adorable. This is a man who bosses multinational corporations around and scares the living daylights out of CEOs with just a glance and the readying of his pen. This is a man who commands the best tables at restaurants on the power of his name alone. And here he is whining like a six-year-old boy who doesn’t want to miss the ice cream truck.
“I know,” I lower my voice and now make more of an effort to hurry through spraying my perfume in the air and walking through the mist, during which I, of course, forget to close my eyes and cost us a valuable ten seconds of time while I wave both my hands furiously in front of my face, hoping the slight whiff of air will keep the tears from forming. It doesn’t. Even with my head tilted back, as if that would help, my eyes immediately fill with protective droplets. Now I have to touch up my makeup again.
“Em, come on,” he pleads again. We have a long ride to my mother’s house, and I am half blind and tearing like I’ve just cut onions as I stumble out to the car, arms outstretched and feeling for the door handle.
When we arrive, the cars are all in line in Delilah’s circular cobblestone driveway. Candles are lit in each window, which gives the house some appearance of warmth and charm in the darkness (otherwise it quite resembles a haunted mansion with its dramatic stone cuts and gables, the gargoyles on the corner eaves like a classic Old World New York City hotel). Anthony skids the car into an available spot while the red-jacketed valet looks on in stunned and insulted silence. He hurries forward and for a minute forgets that I am with him.
“Are they here?” I call out from still inside the car, with the door swung open, trying to arrange my skirt so that I don’t flash the valets as a little compensation for us speeding right by them. I stand finally, tottering on my heels on the cobblestone surface of the driveway.
“I don’t…I don’t see it…” Anthony is tall, but he’s rising on his toes to try to spot the Mazda among the Lexuses (Lexi?), Mercedes and, inexplicably, minivans.
“Good,” I release my shoulders down a half inch and breathe fully for the first time in an hour. Anthony has driven like a—
“Oh God!” Anthony deflates, physically sinks to what looks like two inches shorter than usual, then turns to me with a white face and dull eyes. “It’s here.”
“They’re here?” Now I’m stricken and white with anxiety, the blood sound rushing in my ears as I’m sure his was as well. Pure panic. His parents are like him, never on time to anything. And now we were out here in the driveway and they were inside my mother’s house, at my mother’s party, having probably met her already. Without us. That could not be good. Worst case scenario.
“Disaster,” whispers Anthony and after a split second to lock eyes in mutual silent planning, together we run for the front door. Running in stilettos is never pretty, but try it on a cobblestone driveway. You need ankles of steel. I must have looked like I was running over hot coals, all flailing and awkward-legged, moving forward and trying to stay upright, not being able to focus on much but seeing the back flaps of Anthony’s jacket waving at me as a fashion taunt. And did I mention that it’s hard to come to a stop while wearing stilettos and running? I’m sure the guests inside heard the thud when I hit the door, and only much, much later, when perspective allows you to look back and laugh at a moment of pure mortification, did Anthony admit that he thought I was actually trying to break the door down with my shoulder.
Locked.
We ring the bell, and the door magically slides open by no one in particular that we could make eye contact with, because the moment we were inside we snapped into reconnaissance mode. Scanning the crowd for his parents and my mother, marching forward with dead-serious purpose, we wove around anything in our path to find them. Time was moving in an off-kilter pace, with edges blurred and no sound seeming to come from any of the partygoers’ mouths. Adrenaline apparently makes you deaf too. People smiled at us, and in our fierce tunnel vision, we looked right through them, ignored them. We really know how to make an entrance.
It was our engagement party. We were the guests of honor, and we all but plowed through groups of our well-wishers, elbowed away gushing and smothering great-aunts, snubbed adorably dressed little girls with bows in their hair and a starstruck look in their eyes, twirled tuxedo-clad waiters in our wake as they pirouetted to save their trays of champagne and salmon crudité from our forceful and focused path. We were actually running now. Anthony pulled me by the hand through any open pathway, slaloming around groupings of chairs, turning corners around marble columns, and scanning the crowd with osprey vision for any sign of two somewhat short Italians undoubtedly hovering in the corner in an overwhelmed daze.
Room to room the search went on, with us blowing through in fast-forward with the sound off. And just before we took the stairs two at a time to search the bathrooms and bedrooms upstairs, I saw it happen. My eyes stopped in mid-scan and locked on the scene, zooming in with the clearest of precision. It was, of course, the first thing I saw clearly all night.
At the doorway to the kitchen (where else would Carmela be?), there she stood.
I could only see her upswept twist of a hairdo, home-done and with some flyaways poking out of her hair clip, and the red-flushed side of her face, her mouth open, slack in disbelief. She wore a black dress with a white cameo pin at the neck, which explains the confusion. She was looking down at her hands, at the fur coat she now held loosely in them. And her face rose blankly when Delilah’s publisher, Roger, dropped his hat in her hands and kept walking toward the bar, deep in conversation with Delilah’s publicist. From the side, another guest draped a fur over Carmela’s now full hands, and Carmela’s head turned again in a slow, dumbstruck way as it all started to add up…
They think she’s the maid.
“Anthony!” I pulled him by the back of his jacket, depending on his old soccer days’ agility to keep from tumbling backward into a certain head injury on the marble floor, and pushed my way through more guests to reach her. Anthony was paper white when he arrived behind me.
“Carmela!” I hugged her while Anthony deftly slid the jackets out of her hands. The hat he let drop to the floor. “Sorry we’re late, we had a terrible time with traffic, and we tried to call you but you’d already left…” My plan of diversion was just to keep talking nonstop. Confuse her so she doesn’t remember that she’s just been mistaken for the help.
“Some museum this is!” Anthony’s father, Vic, appeared from the kitchen, chewing on a biscotti that he’d stolen from the not-yet-ready-to-be-served dessert trays. “Jesus! Look at this place!”
“Dad,” Anthony warned and with a stiff shake of their hands and a silent male reminder through the eyes, the men were behaving and calm and ready to get drinks at one of the three bars spread throughout the downstairs of the house.
“You grew up here?” Carmela asked with her deep brown eyes narrowed ever so slightly, like she didn’t even want to hear the answer.
“No,” I said with an enormous smile, showing her that I was glad not to have grown up in splendor. “We lived in Nutley before this.”
The magic word. Nutley. Carmela softened. I was back to size with her again.
“This is quite a…” Carmela couldn’t find the words.
“Yes, it is,” I stopped her, not even knowing what I’d answered. Anthony formed the international signal for do you want a drink? and I held up four fingers. And keep them coming.
Carmela stood with her back to the wall, fingering the leaves on a potted ficus tree, and pulling her hand back slightly when she figured out by touch that it was real. The edges of her mouth lowered slightly, and she looked at the china cabinet. Nothing fake there either. I heard her sigh, then wondered what level of hell this evening was going to sink to.
Quite the thought for a bride-to-be at her engagement party. What level of hell will this evening sink to? And right on cue, there was Delilah. She stood still when she saw us, didn’t rush forward for a hug. She wore an off-white, tailored suit dress with clear Swarovski crystal beading on each lapel, an off-white rose corsage with pearl