To Die For (9 page)

“All I want to know, son, is does she love you and stand by you?” I asked him. “Because pretty won’t last forever. Pretty looks good on Saturday night, but where’s she going to be Sunday morning? Is she going to be a faithful companion? Will she make a good mother for your children? These are the questions.”

“You should see her with that puppy I gave her, Dad,” he tells me. “It’s like he’s a baby. She’s got him his own little bed. She even cooks him special dinners.”

I asked him if he felt like he could trust her that she wouldn’t be looking at other men. With a woman like that you’ve got to ask the question, because you know other men are going to be looking at her. The opportunity is always going to be there. So the question is, What’s she going to do about it? And especially with this career business. She’ll be out in the world, maybe even up on the damn television for the world to see. “Your mother was always home,” I told him. “And call me old-fashioned, but in my opinion that’s where a man’s wife’s meant to be.”

He laughed when I said that. “This is the nineties, Dad,” he told me. “Women aren’t content anymore to just stay put. They’ve got to get out there in the world. They’ve got to have their own identity. It’s not enough for them anymore just to clean the bathroom and bake lasagna.”

“Your mother did plenty besides that,” I told him. “You watch what you’re saying, young man.” Now I’m sorry it happened but I actually got a little hot under the collar when he said that.

“Don’t get me wrong, Dad,” he said. “You and Mom have a great marriage and all I hope is Suzanne and I can do that well. It’s just different nowdays. The fact is the other night, we were sitting around watching TV and Suzanne made me a batch of brownies. Don’t ask me how a person can mess up a box of Duncan Hines where all you have to do is crack an egg and stir in a little water, but she managed it. Chocolate flavored cardboard, that’s what came out of the oven.”

“She can learn,” I told him.

“Right,” he says. “She can learn how to put a frozen dinner in the microwave and take the pizza out of the box. Lucky we own a restaurant.”

I mean, we were just kidding around.

Then he gets real serious, and I almost think there’s tears in his eyes. “You don’t know how wonderful she is,” he tells me. “And knowing a girl like that would choose me makes me feel like I’ve got something to live up to. Like I’ve got to buckle down and make something of myself down at the restaurant. I’m going to spend the rest of my life making her happy she chose me. I’ll never let her go.”

O
F COURSE ALL HE
ever said about Suzanne to our parents was what a great person she was, and how much in love they were. But he told me—back when they were first going together—she was real horny too. I mean, these two didn’t just do it in the backseat of his car. Larry told me they used to make love in the storeroom at the restaurant, and at the beach, at night, and one time she even took him up to her room at her parents’ house, with them right downstairs watching TV. “She looks so prim and proper,” he says. “But you should see how she gets. She’s so wild and passionate.” He was actually worried about keeping her satisfied. That’s why he came to talk to me, in fact. I mean, we never had a conversation like this before, but he said he was just so anxious to please her. He wanted my thoughts on how to keep a woman happy. “Just be yourself,” I told him. “If that’s not good enough for her, that’s her problem.”

Back when they were dating, they used to go to this place in Woodbury, The Hot Spot, where you could rent a hot tub room for an hour, with a CD player, a TV, VCR, the works. I guess every room at this place had a different theme, like Hawaiian, Wild West, The Big Apple. He called me up this one morning. “You should have seen Suzanne and me in Jolly Olde England,” he says. She brought along a video of
Beaches,
her favorite movie. They had champagne and strawberries. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things we did, Jan,” he told me. “I thought they only did that stuff in the movies.”

Another time, I guess he took her into Boston to see a Red Sox game. Not that she was this big sports fan, but of course my brother was, and you got the impression she figured this was a cool thing to do—like afterwards, she’d enjoy working it into the conversation, “When I was at Fenway last week.”

It was kind of a chilly day, late in the season, so I guess he brought along a blanket to put over them, and she starts unzipping his pants under the blanket, feeling him up. Anybody knows Larry knows when he’s watching a game that’s what he wants to do, watch the game. Plus I guess he felt pretty self-conscious. I mean this was in the bleachers and everything. Even with the blanket over them it must’ve been pretty obvious what was going on. He tried gently to get her to lay off, but she didn’t want to. She told him this story she heard, about this ball game at the Skydome in Toronto. I guess there’s this hotel there, where some of the rooms look right out over the ballpark. And this one time—a night game—the Blue Jays were playing, and all of a sudden you can feel the attention of the crowd shifting from the diamond to this one picture window in the Skydome hotel, where this couple’s going at it, with the lights on. Before long you got—what?—50,000 people maybe, all eyes on these two people screwing their brains out, and hardly anybody’s even following the game anymore.

Larry told me, when he heard that, he was thinking how awful that must’ve been for those two people, when they found out. How embarrassing. But for Suzanne the point of the story was how she’d like to drive up to Toronto some time and catch a game. She told him she wanted one of those special rooms in the Skydome. “Just think,” she told him. “We’d be more famous than the ball players.”

A
FTER THE WEDDING
I didn’t see so much of Larry. I’d call him up to go four-wheeling or just to hang out, but he’d be tied up, furniture shopping. “Married life,” he’d say. “What are you going to do?”

He didn’t talk about her that much, and she wasn’t around that much either, from the looks of it. I’d stop by and he’d be home watching a game or working on his truck but not her. She’d be out shopping with her girlfriends or over at her mother’s. He said he figured she felt more at home at the mall than in their bedroom. He joked about it, but you know, it made me wonder. Especially when she started working on that video of hers, and it seemed like she was always off someplace with her students.

Who ever knows what goes on behind closed doors? But if I was taking bets I’d have to guess things weren’t that hot between the sheets anymore over at Butternut Drive. A girl like her, she just figures she can ride her face around for the rest of her life. It’s the other ones, that don’t seem like they’ve got so much going for them, that really put out for you. Her, she’d always be wondering how her hair looked.

What do I know? Larry never said boo. I mean, I knew the guy eighteen years, but we never talked about personal stuff. It was always, you know, how do you like those Sox? How do you like those Celtics? He could be hemorrhaging to death and he’d tell you, “I’m fine. How’s by you?” That’s guys for you.

Everything just looked so perfect over there. I mean, the condo and the dog and all the trips they took, and her always dressed so fashionable, and their house always neat, and him doing so good at the restaurant. They were making plenty of money. Had a nice home. They just looked golden. I remember saying to them one time—one of the few times I saw them both together—that they could be in a TV commercial. She looked like she might be one of those wives that uses Ivory soap, and her husband writes in to the company to say how soft her hands are. I said someone should write in to some company about them. And the next week he told me she’d done it. Got him to write in to this shampoo company, to say how great her hair smelled. “Who knows,” she said, “they might put us in a commercial.”

I asked her one time if she ever heard back. She said yeah, but all they did was send her a free bottle of conditioner.

I
’LL TELL YOU WHAT
kind of a boy this was. This was a boy that one time, when he was eleven years old, took his paper route money and sent it to Africa for the starving children. This was a boy that, the night of his senior prom, he stops by the nursing home with his date to visit his grandmother. You want to talk Mother’s Day? I’ll give you Mother’s Day. This boy, on Mother’s Day, sent me one long-stemmed rose for every year he’d been alive. Last year it was twenty-three. Now that’s as many as it will ever be. You tell me—does a mother get over something like that?

Even when he was a baby he was good. Slept through the night, first night we brought him home from the hospital. Even before we had him toilet trained, he used to apologize when I had to change his diaper. I kid you not. “Sorry, Ma,” he’d say to me. His big sister taught him how to say, “Better luck next time.” “Better next time,” he’d say to me. Could you be mad at a boy like that?

Oh, he was an altar boy. But he never planned on being a priest, like so many of the other altar boys. Even when he was five, six years old, and people would ask him, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” his answer was always the same. “I’m gonna cook spaghetti and pour beer at my pop’s restaurant.” Never a fireman. Never a policeman. My boy was going to make the best eggplant parmigiana in town.

Larry never gave us trouble with girls. He was always a gentleman. The girls loved him, naturally—who wouldn’t? And he liked the girls too. But like he always said, “You and Pop come first, Ma. Any girl for me, she’s gotta be a girl for my whole family.”

Now I won’t say we didn’t have our moments. What parents don’t, I ask you? One time we got a note home from school, Larry’s gotta do his homework. He says you don’t need algebra to work in a restaurant. So his father and me had a talk with that boy. “You sure you don’t want to go to college, Lawrence?” I ask him. “Because you know, you say the word, your pop and I will come up with the money, same as we did for Janice’s skating.” We may not be wealthy people, but our children never lacked. Never was there something they asked for that we didn’t provide. And never did they abuse our good faith either.

But no, he wasn’t a college man, and we made our peace with that. We knew our Larry would earn an honest living at our place, and one day it would all be his. The customers adored him. Not just the young girls but everyone. “How’s Larry doing?” they’d ask me, if a couple weeks went by they didn’t see him. “You should see my granddaughter that’s visiting from college,” they’d say. “She’d be a nice girl for Larry.”

He was always polite. Never made them feel like they weren’t good enough. Only he kept his distance. Never got serious once, until she came along. The little blonde. A model, he called her, meaning she gave out free samples at a store. Not Italian, that’s for sure.

“I got to tell you something, Ma,” he said to me one time, when the two of us were tending bar, a week, maybe two after he met her. “This is the girl I’m going to marry.” By this time he’d sent her the roses, took her out for dinner, but you didn’t want to think it was serious. I mean, these two had nothing in common. P.S., she was older. Two years. Not that she liked to let on.

“She’s a cutie all right, Larry,” I told him. “Reminds me of Nanette Fabray.” I mean, you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to know it’s a bad idea to try and discourage them. That only fans the flames. “I bet she’s a college graduate too,” I say. Her father running a car dealership and all.

Oh yes, he says. She went to college over in Somerset. Honor student, sorority sister, the works. She’s heading someplace, this one. We’ll be hearing from her, you can just bet on it.

“Let me tell you something, son,” his father tells him. “The cute ones, the pretty ones, they aren’t always the best bet for the long haul. Look for a woman you can grow old with.”

“What are you saying, Joe?” I ask him. “You saying I didn’t ever cause your heart to skip a beat, round about 1962? You telling me all I ever was to you was somebody’s ma?” I can say these things to my husband on account of what a good relationship we got. I know he’s crazy about me. He knows I know it too. I just like to give him a hard time now and then.

“You’re the exception, Angela,” he tells me. “Everybody knows that. But how many times in a century is a boy gonna find a beautiful woman that’s a beautiful mother too? And since I found one, how many more times can it happen? Tell me the odds lightning’s gonna strike twice.”

“Well,” he says, “all I know is this is the girl for me, Dad, and come summer, you’d better get your good suit cleaned because there’s going to be a wedding.”

Couple weeks later he brought her by the restaurant. You could tell he was nervous taking her around. He shows her the baseball trophies from the team we sponsored, shows her the ice-making machine. Takes her into the cooler even. “Here’s the ladies’ room,” I hear him telling her. “Here’s a picture of my sister, the year she placed second in the eastern division junior figure skating competition, compulsory figures. … One time we had Tony Conigliaro sitting here, right on this very bar stool,” he says. “And you know the guy that does the muffler commercials, that says ‘You show us a better deal, we’ll install your muffler free of charge’? He sat right there in that corner booth.”

You could tell she was trying not to laugh, when he said these things. This was a worldly type woman. She probably never met a boy like Larry, that couldn’t tell a lie to save his life. She probably thought he was nuts.

I’m still trying to figure out why she decided to marry him. I mean, no question, she could’ve found other guys. I’m not saying Larry wasn’t a wonderful catch. Best husband a girl could ever find for herself. And it’s true, he worshiped the ground she walked on.

But what was she looking for out of him? That’s the question I lay awake nights asking myself. Why’d she have to go and marry my son?

T
HE FIRST THING
I thought when I met Larry was Tommy Lee. The drummer for Motley Crüe, you know? Not that Larry wore an earring or snake tattoos naturally, but he had those same dark, brooding eyes, and he used to wear his hair pretty long. Before he got serious about the restaurant business and everything. He even used to play drums, although he sold his drum set when we got engaged, to pay for my ring.