Very Valentine

“Do you think we’re going to be okay?” I stand up.

“I don’t know yet, Valentine. There’s still a lot of information to gather. The more I dig, the more I believe you should think about selling the building.”

“Oh, so you didn’t come for the chestnuts, you came here to nail up a For Sale sign,” I tell him.

“Val, you’re not helping,” Alfred says.

“And you are?” I shoot back.

Gram moves the chestnuts around with her spatula. “Bring the brokers through, Alfred,” she says quietly.

“Gram…,” I protest but she cuts me off.

“We have to, Valentine. And we’re going to.” Her tone tells me the subject is closed. Alfred takes a chestnut from the tray Tess holds, cracks the shell, and eats it. I look at Tess, who looks at me. Then Tess says, “Just don’t forget Valentine, Gram. She’s the future of the shoe company.”

“I think of my grandchildren first.” She takes the tray from Tess. “All of you.”

5. Forest Hills

THERE ISN’T A SOUL on the E train as Gram and I board at the Eighth Street station to go out to Queens. It’s a quiet Sunday morning, but the evidence of a wild Saturday night is visible as we skirt empty liquor bottles and soda cans. As we push through the turnstile, the subway platform is filled with the pungent scent of motor oil and Dunkin’ Donuts. I’ve never understood how the doughnut smell can waft down from street level but the fresh air can’t.

A train pulls into the station, its dull gray doors open wide, and I quickly step in and scan the car to make sure it’s a good one. A good car has no abandoned food on the seats, odd riders, or mysterious moisture on the floor. Gram chooses two seats in the corner and I sit down next to her. As the train lurches out of the station, Gram pulls the Metro section of the New York Times out of her purse and begins to read.

“You know this is a setup,” I tell her. “We’re going for Sunday brunch, but there’s something else brewing. I’m very intuitive about these things.”

“Aren’t we going to see the pictures from Jaclyn’s wedding and watch the video?”

“That’s only part of the agenda.”

Gram folds the newspaper into a square. “Well, what do you think they’re up to?”

“Hard to say. What do you think?”

I attempt to be direct with Gram, who is known to keep important details to herself, only to drop the bomb when there’s a room full of relatives. When she doesn’t answer me, I try another tack. “Alfred called. What did he want?”

“He had a question about quarterly taxes. That’s all.”

“I figured he already sold the building and the Moishe brothers were on their way to pack us up.”

She sets the paper down on her lap. “You know, Valentine, I’m just trying to do the right thing for my family.”

I’d like to tell Gram that this time the right thing for her family is the wrong thing for the two of us. I’ve met with a real estate agent in the village, and there’s simply no place to move the Angelini Shoe Company that we can possibly afford in the vicinity of Perry Street. The real estate agent found an empty loft space way out in Brooklyn, in an industrial area surrounded by auto-repair shops, a steel factory, and a lumberyard. The thought of moving our shop away from the Hudson River and the energy of Greenwich Village made me so sad, I never even went to look at the space.

“You understand why I’m on edge.” I look out the window.

“Nothing has happened yet.”

I nod. This is vintage Gram, and the very attitude that got us into trouble in the first place. And, I’m afraid I’m just like her. Denial provides temporary comfort, cushioned with hope and bound by luck, it’s a neutral, an emotional state that goes with everything. Years may pass as we wait for the other shoe to drop, and in the meantime? Well, we’re fine. We wait in hope. Denial does no damage until the last minute, when it’s too late to salvage a situation. “I’m sorry. I’m just nervous, that’s all,” I tell her.

As the train pulls into the Forest Hills station, I help Gram stand. Her grip is strong, but her knees are unreliable, and lately, they’re getting worse. It takes her longer to climb the stairs at night, and she’s all but stopped her walks in the Village. I cut an article out of the New York Times about knee replacement and left it by her morning coffee, but when Gram read that there’s a six-week recuperation period, it killed any possibility that she’d actually go in for the surgery. “My knees are good enough,” she insisted. “They got me this far, they can get me to the finish line.” Then she dropped the article into the recycling bin.

We take the escalator up to the street. I don’t know what we would have done if she had to climb the stairs. I might’ve had to throw her on my back like the shepherd carrying the sheep in our Christmas crèche.

We emerge on the sidewalk facing Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church where I attended mass every Sunday until I went to college. Gram takes my arm as we walk the two blocks to my family homestead.

“You know, sometimes I can’t believe I grew up here,” I say as I take in the old neighborhood.

“When your mother told me that she was moving to Forest Hills after she got married, I almost died. She said, ‘Ma, the fresh air.’ Now, I’m asking you-is this air any better than our air in Manhattan?”

“Don’t forget her pride and joy-her garden and her very own attached garage.”

“That was your mother’s highest aspiration. To park her car where she lived.” Gram shakes her head sadly. “Where did I go wrong?”

“She’s a good mother, Gram, and a fine member of the Forest Hills bourgeoisie.” I take Gram’s arm as we cross the street. “Did she ever rebel?”

“I wish!” barks Gram. “I hoped she’d become a hippie like all the other kids her age. At least that showed some moxie. I told your mother that every generation should take their culture by the collar and shake it. But the only thing your mother wanted to shake were martinis. To tell you the truth, I don’t know where she came from.”

I know what Gram means. I used to pray for a feminist mother. My friend Cami O’Casey’s mother, Beth, was a lean broomstick of a woman, with gray hair at thirty-six, who wore Jesus sandals and pounded her own oatmeal. She worked in a government agency in Harlem and wore cool buttons that said things like KILL YOUR TV SET and I LOVE YOU WITH ALL MY KIDNEY. Instead, I got Hollywood “Mike,” with her wiglets and her tackle box full of makeup and that damned dressing room mirror surrounded by Greta Garbo lightbulbs. Cami’s mother marched for peace while my mom sat around and waited for fishnet hose to come back in style.

To this day, my mother holds up current fashion trends like barbells. She knows when to shelve lime green because purple is the color of the moment. When big hair was huge in the eighties, Mom went for perms. She’d come home kinked, frizzed, and puffy, and when the curls weren’t big enough, she’d throw her head upside down and spray her hair from the roots out until it stood away from her scalp like the rays over the head of Jesus on the Holy Sacrament tabernacle. Sometimes her hair was so big we worried that she might not fit into the car.

I prayed a novena in 1984 so my mother wouldn’t get emphysema from all the hairspray she used. I did a science project on the devastation caused by aluminum chlorofluorocarbons, the powdery stuff in aerosol cans, especially Aqua Net. I showed my mother scientific proof that her beauty regimen could actually kill her. She just patted me on the head and called me “My little Ralph Nader.”

When I wasn’t praying to God to spare her life, I prayed my father wouldn’t get asthma or worse from the secondhand hairspray inhalation. I imagined the entire family dead from the fumes and the police finding us on the floor like a clump of Lincoln logs. When I told my mother my deepest fear, she said, “But when the authorities find us, I bet my hair looks good.”