Julie and Romeo Get Lucky (10 page)

“I'm sick,” Sarah said. “I was sick.”

Gloria immediately put a hand on Sarah's forehead as if to test the validity of her statement. “You're not hot, but you're pale. Will they let you out of school for being pale?”

“They will if you throw up on them,” Sarah said sensibly.

Gloria had abandoned her own cart and was now sorting through mine. “Japanese seaweed crackers, tofu, baby eggplants, raw goat cheese. No wonder this child is feeling punk.”

“It's not for Sarah, it's for Nora.”

“Since when do you do Nora's grocery shopping?”

“She's going to have three babies,” Sarah said.

It's amazing how quickly we adapt to news. I had known about Nora's pregnancy for such a short period of time, and already I could hear the words without my mouth going dry. But when I saw the news hitting Gloria like a fast right hook, I was reminded that this was indeed still a shocking thing.

She wrapped her fingers through the slender metal bars of my basket and blinked. “Nora doesn't like children.”

“She likes me,” Sarah said.

“But what are the chances she'd get three like you?” Gloria stumbled on the word three. It was hard for her even to say it.

“I don't know,” Sarah said, obviously pleased at the thought of three little versions of herself. “She's my aunt. I guess it could happen.”

“Oh, Julie,” Gloria said. “How could you not have told me?” Her eyes were bright and glazed in tears. For Gloria, who told me everything and was used to hearing everything, this was a genuine betrayal.

“I've only known since last night, and in case you've forgotten, I've had my hands full over at my house. I was going to call you as soon as I had two minutes in a row.”

“You can call me at three o'clock in the morning.”

“But wait,” I said. “The story gets better.”

“Four babies?” Sarah said.

A skinny woman in a navy warm-up suit who was pushing her cart past us slowed down at that and turned to look at me. Massachusetts is not by its nature a particularly nosy place, but any thinking woman would have to stop at the mention of a quartet delivery. I shook my head no, and she sailed off down the aisle looking relieved.

“She has an incompetent cervix, and she's on total bed rest.”

“That's awful!” Gloria said. “So you have to do all her shopping?”

“She's on total bed rest in a hospital bed that is
in my living room
.”

“Nora's living in the living room?” Sarah asked excitedly. All of the real action had transpired during her brief appearance in school, probably furthering her belief that she was better off staying home.

While Sarah's joy at having another captive audience member was evident, Gloria said nothing. She only blinked. Since the death of my parents, Gloria was the person who had known me better and longer than anyone else in the world. She was the maid of honor at my wedding and came with me to the lawyer for my divorce. We have taken care of each other's kids and borrowed each other's clothes and attended each other's hysterectomies. We have, for richer and for poorer, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, stuck by each other. So I cannot say it surprised me when Gloria just sat down on the floor of the very clean Bread & Circus, rested her back gently against a display of soup cans, put her face in her hands, and started to cry.

“Hey,” Sarah said, touching Gloria's shoulder. “It's okay. Nora's going to be okay. She might even want to name one of the babies after you.”

“Baby Gloria,” I said, and took my place beside her on the floor and held her knee. Sarah sat down as well, impressed to see adults behaving so far outside the range of normal behavior.

Gloria laughed a little bit into her hands. “You're completely doomed,” she said. “You know that, right?”

“I do.”

“Romeo upstairs, Nora downstairs, everybody else running around.”

“Don't forget about the visitors,” I said.

“They come every two minutes,” Sarah said. “Especially the priest and his brother.”

Gloria shook her head. “What are you going to do with three babies?”

“Ah!” I held up my hand. “Correction: What is
Nora
going to do with three babies?”

“Forgive me. You know what I mean.”

“We just haven't gotten that far. For now, we only have to concern ourselves with hatching them.” I looked at my watch, suddenly remembering that I'd left a houseful of defenseless invalids alone too long. A pretty young girl rolled past us with a baby propped up in the front of her cart. She pointed us out to the baby and told her to wave, but the baby only blinked and blew a little bubble of spit.

“This is where you get them,” Gloria whispered to Sarah. “Over on aisle five. Why does anyone go through all the trouble of making them at home when you can just throw one in the cart?”

Sarah giggled at such talk.

“Okay, girls, enough of this foolishness. I have an infirmary to run.”

We hoisted each other up off the floor and resumed our shopping. Gloria, who was a much more enlightened eater than I have ever been, gave me some guidance as to what Nora would find acceptable. Then we steered our carts into the checkout line, me behind Gloria.

“Have you won the lottery yet?” Gloria asked Sarah, as the last of her groceries were tucked into their bags.

Far above Sarah's head I mouthed the word, “No.”

“Not yet,” Sarah said sadly.

“Well, don't give up. You just have to keep trying. It's all about beating the odds, you know. You can't win if you don't play.”

“I know,” Sarah said.

Gloria kissed us both and promised to come over soon to visit everyone. She said she was anxious to see if Nora looked fat. “Courage!” she said as she wheeled away. I thought she was saying it to me and Sarah thought she was saying it to her and we both gave weak, sad smiles in return.

I pushed the cart up to the checkout and made myself busy unloading the pricey whole-grain items onto the black conveyer belt. I didn't want to look at Sarah, and I didn't want to look at the bright Massachusetts State Lottery sign that told us that playing would be fun. Sarah always wanted to ride along to the grocery store with me, and for the first time, I realized it wasn't because the grocery store was such a great time for her. It was because I always bought her a ticket. If there was a problem, it was as much my responsibility as anyone else's. Sarah stood on her toes to reach down into the basket and hand me the lemon hummus and the plain fat-free yogurt and the very first clementines of the season.

“Do you think Gloria doesn't want Aunt Nora to have babies?” she asked me.

I shook my head with as much reassurance as I could muster. “It's nothing like that. It's just that she's worried. She knows it's going to be a lot of work.”

“But we can do it,” Sarah said. “If we all work at it together. Mom and I can watch one of the babies and you and Romeo can watch one and Aunt Nora and Uncle Alex can watch one. It's not too many when you think about it that way.” She handed me a bag of limes and some all-natural Parmesan bread sticks that actually looked pretty good.

“No, it's not so bad.”

A thin young boy who should have been in school himself loaded the bags back in the basket for me, and we pushed them off toward the electric door and the cold bright day outside. Sarah was walking as slowly as was humanly possible, and I slowed down further and further to stay beside her. And then I did something I cannot explain. I turned the cart around and marched right up to the information desk.

“I want to buy a lottery ticket,” I said.

“How many?” The woman behind the counter was writing out some numbers on a piece of paper. She did not look up at me.

“Just one.” I turned around and looked at Sarah, and she was beaming. Light was practically radiating from her head. “Just one,” I said to her. “Do you understand me? One last ticket, and you don't tell anyone. After this, it's over. I won't break down again, okay? This one ticket, then we turn the whole thing off for good.”

“Okay.” She wrapped her arms around my waist and buried her face in my stomach, squeezing me with all of the love she contained. I knew that what I was doing was wrong, but it had been a long day, and a single dollar had given both of us a much-needed bounce toward joy.

“What do you want?” the woman said.

“Mass Millions,” I told her. “Quick pick.”

Sarah looked up at me with a puzzled expression.

“It's time for a change,” I said, remembering that Sandy had declared a Fatwa against the Mega Millions.

When we were in the car, Sarah put the ticket in her shoe. “This is all I needed,” she said, and pulled her laces snug again. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“And you're never going to tell.”

“I'm never going to tell,” she said. “Unless it's the winning ticket. If it is the winning ticket, then I'm going to want to tell Mommy.”

“I think that's fair.”

We stopped off at CVS and picked up the prethreaded floss picks for Romeo, and while we were at it, we got three packs of baseball bubble gum cards for Little Tony and a box of Hot Tamales for Big Tony and a bottle of Whisper Pink nail polish that Sarah picked out for her mother. After that, we drove home in glory. We had every last thing that everybody wanted. We were rich.

F
OR THE FIRST FEW DAYS OF
N
ORA'S BED REST
,
every time Alex came to visit, he lugged in another box of things that she simply could not do without. He brought over a very practical little desk on wheels that looked exactly like those things that nurses put hospital trays on to conveniently suspend them over the bed, except this one was made out of cherrywood or teak and Nora quickly covered it with papers from the various boxes. She sat with the bed positioned upright, a headset plugged into her cell phone, her laptop computer plugged into the wall, and continued to run her empire from my living room in Somerville.

“The property in north Cambridge is perfect for them,” she was saying as I tried to the best of my ability to pass unnoticed up the stairs, but Nora never missed me. She started snapping. Snap, snap, snap. I took a deep breath and turned to face her. She was pointing to a file box on the floor. Snap and point, snap, snap, point. I pointed to myself, then to the box, and she nodded with enormous exasperation.

“One minute,” she said. “My girl is bringing me the file now.” She covered the speaking wand with her hand and said, a bit too sharply, “Jackson!”

Now really, if she could cover the mouthpiece to say Jackson, couldn't she cover it long enough to say, “Mother, could you hand me the Jackson file in that box?” It wasn't as if I was looking for “please.” But she had already thrown up twice this morning and I knew this was trying for her as well, so I picked up the file and handed it to her. She did not look up.

“I know they want four bathrooms, but that's what closets are for. The downstairs closet is absolutely begging to become a half bath. There's the answer.”

If Sarah and Little Tony weren't so thoughtlessly engaged in their elementary education during the day, they would have been the ones doing the fetching. Both children, it seemed, longed for nothing in this world but to be personal assistants, and they were training at the elbow of the master CEO.

Nora demanded that they do their homework the same way she demanded they bring her another cup of herbal tea, check the printer cable, and fold, stamp, and seal all documents before taking them out to the mailbox. She checked their spelling and math problems between calls. She let them type up the poems they wrote for English class on her computer while sitting beside her in the bed, each waiting for the other to complete his or her turn. She let Tony play Hangman on her Palm Pilot while she let Sarah watch her daily dose of
Wonka,
and if Sarah wished that she had the Palm and Tony wanted to put on a different movie, neither of them made a peep about it. Nora did not tolerate one word of bickering. Bickering in any form got on her nerves and resulted in the immediate banishment of both parties from the living room, no matter who had instigated said bickering. Nora ran a very tight ship.

I suppose I should have admired her, the way she never stopped. But Nora's industriousness and decisiveness made Sandy and me feel like a couple of blind moles searching our way through pudding. It was frankly impossible for me to believe that Nora's cervix, or any other part of Nora's being, was incompetent. The tornados she spun out from the stillness of her bed only made me tired.

In a way, I was coming to understand my formerly ill-behaved, formerly teenaged daughter: She just had too much energy. Even back then, she had wanted to rule the world. Until she found real estate as a means of channeling her powers, she was simply too much to bear.

She snapped at me again, and my eyes came back into focus. I had simply been standing there. She handed me the Jackson file, still talking a million miles a minute.

“Do they really think that Greenspan is going to keep the interest rates at Nixon administration levels much longer? The time to move is now!”

Then she snapped and pointed to the box where the file should be returned. Had she been a child, I would have whacked her over the head with the file—not hard enough actually to hurt her, but hard enough to startle her into a clear realization of what it meant to snap at one's mother. But she was pregnant, and it wasn't good to whack one's pregnant daughter, even with a paper file, no matter how badly one wanted to.

I carefully put the file back into its correct slot and looked again to Nora, but she only pointed to the phone. The phone that she perhaps thought I hadn't noticed before. She wanted to tell me that she was very busy, and I should go.

I do not remember my mother ever assuming the role of handmaid in my life, not even for an instant. That is not to say that she didn't take care of me and my brother. The food was good and the house was clean and the budget was sufficiently tight and fair so that we always had enough but never too much.

But my mother and father lived in what I thought of as the adult world while my brother and I lived in the children's world, and while those two planets could peacefully coexist, they had a very specific order of gravity. The children revolved around the parents, never the other way around. When I was nine years old, I could no more imagine my mother sitting on the floor with us to play a game of Monopoly than I could imagine getting out of bed to join one of their cocktail parties and being greeted with a cigarette and a Manhattan. I was there to set the table and hang out the laundry and do whatever little things my mother was too busy to attend to. I was a child, and my duty was to be of service to the world of adults. My brother used to say my parents had children because they didn't want to have to pay anybody to work in the shop. No one ever questioned that or even felt bad about it, that's just the way life was.

Even when I was a grown woman with children of my own, I still felt that I was somehow less than adult when in the presence of my very adult mother. Had I been smart, I would have realized that one can only truly feel like an adult in relationship to one's own children.

But I wasn't smart. I was a tenderhearted sap who wanted to be close to my girls and make sure they never suffered a moment's alienation. So instead of marching them off to their room at the first sign of bad behavior, I learned to use the hula hoop. I let them stay up late on weekends and fall asleep in our bed watching movies. I gave them my lipstick and attended all of their basketball games and gave them every opportunity to be open and honest with their accessible mom, and what happened? They still managed to seal themselves off on another planet. The difference was that their planet did not revolve around mine.

Long after I had completely lost control of the situation, it occurred to me that my mother had been right after all. If you spend too much time trying to be somebody's pal, you'll only wind up getting snapped at down the line.

I went upstairs to check on Romeo, dreaming of the days when I had nothing to do but strip thorns off roses for hours at a time.

My handsome fellow was sitting up in a chair reading a magazine. He was wearing jeans and a polo shirt. He was wearing shoes. His hair was wet and neatly parted, and when I walked into the room and gaped at him with frank amazement, he smiled.

“Ta-da!” he said, opening his arms.

“Did you take a shower?”

“I did.”

I went over and knelt beside him, resting my hands lightly on his knees. “Romeo, you shouldn't do that. Nobody was upstairs. You could have killed yourself.”

“Do I look dead?”

“Actually, you look very clean.”

“I'm really getting better. I'm going to go down those stairs tonight.”

“No.” I felt a great, unaccountable sob rise up in my throat. He couldn't leave me here alone like this. “You're not ready.”

“I think I might be ready. I'm feeling good. Do you know what I've been thinking about all morning?”

You've been thinking about not leaving me. You've been thinking about the fact that you never want to spend another night away from me again.
“What?”

“I'm going to paint your ceiling.”

“No,” I said weakly. “No.”

“Seriously, you have some water stains. They're faint, but I've had plenty of time to think about them. I don't want you to think I'm sticking my nose in where it doesn't belong, but I really think we should paint the whole room. Find a new color, lighten the place up.”

“The water stains are old. Ten years old. There was a little leak and I had to put a new roof on and there just wasn't the money to paint. To tell you the truth, I just got used to them.” My voice cracked a little at the end of the sentence.

Romeo put his hand on my head. “Are you upset about the paint? We don't have to paint. It's a great room. The color is fine.”

“No, I'm just a little tired, that's all. We can paint it someday.”

“But that's how I know I'm really better. I feel like painting it now. I've been very focused on this.”

“Well, not tonight, okay?”

“Not tonight.” He touched my cheek. “How's Nora?”

“She's taking me down to a pulp,” I said.

He scooted over in his chair. “Come here.” He patted the tiny sliver of fabric beside him, a sliver that represented approximately one-eighth of the space I would comfortably need to wedge myself into that chair.

“Romeo.”

“Come here,” he said, and his voice was dreamy and low, and I just fell into it.

I was a woman who needed to be held, a woman who needed to be kissed. I was sick and tired of playing nurse without having any opportunity to play doctor. I pulled my stiffening knees out of the lock position. I straightened up, balanced precariously on the arm of the chair, and leaned over. I was very careful to come at him straight on. “Hold still,” I whispered. I kissed him with sincerity and lust.

We were still very much in the game. We hadn't been on the bench so long that we'd lost our confidence. Romeo slipped a hand beneath my sweater, kissing, kissing while his fingers tapped up my ribs and lightly touched the underwire of my bra. That was the moment, that was the hopeful place we were at, when the door swung open.

Who knows what combination of factors come together to create an accident? Was it the kiss, the door, the slender arm of the chair? Was it simply the surprise of three startled adults that sent me straight back, hitting the floor first with my shoulder, then my head?

The sound of the crack alone would have been enough to make me faint, and for an instant I did go out, either from pain or disappointment or simple exhaustion. I closed my eyes and gave myself over to the darkness studded with stars. My feet stayed straight up in the air and rested on the chair arm where once I sat.

“Dad! Don't get up!” I heard a voice say from very far away. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

Had Romeo fallen as well? Had the whole chair tipped back? I tried to find words from deep in the recesses of my mind. I wanted to comfort this stranger in my darkness, to tell him, no, I'm fine. Don't worry about me.

But I didn't have to. Romeo answered instead. “No,” he said, “I'm okay. Julie? Are you okay?”

Did they notice I was suddenly missing? Did they hear the explosion that was my head hitting the wood floor?

“Julie?”

Someone lowered my legs onto the floor and straightened me out. Should they move me? Was that right?

“That was a fall, all right,” Big Tony said. “Open up.”

I opened my eyes and looked at him. Where was the panic, the concern?

“You really got the wind knocked out of you. Do you want to stand up?”

“Julie?” Romeo said. “Are you okay down there?”

“Dad, really, she's fine. Don't get up. You're going to hurt your back again.”

“Sure,” I said, “I'm fine. Just give me a second.”

I saw Big Tony's feet walk away, and a minute later he was pulling me up to sip a glass of water. It was how the Cacciamanis comforted those in pain.

“Drink it slow,” he said, and helped me hold the glass. “You know, I should go to medical school just so I can look after the people in this house. I could go into neurology, obstetrics, orthopedics, pediatrics”—he looked at me and smiled—“trauma.”

“That's funny,” I said, and handed back the glass. There was a huge pain in my shoulder and a hot throbbing in the back of my head. “I'm just going to stretch out for a second.” I was not feeling so great. I just lay back on the floor and felt enormously comforted by its stillness. I closed my eyes.

“Are you sure you're okay?” Romeo said.

“Sure,” I said drowsily.

They waited for a minute, gave a single beat of silence in my honor, and dove right into their conversation.

“I'm serious, Dad. I've been thinking it over. I want to go to medical school.”

“Well,” Romeo said.

“I know it. I'm almost thirty-seven and I don't have any money and I have Sandy and the kids to think about. But what about the future? It's a huge risk, I know, but I'd be making an investment in myself, an investment that I think would pay off for all of us in the long run.”

“That's true, but you have to—”