How I Saved My Father's Life (and Ruined Everything Else) (8 page)

Antoinetta smiled at me. “Want to play saints? You pick one to be and I'll pick one and we'll pretend we're dying?”

My heart soared. “Yes,” I said.

T
hanks to my father's divine intervention, I auditioned for the junior company of the Boston Ballet. If I got picked, I would take the bus into Boston twice a week for class, starting in September. My feet hurt from my toe shoes and my neck hurt from stretching so much. In other words, I felt great. Each of us waited in a big room, and they called our names one by one. When it was my turn, I stood all alone up on the stage and official people with notepads out in the audience asked me to do this or that.
Jeté! Arabesque! Jumps in first position! In fifth! Switch! Switch!
I had a good audition. I knew it. When I walked off the stage, one of the women shouted, “Thanks, Madeline! You'll be hearing from us!” in a way that made me think:
I got it!

But when I went out to the waiting room where all the mothers were sitting, I acted very cool. I saw them trying to read my face, but I wanted to seem mysterious. I mean, would Marie Taglioni rush out after an audition and start bragging and gushing? No. She would have good posture. She would nod. She would leave.

“Well?” my mother whispered as I gathered up my things. When I didn't answer, she said, “Madeline? I'm dying here.” That made me smile.

I almost took her hand while we rushed down the long corridor and then the stairs that led us outside. But I didn't want to be seen, a future ballerina with the junior company of the Boston Ballet, holding hands with my mother. So I just made a face that said:
I think I got it!
And in that instant, when her eyes lit up with something like pride, I almost loved her with the same intensity I used to before the divorce.

Once we got outside, though, and the car cost a zillion dollars to park in the garage and the traffic was thick and cars cut us off and honked their horns, I went back to being annoyed with her. I knew better than to distract her, even about this, when she was driving in Boston traffic.

So I put in my new favorite tape. Nuns singing Renaissance music.

“Do we have to listen to this now?” my mother said. She gripped the steering wheel hard enough that her knuckles got white and bony. “Can't we listen to whoever kids are really listening to these days?”

“I like nuns,” I said. I wanted her to get us out of the traffic and concentrate on my audition even more, so I just listened to the nuns and thought about when we all lived in Boston and were happy. I thought about my Montessori School and how there were no grades and kids were put together by what they knew and what they liked. I was in the Ocean group. We read stories about the sea and kept a tank of saltwater tropical fish and learned about underwater life. Where were they now, the Ocean group? I wondered. I tried to remember their faces, the kid with the freckles, the kid from Germany, the boy who said he wanted to marry me. And my three friends with the beautiful flower names.

I sighed, homesick for our old life, the way we would cook spaghetti together and my father would make one of his super-duper salads and play opera and we would all sing together real loud. Sometimes I had dreams where I was
in that apartment and someone was singing “
L'amour est un oiseau rebelle
” from
Carmen
but it wasn't my mother singing and it wasn't my father; in fact, I couldn't find either of them and I couldn't find my way, either. I hated that dream.

“At last,” my mother said, relaxing. “Okay. Tell me about it. Every detail.”

But I wasn't thinking about the audition anymore. Instead, I was thinking about the Calabros and how they'd invited me over for Easter breakfast
. Bring your mother,
they'd said.

“Want to go somewhere with me?” I said, surprising myself because the last thing I wanted was to share the Calabros with my mother. But thinking about our old life had made me forget for a minute how much I didn't like her anymore.

“It depends,” she said.

“Can't you just say yes? I mean it's a thing I want you to do and right away you have to have all these conditions.”

“All right. I'll do it. But can't I even ask what it is?”

I was already sorry I'd invited her. I tried to think of a lie, to make up something like the school carnival or something. But that might be a sin. It was so hard to be Catholic.

“This is a mistake,” I said. Our life seemed to be gathering mistakes at a surprising speed.

“Come on,” my mother said.

“I have this new friend,” I said reluctantly. I saw it already, a new mistake coming. “Antoinetta.”

“Antoinetta?”

“Antoinetta,” I said, clenching my teeth. “And her family invited us for Easter breakfast.”

“All of us?”

I frowned. “Not your boyfriend. Us. Our family.”

“I was thinking of Cody,” my mother said gently.

I thought of all the kids that roamed around the Calabro house every Sunday, the little ones eating meatballs and the fat babies and then the middle ones, girls who chewed gum and braided one another's hair and put on temporary tattoos.

“Cody can come,” I said.

“Should I call her mother and ask her what I can bring?”

“Her mother's dead,” I said proudly.

“Well, isn't that sad,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, but thinking about the Calabros, I didn't feel sad at all. Instead, I felt part of something I hadn't felt part of for a long time: a family.

Right away I saw it had been a mistake to bring my mother. For one thing, she wore a suit, the kind of thing she wore to meetings with editors. For another, she had brought asparagus with toasted sesame oil. I looked at her standing there in her business clothes, holding the pottery dish with the scrawny asparagus in it, and I wanted to disappear. Better yet, I wanted her to disappear.

But Mama Angie, Antoinetta's grandmother, came over and took the dish. She smelled it, then said to my mother, “You're Dutch, right?”

“No. No. I'm just American, I guess.”

“Indians?”

“I'm nothing,” my mother said, laughing.

“Huh,” Mama Angie said, and she put the asparagus in the refrigerator.

I brought my mother and Cody into the kitchen and introduced them to all the aunts and uncles, and to Antoinetta's
father, and to Antoinetta herself. She was wearing a yellow ruffly dress. Antoinetta dressed pretty badly, but I didn't care. She went to Catholic school and wore a blue plaid jumper or a skirt with a white blouse, a navy cardigan, and either navy kneesocks or tights every day. She didn't have to think about clothes. She could use her brain cells to think about religion, about saints and things.

Cody was with the little kids. Mama Angie had made him a little loaf of sweetbread, like she did for her own grandchildren, in the shape of a cross. Smack in the middle was a boiled egg. One of the aunts—Carla? Fanny? I still couldn't keep them straight—was showing my mother the special Easter breakfast foods: the homemade cheese and the frittata, which was like an omelette, and the pastera, which was a rice pie.

“This is so interesting,” my mother was saying. “Did you know I have a cooking column? And my project now is ethnic food.”

“Yeah? Who do you write that for?
Good Housekeeping
?”

“No—”

“
Ladies' Home Journal
?”

“No. It's a magazine called
Family
.”

“I never heard of it,” the aunt said, and went back to layering a lasagna.

Mostly, during breakfast, I was miserable. My mother kept embarrassing me. It was like she was incapable of doing or saying anything right these days. Who cared about her stupid column? Worst of all, she didn't even realize how she was coming across.

Now she was asking Aunt Mary how they made the pastera. “We don't tell strangers our recipes,” Aunt Mary said coldly. I couldn't believe what was happening.

Then she went over to Antoinetta's father and asked him stupid questions about being a barber, and when he answered them she gushed, “How interesting!”

She even tried to explain Unitarianism to two of the uncles.

“You got the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. You understanding what I am saying?” Uncle Al said.

“Well, yes,” my mother said. “But—”

“There is no but,” he said. “That's what you got.”

Then, Mama Angie, all four foot ten of her, climbed onto the kitchen table. She took a bottle of holy water from her
apron pocket and sprayed it over all our heads, saying something in Italian.

Still on the table, she called to me, “You staying for lunch? We got lasagna.”

I felt so proud, being singled out like that by Mama Angie, but my mother had to open her big mouth. “We couldn't possibly eat one more thing. But thank you.”

Antoinetta pulled me into the hallway while my mother went around shaking everyone's hand like she had just gotten a new magazine assignment.

“I had the most incredible idea,” Antoinetta said. “Wouldn't it be great if my father fell in love with your mother?”

I almost laughed. “You've got to be kidding,” I said.

“What's wrong with my father?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It's just that what would he ever see in my mother?”

Antoinetta looked at me, shocked. “But she's so beautiful,” she said.

I watched my mother coming toward us, holding Cody's hand in one hand and the dish with the asparagus in the other. No one had even tried it.

“She is?” I said, seeing nothing but a person who messed up everything she touched.

In the car on the way home Mom said, “How do you know this girl?”

“Church,” I said.

“What church?”

I shrugged.

Then Cody, who had eaten his entire miniature loaf of bread, pizza, two slices of pastera, canned pineapple, and ham, said he was carsick.

“It was a mistake to let you eat so much strange food,” my mother, the expert on ethnic cuisine, said, swerving into the breakdown lane.

She took Cody out of the car and stood way over near the scrub that grew by the road. I watched them, Cody's face with its greenish cast, my mother in her silly business suit.

She saw me looking and waved like an idiot.

“We're okay!” she shouted.

“No, we're not,” I said to myself.

E
ven though my house and my mother and my little brother were the biggest embarrassments in my life, I invited Antoinetta to sleep over on a Saturday night. I had to.

For one thing, my mother didn't like that I was always at Antoinetta's house. “Don't girls take turns hosting each other?” she said, which made her sound like Martha Stewart. For another thing, even though I went to her house every Sunday after church, her father didn't allow sleepovers there. “Strangers in our house at night make him uncomfortable,” Antoinetta explained, which insulted me. After all, I wasn't exactly a stranger. When I said that to Antoinetta she got all defensive. “He's suspicious of things like that,” she said.
“That's all.” So if I was going to get Antoinetta to myself for a whole night it had to be in my awful house with my awful family. That definitely went on my merit list for sainthood.

It took weeks to convince her father that this was a good idea. He asked her questions like: “What will you eat over there?” and “What do these people want from you?” After the asparagus incident I could understand the food question. But I was beginning to think that maybe Antoinetta's father was
paranoid
, which meant he believed everybody was after him—that was a bonus vocabulary word and I got it right.

By the time he gave her permission, I was deep into rehearsals for that ballet set to Vivaldi's
Four Seasons.
This was for Misty Glenn. And I got the lead in “Spring,” even with my so-called chicken arms. It required great concentration and practice. Also, I had just started dancing in toe shoes and my feet killed me. When I took off my toe shoes my big toes were all bloody. I liked to come home and soak my feet. I even let my mother wrap my toes in soft gauze, which made me feel good. She was so gentle and nice when she did it, and all the while I thought of the pain I was enduring and how good that was for my pending sainthood, too.

So even though it was the most inconvenient time in the world for me to have someone sleep over, since that someone was Antoinetta, I got all excited. At rehearsal, the choreographer, a man named Randy, told me I was not concentrating hard enough. I missed my cue twice and I did a sloppy arabesque. My jumps, he said, gave him indigestion. Randy spoke with a mysterious accent, and Demi Demilakis, who got the lead in “Winter,” said that she'd heard he was from Transylvania. This sounded both scary and exciting to me.

Before I could leave, Randy stopped me at the door. “It is Spring,” he said, frowning. “You must think light! Think airy! You must think!”

I stood there, clutching my ballet bag, my toes aching like crazy. I concentrated on my costume, all sparkling green and glittery in its plastic wrap, in my other hand. I wished I could explain everything to him. I wondered where Transylvania was, and decided it must be in Russia. Then I wondered if there were any Russian saints. The only thing I knew about Russia was from seeing half of
Doctor Zhivago
, which was probably the most boring movie ever made. My mother cried through the whole thing and made terrible soup called
borscht for dinner afterward. Borscht is beets, which are the worst vegetables, worse even than cauliflower.

“Madeline?” Randy said. He rapped my head with his knuckles, hard. “What is going on in there?”

I shrugged, thinking that maybe all Russians were saints—all the snow, all those beets. They endured an awful lot. I wondered if I had a crush on Randy, with his sunken eyes and Gumby body and his weird accent.

“Is Transylvania in Russia?” I asked him.

“I have no idea,” he said, clearly disgusted with me.

When my mother and I got home, Antoinetta and her father were already there, an hour early, sitting in their car.

“Is that them?” my mother said, sounding distressed. “Already?”

Limping, I followed her to their car.

“Hello,” she said in her fakest voice. “Would you like to come in?”

“Yes,” Antoinetta said too quickly. “He would.”

I practically groaned out loud. Antoinetta still thought her father and my mother might get together, even after I explained I could never do that to her or her father.

Luckily, he refused to come in. He didn't like to go into other people's houses. He actually said that to my mother.

Even with my sore feet and bad rehearsal, having Antoinetta for a whole night made me the happiest I had felt in a long time. My mother was asking us questions about beverages and dinner and renting movies, but we didn't stop to answer. Instead, I grabbed on to Antoinetta's arm and pulled her upstairs.

Antoinetta brought her book,
The Lives of the Saints
, and we took turns reading about different ones and acting out the best parts of their lives: getting our eyes plucked out, burning to death, helping lepers. Being a saint was exhausting.

“You know,” Antoinetta whispered after we got in bed and turned off the lights, “I might become a nun.”

I frowned. “You can't get married or anything,” I said.

“You marry Jesus,” she said, shocked at my stupidity. “You wear a wedding dress and everything.”

“But you don't get to kiss anybody,” I said.

“You get to be Jesus's bride,” she said. Her voice had turned cold. “That's better than kissing anything.”

“Okay,” I said, suddenly bored and sleepy.

“Boys smell bad. Like dirty socks,” she said. “Jesus is clean and pure.”

When I didn't answer her she rolled away from me. But what could I say? I wanted to skip the nun part and go straight to saint; that was a fact. Along the way I might want to kiss a boy, a real boy, smelly or not.

“You'd be a good nun,” I said finally.

She didn't answer but somehow I knew she wasn't asleep.

“Really,” I said. “You would be a great nun.”

She rolled over again, toward me so that we were face-to-face. When she talked, I could smell the pepperoni from the pizza we'd had for dinner on her breath.

“I might be an airline stewardess instead,” she whispered. “Then I would marry a pilot and live in Chicago.”

I mumbled something. My toes ached in a way that I liked.

“You know Joseph Copertino?” Antoinetta said. Clearly, she had not been dancing ballet all day or she would just be quiet and go to sleep.

“Is he from church?” I asked her.

Antoinetta laughed. “No, silly. He's the patron saint of air
travel. Ever since he was a kid, he had these ecstasies. Yelling, beating, pinching, burning, piercing with needles—none of this would bring him out of them. But he would return to the world when he heard the voice of his boss.” She yawned. “He would often levitate and float, so he became the patron saint of air travel.” She rolled over. “Mmmmm,” she said. “Hmhmhmhm.”

I guessed those were falling asleep noises. But now I was wide awake. Floating! Levitating! I lay there, concentrating really hard on getting my body to lift up from the bed. But I just stayed there, earthbound, until I finally gave up and went to sleep.

The next day, Cody was going to Henrietta Plotz's birthday pool party at her house. She had a pizza shaped like a dinosaur and a karaoke machine. That was all fine for Cody, but why I had to go was beyond me. I didn't even care that they had an indoor pool.

“Bianca got to ask one person her age and she picked you,” my mother explained, talking like this was a good thing for me.

Henrietta's sister Bianca was so dull and so unliked that the fact that she had picked me made me certain that the
L
on my forehead was getting bigger every day.

“Besides,” my mother said, “saints are into sacrifice, aren't they? You should feel grateful for the opportunity to give up an afternoon this way.”

“Ha-ha,” I said. But she had a point.

That's how I ended up at a six-year-old's party, sitting on the side of the pool with Bianca Plotz looking at the younger kids splashing around. I could see my mother, sitting with the other mothers, in her pants with the drawstring waist and her toenails painted baby blue and only the top of her black bathing suit. She was telling them how my father did not want her to take us away so far for so long.

“He's being a jerk,” she said.

Cody floated on his back. It was all he could do. Everyone else graduated in swimming class, from Pike to Eel to Minnow, and Cody remained behind, unable to put his face in the water, to blow bubbles, or to kick his feet and move his arms together in a way that would move him forward. He stayed in Pike. He floated.

Cody always wanted to get me on his side about the divorce, which meant that he wanted me to blame Dad for everything. Just that morning he said, “Would you feel really horrible if Ava Pomme died?” Cody always said Ava Pomme like they were two parts of one word: powder puff, coffee cake, Ava Pomme.

“Of course I'd feel bad!” I said. “And so would you.”

“But if she died,” he said, “then Dad would come home.”

As dumb as that was, even I considered the possibility.

“I don't like her,” Cody whispered, all sad and guilty.

He made a list of all the things he didn't like about her and decided to recite it to me right then, for about the millionth time. This was a trick he'd picked up from our mother, who had picked it up from her therapist.

“Her tarts,” he told me.

“Her tarts,” I reminded him, “are famous.”

“I only like Pop-Tarts,” Cody said. Then he imitated Ava Pomme's horrified voice: “Surely your mother doesn't give you those?”

“Pop-Tarts,” I said, jumping to Ava's defense, “are totally revolting.”

“Her clothes,” Cody continued. “They're black. All of them.”

I sighed. “Of course they're black. That's sophisticated.” Our mother's wardrobe of various types of khaki trousers—capri, flat front, side zipper, loose fit—floated through my mind.

“The noisy elevator that goes to her apartment,” he said.

“Cody,” I reminded him, “it goes to
their
apartment.”

“It's for deliveries,” he practically shouted. “I hate that sliding grate that you have to close after you already closed the door. Then it goes up so slow, and it makes that noise that sounds like at any minute it will break and everyone in it—you and me and stupid Ava Pomme—will smash to death.”

Twice Cody had hyperventilated in that elevator, forcing Ava Pomme to stick his head in a bag of tomatoes one time and a bag of sourdough bread the other time. When he caught his breath, he threw up: once in the elevator and once on Ava's black shoes.

“That baby,” Cody said. “Zoe.”

I frowned.

“Kiss your baby sister,” Cody said in his Ava Pomme voice.

Zoe didn't seem real to me. She didn't do much of anything except get carried around and look cute. When I was a baby, my father used to carry me on his back in a big forest green backpack. I had pictures of that, with my parents standing together on a beach somewhere and my own baby face grinning out over my father's shoulder. I loved those pictures. No Cody. No Ava Pomme. No Zoe. Just a family.

The idea that Zoe would one day turn into a person, someone to contend with, made me nervous. I didn't like to think about it.

I hated divorce. It should be illegal or something. All it did was cause problems for everybody. Sometimes I felt like I was getting pecked apart by crows, pieces of me scattered from here to New York. I wished I was still whole, the way I had been before my mother messed up everything.

One time, right after Baby Zoe was born and I was feeling about as low as I ever had, my mother came in my bedroom and found me crying. When she walked in, I put a pillow over my face so she couldn't see me all red and blotchy and sad. She sat on the bed, took the pillow away, and put her cool hand on my forehead, the way she used to when I was
little and felt sick to my stomach. “I know, I know,” she kept saying, but she didn't know. She didn't know that I thought everything was her fault. She didn't know how it felt to have your father leave and marry some other woman and then have a new baby.

So I told her. I sat up and let the pillow drop to the floor and shook her hand off my forehead and said, “It didn't have to be like this! Why do you go and mess everything up?” She looked shocked. “How did
I
mess everything up?” Mom asked me. “By being so ordinary,” I told her. Then she started to cry, too. She said, “Oh, Madeline.” In a movie, we would have cried together, in each other's arms. But this was real life. Mom got up slowly and shook her head and walked out of the room, and I was left alone to think about everything, which now included not just divorced parents and a stepmother, but also a baby sister.

Here she was now, casting a shadow over me.

“Time to go,” Mom said, still in her bathing suit.

“Fine,” I said. Three hours at this stupid kid party and boring Bianca had hardly said a word. She was traumatized because she was going to sleepover camp next week and she had never been away from her parents. How lame is that?
She should try never ever getting to spend real days with her father. She should try having everything good being stuck in a photograph instead of part of her real life.

“Bye, Bianca,” I said.

“Are you going to write me at camp?” she said desperately.

What would I ever write to her? “Gee,” I said.

“Of course she will,” my mother said. “She'll send you postcards from Italy.”

My mother and I stood for a minute, side by side, watching Cody float.

“I am not going to write her at camp,” I said.

“She's lonely,” my mother said, her eyes fixed on Cody. “You have no idea what loneliness feels like.”

“Here we go again,” I mumbled.

“Hey, buddy,” my mother called to Cody. “Let's go.”

Slowly, he floated to the edge of the pool, near the ladder. She held out the big blue-and-red striped towel that had his name printed in the middle in bright yellow letters. She was smiling, her arms outstretched.