My Mother-in-Law Drinks (6 page)

“Oh my God, but where is he, inside the store?”

“Mamma, why do we have to leave?”

The populace of the supermarket had lifted their eyes to the closed-circuit television sets.

At last I started to feel a little less alone.

W
hat, your mother couldn't have bothered to tell me herself?” I said to Alagia when she came to give me the news, acting as deeply resentful as I could manage.

Her response:

“Oh, I knew it. You're such a pain, Vince'. When are you going to quit taking offense all the time? You're always going on about all the slights and neglectful treatment you have to endure instead of just listening to what people are trying to tell you. I just informed you that Grandma has cancer; don't you think you should be focusing on that?”

Whereupon I was left more or less speechless. It's true, I like to take offense, I like to point out shortcomings in the manners of others, especially when their mishandling of personal interactions is directed at me. I gloat when people fail to behave the way they ought to, because that gives me an opportunity to say so, to manifest my icy disapproval. Acting offended is the work I was put on this earth to do, truth be told.

“Let's just recapitulate for a moment, okay?” I replied, with just the right amount of indignation to keep her from realizing how pissed off I was. “As usual, your mother benefits from every mitigating circumstance; but what am I saying, mitigating circumstances would already represent progress. It never even occurs to you and Alf”—our nickname for my son, Alfredo—“to question anything she does or says. If she so much as spits it's gospel truth. But when you two turn in my direction you suddenly discover the joys of parent-child dialectics, am I right? So true is this that it strikes you as perfectly normal to read me the riot act if I so much as dare to point out the childishness of Nives's behavior toward me.”

“Oookay,” Alagia said, liquidating my diatribe with a pause that was not exactly brief and served to say: “I acknowledge that you've done your best, and I'll also be so kind as to suspend judgment, which means you get to land on your feet, provided you agree not to drag it out any longer than you already have,” whereupon she continued, “So, can we talk about Grandma now?”

“Of course, of course,” I replied, promptly accepting the compromise. I can't hold my own with this girl: she's practically an optimized, turbocharged version of her mother.

We gave ourselves a few seconds of silence to alleviate some of the argumentative tension. I put on a show of pacing meditatively around my kitchen table (because that's where we were) and then I made my way to the simple question I had culpably overlooked at the outset.

“Where did you say she has it?”

“How would I know? From what I understood, it's some kind of leukemic lymphoma. One of the pretty rare kinds, too.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“The really funny thing was the way she treated the doctor.”

“Why, what did she do?”

“You had to be there. He was this smooth operator; he'd clearly spent some time at the tanning parlor, and he was wearing a pair of orange Crocs with his lab coat, convinced he was God's gift. He'd called us into his office for a private conversation, all like: ‘I need your help with this; we shouldn't deny anything, just obscure the truth, unveil the actual situation little by little,' ‘It'll do us more good than it will her,' and so on. The whole thing in the damned first-person plural. In other words, a lesson in sheer humanity that I couldn't tell you, with Mamma holding her handkerchief pressed against her nose like a boxer after a match and Alfredo who was on the verge of pulling out a pad of paper and jotting down notes. Then, as soon as Grandma laid eyes on him, the junior doctor, she looked him straight in the face and said, ‘I've got cancer, right?'; and doctor boy just gaped at her like an idiot. You know when a wife waits up for her cheating husband to come home at two in the morning and wrings the confession out of him before he can come up with a good alibi? Like that. You'd have wanted to razz him if he hadn't done such a perfect job of making a fool of himself on his own; anyway the truth was written all over his face. At that point it would have been practically impossible to pull the wool over her eyes.”

“Well then it's just as well I wasn't there, or I definitely would have started laughing.”

“That's exactly what she said when we left.”

 

Assunta. Assunta Russo, also known as Ass. Alagia and Alfredo's grandmother. Nives's mother. My mother-in-law. That is, my ex-mother-in-law. A piece of work. Probably the only human being on the planet in whose presence Nives sheds her intellectual pretensions, takes her vocabulary down a good ten notches, and suddenly starts speaking in simple sentences composed of subject, verb, and object, even taking care to stay on topic.

Ass (it's just an abbreviated form of her name and nothing else, and those of you who know English can keep your smart comments to yourselves; besides, if there's anything my mother-in-law lacks, in every sense of the word, it would be that) is the exact opposite of her daughter. Pathologically incapable of dressing up an idea. Indifferent to the subconscious. Allergic to complexity.

To take care of Nives and fund her education, she'd worked as a waitress in a restaurant for practically her whole life, a little like Ellen Burstyn in
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
(“Only that prick of a husband of mine didn't get killed in a car crash, and worst of all I didn't meet Kris Kristofferson afterward,” she pointed out to me when I suggested the comparison with the Scorsese film), and it's probably from her dedication to earning a living that she developed her idiosyncratic way of dealing with those people who take problematic approaches to the questions of life.

This much is obligatory biography. But since I've known her for a while now, I believe that I can safely say that this tendency to get straight to the heart of the matter is part of her character. In the sense that even if she'd been wealthy enough not to have to work for a living, her hard-assed waitress's pragmatism would still have guided her through her passage here on earth. Among other things, she never made a point of the fact that she'd spent the best years of her life humping trays so that her daughter would never lack for anything. None of us has ever heard her feel sorry for herself, not even once, like those failures who bombard their children with reminders of all the things they had to give up, practically taking them to court over it, accusing them of making them slave away for them without social security and withholding (you wouldn't believe how many people like this there are out there). It's just that Ass just isn't like that. The only way she knows how to think is in terms of cause and effect. That's why she's always fought against Nives's innate tendency to take the long way around when it comes to understanding things. And as if she'd set out to achieve it, she got herself a psychologist daughter.

Nives claims that she chose her profession as a response to the simplified world model that her mother offered her (and I hardly need point out here that from “as a response” to “offered her” are her exact words).

According to her reconstruction of events, it all dates back to a little tantrum she threw when she was roughly nine years old. One afternoon a wave of unexpected sadness came over her, the kind of depression that attacks children for no good reason and turns them into whiny pests, and sure enough she started pestering her mother, crying and complaining over nothing, the way kids do when they're trying to get your attention but they don't know what they want, basically because what they really want is for you to figure it out for them.

Ass let her carry on for a while, hoping that she'd cut it out on her own, but when she realized that at this rate they might still be at it that night, she sat the girl down and delivered a little lecture that more or less consisted of the following considerations:

“You got a good night's sleep. No tummy aches, no nightmares. Yesterday in school you recited a poem by heart; I know that because your teacher told me when I ran into her at the supermarket. At lunch you ate a cutlet, mashed potatoes, and a second helping of strawberries. Then you watched the cartoons you like on TV. You don't have much homework for tomorrow, your forehead isn't hot, and your dog hasn't died. So will you explain to me why I ought to worry about a problem that doesn't even exist?”

And Nives stood there, raptly following point by point that presentation which was impeccable both in theory and in application; then without speaking a single word or shedding another tear, she went into her bedroom and did her homework, dragging behind her a sense of mortification unlike anything she would ever experience again in her entire life.

From that day forward she never misbehaved willfully, terrified by the prospect of a second rendition.

It was that same day that she felt within her the first stirrings of a decision that she would come to several years after that (from “felt within” to “after that,” obviously, I had nothing to do with).

“I'll become a psychologist,” she said to herself when she discovered that a scientific discipline existed that dealt specifically with the feelings of sadness that wash over people for no apparent reason. “I'll try to solve the problems that my mother thinks don't even exist, I'll listen to people when they tell me about them, and I'll take them seriously.”

“And I will bust Vincenzo Malinconico's balls all the livelong day,” I would add.

 

Now I don't want to come off as a cynic. When Nives told me the story of the minor childhood trauma that scarred her for life I actually felt a twinge of pity, and I took her hand and then we embraced sweetly (okay, at the time I hadn't gotten her into bed yet, but I swear that I was prompted only by a sincere desire to console her). I can see how a little nine-year-old girl experiencing a wave of unfounded sadness would have her feelings hurt by such a show of maternal cynicism. Because there's no doubt that sadness is real. And it comes when it feels like it, more or less like sneezing. Only you can't just put on a sweater to make it go away.

A little girl who suddenly feels sad for no reason one afternoon (and actually, now that I think about it, it would be vitally important to know whether it was a Sunday) ought to have her constitutional rights recognized—and by “constitutional” I mean relating to her biological constitution—namely her right to have her parent explain to her that feeling sad for no good reason is just something that happens, and that there's no cause for despair, because it'll pass soon enough.

But in order to provide this kind of assistance a mother would have to be willing to recognize the cry for help that takes the form of a child's whining about motiveless sadness and, thus, validate it, at least a little. And the problem is that there are people in the world, even people who are mothers, who simply don't believe in motiveless sadness (perhaps because they're all too familiar with the motivated kind). And so they simply ignore the request. And they don't do it out of selfishness or arrogance: it's more that they just aren't willing to consider the larger theological question. Because it's obvious that no one can persuade anyone else to believe in the existence of something. You either believe or you don't, and that's that.

A mother who refuses to take responsibility for her little girl's unmotivated sadness refuses to believe in it. It's a little bit like a doctor dealing with a hypochondriac: he tends to dismiss out of hand any set of symptoms embroidered with a rich array of details.

Now I—in case you're interested in knowing what I think about it—profoundly envy people like my mother-in-law. People who focus on evidence and rank things by priority. People who get things done. Who dismiss the anguish of a depressing afternoon with a shrug of the shoulders. Who believe that the soul may very well exist, but who still prefer not to open that can of worms. Who don't take their own thoughts all that seriously, and thus manage to avoid sitting around constantly rethinking, refining, modifying, and revising them.

Because I, unlike people like Ass, am a perennial victim of the things that go through my head. And if only I could think those thoughts just once and be done with them. My thoughts exit and enter my mind with such freedom, such promiscuity, such grim determination as to prevent me from making so much as a single decision with anything like true conviction, so that it's debilitating to have to interact with them. My thoughts are a bunch of sluts, if you want to know the truth.

I wish they'd stop treating me like a hotel, coming to me for consolation and help after they've been out doing who the hell knows what around town. That for once in their miserable lives they'd content themselves with their owner and just stay faithful to me.

If I were to identify my chief shortcoming, the one that I most often see recurring in my relationships with other people, I'd have to say that it's my tendency to brood over things. I brood over things a lot. When I'm walking. When I'm working. When I'm having fun. When I'm feeling sorry for myself. When I'm having sex. And especially when I'm not having sex. (And when you think about it, brooding is an activity for psychopaths. Because you brood over what's happened, and what's happened—as the word itself indicates—has already happened. So it's clear that fretting over issues that you can't do anything about is a morbid pleasure, a form of intellectual necrophilia, a masochistic indulgence.)

Well, I do something even worse: sometimes I'm so overwhelmed by my broodings that I actually sit down and write. I fill page after page of Word documents in the hope of finding the right words to nail down one point of view, one I can stick to forever. I work deep into the night, when I really get obsessed. And then I say to myself: What, are you stupid? Are you trying to write a book or something?