Читать книгу Everywhere That Mary Went - Lisa Scottoline - Страница 8

4

“Taste, cara,” says my mother, holding out a wooden spoon with tomato sauce.

“Mmmm. Perfetto.” I’m at my parents’ row house in South Philly the next day, playing hooky because my twin sister’s on parole from the convent. She only gets out once a year under the rules of her cloistered order, and isn’t permitted phone calls or mail. I hate the convent for taking my twin from me. I can’t believe that God, even if he does exist, would want to divide us.

“You all right, Maria?” My mother frowns behind her thick glasses, which make her brown eyes look supernaturally large. She’s half blind from sewing lampshades in the basement of this very house, her childhood home. The kitchen is the only thing that’s changed since then; the furniture and fixtures remain the same, stop-time. We still use the tinny black switchplate like a bulletin board, leaving notes among the dogeared mass cards, a photo of JFK, and a frond of dried-out palm.

“I’m fine, Ma. I’m fine.” I wouldn’t dream of telling her I think I’m being watched. She’s like a supersensitive instrument, the kind that calibrates air pressure—or lies. She has a jumpy needle, and the news would send it into the red zone.

“Maria? They’re not treating you good at that office?” She scrutinizes me, the wooden spoon resting against her stretch pants like Excalibur in its scabbard.

“I’ve just been busy. It’s almost time for them to decide who makes partner.”

“Dio mio! They’re lucky to have you! Lucky! The nuns said you were a genius! A genius!” A scowl contorts her delicate features. Even at seventy-three, she makes up in the morning and gets her hair done every Saturday at the corner, where they tease it to hide her bald spot.

“Catholic school standards, Ma.”

“I should go up there to that fancy office! I should tell them how lucky they are to have my daughter be their lawyer!” She unsheaths the spoon and waves it recklessly in the air.

“No, Ma. Please.” I touch her forearm to calm her. Her skin feels papery.

“They should burn in hell!” She trembles with agitation. I wrap my arms around her, surprised at her frailty.

“It’s all right. Don’t worry.”

“Whaddaya two doing, the fox-trot?” jokes my father, puffing his cigar as he walks into the kitchen. He looks roly-poly in a thin short-sleeved shirt. It’s almost transparent, made from some obscure synthetic fiber, and he’s got the dago T-shirt on underneath. My father has dressed this way for as long as I can remember. When he’s dressed up, that is.

“Out! Out of the kitchen with that cigar!” my mother shouts—of necessity, because my father never wears his hearing aid.

“Don’t shoot!” He puts up both hands, then returns to the baseball game blaring in the living room.

My mother’s magnified eyes are an inch from my nose. “When is he going to stop with those cigars? When?”

“He’s been smoking cigars for sixty years, Ma. You think he’ll quit soon?”

Suddenly, there’s a commotion at the front door and I hear Angie shouting a greeting to my father. My mother and I hurry into the living room, where Angie is taking off her sweater.

“Hello, beautiful,” she says, with a laugh. She always calls me that. It’s her joke, since we’re identical twins.

“Angie!” I lock her in a bear hug.

“Hey, that’s too tight, let me go.”

“No.”

“Mare …”

“Not until you tell me you miss me.”

“Ma, get her off of me, please.”

“Let your sister alone. You’re too old for that. Too old.” My mother swats me in the arm with the spoon.

“Too old to hug my own twin? Since when?”

She hits me again.

“Ouch! What is this, Mommy Dearest?” I let Angie go.

“Yeah, grow up,” she says, with a short laugh. Her eyes look large and luminous under a short haircut—our childhood pixie resurrected. She’s dressed in jeans and a Penn sweatshirt just like mine, having left her Halloween costume back at the convent. We’re twins again, but for the hair and the fact that Angie looks rested and serene, with a solid spiritual core.

“Look at her, Ma, she looks so good!” I say. “Angie, you look great!”

“Stop, you.” Angie can’t take a compliment, never could.

“Turn around. Let me see.”

She does a obligatory swish-turn in her jeans.

“You wearing underwear?”

She laughs gaily. For a split second, it’s a snapshot of the twin I grew up with. I catch glimpses of the old Angie only now and then. The rest of the time, she’s a twin I hardly know.

“Basta, Maria! Basta!” chides my mother happily.

“So you’re out of uniform. I can’t believe it.”

“I changed at a Hojo’s after I left.” She sets her purse on the floor.

“Why?”

“No special reason. Tired of you making all those habit jokes, I guess.”

“Me?”

“You.”

“Well I love the sweatshirt. You look like yourself again.”

“Like I didn’t know you’d say that,” Angie says.

“Look at this hair!” My mother runs an arthritic hand through Angie’s hair. “So soft. Just like a baby’s.”

Angie smiles, and I wonder why she’s so accepting of my mother’s touch and not my own.

“Look at this hair, Matty!” my mother shouts delightedly. “Just like a baby’s!”

My father smiles. “You got your baby back, Mama.”

Angie positively glows in my mother’s arms. “I can’t get over how good you look, Ange. I think I’m in love,” I say.

“Will you stop already?” She wiggles away from my mother, still smiling.

“Plus I’m not used to you looking so much better than me. You look like the after picture and I look like the before.”

“That’s because you work too hard.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Did you make a partner yet?”

“No, they decide in two months. I’m going crazy. I hate life.” I wish I could tell her about the partnership rumors and the strange car, but we won’t have any time alone unless I waylay her.

“And it’s a hit! Out to right field! Might be deep enough … It is!” screams the Phillies announcer, Richie Ashburn, but my father’s too excited at seeing Angie again to look at the television. My parents miss Angie, even though they’re proud of her decision. They’re proud of both their twins, the one who serves God, and the other who serves Mammon.

We troop into the kitchen to talk and drink percolated coffee from chipped cups. That’s all we’ll do today, as Richie Ashburn calls a high-decibel double-header to an empty living room. I start the ball rolling over the first cup, whining about my caseload, but my father quickly takes over the conversation. He can’t hear when others talk, so his only choice is to filibuster. None of us minds this much, least of all my mother, who footnotes his narrative of their courtship.

My father takes a breather after lunch and my mother holds forth about the new butcher, who doesn’t trim off enough fat. She tells a few stories of her own, mostly about our childhood, and I realize how badly she needs to talk to someone who can hear her. Angie must know this too, for she doesn’t look bored, and, truth to tell, I’m not either. But we both draw the line after dinner, when she launches into the story of a maiden aunt’s gallbladder operation. Angie seizes the opportunity to head for the bathroom and I follow her upstairs, hoping to get her alone. I reach the bathroom door just as she’s about to close it.

“Ange, wait. It’s me.” I stick my foot in the door.

“What are you doing?” Angie looks at me through the crack.

“I want to talk to you.”

“Move your foot. I’ll be right out.”

“What am I, the Boston Strangler? Let me in.”

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Number one or number two?”

“Mary, we’re not kids anymore.”

“Right. Number one or number two?”

She shakes her head. “Number one.”

“Okay. So number one, you can let me in.”

“It can’t wait two minutes?”

“I don’t want Mom to hear. Will you open the goddamn door?”

So she does, and I take a precarious seat on the curved edge of the tub, an old claw-and-ball-foot. Angie stands above me with her hands on her hips. “What is it?” she says.

“You can pee if you have to.”

“I can wait. Why don’t you tell me what you have to say.”

A little ember of anger starts to glow inside my chest. “What’s the big deal, Angie? We took baths together until we were ten years old. Now you won’t let me in the bathroom?”

She closes the lid on the toilet seat and sits down on it with a quiet sigh. The old Angie would have snapped back, would have given as good as she got, but that Angie went into the convent and never came out. “Is something the matter?” she asks patiently.

By now my teeth are on edge. “No.”

“Look, Mary, let’s not fight. What’s the matter?”

I look down at the tiny white octagons that make up the tile floor. The grout between them is pure as sugar. My father, a tile setter until he popped a disc in his back, regrouts the bathroom every year. The porcelain gleams like something you’d find at Trump Tower. My father does beautiful work.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Angie says.

I smile. We used to be able to read each other’s minds; I guess Angie can still read mine. “What was it Pop always said?”

“‘It’s not a job, it’s a craft.’”

“Right.” I look up, and her face has softened. I take a deep breath. “I don’t know where to start, Ange. So much is going on. At work. At home. I feel tense all the time.”

“What’s happening?”

“It’s the last couple of weeks until they decide who’s partner. I heard they’re only picking two of us. Everything I do is under the microscope. Plus I’ve been getting these phony phone calls. And last night I could swear a car was watching me from across the street.”

She frowns. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“But why would anybody be watching you? You’re not involved in any trouble, are you? I mean, in the work you do?”

“I don’t do any criminal cases, if that’s what you mean. Stalling would never touch anything like that.”

From downstairs, my mother calls, “Angela! Maria! Dessert!”

Angie gets up. “Maybe it’s your imagination. You always had a vivid imagination, you know.”

“I did not.”

“Oh, really? What about the time you hung garlic in our room, after that vampire movie we saw? It was on our bulletin board for a whole year. A foot-long ring of garlic.”

“So?”

“So my sweaters smelled like pesto.”

“But we never got any vampires.”

She laughs. “You look stressed, Mary. You need to relax. So what if they don’t make you partner? You’re a great lawyer. You can get another job.”

“Oh, yeah? Being passed over isn’t much of a recommendation, and the market in Philly is tight. Even the big firms are laying people off.”

“You need to stay calm. I’m sure everything will turn out all right. I would tell you that it’s in God’s hands, but I know what you’d say.”

“Girls, your coffee’s getting cold!” calls my mother.

“She’s waiting for us,” Angie says. “And I still have to go to the bathroom.”

I get up, reluctantly. “I wish we could get time to talk, Ange. We never talk. I don’t even know how you’re doing. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she says, with a pat smile, the same smile you’d give to a bank teller.

“Really?”

“Really. Now go. I have to pee.” She ushers me out the door. “I’ll pray for you,” she calls from inside.

“Terrific,” I mumble, walking down the stairs to a darkened living room. The double-header is over, and my father is standing in front of the television watching the Phillies leave the field. Red, blue, and green lights flicker across his face in the dark. Despite the carnival on his features, I can see he’s dejected. “They lose again, Pop?”

He doesn’t hear me.

“They lose, Pop?” I shout.

He nods and turns off the ancient television with a sigh. It makes a small electrical crackle; then the room falls oddly silent. I hadn’t realized how loud the volume was. He yanks the chattery pull chain on the floor lamp and the room lights up instandy, very bright. They must have a zillion-watt bulb in the lamp; the parchment shade is brown around the middle. I’m about to say something when I remember it might be because of my mother’s eyesight.

“You want some cannoli, honey?” my father asks tenderly. He throws an arm around my shoulder.

“You got the chocolate chip, don’t you? ’Cause if you don’t, I’m leaving. I’ve had it with the service at this place.”

“What kinda father would I be that I don’t have the chocolate chip? Huh?” He gives me a squeeze and we walk into the kitchen together.

My mother clucks about the cold coffee as we sit down, and Angie joins us at the table. My father’s soft shoulders slump over his coffee. We carry on the conversation around him, and my mother chatters anxiously through dessert. Something’s wrong, but I can’t figure out what it is. Angie senses it too, because after my father declines a cannoli for the second time, she gives me a discreet nudge.

“Pop,” I say, “Have a cannoli. I’m eating alone here.”

He doesn’t even look up. I don’t know if he doesn’t hear me or what. Angie and I exchange glances.

“Pop!” Angie shouts. “You okay?”

My mother touches my hand. “Let him be. He’s just tired.”

My father looks up, and his milky brown eyes are wet. He squeezes them with two calloused fingers.

My mother deftly passes him a napkin. “Isn’t that right, Matty? You’re tired?”

“Ah, yeah. I’m tired.” He nods.

“You’re leading the witness, Ma,” I say.

She waves me off like an annoying fly. “Your father and I were talking about Frank Rizzo last night. Remember, it was this time of year, Rizzo had the heart attack. It’s a sin. He coulda been mayor again.”

My father seems lost in thought. He says, half to himself, “So sudden. So young. We couldn’t prepare.”

“It’s a sin,” repeats my mother, rubbing his back. With her lipstick all gone, her lips look bloodless.

“Pop, Rizzo was almost eighty,” I say, but Angie’s look silences me. Her eyes tell me who they’re grieving for. The one who loved percolated coffee, the Phillies, and even an occasional cigar—Mike. I feel a stab of pain inside; I wonder when this will stop happening. I rise stiffly. “I better get going. It’s a school night.”

My parents huddle together at the table, looking frozen and small.

Angie clears her throat. “Me too. I have to change back.”

I walk to the screen door with its silly scrollwork D, looking out into the cool, foggy night. I remember nights like this from when I was little. The neighbors would sit out in beach chairs, the women gossiping in Italian and the men playing mora. Angie and I would sit on the marble stoop in our matching pajamas like twin mascots. It was a long time ago.

I wish I could feel that air again.

I open the screen door and walk down the front steps onto the sidewalk. The air is chilled from the fog, which hangs as low as the thick silver stanchions put in to thwart parking on the sidewalk. A dumb idea—all it does is force people to double-park on the main streets. Like my father says, in South Philly the cars are bigger than the houses.

Suddenly a powerful car barrels by, driving much too fast for this narrow street. It comes so near the curb in front of me that I feel a cold chill in its wake.

“Hey, buddy!” I shout after him, then do a double-take. It looks just like the car from last night.

I run into the middle of the street, squinting in the darkness. I catch sight of the car’s flame-red taillights as it turns right at the top of the street and disappears into the dark. My father comes out of the house, followed by my mother.

“Pop! Did you see that car? What kind of car was that? Was that an Oldsmobile?”

“What?” He cups a hand behind his ear, making a lumpy silhouette in front of the screen door.

“Ma! Did you see that car?”

“What car?” she hollers, from behind her bulletproof glasses.

Behind them both, at a distance, is Angie.