I heard the screeches but I was way too busy falling into a deep
infatuation with a velvety patch of moss growing under the old rhododendron
bushes. Besides, blue jays flew in and out of our yard all the time. No big
deal. This one though descended on to my brother’s new crew cut like a
pterosaur, pecking him while it flapped its perturbed humongous wings. The poor
boy ran in circles with the bird still attached to his head until he finally
did let go of the egg that he found lying on the lawn. My mother kept shouting
from the porch, “Drop it! Drop it!” I never laughed so hard in my life. I told
him afterwards, “You should have seen your face!”
That
was before we moved to the new house where there were no old rhododendrons and
sadly for her no more blooms for my mother to place in her grandmother’s vase
every spring. However, there was a built-in stereo system in all the downstairs
rooms. How could I know at my young age that it would be the precursor of the
way our lives would change forever? Back in the old place, doors would slam and
my mother’s yelling for my father to stop playing his opera records so loud
that the whole neighborhood could hear was something that held them together.
Now, seemingly sober except for wide inflated nostrils and narrowing eyes,
she’d grab her handbag and keys from wherever she had left them and tear off
somewhere in the car. I was afraid to admit that I liked the music, in case she
would think I was taking sides, so I pretended to be busy with my homework when
she knocked on my bedroom door to ask me if I wanted to take a ride.
One evening she suddenly stopped breading
the veal cutlets to announce that she had taken a part time job but would still
pick my brother and me up after school. Later I overheard her rave to my father
about what a great guy her new boss was. And he loved opera too! What a
coincidence! On the night he came over to meet us and have a drink, he looked
nothing at all like a person who would enjoy listening to opera, so I took
refuge under the kitchen table and stayed there until he left.
Soon my family was making dates with his
family and it seemed like fun. Still these people were different from my
parents’ other friends, and at miniature golf outings, backyard barbeques, and
spontaneous get-togethers at the Dairy Queen, where our cars would match up
side-to-side and we would all spill out and greet each other like favorite
cousins - Hi! Oh Hi! Hi! Hi ya! Hi! - I’d
glance over in his direction and in the midst of all that fake chumminess I’d
wonder if my father was really having that good a time.
Things got thicker on one rain drenched
Sunday afternoon when my mother interrupted me at the highest point of my
playing a terrific game. She watched me for a minute before she sat on the edge
of my bed and began to imitate someone’s secretary poring over an agenda.
“You know the Schwarzs
keep telling us how beautiful it is in the mountains so we’re not going down
the shore for our vacation this year. We’re going up to
I hesitated to ask, “Are they going with
us?” but she left, soundlessly closing my bedroom door.
The long car ride past road kill and
strips of sooty weeds turned my little brother from a reasonably cute clean cut
kid into an awful hideous tormentor. I think if he kicked the back of my
father’s seat just one more time, my parents would have gladly stopped the car
to fling him out. “And stay there!” I
pinched his scrawny arm as hard as it was legal and said, “You’re pushing your
luck there, buddy. Just stop it, will you?”
As I watched out to the unfamiliar and
monotonous countryside, I struggled with my limited understanding to find a
reason why my father was willing to trade his beloved surf fishing on our
gorgeous breezy beach everyday, in his favorite hat and shorts and everything,
all for a boring lake. Where the hell were we going to eat?
Instead of the ocean, our motel had a
concrete pool with a fountain statue of a young boy pissing where the diving
board used to be. We took our meals in a log cabin where the blueberry pancakes
were delicious, but I missed down the shore and stopping with my mother, both
of us still sandy in our wet bathing suits, for a half dozen ice-cold
littlenecks at the outdoor stand on the way back to the house.
After a visit to Fort William Henry, where
I’ll never forget how bad I had to go to the bathroom, we strolled around town
with everyone wearing sweatshirts and eating ice cream cones. I barely had all
the sprinkles licked off my double scoop of vanilla when my brother spilled the
beans.
“Hey, everybody look! There’s Warner
Schwarz and his kids!”
I looked up at my mother. “I thought you
said they weren’t coming,” I said angrily.
Thou Shalt Not
Commit Adultery. Unlucky number seven down the list, I think, on those old
stone tablets - the word tablets always reminding me of pills - supposedly
written by the actual hand of God while Charlton Heston
cowered awed and petrified from behind a large rock. As fast as lightening
struck everyone behaving badly in the movie, we were back in the room packing
up for the drive home to
My father’s murderous rage drove him
straight over the bridge to
“The dogs up here crap olive pits,” he
told me over the phone. Warner’s hysterical wife, and I mean hy-ster-i-cal, you have no idea, finally left us alone as
soon as the judge gave her the house – a recently built split-level on a dead
end street which was good for the kids who were, now that I come to think about
it, real pains in the ass.
In our case, we were shrinking. My mother
moved us into a second floor garden apartment on the other side of town with
the grim prospect of a shared front stoop. She spent an entire afternoon
painting all of her Italian Provincial furniture black, and then called my
father at his office and told him to go shit in his hat.
“It’s martooni
time!” People I had never seen before came over on the weekends to tell jokes
and listen to bossa nova records. We fell into the
habit of grazing on reheated frozen hors d’oeuvres before dinner. Chicken Divan
and green peas in cream sauce appeared on the table in thrift shop silver plate
instead of in the cozy Pyrex casseroles that held the lasagna I used to know.
Since my friends were the children of the
parents my parents used to hang out with, I was forced to acquire new ones and
give it a try within the apartment complex where we now lived. There was a soft
Irish girl with strong possibilities, but she had a mean father who became that
way after her mother died. He forbade her to hang around with me because my
parents were divorced, which they weren’t yet. I wanted to scream out our
second story casement window so that everyone would know, THEY ARE STILL ONLY
SEPARATED! A tall blonde girl with a name I never heard of had just come over
from a country called
I wished that I still had a yard and
friends who were uncomplicated with parents who would pick them up at my house
after a day of playing and stay awhile to talk and have a scotch on the rocks. Like in the good old days.
“I am so sick and tired of listening to
your issues,” my mother would groan when I complained to her about how things
were.
“But I didn’t cause these issues,” and
before I could say anything more or else get smacked, Warner would ride in like
Sir Lancelot on his big horse’s ass and rescue her.
“Your mother has been through a lot and
she doesn’t need any more tsuris
from you. And she’s working hard to make ends meet so do me
a favor, will you? Knock it off.”
One evening when he was out of the house, I
was lying across her bed staring at her things. Something was sitting on top of
a wig stand that reminded me of one of those trophy scalps displayed in a glass
case at the fort back in old
“It’s a fall,” she told me.
I watched her attach it to her hair with
a few bobby pins and then like the way the snowfall outside was transforming
everything, even the rusty gas station down the street into being wonderful, I
unexpectedly became the daughter of someone who was beautiful. She looked just
like Elizabeth Taylor.
Life was more livable on this strange new
planet after that. I was getting used to the air. I was allowed to paint my
room orange. I bought my first pair of Pappagallo
shoes. When the telephone rang, some of the calls coming in were for me. I
started a record collection. And I began to look forward to things.
The view out my father’s wide leaded glass
window was impressive, so he had installed a comfortable upholstered seat on
the sill where you could sit and watch the boats go up and down the river.
Sometimes he would point out to someone
famous while we walked through the elegant lobby. “Do you know who that is? He’s the guy who owns Le Moal.” I would widen my eyes in feigned
admiration while he’d call out to him with his lion’s roar of a voice to come
over for a second to meet his kids.
Before taking us out for some really good
Chinese food and the latest must see movie, my father liked to watch the
evening news, which up to now simply conveyed the comforting signals assuring
me that the grownups were taking care of things. This time I couldn’t help but
sense the shadowy alarm. Russian nuclear missiles were off the coast of
In school, everyone talked about the dirty
commies and some kids said that we should pray to the Blessed Mother because
this was probably the end of the world that she always warned about whenever
she appeared to someone. Day after day, we marched in single file for
pitch-black air raid drills downstairs in the cafeteria, and instead of reading
out loud from our history books about the time of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan,
which I loved, we spent the
afternoons at a special mass to pray for human reason.
One afternoon I called my father at his
office, bluffing a 100% score on my math test. He liked it when I kept him
informed. I faked indifference as I brought up the subject that was bothering
me.
“So Dad, what do you think of all this
stupid stuff with the missiles and
For a second I thought that he had hung up
on me. “Dad?”
“Those bastards.”
“Dad listen, there is so much poverty and
hunger in their country. What if they don’t care whether the world ends or not?
What if they feel they have nothing to lose and launch the missiles on us
anyway? Do you think they would do that? You know, just for the halibut?”
“Let those goddamn bastards try and we’ll
send over so many American bombs that there won’t be a
“I’ll
talk to you soon Daddy. I love you.”
“Me too, sweetheart.
Congratulations on the math. Keep it up.”
I packed some essentials in my overnight
case and hid it in the back of my closet. I had it figured that if the Russians
came over and started looting, I would pull all of my mother’s phony baloney
silver out from the bottom of the kitchen cabinet and take Warner’s liverwurst
and Levy’s rye out of the
refrigerator and throw it all out the window at them.
While the world waited in an eerie
standstill for a resolution, I was sowing the seeds for what would grow into a
deep and disconsolate discomfort with the promise of serenity. In the years to
come, in times of good omens, bright prospects, and not one cause for despair,
I’ll always stop to listen for the whistling of those goddamn bastard missiles.
“Boom! Boom! Boom!” On the way to the diner my brother played war with me
in the back seat of the car.
“Stop it!” I hollered.
“The Russians are going to get you and see
your stinky underwear!”
He was only an eight-year-old mindless
idiot but I exploded all over him like a land mine. “The Russians won’t leave a
thing for you! Not one thing! All of your toys and stuffed animals and pizza
and soda too will be vaporized to toxic dust and our parents won’t even be here
anymore to give you a good beating because they’ll be dead! We’re all going to
die and lose everything!”
He stopped breathing and took on the look
of someone deranged and bloodless. Then he started to cry. Really cry.
Finally for what seemed like the first
time in months, my mother turned around in the front seat to address me. “So
now you’re happy, right?”
“What? He started it! And you don’t even
care if we’re scared that the world is going to end! You haven’t mentioned one
thing or talked about it to us! Not ever!”
I thought uh-oh as I watched her shoot a
mean mascaraed eye over in Warner’s direction.
Shaking from the suddenness of my unexpected defiance, I braced myself for how
he was going to cut me down and cause me to want to stay in the car while they
went in to eat, and I hardly felt like missing another meal. But instead, a set
of concerned eyes latched on to mine in the rear view mirror and asked, “Are
you nervous about this missile business? Is it troubling you?”
My mother dragged my frenzied brother
inside to get a table while I waited for a decent-sized separation to form
between them and me so that the people staring at us as we walked in would know
that I was no way a part of this mess. No way.
“Hold it,” said Warner, as he grabbed on
to my shoulder like a vice grip just as I was about to proceed, motivated by
the thought of a charcoal grilled cheeseburger and fries. After he let go, I
was still feeling the press of his fingers on my bone. He pulled out a
cigarette, lit it and took a long drag. “I’d offer you one but your mother
would kill me.”
Little did he know that Cathy Betsch and I tried one of his disgusting coffin nails once
and coughed so much we almost puked.
“Listen to me for a second will you? Don’t
you think that the Russians are people too? They have families and kids to
consider just like us. Why the hell would Khrushchev want to start a nuclear
war for, for cripe’s sake? Don’t worry. He’s just
seeing how far he can get. They’ll back off. Life has a habit of wearing on no
matter what happens, kiddo. You know that. Even the subways are in a hole, ok?”
After he humanized the whole thing for me,
I lost interest in what the Russians were doing and became obsessed with the
British invasion instead. He still owes me five dollars on a bet that those
lousy Beatles would never make it in this country. “Not a million in one
chance,” he said.
Years later, after he and my mother
divorced, I ran into him in Macy’s. He had both knees replaced and was walking
funny. We talked about my mother and how she was doing. I told him that she was
moving down to
Before we parted for the last time, I knew
what I wanted to ask.
“Warner, can I ask you something?”
“Sure kid. Go right ahead.”
“Do you like opera?”
“Are you for real? It’s god awful to me.
Are you thinking of taking me to the opera? Please don’t.”
“No, no. I was just wondering that’s all.”
Copyright © 2009 by Denise Falcone
Denise Falcone is a writer who lives in