What Remains (3 page)

Most people think Fortune is something good—to have a
fortune,
to be
fortunate
—a word that implies advantage, like “luck.” We use prefixes for bad fortune: misfortune, ill-fortune, unfortunate, but Fortune goes both ways. The Romans personified it in the form of a clever but dispassionate woman who coolly disperses both the good and bad with a flick of her wrist. The goddess Fortuna. Good fortune from her left hand out of a cornucopia filled with gifts—things like straight teeth, a good job, a two-car garage in the suburbs. Bad fortune from her right hand holding a ship’s rudder that changes direction, triggering car crashes and untimely deaths. A gesture from her, and the place you thought you were going is no longer in front of you. We call it fate when there is no logical path from then to now. When the man misses a train, then shares a taxi with his future wife or when the cautious woman daydreams through a stop sign at a busy intersection and is hit by a speeding truck. When the man who loves to fly dies in a plane crash. We shake our heads. It’s fate, we say.

Every Tuesday afternoon in Suffern I took a bus from Airmont School to Sacred Heart for religion class, where Sister Teresa taught us not to sin. There was an implicit promise of reward for that, but I didn’t think it was so simple or personal. My life at the whim of a fickle, apathetic woman made much more sense to me. As a young girl I thought misfortune would befall my father. I thought he would drive his car off the bridge in an ice storm on his way home from the restaurant he owned in Yonkers. The Tappan Zee Bridge with its thin strip of guardrail and the Hudson below, a blanket of black ice on the asphalt. I stayed up alone on these nights, watching for his headlights in the driveway. Standing on the edge of my bed to see out the window, careful not to wake my sister. When the lights appeared I crawled quietly under the covers and tried to sleep in the restless night. It was never peaceful, and I still dread nights, the quiet. When the unforgiving ring of a telephone is impossible to ignore.

The phone didn’t ring in the house on Madison Hill Road in the middle of the night. My father’s blue Mustang never skidded off the bridge, but twenty-six years later the phone rang late at night in the house on Martha’s Vineyard, and I knew.

In seventh grade I had Mr. Durrwachter for biology, and Caroline Garritano was in my class. It was 1976 and
Jaws
was the scariest thing most of Suffern Junior High had ever seen.
Welcome Back, Kotter
was launching John Travolta. My parents were watching
Roots
and following the Patty Hearst trial. Jimmy Carter was elected president and the Yankees were losing, but I was concerned with other things.

I was a quiet twelve-year-old fascinated with the junior high cool kids. The girls, really. The ones who walked down the halls in twos and threes, glossy-lipped with strawberry flavored Kissing Potion, unaffected by pimples and lunch tables and bus lines after school. The girls with feathered hair who hung out at Sport-a-Rama ice rink on Friday nights watching the older boys play hockey, wearing Puca beads and mood rings. They sat in levels in the bleachers, sideways so they could talk to one another, and flirted with the boys between periods, arranging and rearranging themselves like patterns in a kaleidoscope. They wore Frye boots and chinos and kept Salon Styles in their back pockets. I was still wearing hand-me-downs from my older sister—stiff Wranglers and pilly sweaters—and when I saved up enough to buy carpenter pants, they weren’t the right ones. They were missing the telltale hammer loop on the left side.

My hair was long and straight, and I wasted hours with the curling iron trying to create what they seemed to be born with. They carried cassette recorders and played Peter Frampton on the hill at lunch. They left a trail of Love’s Baby Soft in the halls. And then there were the Garritano twins, Caroline and Suzanne. They wore Charlie.

The twins created energy around them, a palpable squirm of adolescent girls hoping to tag along with them to the mall. Caroline and Suzanne moved through seventh grade as if they had been handed an envelope with directions on the first day. They were not frantically trying to create themselves, like the rest of us. You can see it in Suzanne’s yearbook photo—the one on its own separate page above lines of junior high yearbook prose about life and fate.

Everyone I knew wanted to be where the Garritano girls were—the cafeteria, the movies, or Nicky’s Pizza. They hung around at the school some days after the last bell, and rumors of what went on rippled through lunch tables and slumber parties. They reigned over the playground, sitting on swings. Unhurried, letting their feet brush the ground and watching the boys hop around them like popcorn.

One rainy day after school let out, after I was already on the bus and the school was deserted, Suzanne and Caroline snuck into the old janitor’s quarters at the far end of the hall. It was strictly off-limits, which made them predictably intriguing. There was a dumbwaiter here that dropped from the main floor into the basement—the kind with doors that opened from the top and bottom like a sideways elevator.

They had a boy with them that day—Eddie Meyer from the hockey team. Suzanne’s boyfriend, though the twins weren’t possessive. But he was Suzanne’s boyfriend this day, so he let her in first, watched her squeeze through the horizontal doors, and then followed after her with Caroline. The three of them were cramped, sitting hunched in the tight space, and when the elevator dropped to the basement, Eddie and Caroline got off. Suzanne tried to follow them, sticking her head out awkwardly through the doors, and the top door of the dumbwaiter dropped down on her shiny long hair, crushing her neck. It happened too quickly for her to call out or make a noise. But the dumbwaiter doors, solid metal, were loud when they closed, and Eddie and Caroline turned around. Of course she was dead already.

There was an eruption of grief the next day. Principal Parparella broadcast the news over the crackly public-address system, and clusters of teenage girls formed—sobbing their stories to school counselors and to boys they had crushes on, carefully wiping mascara streaks from their faces. There were legends forming already—romantic stories of Suzanne’s last words.
Tell Eddie I love him,
echoed through homerooms. Weepy girls who barely knew her pooled in the cafeteria and crowded into big hugs in the halls. And they all got out of class. The school cut a lot of slack in absences for the next few days. It was easier to excuse an absence than to talk about what had happened. It was easier to excuse an absence than to tell a twelve-year-old about Fortune. That it was not personal, really.

I gave a name to these sobbing girls later, when we were grown women. I spotted them again in the wake that shook the world one July when I was too close to Fortune’s rudder. I called them
tragedy whores.
Even as adults, they cluster in groups, feeding on these occasions, where they reap the reassuring comfort of connected souls. That is the small reward and point of the wake. They are eager participants, playing with Fortune from a safe distance, then going home to husbands and children, unmarked.

Tragedy whores don’t feel the foundation break apart beneath their feet—the reeling blast of emptiness, though to watch them you might think so. They’re voyeurs. They feed like coffin flies on drama, embroiled in virtual grief and the illusion of heartbreak. They all have stories they want to tell,
insist
on telling, proclaiming their link to tragedy. Emotional rubberneckers.

I didn’t like them at twelve, and I hated them at thirty-five.

Suzanne’s funeral was the Super Bowl of tragedies for Suffern Junior High. The church was standing room only; the young parents sat bravely in the front row beside the spitting image of their dead daughter. Everyone wanted a view. When the young and pretty ones die, the tragedy whores get seats up front. They love the melodramatic story. That the deceased had an identical twin sister still walking around was a windfall.

The climactic moment, however, was not witnessed by the hundreds in the church, but by an unprepared twenty-five seventh-graders in Mr. Durrwachter’s first-period science class. Eighteen hours after the dumbwaiter crushed Suzanne Garritano’s neck, Caroline walked into class with her jacket on, sipping Coke through a straw. The rest of us were frozen, knowing we should turn away, but not quite able to. Caroline was uninterested. She walked to the front of the room, without a glance to the rows of desks, and said in a flat voice, her arm stretched out, holding a piece of paper, “I can’t come for class, Mr. Durrwachter. My mom wrote a note.” Mr. Durrwachter looked at her and nodded. He took the note and stared unblinking as she turned and walked out, unconcerned with his reply.

Caroline Garritano saw her sister dead in the dumbwaiter and then excused herself from class sipping Coke through a straw. She knew about Fortune.

There are three places that define my early life, and you can drive to all of them in half a day. The city, where I live now; the Rockland County suburb where I grew up; and another small town about an hour’s drive upstate.

The city, New York, is the place I longed for since the nights in the back bedroom at Tante’s wedged into her trundle bed with four fidgety brothers and sisters, listening to the buses go up First Avenue. Watching the lights in other buildings. Her five-story building was on the corner, with a thick black double door. The corner where my father, on leave in full army uniform, waved down a cab to take my mother, pregnant with me, to the hospital and a man saluted him from the back of a limousine. The corner where Grandma Binder raised my mother, in the building across the street.

Suffern, New York, is the suburb, where I went to school and played the flute and hung a David Cassidy poster on my wall. It was where I lived with my brothers and sisters, my mother and father, and Grandma Binder for most of my young life. It’s a sleepy town forty minutes north of Manhattan, over the George Washington Bridge, up the Palisades Parkway. A shapeless bundle of families too far from the city to borrow its identity, too close to find its own. Sacred Heart Catholic Church marks the entrance to downtown. The old Lafayette playhouse, the post office, and twelve beauty salons line Main Street. The Avon plant sits just up the road on Route 59.

The small town upstate is Kingston, my moveable feast.

Kingston is anchored by
time
. Kingston is an
era.
At the end of the day, no matter where we have been in our lives, the DiFalcos are firmly tethered by the ghosts of Kingston.

Kingston memories flash through my head like old home movies—Grandma Millie mugging for the camera with hands on her hips and her eyes shut in a smile. Her friend Norma, up from Queens for the summer, standing on the back porch in her housedress. People moving in jerks and fast-motion like 8-millimeter frames. Mouths moving, always smiling, happy like they didn’t know better, didn’t know you could be somewhere else. Uncle Joey picking out the chords of “Stairway to Heaven” on his guitar. Grandpa DiFalco at the stove stirring his red sauce, orange fly strips hanging over his head. My father holding a fishing rod off the dock. Aunt Maryann at the oak table in the Knotty Pine room, her cards laid out for solitaire, a wineglass beside her, filled to the rim. It is upstate New York in the seventies. Anything can happen or nothing can happen, and either way is fine.

The city of Kingston was a town with schools and historical sites, restaurants and churches. It had an order—businesses where people wore suits and white shirts to work. There were neighborhoods of houses with paved driveways and aluminum siding, but this was not
our
Kingston. The closest we came to that Kingston was in August, when my sister and I had our birthdays in the same week, and Grandma Millie took us to Luigi’s for pizza and cannolis.

Our Kingston was in a small alcove called Mount Marion on the banks of Esopus Creek. There might have been another world beyond there, but we didn’t need it. Once you turned off Old King’s Highway onto Clint Finger Road, you drove through a patch of woods and the road closed up behind you. Mount Marion was where we went to be outside of order.

Grandma Millie’s father, Pellegrino, bought the property in Mount Marion for four thousand dollars in 1954, and after Millie retired from the phone company in New York, she and Grandpa moved in, leaving their apartment on Fifty-eighth Street in New York City, where they raised my father and his three brothers and sister. It was a lot and a one-story house, but Grandpa added a second floor—a clumsy jumble of rooms he put together from a kit that made it look like two different houses stuck together. There were never fewer than half a dozen cars and motorcycles in the driveway, parked at odd angles and in various states of disrepair—one or two on cinder blocks, waiting to be hauled off to the junkyard. A large square gravel patch in the front yard stood in for a driveway, and the grass was knee-high right up to the door. There was a big weeping willow tree in the side yard that shaded Grandma Millie’s vegetable garden.

There were two large rooms downstairs—the living room with a TV and couch that doubled as extra bedding, and the Knotty Pine room. Grandma and Grandpa’s room was off the living room next to the room where Norma stayed.

The Knotty Pine room was part of the original house and was named after the pine-paneled walls Grandpa bought with a rare windfall from the track. It creeps, somehow, into every story that is repeated about those summers. It had French doors on the side, which I thought made the house sophisticated, and a long oak table right down the middle.

On the side wall, beside the French doors, was a scuffed wooden dresser and a mirror wedged with old photos. The drawers of the dresser were stuffed carelessly with Grandpa’s betting sheets, shotgun shells, and unpaid bills. It was the only neat room in the house, because Grandma gave us a dollar or two every week to clean it up.

A makeshift wooden ladder led up to a loft, where my older sister and I usually slept. It had two twin-sized mattresses on the floor, and boxes of letters, papers, and discarded knickknacks stacked in the corners. There was a fluorescent mural on one wall that had been sprayed by one of Grandma Millie’s adopted strays on an acid trip. At the back of the Knotty Pine room a door led out to a screened-in porch. From the porch you could see all the way down to Esopus Creek, which divided the short strip of houses where we were and the rental cabins across from us. The creek was muddy green, with tree branches hanging low on both banks. We often bathed in it because the plumbing in the house was unreliable. We kept a bottle of Flex Balsam shampoo out on the dock and when the mood struck, we jumped into the creek in our shorts, soaped up, and then swam underwater to rinse, leaving a trail of soap scum. Then we dried off in the sun on the dock. The water in the house was no good for drinking, even by the flexible standards of my grandparents. Grandpa had jury-rigged a hose with a pump to bring in the water directly from the creek. We could wash the dishes with it, but it had to be boiled first for drinking. On Saturday mornings Grandpa filled the back of his brown station wagon with empty milk jugs and drove over to Maryann’s friend Jeannie’s house in Lake Katrine, a town over, and filled them up from her tap.

Mount Marion as we knew it orbited around Grandma Millie. The house was like a termite mound of wriggling, rotating DiFalcos, each one cheerfully bringing new members to the colony. Grandma Millie was their queen, heaped right in the middle. She was three hundred pounds, with a raspy voice and a mischievous wink. She had a jowly face marked with bright-red rouge and creamy green eye shadow caked in the creases. She wore cheap rubber flip-flops and big, bright muumuus that she bought on sale at Montgomery Ward—whether it was eighty degrees out or ten. She was always smiling, a fleshy mass of love; everyone competed for her attention, from the box boys at the Pink Store to the old ladies who ran bingo. There was a place here for everyone.

Aunt Maryann was her daughter, my father’s younger sister. She was large like her mother, with the same grin and the same wayward wink. She also inherited from Millie a chameleonlike ability to be any age at any moment. She had a head of thick black hair that she made bigger with an even thicker black hairpiece when she went out. She lived in Mount Marion year-round and ran the house like an Egyptian princess with shimmery blue eyelids and clingy outfits. She was perfectly certain of where she should be at any given moment; most often it was at the head of the long oak table in the Knotty Pine room with a glass full of Riunite.

In the summer the air in Kingston was thick with mosquitoes and the Mount Marion house was a centrifugal fusion of love, cigarettes, and sticky wine. It was a hot spot for a revolving “rat pack” of twenty-somethings that included my uncle Joey, aunt Maryann, my other “uncles”—Freddy, Johnny, PJ from Fifty-Eighth Street, Jimmy from the cabins across the creek—and whoever else might be passing through. Millie collected people like green stamps, cashing them in when she needed a favor. She found them, and Maryann carefully worked them into the routine. Millie stumbled upon Tammy in the butcher department at Waldbaum’s and befriended her for the discounts and good cuts. She brought Tammy home and Maryann matched her up with Johnny.

Tammy and Johnny were doomed from the start. Tragic lovers. After years of dating and infidelity and boozy shouting matches on the dock, there was nothing left for them to do but get married. Johnny had a deep, hoarse laugh and spent one summer in a full body cast after he broke his neck in a car accident. I remember him sipping beer through a straw in The Kingston Hospital. His brother PJ died young from too much whiskey but Johnny lived, ten years longer than he was supposed to. “His liver,” the doctors gravely told Tammy one hospital stay. “You should make arrangements.” She went to Seamon-Wilsey for an urn. Jimmy and Freddy went to visit him during this fluorescent-lit vigil and brought him a meatball parmigiana hero from Angelo’s. He walked out of the hospital proclaiming the healing powers of a good meatball parm and drank his way through ten more years. Tammy moved out after that, but according to family legend, she routinely drove by Johnny’s trailer for the rest of his life, affectionately waving the urn and yelling out her window, “Die already, you son of a bitch.”

They were in and out of jobs, all of them—construction and odd labor. A few of them made a decent living bringing pot from the city and selling it in the Kingston bars on weekends. When Grandma Millie got wind of this, she wanted a piece of the action and started growing her own pot in the vegetable garden under the weeping willow. During card games in the Knotty Pine room, Larry sat at the table with a big mound of it and a pack of EZ Widers and rolled perfectly shaped joints that he stuffed into cigarette packs.

Maryann brought Larry home from People’s Choice, a popular bar where she worked, and he hung around for three years. He was famous for his skill at rolling joints and for teaching us all to drive a stick shift. Learning to drive a stick shift with Larry was a rite of passage in Kingston. You didn’t really
arrive
until Larry put you behind the wheel of his green two-door Subaru and ran alongside the car, yelling through the driver’s window, “The clutch is on the left, no, the left!” One summer, my younger brother found the brake just inches before lurching the Subaru into the creek. After that we practiced in the field across the road. Larry was fifteen years old when Maryann discovered him in the bar, and he was devoted to her. I was twelve that summer, but in my eyes he was big, sitting around the table in the Knotty Pine room, drinking beer and playing cards with the grown-ups.

Our family spent almost every summer weekend in Kingston. My parents packed us into our white wood-paneled station wagon—four of us squished in the backseat, my older sister up front, in the middle. We drove up Route 17 making up songs, picking fights, and yelling out landmarks: Motel on the Mountain, Angel Bridge and Devil Bridge, Red Apple Rest.

“We’re almost to Red Apple Rest,” my mother would say. “And we’re not stopping unless it’s quiet!” And then we watched out the windows, hushed, for the big, red wooden apple that meant hot dogs and cotton candy. It loomed large and as animated in our unshaped stories as the optometrist’s sign in
The Great Gatsby,
marking our entrance to Kingston and the summer the way the big, round spectacled eyes marked East Egg.

The bridges were just past Sloatsburg, and the Tuxedo Motel. They were a pair of cast-iron structures built high over the water, higher, it seems, than they needed to be, and we personified them. The black one was Devil Bridge, because it was dark and rusty and looked sinister. When we approached it we all yelled out, “Devil Bridge!” and my sisters and I crossed our fingers and raised our feet. Angel Bridge came up next and was shiny and unspoiled, with glinting silver beams. “Angel Bridge!” we all yelled, and then my brothers crossed their fingers and raised their feet. We were quiet and serious as we approached the bridges, ready to act. I don’t remember what the consequences were if we didn’t raise our feet, but I never considered testing fate.

Two or three times a summer Grandpa loaded the grandkids into his rusted brown Cadillac, and we took the Thruway north to exit 24, then I-87 to Saratoga—the upstate town where the Rockefellers, Whitneys, and Vanderbilts summered—to the racetrack, where I caught a glimpse of another life. A life of wide-brimmed hats and white gloves, of pressed slacks and pastels. Of people getting out of fancy cars. I saw boys like the one I would later marry, with neat khaki shorts and blue blazers. Clean, short hair. They sat in a separate part of the track, in boxes, eating sandwiches, while we ate in the greasy restaurant, thrilled with our big plates of the breakfast special.

Grandpa taught us about the horses, boxing trifectas, and long shots. Grandma Millie taught us to steal. She called it night-raiding. She dressed us up in black clothes, a big festive event—like Halloween—and equipped us with pillowcases and flashlights. We were instructed to fill the pillowcases with crops: corn from the Boises’ farm, tomatoes and zucchini from the garden next door. Apples from the orchard at the end of the dirt road. She had us pumped up like Little League champs. There were anywhere from five to fifteen cousins here during any given summer, and everyone wanted to go night-raiding, even more so after the neighbor fired his shotgun at my brother and me, as we ran dropping the pears we had taken from his tree.

During the day Millie carried on a more sophisticated subterfuge at Waldbaum’s, slipping choice cuts of meat into the great folds of her housedress. She had an ideal shape for camouflage and could tuck a small bag of groceries beneath her enormous breasts. I went with her on one of these shopping trips. She wheeled her shopping cart through the store, filling the large area with lower-priced items and setting more expensive things, like meat, in the front—where you might put a purse or a baby. Then she draped her breasts over the cart and leaned forward, pushing it along with her body. I watched her make a five-pound roast disappear this way. Her arms stretched out along the sides; she looked simply relaxed on a slow, heavy stroll through the store. She hummed to herself, glanced casually, like the other shoppers, up and down the aisles. She pushed her way to the checkout line, where, still leaning over, she set the items from her cart out on the belt. When the cashier had rung her up, chatting with her the whole time—they all knew Millie—she wheeled the cart out of the store and emptied her housedress onto the front seat of the car. A box of Devil Dogs had found its way in there, too. She didn’t think of it as stealing so much as
pocketing
stuff.