of my book deadline holding me back. Must write book… I really couldn’t go anywhere until I hammered out this ending, but I was getting close.
“So book a flight for after Christmas,” Jack said, making it sound all too real. “You probably want to take the girls, ease them into it.”
The girls…I hadn’t really anticipated their reaction to moving. I decided to put that conversation off until after Christmas.
That Christmas I felt full of hope and excitement, sure that in future Christmases our family would be more relaxed, less harried, leaving us more time to eat together and participate in family activities. Although I had no idea what those activities might be out in Oregon, I composed a placid family portrait in my mind: Jack with a fishing rod, me in worn blue jeans that fit at the waist, the kids in yellow slickers and rain boots right out of the Land’s End catalog. Next year we could buy them bikes since they’d have a place to ride them in the wide-open spaces. Next year we could try skiing at Mount Hood, and this summer we’d rent a houseboat or take the girls white-water rafting.
“White-water rafting?” Jack asked dubiously one night as we rattled through plastic bags, trying to assemble as many toys as possible. “Sure. And I’ll grow a beard and start eating tree bark and you can call me Grizzly Jack.”
“Don’t crush the dream, and can you figure out where the batteries go?” I asked, handing him a robot Scout had resigned herself to when I warned her that she couldn’t count on Santa to deliver rocket boots or a hovercraft or any of her other new inventions this year.
By Christmas day our little town house was bursting at the seams under the weight of holiday gifts and decorations. Before we’d even had coffee and cinnamon rolls Scout’s robot had knocked over a vase Becca had made for me in Girl Scouts, and Dylan had cut his foot on a twisty tie wire from a toy package. But I didn’t sweat it, knowing that this would be our last Christmas in cramped quarters. We would probably have to sit for more than an hour in bridge traffic to make Christmas dinner at my parents’ house in New Jersey, but I refused to get annoyed and packed a deck of cards to distract the girls with.
If Christmas Eve with the dysfunctional Salernos hadn’t blown my resolve, nothing would.
Jack and I had stayed up for an hour early this morning, raking over the coals. Jack’s mother had insisted we stay for course after course of verbal abuse and heavy foods—the appetizer, the antipasto, the pasta course, the fish course, the dessert platter. I didn’t let myself get annoyed over Mira’s bossiness or worried that we were keeping the kids up till midnight on Christmas Eve. If this was going to be our last Christmas in New York, I was determined to suck it up and make it a merry one, even if it meant playing the long-suffering daughter-in-law, though Mira nearly undid my resolve with a single platter of shrimp.
“Did you see Grandpa’s fish?” Mira asked the children, pointing them into the den, to a mounted cod on a plaque, a small Santa cap perched on its head. “Isn’t it hilarious? Press the button. Go on, press it!”
Becca followed her instruction and the cod’s mouth opened and closed as it growled out the carol: “We Wish You a Merry Christmas!”
Mira clapped her hands to her cheeks in hilarity. Becca nodded politely, but the rest of us seemed unfazed.
“We’ve got one of these at home, Grandma,” Scout pointed out. “We got it for Daddy last Christmas.”
“Oh, really?” Mira’s smile went slack as she spun toward Scout. With the aura of scotch hanging over her I worried she might fall on my daughter, but Mira righted herself, hands on hips. “And I suppose yours is better?”
Scout blinked, clearly uncomfortable.
Stepping in quickly, I put my hands on Scout’s shoulders reassuringly. “It’s okay, honey.” I pulled Scout against me, as if the need for a hug had just come over me. “The fish is very funny, Mira. That’s why the girls bought it for Jack. We howled when we first saw it in the store.”
“I suppose,” Mira said, but her movements were icy as she turned and headed back to the kitchen, mimicking my daughter. “We have one at home!”
It’s not a competition, I wanted to call after her, but I held my breath, having covered that ground with Mira before, to no avail. Mirabella Salerno wanted to be the best, the prettiest, the funniest, the richest, and she didn’t even have the refinement to mask her quest for self-aggrandizement beneath a more subtle façade. The daughter of Long Island’s self-proclaimed mattress king, Mira’s childhood had been chock-full of material splendor. I’d seen photos of the white baby grand piano, the pony, and the catered birthday parties with magicians, clowns and candy shops on wheels. Since her parents had died before I came into the picture I was never quite sure if these treats were reinforced by genuine love and affection. In either case, the goodies had stopped when the IRS clamped down on her father for nonpayment of income taxes while Mira was in high school. Her “good life” went down the drain and she’d been unable to pull herself back up into the privileged social strata. I sensed that her marriage to Conny had been a concession, with baby Frankie coming along a mere seven months after the ceremony. “He was premature,” Mira always claimed. “You should have seen him—a scrawny thing.” Despite her pride over the grown Frank, who’d revitalized the mattress dynasty, I sensed that Mira had settled when she married a mere transit worker. Over the years Conny had moved into the family business, but he never became the Mattress King.
Although family fortunes dwindled, Mira never lost her sense of entitlement and vanity. According to Mira, she was the best woman golfer at the Little Bay Club, the smartest player in her bridge club, the youngest-looking grandmother in all of Queens. I would agree that her home, a contemporary minimansion right at the edge of Little Neck Bay in Malba, was among the most breathtaking in New York City, though the cavernous great room and cold hardwood floors seemed to cry out that beauty is meaningless in a home without human warmth and compassion. In that way, the house was an accurate reflection of Mira’s personality—a stark, expensive show-place with no tolerance for liveability.
“What do you think my parents are going to do in that house?” Jack had asked when construction was under way some ten years ago. “Did you see the house? It’s huge!”
“Well, I suspect they’ll start by having sex in each room,” I had answered flippantly. “And then they’ll strip off their clothes, run naked down to the water and shout: ‘We’re queen and king of the world!’”
Jack had been sorry he asked, though he laughed despite himself, despite the lingering pain that tugged at him whenever his parents entered his periphery. Apparently it hadn’t been easy growing up in the Salerno household, son of Constantine and Mirabella. I didn’t meet Jack until we were both in our twenties, so I can only go on his stories of the horrors of coming home at age eight and not knowing what to expect. A good day would be when his mother would pour him a glass of milk and remind him to clean his room and get his homework done. A bad day? Well, they ranged from inebriated Mom dropping whole jars of garlic powder into the spaghetti sauce to Mom passed out on the floor, her face bloody and bruised from the fall. It always broke my heart to hear Jack recollect these stories so calmly, to picture the young Jack, close to Rebecca’s age, picking up his mother, dabbing at her wounds with a damp washcloth and helping her back to bed, all the while worried that she might come alive and lash out at him, spewing out accusations and curses in her drunken state. “She wasn’t always that way,” Jack would tell me calmly. “But not knowing, the anxiety of wondering as I walked home from school what kind of mood she’d be in, that was the worst part.”
“And where was your father when this was going on?” I’d asked dumbly.
At work, driving a train for the MTA. Or taking Jack’s older brother Frankie to a “go-see” in Manhattan, since Frank’s success at age seven in a TV commercial for bandages had the whole family hot for Hollywood. Or coaching Frank’s baseball team to victory (though Frank was warned to duck fly balls to protect his money-maker from disfiguration). Or carousing with his buddies down at the Town Tavern. Or ushering the eleven thirty mass each Sunday—one of the