door in tears.
“Oh, Jesus, Carla,” my mother would say. “Sit down. Relax.”
“Kathi, you know how he gets.”
“Believe me. I remember.”
For some sick reason, Carla’s crises brought out my mother’s perky side. Kathi would practically chirp as she whipped up something for Carla to eat. My mother and stepmother would sit at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes and snacking like two girlfriends on their lunch break. When Carla decided that she was ready to go back home, my mother respectfully showed her the door.
“She’s not the brightest person in the world,” Kathi said of Carla. “And she’s lazy, always has been. The woman has two speeds—slow and stop. But, Christ, if I had to live with your father, I’d want to sleep all day, too.”
——
MY STEPMOTHER WAS THE youngest of three girls, the only member of her immediate family who was born in America. Her parents and sisters moved from Italy after World War II ended. Carla’s mother, Elda, was a big, square-faced woman with a loud, brusque voice, who in her sixty-one years as an American citizen never learned to speak English. She didn’t need to. If Elda wanted something, she would simply holler and thrash while everyone around her scrambled to figure out what had to be done.
My father hated Elda so much that he refused to go to his mother-in-law’s house even on Christmas Day. The one time I remember Elda visiting our house, she commandeered my father’s yard tools and did some pruning on the birch Dad loved more than any other tree in the yard.
“Get away from that,” Zeke yelled when he saw what she was doing. Elda snapped back at him in Italian, a long, Fascist-sounding rant, then went home. A few months later, the birch tree died.
“She killed it,” my father said. “She did it on purpose.”
My stepmother grew up to be the exact opposite of her mother: a quiet, sluggish woman with her head in the clouds. Carla’s only expressed ambition in life was to become a flight attendant or a florist. She’s been a waitress and a hospital tech, sometimes simultaneously, for the almost thirty years that I’ve known her. A devoted mother, she always made sure that her work schedule allowed her to go to my brother’s and sister’s hockey games. She has probably spent half her adult life shivering in ice rinks, cheering for her offspring as they skated in circles and clobbered other kids with their sticks.
As soon as he married Carla, my father bought back his childhood home from the couple who had bought it from his widowed mother. It’s a New England cape with weather-beaten shingles that look like slices of burned toast. The house is small, but the backyard is one of the biggest on the street, with room enough for a garden and a decent game of Wiffle ball. At the edge of the yard is a hill that my father gutted of trees and terraced with long wooden planks hescavenged from the town dump. Below the hill is a meadow of wild-flowers and reeds. Every winter the Danvers Fire Department floods the meadow with water so that it can freeze into a public skating park. Zeke taught my brother, sister, and me how to skate there by pushing a plastic milk crate around the ice until we were sturdy enough to glide away on our own. He and his four brothers all learned to skate the same way, in the same meadow, a generation before us.
I spent Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays at my father’s when—if—visitations were being properly observed, and I cannot recall a single day in my life when his house was not under construction. Zeke has remodeled the interior himself slowly over the years, tearing apart floors and knocking down walls. He works room by room, often leaving a project unfinished for several months in the spring only to resume it later in the winter. There have been spells when we washed our dishes in the bathtub, or shared one toilet among six people. Inevitably, in the rubble of these renovations, my father will find something—a
“Oh, Jesus, Carla,” my mother would say. “Sit down. Relax.”
“Kathi, you know how he gets.”
“Believe me. I remember.”
For some sick reason, Carla’s crises brought out my mother’s perky side. Kathi would practically chirp as she whipped up something for Carla to eat. My mother and stepmother would sit at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes and snacking like two girlfriends on their lunch break. When Carla decided that she was ready to go back home, my mother respectfully showed her the door.
“She’s not the brightest person in the world,” Kathi said of Carla. “And she’s lazy, always has been. The woman has two speeds—slow and stop. But, Christ, if I had to live with your father, I’d want to sleep all day, too.”
——
MY STEPMOTHER WAS THE youngest of three girls, the only member of her immediate family who was born in America. Her parents and sisters moved from Italy after World War II ended. Carla’s mother, Elda, was a big, square-faced woman with a loud, brusque voice, who in her sixty-one years as an American citizen never learned to speak English. She didn’t need to. If Elda wanted something, she would simply holler and thrash while everyone around her scrambled to figure out what had to be done.
My father hated Elda so much that he refused to go to his mother-in-law’s house even on Christmas Day. The one time I remember Elda visiting our house, she commandeered my father’s yard tools and did some pruning on the birch Dad loved more than any other tree in the yard.
“Get away from that,” Zeke yelled when he saw what she was doing. Elda snapped back at him in Italian, a long, Fascist-sounding rant, then went home. A few months later, the birch tree died.
“She killed it,” my father said. “She did it on purpose.”
My stepmother grew up to be the exact opposite of her mother: a quiet, sluggish woman with her head in the clouds. Carla’s only expressed ambition in life was to become a flight attendant or a florist. She’s been a waitress and a hospital tech, sometimes simultaneously, for the almost thirty years that I’ve known her. A devoted mother, she always made sure that her work schedule allowed her to go to my brother’s and sister’s hockey games. She has probably spent half her adult life shivering in ice rinks, cheering for her offspring as they skated in circles and clobbered other kids with their sticks.
As soon as he married Carla, my father bought back his childhood home from the couple who had bought it from his widowed mother. It’s a New England cape with weather-beaten shingles that look like slices of burned toast. The house is small, but the backyard is one of the biggest on the street, with room enough for a garden and a decent game of Wiffle ball. At the edge of the yard is a hill that my father gutted of trees and terraced with long wooden planks hescavenged from the town dump. Below the hill is a meadow of wild-flowers and reeds. Every winter the Danvers Fire Department floods the meadow with water so that it can freeze into a public skating park. Zeke taught my brother, sister, and me how to skate there by pushing a plastic milk crate around the ice until we were sturdy enough to glide away on our own. He and his four brothers all learned to skate the same way, in the same meadow, a generation before us.
I spent Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays at my father’s when—if—visitations were being properly observed, and I cannot recall a single day in my life when his house was not under construction. Zeke has remodeled the interior himself slowly over the years, tearing apart floors and knocking down walls. He works room by room, often leaving a project unfinished for several months in the spring only to resume it later in the winter. There have been spells when we washed our dishes in the bathtub, or shared one toilet among six people. Inevitably, in the rubble of these renovations, my father will find something—a
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