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Gina’s white T-shirt had an image of a caterpillar with a fedora standing upright and dipping another caterpillar like it was the finale of a dramatic dance.
“The tango?” I asked.
She craned her neck to try to examine it. “I guess.”
We were at Riverfall, sitting on the same stools where Todd and I had sat. “Do we always meet in the same place where I’ve recently been?”
“No.” She sipped a clear cocktail. “You want to go somewhere else?”
“Yes, please. Anywhere.”
“Italy? Paris? London?”
“We can do that?”
“We can do anything. There are no three-dimensional limits here. No time. No space. This is all yours.” She opened her hands wide.
“Let’s just walk.” I got up from my stool, wanting to never see the inside of Riverfall again.
“Sure? It doesn’t take any longer to get to Europe than anywhere else, you know. You understand how it works here, right?”
“I can’t think right now, Gina. I just don’t want to be here.”
“Got it.” Gina stood, still holding her drink as we walked out.
“You can’t take that,” I said.
“You really don’t get it.” She sipped as she strolled down the street. “I always liked Cellar Bar. It’s dark and mysterious. Let’s go there.”
“Okay.”
At the corner, Gina finished her beverage and threw it—glass and all—into a garbage can.
Instinctively, my mouth dropped.
“Jada!”
I held up my hand. “Never mind. I get it. A city maintenance worker is not going to find a glass in that garbage tomorrow. I get it.”
“Good.”
“I want a drink,” I said.
“Me too. I’m parched.”
Gina held the door open to Cellar Bar for me. We worked our way through the dimly lit lounge with its plush seating and flickering votive candles. We sat down in the back corner on a comfortable couch.
“I woke up knowing something was off,” I said.
“That was your gut preparing you for what you already knew.”
I nodded. A server came by, and Gina ordered two martinis for the both of us.
“I keep wondering how I got here.” I leaned back. “But I know I have no one to blame but myself.”
“No, no blaming.” She leaned back too. “It was bound to happen. You never did things for the right reasons. You never listened to yourself, and to what you really wanted.”
“How so?”
The server came by and placed our martinis on the round table before us. “Getting married. Becoming a mother. Was that what you really wanted? Even going away to school and law school. I mean, sure, you wanted to do those things, but you were also distinguishing yourself from your mother and sister, who you always felt collectively rejected you.”
That stung. I cocked my head. “Damn.” I thought about that for a moment. “I’m a highly educated, independent woman. I didn’t get married and have a baby to make my mother happy or to compete with my baby sister.” I reached for my martini a little too quickly, and some of it spilled on the floor.
“You can tell yourself that, but now you wonder why you want to leave your husband and why you don’t feel like you think you should feel as a mother. It’s because you weren’t following your true path. You weren’t living—aren’t living—your authentic life.”
“Oh God, you’re talking like a meme again.”
“You weren’t true to yourself when you made those decisions,” she continued. “And now you’re suffering.”
I tried to comprehend what she’d just put out there so I could respond coherently, but she continued before I could fully formulate a response.
“When you start realizing who you are and what you want, you will make choices and surround yourself with people and situations that don’t cause inner conflict and outer turmoil.”
“So I do have only myself to blame?”
“Stop focusing on that. You’ll understand better after you see where we go next. Let’s finish our drinks first.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’re not going to pull my hair, are you?”
She spat out her martini. “No,” she said as she wiped her mouth.
We finished our martinis then headed outside and down the street. When we turned the corner, I realized we were on my parents’ block, a few yards from their house. What is going on?
I spun around, trying to figure out how we had arrived there, but Gina strode past me, her eyes on my parents’ front door. “Remember? Any time, any place,” she said.
My mother’s old black Cadillac was in the driveway. She loved that car, with its red leather interior.
Gina made a left turn, and I knew she was headed to the backyard. My parents’ above-ground pool and wraparound wooden deck had been the center of summer for me, my sister, my cousins, and all of our family and extended family. Everyone had come to the Santanellis’ every weekend to swim and barbecue.
I thought about how Mark and I had essentially the same setup—a built-in pool and an even bigger house—but ours wasn’t the same summer clubhouse for friends and family. Not at all.
Gina plopped down on a plastic lounge chair and was suddenly holding a bottle of Sweet Sun tanning oil SPF 2 and sniffed it. She squeezed out a dollop and handed it to me. This was the smell of our childhood summers—one-hundred-percent-artificial coconut.
“They still make this stuff?” I inhaled the aroma. “Oh, that smells delicious.” I rubbed it all over my face and hands. It was hot and slippery, just like I remembered. And SPF 2? We didn’t know better back then, and neither did our mothers.
“So what are we doing here?” I asked.
“Just watch.”
Gina and I leaned back, lifting our arms overhead and wrapping our hands around the metal bar at the top of chairs like we used to do, and took in the scene.
I saw Orly as a little girl—about five years old—behind the sliding glass door, trying with all her might to pull it open and step out from our kitchen to the deck and pool. I was right behind her—about nine years old—and reaching past her. We pushed together on the count of three and finally emerged in our matching bathing suits—pink bikinis with white polka dots and ruffles by the hips. Our hair was wet and slicked back. We’d obviously been swimming already.
It was startling to see myself and Orly so young. On instinct, I sat up and waved.
“No one can see you,” Gina explained. “Sit back. Relax. Enjoy the show.”
Orly ran to the pool and put her toe in.
“No,” the nine-year-old me yelled. “We just ate. You have to wait twenty minutes before swimming, or you’ll get cramps.” Little me put on sunglasses and pranced over to the other side of the pool.
“Hold on!” our mother yelled as she stepped out from behind the glass doors. She had big hair, big sunglasses, was snapping her gum, and wore a big, flowing gold cover-up over her gold bathing suit. “Hold on, Orly, honey. Don’t swim right away. Ya just ate lunch. Wait a little. Here, float on the raft.” She stood at the other end of the pool and pushed a big yellow inflatable raft toward Orly with her foot.
“I want to float on a raft too. Where’s the other one?” I asked.
“I don’t know what happened to it,” my mother said before sitting down at the outdoor table by the large grill. She had a Redbook magazine in front of her as she a lit cigarette. “Check on the side over there. It might’ve gotten thrown over last weekend.”
I leaned over the edge of our deck and surveyed the rest of our backyard, which wasn’t much. The deck and pool consumed almost every bit of land.
“It’s not there,” I said.
“I don’t know, then,” my mother said, not taking her eyes off of her magazine.
Orly floated, eyes closed, hands behind her head, content and comfortable. I loved floating on the raft. I believed the sun’s rays were attracted to water, and that was the way to get the best sun. I’d explained the whole theory to Orly, who seemed to understand. That was one of our top priorities over the summer: getting tan.
“What am I going to float on?”
“Jada, put your feet in and relax, please. You can swim in a few minutes.”
“Not in a few minutes! In twenty minutes. It’s only been two minutes. That’s eighteen more minutes, and she gets to float the whole time?”
My mother inhaled deeply on her Virginia Slim.
“I’m not sitting here with my feet in like an old person,” I continued. “In eight minutes, Orly should get off that raft and let me have it for ten minutes. Then we will both have had it for ten minutes. Fair is fair.”
“Jada, just put your feet in and relax, like Mommy said,” little Orly said.
“Shut up, Orly!” I snapped back. “That’s what’s fair. Right, Ma?”
My mother ignored me and called for my father. “Dominic! When ya going to the store?” I could tell it was a Friday because my father used to take Friday afternoons off in the summer. He owned his own small plumbing business, so he could do that. Still, his Fridays weren’t for relaxing. My mother sent him food shopping for the weekend for when all of our cousins would come over. And she would make him clean the pool. I thought he liked it all, though, especially the pool stuff. He would tinker with the filter and analyze the tubes, like the plumber he was.
“Right, Ma?” I walked up to her. “Ma? Mom?”
I turned to Gina. “I am a piece of work.”
“I prefer the term work in progress,” she said without taking her eyes off the scene.
My father peeked his head out from the sliding glass door. He looked so handsome. His hair was dark, not gray like it was now, although we told him it was very distinguished now. He was wearing the big gold cross that my mother had given him for Christmas one year. He wore it every day, even to this day.
“I’m going in a few minutes. Did you check the downstairs freezer?”
“Yeah. We don’t need burgers,” my mother said, crushing her cigarette in the ashtray. “But get more hot dogs. For some reason, we’re going through hot dogs this summer like it’s nobody’s business.”
“Right, Ma?” It was like nine-year-old me was invisible.
“Jada, you want to come with me to the store?” my father asked.
“No,” I said, still glaring at my mother, my hand on my hip. “I’ll be relaxing on the raft in about five minutes.”
“No, you won’t!” Orly shouted from where she floated.
“Yes, I will,” I shouted back.
“What happened to that blue raft, Dom? We can’t find it. We only have the yellow one.” My mother motioned to Orly.
“I don’t know,” my father said. “Did you look over the railing?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Sure you don’t want to come, Jada?”
“I want to be in the pool,” I said. “It’s summer! Why would I want to go to a boring grocery store?”
“Go.” My mother waved the air. It wasn’t clear who she was talking to. I assumed both my father and me.
My father left, but I didn’t move.
“Oh boy. I know what’s coming,” I said to Gina.
“So do I,” she said.
“It was stupid. It was just a raft. I should have let it go.”
“That’s not the point.”
My mother flipped the page of her magazine. “What, Jada?”
“How many minutes ago did we finish lunch?”
She glanced up.
“About ten minutes ago, right?” I continued. “So tell Orly to get off that raft so I can float for the next ten minutes. Then twenty minutes will have passed, and we can both swim.”
“Oh, Jada.” My mother went back to her magazine. “You are unbelievable. Ya know that? Where did ya come from? Honest to God. Go play with a doll for ten minutes. Quit being silly.”
“It’s not fair!” I screamed. “I don’t want to play with a doll. I want to get tan!”
“Jada, is Orly acting that way?”
“No, because she’s getting what she wants!”
“Well, if the tables were turned, would she carry on like that?”
“Yes!” I practically shouted.
“I would not,” Orly called from the pool.
That was it. I walked over to the pool, put my foot in the water and, with all my might, splashed a dry, sunning Orly on the raft. Five times.
She jolted up and screamed, “Jada!”
My mother yelled too. It was a chorus of the two of them yelling my name as I marched back into the house. I would have slammed the door if it was slammable, but it was the sliding door that was too heavy for us at that age. Yet I was angry enough to open and close it with no problem.
Gina and I stood there and watched my mother grab a towel from the side of the deck and hand it to Orly. My sister dried her stomach and legs and handed it back to my mother, who went back to her magazine and lit a new cigarette. Orly kept floating.
I spent the next hour in my room.
I turned to Gina. “I spent an hour in my room. I was only spiting myself and missing out on, what I believed then, was good sun time. I was a brat.”
Gina laughed a little, still watching the scene before us—Orly floating and my mother smoking.
“Best friends, these two,” I said. “Like water and water. I’m the oil. I don’t mix with either.”
“The suntan oil to their pool water.” Gina adjusted herself on the chair and surveyed her bony arms, which glimmered from the Sweet Sun tanning oil. “You’ve been fighting for a long time. Fighting to be understood, fighting to get in there, to prove your worth.”
I nodded but didn’t have too much time to consider that. She popped up. “Let’s go.”
I stayed.
“What’s the matter? Feel like you’ve seen enough?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Too bad. There’s more.” She gave me her hand and pulled me up. Gina headed toward the house and opened the sliding door.
Orly and I were sitting at the kitchen table, doing our homework. We were about twelve and eight. I was reading something aloud as Orly listened.
“The hydrologic cycle is part of—oh, hold on. That’s supposed to be ‘of.’ I wrote ‘if.’ When I read my essays out loud, it helps me catch mistakes.”
“Me too,” little Orly declared.
“My college roommate is going to think I’m crazy.”
“Is she going to live here?” Orly asked.
“No. At college.”
“You’re not going to live here?”
“When I go to college? No way. You think I’m working this hard in seventh grade to go to Queens U and never leave the borough? I’m going somewhere prestigious.”
Orly looked confused.
JoAnn came into the room to stir the pasta cooking on the stove. “Two more minutes,” she said. “Clear the table.”
“Jada’s going to move for college. She’s going to have a roommate,” Orly said.
My mother stopped in her tracks. I could tell from her face that she thought this was a ridiculous conversation. It was a face she’d made often and still did. “Is that what she thinks? Move this stuff to the dining room table.”
Now I was the one who looked confused.
“I never fit in with them,” I said.
Gina nodded. “Let’s go inhale some more artificial coconut and talk.” We went back to the deck, where we reclined on the lounge chairs again and fixed our eyes on the clear blue sky.
“My mother always loved Mark.”
“Part of the problem,” Gina said.
“I didn’t marry him for her.”
“Not consciously.”
I groaned.
“Remember introducing him to your family? You couldn’t wait.”
“My mother and Orly were so impressed with him. I loved it. It felt like I won. Like, ‘See, you two, I’m not so odd. Someone extremely successful and good-looking thinks I’m amazing.’ Wow, how twisted is that? But now when he laughs at every little thing my mother says, I pay for it.” I lowered my gaze to the still water of the pool in front of me. “But he’s a good guy. Do I have to tell him about Todd, even though we didn’t have sex?”
“I was wondering when you were going to ask that.” She rolled over to face me. “Let’s back up. If you had pulled the trigger with Mark and moved forward with a divorce and then found out it wasn’t going to happen with Todd, would you have thought ‘Why did I even tell Mark? I broke up my marriage for nothing.’”
I shook my head.
“Of course not. You know better than to think that a marriage built on a shaky or virtually no foundation is better than nothing. You know it’s not sustainable with Mark and, yes, you’re possibly going to end up alone but—”
“I already feel alone.”
“Exactly. One night with Todd made you realize, truly and deeply and in a way you never had before, that the brain is the sexiest organ. Not that Mark isn’t smart. He’s a genius. But the brain really is the essence of someone, and his brain and your brain don’t want to stay up all night talking.”
“We never did. But you couldn’t have convinced me not to marry him. Not then.”
“But you see now?”
“My eyes have been opened.”
“So, do you have to tell Mark?” Gina rolled back over to face the sun. “Well, I’ve asked this before, but would you have gone back to Todd’s room if Mark were standing right there?”
I knew the answer. But how will I ever get the words out?
Then I heard, “Shake ’em! I got maracas! You got maracas! Shake ’em. Shake ’em. Shake ’em!”
“What the...” I lifted myself up to see what the hell was going on.
Grandpa Tony and Grandma Rose were on the deck in a two-person conga line, coming toward us.
“What are they doing?”
“Dancing,” Gina said.
“To the left. To the left!” Grandpa shouted.
“To the right. To the right!” Grandma sang.
“Shake ’em. Shake ’em. Shake ’em!” they yelled in unison.
“Oh my... God,” I said under my breath.
“Where are you two crazy kids coming from?” Gina asked.
Grandpa Tony took his hands off Grandma and did a little shaking move with his hips. “A welcome party. Our dear friend Louise Lucci always loved to dance.” He took two steps backward as Grandma took two steps forward, and then he twirled her.
Grandma untwirled and sat on the edge of my lounge chair. “So, how’s it going here?”
“Not as much fun as you’re having,” I said.
“Well, that’s how it goes.” She patted my leg. “This is the hard part, dear.”
“Seeing flashbacks?”
“No, life. Going through it. Learning the lessons.”
“So I hear.”
Grandpa Tony sat on the edge of Gina’s chair and leaned toward me. “But your soul will be better for it.”
I motioned to Gina. “He sounds like you.”
This visit is leaving me with a lot to digest, and not in the eating way, which is so much more fun.
Grandma and Grandpa stood. “Come on!”
Gina grabbed my hand and pulled me off the lounge chair. Then she and my grandmother sandwiched me in a conga line with Grandpa leading.
“Hold my hips,” Grandma called back to me.
We congaed away, and when we reached the edge of the deck, my grandmother leaned back as Gina leaned forward. It was a conga hug. I rested my head on my grandmother’s shoulder, and Gina rested hers on mine.
“You may not like where you’re being led, but you’ll appreciate it once you get there,” Grandma whispered. “In the meantime, dance.” She jutted her butt backward, which made me bump into Gina and made us both laugh. Then Grandma grabbed Gina’s hands, tightening our conga hug.