They had a house with a mother, a father and two kids. We couldn’t get enough of it.
House Number Three was actually an apartment. It belonged to my father. And then there was his girlfriend’s apartment. My father saw my sister and me on weekends. That was the custody agreement. Saturday nights we either slept at his apartment in Port Chester (another suburb about twenty minutes from Yonkers) or we would go to his girlfriend’s place, where my sister and I would crash on a pull-out couch. House Number Four.
I HAD TROUBLE sleeping at that age regardless of where I slept. I never wanted to go to bed for fear that I would miss something. I remember lying in bed hearing adults talking or a newspaper turning or the television and I thought, I gotta get out there. What could they possibly be doing? There is definitely something goin’ on.
The other thing that would keep me awake was the sound of my parents’ voices. The ones that my mind recorded from when they were still married. Not conversations. Fights. And not the words they used to fight with but the sounds they produced while they were fighting. Theirs was not an amicable breakup. There’s a thing that happens to a person’s voice at the peak of rage. Vocal cords no longer become a free channel to express emotion. Vibrations become impeded and grate against the inside of one’s throat. This is what I knew to be the sound of my parents’ relationship ending. When that recorded noise would keep me awake, I would try to replace it with the sound of my Big Wheel. A plastic tire rolling over cement. This worked for me sometimes.
Even after I fell asleep, I didn’t easily stay asleep. I would often wake up in the night, usually from nightmares. And sometimes figments of my dreams would float around the room. This was terrifying, and the only way I knew how to snap myself completely out of the dream state was to run. I would run into the bathroom, down the stairs or out into the hall. Once I woke up and started running from something and crashed right into my mother’s bedpost. Nose first. My mother sat me up on the bathroom sink with a wad of toilet paper on my nose to stop the bleeding. “What the hell were you doin’?”
“Umm … I couldn’t sleep.”
“So you figured you’d run into a couple of walls? Knock yourself out?”
She made me laugh. This, she was good at.
Of the four different places I slept, there was only one constant: my sister Catherine always slept right beside me. She was either in the same bed as me or in the bed right next to mine for the first six years of my life.
There was a moment in the mornings, after my sister and I woke up and before we opened our eyes, when we weren’t sure which one of the four houses we’d woken up in. (If you’ve ever fallen asleep in your own bed with your head where your feet usually are, woken up and were so confused as to why your window was now behind you, then you get the picture.) So what my sister and I would do was keep our eyes closed and try to guess. We would try to listen for someone’s voice or try to smell where we were. There was always one place out of the four where we secretly wished to be, but it was never the same place every time. It depended on our mood. And sometimes, when we really, really wanted to be in one place and woke up someplace else, it was a drag. Oh, damn, I’m here? I wanted to be there.
IN 1975, WHEN I was four and Catherine was six, our mother, at age twenty-five, had a job at a department store. She worked weekends and some weeknights. That way her days could be spent with her children. The couple of weeknights she had to work were tough for us. I remember us crying a lot because we didn’t want our mom to leave. Our grandparents were great people, but we were already one parent short.
Not only was our mother young, she was also pretty. On weekends she would go to the beauty parlor with her friends. She always wanted to be attractive for herself, but since the divorce, and for the first time in her adult life, she also had the intention of being attractive for other guys. She started dating a few years after she and my dad split.
She brought a man to 15 Verona Avenue whose name was Raymond Canalli. He was a well-dressed guy who drove a new Cadillac Coupe de Ville and apparently was in the contracting business. Ray had pudgy fingers with three big rings. Which gave his hands a look of wealth and therefore security. I liked them. I liked them when they were holding my grandmother’s silverware at the dinner table and I liked them when he patted me on the head. One night, from our bedroom window, my sister and I watched my mother walk Ray to his car. Ray had one hand on our mother’s back. I liked that, too.
Our mother never stayed over at Ray’s place, nor did he ever stay at our grandparents’ house. Even dating was a bit tricky.
Catherine and I used to tie one end of a jump rope to the partition fence. While one of us turned the free end, the other one would jump through. One night, while my mother was out with Ray, Catherine was at the fence turning the jump rope and I was sitting at the iron table on the back patio with my grandfather. He was drinking a beer and I asked him if I could have some. He had a little more than half a beer left and gave it to me. Catherine said, “Joey, come jump with me.” It was a beautiful summer night; I was drinking beer with my grandfather and had my elbows on the table; I was feeling very grown up. Playing jump rope with my sister would’ve interfered with how cool I was. So I just sort of shrugged one shoulder at her, said, “Maybe later,” and finished the warm can of Miller High Life. It didn’t agree with me. Later on that night, I wound up in the bathroom throwing up, with my grandfather sitting on the edge of the bathtub watching me. With my head in the bowl, I heard my mother come home from her date and my grandmother yelling from the kitchen, “Your father gave him a beer, now he’s throwing up in there!”
My mother came into the bathroom and, having assessed the situation before she even put a foot in the door, slapped my grandfather on the back of his head, slapped me on the back of my head, and walked out shouting, “I’m gone for four hours and my son winds up knee-deep in bile?”
My grandfather laughed at that. My mother screamed some more from the kitchen. “It’s funny? It’s so goddamn funny that I’m twenty-five and I can’t go out for one night without coming back to this? It’s funny, right?”
My grandfather stopped laughing. I was wishing that I had jumped rope that night and my mother was probably thinking she shouldn’t go out to dinner for a while.
AFTER ABOUT SIX months into the relationship with our mom, Ray started showing up with presents for everyone. A couple toys for us kids, an expensive piece of jewelry for our mother. Then, one Wednesday night, in the middle of August 1975, Ray Canalli brought over a little something for the house. Like two television sets. One was a twenty-one-inch color TV for the living room and the other was a portable black and white number that we could watch outside on the back patio. A big color TV? For my sister and me? It sent our heads spinning. But the portable one? Now, that was something special. Plenty of people had regular TVs, but having one you could watch from your back patio? That was something to be contested. And that was exactly what Catherine and I felt on our grandparents’ patio, with our bowl of popcorn, watching our New York Yankees play on our brand-new portable television set—we were something to be contested.
That night, I woke up and, standing before me in our room, a witch was sharpening her cats’ claws on a whetstone. It made sounds that should’ve come off a chalkboard or out of a blacksmith shop. Two hateful and unyielding forces grinding against each other that sent my four-year-old ass running. When I got halfway down the stairs, I heard some kind of clanging noises and voices ahead of me. I stopped, trapped between two scary places. I looked back up the stairs. The entrance to our room was foggy and dark. The witch wasn’t following me, but I still didn’t know what those noises from downstairs were, so I wasn’t going anywhere. I dropped to a stair and held my blanket up to my mouth. I froze. Then the clanging in the distance began to sound familiar—ceramic cups hitting against saucers, maybe. I recognized the voices as my mother’s and Ray’s, coming from the kitchen. As my mind cleared, I realized they were just talking and sipping coffee. It was nothing.
“Ray, what are you doing?”
“Drinking coffee with you. What are you doing?”
“Trying to raise my kids right.”