for free is true,” she said, blowing out a last puff of smoke and crushing the butt beneath one three-inch heel.
“I don’t know, Michelle, it sounds kind of…manipulative.” I wanted a proposal that was genuine—that came from Kirk and Kirk alone. “That’s just not me,” I continued. “I’m not a game player.”
“Okay,” she said, waving that weighty engagement ring in the air as she pulled open the door and headed inside once more. “But, remember, you got to be in it to win it.”
3
Welcome to Brooklyn. Population: Married
“I don’t like that, Angela,” my mother said, standing over a sizzling pan of eggplant on the stove. It was Sunday, and after an utterly uneventful weekend spent mostly alone (Justin and Lauren had disappeared to the Hamptons on Saturday, thank God, to celebrate their happy reunion), I had gone to my mother’s house early, ostensibly to help her cook, and was now being subjected to the third degree while chopping garlic. It was my own fault, really, for admitting that Kirk had gone home to see his parents. And for saying it with a less-than-cheerful expression.
“How many times has he been here?” Ma said now, flipping the eggplants with barely contained indignation. “It’s not right.”
For once I had to agree with her. She was from the old school, where a man treated a woman with the utmost deference. My father was one of those men. It seemed when I was growing up, there was never a moment when he didn’t put my mother’s concerns above his own. Even up until the moment he died, as he lay on his sickbed, where my mother had permanently stationed herself, he begged her to go to sleep, knowing he would be up and in pain for the rest of the night. Of course, my mother didn’t dare close her eyes during those last few days. In fact, she still blames herself for succumbing to exhaustion the night he passed away. “I closed my eyes for one minute, and he was gone!” she laments, as if the fact that she couldn’t stay awake had ultimately done him in. Even four years later, she still wore mourning clothes, and judging from the way her knit skirt was starting to fray around the edges, they were the same ones she’d bought in her first year as a widow.
“Ma, how come you never wear the dress I bought you?” I said now, hoping to get her off the subject of Kirk. “What did you do, throw it out?”
“I have it. It’s in the closet.”
I bet it was. Along with sheet sets she had gotten on sale and never used and the tablecloths from Italy she was saving for a “special occasion” that never seemed to come. Hence the one flaw in the Old World ways: You never enjoyed anything while it was fresh and new. “I don’t know what you’re waiting for,” I said.
“Don’t worry about me. Worry about yourself,” she said, starting to pull the eggplants out of the pan and placing them on a plate.
“Who’s worried about Angela?” Nonnie said, coming through the kitchen door from her apartment downstairs.
“Hey, Nonnie,” I said, jumping up to enfold her in my arms. I breathed in her flowery scent and leaned back to gaze at her soft, smiling features with relief. Cheerfully attired in a bright red blouse and a pair of polyester capris—like most of her peers in the eighty and over set, she couldn’t resist synthetic fabrics—my grandmother was a breath of fresh air in the gloom that permeated my mother whenever she thought one of her children was in danger of unhappiness. Since I was the one who usually fell into that category, I had come to rely on Nonnie to keep things on an even keel.
“You gonna cook in that?” my mother said, turning from the sauce she stirred momentarily to take in my grandmother’s festive outfit and made-up face.
“I sure am,” Nonnie said, then defiantly grabbed a bowl of chopped meat off the counter. After dumping in the garlic I had just finished dicing along with breadcrumbs and myriad other ingredients so secret she claimed she was taking their names to her grave, Nonnie reached into the bowl of red meat and spices and, rings and all, began to mix the ingredients by hand.
“So what’s your mother worried about now?” Nonnie asked, addressing me as if Ma weren’t standing two feet behind her at the stove.
“Oh, you know. The usual. Me and Kirk.”
“Hey, that’s right,” my grandmother said, as if it just occurred to her I was without my other half. “Where is the Skinny Guinea?” she asked, using her nickname for Kirk. It was Nonnie’s way of accepting Kirk as a permanent fixture in my life despite the fact that he had no relatives whatsoever who hailed from the boot of Europe. She believed that all the meals he had eaten in our home qualified him as an honorary Italian, albeit a thin one. “I don’t know where he puts it!” she would say after he cleaned a plate heaping with pasta and red meat.
“He went home,” I admitted now, watching her face carefully as she grabbed up a clump of meat and began rolling it into a meatball.
“Oh, yeah?” she said, plopping the meatball into the pan my mother had laid out on the table and grabbing up another clump of meat. “Too bad. He loves your mother’s eggplant. He’s gonna miss out, huh?” she said with a wink as she finished up another meatball.
I smiled. Leave it to Nonnie to turn things around and make it seem as if Kirk were the one missing out on something. Reaching into the bowl before her, I started to roll meatballs right along with her.
“You don’t think that’s wrong?” my mother chimed in, giving the sauce one last stir before she joined us at the table. “He’s been to this house I don’t know how many times, and he doesn’t invite Angela into his own home? To meet his parents?”
Nonnie shrugged, grabbed up some more chopped meat, rolled. “Don’t his parents live in, whatsit—Massachusetts?” she said. The way she said Massachusetts made it clear that this wasn’t as desirable a location as, say, Brooklyn. Because in Nonnie’s world, there really weren’t too many places outside of Brooklyn she felt it necessary to be. Her own mother had moved here from Naples as a teen, and Nonnie had grown up right on Delancey, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. In all these years, she’d never really seen any reason to go anywhere else. According to her, Brooklyn had everything a person could need: Al’s Butcher had the best Italian sausage, and there really wasn’t a better bagel to be had anywhere in New York than at Brooklyn Bagelry, never mind the rest of the country. And with Kings Plaza a short walk away and packed to the brim with shops that kept her in polyester and high-heeled Cubby Cobblers, what more did a woman need?
“He’s not serious about her. And I don’t like that,” my mother said, putting up the water for the pasta.
“Serious. Who needs serious? There’s plenty of time for that,” Nonnie said with a wave of one ringed hand.
She was right, I realized. Why was I in such a hurry, anyway? Kirk and I hadn’t even been together two years yet. Getting all worked up about marriage seemed a bit…premature. Didn’t it?
Returning to the table and grabbing a hunk of chopped meat, my mother eyed me and Nonnie with a shake of the head. “Did you bring up the sausage from your freezer?” she asked my grandmother.
“No, I didn’t have any,” Nonnie said lightly. “But don’t worry. I asked Artie to bring it.”
“Artie?” my mother said, “Gloria Matarrazzo’s husband?”
“Gloria’s dead,” Nonnie said, rolling the meat between
