Storm in a d cup, p.5
Storm in a D Cup, page 5
‘Edward, what are you muttering about?’
‘Nothing, dear.’
‘Nothing? You’ve been like this for months now. Will you please tell me why you are never happy?’
Dad stared at her for a long moment before he said, ‘I’m never happy? Jesus Christ, Marcy – if anyone here is always complaining, it’s you. Just leave everybody alone. And stop ruining everything.’
That alone shocked us all, because Dad never raised his voice. He was the mildest man in creation. And Marcy wasn’t used to anyone talking back at her. It earned him a smile but also a silent admonishment from my eldest aunt Maria who could smell trouble a mile off, especially where Marcy was concerned.
‘Me?’ Marcy said in drunken horror. ‘You didn’t even want to come out here in the first place! I had to drag you!’
Julian glanced at me but I was too busy keeping my eyes downcast and praying Marcy wouldn’t be there when I reopened them.
‘OK, Marcy,’ Julian said softly. Even though she lived on the other side of the ocean her outbursts were legendary to him. ‘Come and help me dish up dessert now?’
That’s when she turned to me. Me. I hadn’t even breathed. ‘Dessert? When are you going to understand that I don’t eat dessert? How do you think I manage to fit into my clothes, by having dessert after every meal like you?’
I shot a quick glance around the table. Besides Julian, no one seemed to have heard a word. So she continued, in a louder voice. ‘If you’d only listened to Ira instead of complaining about what a bad husband he was you wouldn’t be on your second marriage, with all due respect to Julian here.’
‘I never complained to you about Ira,’ I countered, always flammable but still wary of an argument in front of the entire family. ‘Never. I always kept my problems to myself.’ And before I could stop myself, I added, ‘Besides, you’d be the last person I’d turn to.’
Marcy looked at me with rounded eyes. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
I snorted. ‘That if it weren’t for Nonna Silvia who raised us I’d be a basket case.’
My maternal grandmother Silvia had left Tuscany for Boston to give her daughters a new start in life after she was widowed. She’d sold her farmhouse near San Gimignano to buy a shop with an apartment above. She sold imported goods from Italy and had rapidly established herself in the area as an honest and capable businesswoman, earning the respect of everyone. Her daughters – Maria, Monica and Martina – followed in her footsteps, working in the shop and eventually opening their own restaurant called Le Tre Donne (the three women) while Marcella (Marcy) the black sheep of the family, preferred to dedicate her entire life to fawning over the inconsolable widower of her dead twin Emanuela (my real mother, nicknamed Manu).
Only there was one huge fly in Marcy’s champagne, i.e. Manu’s little orphan (me). If she wanted Edoardo (my dad) she would have to agree to be a loving (ha) mother to me. Marcy had wanted him so badly she had agreed, but soon after she had Judy and Vince who absorbed her completely. Let’s say I was lucky that we had Nonna Silvia taking care of us for as long as she lived.
‘You are a basket case!’ Marcy assured me. ‘Look at yourself! You lost Ira because you couldn’t take care of him, or yourself. He had to blackmail you into surgery so you could fit through the door!’ (Surgery that never happened as he’d dropped his phone on my gurney minutes before my stomach bypass. When it had beeped with a message from his lover, you can imagine my reaction. Let’s just say it involved escaping the hospital buck naked and a police car chase with a female cop who understood where I was coming from.)
Julian cleared his throat, but Marcy interrupted him. ‘And now that you’re married to a sex symbol who’s on all major chat shows you still don’t take care of yourself! Look at you in that bland green sundress, ponytail and your flip-flops. Flip-flops – where do you think you are, the beach? Do you want to lose him to some Hollywood movie star or something?’
Julian coughed. ‘Uh, actually, Marcy, I like the way my wife looks very much.’
I beamed at him and he squeezed my hand. ‘Now,’ he continued. ‘Who wants dessert?’
There was a collective ‘me’ as I cleared the dishes, eyeing Marcy who sat back in her sloshed stupor, barely able to sit upright, let alone help.
‘I hope it’s not one of Erica’s fat-bomb cakes,’ she muttered to anyone who would listen.
But Maddy was too young and inexperienced in the Cantelli affairs to know any better. ‘I like Mom’s cakes, Nana.’
Marcy snorted. ‘Well then watch out you don’t explode like your mother. And don’t call me Nana.’
‘Why not?’ Dad suddenly barked and I flinched at the unfamiliar sound of his raised voice. It was like he’d finally found a backbone from under the table. Good for him. ‘They are your grandchildren. You’ve got seven of them.’
‘And God knows how many more,’ Judy added. Everyone, me included, stared at her.
Dead silence. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Vince suddenly demanded.
Marcy waved her glass around, the martini sloshing around the sides. ‘I don’t need to be reminded of my grandchildren with all the babysitting I’ve done in my life—’ (at that Judy, Vince, Sandra and I snorted. Steve, who was too polite, and Julian, who hadn’t been around early enough back then, sat in silence) ‘—it’s a wonder they don’t call me Mom.’
‘No one dares call you Mom,’ Judy snapped, then turned to me. ‘What is it she said whenever we asked her to babysit?’
‘Children belong to their parents, not their grandparents,’ I answered. I knew the spiel by heart.
‘I don’t recall your mother ever saying that to you when she used to watch them while you slept your afternoons away,’ Dad said, glaring at Marcy who shot him an injured look. ‘What?’ he said. ‘I’m not allowed to say the truth? If it wasn’t for poor old Silvia, bless her soul in heaven, and your sisters here, we’d all be dead by now.’
‘Yeah, and what a great job she and my marvelous sisters have done!’ Marcy spat. ‘My eldest daughter’s a fat loser, my youngest is a slut who sleeps around—’ (at that Steve turned beet red and excused himself) ‘—and my only son has had more affairs than I can count.’
Sandra blanched and turned to Vince. ‘They know?’ she squeaked.
Vince swallowed and dared a quick glance around the table. ‘Let’s go upstairs, honey. I think I’ve heard enough.’
‘But I haven’t!’ Sandra snapped.
I put my head in my hands again.
‘Slut?’ Judy cried in disbelief. ‘At least I didn’t abandon my baby!’
And then my head shot up again to stare at Judy, then at Marcy. I thought that was a secret Marcy had revealed only to me, in a sign of truce years ago. ‘You knew?’ I asked my sister.
‘Of course I knew. You thought you were the only bearer of her secrets? She can’t keep a secret any more than she can hold her booze.’
‘Abandon?’ Vince whispered, wide-eyed and sitting back down and even Sandra seemed to have forgotten her own little drama. ‘What’s she talking about, Ma?’
‘About the fact that your angelic and celestial mother had a baby before she married Dad. In England,’ Judy sneered. ‘She left him on the steps of a church, for Christ’s sake! Anyone beat that if you can!’
Julian’s head snapped up and he stared at Marcy. Really hard. It must have hit home because that was what had happened to him too before Maggie and Tom adopted him. I squeezed his hand, my eyes swinging to poor old Dad who sat pale and still. Shit. Everyone seemed to know but him.
‘Dad?’ I whispered. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Edoardo?’ Zia Martina asked, placing her hand on his, which Marcy readily slapped away.
He didn’t flinch but stared ahead for a long time as if he hadn’t heard or felt any of it. Or as if he had a gazillion times. I held my breath, waiting for him to say something, and everyone at the table froze.
‘Dad?’ I nudged him gently, my heart skipping a beat.
‘Edoardo?’ Julian echoed me.
Dad turned to us with a sweet, sweet smile. ‘Yes? I’m fine, thanks. Marcy, I think you have quite a few apologies to make before you leave this table. Julian, please pour me another glass of that fantastic wine you and my lovely daughter make. Would you mind?’
Julian stared at him at length, then nodded.
I took advantage of that beat and left the table for barely thirty seconds, almost missing the grand finale. I wish I had.
‘She’s so bloody obese!’
‘Marcy,’ I heard Julian say. ‘With all due respect I think you’ve had too much to drink. Now why don’t you go upstairs and lie down for a while?’
‘I don’t want to lie down,’ she snarled.
‘Of course she doesn’t,’ Judy snapped. ‘She’s been horizontal all her life. And not always alone.’
Marcy crossed her arms and glared at her. ‘Look who’s talking, Mother Teresa of Calcutta.’
I packed the dessert trolley with my home-made tiramisù, blueberry cheesecake and Sicilian cannoli, Tuscan cantuccini and castagnaccio, along with a fresh pot of espresso coffee and some Vin Santo, a sweet dessert wine, hoping that all this sweetness would counteract all the bitterness at the table. It usually worked for me.
‘Yeah, well at least I had the decency to sleep with guys my age,’ I heard Judy say.
‘What?’ I said as I returned with the dessert tray. I could feel my ears getting hot, and I can tell you the situation was getting way out of hand even for someone as confrontational as me.
Had Marcy had an affair while she was married to my dad as well? And with a younger man?
‘Oh, you don’t know about her toy boy?’ Judy said.
‘Toy boy?’ I squeaked.
‘Yeah,’ Judy said. ‘A kid from your school, too.’
I froze, my voice struggling out of my mouth. ‘Who?’
‘That cute Italian dropout, remember the one who used to take the older girls behind the supermarket? What was his name? Tony – Tony Esposito.’
Not just the older girls. He’d taken me, too, but no one needed to know that. Because it had been an absolute disaster of an attempt at being like everybody else. The minute he’d put his hand up my shirt, I’d pushed him away and run all the way down the alley, my heart beating like it would crush my ribs.
I turned to Marcy, barely breathing. ‘You slept with a kid?’
‘He wasn’t a kid. He was eighteen.’
‘And you were, what, forty-something?’ I countered, rapidly calculating the age difference.
I looked around at my family, from my parents to my siblings and their families to my aunts to my own children. I thought that I’d managed to drag the children away from all that Cantelli drama by moving to the other side of the world. I thought I’d also protected myself, but it was obvious to me that Dad and Marcy were at the end of the line. Vince and Sandra, ditto. Judy and Steve, ditto as well.
As I thanked my lucky stars for my healthy relationship with Julian, I couldn’t help but wonder. Why was it so hard to stay together? Was it a Cantelli trait? Ira had almost driven me to insanity slash depression. I should be supportive of them, not melancholic. Still, when I look back and remember our childhood, I saw the signs, loud and painful.
My aunts, who constantly turned down marriage proposals from all of Little Italy, seemed to be the only ones who, besides Julian and myself, were happy. How did they manage to not be lonely?
‘OK, everybody pipe down now, please, and enjoy your desserts. We’ve had enough drama for today,’ Julian said. ‘And then I suggest you all go to your rooms and calm down for the rest of the afternoon. It’s too hot to do anything anyway.’
‘Marcy – apologize to Erica and Julian,’ Dad said softly.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said hastily. I just wanted to get this lunch over without any bloodshed.
‘Yes, it does, sweetheart,’ he assured me. ‘Marcy?’
But Marcy just glared at him and took another sip of her wine.
‘Please,’ I whispered. ‘It’s OK. I’m OK.’
At that point, Zia Maria turned to me. She was the oldest of my aunts, but also the spunkiest. She took care of everything domestic, like cooking and cleaning. After my nonna’s death, it was she who had taken the reins of running our household, seeing that Marcy was only capable of napping all day long while the laundry basket exploded and the fridge got emptier and emptier every day. Zia Maria was, for all intents and purposes, our mother-in-charge and we all loved her fiercely for taking care of us so selflessly.
‘Of course you’re OK, sweetie,’ she reassured me. ‘Because you are like your mother Emanuela. You’ve got guts and you are strong. You have all her best traits and she had all of Nonna Silvia’s. You’re a winning combination.’
Marcy snorted and lifted her empty glass. ‘Yeah, Manu was a real concentrate of virtue.’
‘Do not… even try to soil your sister’s reputation,’ Zia Maria warned her.
‘You shut up!’ Marcy slurred. ‘You frustrated tramp, trying to steal my husband from me with all your casseroles!’
‘I’m not going to listen to any more of this,’ Dad said, looking up from the table to me. ‘Sweetheart, forgive me, but I’m taking Marcy home. I’m so sorry that we’ve ruined everything, and so soon. Just when I thought we’d be able to make it to a week.’
‘Oh, Dad, no, please…’
‘Edoardo, don’t worry,’ Maria said. ‘You stay and enjoy your daughter’s family. ‘We’ll go.’
‘No, please don’t,’ my father begged her. ‘You and your sisters work so hard, you deserve a break…’
‘It’s fine. We can always come back on our own some other time.’
‘Of course,’ I assured her. ‘Anytime you want, the door is always open to you guys…’
‘Oh, but I have to literally beg to be invited,’ Marcy snapped.
Why oh why did my family have to drag their baggage all the way across the ocean? Couldn’t they just bring sunscreen and flip-flops like every other traveler? No, of course not, we had to flog every family issue of the last fifty years, from my aunts’ role in our lives to my weight, to Judy’s infidelity – but never, ever, Marcy’s flaws. As if she was some fragile, glass princess who was never to be held accountable for her mistakes. Normal admin in the Cantelli household. They say Italian families are particularly solid, but you wouldn’t say that looking at mine.
So just like that, the whole band – all fourteen of them – had come and gone, just like they’d come from next door and not over the Atlantic Ocean. And in the space of three days. Thank you, Marcy, for turning our family into a circus.
‘Thanks for your support, honey,’ I said to Julian as we later loaded the dishwasher.
He shook his head. ‘Your family never ceases to amaze me.’
I snorted. ‘That was nothing. You should’ve seen Marcy at Maddy’s christening.’
‘Yeah?’
‘After her sixth gin and tonic, she climbed up onto the table and accused all of her sisters of having an affair with my dad – simultaneously.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Yeah. I’m going to have to do something about her drinking. It’s way out of hand – more than I thought.’
‘Honey,’ he said, hugging me. ‘You are not your stepmother’s keeper. She’s an adult and has to learn to take care of herself. Or if not, she has plenty of people to lean on. You live on the other side of the Atlantic and have got your hands full enough as it is, yes?’
I frowned. He was right – I was the least qualified in any case to deal with her, what with our stormy past. Needless to say Marcy had shattered three couples including her own marriage in the space of five minutes and in less than two hours each had boarded a different plane back home. What should’ve been two weeks of hell was concentrated in three days. One needs to always look for the silver lining.
*
A week later I called my dad’s cell phone to make sure he hadn’t suddenly lost his cool and murdered her. ‘Hey, Dad, how are you?’
A long, long sigh. ‘I swear to you, Erica, your mother is killing me. After forty-three years she still drives me crazy. She’s going to die an old selfish woman. And even if she lived to be a hundred years old, she will never be like my Manu.’
Just the thought of my real mother made me smile. When I didn’t burst into tears.
‘Dad…’ I faltered. This was the very first time I’d ever heard him complain about Marcy. I always thought he was happy to be her slave, valet, et cetera. How the hell was I supposed to know he was suffering this much?
He cleared his throat. ‘Sweetie, I’m sorry. But I’ve had enough. For years I’ve put up with your mother and now I know that I’ll be spending our next anniversary in jail because I am going to kill her very soon.’
5
Taking the Plunge
With the clan gone and everything back to normal, I worked up the courage to tell my husband exactly what I thought of his baby idea. That babies shouldn’t be marriage fixers, that I was too old, we were too busy and he was never around anyway. Besides – look at the trouble big families brought. All perfectly solid reasons, right?
But when he brought me breakfast in bed (how sweet was he?) I decided that, at the end of the day, Julian was completely different from my family and that he should experience the joys (the pains were all for moms) of fatherhood. And that he was definitely worth nine months of gastric reflux, chronic backache and swollen feet. (He liked me even when I was cranky.)
‘We should do it,’ I said while I took a sip of my coffee, the kids still in bed.
‘Do what?’ he asked, looking up from his paper.
‘You know, the kid thing,’ I whispered into my mug, feeling my face go hot.
Rustling of paper. Intake of breath. His. I was already holding mine.
‘Really, Erica?’ he whispered.
