The Clancys of Queens (16 page)

I ran home from the bus that day and straight to my room, grabbing my mother's stack of old magazines and a pair of scissors on the way, and set out to make a collage based on the themes of the book. I had done very few of my assignments for English class and hoped this would count for something to my teacher. In the middle of a sheet of paper I glued a King of Hearts playing card and surrounded it with phrases like
twisted sister.
For the first time, I cared about something that could be called schoolwork.

The next day I stood at my teacher's desk, too giddy to keep up my typical tough-girl act, and started to explain to her, “So I read this book yesterday—I don't know if you've heard of it—
King Lear
? And, uh—”

“Cut the crap, Clancy. No, you didn't.”

“What? Um, yes, I did.” She rolled her eyes, but I was undeterred. “Anyway, so I made this…”

“Shakespeare. Yesterday, after not doing any work all year, you up and read Shakespeare, for the hell of it? And, wait, the whole play, no less? C'mon, kid! I'm not an idiot.”

At that I slapped my collage onto her desk and walked off. The next day she slapped it back onto my desk, upside-down so I could read her note right away:
A++ This is fantastic!
Then she said, “Let's talk after class today, okay?” I gave a smug smile, followed by a real one, and nodded.

The following summer, before senior year, instead of playing handball at the PS 133 park with me, Alli was pushing a stroller around it. Sometimes I'd join her for a loop or two, and we'd catch up; other times, she'd come over to my house and we'd fight over music and eat Cheez Doodles as always, only now we were also taking turns cradling the baby.

Come the start of the school year, Alli's mom had agreed to babysit during the day—she did administrative work at our local police precinct and was able to switch her schedule, buying Alli just enough time to rush straight home after school and pick up her daughter before her mom had to leave for her shift. And on nights and weekends, Alli got a job waiting tables—she was a seventeen-year-old single mom, and she was as dedicated a mother as one twice her age. One day, when it was just the three of us in my room, I couldn't help breaking our badass code to tell her how impressed I was, “I'm so fucking proud of you! You're like Mary Poppins but sluttier.”

In jest, there is truth…

“Oh, shit. You wanna get smart?! Don't think I can't hold this baby with one hand and knock your ass out with the other!”

Who is it that can tell me who I am?

“Ha! There's my girl! But, for real, Al, you're one helluva mom.”

“Thanks, girl. Now that's enough with the mushy shit!”

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

Thanks to that
King Lear
–collage-induced chat with my junior-year English teacher, I started senior year in an AP class devoted to Shakespeare—this Fool had finally found her place, and I never missed another assignment.

And, while even motherhood couldn't turn Alli from a Mae West to a Donna Reed, there was no doubting that she had changed some. One day, just a few weeks into the school year, sitting next to me in the cafeteria, she leaned to whisper into my ear.

“
Psst.
Yo, I got an idea. Howsa about we do one last thing before we leave this hellhole, to give 'em something to remember us by!”

“Uh-oh. What?”

“Let's make the honor roll! Actually, nah, fuck that—the dean's list! C'mon!”

“You serious?”

“Dead ass.”

“…A'ight, fuck it.”

So, we did.

Alli's parents were so thrilled by our semester of straight A's, they decided to babysit her daughter so she could go to prom. She was beside herself, even if she would have to come straight home afterward and not join the rest of our crew at the after-party. Somebody had found a cheap little house near the beach out east, and we calculated, if we pooled together all our summer and weekend job money, we had just enough for a two-night stay.

It had to be paid for, in full, two weeks in advance, and we made it just in time. And then, just a week before prom, we got the news: this cheap house was too cheap to be true. We had been scammed. All our money was gone.

I had been so solidly schooled by my mother to be proud of what we had, that what was ours was ours and what was his was his, that a few more days would pass before the thought even occurred to me. I went to Mom first, and with her okay, I decided to call Mark. I wasn't but a quarter of the way into the story when he cut me off—

“The house is all yours.”

He really meant it, too. Mark decided to stay on Roosevelt Island so we could have the Bridgehampton place all to ourselves. And come prom weekend, there was Kristy, Erin, and the rest of our crew, one by one, doing cannonballs into the lagoon pool.

“If I told you that the universe was infinite,” Mark says, “that it had NO END…” He was now leaning so far back into his chair that the front two legs came off the floor, and all six feet, ten inches of him was teetering on the back two—the international symbol for
Get ready, this one's gonna take a while—
“…how would that make you feel?”

And, particularly in this scenario, he was not being overly dramatic—a question like that would take a while for anyone to answer. But it's especially the case for me, because I'm five years old.

As far back as I can remember, Mark had a strict dinner itinerary: Cocktail hour. Appetizers. Salad course. Entrée. Dessert. Existential Questions.

And, as far back as I can remember, I'd just as soon skip the soufflé and get right to the conversation.

If we were at Mark's Roosevelt Island apartment, we had these talks in his Victorian-era-inspired sitting area, sitting in tufted leather wingback chairs—for him, think Woody Allen's head on Larry Bird's body hosting Masterpiece Theatre; for me, think a dangling, squeaky-voiced, anthropomorphic pair of Nikes talking the cosmos (I was so engulfed by that giant chair, all you could see of me in profile were my shoes).

The chairs sat in front of Mark's enormous wraparound living room windows that, seventeen stories up, provided a panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline. Rapt in thought, I'd stare out at the zillion lights, while Mozart's Symphony No. 40 or Beethoven's Ninth lulled and swelled in the background. Or, if my little brain really went into overdrive and I needed a break, mid-conversation I'd reach for the windowsill to snatch up Mark's jumbo pair of vintage black binoculars—like two liters of Coca-Cola strapped to my little face—and zoom in on a guy in his Midtown kitchen, or a couple walking arm in arm along the Manhattan waterfront, or the cars crossing the Queensboro Bridge.
Whew, space may be expanding, but so long as that guy is picking his nose in his Chevy, I can be sure of my existence.

If we were in Bridgehampton, we were always tucked into the pine wormwood table near the kitchen, under the upended antique radio horn turned hanging lamp, catty-corner from the brick fireplace and the room-long, grid-paned window, on the other side of which was that giant ancient elm tree and the country night sky—same zillion lights, same little brain in overdrive, but here, instead of Mozart, an equally potent concerto of crickets, crackling firewood, and Mark's teetering chair creaking away on the old farmhouse floorboards. (Mark didn't allow music in Bridgehampton, with the exception of weekends when his best friend, my Uncle Sal, and his crew were visiting, in which case he not only permitted but enjoyed our Riccobono family ritual of all-out Motown dance parties, where we'd stagger ourselves on the staircase, begin our slow, finger-snapping descent, then start belting out the Temptations' “Ain't Too Proud to Beg,” using Mark's eighteenth-century brass candle snuffers as makeshift microphones.)

When it was just the three of us, Mark and I would go on and on talking for so long after dessert in Bridgehampton that Mom would leave us to it and head to bed. But at some stage she'd crack her bedroom door and yell, “Bedtime, Chickenella!” Then I'd beg for more existential conversation the same way I begged Dad to let me watch one more episode of
He-Man
in Broad Channel or pleaded with Grandma to let me play one more game of Ollie Ollie Oxen Free: “Just five more minutes, Ma! Please!”

One of those times, when I was about ten, Mom gave in, but when five minutes turned to thirty, she plodded down the stairs, all groggy and squinty-eyed in her nightgown, and, shocked to see us still going strong, said, “Are you two gonna talk about the moon and stars ALL NIGHT?”

And that's how these marathon conversations got their name—forever after we called them our “moon and stars talks.”

Prior to prom weekend, none of my friends at Mary Louis had any real idea what it meant when I turned down invitations to hang out because I was “going to my mom's boyfriend's place.” Alli had met Mark not long into our friendship, a few years earlier, at my house on 253rd Street in Queens, and I'm sure that I told her a rough version of my backstory, but she wasn't the type to ask a lot of questions, and I didn't go into details. As for the rest of my friends, if I glazed over the specifics, it wasn't because I was trying to hide any details so much as they weren't exactly easy to work into cafeteria conversation. “Hey, Tara. Everybody's goin' to the park Saturday, smoke a couple blunts, chill. You comin?”

What was I supposed to say?:
“Well, I was planning on discussing the Hudson River School painters, maybe a little particle physics, for hours and hours, like I've been doing since I was five, with my mom's boyfriend, Mark, who, I guess I haven't mentioned, is this rich genius giant, literally, and he has this insane duplex in the city—which my mom used to clean; that's how they met—as well as this extraordinary Bridgehampton estate, but he's otherwise just another member of our big Italian Brooklyn family! And we don't take any money from him, but he's supergenerous in so many other ways, and he would give it to us if we asked, but we don't, ever, because my mom really values her autonomy, and so even though they've been together for almost my whole life, they've never gotten married or lived together, and Mom and I have always stayed right here in Queens, and I'm pretty much just like all of you…” bell rings
…Ah, to hell with it.

“Blunts, Saturday, see you then!”

By fourteen, I actually was choosing weed in Queens over existential conversation in the Hamptons pretty regularly. Up until then I had been with Mark and Mom every other weekend, but now my mom would allow me to opt out and stay over at Alli's or another friend's house instead. Also, years earlier, come the end of Middle School 172, just as the full-blown,
Great Gatsby
–esque, airborne, Riccobono-invasion parties had stopped, so, too, did the limos arriving to pick me up from school—if one had pulled up in front of the bodega on 179th and Hillside, there was no way I could have gone three minutes, let alone three years, without an explanation.

At seventeen, I had only two friends who fully knew the details of my social-strata–hopping life: Esther and Lynette. When I told Esther, at eight, I was so young, I was not at all conscious that it could be perceived as strange. As she was the same age, she hardly batted an eye. “Oh, okay, cool. So, you wanna play Miss Mary Mack now?” Telling Lynette at age twelve was a different story.

There were two reasons it wasn't difficult explaining why my mom didn't take any money from Mark. One was that by the time I was in middle school, my mom had left her job waiting tables at The Old Tubby House after landing a much more lucrative sales position at AT&T—we were by no means rolling in it, but we had as much, if not more, than most of my friends' families. And two, even if my friends didn't perceive us as comfortable, it was never hard to explain to anyone in Queens, young or old, then or now, my mom's insistence on being self-supporting.

That said, then, the problem when I first told Lynette about my quasi dual life wasn't the money…it was the ketchup.

By age twelve, I was very much aware that the way things worked at Mark's house was different from what my friends were used to, and, before the first time I brought Lynette to Bridgehampton for the weekend, I felt the need to prepare her. At that stage, the priority in those preparations was explaining that Mark didn't allow ketchup, or any other condiment, to be placed on the dinner table in its original packaging. So, the Friday before we were to leave, in the recess yard of MS 172, while the other kids were beating the snot out of one another on one side, on the other I huddled up with Lynette.

“Well, if I can't put the ketchup on the table, where the hell do I put it? The floor?”

“You have to take it out of the bottle and put it in a ramekin, with a little spoon.”

“A ram-e-what?”

“It's like a bowl, a porcelain one, with ridges on it. Don't worry, I'll show you.”

“Huh. So long as I get to go in that pool, I'll put the ketchup wherever he wants!”

Come the end of our eighth-grade summer, at age fourteen, Lynette had spent so much time in Bridgehampton that when Mark invited her whole family for a weekend, she took great pride in giving them a tour of the property herself. “And this is the Barn…and Mark calls this the Main House…and here's the kitchen, and—wait, see these things? These are what we use for ketchup, mustard, everything—they're called ramekins.”

Not long after that weekend, Mark started offering the Solinas his house for a whole week every year. He insisted on staying on Roosevelt Island so that they could have the run of the place, and though he and Mom weren't there, I was. I can't remember whether, without Mark around, they put the ketchup bottle on the table, but I do have a favorite memory of watching John Solina, Lynette's dad and a second father to me, with a deep tan and a wide smile, wearing his classic Italian man's slip-on white leather Keds and a tank top, walking back up Jobs Lane from the beach midmorning, just past Colin Powell's house, fishing rod in one hand, tackle box swinging from the other, bringing home his catch for Antonetta to fry up for lunch.

After two years of being wrapped in the troublemaking vortex with Alli and seeing somewhat less of Lynette, Esther, and Bridgehampton, by sixteen—probably not coincidentally right after Alli got pregnant and our partying came to a halt—we original three were back together, and that summer we spent a ton of weekends in Bridgehampton. Lynette had a steady boyfriend, Rob, a sweet but tough Queens boy with a skin fade, baggy jeans, and a gold chain necklace, and since it was okay with her parents, Mark had extended an invitation for him to join us. So one Friday night, Lynette, Rob, and I piled into his little red hooptie, and in the two-hour drive from Hollis to the Hamptons, she and I prepped him.