The Sicilian
“She thinks he represents security. She thinks he might change and be kind to her. She pities him; that enslaves her.” – Elizabeth Harrower
Retrieving my clog, I picked up my bag and left. There was a bus to New York City that stopped across the street. I would be home in a few hours. My friend Palmer had invited me to her parents’ house in the Adirondacks. This would be better than sitting in my tiny house wondering why I had refused to go to Tortola. Palmer had a friend, an actress friend, who also came. She sat in the back seat and talked about auditioning. When she stopped, I talked about Catherine.
I told Palmer about the couple who came to Beckman's house expecting dinner and instead were told my sister was dead. Laughter came from the back seat. I turned around. The actress was giggling. “I'm sorry, but you're so intense. Seriously, I can’t handle how intense you are."
I had this sudden urge to punch her or open the back door of the car and push her out onto the highway. The isolation of tragedy was terrible. No one cared or understood except the rest of my family, and no one in my family would speak of Catherine or the accident or how they were coping. The only person I felt remotely close with was my nephew Henry, and this was because we played hide-and-seek, both of us searching for my sister. I knew this wasn't healthy or sane, but then I also knew taking multiple hits of acid in one day was a bad idea, and I still did it.
"She doesn't understand," Palmer patted my knee. The actress had fallen asleep.
"I hope someone she loves dies suddenly, and then someone laughs at her."
Palmer nodded.
"Do you think I'm insane?"
"Maybe a little. Which is understandable."
"I threw a clog at the linen guy."
"Did you hit him?"
"Yes."
"Why did you do that?"
"My mother served him tea on fancy china. He wanted to take me to Tortola."
"What's that?"
"Some island. My father hated him."
"Hasn't he hated all your boyfriends?"
"We're finished. Anyway, I think he's married."
photo by Jordan Finnerty
The Adirondacks were gorgeous, with rolling mountains, tall whispering pine trees, and lakes with water that felt like velvet, cold velvet, on your skin. Each morning, I went swimming and lay on the dock, soaking up the sun. Physical happiness was a problem in the months following Catherine's death. I finally returned to an aerobics class and found myself moving again, feeling the strength and stretch of my muscles, breathing hard, and then suddenly remembering her, the bruised hands, her broken body.
I stopped breathing and left the gym, my heart a rock in my chest. The grief was my connection to her, and if I no longer felt the grief, I would lose her forever. I had played soccer in high school and was good, fast, and aggressive. Exercise had been like a drug for me. Even when I drank and took drugs, I ran and went to classes. It was the only way to silence the voice in my head that suggested I stand too close to the edge, stay underwater until my lungs soften, and take all the pills I had saved.
Finding a job became my new obsession. My resume gave no clues as to suitable employment. I could climb telephone poles, balance several plates on my wrist, and deal with bartenders. I knew a vast amount about the Irish Potato Famine. I was also a very convincing fox and could spin wool. My mother said I was helpful. My father said I was patient. My professors told me I was gifted. My ex-boyfriends would say I had made them miserable. I decided to apply to be an assistant buyer again but to aim lower than the trendy Macy’s.
Abraham and Strauss hired nearly everyone. A&S was located on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn and had fallen on hard times despite its claim to be a "flagship" store. I was hired after several interviews, during which I spoke of merchandising with a passion reserved for acting. I was hired as an intern and assigned to the cosmetic buyer — an irony since I rarely, if ever, wore any makeup, and when I did, I applied it with a shovel.
My commute from Hoboken was long and frequently made longer by my habit of passing out or fainting while sitting on various subways or crossing the terminal in the World Trade Center. The combination of little food with many anti-anxiety, depression, and insomnia medications and what would turn out to be severe anemia produced impressive, seamless back outs. One morning, I woke up in the far corner of the World Trade Center with my belongings neatly piled next to me, a note that said, “You were in the middle of the lobby, so I dragged you here. Please see a doctor."
The cosmetic department was in the back of the first floor, behind the cosmetic floor, where tall women dressed in black stalked customers with perfume and makeup brushes, offering to transform them into sweet-smelling beauties. The eighties were a popular time for “gift with purchase.” You’d buy Estée Lauder eyeliner and get a box of three hundred eye shadows, an umbrella, or cologne. The cosmetics buyer was a diminutive tyrant named Rochelle who came from Lodi, New Jersey and thought I was an idiot.
The first time we met, she glared at me and said, “Put on some makeup! You represent the cosmetics department, and it looks like you just fell out of bed!”
Well, I had just fallen out of bed, and I didn't have much makeup. Rochelle threw one of the hundreds of sample kits at me, and that was that. My officemate was Debbie, a blonde, exceedingly dim bulb who worshipped Madonna. She dressed like the eighties Madonna in fingerless gloves and layers of underwear, had her hair bleached like Madonna, wore black eyeliner like Madonna, and constantly sang Like a Virgin. Debbie’s appearance was acceptable, while my depressed hippie look was not. Debbie had a boyfriend named Ben, whom she called “Benji” in a squeaky little girl voice. Not surprisingly, when Rochelle was ready to choose an assistant, she chose Debbie. I was not terribly upset. My final days among the makeup had passed with violent fantasies of slapping Rochelle across her very made up face. The head of HR told me I would be asked to do something meaningful instead: hire temporary help for Christmas.
“You were a history major at Rutgers, right?” He asked as if this had any bearing on my ability to choose people to run cash registers, wrap gifts, and generally be an asset to A&S during the Christmas rush.
"Yes. Also, I was an actress. And I can climb telephone poles.”
He nodded. "Well, the acting might help with the interviewing," he said.
The next day, I reported to the deserted tenth floor, where a temporary office had been set up with two cubicles and a huge waiting room. I put my coat on one of the desks and returned to the waiting area. A man came out of the other office. He was very tall and thin and was wearing an old-fashioned suit. His hair was impressively curly and long. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and seemed completely out of place. I felt an instant kinship sealed when he grabbed me and said, "Thank God, I was so afraid you'd be one of those zombie gals with huge shoulders and hair! I'm Sean. Let's go smoke!"
Sean was so overqualified for life that he struck me as practically unemployable. He had an undergraduate degree from Stanford and a PhD in theology from Yale. I'm not sure how he ended up with me in a bad part of Brooklyn in a floundering department store, but I was grateful to have someone to talk to who didn't order me to wear lip gloss and scrunch up her nose when I used a word longer than three syllables.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked him after we smoked our cigarette.
Sean sighed. "I don't interview well," he said. "I lost my job as a social worker and six friends to AIDS. You?"
"My sister was killed by a drunk driver, and I'm clinically depressed."
He smiled. "Let's go have some fun. We deserve it."
Although we were only gone for ten minutes, all the chairs in the waiting room were filled. The potential Christmas workers ranged from men with tattoos wearing muscle tees, punk rockers, the homeless, out of work prostitutes, artists who were failing at their arts, and many recently released prisoners. I had never seen less employable people. Sean looked at me and winked. He understood as I did that A&S had made a big mistake asking a deeply depressed would be ex-actress and an out of work social worker to choose who would staff their Christmas season.
We hired them all. As long as they had an ID and could fill out the application, and they were nice, we gave them a job. After six days, all the positions were filled. I heard stories of dead children, lost dreams, foreclosed houses, false imprisonment, and domestic violence. Every single candidate had suffered through extreme heartache. I felt their sadness, and my sadness was somewhat alleviated by giving them a minimum wage job with no chance of anything permanent. They would get a discount and a half hour for lunch.
At first, desperation was a great motivator, and our choices were perfect workers, on time, pleasant, and willing to do almost anything. But this didn't last. My final memory of Christmas in 1983 was witnessing our Christmas hires tossing merchandise down from the store's windows to their relatives and friends waiting on the street. I wondered if I was guilty of anything, but then I recalled the spirit of Christmas, which was to help the poor. In 1983, no one was helping the unfortunate. If you were suffering, it was your own fault. I hoped the lady living in the battered women's shelter had managed to toss down the dollhouse she wanted for her youngest child. As I was getting ready to leave, a middle-aged black woman I had hired for housewares came up to me and put out her hand. "I want to thank you for giving me a chance. They offered me something permanent, and now I can afford a Christmas tree for my kids."
I wanted to hug her, but she was very dignified. "That's such good news, Margaret," I said.
"Can I ask you something, honey?"
"Sure."
"Why are you so sad?" She lightly touched my shoulder.
"I'm fine," I said.
"I know sad when I see it," she said. "What happened?"
"My sister died, and I'm not handling it well."
"Can I pray for you?"
"Of course," I said.
She left, and I felt better. I had helped someone instead of always needing help.
Sean was fired, and I was transferred to personal stereos, where I worked for a man whose last name was Sugar, who exuded stress, starting each morning with several lines of cocaine and many cups of coffee. I craved order. Although it might seem counterintuitive to view the hyper tyranny of a small electronics buyer as orderly, well, at least I now had an actual job title. And I needed to support myself. Despite my mother's offer of money, there were too many strings and chains, in fact, attached to their help. Rent, food, utilities, gas and other things required an income. I allowed my parents to pay for therapy, as it was their fault I was crazy. I had seen five separate psychiatrists who were fascinated by my family stories but seemed indifferent to my alcoholism. They presented me with new drugs and the suggestion I commit myself. After surviving Christmas at Abraham and Strauss, I started experiencing panic attacks that were blinding in their intensity. They came without warning, usually in public. I had one after waiting for nearly twenty minutes on a bank line. The teller smiled, and I couldn't speak because I wasn't breathing, and my vision had narrowed to a teeny, tiny chink.
One afternoon, I was stopped while driving by a Hoboken policeman. He looked at my license and said, "Are you related to that woman killed last February?"
"I'm her sister."
"I was there that night. The guy was so drunk he didn't know what he did."
"He killed her. He took Henry's mother away."
"She had a kid?"
"He was three."
"Jesus Christ! Listen, I got that son of a bitch's address. I can give it to you."
I was gripping the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles were white. But this was not what I wanted. Nothing would bring her back. At the trial, it was revealed he had lost his job that morning and had been drinking all day. He received ninety days of community service since it was a first offense. But what would I do if I went to his house? Break the windows? Kill him? Burn his house down?
"That's okay."
"Suit yourself. Slow down, Mary Ellen."
I parked my car and started to choke. Catherine had been hit a few blocks from my house, and each time I was close to that place, my ears started ringing, and I couldn't breathe. Now it felt like something heavy was pressing down on my chest. I had tunnel vision, and my pulse was so fast I could see it in my wrist. I got out of the car and staggered onto a bench, my head between my knees. People would think I was drunk, I thought, but I wasn't. I was crazy. Several weeks later, on line again in the bank to cash a check, it happened with the same teller. I hadn't been included in the trial. Apparently, my mother had shown all of my sister's baby pictures to the judge. Catherine used to cut herself out of photographs when she was older. We were suing the bar since the driver of the car was so overserved. There was no life insurance since she was only thirty-two and healthy.
I associated a job, any job, with sanity. It didn't matter if I hated what I did or was bored or overqualified. I wanted someone to tell me what to do. I was trained to become Steve Sugar's assistant by his soon-to-be former assistant, possibly the most neurotic, angry woman I had ever met. Her persona was an eighties career woman on steroids with her power suit and pumps that hurt to look at. This costume was completely unnecessary as we were hidden in the mysterious back room of the electronics floor in a tiny, windowless office with stereo components piled high. We could have worked in our pajamas or bikinis for all the public could see of us.
Kaitlyn was younger than me but seemed old, maybe because she was so jaded. Despite the power suit, the vendors, salespeople, and customers harassed her constantly. Her beauty was unsuccessfully masked by a severe bun and businesslike makeup. By the end of the day, wisps of brunette hair had escaped curling around her face, her makeup was smeared, and she looked like an exhausted teenager. Her way of coping with sexist remarks was disturbing, to say the least. If a vendor muttered something about a "nice rack," Kaitlyn would shove her breasts into the guy's personal space and say something like, “Go ahead, grab 'em." Maybe I would have become that woman if I'd stayed at the telephone company longer. She was on her way up and out with a buying job in a suburban store on Long Island.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, my boss was receiving components from Crazy Eddie and storing them in a Secaucus warehouse until they had cleared the manifest. These components were sold to various retail stores at a discount, and Sugar pocketed the profit. I blithely signed everything Mr. Sugar put in front of me. Like my dad said, I was obedient when I wasn't running away. I was so thrilled by my unexpected understanding of the gross margin; I accepted his explanations about where the speakers were being sent and why so many Fisher components were missing from the inventory. Things never added up in my experience. In ten years, my checkbook balance had never balanced. I assumed someone would eventually realize they'd hired an idiot and fire me. Instead, Sugar disappeared, the FBI raided our office, and decided I was too naïve to implicate in the crimes committed by Crazy Eddie and my ex-boss.
Walking outside of the store onto Fulton Street, you were greeted by the Nation of Islam members selling their newspapers but avoiding you since you were a white devil woman, people asking for money, and vendors selling everything from stuffed animals to heroin. The designers of Fulton Street tried to create a lively pedestrian shopping area, but the glory days of Abraham & Strauss had clearly passed. The neighborhood was going down fast. I had been warned not to stray far from the security guards at the store's entrance, and while I really wanted to escape the stale air and sad merchandise behind me, the urban landscape beyond was close to terrifying.
As a kid, it had always irked me that neither of my parents seemed to go to an office. The few sit-coms I'd watched featured men going to offices carrying briefcases and people having meetings, sitting around important looking tables discussing stuff or arguing or sending out for lunch. To me, that life looked magical with lots of office supplies like paper clips, staplers, and whiteout. Our next door neighbors lived in the fancy house and had that sort of father. He caught a bus to New York at dawn, returning for a late dinner. The two boys were fed, and cocktails and opera music were served on the lawn in the warmer weather.
My father didn't have that sort of work life. On most days, he went to Rutgers, but his classes started later, and he didn't have a briefcase; he used a boat bag full of books and papers. My mother worked out of the house, and my parents were always having breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, frequently in the company of our cleaning lady, who gave up her sandwiches to eat salads with my parents.
I hoped meetings would be exciting and productive, although they were rarely exciting and often counterproductive. At the phone company, senior executives conducted company meetings, usually on the topic of a new phone thingamajig. We sat in uncomfortable chairs and listened, trying to match the handout with what was shown on the overhead. I had one triumphant moment when I had spent nearly an hour trying to read a graph until I raised my hand to ask the presenter why everything looked different. It was revealed the slide was upside down, and all the nodding and uh huhing being done by my colleagues was a fraud. Also, these meetings were fraught as I was the only woman and had to pretend the jokes, invariably degrading and gross, were funny.
While I could appreciate how work was often depicted in literature, Bartleby, Dickens' miserable clerks, and movies made during the fifties featuring unhappy men in their drab uniform of suits and ties, I thought these drones might be better parents. Their work lives would possibly offer so little happiness that they would shower their children with affection and Christmas presents. Unlike my parents, they would not return to their work, my mother to her drafting table, my father to his reading, as soon as the news was over. Neither of them had ever asked me whether I had homework or if I liked my teachers. Still, my stint as an assistant buyer in major electronics cured me of this delusion. Work sucked.
And then I saw him, skinny, dead white skin, all black clothes, an air of hopeless anger, my penchant for bad boyfriends came rushing back. He wore a black leather Ramones jacket and smoked unfiltered cigarettes. He looked as unhappy and lost as I felt. It wasn't love at first sight. It was never love. If I wasn't going to commit suicide, I might as well have another dysfunctional, doomed relationship. I had no idea how terrible things would become or how he would prove to be the thing that pulled the phoenix from the ashes, allowing me to rise and live. I made sure he was violent and miserable and capable of hurting me. I wanted to be hurt.
Kaitlyn and I were standing by the entrance. She was scowling at the homeless while I inhaled non-store air and tried to avoid a Rastafarian who wanted me to purchase some ganja. He was standing by the man who occasionally screamed that the world was about to end, smoking a cigarette, his black clothes a perfect contrast to his pallor.
"Freak," Kaitlyn muttered, looking at him.
"What's his deal?" I asked, trying to sound uninterested.
"He's some sort of wannabe punk rocker. His daddy knows the district manager. Some sort of Mafioso. Totally gnarly."
"Why?"
"The Mudd Club? CBGBs? The Ramones? I mean, who cares? He's a fucking seventies wannabe."
Kaitlyn had her eyes on the prize, which in the early eighties was a red tie wearing, Reagan voting Republican who liked a little cocaine on the weekend and was due a huge bonus.
"Who does he work for?"
She made a face. "Seriously?"
I nodded. I used to drink at the Mudd Club and was an occasional patron of CBGBs, mostly to see bands with friends in them. I had also seen the Ramones there and liked their manic energy, wit, and dissonance.
"He's the assistant in small electronics. He works in the cubicle right next to yours."
He stubbed out his cigarette and looked at us. His eyes were dark and circled with purple. I wondered whether he was a junkie. It wouldn't matter. I smiled and waved. He looked surprised and slowly raised his hand like someone telling an oncoming car to stop. Or a robot.
"Where does he live?"
Kaitlyn ground out her cigarette with the heel of her stiletto. "Fuck if I know. In a crypt by the look of him."
And so the campaign began. I found reasons to knock on his door and request things: tape, pens, and matches. The last request was accompanied by an invitation to smoke a cigarette. We ducked out the side door and stood in the foggy spring morning.
"So," he exhaled. "Where are you from?"
"Princeton. But I live in Hoboken now."
"Princeton? Pretty ritzy, right?"
"Boring. Are you from Brooklyn?"
"Long Island. But my old man owns buildings in Sheepshead Bay. I live in one of his buildings."
I nodded. Contact had been made. I had no idea where Sheepshead Bay was, but I would find out. The mission was to captivate, seduce and then, I didn't know. I was bored and alone and he seemed like good boyfriend material. His lack of pedigree would annoy my parents, and his air of mysterious pain was irresistible. One might point out that my tolerance for pain had been severely tested, and possibly, I would do well to avoid this particular type of mayhem. But I was restless, not drinking still, but ingesting too many psychotropic drugs to label myself sober. I hadn't been to an AA meeting in over a year. The longing to drink had faded somewhat, but in the back of my mind, there was a secret room, a bit like Bluebeard's chamber of murdered wives, full of glowing bottles. I had promised Catherine to stay sober; I had promised a dying woman I loved more than anyone, and yet I knew that promise was eventually going to be broken. And the Sicilian, for that was his ethnic identity, would help me renew my membership in hell.
First, there was pursuit. In high school, when my best friend and I went on our college tour, I was famous for my technique of picking up men, two men, because she was far too shy and insecure to try. What I had discovered about most men and boys was their massive insecurity and fear of women. All women. Old women, beautiful women, plain women, intelligent women, it didn't matter, they were afraid. Once I discovered this fact, I perfected the two minute seduction. I asked for something (the time, a light, space on the couch), and then I said something flattering (you smell good, wow, I love your shirt, you have beautiful hands), and they would be putty in my hands. Catherine called me the "man magnet."
For some reason, I decided to bag the gloomy Sicilian. I started dressing with more attention, brushing my hair, and even adding makeup. I tried to sit next to him during our electronics meetings, where we were shown PowerPoints covered in graphs explaining sales and loss and customer relations. During these meetings, I passed him notes modeled on fortune cookies with meaningless statements like, "You will be surprised by something," "Life is a bowl of blueberries," and "What did you eat for breakfast?"
They were idiotic, but they got his attention. When he turned around to look at me, I would meet his eyes, look away, glance back, and smile. And then he rolled his sleeve up, and I saw the tattoo. In the eighties, only pirates and prostitutes had tattoos. This would drive my mother crazy. I was thrilled.
One Friday he wasn't at work and his boss, a skinny, sad looking man said he had food poisoning.
"He's pretty sick," his boss looked harassed. "Clams, I think."
"Can I have his address? I'll send him a card."
"Sure. "
I returned to Hoboken and bought a chicken, carrots, onions, and noodles. I made chicken soup and left it in the refrigerator to skim off the fat. On Saturday morning, I took the Path train to The World Trade Center and then switched to the D train. The soup was in a container on my lap, and people kept sniffing it since it smelled wonderful. After nearly two hours, at the last stop, I left the train, ascended a staircase, and was surrounded by grim, gray buildings, high-rises with shuttered windows, and empty streets. The Sicilian lived in a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood, and it was the Sabbath. The few people I passed were dressed to suggest they were ultra-Orthodox, so I kept my eyes on the ground.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach