Second Nature (6 page)

Okay, so she wasn’t Sicily’s real mother, Marie thought.

It was at times like these that Marie—who was careful to tell friends about her brisk plans for turning Sicily’s half of the apartment into a combination home gym and office, who smiled in wry complicity when someone blatted on about how she and her husband couldn’t wait to “get their lives back” after the last kid finished college—wondered what the hell she would do with her own life once she got it back. Marie hadn’t seen Sicily take her first steps, or fed her pureed peas, or strapped her in to a papoose contraption so the dentist could yank out two-year-old Sicily’s abscessed tooth, or cried herself sick, as Gia had, when Sicily screamed for so long that she passed out. So maybe it wouldn’t be such a big dislocation as Marie imagined. Maybe after the initial jolt would come a serene immersion in long-renounced liberty. Marie wouldn’t have to listen thirdhand to Kit Mulroy’s minute and mournful dissection of her latest in a serial string of bad romances. She wouldn’t have to have men in masks clean the mold off the ceiling of Sicily’s rooms from the damned humidifier that ran day and night. She wouldn’t find her own cashmere sweaters, casually liberated from her closet by her niece and stretched out of shape by boobs two sizes larger than her own, draped over a dining room chair.

She wasn’t Sicily’s real mother.

She was nobody’s real mother.

A skillful doctor had taken care of the threat of that—on two occasions two decades ago—and left Marie none the worse for wear. When she listened for an emotion from those incidents, there was only a loud absence, like the void left when a siren stops. Or so Marie thought until she inherited Sicily, her daughter-by-dint-of-despair.

And still, it was not only for the sake of her niece that Marie had shoved anything out of her own life that would interfere with Sicily’s. It was for Marie herself, compensation for the loss of her sister, and for both men she had loved enough to marry, and for the doctor who explained, as he cheerfully vacuumed away the products of accidental conception, that he’d had to give his own poodle an abortion (“Not here, Miss Caruso! Don’t worry!”) because it was too small to give birth to seven puppies. Sicily’s blooming was recompense for losses and regrets that could still ambush Marie, especially late at night, in some unlikely place—in a tent city built by protesters in Washington, D.C.; on the eighteenth floor of the Four Seasons in San Francisco.

If there was an Olympic team for pragmatics, Marie believed she would have been its captain. She was the sprightly surrogate, the cheerleader and role model. Good at it. “Prop” was the word that occurred to her. Something fake but convincing enough for a good impression, like the olde-tyme lamppost they pulled out of some back room for her last publicity photo, making her lean against it with her arms folded and her smile a welcoming beacon—so she’d look all trusty-wusty and charmy-smarmy, instead of the brassy West Side broad she actually was. So she’d look like somebody’s maybe-a-little-hipper … well, mother.

“Did you hear me?” Marie called. “I’m not dressing up in some celery-colored linen suit with a boxy jacket.”

There was no answer, but the fierce smell wafting in from the kitchen didn’t bode well for brunch. Sicily usually used the sink for mixing paint or cleaning pens and brushes. What would Marie do when there was no one to yell at about toxic chemicals not belonging in the same sink we used to wash lettuce?

Sicily had rewired Marie’s heart as no adventure, no honor, no catbird-seat job had ever done. Marie was not Diane Sawyer, and she had gotten out of New York before it became clear to everyone but her that she never would be. Within a certain realm, she was a household name, with even more influence than affluence. Chicago native Warren Elizabeth Adams, the third Adams and first woman to be elected president of the United States, had chosen Marie to conduct her first on-camera interview. (“Are you named for Warren G. Harding, Madam President?” Marie asked. “I think so,” President Adams said drily. “My mother hoped to keep me humble, but she did not succeed in that.”) Not even Marie’s Pulitzer for “The Madonna of Juarez”—the story of a Mexican teen who walked across the bridge to surrender her baby into the arms of bookend California physicians, getting five thousand dollars to buy a house, where first she sold coffee and pastries, then coffee and beer, then beer and herself—not even that could touch the hem of Marie’s devotion to Sicily.

Sicily was Marie’s reason.

How big would this place feel without Sicily’s music, thumping like a kind of combat artillery, her ossified bowls of oatmeal, the spoons mortared in them like pop-art sculpture, the tubes of tinted moisturizer she left in the pockets of her jeans that showed up in brown streaks on Marie’s silk T-shirts after they went through the wash? Like Central Park on a sunny morning with no earnest runners huffing their way around the reservoir. Like a beach without gulls. Like a long, vast parade with no marching bands.

Marie had never really expected Sicily to leave. She had not expected someone who needed her to accomplish so thoroughly what Marie had with such single-minded diligence set out to help Sicily accomplish.

Sicily is mine
, Marie thought.
Not Jamie’s anymore. Not even dear Gia’s
.

Mine to give to Joey
.

Of course, Sicily was beyond lucky to have Joey—one of a kind, maybe one half of one percent of one of a kind. Somehow, astonished by the pink sapphire on Sicily’s hand and the small country wedding planned for August at Uncle Al Caruso’s big stone house near Lake Madrigal, Marie had never fully registered that the poignancy of Sicily’s past would rear up and demand its due. The times that Marie’s own mother had remarked how like Gia Sicily was, in her every movement, now numbered in the hundreds. Patricia Coyne, Jamie’s mom, had offered Jamie’s slim wedding band for Joey, as well as the gold locket given to Gia by Jamie as a first-anniversary gift, to be the traditional “something old” for the bride’s regalia. Martin Coyne, Sicily’s paternal grandfather, would walk her across the lawn to the arbor. Marie would be the something blue, sitting there with all the other relatives. Sicily’s parents had the advantage of being saints. And so, from now on, the thing to do, Marie thought, was to present that news chick’s face, still downright perky, even though she knew—she could actually
feel
some days—that her very posture was eloquent with a hurt she had never expected to experience.

There was one more emotion, perhaps the one that caught Marie by surprise with the least warning. And it was her mourning for Sicily’s face. Wearing their grandmother’s ancient satin with one hundred and ten buttons up the bodice, Gia had been a bride fairer than the calla lilies she carried. Sicily was taller and stronger through the shoulders, but in a strapless sheath, that cascade of hair twined and tendriled … oh, Sicily would have been a stunner, a bride to outshine—no.

No.

The secret to living Marie’s life was keeping it squarely in the present, not letting herself be borne back along too many rivers with banks shrouded in the softening fog of time.

“I’m not wearing any mommy-of-the bride gear,” Marie repeated, letting her voice rise up to shrill on purpose, nudging-and-not-nudging, making an elaborate business of jangling through the wood-and-aluminum hangers she favored.

Her closet was “finished,” as was Sicily’s, with a ridiculous expanse of drawers, shelves, and grottoes. Sicily always said that the number of pairs of shoes Marie owned gave her the raw urge to rush to the Red Cross and donate blood. One pair was silver; the other forty were black. And of those forty, probably fifteen were ballet flats that would have been indistinguishable to anyone but Marie, distinct only by their labels, identifying them as having been made by different Italians.

When Sicily didn’t respond, Marie went on, “I don’t have anything like that, Sicily! Not for tonight, not for August.”

“I can’t fry an egg,” Sicily announced. “I’m hopeless at huevos.” She had come into Marie’s room and was sitting on the round African bride stool that Marie kept in her closet so that she could slip her stockings on without running them. “I can draw a good greenstick fracture though. And I’m hell on a skull fracture. How many skull fractures will I draw in my life, you think? They’re a favorite subject for lawsuits.”

“I wouldn’t underestimate a good greenstick fracture,” Marie said. “Or a skull fracture either.”

“You don’t have to play mother of the bride,” Sicily said.

“Well, good,” Marie answered, biting her lip. “Fine. I’m glad it’s not a big deal.” So there. So what? Sicily was only acknowledging what Marie had already admitted. “I look like shit in lavender.”

“Auntie, what I really mean is that you don’t have to playact. It doesn’t matter what you wear, because everyone knows you’re mother of the bride.” Sicily, twenty pounds heavier and five inches taller than Marie, grasped her aunt’s shoulders and gently brushed her mouth against Marie’s eyes, in a parody of Marie’s ritual good-night kiss. “You’re not the only mother I’ve ever had, Marie. But you’re the only mother I ever will have.”

A great hollow barrel rolled through Marie’s stomach, part sweet satisfaction, part desolate longing for Gia. Gia would have been the mother God created for ceremonies such as these. How she would have delighted in tiny flourishes—little place cards made by hand, each with a tiny ribbon dangling a fairy slipper and a teeny black tuxedo shoe, a cloud-shaped poster decorated with the collected evolution of Joey and Sicily, from gap-toothed moppets in Sister Colette Amici’s second grade to the single prom photo Sicily had allowed Lachele LaVoy to take—a picture of Sicily facing away from the camera, her strong, resplendent back bare nearly to the hips, as she fastened a white rose to Joey’s lapel.

Jamie and Gia had been remarkable parents, who had taken their job seriously and done it well.

When Marie was visiting, staying at her sister’s house in Chester, the routine of Sicily’s preschool days never varied: Gia kept a big roll of butcher paper disguised by a circle of garage-sale glass and a big old shawl, as an end table. Before Sicily sat down to a (cooked) breakfast, Gia laid out a full kitchen table’s length of the butcher paper, taping it securely at both ends. As Marie sipped her coffee, Gia would sketch a castle with a tiny princess for Sicily to paint. On those visits, Jamie would come out into the midst of that domestic grandeur and kiss Gia in a way that made Marie’s stomach contract. She had, if she was honest, wanted to be Jamie’s wife—yes, a thousand years ago, but yes—not his pal, the “best gal” at their wedding. She had wanted to be Sicily’s mother, not her godmother.

And yet she’d done her best. The charcoal-on-gray invitations for the engagement party tonight read only
ME AND JOE, FOREVER AND EVER
. But inside, under the date, time, and location, was a subtle (Marie thought it was subtle) hint that this event also was, de facto, a wedding shower. Not even Kit could convince Sicily to put up with an afternoon of silly guessing games
(Why does the groom throw the bride’s garter? Why tie tin cans to the bumper of the new couple’s getaway car?)
and to make a keepsake bouquet by pulling the ribbons from each gift through a hole in a paper plate. So Marie had penned in graceful Catholic-school penmanship,
Your presents will be your gift
.

Sicily pretended to be mortified. But no one on earth loved surprises more than Sicily did. And Marie had one tucked away right now in her enormous purse—a week at a lush tumbledown resort on Big Pine Key.

So maybe she was a parent after all. A hasp in Marie’s spine slipped open and she relaxed. To Sicily, who had disappeared and returned, Marie said, “I guess you puking all over my three-hundred-dollar suede coat the first time you got drunk earns me my spurs.”

“I only did what you told me. We had the never-get-in-a-car-with-someone-who’s-been-drinking talk—”

“Cripes, Sicily. It wasn’t even a week before!”

“I was being cautious,” Sicily said. “I was thinking ahead.”

“You weren’t even sixteen.”

“You literally kicked me in the rear when I was holding on to the toilet, remember? You told me to run away and live with distant relatives. And me, a disabled girl …”

“I didn’t kick your butt until you told me—and I quote—to ‘not make such a big effing deal about it.’ ” Marie didn’t ever use hard-core vulgarity, a trait that was just about perpendicular to the rest of her personality.

“Well, this is all goddamned interesting, but tonight I’m wearing jeans,” Sicily said. “And double cashmere. It’s goddamned cold out there.” Soon Marie had picked out her own variation of the same outfit; black Highbeam jeans and a ruffled Lenore Hannigan blazer. And then there was nothing left to do but wait for six hours or so until the car Marie had hired would come for them.

“I could work,” Sicily said.

“You could sit,” said Marie.

“I could try to wash the tomatoes out of that pan.”

“Let it soak.”

And so they sat. Marie made mimosas. “Do you remember making fake mimosas for me, with ginger ale and orange juice?” Sicily asked.

“I make them for myself still, all the time,” Marie said. “Two real ones and I’m ready to dance on the table to old Blondie songs.”

“I’d pay big for that,” Sicily said. Before either noticed, they were both three mimosas in. “Auntie, will you get married after I move out?”

“I think I’m a little … uh, over the meridian for that, Sissy.”

“People do it all the time at your age!”

“I didn’t say I was never going to do it again. I expect to do it at least once more before I stop forever.”

“Not that. You know what I mean. What about that guy you were with? I want to call him Moss or Gray …”

“Brown,” said Marie. “Brown Stuart.”

At some point, it became clear that Marie’s life would be the chance to grab a carry-on bag, a long dress, some underwear, and a cab—headed for places girls who grew up in a two-flat at 79th and Kedzie Avenue rarely got to go, to the trials and the nuptials and the funerals of the famous and the infamous. She traveled light, literally and personally, with no strings. That wasn’t to say she lacked for love. Brown Stuart, her counterpart at her first job, her lover for years, would have married Marie a thousand times. Bookish, boyish, a kid from South Boston, suddenly rich and visible, he had switched his first and last names to mimic the prep-school cred that Anderson Cooper owned the day he was born. When Marie was pushing forty-five—still young enough, technology being what it was, to have perhaps one child—she’d finally decided to take Brown up on offer one thousand and one. But Marie’s decision to say yes to Brown’s proposal coincided nearly exactly with her sister’s death. Five or six years ago now, Brown wrote to say he’d married Melanie Towers, a D.C. bureau reporter not a day over thirty-five. In short order, Brown and Melanie had a little boy. Marie sent a baby gift, the most impractical engraved rattle she could find, in that bird’s-egg-blue box that, even empty, firmly announced its status.