Slightly Suburban. Wendy Markham
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I ask. “What don’t you know?”
“Just…why do you want to leave the city?”
“I’m sick of it. It’s crowded and noisy and expensive and stressful and dangerous and it smells and we’re surrounded by strangers, some of whom are circus freaks and pickpockets and perverts. I can’t take it anymore. I want to live in a small town.”
“You grew up in a small town.”
“I know, but—”
“You left your small town the second you were out of college and moved five hundred miles to New York because you didn’t want to live in a small town. Remember?”
Of course I do, but he doesn’t. I didn’t even meet him until I’d been in New York a few years. I hate when he uses my past against me like this.
Okay, he’s never really done it before. But he’s doing it now, and I think I hate it.
“So are you saying you want to go back?” he asks.
“To Brookside? God, no!”
“Good. Because I don’t think I can live there. Nothing against your family.”
“I know I can’t live there. Everything against my family.”
Don’t get me wrong—I love my family. Do the Spadolinis have their little quirks and oddities? Absolutely. Like, as much as they resent stereotypes about Sicilians and organized crime, they do have a hush-hush sausage connection (my family pronounces it zau-zage, and I’ve never been sure why).
What the heck is a sausage connection, you may ask? Or you may know already, though unless you’re Spadolini compare, I doubt it.
See, my brother Danny knows this guy, Lou, who furtively sells homemade zau-zage out of the trunk of his car and let me tell you, it’s the best damn zau-zage you’ll ever taste, see?
It’s even better than Uncle Cosmo’s homemade zau-zage, which has too much fennel in it, see. When one of my nephews once told him that, he inadvertently started what is now referred to in Spadolini lore as the Great Zau-Zage Wars of Aught-Six.
So, yeah. We have our quirks and oddities, just like any other family.
Well, Jack’s family doesn’t exactly have quirks and oddities, per se. The Candells may have an organic-produce connection, but their (probably organic) family tree is barren of colorful relatives like Snooky and Fat Naso and Uncle Cosmo of the Homemade Zau-zage and Spastic Colon—who will tell you, usually over a nice zau-zage sandwich, that one has nothing to do with the other, but I’m not so sure.
Oh, and the Candells don’t discuss bowel function—or malfunction—around the Sunday-dinner table, either. In fact, they rarely even gather around the dinner table on Sundays or any other non holidays in the first place. When they do, it’s usually for takeout. Usually chicken. Not KFC, though. The Candells don’t go for battered, deep-fried food.
My family would batter and fry lettuce—iceburg, of course. They privately refer to the Candells as a bunch of health nuts, and they don’t mean that as a compliment. When my brother Frankie Junior found out at our wedding that Jack’s sister Rachel is a vegan, he practically shook her by the shoulders and screamed, “What the hell’s the matter with you? For the love of God, eat a cheeseburger, woman!”
So, while I do love my family, I do not want to live anywhere near them or, for that matter, in the bleak and notorious blizzard belt of southwestern New York State.
You’ve probably heard about the prairie blizzards of yore, and the historic Buffalo blizzards fifty miles north of my hometown. Let me tell you, that doesn’t compare to what we get in Brookside every year once the Lake-effect snow machine kicks into gear—and it lasts for months on end. Our Columbus Day and Memorial Day family picnics have both been snowed out more than once.
A few Christmases ago, my brother Joey parked his van on my parents’ side yard and when Lake-effect snow started falling, it quickly became mired. He had to leave it there overnight. Well, the snow kept falling, foot after foot after foot, and by the next afternoon, the van was completely buried. I’m talking buried—no one knew the exact spot where he had parked it, so it couldn’t even be dug out. Joey had to rent a car until well after Martin Luther King Day, when the roof emerged after a fleeting thaw.
So, long story that could go on and on—no, I don’t want to live in Brookside.
But I don’t want to live in Manhattan, either.
“I want to live someplace where the sun shines and we can have a house, and a garden—” I see Jack cast a dubious glance at the barely alive philodendron on the windowsill “—and trees,” I go on, “and a driveway—”
“We don’t have a car.”
“We’ll get one. Wouldn’t it be great to have a car, Jack? We’d be so free.” It’s funny how basic things you took for granted most of your life—like cars, or greenery, or walls, ceilings, and floors without strangers lurking on the other side—can seem luxurious when you haven’t had them for a while.
“I don’t know,” Jack says again.
“Come on, Jack.”
“But…I get allergic smelling hay!” he quips in his best Zsa Zsa Gabor as Lisa Douglas imitation, which, I have to say, isn’t all that great.
“There’s no hay. I’m not talking about the country. Just the suburbs. It’s time for a change.”
“I’m not crazy about change.”
“Change is good, Jack.”
“Not all change.”
“Well, whatever, change is inevitable. We might as well embrace it, right?”
Jack doesn’t seem particularly eager to embrace it—or me, for that matter. He’s starting to look pissed off. He aims the remote at the CD player and raises the volume a little.
“I just feel like we’re stagnating here,” I tell him, above Alicia Keys’s soulful singing. “We can’t go on like this. We need a change. I desperately need a change, Jack.”
I should probably drop the subject.
But I’ve never been very good at that—not one of my more lovable qualities, but I can’t seem to help myself.
“I really think we’re missing out on a lot, living here,” I tell Jack.
“Missing out? How can you say that? This is the greatest city in the world. It’s filled with great restaurants and museums, and there’s Broadway, and—”
“When was the last time we took advantage of any of it?”
“I took advantage of it just last night,” he points out, and immediately has the grace to look apologetic and add, “It wasn’t that much fun without you.”
“Well, I feel like all we ever do is go to work and come home, and on the weekends, we scrounge around for quarters and hope we can find an empty washer in the laundry room. Wouldn’t it be great to have our own washer? We could leave stuff in it if we didn’t feel like taking it out the second it stops. We wouldn’t have to worry about strangers coming along and touching our wet underwear.”
“I don’t worry about that.”
“Well, I do,” I say, shuddering at the memory of walking in on the creepy guy from 9C fondling my Hanes Her Way. “Seriously, Jack. I want a washer. In a laundry room. In a house…”
“That Jack built.”
“No! You don’t have to build it,” I assure him, and he laughs.
“No, it’s Mother Goose,” he says, and I’m relieved that he seems a lot less pissed off. “Didn’t you ever hear that nursery rhyme? This is the cat that killed the rat that lived in the house that Jack built. Or something