TREYF (7 page)

•   •   •

B
uck Berkowitz, my father's best friend, lived a few flights below us with his perpetually scowling Catholic wife, Velma, who wore her chocolate brown 1950s updo Aqua Netted to a standstill. Possessed of a screeching voice like nails on a chalkboard, tortoiseshell cat-eye glasses, and pearl gray twinsets, their arms stuffed to the elbows with used Kleenex, Velma kept her husband at an arm's length; when he went to hug her, she pushed him away. When he went to kiss her, she gave him a cheek. A man with the muscular shoulders of an all-American Ivy League tackle, Buck was an eight-by-ten glossy, my mother used to say, with hair so black it was almost blue, and a Brylcreemed
spit curl that sat glued to the middle of his forehead, like a comma. Obsessed with Chihuahuas and his perfectly square white Chiclet teeth, which he would have cleaned monthly at the dentist whose office was on the ground floor of The Brussels, Buck was a math teacher at a local Catholic boys' high school and utterly devoted to children and their well-being.

As much as Buck loved children was exactly how much Velma loathed them; their daughter, Darleen, born with spina bifida, seemed to exhaust Velma with every pull and drag of her child's heavy wheelchair, her every need to be tended, morning and night. Over a pizza and Tang dinner one night at their powder blue apartment when I was ten, I caught Velma glaring at me across their mahogany dining room table after Buck and my parents had stepped outside onto the terrace to have a cigarette.

“What?” I whispered to her across the pile of oil-stained pizza boxes, while Darleen, sitting next to me on a square couch pillow, played with her food.
The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour
blared from the abandoned television in the living room.

“Nothing, Elissa,” Velma sighed. She shook her head, pushed herself away from the table, stood up, flattened out her apron, and slunk into the bedroom, alone; I heard the click of the button in the doorknob.

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V
elma had moved to New York from eastern Kansas in 1954 to launch an acting career that never took off; instead, she was relegated to odd jobs as a hand double in short television commercials for second-tier products, like Rinso Soap, the camera
stopping just north of her slender wrists
.
Ten years later, she met Buck at a party—recently divorced and handsome beyond her wildest dreams—married him, gave birth to Darleen, and spent most of her time dressed in a flowered cotton apron in their kitchen in The Marseilles, turning out breakfast, lunch, and dinner for her new family: her freezer was stockpiled with Swanson frozen dinners—honey-fried chicken, the complete turkey dinner, Salisbury steak, Welsh rarebit—for every occasion. The only time she actually cooked anything from scratch was at Christmas, when she produced a ham for me, my parents, Buck and Darleen, and the Hoffmanns, as a show, she announced, of Christian goodwill. The size of a beach ball, it was served studded with cloves and canned pineapple rings held in place with red- and green-dyed toothpicks that bled into the meat while it sat roasting for hours in their Caloric oven. When it was ready, Velma dragged it out and onto a mottled-glass cutting board while my parents, Inga, George, Tor, Eddie, Darleen, and I played with the three Berkowitz Chihuahuas and helped Buck unpack cardboard shoeboxes filled with plastic Victorian carolers in top hats and bonnets, their tiny red mouths shaped into perfect Os.

“Buck!” Velma would bleat from the kitchen. “Have them set up the carolers on the mantelpiece!”

Buck lifted up the white plastic fireplace that had sat propped against the living room wall since Thanksgiving, and hung it off two small metal picture hooks. One by one, Eddie and Tor and I took turns positioning the tiny carolers on the fake mantelpiece. Switched on, the fireplace played an endless loop of Mantovani Christmas music while a small fan blew three orange velvet ribbons
against a hard plastic backdrop onto which was painted a flaming Yule log. Darleen, sitting in her wheelchair and dressed like a much younger child in a red velvet jumper flecked with tiny green reindeer, her legs encased in white Danskin leotards, howled with glee and applauded. Buck scooped her out of her chair and bounced her and her rubbery toy Rudolph over to the fireplace, where she stood the reindeer up in the middle of the arrangement and cooed.

“Just like Tiny Tim!” Tor shouted.

“Don't be an
asshole
,” my father mumbled, grabbing Tor's collar and pulling him away from the fireplace while George and Inga huddled together on the terrace, away from the festivities, their backs to their children, watching the Christmas lights flicker over The Champs-Élysées Promenade.

Once the ham was eaten and small bowls of vanilla ice cream topped with maraschino cherries were sucked down, Buck, Darleen, my father, and I bundled ourselves up and took the dogs out for a nighttime walk. While my father held the leashes of all four dogs, Buck bent down at my feet and zipped up my Mighty Mac, gently tousling my hair when he reached my chin; I loved him for his tenderness, but stopped myself from telling him so.

“It's
f-r-e-e-z-i-n-g
—aren't you cold, honey?” He fake-shivered, and helped me into my mittens. I wanted to fling my arms around his neck, rest my head on his shoulder and never let go.

Buck picked up the Chihuahuas and set them down on a threadbare blue towel draped across Darleen's lap, and I pushed her along in her wheelchair, her motionless legs pointed straight out in front of her. My father and Buck followed slowly behind us as I struggled
to maneuver my friend's leaden weight into the promenade and up to Austin Street. I wheeled her past John's Candy Store and Tess's Dry Cleaning towards the Associated grocery at the end of the block. We stopped, alone, under the glare of a streetlight, as though it were any other ordinary winter evening, and I pulled the brake lever on Darleen's wheelchair. Austin Street was like a barren Hollywood back lot: there was not a single holiday display coloring the cold gray sky. The dogs perched on her lap, Darleen looked forward with an unsure grin, wide-eyed and unblinking, as if to the future and towards something only she could see. Our fathers came up behind us, talking about Long Island—the South Shore versus the North, where the better school districts were—and who would be able to move their family out to the suburbs first to get away from the griminess and danger of the city.

“We can go anytime,” I heard Buck say to my father, who stopped to light two cigarettes, one for each of them, in his hand cupped against the cold.

I waited for them to catch up to us, their only children and their dogs, and I reached forward to gently touch the back of Darleen's head with a gloved hand; even through the wool, her dark brown hair felt delicate and silky, like an infant's. She was fragile and suddenly, I knew, somehow, that she would die. My throat clutched the way it did when I was about to weep, and something warm climbed into my chest towards my heart, and engulfed it.

E
very night, there is another celebrity Christmas special to watch on television: The Osmond Brothers, singing carols from Temple Square in Salt Lake City, enormous flakes of snow settling down on their thick, gorgeous Mormon eyelashes. John Denver, wearing a metallic silver, yoke-front Western-style shirt, performs from inside a heated glass geodesic dome atop a mountain in Aspen, while Annie Denver and a group of their hippie friends watch contemplatively through matching round granny glasses. There's
The Andy Williams Christmas Show
and
The Partridge Family
,
The Brady Bunch
, the Carpenters, Bob Hope, and Dean Martin, who sings
Ave Maria
. There's Perry Como, who my mother swoons over, and when Bing Crosby sings
The Little Drummer Bo
y with David Bowie, I yell for Gaga, who is frying potato latkes in our kitchen.

I am not allowed to have a Christmas tree—my father believes
that it's symbolic of everything Christian and pagan, and it would certainly kill his Orthodox father if he ever found out about it—even though my mother had one as a child. She grew up in Williamsburg among a sea of Catholic neighbors, like Grandpa Phil's best friend, Sister Redempta, who ran a parochial school for orphaned boys.

“It was really just a holiday bush,” my mother tells me and my father while we drive home from a shopping trip to Macy's, where he lets me pick out Hanukah gifts for Tor and Eddie and Darleen. On our way out of the store, my parents plunk me down on the lap of the store Santa and snap a picture. In it, I am smiling and looking away coyly while Santa asks me what I want for Christmas and I say
A Christmas tree
and my father grabs my hand and yanks me out of the store and out to the car.

Gaga comes running down the hallway, nearly tripping over the dog, and her eyes grow misty when she sees the actor and the rocker—Bing in a blue golf sweater, Bowie in a tight shirt, a massive gold cross dangling around his neck as though he himself might be crucified. They're standing on a set decorated like an empty parish house attached to a very old church, with a piano and a Gothic window behind the two singers.

“My favorite song,” Gaga says wistfully, standing over me in my bedroom with a Teflon spatula in one hand and an oily kitchen towel in the other. We watch the little Sony Trinitron television that my parents have given me for Hanukah; she begins to croon in a low, guttural mezzo-soprano with one of the most bizarre duets ever assembled for modern television, between a 1940s movie star with a strong religious, right-wing streak and
a space oddity who sometimes goes by the name of Ziggy Stardust and apparently likes boys. And sometimes, girls.

Come they told me, pa rum pum pum pum.

Gaga loves this song; she's loved it since she first heard it on the radio in the late 1950s, alone in her Williamsburg apartment while my mother was out of the house and singing on network television, and Grandpa Phil was working at his furniture store down the street, supplying most of his neighbors and Sister Redempta's orphanage with the mundanity of life—the dour mahogany beds, chairs, desks, tables that reeked of utility and plainness. It's Christmastime and I imagine that Gaga's Italian neighbors have decorated their windows with wreaths and tinsel, and tied balsam roping around the banister from the ground floor all the way up to the roof. Sweet, yeasty clouds of baking panettone slither out from beneath her neighbors' doors, and Mrs. Lambiazi, who lives two flights below her, comes up to borrow extra egg whites for the torrone she's making for her son, who is coming in from Providence with his new wife and baby. By the twenty-third, Gaga tells me thirty years later, the building begins to smell like a fish market: her neighbors are making baccalà and scampi and fried eel, and there's so much pounding and chopping and shouting in Italian going on in the other apartments that she turns on the radio to calm her nerves, and sits down at her kitchen table to listen, alone, and hears, for the first time,
The Little Drummer Boy.

Gaga longs to cook great, immense holiday meals that her
family—her four sisters and their husbands and children, her own daughter and husband—will love and look forward to every year. But her sisters have scattered, some to Florida, some to New Jersey, and her daughter is afraid of food and starved herself to lose weight so that she could be on television; her husband can't keep weight on no matter what she feeds him and treats food like the fuel he pumps into his Plymouth. So Gaga makes her weekly chicken soup, and her weekly blintzes, and her weekly brisket as if it was nothing more than a chore. It is eaten by her, by her husband, by her daughter, mechanically, angrily, on the run, and entirely without pleasure. Gaga finds her peace and contentment, instead, in the thrice-weekly, middle-of-the-day trips she makes to Leroy Street in Greenwich Village, to see her beloved lady friend Norah; Gaga cooks what she knows Norah loves, and they'll be together through the afternoon, drinking strong tea and sometimes sherry, until Gaga has to take the L train from Fourteenth Street all the way east through Manhattan and across the bridge back to Williamsburg, before Phil comes home from the store, before anyone even knows she's been gone.

Christmas swirls around Gaga, and it sucks her in; over the years, she's come to love it, to live vicariously through the goodness of it, through the noise and the food and the psychic heart nourishment that she so desperately longs for. In Brooklyn, the holiday doesn't care whether she is Jewish, and neither do her neighbors: Christmas climbs the steps of her apartment building and creeps into the rattling radiators and the pipes, and when Mrs. Lambiazi shows up one Christmas Day carrying a pan of steaming lasagna Bolognese, meat and cheese together, and Gaga
says, “Thank you, but I can't,” Mrs. Lambiazi tells her in Italian that she is now family—
Tu sei la nostra famiglia
—and that it comes from her home and her heart, and that she must. And so she does.

There are only three Christmas songs that Gaga truly loves and will listen to:
White Christmas
, because it was written by Irving Berlin, and she loves anything written by Irving Berlin;
The Little Drummer Boy
, because of its simplicity; and
I'll Be Home for Christmas,
which she can't get through anymore without weeping—
if only in my dreams
—since the morning, fourteen years earlier, when Mrs. Lambiazi got the telegram about her older son, who was at Anzio with his battalion. Gaga heard the screaming from two flights up and ran down the stairs to find her neighbor collapsed on the kitchen floor, the radio on, her baccalà still simmering in a pan of water on the stove above her.

If only in my dreams
, and Gaga has to take off her glasses to wipe her eyes; once she starts, she can't stop, so deep is her sadness and grief for Mrs. Lambiazi, but really for her own life and situation, and her longing to fill a home with the kind of warmth and laughter and music she'd had when she lived in her mother's house on South Fifth Street, before all of her younger sisters married and moved out and she, at thirty-three, was left behind, and people began to talk.

On this night, in my room in Forest Hills, Gaga sits down on the edge of my bed to watch Bing Crosby and David Bowie sing together, while her latkes fry in a beat-up Teflon pan in the kitchen down the hall, and all she can think of is lasagna Bolognese and the smells of balsam roping and simmering baccalà and sustenance, and life.