The Middleman and Other Stories (9 page)

The story about Grandma deMarco, Dad's mama, is that every Thanksgiving she served two full dinners, one American with the roast turkey, candied yams, pumpkin pie, the works, and another with Grandpa's favorite pastas.

Dad relaxes. He appoints himself bartender. “Don't you have more ice cubes, sweetheart?”

I tell him it's good Glenlivet. He shouldn't ruin it with ice, just a touch of water if he must. Dad pours sherry in Vic's pottery espresso cups for his women. Vic made them himself, and I used to think they were perfect blue jewels. Now I see they're lumpy, uneven in color.

“Go change into something pretty before Carla and Brent come.” Mom believes in dressing up. Beaded dresses lift her spirits. She's wearing a beaded green dress today.

I take the sherry and vanish behind a four-panel screen, the kind long-legged showgirls change behind in black and white movies while their moustached lovers keep talking. My head barely shows above the screen's top, since I'm no long-legged showgirl. My best points, as Ro has said, are my clusters of grapes. Vic found the screen at a country auction in the Adirondacks. It had filled the van. Now I use the panels as a bulletin board and I'm worried Dad'll spot the notice for the next meeting of Amnesty International, which will bother him. He will think the two words stand for draft dodger and communist. I was going to drop my membership, a legacy of Vic, when Ro saw it and approved. Dad goes to the Sons of Italy Anti-Defamation dinners. He met Frank Sinatra at one. He voted for Reagan last time because the Democrats ran an Italian woman.

Instead of a thirties lover, it's my moustached papa talking to me from the other side of the screen. “So where's this dining table?”

“Ro's got the parts in the basement. He'll bring it up, Dad.”

I hear them whispering. “Bo? Now she's messing with a Southerner?” and “Shh, it's her business.”

I'm just smoothing on my pantyhose when Mom screams for the cops. Dad shouts too, at Mom for her to shut up. It's my fault, I should have warned Ro not to use his key this afternoon.

I peek over the screen's top and see my lover the way my parents see him. He's a slight, pretty man with hazel eyes and a tufty moustache, so whom can he intimidate? I've seen Jews and Greeks, not to mention Sons of Italy, darker-skinned than Ro. Poor Ro resorts to his Kabuli prep-school manners.

“How do you do, madam! Sir! My name is Roashan.”

Dad moves closer to Ro but doesn't hold out his hand. I can almost read his mind:
he speaks.
“Come again?” he says, baffled.

I cringe as he spells his name. My parents are so parochial. With each letter he does a graceful dip and bow. “Try it syllable by syllable, sir. Then it is not so hard.”

Mom stares past him at me. The screen doesn't hide me because I've strayed too far in to watch the farce. “Renata, you're wearing only your camisole.”

I pull my crew neck over my head, then kiss him. I make the kiss really sexy so they'll know I've slept with this man. Many times. And if he asks me, I will marry him. I had not known that till now. I think my mother guesses.

He's brought flowers: four long-stemmed, stylish purple blossoms in a florist's paper cone. “For you, madam.” He glides over the dirty broadloom to Mom who fills up more than half the sofa bed. “This is my first Thanksgiving dinner, for which I have much to give thanks, no?”

“He was born in Afghanistan,” I explain. But Dad gets continents wrong. He says, “We saw your famine camps on TV. Well, you won't starve this afternoon.”

“They smell good,” Mom says. “Thank you very much but you shouldn't spend a fortune.”

“No, no, madam. What you smell good is my cologne. Flowers in New York have no fragrance.”

“His father had a garden estate outside Kabul.” I don't want
Mom to think he's putting down American flowers, though in fact he is. Along with American fruits, meats, and vegetables. “The Russians bulldozed it,” I add.

Dad doesn't want to talk politics. He senses, looking at Ro, this is not the face of Ethiopian starvation. “Well, what'll it be, Roy? Scotch and soda?” I wince. It's not going well.

“Thank you but no. I do not imbibe alcoholic spirits, though I have no objection for you, sir.” My lover goes to the fridge and reaches down. He knows just where to find his Tab. My father is quietly livid, staring down at his drink.

In my father's world, grown men bowl in leagues and drink the best whiskey they can afford. Dad whistles “My Way.” He must be under stress. That's his usual self-therapy: how would Francis Albert handle this?

“Muslims have taboos, Dad.” Cindi didn't marry a Catholic, so he has no right to be upset about Ro, about us.

“Jews,” Dad mutters. “So do Jews.” He knows because catty-corner from Vitelli's is a kosher butcher. This isn't the time to parade new words before him, like
halal
, the Muslim kosher. An Italian-American man should be able to live sixty-five years never having heard the word, I can go along with that. Ro, fortunately, is cosmopolitan. Outside of pork and booze, he eats anything else I fix.

Brent and Cindi take forever to come. But finally we hear his MG squeal in the driveway. Ro glides to the front window; he seems to blend with the ficus tree and hanging ferns. Dad and I wait by the door.

“Party time!” Brent shouts as he maneuvers Cindi and Franny ahead of him up three flights of stairs. He looks very much the head of the family, a rich man steeply in debt to keep up appearances, to compete, to head off middle age. He's at that age—and Cindi's nowhere near that age—when people notice the difference and quietly judge it. I know these things from Cindi—I'd never guess it from looking at Brent. If he feels
divided, as Cindi says he does, it doesn't show. Misery, anxiety, whatever, show on Cindi though; they bring her cheekbones out. When I'm depressed, my hair looks rough, my skin breaks out. Right now, I'm lustrous.

Brent does a lot of whooping and hugging at the door. He even hugs Dad who looks grave and funereal like an old-world Italian gentleman because of his outdated, pinched dark suit. Cindi makes straight for the fridge with her casserole of squash and browned marshmallow. Franny just stands in the middle of the room holding two biggish Baggies of salad greens and vinaigrette in an old Dijon mustard jar. Brent actually bought the mustard in Dijon, a story that Ro is bound to hear and not appreciate. Vic was mean enough last year to tell him that he could have gotten it for more or less the same price at the Italian specialty foods store down on Watchung Plaza. Franny doesn't seem to have her own winter clothes. She's wearing Cindi's car coat over a Dolphins sweatshirt. Her mother moved down to Florida the very day the divorce became final. She's got a Walkman tucked into the pocket of her cords.

“You could have trusted me to make the salad dressing at least,” I scold my sister.

Franny gives up the Baggies and the jar of dressing to me. She scrutinizes us—Mom, Dad, me and Ro, especially Ro, as though she can detect something strange about him—but doesn't take off her earphones. A smirk starts twitching her tanned, feral features. I see what she is seeing. Asian men carry their bodies differently, even these famed warriors from the Khyber Pass. Ro doesn't stand like Brent or Dad. His hands hang kind of stiffly from the shoulder joints, and when he moves, his palms are tucked tight against his thighs, his stomach sticks out like a slightly pregnant woman's. Each culture establishes its own manly posture, different ways of claiming space. Ro, hiding among my plants, holds himself in a way that seems both too effeminate and too macho. I hate Franny for what she's doing to me. I am twenty-seven years old, I should be more mature. But I see now how wrong Ro's clothes are. He
shows too much white collar and cuff. His shirt and his wool-blend flare-leg pants were made to measure in Kabul. The jacket comes from a discount store on Canal Street, part of a discontinued line of two-trousered suits. I ought to know, I took him there. I want to shake Franny or smash the earphones.

Cindi catches my exasperated look. “Don't pay any attention to her. She's unsociable this weekend. We can't compete with the Depeche Mode.”

I intend to compete.

Franny, her eyes very green and very hostile, turns on Brent. “How come she never gets it right, Dad?”

Brent hi-fives his daughter, which embarrasses her more than anyone else in the room. “It's a Howard Jones, hon,” Brent tells Cindi.

Franny, close to tears, runs to the front window where Ro's been hanging back. She has an ungainly walk for a child whose support payments specify weekly ballet lessons. She bores in on Ro's hidey hole like Russian artillery. Ro moves back to the perimeter of family intimacy. I have no way of helping yet. I have to set out the dips and Tostitos. Brent and Dad are talking sports, Mom and Cindi are watching the turkey. Dad's going on about the Knicks. He's in despair, so early in the season. He's on his second Scotch. I see Brent try. “What do you think, Roy?” He's doing his best to get my lover involved. “Maybe we'll get lucky, huh? We can always hope for a top draft pick. End up with Patrick Ewing!” Dad brightens. “That guy'll change the game. Just wait and see. He'll fill the lane better than Russell.” Brent gets angry, since for some strange Amish reason he's a Celtics fan. So was Vic. “Bird'll make a monkey out of him.” He looks to Ro for support.

Ro nods. Even his headshake is foreign. “You are undoubtedly correct, Brent,” he says. “I am deferring to your judgment because currently I have not familiarized myself with these practices.”

Ro loves squash, but none of my relatives have ever picked up
a racket. I want to tell Brent that Ro's skied in St. Moritz, lost a thousand dollars in a casino in Beirut, knows where to buy Havana cigars without getting hijacked. He's sophisticated, he could make monkeys out of us all, but they think he's a retard.

Brent drinks three Scotches to Dad's two; then all three men go down to the basement. Ro and Brent do the carrying, negotiating sharp turns in the stairwell. Dad supervises. There are two trestles and a wide, splintery plywood top. “Try not to take the wall down!” Dad yells.

When they make it back in, the men take off their jackets to assemble the table. Brent's wearing a red lamb's wool turtleneck under his camel hair blazer. Ro unfastens his cuff links—they are 24-karat gold and his father's told him to sell them if funds run low—and pushes up his very white shirt sleeves. There are scars on both arms, scars that bubble against his dark skin, scars like lightning flashes under his thick black hair. Scar tissue on Ro is the color of freshwater pearls. I want to kiss it.

Cindi checks the turkey one more time. “You guys better hurry. We'll be ready to eat in fifteen minutes.”

Ro, the future engineer, adjusts the trestles. He's at his best now. He's become quite chatty. From under the plywood top, he's holding forth on the Soviet menace in Kabul. Brent may actually have an idea where Afghanistan is, in a general way, but Dad is lost. He's talking of being arrested for handing out pro-American pamphlets on his campus. Dad stiffens at “arrest” and blanks out the rest. He talks of this “so-called leader,” this “criminal” named Babrak Karmal and I hear other buzz-words like Kandah
ā
r and Pamir, words that might have been Polish to me a month ago, and I can see even Brent is slightly embarrassed. It's his first exposure to Third World passion. He thought only Americans had informed political opinion—other people staged coups out of spite and misery. It's an unwelcome revelation to him that a reasonably educated and rational man like Ro would die for things that he, Brent, has
never heard of and would rather laugh about. Ro was tortured in jail. Franny has taken off her earphones. Electrodes, canes, freezing tanks. He leaves nothing out. Something's gotten into Ro.

Dad looks sick. The meaning of Thanksgiving should not be so explicit. But Ro's in a daze. He goes on about how—
inshallah
—his father, once a rich landlord, had stashed away enough to bribe a guard, sneak him out of this cell and hide him for four months in a tunnel dug under a servant's adobe hut until a forged American visa could be bought. Franny's eyes are wide, Dad joins Mom on the sofa bed, shaking his head. Jail, bribes, forged, what is this? I can read his mind. “For six days I must orbit one international airport to another,” Ro is saying. “The main trick is having a valid ticket, that way the airline has to carry you, even if the country won't take you in. Colombo, Seoul, Bombay, Geneva, Frankfurt, I know too too well the transit lounges of many airports. We travel the world with our gym bags and prayer rugs, unrolling them in the transit lounges. The better airports have special rooms.”

Brent tries to ease Dad's pain. “Say, buddy,” he jokes, “you wouldn't be ripping us off, would you?”

Ro snakes his slender body from under the makeshift table. He hasn't been watching the effect of his monologue. “I am a working man,” he says stiffly. I have seen his special permit. He's one of the lucky ones, though it might not last. He's saving for NJIT. Meantime he's gutting chickens to pay for room and board in Little Kabul. He describes the gutting process. His face is transformed as he sticks his fist into imaginary roasters and grabs for gizzards, pulls out the squishy stuff. He takes an Afghan dagger out of the pocket of his pants. You'd never guess, he looks like such a victim. “This,” he says, eyes glinting. “This is all I need.”

“Cool,” Franny says.

“Time to eat,” Mom shouts. “I made the gravy with the nutmeg as you said, Renata.”

I lead Dad to the head of the table. “Everyone else sit where you want to.”

Franny picks out the chair next to Ro before I can put Cindi there. I want Cindi to know him, I want her as an ally.

Dad tests the blade of the carving knife. Mom put the knife where Dad always sits when she set the table. He takes his thumb off the blade and pushes the switch. “That noise makes me feel good.”