Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [49]
Eleanor, on the verge of tears, uttered, “No thank you.”
“All right, then, terrible decision but you are free to make it. Katarina?”
“Sure. Yummy.” He handed Katharine the crumbly cheese.
“Help yourself to some of that good bread. Now, who else would like a bit? Julia, what’s the name of the doorman again?”
“Mario, but he doesn’t want any cheese, Dad,” Julia said.
“Nonsense. It’s Christmas and he’s working. Where’s your spirit?”
“Please don’t offer him any cheese, Dad,” Eleanor pleaded.
“What is wrong with you girls?” My dad stood up and then yelled across the lobby, “Mario! Mario!”
Mario put his Daily News down.
“Can I interest you in some of the finest Parmesan this side of the Mediterranean?”
“Oh no, thank you, sir.”
“You’re not being polite, are you, Mario?”
“Dad, he doesn’t want any cheese,” I said.
“Okay, I will have some. Thank you.”
“Terr-ific. Okay, let’s see here . . .” And my dad began jabbing at the Parmesan with his knife again. “Where are you from, Mario?”
“Italy.”
“What part?” My dad placed a chunk of cheese in Mario’s palm.
“Umbria.”
“Umbria, my God, that’s gorgeous land! Your family farmers or winemakers or what?” My dad nibbled on a bit of cheese as if he were at a cocktail party in Southampton.
Just then the doors of one of the two elevators opened and Mom and Phil Sully got out. Mom’s eyes went to the cheese on the lobby table, the presents everywhere, the crumbly baguette on the table, Dad, Mario and us girls. While it didn’t reflect favorably on Dad, it wasn’t what you’d call a moment of glory for Mom or Phil Sully, either. Mr. Sully probably wouldn’t want the New York Bar Association knowing he was dating a client. Mom simply walked through it like a rain shower.
“Steve. Girls.” Mario trotted to the door and held it for them as they walked out of the lobby into the sharp December chill and Eighty-seventh Street.
My father didn’t miss a beat. “Katarina, I am about two weeks away from all my Fitzgerald research being done. Did I tell you that? I wish to hell that I could find that he once ran into a blaze and pulled out an orphan. Jesus, the more you know, the more difficult it is to like the guy.”
Dad’s divorced-dad game was strong: impromptu passes made at cashiers at the IGA in Amagansett with whom we had gone to grade school, amorous lunges at Julia’s college friend’s older sister out on his little Sunfish sailboat followed by friend needing to be driven to the train to get back to the city immediately, condoms falling out of his pocket when he stuck out his hand to meet your friend’s elderly mother at the gas station.
A few months later Mom decided to ditch the Upper East Side for Florida, which seemed like a gutsy divorced-ladystarting-over kind of move. My parents were physically farther apart than they had ever been. But there was some backpedaling after Mom was “asked” to leave the complex where she lived in the Sunshine State after only a few months, at which point she opted to crash in the West Village at my father’s studio while she looked for her own place. My father had moved back to Manhattan from Amagansett after his relationship with a local woman named Pity ended, as one can imagine, badly. Reconvening in the West Village my parents now ate together, went to movies and checked each other in and out of the hospital. Some people might call this dating.
“Hi, baby. It’s Mom. I’m at your father’s.”
Katharine and I had gotten an apartment in Brooklyn together after I graduated from Purchase. I scrounged through the ashtray looking for the roach Katharine had overlooked.
“I’ve left Florida,” she said, pausing to let her line “land,” as they say in the theater. The problem with my mother was that everything she said had a big landing. “I’m no longer on speaking terms with my hairdresser” went high into the air and came down at your feet with as much of a thud as “They’ve found a growth the size of a brioche under my left armpit.”
“I’ve left Florida” sounded like she had left her Venezuelan dance