What Pretty Girls Are Made Of (7 page)

“Well, because you’re the only person I don’t know here and you’re sitting where Jamie used to sit.”

“That’s smart of you. Nice to meet you.”

No coy, youthful smile. Elliott got right down to business. “How much money is in the register? Did you make a profit today?”

Clearly his mother’s son.

“I’m not sure, but you can ask one of the girls out front. Is your mom coming inside?”

I was hoping he would say no, since after my delicious half bagel with olive cream cheese, I didn’t have lipstick on.

“Nope. She just sent me inside to get her mail. She doesn’t want to get out of the car this week because of Grandpa.”

“That’s not a problem, Elliott. Can you tell your mom that I have a conference call in five minutes or else I would come out and say hello?”

I handed him the bag of mail that had been prepared for Sally, and he inspected it thoroughly and quietly before responding to my request.

“Yup,” he said, after a good minute of looking through the mail bag.

“Are you doing anything fun for Thanksgiving? Do you like this holiday?” I asked.

“I don’t really like turkey, but the parade is good,” he replied.

“Well, enjoy it, and I want to hear about your favorite floats next time I see you, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, seeming unsure as he turned to leave.

He reappeared in my office after being gone for only about twenty seconds.

“By the way, Alison, you should put on some lipstick.” A verbal P.S. and he was gone.

Helen popped up in the doorway. “So you met the CEO, I see?”

“Ha,” I said wryly. “I figure I better start sucking up to him now.”

But my exchange with Elliott was bizarre. I didn’t expect to be taking direction from an almost-ten-year-old future CEO, and yet something in me already felt compliant.

With Thanksgiving only hours away and the office quiet by 4 p.m., I made an early exit.

CHAPTER NINE

Antiwrinkle Solution

I
always took such pleasure in driving around the north shore of Long Island, where I grew up. The winding rural roads lined with majestic green trees in the summer and glimpses of the traditional homes in the winter filled me with a sense of being on vacation on the busiest of days. The peaceful haven away from the city naturally discouraged cell phone time in favor of family get-togethers and happy memories of childhood. I liked being home even more when my grandfather was visiting. And we were able to have some alone time when I went to pick him up at his nearby apartment to bring him to our Thanksgiving feast.

While my grandfather didn’t live in a nursing home, the average age of tenants in his apartment community hovered at seventy-nine. His full head of thick white hair gave him instant popularity among the widows and divorcées. Surely one of them would love to bleach out the long-embedded stains on his shirts, but he didn’t want to be fussed over and certainly didn’t want to spend money on new clothing when his old duds were “just fine.”

“Hiya, honey,” he said as he struggled to climb into the front seat of the SUV I was driving.

“Hold on, Pop. I’m coming over to help you. Just hold on,” I said, hurrying around the car to help him into his seat.

Once we were en route, my grandfather rattled off his routine questionnaire for me. He knew that during this car ride, it would be either his question list or mine.

“So how’s the job? You working or playing? Running the company yet?”

“I wish, Pop.” Should I get into it with him? I didn’t really want to talk about my work on Thanksgiving, especially when I could find out more about what was going on in his life. And I’d heard that things were
going on.
“Give it time, and I’ll be sending you lots and lots of makeup.”

He laughed, but I sensed that mentally, he was far away.

As the only granddaughter in my family, I shared a precious bond with my grandfather. When I was a child, he would take me on solo outings for sticky-chewy chocolate ice cream at Swensen’s and watch countless musicals on VHS with me, and he took particular pride in honing my math skills. He made me speed-add phone numbers from the phone book for hours, saying that as a girl, I should be just as fast at arithmetic as boys. Progressive! More than I cared about knowing the sum of 516-781-7888—it’s 59, for the record—I wanted to make him proud.

“So what’s going on, Pop? Can we talk about it? I want to hear what’s happening from you directly.”

He turned his face to the passenger window, and out of the corner of my eye I could see his shoulders rise. I had never seen my grandfather, who came from nothing and fought on the front lines of World War II, cry. I couldn’t see his eyes but saw a tear make its way down his left cheek, his face still turned toward the window.

“It’s all I had left, Alison. My work, you know?”

At that moment, I realized that my always saying “you know” came from my grandfather.

He continued. “I know I wasn’t doing much in the office, and I read the newspaper sometimes, but where else will I go? My job was my purpose.” I certainly understood that now more than ever.

“Don’t you crave this new identity of yours now that you have it?” he asked.

“I do,” I said, the word “crave” sounding so correct.

“So don’t let that go. Ever,” he said. “Don’t just give that up, now that you have it. Because once it’s gone . . . well . . .”

My grandfather had started an accounting practice in New York City when he’d graduated from college after the war. Numbers were his thing, as was hard work, and he’d enjoyed building a company from scratch. The practice grew, with a lean and dedicated staff. When my uncle Rick, my mother’s younger brother, graduated from college, my grandfather had promised him that if he successfully worked for a few years at Deloitte, he would bring him into the family accounting firm. He did. And slowly, as the years passed, my grandfather gave his son more ownership in the company. And as the years passed, my uncle slowly and surreptitiously transferred more ownership to his column on the balance sheet, right under my grandfather’s nose.

“Wait, back up. What happened?” I asked.

He took a deep breath and locked his hands together. All he could manage to utter was “Your uncle Rick and your aunt Farrah and their latest plan.”

“Who I don’t consider my aunt and uncle, or my family really, but keep going,” I interjected, clenching my hands around the steering wheel at the mere mention of them.

“Rick asked for my key ring the other day. He said that he was getting new keys for the office since there had been a problem with the front lock. So I gave it to him. He was going to put the new key on my ring and leave it on my desk.” He went quiet.

“Keep going,” I said.

“I had to be let in the next day since I had no key. No nothing,” he went on, dejected.

My heart broke for my grandfather.

“Farrah let me in—said she was there getting documents notarized—and Rick was also there. He’s never at work earlier than I am. You know that Rick’s office is on the ground floor, and I have to walk up to the second floor to get to my office, right?”

I did know this and thought it was disgusting that when the firm had moved to a new building a few years earlier, Rick had taken the ground-floor office and required my eightysomething grandfather to climb a steep flight of stairs to get to his own small office. But I only nodded in response, not wanting to fuel the fire.

He continued, “I was told that I couldn’t go into my office because it was my last day at the firm—
my
firm, the company I started—and that I had no choice but to leave because my days there were over.”

His voice became shaky. “He said that I’m a waste of space at my age, and my just being in the building annoys him.”

“I’m so, so sorry, Pop,” I replied, knowing that nothing I could say would disburden him.

“I started to shake. I was overwhelmed. Like I understood on the outside what was going on, but I really didn’t.”

“Did you talk back to him? Say anything?”

“Rick just shouted at me. I was beside myself.” My grandfather paused. “He told me, ‘You will get out of this firm, this office, and do what old people do!’ Alison, I built this practice from nothing. After the war, I had nothing. And I let him into it, all selfish and stingy, with his mobster clients. Organized crime wiseguys. He just completely changed the character of my firm right under my nose.”

Rick had always been fascinated by the Mafia, ever since he was a child, so representing them must have been a huge honor in his eyes. I was silent.

“I honestly don’t remember how the rest happened,” he said, his voice sounding steadier. We were about five minutes away from home and I knew he wouldn’t want to walk in the door in such an emotional state.

“I signed something,” he quietly mumbled. “Your parents are going to flip out when I tell them this part.”

“What did you sign?”

“Well, I didn’t sign it voluntarily.”

“Pop, what did you sign?”
Oh, I just hate my mom’s siblings and here’s another reason why.

“Papers to the business. Rick stood over me and didn’t give me time to read them. I thought I would pass out, so I just signed in haste.”

“The whole business?” I spat. “Oh, Jesus. Yeah, Mom and Dad are not going to be happy about that, but of course they’ll help you get this right.” I couldn’t imagine my stoic, rock-hard grandfather under so much duress that his hand was forced. I was in disbelief.

“And then he ranted and raved, called me names, and threw me out of the building. I haven’t spoken with him since.”

“I’m just so sorry,” I said again. “I’ll help sort this out, too. They have to be stopped.” We pulled into the driveway and I shut off the engine.

“Rick and Farrah also froze all of my bank accounts,” he added as I helped him out of the car.

“You’ll tell us the rest when we get inside, Pop. I love you so much and I’m sorry.”

“I need your help, Alison,” he said, his voice brittle. “I really need your help.”

“And you’ll have it,” I said with resolve.

He smiled, though his eyes were far away.

It was the first Thanksgiving
we would have with my brother Damon’s new girlfriend, Ayaan—definitely a new dynamic for us, especially while we were dealing with the looming family issues. Unfortunately, money would probably trump turkey as the focus of the weekend, along with noxious family members. My father, mother, brother, grandfather, and I would now be called upon to come together to handle a shit-storm rolling in from the past and colliding with the present.

Ayaan, a first-generation Indian American, was a kind, feisty match for my introverted brother. She laughed at his dry humor and had opened his palate to Indian food. Her caramel skin and big almond eyes were clearly what had encouraged Damon to ask her out, but her intelligence, self-reliance, and sweetness were what had made him commit.

“This Thanksgiving especially,” my dad said while holding up a wineglass full of Diet Coke, “I think we should all be grateful for those of us sitting around this table. Notwithstanding current events that are happening with other family members, we have each other. And that is truly lucky and something to be thankful for.”

My dad had the warmest of smiles under a forty-year mustache. A leg length discrepancy—the result of two car accidents as a child—let him stand barefoot at either five foot eleven or five foot nine. When Damon and I were children, my dad would stand on his taller leg and swing the shorter one back and forth to make us laugh. Now what made us laugh were his “Dadisms”—uncomfortably big words like “omphalos” for belly button and “cumulonimbusy” for cloudy. Our giggles would result in his rolling his eyes and exclaiming, “I’m glad I’m a source of amusement for you.”

My mom was the family glue: a passionate, skinny blonde, no taller than five feet, and with the best gut instincts I’d ever seen. Her kindness and ability to do it all made her worthy of imitation. She was the kind of woman people opened up to while waiting in line or sitting on an airplane. It always baffled me how such an innocuous, good-natured woman could come from such a pernicious family.

The festive Thanksgiving table, set by my mom with her favorite blue-and-white china pattern, came to life as we passed around the perfectly sliced turkey (if my dad hadn’t become a teacher, he easily could have become a surgeon), sweet potatoes with marshmallows, and kale salad (an attempt to infuse healthy greens into the meal) and shared with Ayaan some of the backstory of my grandfather’s distressed state.

“I’ll start,” said Damon, who looked more and more like my dad every day. While he was sans mustache, their noses and cleft chins were unmistakably the same. “My mom’s family is certifiable.” He looked around for disagreement. There was none, not even from my grandfather. “Her siblings are greedy and jealous and always have to one-up each other.”

At least Sally supports her sister and mother.

“I am not like that,” my mother chimed in. “Obviously.” She smiled. “It was my sister, Farrah, who graduated from Binghamton with a degree in deception. Seriously, I don’t even know how she thinks up such devious things.”

I was staying silent, though periodically checking up on quiet Ayaan, since my family certainly wasn’t holding back on her account.

“It has just come to our attention,” my dad continued, “that Rick and Farrah liquidated their father’s bank accounts and transferred their assets by forging Pop’s signature. This is in addition to coercing Pop to fully sign over his business. Unfortunately, that signature wasn’t forged.”

“I’m not even dead yet,” my grandfather said quietly. “Can’t they just wait until I’m in the ground?”

“They’re toxic,” my mom said. “And it started when we were children.”

My brother and I looked at each other, knowing that we had to grin and bear whatever story was about to be told.

You okay? I’m so sorry
, I mouthed to Ayaan. She nodded, smiling ruefully at me.

“This foolery has been going on for decades. My sister would unmake my bed after I would make it in the morning, and then tattle on me that I wasn’t doing my chores and should be grounded. She would hide raw eggs in the back of my closet so that they would rot and stink up my clothes and ultimately the entire room. And starting when I was about nine, and my sister had to babysit for my brother and me, she would lock us in a dark closet for hours so that she could have friends over and not have to watch what we were doing. It was traumatizing being locked up in the dark, next to the heated furnace. Farrah claimed that I was lying when I would cry to my parents. Oh, it wasn’t pleasant growing up in the Payne household.