coming here?” Ma asked.
“I invited him,” Nonnie replied, as if this should come as no surprise to anyone.
“You what?” my mother said, pausing midroll.
“What?” my grandmother replied, eyes wide with innocence. “We’re friends. We’ve been playing poker together on Friday nights for fifteen years now. I can’t invite the man to my home for dinner?”
But as Nonnie turned her attention to the meat once more, I could swear her cheeks were slightly flushed.
“What are you up to?” Ma demanded, putting words to the suspicion that lurked in my own mind.
But before she got her answer, the doorbell rang. “I’ll get it!” my grandmother announced, rushing to the sink to rinse her hands. Then, checking her reflection in the microwave door, she gave her curls a quick pat and headed to the living room and the front door, leaving my mother and me staring after her in surprise.
“Artie! Glad you could make it,” we heard her exclaim from the next room. And within moments, she was leading Artie Matarrazzo into our kitchen. “Look who’s here!” Nonnie announced, gripping his hand. “You remember my daughter, Maria, and my granddaughter, Angela?” she said to Artie, who looked somewhat unsure how he had wound up in our kitchen, much less by my grandmother’s side. I might even have thought he’d stumbled to our house by accident, judging by his somewhat rumpled attire and bewildered brown eyes beneath bushy gray brows, if it weren’t for the sausage he pulled out of the shopping bag he carried.
“Oh, Artie, you remembered,” Nonnie gushed, gazing at the package as if it were a dozen roses, and leaning over to kiss his fleshy cheek.
Oh, my, I thought, exchanging a look with my mother.
Nonnie had a beau. And if the size of that sausage he was sporting was any indication, it was serious.
No less than an hour later, my brother Sonny arrived, with his wife, Vanessa. Of course, dinner was pretty much done by this point, and even the table had been set, leaving Sonny and Vanessa with nothing more to do than stand in the middle of the living room, while both my mother and my grandmother oohed and aahed over Vanessa. Or more specifically, Vanessa’s abdomen, which was round and bursting with her and Sonny’s first child. My mother’s first grandchild. “First grandchild from birth,” my mother would always clarify. My brother Joey had fraternal twins that came with his fiancée, Miranda, and once my mother had accepted the fact that her oldest son was not likely to give her any grandkids unless he married Miranda, she embraced little Tracy and Timmy as her own.
“There is nothing like it when your own son is having a baby,” she declared now, as she often exclaimed when Joey and Miranda weren’t around.
Vanessa, of course, ate it up. Standing before my mother, she ran one well-ringed hand over her abdomen, pressing the fabric of the pink maternity top against the swell, as if to show it off, as she said, “I can’t believe how big I am—and I’m only in my fifth month!”
It was true that Vanessa was huge, but I don’t think it was all baby. At five-nine, with a mane of blond hair sprayed so high it practically hit the woodwork on the way in the door, she still wore her trademark four-inch heels. Huge hunks of gold jewelry dangled from her ears, neck and arms, which somehow added to her girth in an oddly glamorous way. Her overwhelming size made her pregnant state seem all the more glorious. When Vanessa was in the room, she literally took it over. You couldn’t not talk about her.
“How are you feeling? Still getting that morning sickness?” Ma asked. Then, “You really should sit down. Especially in this heat. Summer’s barely begun and already the humidity is unbearable. Angela, get Vanessa one of those nice armchairs from the dining room.”
There really was no escaping Vanessa’s reign over a room, I thought, heading to the dining room for an extra chair as I heard Sonny begin to regale Nonnie and my mother with story of Vanessa’s latest sonogram. “I saw something on that screen. I swear it’s gonna be a boy….”
There was only one thing that could dispel the Vanessa obsession. Well, actually two things. Tracy and Timmy, the Twin Terrors, who had just now exploded through the front door and into the living room, practically barreling Vanessa down in their six-year-old exuberance.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Joey called out in admonishment, as he came through the door, his hand firmly around Miranda’s tiny waist.
It still amazed me to see Joey in “dad mode,” as he’d taken on the role rather abruptly when he met Miranda a year earlier. Up till then, he had devoted all his time and energy to running the auto-parts empire my father had left to him. And whatever spare time he’d had was spent waxing and detailing the ’67 Cadillac that was his pride and joy. Now, suddenly, Tracy and Timmy were his pride and joy. Miranda, his raison d’être.
My mother should have been satisfied with this turn of events. For years, she worried Joey wouldn’t lift his head up from the Caddy long enough to settle down and give her the grandkids she craved. But somehow she couldn’t swallow down the idea of Miranda. It was as if she saw Miranda only as some destitute single mother scheming to get her hands on the dough from our family’s business.
Fortunately, Miranda didn’t notice—or at least acted as if she didn’t. “Hi, Mrs. Di,” she said, leaning in to embrace my mother. I saw my mother’s arms go around Miranda’s petite frame, though I could tell she refrained from her requisite squeeze until she moved on to Joey, whom she not only hugged but gave a firm swat on the butt. “He gets better looking every time I see him!” she said to Nonnie, a wistfulness in her voice that indicated to the more astute observer, like myself, that she felt all that magnificence was somehow being wasted on Miranda.
“He’s all right,” Nonnie responded, with a wink that said Joey was more than all right in her eyes, as she engulfed him in a hug that practically swallowed his six-foot frame. “You remember Artie Matarrazzo, right, Joey?” Nonnie said, dragging Joey to Artie, who sat obediently on the couch. “Hey, Mr. Matarrazzo,” Joey said, shaking the older man’s hand with the same surprise my brother Sonny had displayed at the sight of my grandmother, flushed and beaming over a man other than Grandpa, who had been dead a good ten years now.
But no one had too much time to wonder over Artie, now that Tracy and Timmy had launched a full attack on the living room. They had already pulled all the cushions off the couch and were about to proceed with a pillow fight when my mother swooped down to hug them and shower them with the gifts she kept handily beside the sofa they had all but destroyed. It was as if she would gladly have taken on Tracy and Timmy, who with their big blue eyes and curly brown locks were irresistible, and put Miranda, who stood by gazing on the scene with love, out to pasture.
But whatever lingering animosity there was, it was immediately dispelled when, moments after Nonnie went into the kitchen to check on the sauce, she returned and announced, “Dinner’s ready. Let’s eat!”
Once we were all settled around the table, with me sitting between Tracy and Timmy to keep them from tearing at each other’s hair while we were eating, it suddenly occurred to Sonny that my other half was missing.
“Hey, where’s Kirk?” he said, between mouthfuls of eggplant and linguine.
“Who’s Kirk?” Tracy asked, completely forgetting the guy who had kept her giggling all afternoon with his silly little jokes the last time we were here.
“You idiot,” Timmy declared. “Kirk is Angela’s boyfriend.”
