Concrete Angel (22 page)

“Can we try this again?” she asked when he returned. It’d happened too quickly to take it in. “I don’t think I was at my best.”

“The cleaning woman will be coming in,” he said, reassembling himself quickly.

“A hotel?”

He put a finger to his lips again. “What about your house? You said your husband’s not home much.” She nodded. He cleared his throat. “You do understand such an act would be part of your therapy and not a romantic overture.”

“I need to get it out of the way,” she said, licking her lips. “So I can stop thinking about it. Fixating on it.”

“I see. Well, as your therapist, I won’t think of it as having sex with you, Eve.” He rubbed his chin again. “I do think such an encounter… perhaps two… may deepen the level of our relationship, the level of trust. Do you think you’re ready to go there? Explore that area of your sexuality?”

“Whatever,” Eve said, already planning it in her head. And, of course, it turned out to be the disaster you’d expect.

B
etween my tenth and twelfth birthday, my parents split three more times. We stayed in a motel in Atlantic City for a summer. Mother landed a job at the first casino there, Resorts International. Nothing to do with the gambling operation, however. They would’ve looked into her past too closely if she’d applied for that type of position. Nothing glamorous or well-paying. She may have been a waitress or a hostess. She didn’t talk about it much. The hours were few; the pay bad.

We stayed with my grandmother several times. We rented cheap rooms from time to time, and spent three nights in one of those storage units. Once we found ourselves on Aunt Linda’s steps. She had a place of her own by then. Mother used the interlude to disappear, figuring I’d be happy with Linda for a few weeks. And I was.

Later I found Mother spent some time in jail over those months. She’d forged a check, got caught with her hand in the till. She was always able to talk her way out of it, to make it look like it was more trouble than it was worth to prosecute. It was too cruel to trouble a single mother over trivial matters. Cy Granholm made his first brief appearances, always skilled at framing a defense on the spot. A night or two in jail certainly. Perhaps thirty days once.

Despite the fact these were hard times, Mother held herself together pretty well. She always denied it, wouldn’t believe it when I told her this later, but she functioned best without a man in her life. Looking for a man, holding on to one, hiding things from one, all of this was a lot of work. A new man introduced new desires, schemes, risks. Still, she found it hard to be without one for long. One night she even murdered Jerry Santini but that’s a story you already know.

When I had the patently incorrect idea her romantic life was behind her, Mickey came on the scene.

M
other and I sat facing each other across a tiny kitchen table. Space was so tight our knees touched, making little kissing sounds from time to time. Although my legs were skinny, my knees had excessively large knobs that tapped on hers every few seconds. Mother’s legs, on the other hand, were tan and shapely enough to draw the eyes of men. Her legs, and similarly attractive features, earned her a second husband: Mickey DiSantis.

The great, and still-to-be answered, question was why she wanted him; why we were stuck in a tiny house in the Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia with this guy—this man quite a bit like Jerry Santini—the one she’d knocked off. We no longer talked about that incident, and I’m sure Mickey never hear a word about it. Sometimes I wondered if I’d imagined it all—if those visits to Dr. Bailey hadn’t been a sort of fever dream. Whole sections of my life—our lives—were forbidden topics. No, more than forbidden. They’d virtually disappeared once we moved into Mickey’s. There was no one in my current life who wanted to hear about my past. There was no past; we lived in the moment. Mother had reinvented us time and again. And would forever, I feared.

Things had taken a less glamorous turn with the current reinvention, and I couldn’t make sense of it. It was as if Mickey DiSantis had put a spell on her. My grandmother, so anxious to have us settled with a respectable man, disapproved of him on sight and more so in the weeks following their first meeting. She’d begged us to stay put when we’d moved out of her house nine or ten months before.

“Quite a step down from Hank,” she said repeatedly. “Used cars. Couldn’t he at least sell new ones? What kind of people buy used cars?”

This was a bit of a stretch as a criticism—Grandmother was driving a car from the late fifties—when she drove at all. I could’ve given her more information to use against him, but I was biding my time, waiting to see what happened next.

Mother refused to discuss Mickey’s faults. Some form of blackmail must be involved. What did he have on her? What had he seen her do in the foyer of Gimbel’s?

With a little effort, she could’ve gotten my father back, but instead, here we were stuck with Mickey. I was beginning to lose respect for my mother. My awe of her was declining and would never resurface in full bloom again. With the possible exception of my father, she’d chosen a motley assortment of men.

Mother’s fake capezios were aqua, which she claimed was one of the better colors for showing off a tan. I watched her feet under the table, as she slid the shoes off and on. Mother’s feet were at least a size seven, too big for her tastes. So she bought a six or six-and-a-half and suffered. The shoes revealed a half-inch of swollen toe flesh, which she claimed drove men wild. Too-small shoes pumped out more toe décolletage than the proper size would.

“It brings to mind a higher cleavage,” she explained.

I was with her when she made the purchase, when she labored long and hard over the choice between aqua and peach. With Daddy, she could’ve had them both and the real deal.

I was wearing the sturdy sandals that began making an appearance in the seventies, shoes making feet look twice as wide as they were. It was a shoe to climb a mountain and probably expressly designed to prevent a woman’s foot from appearing small, delicate, sexual. You couldn’t bend those sandals with a surgical instrument.

“It’ll take a few weeks to break them in,” Grandmother said, pulling them out of the box. “Your arch has to get used to it.”

It was some time before I realized how ugly they were. And my arch didn’t get used to it. Instead I developed a permanent cramp in the instep of my right foot. Other than my footwear though, I was a carbon copy of my mother, wearing my hair in styles unflattering to a teenager, not suited to my face at all. What did I know? I didn’t spend any time with kids. I had no more insight into teenage society than Pat Boone.

“You see what I mean about your grandmother,” Mother said, looking pointedly at my feet when I came in the door. “She’ll try to dress you like someone from
Petticoat Junction
if you let her. Next it’ll be overalls and gingham. Mickey says…”

On principle, I stopped listening. Mickey’s pronouncements were aired incessantly despite him exhibiting no discernible signs of intelligence. How could my mother be so clever about some things and so blind about others?

We were eating scrambled eggs and toast. The jam or jam-like substance was in one of those little packets filched from the corner diner, not the expensive kind of peach preserves Mickey liked. Mickey. It was bizarre how a man so completely unknown to me last summer now dominated our lives. Had there ever been a man named Mickey you could take seriously? Someone who didn’t hold a baseball bat or speak in a squeaky voice? Why didn’t he use the name Mike like any normal guy?

“His brother was called Mike,” my mother said when I pressed her.

Did the DiSantis’ name both their sons Michael? If so what happened to Mike? I didn’t ask. It was a piece of the Mickey folklore I could live without.

Mother met Mickey DiSantis when she traded in her ‘66 Cutlass for a newer model. Mickey sauntered out of the showroom, selling her a low-mileage two-year old model in minutes. The car was black. He told her
only
black was classy enough for her. Was there ever a person who used the word classy and was? Certainly not my stepfather.

This would be the first in a long line of pronouncements from Mickey on subjects as varied as clothing styles, refrigeration, NATO, digging for clams on the New Jersey beach, methods of burial, President Kennedy, Vietnam, the proper temperature for red wine, the proper maintenance of the bowels, how to bluff in poker, and dog racing. His mind was wide-ranging in subject if narrow in comprehension. This all occurred to me later. At the time I classified him as weird, icky, a dope, a dork—w
ho
still wore his hair in a slicked-back pompadour in 1978.

Mother was hungry for compliments—so the “classy” car comment worked brilliantly, giving her hope for a brighter future, possibly with Mickey. Her current job, spritzing people with perfume at Gimbel’s Department Stores, was poor-paying and hard on the back since she insisted on wearing high heels. She decided the foyer of a department store was as good spot to meet potential beaus. Daddy had found the job for her himself, telling her she’d get a store discount for her trouble as well as a small salary. He still pumped in the majority of our upkeep.

“Should Hank put you in harm’s way,” my grandmother asked worriedly. “We all know your history with department stores.”

“That’s all behind me now,” my mother promised. Behind her perhaps—but also in front of her.

Gimbels’ Cheltenham’s store manager played golf with Daddy on Saturdays, and the feeling was Mother wouldn’t have the nerve to try something with him circuiting the floor twice a day. She was tightly reined between the entrance and the cosmetic counters. The scents, delightful at first, permeated her clothes, our house, her. I’ve never been able to wear perfume since her short stint at Gimbels.

There were an amazing number of things that had soured for me. Eating evoked guilt; friends were not to be trusted; books produced eye-strain; the medical profession—all frauds; Daddy was a cheat; his family—snobs; my grandmother, Hobart, a scold. I was beginning to wonder if sex would be another tarnished subject. Sex had yet to be discussed despite my age.

Mickey DiSantis didn’t approve of women working.

“God made women to look good, give birth, and shop,” he told her on their first date. “I can see why Gimbels wants you standing at their entrance though,” he said. “You probably account for a huge increase in traffic—people drawn in from the mall. You’re magnetic.” And so were his words.

Mickey and Mother’s romance took off like a rocket, the building blocks being a mutual adoration of Mickey. Okay, he
was
good-looking in a Vic Damone kind of way. But before I knew it, I was stuck at the tiny kitchen table, brushing up against their new found love until it hurt.

“A long courtship doesn’t make sense at our age,” Mother told me when I questioned the speedy union.

When Mickey wasn’t home, I was lucky to get much of anything for dinner, but too many complaints put a tense look on Mother’s face. I’d thought the strained look would disappear once she married, but instead it grew worse. She was like a juggler with all her balls in the air, waiting to see which one would fall first, where it would land. Cooking was still problematic, but Mickey’s salary didn’t stretch to household help and he couldn’t be manipulated as easily my father.

Mickey was world-weary at forty-five. He’d seen it all sometime in the past, maybe in the Marines in Korea. Or perhaps with his first wife, Racine.

“A little house like this practically takes care of itself,” he told us repeatedly. “And feeding me is child’s play. What else would you do all day now that you’re not spritzing?”

Mother swallowed any complaints. She’d finally rid herself of the smell of Obsession and wasn’t going back.

Finishing my eggs in two mouthfuls, I looked desolately at my dessert—an apple. It was May and the apple was pulpy and tasteless. Didn’t my mother know it’d probably been sitting in a bin somewhere since October? You were supposed to buy strawberries in May. Or apricots. I started to tell my mother this, but her eyes had gone slit-like as she stared at her almost empty plate.