by John Perilli
One of the first things I told people about my mother is that they should not take her too seriously. She always knew how to put me on edge when she made some serious-sounding pronouncement before walking into my room, but as I grew older, I found out that she didn’t mean much by any of it. As I became less her daughter and more her caretaker, I noticed that she laughed easier, said to me more often “Oh come on, did you really think I meant that?”
I tried to tell this to my husband, but Joseph did not believe me. He has never forgotten my mother’s serious-sounding evaluation, only months after we had met, of the low likelihood we would get married.
“Have you seen this?” he said to me one morning in our tiny Hoboken kitchen. “Have you seen this?”
He was carrying his laptop, which, with its cumbersome size, made him look like he was bearing a heavy sacred book. I saw my mother’s Facebook profile open on his screen.
Monica and Joseph – I would love to have you both down to open the summer house this Sunday. The Nicholses aren’t next door anymore and I am starting to get agita. I need some help and some company. Love always, your needy old mother.
“What’s wrong here?” Joseph said. He was almost laughing.
I studied it.
“What’s wrong?” Joseph repeated. Sometimes he did this to make me feel bad for being a slow thinker.
“She meant to send us a message, didn’t she?”
The note from my mother appeared as a status update on her page, and not, as I suspect she intended, a direct message to us. I laughed too, but not at her. It was just in form for her to make such a self-deprecating pronouncement and forget that she was also telling it to the world.
“Is she stupid?” Joseph asked.
Joseph knew full well that I didn’t think my mother was stupid, and in fact I have spent fruitless hours trying to convince my husband of her cleverness, her ability to think a layer beyond what she is saying and turn seriousness into comedy. But Joseph had a complex. Not only was he a nurse—which, I found, made him feel qualified to discuss the faculties of the mind just as much as the body—he was also self-made. This was one of the reasons why I loved him and admired him, but it was something which granted him the confidence of the sprinter who knows they have started lengths behind and can still win the race.
“I don’t know why she ever got Facebook to begin with,” I said. It was a concession.
In fact, one of the reasons I thought my mother was so clever was that she has used this summer house on the Jersey Shore to keep me in her orbit. She did not get around much anymore. She had moved herself into an independent living facility, where she was the youngest resident by at least a decade, but the summer house kept dragging us back down to her each year, where she found equal satisfaction reliving this fond tradition as she did relishing the fact that my husband and I, the smartest generation, the overeducated workaholics, really had nothing on her.
“I’ll respond,” I said, pulling out my phone.
“Can we make this the last year we go to this place?” Joseph said.
I told Joseph, in no uncertain terms, that we were going, and that I did not know if it would be the last year we would make the trip. I told him that we’d had this discussion before, and that he agreed to humor me and at least spend a week down there if my mother asked. I had not told him, though, just how clever my mother was by getting him there, and that if she was going to outsmart me every year, I thought I might as well help her get the better of both of us.
* * *
On Sunday, Joseph drove us down, even though I offered to and was more than capable. Again, he had this complex. Sometimes it manifested itself as calling my mother stupid, other times as odd rushes of chivalry where he insisted on driving. He put his music on—hard-charging punk that I couldn’t stand—partly to forestall any efforts on my part to point out his sloppy lane changes, late blinkers, or weaving.
It was an overcast day when we started the drive, but it cleared the further we got down the Parkway. It was the weekend after Memorial Day, and there was a sense of settlement into routine among the tourists and beachgoers we passed on the road to my mother’s, as if summer had already lasted a year, rather than a week. The families who sauntered across the street from the seafood stands under candy-striped canopies to the cheaply beach-themed bars and crowded ice cream shops were content to make us wait. Joseph honked at a couple especially slow pedestrians rolling their Playmate coolers well in front of the crosswalk, the wheels crunching on the asphalt, and told them something out the window which sounded like “go be rich white people somewhere else.” I could not really tell over the noise. I tried to relax.
My mother’s beach house was old for the neighborhood, and was set back a few blocks from the boardwalk and the shore. In a neighborhood of gleaming vinyl sidings, mostly in white trimmed with American flag bunting, my mother’s light green two-floor cottage looked like an underdressed dinner guest. The clapboards were warping and bowing away from the house, and flecks of green paint could be found around the place like the indistinct rings of a distant planet. Besides my mother, we were not the only car in the driveway. I recognized—not without apprehension—the old maroon Taurus belonging to my sister Jamie.
My mother was a small woman, but standing in the doorway of the place she has owned as long as I can remember, she cast what seemed to me a large shadow.
“What the hell took you so long?” she said. “I’ve been here alone.”
We hugged under the threshold, but it was what we always did, and it didn’t carry any special importance to me or, I would guess, to her.
“Jamie is here, no?” I said.
“All alone.”
When we entered, the kitchen was dark. I could already feel Joseph’s nervous energy behind me. I did not see my sister, and could only wonder what my mother meant by her insinuation. Soon enough, though, Jamie appeared. Her long blonde hair, which she colored that way, did not match mine or my mother’s. She looked tan, but in the artificial way of a booth or salon. In fact, I would have been surprised if she had been outside yet for longer than it had taken her to walk from her car.
She was holding up a gray throw rug.
“This feels damp, mom,” she said, pressing her hand into the fabric. “I found this in the basement. Was there a flood? Shouldn’t we have had the basement filled in years ago?”
“Oh I don’t know,” my mother said. “It was probably when that storm blew through last week.”
“You don’t know?”
Joseph crossed the kitchen into the dining room, and asked stiffly if my mother would offer him a drink. She did. He took the wine cooler she passed him and drank nearly half of it in one draft. Joseph did not drink alcohol often.
Jamie saw me, and forgot about the rug for a moment.
“How are you?”
She had this way of greeting me in a warm and loving manner, but which was so exaggerated as to seem insincere. The aaaarrre of “How are you?” held like an inexperienced singer who just wants to get the note right. I told her (I wasn’t sure correctly) that I was good and that we had a good drive down.
“It must have been Tuesday,” my mother said, and I could only admire her bravery in restarting the argument. “There was a big storm.”
“Mom, I never remember your rugs being damp when we were kids.”
“I think they said a few inches of rain,” my mother went on.
“Yes, and they are going to keep saying that until this place is underwater,” Jamie said. “You’re not going to be around for it, but this whole shore is going to be flooded in fifty years, and no one’s doing anything about it. This place isn’t going to be worth a penny.”
“Oh, I wish you’d wash away sometimes,” my mother scoffed back.
This was one of those moments where, as I mentioned, she didn’t really mean what she said. She was a smart woman, and certainly not a climate change denier, but she took the insouciant attitude because she owned the place and could do what she wanted. Like the very act of getting us to visit, it was an exercise of power.
Joseph didn’t seem to catch on. He had finished his wine cooler.
“Would you two stop?”
My mother and Jamie both looked at him, dumbfounded in only the way one can be after someone makes a much larger issue out of something that was not one.
“Oh, but we’re just talking,” my mother said.
“I didn’t come all the way down here just to hear you two bitch and moan,” Joseph said.
“Bitch and moan?” my mother said. “Who’s bitching and moaning?” Jamie remained studiously quiet.
Joseph was too proud to admit he had made a mistake. Rather than engage with my mother and face the possibility that he had misread her, he shook his head, turned around, and went right back out the door.
My mother and Jamie paused only for a moment, then carried on arguing as if nothing had happened. Jamie told my mother that when the super-charged hurricanes of our climate-changed future came sweeping up the coast, she would be lucky if we would be left with timbers of the place to keep as mementos. In fact, Jamie said, we should look to hand the place off as soon as possible.
My mother was wearing a dark look. Her face had grown harder to read as her wrinkles became more permanent, as if the words on the page or the music notes on the staff that were so clear to make out my whole adult life had been blotted with water.
“Well, I am for sure not passing it off to him.” She pointed out the door.
Initially, I took it as I always take such things from my mother, which is to say I felt my face lighten with the approach of laughter.
“You think I’m kidding?” she said. She still had no trouble reading us. She walked out of the kitchen and into the living room, where through the door I could see a wide puzzle being constructed on the coffee table. Jamie and I made to follow her, but she took a pair of noise-cancelling headphones and placed them on her ears, flicking the switch to tune us out. We bought them for her as a joint Christmas present last year, but I didn’t think she really listened to music.
Jamie and I retreated to the kitchen, and an unspoken question passed between us. Did she really mean that? I asked, in the form of a serious look. The equally serious look I received in return seemed to answer Yes.
It was at times like these when I appreciated the similarities between myself and my sister. We were, on the surface, two dissimilar people, she with her tanning trips and constant Instagram activity, the injections that made her look much younger than the two years between us; and me with the practiced understatement, the self-conscious devotion to all things except my physical appearance. However, right then we both found ourselves trying to make sense of someone we had known our whole lives, yet in whose personality we were constantly finding unopened doors that revealed some relic long hidden from us.
I needed to go find Joseph. I made for the door.
“He’ll come back,” Jamie said.
It was an optimistic thing to say, and I felt in that moment sorry that she, unmarried, thought that spouses simply magnetized back to each other.
* * *
I have still never told my mother that Joseph and I met online. I paid a small monthly sum for a premium dating website after enduring a string of lovers my mother disparaged without even meeting. Joseph was my second match after I quickly ignored the first. We might never have met anywhere else. His father operated a gas station somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike—I always forgot where—and his mother, a lifelong homemaker, separated from the family and pursued her own career as a paralegal, which was apparently quite lucrative and the proceeds of which Joseph saw nothing of.
Joseph had been in and out of community college for half a decade, but finally got enough money together to go to nursing school at Rutgers. He specialized in geriatrics, so I thought he would be able to handle my mother, but the first place she invited him was the beach house, almost five years ago. Even then, Joseph told me how much he disliked the place. He did not act like himself. I’d always trusted my mother’s appraisals, and she was initially indecisive on him. Jamie told me—and I believed her at the time—that it was simply my mother’s genteel tendencies showing. The gold dust rubbed off from her circle of well-to-do bridge club friends who had all grown up in Westchester, Fairfield County, and the nicer towns on Long Island. She herself had grown up in a destitute family of South Jersey farmers who later came into comfort after a giant agricultural company bought the surrounding land, doubling their offer for her father’s farm when he held out for more money. Since then, she had disavowed her humble roots, and seemed to see Joseph as a sad reminder of that forgotten time in her life. So I ignored my mother’s advice and married Joseph a year later.
Where did you go? I texted him. A minute passed with no response.
It was only after he married that he started having his fits of moodiness. He always shut himself in our room for a day after every time I asked him to come down to see my mother, while I did housework and grumbled. If I were really angry, I would tell him how I didn’t have the luxury of getting mad and shutting myself in my room, because otherwise the housework wouldn’t get done and our place would be a mess. If I were in a charitable mood, though, I would excuse him by thinking about how he’d grown up in a home where the men always had things done for them by the women, and that he’d never known it any other way.
You’re gonna play mr. I’m-feeling-bad-for-myself? I followed up. I waited a few seconds, then sent him the small symbol of a violin.
This finally provoked a response. By the beach entrance.
He was there, leaning on the metal railing that separated the long boardwalk from the sand, where families were starting to clear out in the late afternoon. A spritely young woman with a waist-length weave, no older than high school, was sitting on a plastic folding chair checking badges and taking people’s tickets. A sign next to her displayed a $10 fee to get in—$100 if you came often enough to invest in a season pass. The grumble of coolers, emptier than earlier in the day, still grated in our ears.
Joseph’s hands were in his pockets. I forgot the sarcasm of my earlier texts and put my hand on his shoulder.
“What’s up?”
The vagueness of this greeting was both intimate—in that we didn’t need to say anything else to express our concern—and alienating, making me feel as if I didn’t care, even though I did.
“Do you know what it feels like,” he said, “when everything feels sort of…tainted…just enough so that you can’t enjoy it, when you know you should be?”
“I do, I do…” I said. I didn’t mean it, and he knew it. He shook his head and walked a few feet down the railing.
“I fucking hate it here,” he said. “I always feel like I’m in someone else’s house, and not just because, you know, I am.”
“Oh, boo hoo!” I said, trying to head him off from one of his glum rants, but far from stopping him, I only encouraged him. I winced at my mistake.
He turned back to me.
“It’s not fucking funny!” he said. “You can’t get it.”
It was tempting to lay into him for his whining, but I was stopped by the thought that, while it might seem like needless complaining to me, it was coming from a genuine place of frustration. I admired—or told myself I admired—this genuineness since I had met him, so I could not bring myself to hold it against him. A small thing for me, which I could call upon my reserve of self-confidence to overcome, might be something that had grated on him for years, and for which each successive offense would drive him deeper into debt to his anger. A kitchen argument. A room where people weren’t talking to him.
“We don’t have to come to the beach, if you don’t want to,” I said halfheartedly.
“Do you know how often your mother stares at me, because she thinks I’m going to make off with one of her knickknacks? Your sister’s another one, but at least she gets me a bit.”
“We don’t have to come to the beach…” I said again.
“It’s not just the beach!” Joseph said. “It’s, like, my whole life. Maybe we should go visit my dad for a change. See how real people live.”
He only said this to provoke me. His father smoked both cigars and a pipe, and his small house always reeked of it. I had set foot in there only a few times.
“Look, Joseph, you knew goddamn well what you were getting into,” I said. “I took you down here before we got married and you didn’t bat an eye.”
“Because I didn’t want to insult your mother the first time I met her!”
“Oh, but now it’s suddenly okay? She paid for our whole fucking wedding and you think you can just treat her like shit?”
“She doesn’t get to treat me like shit just because she has more money than I do.”
“She didn’t say a thing to you today!”
It went on like this, but invariably, as we always do, we ran out of energy. I noticed a couple prying passersby staring oddly at us, but I threw them a dirty look and got them to move along. I looked at Joseph, and I felt a pang of regret for having argued with him. I questioned this feeling, knowing that I still had many good reasons to be angry with him. I felt even worse knowing that my regretful feelings were shorter-lived each time we fought.
“I’m sorry you’re having a bad time,” I said. “Can we just try to have a good time for a couple days? I’ll tell my mom you can’t come next time.”
Joseph finally seemed to relent. “I’m trying, hon. It’s not a matter of effort. It’s just a matter of, you know, my head and everything.”
I put my arm around his shoulder again, mustering what sympathy I could. But I was worried. Worried that I was trying to take someone like Joseph, whose life was spent far from sparkling beach shores, and force him into places that he rightfully resented. Worried that, despite my good intentions, I was ultimately doing this for my own self-satisfaction, the smugness of knowing Joseph had married up to me. Worried that my mother and sister would never understand him. Worried that, despite how much we professed our devotion for each other—truthfully or not—we were fighting against something deep and intractable within the world.
* * *
We spent the next morning helping my mother. She unfolded a tall gray ironing board from a closet in her bedroom and laid it out in the living room. She ran the iron over every drape in the house before she asked me and Joseph to hang them up. My mother pays fastidious attention to color, and the flowered navy and white curtains, while they were faded and no longer fashionable, all matched with the light brown furniture and whitewashed walls. There was none of the charming hodge-podge of patterns and colors I associated with the other beach houses I’d visited down the shore. For my mother, it either matched or went in the donation pile. In between hanging the drapes, Joseph and I were tasked with dusting every surface we could reach. My mother handed me a clean rag, but when she wasn’t looking, I went out to my car and fetched my Swiffer duster, and did the job much quicker. As he worked, I noticed Joseph’s mood improve.
My mother had gone through a series of housecleaners over the years, letting each stay for a summer before deciding they weren’t up to her standards. She paid them lavishly for their time, however, and soon, as rumors went through the housecleaners of the town of her largesse—fifty dollar tips, a generous slice of her inimitable white bean cassoulet for lunch, and glasses of wine thereafter—my mother was forced almost every other day to turn away an intrepid prospect who rang the doorbell, cleaning tools in tow.
After lunch, which was a particularly good edition of the cassoulet, I tried to log onto my computer for some afternoon work. My manager texted me that morning (a toneless “Happy Monday”) asking me to check in as I worked remotely. It turned out my mother did not have WiFi, so I was forced to channel my glimmer of cellphone signal into a mobile hotspot, not wanting to know how much I was paying on my limited data plan. My company made a component of the software behind a number of popular wearable devices tracking blood pressure and heart rate. It was a booming business, but one I saw only a limited upside of since I was technically an independent contractor. I had not worked in a full-time programming position in over three years, and while the part-time gigs paid well enough, they were brutally unpredictable, and women with streaks of gray hair were nonstarters in a technical job interview even in this economy. This assignment had lasted a while, and every so often there was a tantalizing hint of a full-time offer, but I always felt I was one dropped project away from ruin.
I kept a close eye on Joseph as I worked from my mother’s living room. He was a nurse, so of course he took the day as vacation. With no more dusting to do, he began to slide back toward his glumness of the previous night. He took another wine cooler and sipped pensively. I tossed him some attention every half hour or so, asking “you think you want to go to the beach? My mom has a season pass in her bedroom,” or “hey, are the Yankees on tonight?,” but I got one-word responses each time, leaving no avenues for further conversation. I quietly asked my mother to find him something to do, and she gave him a grocery list and sent him to the store with a wad of cash.
After he’d walked out the door, she said to me, “That was way more than he needed. He can keep the rest.”
Jamie, who was replacing the tablecloth in the adjacent dining room, spoke up. “Mom, you know Joseph and Monica both have jobs, right? They don’t need your charity.”
“I’m just trying to be considerate,” my mother said.
“Don’t you think they might find it insulting?”
“If you’ve both felt insulted by money from your mother, you’ve kept very quiet about it.”
I laughed. I privately agreed with Jamie, and I felt a surge of appreciation for her coming to my defense, but my mother was proving she still felt a sense of pride, a fighting spirit that I was always worried might leave her in her older age. As I typed away at my code, wondering how much money my managers were making off my work while I earned the bare minimum they could get away with paying a programmer, I almost appreciated her gesture.
* * *
The Nicholses, my mother’s longtime friends and fellow bridge club members, came for dinner that night. I had met them a few times, and had always thought of them as the rich people my mother wished she could have been. Seeing them again, this impression did not change. Both Mr. and Mrs. Nichols reminded me of their first names but I instantly forgot both. Mr. Nichols was wearing a blue-and-white striped polo shirt that did not flatter his round belly but which he wore confidently. His shorts were a sandy beige and dotted with little red sailboats, and his feet and the boat shoes that encased them had a matching tan. Mrs. Nichols looked much younger than my mother; her voluminous golden-brown hair and smooth face, and the care she clearly took in the maintenance of both, reminded me of Jamie. Her well-ironed rose-colored sundress made it clear she came to impress, but not ostentatiously so. Joseph, I was pleased to see, was not put off by their airs and came to introduce himself. Mr. Nichols shook his hand heartily, but stopped short when Jamie proffered her own hand. He went in for an awkward hug that my sister did not comfortably reciprocate.
“So you’re here again?” Mr. Nichols asked Joseph. “The last time I saw you here you said the seaside just didn’t suit you.”
I marveled not only at Mr. Nichols’ memory but at the way Joseph played off this comment with my mother in plain sight. I was nervous, but needn’t have been.
“Well, every year I spend on my feet running down hospital hallways, the more that beach chairs suit me,” Joseph said. “Plus, I’m in the family now. This place is a little bit mine.”
I didn’t see my mother’s reaction to this, but I couldn’t imagine it was positive. I eyed Joseph for any sign of discomfort, but he showed none. He looked, for all the world, to be having fun.
Bridge is a game which I have never played nor understood. Joseph, who I suspect learned the game to please my mother, has become an okay player in his years down the shore, but could not touch my mother or the Nicholses. Joseph and my mother as a team were demolished in two straight games, before the Nicholses finally showed enough mercy to rearrange the teams and create a fairer contest. Jamie and I sat around, drinking and kibitzing nonsensically. It really was, for a moment, some of the most fun I’d had down at my mother’s summer house.
Once bridge was over, my mother brought out her roast and we had dinner. Joseph drank a glass of red wine, and then another. I joined him for one but switched to water for the next round as I felt my dehydration from the day’s work sap my tolerance. After dinner, I insisted that we switch games. Jamie opened up a game on her phone called Heads Up, where we would hold the phone on our foreheads with words we couldn’t see and guess as many as we could in sixty seconds based on frantic, disjointed hints from the other players. I scored respectably on my first turn, and Joseph did too, but my mother didn’t get it, and eventually just looked at the phone to figure out the answers. Mrs. Nichols surprised me by getting more right than I did. After we finished the first two lists of words and landed on “blowjob,” the first word of the Adults Only deck that was up next, Jamie forestalled my mother going into details by snatching her phone back and saying that we’d had enough. Everyone sat at the kitchen table in a kind of contented bloat from the roast and the tarts my mother baked.
“How’s the new place?” Mr. Nichols said. “You know, the facility…independent living, isn’t it technically?…”
“You can call it an old age home, you coward,” my mother said. “Even though it’s not really. I like it, but I know if I say how much I really like it you’ll get all insulted since I don’t live in Holmdel anymore.”
“This is the only time we get to see you anymore,” Mrs. Nichols said. “We’ve never had a place down here like you.”
I sensed, for the first time, that the Nicholses were driving toward something.
“This place,” Mr. Nichols said, “is it all yours?”
“All mine,” my mother said. “Every last peeling board of it.”
“Well, that’s exactly my point,” Mr. Nichols said.
“You haven’t made a point,” my mother said.
“Oh, well, you’re right,” Mr. Nichols said, and even though I didn’t know him well, I knew that his flusterment was out of character.
“How was cleaning it today?” Mrs. Nichols cut in.
“Worked out just fine,” my mother said. “Monica and Joseph here are a great help. Jamie keeps me honest.”
“Do you think you could manage putting it into better shape? Like if you needed to make improvements?” Mr. Nichols asked.
“I doubt it,” my mother said. “You still haven’t made your point.”
“Okay, then,” Mr. Nichols said, seeming to work up his resolve. “Candy and I were thinking we’d like to buy a stake. We’d go half and half with you. We can keep the place up and you can have some money freed up to travel more, you know, do what you want.”
My mother was very good at expecting things and bending them to her will, but this clearly she did not expect. My attention was drawn to Joseph again. Any enjoyment was gone, and his face was inexpressive and stony. The Nicholses probably saw nothing.
“Are you—are you making me an offer right here?” my mother said.
“No—no certainly not before it’s appraised.” Mr. Nichols said. “But as a good-faith gesture, Candy and I will kick in ten grand to have the siding and roof redone, then buy in at whatever the appraisal is after that. We know a few contractors around here who will do a good job at that price.”
My mother thought about it, and didn’t seem to have a response ready.
“Well, think about it,” Mr. Nichols said, standing up. “We’ll stop by for lunch sometime next week and maybe we can work out the details. But before we left, we wanted to let you know.”
“No, no, thank you very much,” my mother said as Mr. Nichols shook her hand, the sign of a deal taken seriously. “I really appreciate it. I miss you guys too.”
The Nicholses said their airy farewells and left, leaving the kitchen feeling tense, as if all the furniture had been shuffled around since the start of the evening and the room was no longer recognizable.
“What do you think, mom?” Jamie asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. My mother was never lost for words. The situation itself and the sheer fact that she didn’t have an answer seemed to dumbfound her equally.
“I’d really think about it,” I said. “It’s very nice of them to offer to pay for some of the remodeling. Joseph, what about you?”
“Oh I don’t know.”
It was the way he said this that caught my attention. I had noticed the way he was feeling earlier, and knew there was more meaning to it.
“Come on, though,” Jamie said. She didn’t hear what I heard.
“It’s not really my business to say.”
“We’re all family—”
“It’s not really my business.”
He shook his head, rose from the table and climbed upstairs without saying a word to us. I looked at his back, shocked, but did not find in myself the sympathy needed to chase after him. I stayed at my seat at the kitchen table with my family—my real, blood family—alone with just each other for the first time since Joseph had stormed out yesterday.
“It’s a money thing with him, isn’t it?” my mother mused, apparently not worried about being overheard. “He thought he could have it when I died.”
I was not sure if this was true, but it stung me to consider that he would do that to my mother.
“It’s always a money thing with him, isn’t it?” my mother repeated, taking my silence for agreement.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know. You know he’s not attached to this place like you.”
“How do you not know?” my mother said. “Isn’t he your husband? Shouldn’t you know everything about him? I remember everything about your dear father and he’s been buried for six years.”
This was one of those throwaway remarks that, under normal circumstances, I would not have taken seriously from my mother, but the accumulation of her barbs and accusations made it seem like her attitude had shifted. The money offered by the Nicholses, the rudeness suffered from Joseph, all combined to drain her of any unseriousness she had left.
“Mom, you know it’s not like that anymore, we have a thing called privacy,” Jamie said, and I swelled as she came to my defense. “Just because Joseph grew up with less money than we did doesn’t mean he’s out to milk you for every dollar you have.”
“He didn’t grow up with less money than me,” my mother said, and the venom with which she said this confirmed my suspicions. “He needs to learn who he’s dealing with. I’m not a poor farmer anymore and he’s not pumping gas. I’m not going to be treated like shit in my own house.”
Jamie and I had never heard our mother use such language before against any person, never mind a member of the family.
“I don’t know what you saw in him,” she went on. “What kind of son-in-law can’t be happy for me for a change?”
“Shhhhh!” Jamie hissed. “Mom, come on now.”
“What a mistake.”
“Mom, come on.” Jamie’s voice was weaker this time.
“So what do you want me to do?” I said, in a quiet, and confident, and scared voice. “Dump him?”
We all sat there in terror of what we said that led us to this point. My mother did not respond, and for a terrible second I thought she was creating a dramatic pause to say “Yes!,” and then possibly even storm upstairs and declare Joseph no longer welcome in her house. But instead she faltered, and sat back down in her chair after having risen in anger during her argument. She took one of our unfinished glasses of wine and drained it, from about a third full, her eyes closed for the few seconds the drink was going down. Jamie and I were frozen there, in her thrall, as I suppose we had been all our lives and would continue to be until she was rejoined with our father.
“No, of course not,” my mother said. “Did you really think I meant that? You take me too seriously sometimes.”
* * *
Joseph was not sleeping when I arrived upstairs. I shuddered at the thought that he’d heard everything we said, standing silently on the balcony while I gave serious voice to leaving him behind. If he did, he made no acknowledgement of it.
“What’s up?” I asked him again. As always, this vague and intimate and somehow distant greeting failed to elicit a response.
“You know, I’m tired of covering for your ass whenever you decide you can’t handle something and walk out like a little baby,” I continued.
Joseph turned over. “Did you think I was just going to sit there for that?”
“Sit there for what?”
“Oh come on, don’t play that game with me.”
“You’re pissed that you couldn’t sell it when she’s dead,” I said. “Is that right?”
“Monica.”
“Did you ever think I might want this place?” I said. “Is that how it works? Now that you’re the man with a job you get to make all the money decisions? Is that how your dad runs his family?”
“Monica, shut the fuck up,” he said, and I shuddered as I recognized the horrible line I had crossed. I continued to feel defiant, but it was cut now with shame.
“You know, it actually isn’t about the money,” Joseph said. “It’s about the principle of the thing.”
“The principle of the thing?” My voice became wounded and tentative.
“Did you ever think I might actually like this place?” Joseph said.
“You’ve said about a hundred times that you don’t.” I felt the upper hand was mine again.
“Well, look, I won’t pretend I love it all the time,” he said. “But your mom invited me here—which no one else down here would do, let me tell you. I’m a part of the family now, and I don’t just want to sell out to a couple of snobs that I have nothing in common with.”
I was beginning to understand that I had, in fact, lost the upper hand permanently, and my face began to burn bright with shame.
“You know, I feel like everything I do, people think it’s about money,” he said. “Oooh, look at Joseph, he grew up poor so he’s just scrounging for a few bucks all the time. I can’t even think anything without someone pinning some stupid motive on me.”
“I didn’t pin some stupid motive on you—”
“Monica, please, I love you but that’s a total lie. You just did. Every little thing we do I have to worry that I’m making enough money to satisfy you that I’m not about to go panhandling to pay for our dinner, worrying that if I even bounce a fucking check you’ll think I’m some illiterate jerk who can’t handle himself.”
I tried to approach Joseph, but he turned himself around. “I’m tired. You woke me up.”
I sat there and did not disturb him for a few minutes. I felt awful about what I said, and in years past I might have shaken him awake, crying and begging for his forgiveness. But tonight, I tucked myself in beside him, and, as a small gesture of clemency, I wove my arm around his side and felt him hold it there—intentionally or in the mindlessness of sleep, I could not tell.
* * *
There was little sleep that night. A velodrome of thoughts lapped around in my head, shuffling and bumping against each other, but ultimately traveling in circles. There were vague notions where the details of the Nicholses offer and of Joseph’s resentful departure became blurred with the exaggeration of fancy, and there were awakenings in a cold sweat where I was divorced from Joseph and my mother had just sold the entire place to her friends, who made a terrible offer that she was forced to accept, and where Jamie hated me and was weeping.
I awoke before Joseph the next morning. Our arguments always tuckered him out, and it was not uncommon for me to wake up first after a bedtime fight. I would always wait for him, but this time, I broke from tradition and climbed out of bed.
Had to leave early, I texted him. Got a call from work and need to get back to city. I heard his phone buzz as these arrived, but he did not get up to acknowledge them. I was sure he would read more into my early departure. I almost took my phone back out and told him the real reason I needed to leave early, but it would only make things worse to go back and fix it.
My mother, who always rose earlier than me, had laid out a spread of toast and bagels on the dining room table. I stayed long enough for some benedictions. I told her that the Nicholses’ offer was fair and was certainly worth considering, and my mother admitted that she was probably going to take them up on it. Jamie was awake too, and hugged me as I was about to leave. Nobody mentioned our discussion from the previous evening. Neither of them acknowledged Joseph’s absence, and if they disbelieved my explanation about an early call from work, they did not show it. I hoped at least my mother, whose loud and impassioned fights with my father were family legends, might understand what I was doing, and not wrongly accuse me in front of Jamie of walking out on Joseph permanently in such a manner.
That morning, I did think of leaving Joseph, but not because of anything he did. It was a ten-minute walk to the train station, and I felt more disgusted with myself the further I went. In the past, when I made mistakes, I always clung to some redeeming aspect of myself—I was a good person, I generally tried to do good things—but here I found nothing to hold onto. There was no excuse for thinking I was doing Joseph a “favor” by marrying him, or for imagining that he owed me anything in return for my favor. No excuse for thinking he ought to be grateful for joining a “good” family. I was awful and irredeemable. I even wondered if, by staying with him, I was following these same vile impulses, worrying that on his own he would be worse off than with me.
I got on the train when it arrived, and for a second it felt like nothing had changed. But then I remembered my mother becoming for the first time in her life truly serious and wrathful, my sister Jamie taking my side and supporting me, my husband Joseph yelling that none of us understood him and where he came from. I thought of Joseph, and all the large and small things that had changed since I first introduced him to my mother here five years ago, and how I would need to find space for all of them.
© 2024 John Perilli All rights reserved.
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