Eating With the Angels (21 page)

The way she said it sent a shiver up my spine and the sounds of the city disappeared, leaving nothing in the room but what lay between the two of us.

‘So tell me,’ I said softly. ‘I want to know.’

‘Why would I tell you? Why would I tell anyone? But the
trademark sarcasm that would usually ring around my ears with such words was missing.

‘Because secrets rot and fester and turn into … something else,’ I said. And I guessed a woman who had been estranged from her own mother for nearly 40 years and never so much as spoke her name had more than a few secrets.

‘Who do you think you are? Dr Phil? Some things just belong in the past. You people never seem to realise that.’

‘But it might help us understand each other, Mom.’

‘What’s to understand?’

‘You say I’ve never been punished, Mom, but there are other ways of hurting the people you love, you know. You always put me down. You’re never happy with me. Everything I do is wrong. I don’t look right. I don’t sound right. I don’t sit right. My hair sucks. You don’t think that is punishment?’

‘Estelle?’ It was my dad, standing in the doorway in his pyjamas, what little hair he had bunched up on one side of his head, his face crumpled with worry as he looked at my mom. ‘Is everything okay, Estelle?’

She looked at him in such a way that in a moment of extraordinary clarity I suddenly understood why we all were the way we were. And I loved him so much in that instant that I forgave him any shortcomings as a father. I had never thought of my parents as the love match of the century: mainly, I had considered my father a saint to put up with my mother and I guess at times I had wondered what she saw in him. For a woman who oozed disappointment she had always been strangely content with his little life at the shoe store, his mediocre income, his small circle of friends, his lack of ambition. But now I saw that when she needed him to, he rescued her and she was a woman in need of rescuing. She let him love her and she loved him. She really loved him. She was really capable of that sort of love and it was written all over her face.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Go back to bed, Patrick. I’ll be there in a
minute.’ She watched him shuffle back towards the bedroom then took the plastic wrap off the mac and cheese, straightened it out, put it back on again, and put the bowl back in the fridge.

‘Your father asked me to marry him one Sunday afternoon at 3.15,’ she said, without looking at me. ‘We were in the elevator about to go for a walk but instead I went right back upstairs and packed my bags. By 3.55 I was sitting right here in this apartment and I never spoke to that woman again.’

That was it. My explanation. The most I was ever going to get. It occurred to me that maybe I should ring Ty and get Dr Foster’s number. I suddenly felt like a person in need of a whole lot of therapy.

But there was something else. A tingly feeling had started in my toes and was travelling its way up my body, rattling my bones and giving me the shivers as it made its way to my brain where it knocked on the door, begging to be let in. A realisation was trying to dawn on me. I knew that. I just couldn’t quite work out what the realisation was.

My mother gave a dry little cough. ‘Anyway, you’ve got no business dragging up all this old dirt,’ she said, the nastiness creeping back into her tone. ‘It would never have happened if you hadn’t come back mean. If I catch pneumonia and die from being up in the middle of the night, well, let that be a lesson to you Mary-Constance. Some things are better left unsaid. Did you ever stop to consider that?’

The bathroom door flew open and we heard Emmet go crashing down the hall and into my bedroom where the bed springs bounced as he hit the mattress. Clearly, it was me who would be spending the night on the sofa.

‘No, Mom,’ I said. ‘I never did stop to consider that. And if you catch pneumonia and die, I promise I will learn from it.’

She narrowed her eyes, rearranged the yellow quilted satin bathrobe, summonsed Frankie who had fallen asleep post-coitally on my foot, and without another word headed back to her bedroom. The dog gave my big toe a warm disgusting parting lick and in a
flash I thought of
Wild Swans
, a book I had read (most of) a few years before. I’d been outraged by how in pre-revolution China women bound their daughters’ feet to stunt their growth, to keep them tiny and neat just the way men liked them. It was such a gross thing for a mother to do to her daughter, I had thought at the time, yet they did it because their mothers had done it to them too. It was just the way things were. It was history.

And in a way, that was what had happened to me. I saw that then as I wiped Frankie’s slobber off my toe with some kitchen paper. It wasn’t anything I had done that made my mom so mad. It was the way things were. It was history. She had bound and stunted not my feet (although I bet she’d wanted to) but me, the inner me, no doubt because that’s what had been done to her.

And I could be bitter and hateful too, if I chose to be. I could follow the family tradition. But I could also stage a revolution of my own: that was the realisation battering at my brain. I could forgive my mother if I wanted to, I could take off my inner bandages, wriggle my toes, and start growing any which way I pleased. What freedom there was in that thought. What relief! I didn’t have to be anything because of her; I could just be me.

What’s more, I thought with a jolt, I would never have come to that liberating conclusion if I hadn’t come back mean, or more accurately if I hadn’t been nearly killed by that pretzel in the first place.

It was a moment of brightness in what felt like a lifetime of gloom.

When I woke up the next morning Frankie was lying across my chest like a moth-eaten stole and there was something slimy on my neck that was so gross I couldn’t begin to contemplate its origins. Emmet was sitting at the table eating some toxic-looking pink and orange breakfast cereal. Pop was already in his chair fondling the remote control as Mom vacuumed the very sofa cushions on which I lay.

‘What the hell is that?’ I asked groggily, wiping at the mess on my throat.

‘Well, I’ve been watching his head and nothing came out of there,’ Emmet said with a slurp. He looked remarkably chipper for someone who had been mainlining cleaning products the night before, something we were all no doubt supposed to ignore.

‘Get off me, you disgusting animal,’ I said, pushing Frankie onto the floor and lifting up my legs so that my mother could Hoover beneath them. I watched her as she cleaned, her features knitted together in concentration, her eyes careful to avoid mine. Our little tête à tête in the night had obviously not changed anything for her but as I looked at my feet, still aloft in the air, a smile crept across my face. I wriggled my toes.

‘I am revolting,’ I told my mother as I pushed away the Hoover hose and got off the couch. ‘I am a Chinese girl’s feet.’

‘What is it with this family and history?’ Emmet grumbled. ‘Haven’t you guys heard of the E! Channel?’

‘Do you think they fixed up all of Mary-Constance’s brain?’ my mom asked no one in particular. ‘I hope they didn’t make a mistake and leave something in there by mistake like the lady with the scissors. You know the one, Patrick. Or was it a sponge? She died, anyway. Or did she just end up in a wheelchair?’

I needed to get out of the house for a while. That much was clear. It was going to be too hard to wriggle my toes when the bandages were still so close at hand. The problem was, where could I go?

I was pondering this question in the bathroom after showering Frankie’s dubious emissions from various parts of my body when I found the St Jude medal that Mom had given me in the hospital, which had caused so much eye-narrowing on the part of Signora Marinello. It was caught in the lining of my toilet bag. When I rubbed it between my fingers, all I could think of was sinking into that big fleshy bosom of hers. I needed to be held tight and comforted a little. I needed someone to help me, to guide me; hadn’t she said that she would always be there, that if I needed her I just had to go find her?

‘You just missed her,’ the droopy-eyed fisherman from my coma told me when I arrived at St Vincent’s. ‘She finished her shift. She left aready.’

The neurological ward, my home for all those weeks, bustled and throbbed around me. If anyone remembered me from my weeks of lying there then they did a good job of not showing it. Unconscious I had been the centre of attention but standing on my own two feet I felt like an insignificant spinning top being knocked from one side of the stark white hallway to the other. I lost my balance avoiding a paramedic who I am pretty sure was the water-taxi driver who took me to the Hotel Gritti Palace. (‘Hello. Hello. Can you hear me?’ It all made perfect sense now.) Then I regained my equilibrium only to be knocked off course again by a nurse running along the corridor with an armful of IV bags. I ducked into a doorway to avoid a collision,
only to ram an elderly teary-eyed couple grey with grief. I jumped backwards, panicked, and spun around, looking for the elevator, fighting back tears. Then I felt two strong hands steadying me from behind, turning me slowly around. And there was the delectable Marco.

Good grief, but that man did things to me I didn’t remember any other man ever doing. If I could have pushed him into the linen closet and performed disgusting acts on him right then and there, I would have — not that I could see a linen closet and believe me, I looked. I could just tell he knew that was what I was thinking too because there was laughter, slightly mocking, in his eyes. This, as you can imagine, transformed me into a silver-tongued devil of staggering proportions.

‘I am a Chinese girl’s feet,’ I blurted out. ‘I wriggle.’

‘Never been much of a poetry fan myself,’ Marco said smoothly. ‘So, how’s life on the outside?’

‘Oh, I didn’t mean that about the feet,’ I blathered. ‘I meant the binding. The unbinding. I was just thinking about Chinese girls. You know what? It’s kind of hard to explain. You’re probably thinking of calling security or getting the psych team down to examine me but actually I am just here looking for Signora Marinello and I was thinking about Chinese girls’ feet and I’m making it sound much worse than it is. But if you don’t bind the feet they can grow. That’s my point. But actually my other point is that I’m good, yes, I’m good.’ He seemed slightly taken aback but I felt I was getting a handle on it. ‘And you?’ I inquired politely. ‘How’re you doing?’

‘Same old same old,’ he answered. ‘Saving the world, bringing back the dead. I have a documentary team from Canada coming in to film me this afternoon. My 11-hour stint in surgery last Thursday was reported on CNN, I’ve already been asked to present a paper on it next year at a conference in San Diego. And I just got a call to say my new Porsche has arrived so you could say all is well.’

I nodded my head in what I hoped was an extremely sane and
appropriately interested way while he scanned me up and down.

‘You look good, Connie,’ he said. ‘In fact, you look great.’

I tried desperately to think of something intelligent to say to keep him in my thrall. ‘Can I colour my hair?’ I settled on. ‘I’m worried the chemicals might seep into my brain and mess things up.’

‘I’ve never heard of that happening before,’ he answered. ‘So I think you should be okay. And it would be good to see you blonde again.’

I blushed. Oh for a gondola and a darkened basement, I thought to myself.

There was an awkward silence.

‘I didn’t just say that, did I?’ I asked him.

‘Say what?’

‘The thing about the gondola?’

It was his turn to laugh. ‘No, there was something about a Chinese girl’s feet a while back but no mention of any gondola.’

My relief was enormous.

‘Look, anyway, I should go,’ he said. ‘It was good to see you, Connie, it really was. Take it easy. Go blonde.’

I nodded dumbly and watched him as he strode up the corridor away from me. Those hips. Those shoulders. That neck. If I’d been a cartoon character I’m pretty sure there would have been throbbing marks emanating from my groin right then. I could near as damn it feel that man between my thighs and it was so intensely almost satisfying that I guess I may have started drooling a little.

‘Hey, if it isn’t missus fancy-food snob.’ My Pucci
mushroom-seller
interrupted my lustfulness, clanking past with a multi-layered trolley full of food that I was grateful I could not smell. ‘Come back for more, huh?’

I switched as quickly and politely as I could back into the real world. ‘I’m looking for Signora Marinello, actually,’ I answered her. ‘I don’t suppose you know where she lives?’

‘Do I look like a telephone book?’

‘No, you look like someone who would rather pee in the soup than taste it and who on occasion probably has.’

That sure stopped her short. I eyed up a plate of
donkey-coloured
meatballs, wondering what it would feel like to wear them.

‘You’re a smart ass, you know that?’

‘It’s the new me,’ I told her unapologetically.

‘I like it,’ she said. ‘Marinello’s gone to Nick’s over on 14th and Ninth for breakfast. Says she don’t like my food either. No taste, the pair of you.’

Well, I could only speak for myself on that matter, I thought. Nick’s it was.

I had just stepped into the elevator when I heard someone calling my name, or a variation on it. ‘Costanza Conlan! Costanza Conlan!’ A woman was shuffling towards me on high-heeled slides, a
folded-over
piece of paper in her hand and a pissed-off look on her face.

‘Here,’ she said, thrusting the note at me. ‘I don’t know what you did to get it but this is for you.’ She shot me a nasty look before the elevator door closed and I opened the piece of paper.
I’m not joking about seeing you blonde
, it read.
Call me
. And there was Marco’s phone number.

My feet hardly touched the ground as I glided up to 14th Street and across the avenues to Ninth. Marco, the cutest guy I had ever seen in my whole entire life, the man who caused a party in my pants, wanted me to call him. The new me was hot! And I was open to that, wasn’t I? I was the new me. I could be anyone I wanted to be. Sinful thoughts infiltrated my brain and I saw myself thrashing around various unmade beds, my legs wrapped around Marco’s hips, his lips on my throat, my hands on his chest.

After spotting Signora Marinello through the window, I sailed into Nick’s diner with a spring in my step. She was sitting in a booth wearing a Starsky and Hutch cardigan over her uniform, even though it was sweltering outside. She looked like a big knitted mountain and my heart swelled with love as I all but skipped across the linoleum to her table.

‘Signora Marinello!’ I cried with excitement. ‘It’s me!
Buòn giorno
!’

She lifted her beautiful smooth face up at the sound of my voice and lit up at the sight of me, filling me with such hope and warmth that I didn’t even notice she was sitting with someone. I launched myself into her arms.

‘Oh, I’ve missed you,’ I said into her 12-ply woollen shoulder. ‘I’ve missed you so much.’

‘Me too,’ Signora Marinello said. ‘Let go now, Constanzia. You squashing me.’

I stood back, still beaming. She was halfway through a mighty fine-looking grilled cheese sandwich, an ice-cream soda foaming next to it.

‘Well hello,’ a gravelly voice at my elbow said. ‘Will you take a look at this.’

My heart skipped a beat. My loins stopped pounding. I knew that voice: that voice had spoken words to me once that had made the sort of sense I’d never heard before.

It was Luca.

He was sitting on the booth seat opposite Signora Marinello wearing a pale denim shirt that brought out the green in his eyes and the silver in his hair. He looked like just about the healthiest human being I had ever seen in my entire life and for a moment I forgot about my lack of taste, my fucked-up family, my homelessness and my giant crush on Marco, and all I felt was the excruciating warmth of his words at the squero.

‘Don’t just stand there,’ he said, sliding over. ‘Take a seat.’

I did so, zombie-like.

‘Wassa matter, Connie?’ There was a mischievous note in Signora Marinello’s voice. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

‘I know you?’ I asked Luca.

He raised his eyebrows, eyes twinkling. ‘Well, no,’ he answered. ‘But I know you. Luke Scarpa.’ He held out his hand and I reached
for it, my fingers pressing against the dry crinkled lines of his palm. ‘Pleased to finally meet you.’

‘Scarpa?’ I repeated dumbly, still holding his hand.

‘Scarpa senior,’ Signora Marinello pitched in. ‘Marco’s father. I wonder should I have fries. I feel like fries.’

I finally let go of Luca’s hand but then didn’t know what to do with my arms. They flopped uselessly on the table and I had to make a special effort to put them down in my lap. Marco’s father. Of course he was Marco’s father! Why hadn’t I thought of that before? I knew that already. Why hadn’t I asked anyone about him? Where was my head?

‘So, how you doing?’ Luca asked quietly.

‘How do you know me?’ I could actually feel him sitting next to me. And while I couldn’t smell him, couldn’t smell anything, my head was suddenly filled with the memory of the faint scent of lemons that had bewitched me at the boatyard in my dreams.

‘Well, I don’t, exactly,’ he said. ‘But I sat with you a few times at the hospital when I came to see Marc and Eugenia.’

‘Your name is Eugenia?’ I asked Signora Marinello, who nodded and stopped a grouchy waiter to order her fries. I had never thought to ask what her first name was and felt momentarily ashamed of my self-absorption. Not that I was finished with being self-absorbed, you understand. Not by a long shot.

‘But why would you sit with me?’ I asked as Signora Marinello munched on her sandwich, the sound of the working deep fryer underscoring a crackling Fleetwood Mac track being piped around the diner.

‘I had business at the hospital,’ Luca said, contemplating the cheeseburger in front of him, ‘which didn’t take as long as I planned so I found myself with some time on my hands, came by to see Eugenia and there you were.’

‘And what better way to spend your time than with a pretty girl who don’t answer back, hey Luca,’ Signora Marinello teased.

‘Well, you looked like someone who could do with some
company,’ Luca said simply. It was just like in my dream. He had this way of making me feel I had known him forever, of dropping precious jewels into the conversation as though they were common or garden pebbles.

‘You the best visitor she has all the time she’s there,’ Signora Marinello told him. ‘You wanna meet the mother. Wheee.’ She said something in Portuguese that sounded like a lot of swear words, the flow of which was halted by the arrival of a big plate of perfectly cooked fries.

‘What about Tom?’ I asked her. ‘He came to visit me. Eventually. And Fleur. What about her?’

‘Oh yeah,’ Signora Marinello agreed. ‘Her husband marry her best friend but she can’t remember.’

‘They’re not married,’ I pointed out. ‘Officially, he is still married to me.’

‘You have retrospective memory loss?’ Luca seemed impressed.

I nodded sadly.

‘Huh,’ he chewed on his burger. ‘Unusual. Doesn’t seem to be much else wrong with you.’

‘I’ve lost my sense of taste,’ I said, dipping one of Signora Marinello’s French fries in ketchup, something I never would have done before. I had been something of a fry snob ever since Tom told me to be. He would rather shoot himself in the head than serve fries. And as for ketchup … Over his dead body or yours should you attempt it, or even ask for it. ‘Which is kind of a tragedy because they tell me I am the
New York Times
restaurant critic.’