Mafia Chic

“I’d rather eat fifty pounds of scungilli and explode.”

“Outta my kitchen!” She slapped my arm.

Moving back into the living room, I saw five of my cousins and my father on their cell phones. Placing bets, checking on the book they’d taken. The women were martyrs. The men were criminals. Me? I was just certain that I’d never find someone who would understand the dance of it all.

My father stood up to stretch. Sometimes he liked to go outside on the front steps of our house and smoke a cigarette. I saw him go out the front door, and I followed him.

“Hey Dad.”

“Teddi Bear, come ’ere.” He stretched out an arm and wrapped it around me and kissed the top of my head. “I come out here for a little quiet. Those women are like a gaggle of friggin’ geese.”

“I know…. Ma’s giving me the ‘hurry up and get married’ speech again.” I looked up at my father. He slicked back his hair in a pompadour and favored polyester shirts in ugly colors like lime green. He wasn’t Manhattan stylish, but he was still handsome, his jaw square with a dimple in the middle, and his eyes nearly black and penetrating.

“She’s kind of a broken record with that one.”

“What about you, Dad?”

“What about me?”

“Am I this big disappointment because I haven’t found Mr. Right? Should I marry some Brooklyn boy and live around the corner from you and Ma?”

My father smiled a half-sad, sort of mysterious smile. Then he took my chin in his fingers and tilted my head up so I was looking right into his eyes. “Teddi…when I first set eyes on your mother, believe it or not, I knew she was the one.”

“Struck by the thunderbolt?”

“Not quite. The thunderbolt is like crazy love. We were just high school kids, you know. I was a player. She was the prom queen. But I knew what I wanted. I wanted a nice girl I could have babies with. A good cook. Pretty.”

“And?”

“And don’t tell your mother I said this or nothin’, but that was then. This is now. I don’t want to see you like my brother’s kid—Angela. Divorced with four fuckin’ kids to feed. You take your time. And who knows? You just might get struck by the thunderbolt.”

“I hope not.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Aunt Mariella and Uncle Mario.”

He nodded. After my uncle Mario had been paroled, he married Mariella in Las Vegas two weekends later, and they never left Sin City. They never came to Brooklyn to visit. Too many painful memories, they said. But once, my grandmother and Poppy had gone to see them in Las Vegas, before my grandmother died a few years back. When they returned, my grandmother wouldn’t speak about what they’d seen for the longest time. I found out what happened from my mother, whispering—which in my mother’s case is more like what other people call a normal speaking voice—to my father one night, when they thought I couldn’t hear.

Mariella, crushed by waiting for her true love all those years, had long since gone mad. She was no longer the beautiful woman from the picture in the photo album. Her beauty was still there, but her eyes, so fiery in the photos, were flat. She was extremely childlike—she wouldn’t go to the grocery store by herself, or even cross the street. But my uncle Mario remained true to her, doing all the shopping, even cutting her meat for her and helping her do her hair. I suppose some people might think that’s romantic in a tragic way. I just thought it was tragic. Period.

“You know, Teddi…it doesn’t matter who you marry. I just want you to be happy.”

“I’m happy in my restaurant, Dad.”

“Yeah…but when you’re old and gray, it’s not like you can curl up next to a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, Teddi.”

I didn’t see the point in telling my father that was the stupidest thing I ever heard. I just nodded as if he’d told me the sagest wisdom a father can impart to a daughter.

He lit his cigarette, and I kept him company while he smoked it. Then we both turned to go back inside.

“You know, Teddi,” Dad said as he pulled open the door. “I do just want you to be happy. An’ no pressure or anything, but the reason your mother acts this way is that you’re your mother’s only hope. That brother of yours…he’s dating a girl he met at the Playboy mansion this week.”

“I know,” I said, and rolled my eyes. Where my brother Michael was concerned, forget being struck by the thunderbolt. He was blinded by brainless blondes with boobs.

“I’m so full I could positively vomit.” Lady Di clutched her stomach as she rocked slightly on the couch back in our apartment later that night.

“It’s truly torture. It’s a week’s worth of calories. Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t skip it once in a while.” I was ensconced in our overstuffed living room chair—a descriptor that matched my own swollen belly.

“Oh, please, Teddi, your mum would have your uncle Lou here in ten minutes flat to check on us if we didn’t go. It’s simpler to go along.”

“I don’t know how you can be so blasé about it. Uncle Lou’s like an oversize baby-sitter.”

“Because they’re not my family, Teddi. It’s easier to find them slightly dotty and laugh about it.”

“Well, I’m glad my world exists to amuse you.”

“Don’t be cross, Teddi. They really are sweet in their own way.”

“Sure. You didn’t have to hide the Career Day notices from elementary school. Every kid had his or her parent in to talk to the class for five minutes about their job. There were three cops and a bunch of firemen, a stockbroker, a lawyer or two, a doctor, a teacher…one kid’s father owned a dry-cleaning business. Joey Antonelli, the plumber. There was even an out-of-work actor. Everybody had someone there but me. I mean, what was I supposed to do? We had twenty-two phone lines in the basement for my father’s bookie business. I couldn’t drag him in for Career Day. And then there’s the fact that…well, I’m still not one hundred percent sure what it is he does. Bookie? Loan shark? Well, anyway, not Career Day material.”

“I would have thought it would be very interesting.”

I threw a pillow at her.

“I’m serious,” she protested. “Think of all the little minds who could have been turned on to a life of crime. It’s perfectly charming!”

“All I’m saying, Diana, is it’s charming as long as it’s not happening to you. But these Sunday dinners not only blow my diet, they’re exhausting. I love my family members—each and every one. It’s the constant harping on my lack-of-a-boyfriend status. If I have to hear one more time that we’re both destined for old maid-hood…”

“Ignore them. Ignore them, Teddi. It isn’t worth it. You need to become more like the British. Smile and nod. Smile and nod.” With that, she sat upright, glazed over her eyes and began waving at me like a very stiff Queen Elizabeth, turning her hand just so, smiling and nodding as if greeting me from her gilded coronation carriage.

“Your father at least had a real job.”

“Oh, please. His job is to sit around with a stick up his ass.”

I laughed. “Smile and nod, Lady Di. Smile and nod.”

“Don’t make me laugh, Teddi. I’ll vomit, I swear. How is it you don’t weigh four hundred pounds growing up in a family like that?”

“You learn to pick at your food and make it look as if you ate. I don’t know…it’s like the restaurant, I just taste everything and don’t ever finish any one thing. Plus my family serves things like sheep’s head. Did you try some of that?”

“No. And the sight of your gorgeous cousin Tony gnawing on a sheep’s jaw bone—it still had teeth on it for God’s sake—may have cured me of my infatuation.”

“My father used to stack the heads one on top of the other in the extra freezer we had out in the garage. They’re quite a delicacy, you know.”

Lady Di shuddered. “They make me squeamish. Really horrid things. And that squid stuff…”

“It’s an acquired taste.”