What Remains by Carole Radziwill Read Free Book Online Page B

shift in what was expected of women. The idea of a career, a college education, was possible yet seemed just beyond her reach. She had a baby when she was eighteen, an age for trying things on, and four more before she started supposing a life for herself. She was caught between the pretty picture and this other thing that was yet to be defined.
    I think there was a point in the beginning when she was thrilled with this family she had made. When she loved the madcap drama of five babies, a handsome husband, a pretty new house in the suburbs. The paint peeled faster than she expected, of course.
    She was good with occasions. Our birthdays were filled with neighborhood kids and balloons and a Betty Crocker marble cake. We carved pumpkins every Halloween and picked from a chest full of costumes. On Easter we dressed up and drove into the city to Tante’s.
    At Christmas she put together an extravaganza of food and toys. There was an improbable number of presents under the tree, and there was food in the house for weeks. Neither of which we could afford, but reality was put on hold. The empty house filled up magically, with furniture in the living room and a life-size poster of Santa Claus tacked to the wall. There was a big fir tree, borrowed chairs, stackable plastic tables draped with red-and-green tablecloths. Boxwood garland hung from the ceiling and wrapped around the banister; a wreath went up in the hallway. Cars crowded our driveway by noon on Christmas. My father started cooking on Christmas Eve and finished Christmas night. There were giant aluminum trays of baked ziti, calamari, and eggplant parmigiana. Food appeared like the miracle of the loaves. The sensation lasted through New Year’s, until all the food was eaten and all the needles were off the tree. We were characteristically late in taking everything down.
    Then, however, there was the rest of the year to get through.
    I was seven when my dad bought a restaurant in Yonkers and called it DiFalcos. It was on Kimball Avenue, three blocks up from Yonkers Raceway. It was a family restaurant, where you could get a chicken parm with a side of spaghetti for $2.50, cheese lasagna for $2.25, and free refills on soda. My mother waitressed here at night and on weekends. Sometimes on Sundays I would go with her to help. She would let me carry the baskets of bread to the tables, clear the dishes, fill up sodas. They struggled to keep the restaurant open and never seemed to save a dime, no matter how hard they worked. There was a flush of optimism one year when they bought a brown-velvet love seat, fancy teak bookshelves, and a brass tea cart with wheels. But DiFalcos didn’t survive, and then there were years of unpaid bills, foreclosure notices, and food stamps. My father took a job at Stella’s Deli. He moved easily within his space, wherever his space happened to be, like a man who had planned it all.
    My mother was different. She wasn’t like the other mothers on the block, exchanging casserole recipes and sewing patterns. Like all little girls, I watched my mother carefully. If she had been the sort to bake cookies or play bridge, I am certain that I would have played bridge, too. But she wasn’t.
    My mother wore short skirts with go-go boots, which were the style then. She was a pretty mother. She had Boswell’s Life of Johnson and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and they were both marked up in the margins. She was a smart mother. She was inconsolable when my father took the car to work one Saturday and she missed the Sears white sale. She was a sad mother. She screamed, furious, if towels were not washed, when the toilet paper ran out. She was a mad mother. I can’t find an adjective to hang onto.
    My mother had no language yet to describe what she was feeling in 1973. For a year she drove white-knuckled over the Tappan Zee Bridge to the restaurant, willing herself not to drive off. Then at twenty-seven, with five children, she started her retreat.