All This Talk of Love (8 page)

Turns out it’s just beginner’s luck, though, because the next round Prima can’t get the ball anywhere near the cup. Matt’s expertise carries them; the other team can barely stand up straight, so they win again, but in the meantime the rules make her drink many, many cups of beer. She keeps one eye on the living room and kitchen through the sliding doors. She has no idea what’s become of her parents but suspects they’re in the garage inspecting Tom’s new tractor. She checks the upstairs windows for spies. “All righty, then!” she calls out. “Next victims!”

Zach and the girl step up.

Her name, it turns out, is Allison. Allison Grey. She’s a senior at Padua, the sister high school to Salesianum, where Zach used to go and where Patrick goes now. What would the nuns at Padua think of Allison, Prima wonders, a good Catholic with glitter on her cheeks, smoke breath, and a Coors Light in her hand? She’s pretty enough for Zach—he likes blonds, all his girlfriends have been blonds—but she thought he was going steady with a girl in his biology class at Penn, or at least that he was done with high school girls altogether.
Th
eir teams take turns at the Ping-Pong table, and in between, Allison keeps grilling Prima about the house like she’s a real estate agent. Does she have a decorator? Who picked the border on the wallpaper in the study? Prima wonders how grand a tour Allison Grey got, and when. All the back-and-forth with her makes Prima dizzy. Her yammering voice and sparkly face are like an overloud commercial for zit cream.

“I just love the lowboy in the hallway. Is it Ethan Allen? My mom and I saw one just like it in the showroom last week.
Th
at’s what we do, me and my mom, go to sample houses and furniture stores and antique fairs.” She says this as she flicks the ball effortlessly into the cup. She and Zach are beating them pretty bad, and now Prima’s forced to take another drink.

“All right, Chatty Cathy,” Prima says when it’s her throw. “I’m hip to your mind games. You, too, Zachary Joseph.”

Maybe if she doesn’t concentrate so hard, Prima thinks, she’ll make this next one go in. She guzzles the rest of her beer, steps up to the table, and tosses the ball with barely a look. It hits the Gooch square in the face.

“OK, she’s cut off,” says the Gooch.

“Oh yeah?” Prima says. “You gonna stop me?”

She senses her mother’s presence. And when she turns, there are her fierce, accusing eyes behind the glass door. Daddy beside her. Both stand stone-still, arms crossed. Prima gives them a jaunty wave. No reaction.

Zach’s next shot wins the round, and Prima and Matt’s short but glorious reign comes to an end. Matt puts his arm around her. “Maybe you should take a break.”

“You’re saying I’m drunk?”

“You’re the coolest mom ever,” says Allison Grey. Prima looks over at her. It’s possible that she’s quite sweet. Is she going to marry my son? Prima can’t stop staring at her cheeks.
Th
en Allison turns away.
“Break his heart and I’ll kill you,”
Prima says under her breath, but it’s louder than she realizes, and Zach hears her and shoos her toward the house.

You were necking in my guest room, weren’t you? Prima thinks. No wonder the fringe on the Oriental rug was out of whack. She looks around her in all directions, up at the second-floor windows; the floodlights dazzle her eyes. Where’d Ryan go, anyway? And Patrick? Why’s that group of kids walking into the field?
Th
ey’re being too loud.
Th
e neighbors will call. What if Tom wakes up? He’ll be mad at her, like he gets when she’s relaxed enough to enjoy a few drinks. Why doesn’t he like her when she’s relaxed? Why does he need two beers at Grotto’s before he puts his hand on her thigh?

Th
e door slides open. “Come inside right now,” her mother says, the words a hiss. She takes Prima’s arm and guides her over the threshold into the muffled quiet of the house and to the steady barstool of the kitchen island.
Th
e stool is high. Her legs dangle like a girl’s. Her view is of the big, open living room, the back staircase, the fireplace. She has picked out every single piece of furniture, every plate and vase and candle and coaster, and the music they make together brings her calm.

“I don’t like this one bit,” her father says. He watches the games on the porch through the window above the sink. “You let those kids drink too much.”

“
Th
ey’re
teen
agers,” Prima says. “
Th
at’s what they do. It’ll wear off. Better they do it here than under some bridge like I used to.”

“And you’re proud of that?” he says.

“I thought you had more common sense now,” says her mother, shaking her head. “How much did you drink, anyway?”

“Is Mary Walsh still here?”

“I been talking to her in the driveway,” her mother says. “Good thing.
Th
en I come inside and see what I see?”

“If you don’t like it, you can leave,” Prima says. “It’s not your party. Not everything’s designed for your comfort and joy.”

“Watch it, girl,” says her father. He gives Prima the stern look that still makes her stomach fall. “Show some respect.”

She turns the other way and rolls her eyes.

“You’re lucky your husband’s in bed.”

“Welcome to my world,” Prima says, throwing her hands up in the air. “Ten o’clock on a Saturday night, Tom dead asleep, me in the kitchen by myself. It’s a wonder I’m
not
a drunk.”

She doesn’t know why she says this. Compared to every other husband in her circle of moms, Tom’s a good egg. He doesn’t make many gestures, but when he does, he makes them big, like she does: surprise weekends in New York City, a BMW with a red bow on the hood, the diamond-studded watch on her wrist. So what if he doesn’t smother her with kisses every time she walks through the door? Who has time for that stuff anymore?
Th
e last thing Prima wants is to be one of those
’merican
wives who complains that her husband doesn’t talk enough, doesn’t romance her, doesn’t appreciate her. But she falls into that trap without even trying. Maybe she watches too much TV.
Th
at’s all you see: husbands snoring away in the hammock while their wives drool over the gardener. One thing Prima can’t bear is a bored housewife who wants to be her husband’s best friend. A man, more than a woman, needs his own life. Don’t nag him too much, and he’ll always come back to you.

“Poor you,” her mother is saying. Her arms are opened dramatically wide. “In this big house like a princess.”

“I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me.”

“I don’t.”

“My life is perfect,” says Prima.

“Don’t be sarcastic.”

“You don’t understand.”

Maddalena shakes her head. “I understand you have too much. Your problem is you have no problems. You make them up so you have something to do.” She walks to the sink and starts washing the dishes.

“Use the dishwasher, for Christ’s sake,” Prima says. “
Th
at’s what it’s for.”

Ryan and Patrick and a pack of boys stumble into the living room from the porch. Doubled over laughing, holding their beers steady, they fall onto the couches.
Th
ey switch on the TV and turn on the baseball game full volume. Ryan’s a Yankees fan now that he’s at Syracuse, but he’s the only one pulling for them over the Indians.

“
Th
e Indians’ll skin you if you let them,” Prima shouts from her perch. “
Th
eir pitching’s been lights out.”

Just then, like magic, Paul O’Neill hits a grand slam. Ryan jumps on the arm of the couch and raises his arms above his head like it’s a touchdown. “Real lights out, Ma,” he says. “You should be a commentator.”

It hurts her, O’Neill’s grand slam. It feels, in this particular moment, personal. “Cut me some slack, will you?” she says. Again her voice comes out louder, more anguished, than she intends. A screech.
Th
e boys look over at her, narrow their eyes. Ryan drops his arms.

“Are you
crying
?”

“
Am
I crying?” She covers her face. “Yes, Ryan. Maybe I am! Maybe I’m crying!”
Th
e darkness spins.
Th
e tears are hot on her palms. “I can’t be right all the time, you know.”

“Jeez, Ma,” he says. “It’s just a baseball game.”

“Get your feet off the couch!” she shouts, though her eyes are still covered.

He hops down and says something to one of his buddies.
Th
e two erupt in laughter.

“Don’t make fun of your mother,” says Maddalena.

It’s the first good point she’s made all night. And then it’s her unmistakable arm around Prima’s shoulders, her warm, perfumed chest upon which Prima lays her head.

“If you ask me, she needs to grow up and not be such a wacko,” Ryan says, and with that he and his buddies are gone.

“Come with me,” says Maddalena. She guides Prima off the stool. Her father takes her other arm. Her body feels both unexpectedly light and familiarly sludge-heavy at the same time.
Th
e stairs are wobbly.

“Open your eyes,” Maddalena says. “Move your feet!”

“Not my room!” says Prima. She goes limp. “Tom’ll wake up!”

“So?”

“He’ll think something’s wrong. Nothing’s wrong. I can’t fall asleep. I have work to do.” She tries to break free. “
Th
e party—”

“
Th
e party’s over,” says her father.

“Take her to the living room,” says her mother.

And then she sits between her parents on the sofa for what feels like hours. Her drunkenness fades to a buzz, then to a dull throb behind her left ear.
Th
e cloud of negativity over her mother, which first descended early in the night when the subject of Italy was mentioned, lifts for a while as they discuss Mary Walsh’s obvious eye job, new colors to paint the living room walls, and the upcoming season of Christmas shopping. Slowly the throb fades, too, and the night clicks back into place. At exactly eleven o’clock, Frankie calls, and mother and son gab like sorority sisters while Prima and her father flip through magazines.

When Maddalena finally hangs up, she’s got a smile on her face like she’s forgotten there’s been any fighting or drunkenness at all. “How’d he know to call here?” Prima asks her.

“I told him last night. He pays attention.”

And I don’t? Prima almost says, but she lets it go. Still, she can’t resist taking a shot: “So how is the little vampire, anyway?” And just like that, as Prima suspected, the cloud descends again, and mother and daughter look at each other through the fog.

“You don’t take anything serious,” Maddalena says. “No, that’s not true. You take the wrong things serious and the other things—the right things—you don’t pay attention to.”

“Give me an example.”

Maddalena shakes her head. “We fight enough for one night.”

Prima can’t admit to her mother that she, too, is worried about Frankie. His walks remind her of Tony, the weeks before, when he’d come home hours late from school with no explanation and clean his room top to bottom without doing his homework and get quiet and far away in the eyes. So she changes the subject to something safe, and soon it’s time for her parents to go.

She stands in the headlights of her father’s Cadillac, waving as he backs out onto the street. He doesn’t see so well anymore, and the road from here to Graylyn Ridge is dark and windy and narrow. At least once a week somebody hits a deer or drives into a ditch. He’ll call her in thirty-five minutes to let her know they made it home safe. In the meantime, the last remaining clouds in Prima’s head evaporate. She paces around the yard, sandals in hand, cooling her bare feet on the grass. (Lately the soles have been burning in flashes, day and night. She knows what this means, that it’s the end of one era and the beginning of another.) She stares at the oakleaf hydrangea, pulls some weeds, breaks off a sprig of the red chokeberry. Even in the shadowy light they are beautiful against the brick. One day she wants a moonlight garden, all white flowers. Daisies and honeysuckle and birch. She wants to step down from the back deck at night into a field of ghosts. On recommendation from her landscaper, she is also considering an English garden—“controlled wildness,” he calls it. Violets, peonies, primroses, asters. Something to shake up the yards of box hedges and boulders of Fox Chase Estates. It’s a pretty neighborhood and costs a fortune in civic-association dues and property taxes, but the front lawns and flower beds are a yawn.

Th
ree thousand three hundred and eighty-five square feet.
Th
ere’s your answer, Allison Grey. Market value: four hundred thousand dollars. She didn’t want to brag. Maybe the girl isn’t from money. She could be at Padua on scholarship. She and her mother might walk through Ethan Allen just to daydream.

After twenty-five minutes, Prima heads back inside, takes two aspirin, and sits with a big glass of water on the main stairs next to the hall phone. Yanks-Indians is long over, but the games on the porch continue.
Th
e basement door opens and closes.
Th
ere are separate sets of footsteps on the back stairs and moving slowly across the second-floor hallway. She has lost supervisory control. She needs to set up the sleeping bags in the family room and put out towels for morning showers and prep some of the breakfast so she’s not overwhelmed by all the hungry mouths in the morning. She wonders if the keg is done. In her mind the whole time is the image of a deer and a ditch and her father’s car flipped over. She imagines her life without them, the emptiness of it, how you are never too old to be an orphan. Her friends who’ve gone through it have started on medication and gained weight; their grief hangs on them like an odor. When the first parent goes, Prima wonders, will the other move in with her, or will Frankie move back, or will they insist on living alone in Graylyn Ridge? Neither will want to give up the house, and she won’t be able to win that argument, either. A house is an impossible thing to give up. It is a display of your insides, whether you mean it to be or not. And when you surrender your house, half your self goes with it. Meanwhile ten minutes go by and the phone doesn’t ring and doesn’t ring, and then it does, and her mother and father are home safe, and Prima says she’s sorry for how she behaved tonight, because she is, because she’s a good daughter and has a good life, and they say to make sure to wish the twins a happy birthday and tell them to save the money they put in their cards, and she says, “I will.”