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Not Tony and Tina

 [img_assist|nid=4361|title=Hair Drawing, Simona Mihaela Josan © 2004|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=151]My mother wishes for me: I wish you’d cut your hair short. I wish you had some security. I wish you’d write about real Italians. That wish came on a rainy spring Sunday after she and my father had spent the previous evening attending the decade-old play-in-a-restaurant, "Tony and Tina’s Wedding."

"Your cousin didn’t like it either. And your father —" she batted the air, "Well, nothing bothers your father."

Not true, of course. Wool bothers my father, wool and the entire sad history of mankind and any and all humiliations to the human spirit big or small. Earlier, he’d stood in my living room contemplating the rose window in the church across the street. Then he turned toward us slowly, looking as though he’d just had a long talk with God, and announced that he wasn’t coming with us to the annual Philadelphia Flower Show.

He wanted to watch a golf tournament. We left him in the company of Tiger Woods. By then it was raining heavily. I kept my eyes on the streets, trying to avoid the pot holes, while she, waiting for my corroborating outrage, continued to describe the play.

"It’s a satire, Mom.”

"It was mean," she said. I let that one pass. Given her exasperation, it was not the time to lecture her on the properties of satire.

"When did you ever go to a wedding in our family where they served a piece of meat meatballs hard as a rock—instead of salmon or even just a nice chicken? And when was the last time you ever saw anybody dance on a table with her—all of her top was hanging out! The clothes were awful and the language. This we paid $75.00 for? No one in our family acts like that."

No one in our family acts like that. My mother had been seduced into believing that those characters were badly-behaved members of our own family. She loved being an Italian-American. Tony and Tina had embarrassed her.

"And you," she said.

"Me? What me?"

"You should do something about it."

The parking attendant was waving and flailing at me. Lot full. I backed out onto the street. "Like what?"

"Write something good."

"Aren’t I writing a novel?"

"Is it Italian?"

I had been keeping my own counsel with this third novel because there were Italian-Americans in the work. Until now, I’d never mined the depths of my Italian-American experience, mostly because I didn’t think there was one.

My mother was already convinced she was the mother in two previous novels (women to whom she bears no resemblance, both of whom I’d killed off in violent ways). How could I tell her that I planned to showcase her in the new book? So far the writing had made me sleepy with guilt. Each time I shot an arrow aimed at the bull’s eye authentic, I hit caricature.

We found a parking space two blocks away, then linked arms under a single umbrella and ran to the convention center, where we were cast into yet another ethnic wonderland: France. Amid the lush floral displays stood a mini Eiffel Tower; a Parisian cafe; a repro Tuileries. Geraniums, blistering red and swollen, spilled out of glazed pottery. There was even a reconstructed Japanese bridge against a canvas backdrop of Monet’s garden at Giverney. Years before I’d been to Giverney and had stood on the real bridge looking out over Monet’s pond.

My father was stationed in France after World War II. For decades I’ve been running with the joke that my parents named me Denise because my father—who chose the name—was secretly fascinated with a French chanteuse named Denise. I’ve invented his French experience as romantic, clothed him in fluid gabardine instead of army fatigues, added an unrequited love to his post-war France. I wanted to account for being a Denise in a family of Joes and Marys. I wanted a reason. So I made one up.

That day at the flower show I said, "It doesn’t look like this."

But my mother was thrilled, believing she was a guest at Monet’s home. Should it matter then that the play had depicted Italians as lewd, gauche, dumb? Wasn’t it all invention? This garden in a convention center? Those actors in a wedding? My mother didn’t think so.

She believed that somewhere between depictions of Italians exerting brute force, wearing bad clothes and making wise-cracks, there had to be another portrait.

As we sampled bistro food under a striped cafe awning I began to feel shame—not for what I was, but for my obsessive efforts to banish all traces of it. I hid my maiden name: Piccoli. Gess, my married name, was short, sweet. What I’d barely admitted to myself was how much I loved its Anglo-Saxoness. I was a coward. I never wanted anyone confusing me with those other Italians.

“Where are the Italian-American writers?” Gay Talese had asked in an essay for the Times. Why so mute? Well, Italians don’t grow up with books in their houses, he pointed out. There were books in my home and magazines, yet nothing that resembled a library. I wasn’t read to as a child—I was talked to. I grew up in a family where everyone thought it was their obligation to articulate their raw emotions as if they were splinters that needed to be tended to immediately. The entire range of emotion was accessible by asking, "How do you feel?"

"Sit down and I’ll tell you."

Seated around a table with relatives is how I learned story. Sometimes the stories were funny and sometimes they were somber, but my mother was right: they were not stupid, brutish, or lewd.

After we’d had our fill of croissants and espresso, we linked arms and left the convention center. The rain and wind had died out. The sky was opaque gray.

"Italians bleed together like cheap madras," I said.

"That’s true," my mother said. She shrugged. I watched the sharp planes of her face shifting. "I’m not educated like you and your brother and your sister, but I know when somebody’s making fun of me."

On the subject of my intense family ties I’ve been from A to Z and back again, as torn up as a dirt road after a drag race when I examine their blunders, their open-hearted messiness.

"Be funny," she said, "but tell a whole story."

Hadn’t she, my first reader, always offered herself up for scrutiny? That day she was asking me to give something back, something more complex than stereotypes: real Italians.

"I’ll give it a shot," I told her.Denise Gess is the author of two critically-acclaimed novels, Good Deeds (1984) and Red Whiskey Blues (1989) and the co-author of the non-fiction book Firestorm At Peshtigo: A Town, Its People and The Deadliest Fire in American History (2002). Her short fiction has appeared in the North American Review and has been anthologized in The Horizon Reader. She’s working on a collection of essays entitled Bad For Boys.

Among Poets

A sixteen-foot blowfish stuck her spiny yellow claws into my arm
Then planted her fuschia balloon lips on my chest

The shiny seven-foot dolphin offered a smoke.

Through gray-green dune grass and sprays of cold salt
I had plunged, faithless, into the sea.

Called down,
Away from the anesthesia of oxygen,
To breathe through water and call it home.

My virgin voyage to Poesy

Where nobody has a mother.

Local Author Profile: Lisa Scottoline

Killer Smile, Lisa Scottoline’s eleventh novel, has already been chosen as Main Selections by both Literary Guild and Mystery Guild. It will also be featured in Doubleday Book Club, Quality Paperback and Book of the Month Club. Philadelphia Stories talked with Lisa about her life as a writer, and what it means to be a writer from Philadelphia.

What was the inspiration for your latest crime novel?
My inspiration for Killer Smile came when my father, who was terminally ill, called me over. He said he had two important things to give me. One was the deed to the family cemetery plot, and the other he said was the last of the family secrets. He handed me two booklets covered in pink paper. They turned out to be my grandparents’ alien registration cards. It was then that I learned an important piece of U.S. history, and a very personal piece of my own family history.

During WWII, as many as 600,000 Italian Americans were forced to register as enemy aliens, and thousands more were relocated, and even interned. In Killer Smile, lawyer Mary DiNunzio sets out to get reparations for Amadeo Brandolini, an Italian American who committed suicide while interned during World War II. Mary discovers that Brandolini did not actually commit suicide, and she is determined to find justice for him.

Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process?
The truth is that I don’t write with an outline. When I have an idea, which is only once a year, I go ahead and write it. I let the story develop as I write it. Even I am not always sure which direction it will take.

Did you always want to write?
No, I loved Perry Mason, and always wanted to be a lawyer. I practiced law for several years, but at the same time I was a bookaholic. Eventually I traded one passion for another.

How did you become a professional writer?
I was working as a litigator at one of Philly’s most prestigious law firms, when the birth of my daughter coincided with a divorce. I wanted to stay home to raise my daughter, but still needed a way to pay the mortgage. At the time, Grisham and Turow had come on to the scene, and it occurred to me that there was no one writing from the female perspective. I lived off credit cards for several years, and wrote while my daughter slept (which wasn’t much). I had finally just taken a part-time job as a law clerk when my first book, Everywhere That Mary Went sold to HarperCollins.

How does the Philadelphia area influence your writing?
All my books are set in Philly. I love Philly for its neighborhoods, dialects and heavy dose of reality, and thought it would be terrific to put it on the literary map. The law was also born in Philly, so what better place to set legal fiction books?

Can you offer any advice to young writers?
Just to go for it! I believe everyone has a story in them, and they should never be discouraged to put it on paper.

Pierce Street

I first see the cat on my way out to the Super Fresh to pick up Portobello mushrooms. He’s lying on the other side of our one-way street, a single lane narrow enough to be an alley really, a place where he never would have lain normally, smart stray that he was. I didn’t look for long, only enough to confirm that his body had been crushed, though not which part, to acknowledge the red pool spreading slowly beneath him, the flies already buzzing inside the mouth that the car wheel had forced open.

I look up and down Pierce Street and see that I’m alone. There’s no one around to fill me in on what happened, no one but me and this dead cat. It’s a hazy summer night in South Philadelphia. Air conditioning units whir from first and second floor windows. It isn’t much of a decision, really. I’m strapped for time, with a friend due to arrive for dinner and my new backyard grill not even fired. I keep moving, toward my Nissan, which beeps cheerfully when I aim the keyless remote toward it.

I squeeze my car around the cat, turn the corner and wave to the two old ladies sitting on beach chairs in the next alley. They smile and wave back. We’ve been on better terms lately. Our relationship, which even now consists solely of smiling and waving, has evolved slowly. At first they were content to stare as I drove past them on my way out for the evening. I forced the issue, though, making eye contact and waving when I was in a good mood and staring straight ahead when I wasn’t. The inconsistent approach didn’t exactly loosen them up, but now we have the routine down: I nod and smile, they smile and wave.

This brief interaction doesn’t help my mood, though. I make my way through a grid of streets in the gray summer night, pondering the reality of my neighborhood, a place where cats are hit by cars that keep driving. Where a friend of mine called the morning after my housewarming party, insisting that I move immediately after she had witnessed a gang of kids beat up another kid over on Washington Avenue on her way home. Where the people next door, a family that I knew would be trouble not long after I had moved in, once put a bullet through the center of my front picture window.

I was out for the night, having dinner at my parents’ house south of the city, in the now-suburban countryside where I grew up. It was dusk when I returned to find police tape separating my row house and the one next to it from the small crowd that had gathered. A group of women and children, some whom I vaguely recognized, pointed me toward the cop who stood nearby guarding the crime scene.

I didn’t ask for an explanation and the cop didn’t provide one, although I heard the story plenty of times in the weeks to come from Norman, the boy who knows everything there is to know about what goes on around Pierce Street. His face would light up and his glasses flash as he recreated the scene, the domestic dispute that erupted in the house next to mine and spilled out into the street. How the old lady’s son went after the guy nobody had ever seen before, how everybody scattered — adults, kids, everybody, including Norman — when the old lady gave the gun to her dear boy so he could start shooting. He didn’t get the guy, Norman said, his narrative slowing in disappointment. But I should have seen how the cops came running, he said, speaking breathlessly again. They must have been right up the street to get here so fast after everybody started using their cell phones to call 911!

At first the cop wouldn’t let me past the tape, but he changed his mind after a few minutes, with a warning not to touch anything until the detectives showed up. As I unlocked my front door, I took a closer look at the window. The hole the bullet had made was small and perfect, except for single cracks on each side that extended from the hole to the frame, like blood vessels in the eye of someone who is tired or stoned.

Inside, I turned on the light next to my sofa. Everything in the living room looked as I had left it, except for the tiny shards of glass on the stereo and carpet, and the hole the streaking bullet had made in my ceiling. I looked at the one in the window and the one in the ceiling and made a quick calculation: even if I had been standing right in front of the window, watching the fireworks, I wouldn’t have gotten hit. A broom that wasn’t mine was lying out on the patio, a stray projectile from the earlier rounds of the fight next door.

Later, I sat on the sofa watching the NBA Finals, as a detective stood on the chair I had lent him and poked a thin metal rod with a circular catch into my ceiling.

“Who’s up?” he asked.

“ Lakers by ten. Third quarter.”

“ Looks like their year again, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Too bad.” He nodded, concentrating on extracting the bullet. “Having any luck?”

“Nope,” he said, grunting as he stepped down from the chair. “That’s okay. We’ll have enough to nail him without it. Better call your landlord. Give him this when you see him,” he said, handing me his card.

[break]

The cat is still lying there when I get home. The street still seems deserted, but then I see Bobbie peering out her screen door and shaking her head. She looks distressed. I don’t know her well but I like her. Her face, perpetually tanned, is weathered enough to suggest someone in her late forties. Childless, she and her husband live in the house directly across from mine. Every night she spends ten minutes with the hose watering the plants on the sidewalk, a lit cigarette dangling from her lower lip. Her garden is a dazzling array of color, all in ceramic pots, and the only sign of natural life on Pierce Street. She smiled and said she would help when I told her I intended to start my own right across from her, but that was a few weeks ago and the last time we spoke.

“I’ll go get a box,” I tell her.

Her expression changes from one of concern to one of resolve. “I’ve got one,” she

says.

“Then I’ll go get gloves.”

She lines a cardboard box from her SUV with a green trash bag and gives it to me. I find that the only way to pick the cat up is to not think about it too deeply, not speculate on the life it might have led, a life I never considered that often on my way to and from my car every day. This must be the attitude anyone must have who confronts what violence does to the flesh for a living, I tell myself. The head sags and the flies scatter as I wrap my hands around the broken body, the blood smearing against the dried soil of my gardening gloves. Bobbie grabs her hose and aims a jet stream at the small pool still in the street. I hold on to the box, unsure of what to do with it, deciding finally to put it on the sidewalk in front of the house where the cat was hit.

Just then Milanya comes out. I have been wondering where she’s been. It is she who has been putting out the styrofoam bowls of dry food that were eaten every day by this stray and two others. Her attempt to domesticate one of the others, a feral kitten that I once found curled up on my doormat as I left for work on one of the coldest mornings of the year, has become a mini-drama recently. So far her efforts to catch Buster and take him to an animal hospital have been unsuccessful. She had gotten as far as coaxing him onto her lap, but last week I came out to find her sitting on a nearby stoop, sobbing, three fresh scratches running up the inside of her arm. Buster stared at her from the other side of a locked gate that protected his alley. She wasn’t crying from the pain, Milanya explained, but for all the days it would take to earn the cat’s trust again. So far she has ignored my sister, a lab tech at a veterinary hospital whose advice I solicited, about getting a cat trap instead.

When she sees the box and realizes what’s inside, she throws up her hands and paces back and forth, not sure what to do with herself. For someone in his late thirties, I feel like I’ve had surprisingly little experience consoling others after a loss. I can see, though, that it doesn’t require much practice: assume what you hope is a sympathetic expression, and nod with conviction at everything the mourner says, whether you agree with it or not. Keep controversial opinions, like your feelings about whether or not one should feed stray cats to begin with, to yourself.

“Who the hell could run over a cat like that and just leave it to die in the street?” Milanya asks. “And I’m sorry, but he’d have to be driving pretty damn fast to hit one in the first place.” While I agree with the first comment and act like I do for the second, I find that I have a hard time empathizing with Milanya’s hysteria. She is choosing to see what has happened as a crime against the cat. And in one way, I agree. All this just confirms something I don’t like about my neighborhood, reinforces my belief that ultimately I’ll never stay, will live here for now because the rent is cheap and the location convenient, but never buy, something that separates me from Milanya and Bobbie and most of the other residents on Pierce Street. But in another**, the cat’s death is just the law of averages kicking in, a probability that Milanya, through her daily bowls of cat food, inadvertently increased. **Not clear; maybe “But in another way,…”

She goes inside to see about having the cat cremated (“My God, we have to do something, we can’t just throw her in the trash!”). I’m about to as well – I’m wasting time and my friend should be arriving any minute now – when Lisa opens the screen door next to mine and says hello. She and her husband Mark moved in after the gunslingers left and the landlord gutted and renovated the place. He works in pharmaceuticals outside the city; she is five months pregnant with their first child. They’re a nice couple and a sign that gentrification, for better or worse, may finally be arriving here on Pierce Street.

We strike up a conversation about my job. She knows from some previous exchanges that I’m an English teacher, and asks me if I know someone she once had in high school, a Catholic parochial school for girls not far from our neighborhood. I don’t know the guy, explaining that private schools like mine don’t interact much with the archdiocesan ones.

“Was he a good teacher?” I ask.

“Oh yeah, he was great. I had him for AP English. He’s taught there for like 35 years.”

“It’s great to have one who really mattered, huh?”

“Oh yeah. He was like, the only good thing about that place.” She smiles when she says this, although the pain of the memory breaks in on the innocence of the smile.

“So what else is going on?” she asks.

“Oh, not much … oh, well, actually, it’s too bad, one of those stray cats just got hit by a car.” I try to adjust my tone to something more serious but it’s too late. Lisa’s face goes blank with confusion. Just then Milanya comes back out, still beside herself.

“Milanya?” she asks. “Which one?”

“Muggsy,” Milanya answers, wiping her eyes. “The one you were worried about.”

“Is he?” Lisa’s eyes darken and soften as she begins to comprehend. “Will you excuse me?” she asks, not really conscious of who I am anymore.

I can’t make out the muffled words behind her front door as she tells her husband the news, but I can hear clearly what comes after that: the sounds of her sobbing uncontrollably. Mark comes out a minute later. “I’ve never seen her so upset,” he says quietly, lighting a cigarette, and I nod with real empathy this time, keeping to myself the unexpected gratitude I feel for the high-pitched gasps I can still hear inside. Someone is doing what none of us had been capable of on this hot July night in the city. Someone is grieving at last.

Matthew Jordan grew up in Delaware County and now lives in South Philadelphia. A graduate of Albright College in Reading, PA and the University of Pennsylvania, he is finishing a Master?s program in English and Creative Writing at Rutgers-Camden. He teaches literature and writing at a private high school in Bucks County.

Waiting

We sit in an airless room surrounded by windows
Blue-black sky, towering neighbors
Wheelchair heaven.

You describe your dream:
Recurring images of chemo-stallions racing across your night sky
Towing starched lines that abruptly plunge to earth.

Lilacs hang daintily on the shower-rings of
New age transfusions,
Shamelessly spilling the scent of spring.

You take an old picture frame,
Plucked from the attic of your mind
And work to bring it all together.
It doesn’t fit.

Smell the lilacs
Feel the power of the stallion’s haunches
See the blue, blue sky without interpretation.

Enjoy this day, this view.
It is all you.

 

Tourette Poem #14

I’ve burdened my son with this now.
He misses strides, kisses the silence,
twists himself into a wretched mess.

A guest in his own body,
he is uncomfortable with the gaze
of strangers.

Too young to be so cautious,
too innocent to grapple with the whims
of that body gone haywire,

he stands at the edge of a narrow morning,
hoping that what is his prison
will someday be his palace.

“Daddy,” he said, “what disguise
do you wear to fool yourself?” or

“Can you taste on your tongue
the slow way mountains move?”

 

Anthony DiFiore has been writing poetry for thirty years. For the last several years he has been writing poems about Tourette’s and the Bible. Currently, he manages a thrift store that uses its profits to aid abused women and their children.

The Piano Chord Most Adjacent to the Inexpressible

The piano chord most adjacent to the inexpressible is the
one that dissolves into flocks of flying birds

The tree as it moves through the breeze most
adjacent to conducting the sonorous
filaments of the air stands as tall as a
doorman to an entranceway to the eternal mysteries

The desert most adjacent to spiritual enlightenment is the
one whose dunes yesterday don’t resemble its
dunes today and whose dunes today
have slopes and dips totally ocean-like and unlike any of its
dunes tomorrow

The rain is finally falling after a month of drought
little earth-lips opening to drink in each drop
and the song each water-drinking element sings
resembles the chorus of an ancient opera sung among
cataclysmic rocks above tumultuous seas

There are no people in this poem
they are either asleep or haven’t been born yet
but the sound in the landscape most adjacent to the
deep heartfelt human voice
is the night-cricket seeming to long for a mate wherever
it may happen to hear its lament repeated
incessantly but melodiously through the dark

So like us
in catastrophe or anti-catastrophe
calling out to space from our centrifugal loneliness
with a voice most adjacent to the
silent nuzzling feeler to feeler of ants meeting from
opposite directions
and lights beaming from north and south and brightly
blending somewhere over the
Arctic in a purple and scarlet shivering aurora borealis
whose ripples are most adjacent to the
music of the spheres hanging down into the
visible from the invisible heavens whose
radiant flowing draperies curving through the folding air
they are

 

Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore was born in 1940 in Oakland, California. His first book of poems, Dawn Visions, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books, San Francisco, in 1964. He became a Muslim/Sufi in 1970, performed the Hajj in 1972, and lived in Morocco, Spain, Algeria and Nigeria. In 1996 he published The Ramadan Sonnets, and in 2001 a new book of poems, The Blind Beekeeper.

The Decade I Longed To Be Grown

I wanted to talk jive.
I wanted to be funky
like the white boy who sang
psychedelic slang
& give birth
to a new dance trend
called disco.

I wanted to be
a kaleidoscope
big as an afro-shaped-globe,
spinning my own tempo
under black light dust.
I’d be a lava-lamp chick
— stone-cold bumping
my have-mercy hips—
& do the hustle
in mommy’s platform heels.

I wanted to be cool.
I wanted to cruise
with my own fly-dude
& steer
the turntable wheels.
We’d groove
What’s Going On?
in daddy’s brown El Camino,
pose mean gangsta leans
in neon-fur-smothered-bucket-seats,
& watch

Lucy’s Sky Diamonds
dangle & dance
like brilliant erotic dice.

 

Penny Dickerson is a 1988 graduate of Temple University where she earned a B.A. degree in Journalism and is currently a M.F.A. candidate in the Lesley University Creative Writing Program (Low Residency) in Cambridge, Mass. (Graduation: January 2005). She has additionally taken a continuing education poetry writing course at University of the Arts under the tutelage of Donna Wolf-Palacio and was once a “Suppose an Eye” participant at the Kelly Writer’s House and looks forward to her parenting scheduling and graduate school time to allowing her to come back. Previous poetry works and journalism have been published in the anthology, Azure and Amber, the Florida Times-Union and her poem, “A Conscious Statement” won first place winner in the Ritz Theatre’s poetry contest in Jacksonville, Florida. Penny will serve as Poet-in-Residence at Andrew Jackson Elementary School (K-8), this fall as a final graduation interdisciplinary project.

Spring

Aunt Ginny is up in her Cessna
Navigating circles and dips
Swooping in the sun

Uncle Jack is on the porch
Smoking dope and thinking
This getting old’s a bitch
When you’re sick

He faces the sky and
Looks for Aunt Ginny
They had a tough winter with his cancer
And weather so bad she couldn’t fly

But it’s spring now
And things are good
Uncle Jack rocks
Smokes dope
And plans
Thinking:
The sun is strong
The flowers are sweet
Maybe I’ll eat lunch today
If that’s stronger than the chemo

He rocks
And watches
While his beautiful white hair
Dead at the root
Blows off his head
Strand by strand
Sprinkling new flowers like snow

Up in the sky
Aunt Ginny does another loop de loop

 

Sandy Crimmins has been published in a variety of print and electronic journals, including American Writing, City Primeval, femmesoul, Isosceles, and Hysteria. Her work appears in the anthologies Meridian Bound, The Eternal Now, and Pagan’s Muse. She is also a spoken word artist, performing her work with musicians, dancers, and fire-eaters.

Kevin’s Funerals

I tried to get over Kevin, my ex-boyfriend, by pretending he was dead. Not the kind of dead where you sip an iced frappuccino on a cloud, but the kind where you’re stuffed into a wooden box and buried under dirt during a rainstorm. I did this on the advice of my therapist, Dr. Marta Pearce.

She said it would help. She said, if I really concentrated, I might be able to experience closure and as a result, move on. So, every night before bed I shut my eyes and pictured Kevin’s funerals. I did this for eight consecutive days, even though Dr. Pearce thought once should be enough. But I like the number eight and frankly, I like picturing Kevin dead. I even went to bed early, just so I could spend extra time on his funerals before my medication kicked in. I would cook up all kinds of scenarios, but the basic story went like this:

I am the last to arrive at Barclay’s Funeral Home, and by last, I mean that I make an entrance. You know the kind where everyone turns and stares, not because I’m late, but because I’m mysterious and beautiful and wearing a slinky black dress and leather espadrilles.

The crowd whispers excitedly, “How did Kevin get her?”

And, “Isn’t she that famous model?”

Kevin’s mother, a pink cushion of a woman who always wore too much perfume even after she found out she was allergic, which leads me to believe she did it on purpose, rushes over to embrace me. I don’t hug her back because she never did this when Kevin and I were dating, and besides, I don’t like to be touched.

“You’ve lost weight, Sharon,” she says, and I can tell she’s jealous. “You look amazing.”

It’s true. I have lost weight, or at least I’m going to. Soon. And I’m taller than I was when Kevin and I were together, by at least an inch.

She also says, “Kevin’s last words were, ‘Breaking up with Sharon was the biggest mistake I ever made.’”

And, “‘Sharon was the love of my life.’”

And sometimes, “‘My life sucks without Sharon.’”

I shrug, as if these revelations mean nothing to me, and wait for her to admit she was wrong about me.

“You were perfect for him,” she says finally, dabbing her eyes with the lace hankies I sent her the Christmas after Kevin and I broke up. “I realize that now.”

I can’t help myself; I smile. I was perfect for him. I still am.

She bites her lip and walks away, a pink cushion of regret.

Kevin’s sisters stare daggers at me, but I am used to this. In real life, Alana and

Courtney exchanged secret looks whenever Kevin brought me home. Dr. Pearce said it was because they were uncomfortable around me, but I know it’s because they were jealous. In all eight versions of the funeral Kevin’s father orders them to move down a seat so I can sit up front. Then he marches over, gives me his arm, and personally escorts me to the casket.

“My son was a damn fool,” he says, loud enough for everyone to hear. “He never should’ve let you get away.”

Kevin’s father always liked me. After the break-up, I would sit on Kevin’s front steps all night long, waiting for him to change his mind. The next morning, Kevin’s father would drive me home. Sometimes, he was late for work because of me.

“I can’t keep doing this, Sharon,” he’d say.

But, he did. Because he liked me.

“This is wrong, Sharon. It has to stop.”

It went on for a year.

“Can you forgive him?” Kevin’s father asks when we reach the casket. “Can you move on with your life?”

Of course I can forgive Kevin, now that he’s dead. Of course I can move on, now. And to prove it, I lean over and kiss his dead lips. A collective sigh rises from the crowd like fresh pastry.

Kevin is beautiful. What I mean is, he has a handsome face. The rest of him has been horribly mangled in a freak accident involving a deer and a Toyota Camry and lots of bleeding, inside and out. In one funeral, he’s lost both of his legs, and the casket is only three feet long. In another, he has a pair of antlers sticking out of his chest. Kevin is horribly deformed, except for his face. I kiss him again.

“I’m sorry,” Kevin’s father says.

That’s what he always said after we did it. When I told Dr. Pearce about the car rides, she said I had transferred my sexual feelings for Kevin to his father. That wasn’t it at all, but I didn’t argue because sexual transference looks a lot better on my chart than exchanging blow jobs for news about Kevin.

Everyone smiles at me now, even Courtney, Kevin’s older sister. I feel sorry for her because she takes after her mother, which means she wears clothes that try to fool you into thinking her thighs are not as big around as tree trunks. But they are. I’ve seen her in a bathing suit. Alana, Kevin’s other sister, has a Bikini Body, but it doesn’t matter because she’s a bitch. No matter how hard I try, I can’t imagine her smiling at me. In two versions of the funeral, she’s in the car with Kevin when he hits the deer.

I wrote all of this in a journal and gave it to Dr. Pearce. She seemed surprised I’d filled 88 pages and was impressed with my attention to detail.

“I hope this is an effective coping skill,” she said, and I watched her write those exact words on my chart. “But perhaps we should look at a different exercise. What do you think, Sharon?”

Dr. Pearce always asks what I think. She’s the only person who does, so I pause before I answer. I think this makes me look intelligent.

“Dr. Pearce [pause], wouldn’t it be better [longer pause] wouldn’t I be better if Kevin were really dead? Think how much more effectively I’d cope if I could really go to his funeral. Wouldn’t that be a great way to get over him once and for all?”

I could see by the look on her face that this was the wrong thing to say. I’ve always been good at reading people’s faces, a skill I learned from living with a mother who was an expert in giving Looks. You had to guess what she was thinking because she wouldn’t say, and most of the time I was right. This look, the one Dr. Pearce gave me, was a mixture of denial and apprehension. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen it today. When I was riding the bus over here, there was a girl sitting across the aisle from me. She was my age, which is thirty-one, or maybe she was eighteen, I’m not sure. The point is, she was reading the May Cosmo and crying. Well, I’ve read that issue several times and there is nothing in there to make you sad, so I knew it had to be something else, like the death of a puppy or a brain tumor or maybe a bad break-up. I got up and sat next to her.

“Excuse me? Miss? I have something to tell you.”

She looked at me and there was a crazy hope in her eyes. I chose the break-up.

“Your ex-boyfriend sends his love.”

The look she gave me was identical to the one Dr. Pearce gave me in her office and similar to the one my mother gives whenever I talk about being a fashion model. Anyway, the girl got off at the next stop, but not before whispering, “asshole,” which only confirms that I was right about the boyfriend.

Dr. Pearce didn’t curse and she didn’t leave the room, but I had to spend the rest of our session trying to convince her that I was only kidding about Kevin. I even offered to tear up the journal and never write about another funeral (though I wasn’t sure I could actually do this), but she called my mother anyway and asked her to pick me up.

“I don’t think you should be alone today, Sharon,” she said, placing her hand on my shoulder. Dr. Pearce never touches me unless she’s giving me bad news.

The fact is, and she knows this, I’m not alone at Bridgeway House. There’s Elaine in the next room, and Katie who shares our bathroom, and the woman who empties trash cans all day. But I knew what Dr. Pearce meant. She didn’t want me to lock myself in my room and refuse to come out for two days, like last time. And she didn’t want me to cut myself because eight months ago she wrote, “No longer a danger to self or others” on my chart and she didn’t want to take it back. I know all this because I read my chart whenever Dr. Pearce leaves the room.

“Sharon? Please look at me. I’m going to call your mother now. I’d feel better if you stayed with her tonight. What do you think?”

I sat back and let her do the thing that was going to make her feel better, even though I knew my mother would be pissed.

She’d say, “I’m sick of this bullshit, Marta.”

And, “Goddam it, do you know how busy I am?”

That’s what she always says when Dr. Pearce calls, even if she hasn’t called in a long time. And, she hasn’t. Not for eight months. So there’s really no reason for my mother to be mad.

I call her my mother, but actually (and she agrees) I’m not sure we’re even related. I look nothing like her, just like Alana looks nothing like her mother and

Courtney. My mother is long-limbed and nasty, like a spider in a children’s book, and doesn’t have to diet to be skinny, and used to say when I was little and before I became too much for her to handle that she took the wrong baby home from the hospital. It was a joke, I know, just not a funny one.

She would also say, “Do you really need that piece of cake?”

And, “You take after your father’s side of the family.”

And sometimes, “I don’t know what to do with you anymore, Sharon.”

And it is possible I was switched at birth because my mother and I are as different as two people can be, although there is no mention of a hospital mix-up in my chart.

So this woman, my mother or maybe not, came dressed in a two-piece tweed suit and black espadrilles, and had her own session with Dr. Pearce. Even though I couldn’t hear them, I knew Dr. Pearce was telling on me, which should bother me but doesn’t. It would be different if she was saying these things to Kevin, or even Kevin’s father, but my mother doesn’t expect to hear good things about me. She came out of that session with the same mad face she had on when she went in.

“Ready to go home, Sharon?” she asked, but she was only being polite for Dr. Pearce’s sake. When we got outside, she took my hand and dragged me down the street like a shopping cart with a broken wheel. Her apartment is four blocks from the office, which gave her plenty of time to say,

“I can’t believe this is still going on.”

And, “Do you know how busy I am?”

And finally, “When’s this going to end, Sharon? Can you tell me that?”

I didn’t answer because, truthfully, I’m not sure what this is. I don’t think it’s the therapy, because my mother likes Dr. Pearce. And it was her idea that I increase my medication, so that’s not it. Maybe it’s the phone calls. My mother can’t take personal calls at work. She is a financial advisor at a brokerage house and when she has to leave early because of my behavior, either “all hell breaks loose” or “the shit hits the fan.”

Anyway, that’s what she says. But, I don’t call her anymore because there aren’t any 8’s in her work number and I don’t like the way her voice sounds when she answers and furthermore, today was not my idea. I hope Dr. Pearce told her that.

I suspect it’s my career plans. She wasn’t happy when I dropped out of college after two months, but, as I told her at the time, a fashion model has no need for higher education. I know, at five foot two inches, I’m not tall enough for the runway, but I have my sights set on print ads and there is no height requirement for that, according to Women’s Wear Daily or W, as it’s now called. And, if I put my mind to it, I can lose the ten pounds that the camera adds. I can lose more than that, if I want to.

My mother hates when I talk about this, but that’s because she’s someone who has no problem crushing every dream I ever had. When I wanted to be a secretary, she said, “You can barely handle clerical work, Sharon,” and to prove it, gave me a job at her company. The people there weren’t friendly; at least the women weren’t. They were jealous because Mr. Abbott, the supervisor, favored me over all the other file clerks. He’d call me into his office and say,

“You’re doing an excellent job, Sharon.”

And, “You’re an important asset to the company.”

And then, “I pass Bridgeway House every morning –why don’t I pick you up?”

When we were late for work he’d tell me not to worry and sign me in at the regular time. He said no one would know the difference because we weren’t that late, and on the mornings he took too long, I’d just finish him off in the car.

How was I supposed to know that dating your supervisor was against company policy? Models don’t have to worry about things like that. They are free spirits who make their own rules. That’s what I told Mrs. Olmstead from Personnel when she called me into her office for a private chat. Only, it wasn’t private because my mother was there and kept screaming things like,

“That goddam bastard!”

And, “I should have him arrested!”

This was her way of showing she was on my side, but all it did was upset me so much that I called her a cunt and threatened to be a danger to myself and others. After I was escorted out of the building by my mother and two security guards, I left a message on Mr. Abbott’s phone (his number had three eights) asking if he still wanted to date, but his number was changed and I couldn’t figure out the new one, even after spending an entire afternoon trying different combinations. That’s when Dr. Pearce changed my medication. And even though my mother wonders out loud what the hell I do all day, she doesn’t hesitate to bring up “that fucking disaster” at Blackwell Brothers when I talk about getting a job. So I don’t talk about it anymore, at least not to her. So that isn’t what she wants to end.

This bothers me. I can’t stop thinking about it. Even after Jay Leno is over and I’ve cut up every one of my mother’s fashion magazines, I can’t stop.

When I wake my mother to ask about it, she tells me to go back to sleep. But she of all people knows I can’t do that. I have to know. Now.

“Sharon, please. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

I know we won’t.

“I can’t deal with this again, Sharon.”

It’s not just her Look this time, but her voice, dripping with something that is not poison, but worse. Separation. The splitting of an atom.

“You should go to sleep.”

I’m afraid to go to sleep and I tell her this.

“Should we call Dr. Pearce?”

I threw the phones in the bathtub an hour ago.

“Jesus, Sharon.”

Resignation, maybe.

Maybe not.

Revelation.

My heart beats quickly. I remember what it is now. It’s Kevin.

She wants Kevin to end, or rather my feelings for him. She wants to get inside my head and stop me from thinking about him. That’s what Dr. Pearce wants, too. Everybody wants this. Everyone but me.

“Do you think it will end,” I ask her, “when Kevin is dead?”

My mother is finally silent. That gives me hope. But then, she looks at me and screams, “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

How does a rational person answer a question like that? There is no answer. (This is in fact what I say to her.)

“Please tell me you’re joking, Sharon.”

I have never told a joke in my life. She knows that.

And suddenly she’s shaking me, as if she can empty out everything that makes me different from her. And she’s repeating herself.

“Twelve years. Twelve years. Twelve years.”

She says this as if my heart is attached to a clock.

“He has a wife, Sharon. Children.”

Families break up. Fathers leave. My own father left when I was five.

“Kevin doesn’t love you anymore.”

That is just plain mean.

“He’s moved on.”

Her words are hooks that make holes in my skin and let in all of her spider poison. When she’s completely drained, she gives me a look that I mistakenly read as defeat. But, I’m wrong this time. She has a little poison left.

“It was so long ago, baby.”

And I don’t have anything to say except, not to me. I want to scream this in her face and tell her I hate her and have always hated her and then I want to ask her why? Why are we nothing alike? Why aren’t I tall and beautiful and have a job where the shit hits the fan if I’m not there? Why do I have to think about Kevin every day, and why won’t I have a Bikini Body by June 1 like it promised on the cover of the May Cosmo? Why can’t I be like everyone else? When is this going to end? But I don’t ask any of these things because my mother, the spider, is crying.

 

Terry Mergenthal has been writing since the age of nine, when she launched a school newspaper from her basement with carbon paper and a used Remington typewriter. Two years ago, she left a career in corporate sales to pursue writing full time. She is working on a collection of short stories and recently completed her first novel, Redeemer, the story of a family marred by murder-suicide in the 1970’s. Terry currently lives in Cherry Hill with her husband and two daughters.