time to her youth. A tear rolls down my face, but as good as she is, it’s not because of Keely. Tonight, I could cry her a river on my own terms, and it would not have to be set to music.
7. SoHo
GRAM AND I STAND ON THE CORNER of Jane and Hudson, surveying the Christmas tree selection as we inhale the cold night air, filled with the invigorating scent of crisp pine and clean cedar.
There’s nothing like December in Manhattan when the Christmas trees go on sale. Every other street corner becomes an outdoor garden, as freshly cut trees are stacked and displayed in their corridors of evergreen. Peels of pungent pine bark fall onto the sidewalk as the sellers trim the trunks and wrap the trees in their umbrellas of webbed plastic before delivery. Glossy wreaths with red velvet bows and sprays of holly tied with gold mesh ribbons hang on rough-hewn stepladders, ready for pickup. You cannot help but close your eyes and believe in the possibility of the perfect Christmas.
I arrange for delivery of our blue spruce as Gram chooses a wreath for the shop door. Mr. Romp places our ten-foot tree on a turnstile and gives it the umbrella treatment. Gram takes my arm as we walk back to the shop.
“Are you inviting Roman to Christmas dinner?”
“Think he’s ready for us?” I joke.
The truth is, I’ve prepared Roman. The good news, he’s from a crazy Italian family, too, so he gets it, we have a shorthand. I worry about that though, a romance at our stage of things should feel solid. Our feelings are clear, but scheduling the time? That’s the tricky part. That, and I live with my grandmother. I’ve never brought a man home to stay. I wouldn’t even know how to ask. I suppose I could do what Italian girls have done for decades: sneak. But when?
Maybe this is the state of romance for two self-employed people over thirty. Between his schedule at the restaurant, and mine in the shop, our communication is like a stack of unread mail; we get to it and each other when we can. It all began with a slow, delicious meal at Ca’ d’Oro; I thought it was the ultimate to have a man cooking for me, feeding me, pleasing me. But the truth is, the last time we ate together we had take-out cold sesame noodles from Mama Buddha on a park bench on Bleecker Street before I had a shoe fitting with a customer.
“Roman has to do something for Christmas,” Gram says, pushing the door to the vestibule open. “He’d liven things up.”
“Just what we need.”
Gram goes into the kitchen to make us a dish of spaghetti marinara for dinner. I climb the stairs to take the Christmas decorations out of storage in my mother’s old bedroom closet. I flip on the small bedside lamp and pull cardboard cartons full of ornaments out of the closet and stack them on the bed. Boxes labeled SHINY BRIGHT are filled with vintage gold-glass teardrops, and silver, green, red, and blue balls embossed with stripes or flocking, each loaded with meaning and memory.
The old Roma lights, oversize bulbs of ruby red, navy blue, forest green, and taxicab yellow, are the only lights my sisters allow on Gram’s tree. Tess and Jaclyn may have the small, mod twinklers in their own homes, but here at Gram’s, the tree has to be exactly as we remember it: a live blue spruce loaded with smoky glass ornaments that have been around since my mother was a girl. We cherish the ornaments that are a little the worse for wear, the felt reindeer with an eye missing, the plastic choirboys in faded red flannel cassocks, and the tinfoil-star tree topper that Alfred made in kindergarten.