Things Unsaid: A Novel (4 page)

“My mother stole my childhood right from under me, you know that!” her mother repeatedly told Jules and her siblings when they were teenagers. “It was the Depression and both my parents worked long hours. I was a glorified slave, that’s what I was, taking care of my sister and brother, cooking and cleaning. No time to think about what
I
wanted.”

Jules had brought Mike home to Akron on summer break, during a body-melting heat wave. It was her grandma’s birthday. Reaching up with her pale, doughy hands to cradle Mike’s face, her grandma had stared up into his blue eyes.

“Such a beautiful boy,” her grandma had purred in her velvety Sicilian drawl. “Oh, so beautiful, and a wonderful boy to marry.”

Mike had grinned.

Grandma had been very busy making her specialty dishes the day before. Jules’s mother had said nothing, leaving the kitchen to Grandma’s culinary magic. To show what a good daughter she was. She hadn’t wanted to relinquish control at first.

“I’d like to cook for my own birthday,” Grandma had said.

“Nah, Ma, I’m going to cook,” her mother had yelled. “It’s the least I can do to celebrate your birthday.” She’d raised her arm, as if to strike her own mother—something Jules had seen her do many times before, to her and Joanne and Andrew—but at the very last second she had bitten her forearm, then lowered it as a welt formed, and tied her apron tighter.

“I should be able to have what I want for my own birthday, now shouldn’t I?” Grandma had said, and everyone else had nodded. They were all hoping for a break from their mother’s cooking or frozen TV dinners.

“Mother, why can’t Grandma eat something else besides lamb chops?” Jules had asked later, casting a sympathetic glance at her grandmother. Soaked with the juices from the meat, the cutting board had a solitary gray raw chop resting on top of a fresh red stain.

“She’s diabetic.” Her mother’s jaw clenched. She could see a little knob of bone where the mandible bulged below the earlobe. “She can’t eat carbohydrates—white foods.”

“Not even for her birthday?” Jules asked, hoping for a different answer.

“I’m not an all-night diner. Lincoln freed the slaves,” her mother replied, voice higher, wringing her red-and-white dishtowel as if it were sopping wet. Then she bit her arm. Hard. Drew blood.

Jules thought of the animals that got caught in her father’s traps when he and Andrew went hunting. Some bit off their own paws to survive. She glanced at Mike, who’d seen the whole thing. He looked stunned.

After pasta—for everyone except Grandma—Jules carried in a tiny pink box. Mike gave her a quick hug, encouraging her, as she slipped out a cupcake with pink icing and “Grandma” written on it. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you,” Jules sang, feeling giddy, as she brought it to the table with one lit candle on a paper plate borrowed from her friend Deirdre.

“What do you think you’re doing, young lady?” her mother said, yanking the plate away. The candle sputtered and went out.

“I know she can’t eat it, but I thought she could have the fun of blowing out the candle and watching us eat tiny mouthfuls,” Jules said.

“What’s all the fuss about, anyway?” her mother said, picking up the paper plate and dumping it in the trash can. “Birthdays are just a reminder you’re getting old.”

Jules could smell the faint Parmesan cheese residue on her grandmother’s housecoat, which revealed her ample décolletage. A warm, motherly woman. The closeness felt good. No one else she knew looked at all like her Grandma. She belonged in some old movie as a background extra with Sophia Loren or some other Italian diva, stealing the scenes. Grandma was a plump, sumptuous cupcake.

Sarah blew out the stubs of the candles before they melted into the white icing, like miniature snowmen collapsing, melting into the letters that spelled out “Grandma.” Giggling, she pulled a candle out and started sucking the icing off it.

After the Crab Pot celebration, Sarah and Megan wanted to walk to the boardwalk and look out over the water at the Mukilteo lighthouse. Jules looked back to see the girls shivering in their short-sleeve, satiny dresses. Typical kids, oblivious to the frigid weather in the name of fashion. They wandered off in another direction, near some souvenir shops. Jules was left alone with Al.

“You know, I think seeing how your mother gnaws away at your father would frighten anyone. All that marital flesh eating,” he whispered, as if it were a secret.

Jules’s mother crossed her arms tightly and leaned heavily against the railing, watching the movement of the waves in the dark. A dim light or two shone on the water for safety reasons. The chamber of commerce wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt.

Jules had chanted to herself the Buddhist mantra of mindfulness and loving-kindness: “May you be happy, may you be healthy. May you be free from worry. May your life be filled with loving-kindness.” She uttered this meditation in reverse order. Instead of friends and family first, acquaintances second, enemies third, and then the world of strangers last, Jules started with human beings she would never know. She chanted “May you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be free from worry” to those she disliked. She chanted “May your life be filled with loving-kindness” to acquaintances. Then she chanted all four wishes to her family. Why did she have to work hard placing her parents in the same category as strangers, let alone friends? Would helping her parents through this make her feel less like an outlier? Did anyone ever truly know their mother and father?

It was the same mantra she had silently chanted before on other festive occasions.
May you be happy
—her mother had wanted to be happy, hadn’t she? Didn’t everyone?

A
ll she’d ever wanted to do was sing.

As a student nurse at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, Aida would pass by her Uncle Gino’s restaurant/dinner club on Gun Hill Road after classes were over. Nothing fancy, but there was a little stage, and she loved being on it. She was always hoping against hope that the regular waitress-singer had called in sick so she could fill in.

“Hello, my singing princess,” Uncle Gino had said that day, kissing her with heavy tobacco breath, smelling of sweat. Aida knew that her uncle was a dirty old man. She could put up with the groping, though. For an audience. For a pathway to a singing career.

“Any chance I’ll get to sing tonight?” she asked him. “I’m always ready to do ‘Someone to Watch Over Me.’ ” That was her torch song.

Uncle Gino shook his head, regret in his eyes. “Sorry, sweetheart. Not tonight.”

Aida always wore the black crepe dress, the one that made her look like Elizabeth Taylor, when she sang at the club. Low-cut, sultry; stiletto heels to make her stand out even more. To be a nightclub singer at a New York restaurant and bar—
that’s
what she had really wanted, she thought as she dragged herself home. Not to be some drudge cleaning up blood and shit, taking temperatures, and looking at old, sickly bodies ready to die. She was the best-looking nursing student at Montefiore Hospital, after all. And even her name destined her for a better life—a life of beauty and song, like the opera
Aida
but without the tragedy. Her fiancé, Steve Seigel, a psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital, had said she could do whatever she wanted after marriage. He wasn’t
good looking. He wasn’t even the smartest psychiatrist at Bellevue.
I could do so much better
, she thought as she opened her front door.

The dorm phone rang and she picked up.

“Hello, this is Bob Whitman, calling for Nancy Sanders. Is she in?”

“Nope, she’s out.” Nancy was the head nurse and her nemesis, a prissy know-it-all, plain if not downright homely, with no fashion sense whatsoever. “Don’t know when she’ll be back.” What was her instructor, Dr. Whitman, doing with that spinster? Was he her fiancé?

“Well, could you take a message for me? I was hoping to take her out for a drink and dinner.”

Aida could hear the disappointment in his voice. He always blushed so easily in front of the students, and seemed shy. He wasn’t as boring as some of her instructors. No great personality either, though. Yet he was rather handsome. For a doctor, that is.

“I’m not doing anything right now, if you want to go for a drink. That is, if I’ll do?”

She heard a gulp at the other end of the phone. Shortly after that drink, they had both broken off their engagements and gotten married.

Aida remembered how excited Bob had been a week after the wedding. They were moving to Akron, Ohio.

“You’ll love it,” he told her. “Akron’s offer to open a medical practice near the tire companies is too good to refuse. A great place to raise a family, too.”

Of all places: Akron, Ohio. No nightlife. No nothing. Just dreary suburban doctors’ wives sitting around all day with their brats, gossiping on the phone to each other and making perfect cakes and lunches for each other. Never, never.

Akron was in its heyday then—a rapidly growing city, a boomtown. So Aida shopped with the other doctors’ wives after the kids were dropped off to school. She had an unlimited bank account, or so it seemed to her. That’s the least her husband could do with all she had to put up with. And the automobiles. Two of the most expensive cars on the market sat in their garage, provided as gifts by the CEOs in appreciation for the medical services her husband provided to their factory workers. Aida knew that her parents had photographs of those cars
plastered on their refrigerator, as evidence of their daughter’s living the dream. She always drove the pink Cadillac.

Aida had pretended to like Akron. Their home—a white Dutch Colonial clapboard with green shutters, a screened-in porch, and a solarium surrounded by dogwoods—was the standout on the block. Perhaps that was her consolation prize. She was so proud of the dogwood trees framing the solarium that she’d had custom draperies embroidered with their blossoms. She never replaced them. They eventually faded until the dogwood blossoms were virtually obliterated, just weathered white blotches on washed-out blue linen. Those curtains now hung in their apartment at SafeHarbour.

That house had only one bathroom—huge, but impractical. Over the years, there were bathroom fights between Jules and her brother. One fight was so bad that when Andrew blocked the door, Jules threw up on the floor in front of her brother, some chunks spraying all over him. Aida never had been able to understand what Jules was thinking. So opaque. Not like Joanne. Andrew was somewhere in between, but a mother knows most of the time what her son is thinking.

That morning, before her little Julia’s first big day in kindergarten, Aida had struggled to help her get dressed in her brand-new white starched blouse with a Peter Pan collar and navy-blue pleated skirt. How that kid hated to get dressed. The school uniform would be a blessing. No arguments or decisions about what to wear. Julia stiffly walked into the classroom with her, trying to hold her hand. It was so tiring, Aida kept dropping it: such a sweaty little hand, soft and spongy, almost boneless.

“Darling, you’re a big girl now. No need to cling on to me. Teachers don’t like that. Do you see anyone else holding on to their mommies?”

Her little girl looked around. Some of the little girls were already sitting at low round tables, looking at the art supplies in the center and picking out the best colors for themselves. Aida spotted another little girl, shorter than her daughter, clasping her mother’s hand. Her mother was trying to let go, too, but the girl was holding on with both hands, walking sideways and bumping into other chairs and toys in the room.

“Hi,” Julia said, walking up to the other little girl, tugging Aida with her. “I’m Julia.” She didn’t adopt that ridiculous nickname, “Jules,”
until she was a teenager. Her little girl did it to reject her good taste. Aida was certain of that.

“Hi, I’m Deirdre,” the small child said, her light brown hair clipped back with two little Bambi deer barrettes. Deirdre smiled right up at her little Julia.

“Oh, your name sounds like a deer—is that why you have Bambi barrettes?” Julia asked.

Deirdre clapped her hands, jumping up and down, laughing and bouncing. Aida could see that Julia liked her already.

“You think I’m a deer like Bambi, because of my name? No one’s ever said that to me before.”

“Yep, and your hair’s Bambi color.” Julia touched Deirdre’s hair, then reached for her hand and they walked off to sit down at a corner table, away from the other mothers and girls. They became best friends, and remained so until they were both married.