Chapter Thirty-Two

“WE SAW A terrible accident,” Franny reported with great excitement after Nan opened her door and found her and Regina there. “A van crashed and rolled over right in the middle of the Atlantic City Expressway.”

“And caught on fire,” Regina added as if it was live entertainment for them, the fire a bonus like an encore at a concert.

They had popped up in Pinetree one Saturday afternoon. What an almighty shock. They’d never visited Nan when she lived in Philly. Because, of course, they were scared by what they saw on the nightly news: street corner shootings; mobs of kids rampaging down Market Street beating up passersby and grabbing things out of stores; even buildings in Philly attacked people, with old crumbling facades falling randomly on pedestrians. Nan was sure they thought that stuff went on every minute, that walking to the grocery store or riding the trolley was taking your life in your hands.

They hadn’t asked Nan if they could visit. They’d left a message on her phone that they were “swinging by” that weekend. No one swung by Pinetree. It wasn’t on the way to anywhere. Nan happened to have the weekend off—two whole days with nothing to do. She supposed she could show Franny and Regina around, maybe take them down to Atlantic City to gamble in one of the casinos or to the Pine Barrens for a hike. Did they gamble? Did they hike? She had no idea.

“Come in,” Nan said.

If you must. Oh hell, they both have overnight bags in their hands. What have I done to deserve this?

She’d hardly gotten them inside when Immaculata came charging upstairs with a full tray of food and a jug of wine in a bag slung over her shoulder. Nan gave up. This whole thing was out of control.

“They don’t drink,” she told Immaculata, gesturing to Franny and Regina.

“We drink,” they said, laughing.

Since when? Nobody tells me anything.

“You look like sisters,” Immaculata said. “I would know you three were sisters anywhere.”

“Do you have any sisters?” Franny asked, heaping cheese and crackers and olives on her plate. She took a big swig of wine.

“Too many,” Immaculata said.

Franny and Regina laughed at everything she said as if she were a hilarious comedian. Who are these cheery women? What have you done with my miserable sisters?

Nan tried to be a convivial host. She shared stories of her favorite library users and the inside story of the delis in town and their specialties. She did her best Jersey Devil imitation, stomping around the room and flapping imaginary wings. She asked them how they were, and they started down their usual path, turning the conversation to their husbands, kids, and grandkids.

Every time she asked her sisters the simple question How are you? it was as if they did not exist apart from their husbands and children. Are we still doing this, women of the twenty-first century? Nan hoped to hear one of her sisters actually answer the question with I’m bored or I’m thrilled or I’m horny or I’m anything that was about their own personal individual life. Who are you without others? Nan longed to ask. Who are you as a person? Who the hell are you?

Then Franny rang her wineglass like a bell with her spoon as if she were making a toast at a wedding. “I have ants in my pants,” she announced. “I want to go somewhere.”

“Me too,” Regina said. “We thought maybe you would come with us, Nan. A sisters’ trip.”

Kill me now.

“You don’t travel,” Nan said. You two are afraid of every damn thing.

“Things change,” Regina said, throwing her hands up in the air.

“We could travel if you’d come with us,” Franny said. “You know how; you’ve even been overseas.”

To her sisters, a few short trips to Europe with an ex who’d paid for everything and never let Nan forget it made her an exotic adventurer, a modern-day Lady Hester Stanhope traversing the Syrian desert in the early 1800s.

“Think about it,” Regina said. “We need to celebrate. We all made it past forty-seven. That’s something to celebrate. We can relax now. We can enjoy ourselves.”

Nan hated to admit it, but she knew exactly what Regina meant. Every woman whose mother dies young knows.

The year Nan had turned forty-seven, she’d been an absolute nervous wreck for the entire year, drinking far too much and too often to kill her terror. It was totally irrational, and she had even known it at the time. But she could practically hear the ticking bomb inside herself that had killed her mother at forty-seven. She felt as if she’d held her breath for the entire year, and then it took her the whole next year to believe she’d made it. She was still here; she could do what she wanted with her life.

“How many times have you thought you had cancer so far?” Nan asked her sisters.

“A million,” Franny said.

“At least. More like a trillion,” Regina said. “I’m sick of worrying about it. I’m done.”

Nan looked at her sisters, seeing herself in a few years, their resemblance too close to deny. If she stopped getting edgy haircuts and dying her hair in crazy pastel streaks, if she gained a few pounds, if she stopped her vigilant opposition to looking, sounding, or acting like her sisters, the three of them could be triplets.

“What is wrong with us?” Nan said. “We spend our whole lives worrying about dying.”

“Show her what you found.” Regina urged Franny, who pulled an old photo from her purse. She pointed to their mother in young womanhood and a striking young man who was not their father, with his cheek pressed to hers. Both were dressed in flashy red satin skating costumes. They were posed on a competition skating rink, in front of a scoreboard and judging stand. They looked like professional skaters. What on earth was this?

“Mom didn’t skate,” Nan protested.

“Oh, yes, she did,” Franny said. “She was even a champion. They were pair skaters, together on the ice for years.” She pointed to the man in the photo. “She was in love with him before Dad. And the guy died suddenly. He crashed his car into a tree. I found letters. Dad never even knew about him. He told me that Mom and he had only ever dated each other, that they only had eyes for each other.”

This was what was wrong with their family. It was blindingly clear now. Nan visualized the incredible ripple effect of that huge raw wound of a secret—an unhappy marriage; a weepy wife stuck in unspoken grief who had settled for a life she didn’t really want; a husband who eventually acknowledged that his wife would never be happy but stayed because he was a good guy, and good guys stayed until their lives went up in flames; and three daughters who grew up thinking this morass of sadness was how life had to be lived.

“I used to be so scared to come in the house after school that I peed my pants every day on the front step when I was in second grade,” Nan said. “I was scared to see Mom crying.”

Regina squeezed her hand, a silent sorry. Franny shook her head and looked at Nan with real sympathy.

“Here’s to the good old days. Before therapy and antidepressants.” Regina raised her glass in a toast, making them all laugh ruefully.

“To the bad old days, may they never return.” Franny held her glass high.

For once, Immaculata was silent. Nan looked at the photo for a long time before she gave it back to Franny. They all paused to watch Franny tuck it away again.

A quiet understanding began to bloom in Nan’s body. This moment was more holy to her than the day she stood over her mother’s grave, knowing nothing about her really.

She wished her mother had been able to hit the bottom of her grief and then rise up to feel joy again, every day. She wished three new baby girls smiling up at her mother had been enough to heal her pain permanently. She wished her mother’s whole life had not been sliding down into black holes and crawling back out of them again. She wished she could have one more time to sit on a couch with her sisters on one of their mom’s good days as she read to them from their favorite Grimm’s Fairy Tales, making a deep scary wolf’s voice. Nan still loved the part when the mother cuts open the wolf’s belly, frees her children inside, and then fills the wolf up with rocks so when he goes to drink from the river, he falls in and drowns. She and her sisters always cheered at that part.

Franny rooted around in her purse again and slid a handwritten list on the table. “So how’s next May for our sisters’ trip? Nan, you can even pick the place from this list we made up.”

Nan summoned up her favorite Dorothy Parker quote, What fresh hell is this? It was a great list, though, full of places she’d love to go to: Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, Edinburgh.

“We spent a lot of time on this list,” Franny said. “Research.”

“You’d be crazy not to go.” Immaculata bossed Nan in her usual way.

Like she was in charge of Nan’s life, not Nan.

“Who asked you?” Nan responded automatically.

Franny and Regina looked shocked at her rudeness.

This is how we talk to each other. We say things straight out. Nan realized Immaculata had taught her that. Because in her own family, no one ever said what they really meant. Today’s revelations certainly made that clear.

“Go while you all can.” Immaculata plowed ahead. “Because you never know.”

Franny and Regina nodded like they were listening to the wisdom of the ages.

“Hey, Mac. You come too,” Franny urged Immaculata.

They’ve been here five minutes, and they’re already calling her by a nickname I didn’t know she had.

“I’m not allowed to leave the state,” Immaculata refused, laughing.

Turning to Nan, Regina chanted, pounding on the table. “It’s all on you, Nan. Let’s go go go go go go go.” Franny and Immaculata chimed in.

It’s that damn homemade red wine. But Nan had drunk enough that she agreed to Lisbon the following spring, and the women all cheered.

“They have a castle in Lisbon from the sixth century, way up on top of a hill overlooking the city,” Regina said. “We better get in shape; we’re going to be walking up there and all over that city.” She looked ten years younger at that moment, lit up with excitement and flushed with wine.

“Nan, did you know Lisbon has the oldest bookstore in the entire world still operating?” Franny announced. “The. Oldest. In. The. Entire. World.” She repeated it slowly as if Nan needed to hear it again, to comprehend the wonder of it.

What a can of worms I’ve opened here.

Nan pictured Franny and Regina in full planning mode, their emails streaming at her for months up ahead, with information on each and every attraction in Lisbon. She was as excited as they were. It might not be a real good idea to encourage them too much way ahead of time though.

She was afraid they’d had such a good time in Pinetree they would never leave, but finally, the next day they got ready to go.

“Take her with you. She’s a pain in my ass.” Nan pretended to drag Immaculata by the elbow toward the car.

They all laughed, Immaculata most of all. Nan was reminded of the merriment of the older women in Barbara Pym’s novels, finding the absurd and pleasurable in everyday life. She never thought she’d be lucky enough to find a gang of women to laugh with like this. Amazing that her sisters were two of them. Stunning that the gang she was laughing with was in Pinetree, New Jersey, of all the unlikely places on earth.

She had not seen any of this coming; how could she? What else was up ahead was a complete mystery to her now.

*

NAN COULDN’T BELIEVE her eyes. Statues of saints rolling by on white pedestals right down the middle of Main Street after being hauled out of St. Anthony’s Church. Crowds of spectators lining the street. The high school marching band playing what sounded like the hokeypokey; that couldn’t be right.

“What’s all this?” Nan asked a cop standing at an intersection near a barricade.

He snorted at her ignorance. “Only one of the oldest Italian festivals in the entire country. Started by immigrants back in the 1800s to ask Our Blessed Mother Mary for a good harvest and to thank her for their safe passage here. Where’ve you been?”

Come to think of it, she had seen posters everywhere and a giant banner across the street. But she thought an Italian festival was about meatball and sausage sandwiches, amateur bands singing Frank Sinatra songs, cheesy carnival rides, maybe cannoli stands. This parade of rolling saints was totally unexpected.

Nan decided to watch the saint parade for a while to see if she could figure out what this was all about. Were the saints leading the way to the meatball and sausage sandwiches?

It was quite hypnotic, the slow-moving crowd singing hymns, people pushing wheelchairs and baby carriages, marchers with kettle drums and trumpets keeping a ragged rhythm. When Our Lady of Guadalupe rolled by, the singing was in Spanish and was much livelier than the dirge-y hymns sung in English. First, Italian immigrants came to this town built on Lenni Lenape land, now Mexican immigrants. Who would be next? From what she could see, this was as much a march of history and cultures as it was a religious procession.

To her surprise, she spied Mona shuffling along in a crowd of other women behind a float arrayed with roses and decorated with a massive Rosary with beads the size of beach balls, topped by the biggest Mary statue she’d ever seen. Impulsively, Nan joined her, startling Mona.

“Where are you going with that giant Mary?” Nan really wanted to know.

“I can’t talk. We pray while we walk,” Mona said.

Now that everyone on the sidelines saw her there, Nan felt she had to keep going. Otherwise, it would feel like leaving a theater five minutes into act one. It was a lurching procession, some of the statues rolled along by altar boys and girls in their garb, others by priests and nuns, and more by members of the Knights of Columbus in their plumed hats. Everyone looked hot as hell, sweat dripping down faces and staining underarms.

When the procession was over, Mona quickly reverted to her usual loquacious know-it-all self to fill Nan in. “My mother couldn’t get pregnant. Six years they were married, nothing. Finally, she walked this procession behind the Blessed Mother, praying all the way.” Mona paused for dramatic effect, leaning close to Nan. “The very next year, she walked behind the Blessed Mother with me in a baby carriage. So there.”

Was Mona hoping for a blessed event of her own? Was there a grandchild slow in arriving?

No, it seemed Mona was required to do it. She explained that her mother had walked the procession every year after for the rest of her life, had six more children before she died, and had pledged Mona would continue the tradition to give thanks.

Nan wondered how many of the women here were marching for fertility. It was probably no more farfetched than a lot of the other alleged infertility cures. There were a ton of books on the subject that people requested at the library—on Chinese herbs, acupuncture for fertility, how to cook with sea moss and wild yams, and her favorite, hypnosis.

Ding of a calming bell. Close your eyes and imagine a baby in your arms. Not a baby with a stinky diaper. No, not a baby puking over your shoulder. Stop that, imagine a sweet-smelling baby. Nan would not be good at being hypnotized; she could just tell. Her mind wandered too much.

Mona pulled an older woman over and urged her to tell Nan her story. The woman had a beaming face, a misshapen torso, and she held herself up with braces and canes.

“I almost died when I was born. My two grandmothers stood over me all night long praying to Mary to save me. They didn’t have no doctors back then, no hospital. But they had this procession the next day. They had Mary to pray to for help. By the time the procession was over, I was out of trouble. And here I am today.” She clearly had told the story many times, but she choked up with real emotion.

The meatball sandwiches that came later were phenomenal, but what Nan could not stop thinking about was the power of the stories the women had told. This town held a deep vein of lore that erupted at every opportunity; she felt wrapped in stories here.