Kitabı oku: «Slightly Suburban», sayfa 2
“Twenty-seven fifty-eight,” says the clerk.
I blink, look down at the counter and shove aside a big fruit basket that’s sitting there in shrink-wrap. “Oh, this isn’t mine,” I tell her.
“I know.”
Then why did you add it to my bill? And would it kill you to crack a smile?
Wait a minute. The fruit basket alone would have to be at least fifty bucks.
“How much was it?” I ask again, gesturing at my stuff, because I thought she said—
“Twenty-seven fifty-eight.”
Jeez. Can this measly little pile of groceries possibly cost that much?
Yes, it can, and Unsmiling Cashier is waiting for her money.
I open my wallet again, wondering why I’m surprised. I mean, after all these years of living in Manhattan, I know things are superexpensive. Yet every so often, I still find myself caught off guard at cash registers.
All that’s left in my wallet are two ones and a wad of receipts.
With a sigh, I pull out my American Express card. As Unsmiling Cashier runs it through the machine, a quick mental calculation tells me that in my hometown, this would run me ten bucks, maybe twelve. Tops.
Back out in the monsoon, I make my way to the doorman building that seemed like such a luxury when I first moved here from my dumpy little studio in the East Village.
As luck would have it, Jimmy, my favorite doorman—who actually flew up to Brookside for our wedding a few years ago—isn’t on duty tonight. He always cheers me up.
Unlike Gecko. He’s on duty tonight and always has the opposite effect. He’s the ultimate pessimist. I swear, you could win the lottery and he’d immediately list every past lottery winner who ever went on to get divorced, go bankrupt or commit suicide. He’s just that kind of guy.
“What a crappy night, huh?” he comments as he opens the door and I blow in on a gust of frozen precipitation.
“Yes,” I say.
“I mean literally.”
Uh-oh.
I know what he means by that.
“The M.C. has struck again,” Gecko informs me.
“Where?” I hold my breath.
“Third floor.”
I sign in relief. That’s six floors away from ours.
The Mad Crapper has been terrorizing our building for over a month now. He never strikes in the same place at the same time, so he’s been impossible to catch. Some tenants want to band together and organize a twenty-four-hour surveillance team with mandatory participation.
I really hope it doesn’t come to that. Because really, the last thing I want to do after a long, exhausting day at work is lurk in a shadowy corridor waiting for some stealthy figure to come along, squat and deposit a steaming pile of fresh crap before my very eyes.
Anyway, who’s to say the Mad Crapper isn’t living right here among us?
Sharing much T.M.I. about the latest strike, Gecko follows me to the mailroom, where I retrieve a stack of bills and catalogs from our box, along with an envelope addressed to Resident.
Uh-oh. Is this from the Citizens Vigilante Group?
No, thank God.
Even better.
“Building’s being fumigated again on Monday,” Gecko informs me as I open the envelope and skim the super’s note telling me just that.
“Again? Why?”
“Roaches,” says the perennial bearer of bad news. “Seventh floor’s infested.”
Infested. Now there’s a word that can’t possibly have a positive connotation under any circumstances.
“Uh-oh,” I say, making a face.
“Uh-oh is right. They’re probably crawling around in your place, too. Keep an eye out when you turn on the light.”
“Believe me, I will.”
It’s not like I’ve never seen a roach. Just about every apartment in New York has them at some point or another. But I freak out every time one scuttles past.
Going back to the Crapper’s latest M.O.—the culprit apparently signed his most recent offering with a fecal flourish—Gecko follows me toward the elevator.
“Have a good night,” he calls after me as I step in.
“You, too.”
“I doubt that,” he replies dourly as the doors slide closed.
For once, I’m right there with him.
On our floor, I make my way to apartment 9K, the tiny Ikea-furnished one-bedroom where we’ve been living for—is it almost five years now?
Five years. No wonder.
After unlocking three dead bolts, I step inside and promptly crash into a chair.
Not because somebody left it practically in front of the door, but because that’s where it belongs. There’s just no other place to put it.
I drop my barbell—I mean, bag—on it.
Ah, relief.
Rubbing my aching shoulder with one hand I turn on a lamp with the other, and check to see if roaches are scurrying into the corners.
No. But they’re probably there, tucked away into the cracks, watching me.
Just to be sure none has invaded our space, I give the apartment a good once-over. That takes all of four or five seconds, because there’s not much to it. Two boxy rooms—living room and bedroom—plus a galley kitchenette and bathroom.
Maybe the place would seem more spacious if we got rid of some of this clutter, I think, trying to be optimistic.
Like what, though? Our toothbrushes? The television set?
A booming sound overhead makes me jump, until I remember that a family of circus freaks moved in upstairs last month.
Seeing them in the elevator, you’d think they were a perfectly respectable Upper East Side family of four: Dad in suit with briefcase, Mom in yoga pants pushing designer stroller, one older kid who’s invariably plugged into something handheld with earphones, one younger kid placidly rolling along in said designer stroller.
The second they get home sweet home, though? Sideshow, full swing. Our ceiling shakes so violently you’d swear there are elephants, giants and fat ladies stomping around up there. Jo-Jo-the-dog-faced-boy scampers to and fro in an endless game of fetch, and there must be at least a couple of klutzy Wallendas who regularly fall off their trapeze onto the uncarpeted floor.
I’m betting a full-time live-in decorator is there as well, because furniture is rearranged as regularly as most of us pee. And I think there’s a resident carpenter, too—that, or a serial killer, because I hear what sounds like a hammer and a buzz saw at all hours. (Jack claims it’s just high heels and a blow-dryer, but he has a high noise tolerance. I could be standing right over him, talking to him, and he doesn’t hear me. I swear, it happens all the time.)
Oh, and I don’t know what happens to Older Kids’ ubiquitous earphones when he crosses the threshold of his bedroom—which has to be right above ours—but he’s not using them there. Our room vibrates day and night with the audio from his television and iPod speakers and arcadelike video-game system.
Valentine’s Day was a nightmare. To celebrate the third anniversary of Jack’s popping the question—yes, I’m big on commemorating relationship milestones—I staged this whole cozy scene for when he got home from work. There I was, waiting in our bed with lingerie, candles, champagne, chocolate fondue and Norah Jones (her new CD, I mean, not Norah herself—we’re not into threesomes).
About five minutes into our romantic evening, our room filled with deafening screams—not mine, and not pleasure. Then came the squealing car-chase tires, cursing and gunfire. Talk about a mood wrecker. Obviously, the kid was tuning in to some cable movie or a PlayStation game that wasn’t rated E for Everyone.
If you ask me, our upstairs neighbors should be censoring their kid’s audio-video habits.
That, or we should get the hell out of Dodge.
You know what? I really think it’s time.
Because, suddenly, I can’t take it anymore.
The circus freaks, the cramped quarters, roaches and pesticides, Mitch, the prices, the subway, Gecko, the Mad Crapper, my job, Crosby, the elevators, the lugging and hauling, the bodily contact with strangers.
When Jack and I first got engaged, I remember, I wanted to move.
But he said—and I quote: “one major life change per year is my quota.”
Ever since, there’s been at least one major life change per year. First we were newlyweds, then he got promoted at work, then I got promoted at work…
Worst of all, in the midst of the job shuffling, my father-in-law died suddenly.
Jack’s had a somewhat contentious relationship with his father for most of his life, and his parents’ divorce after more than thirty years of marriage didn’t help matters. As the only son, with two older sisters and two younger, Jack has always been his mother’s favorite—and his father’s least favorite.
Jack Candell Senior was a high-powered ad exec on Madison Avenue for years, and he pretty much pushed his son into the industry when what Jack really wanted to do was go to culinary school.
I think—no, I know—Jack Senior was hoping his son would become a wealthy, high-profile account-management guy, like he was. Instead, Jack found his way into the Media Department, where he’s great at what he does, but hasn’t become the big shot Jack Senior wanted him to become, and probably never will.
Over the years, Jack and I maintained regular contact with his father—mostly at my urging. My family is tight-knit and it just doesn’t feel right to me to shut out a parent. I’m the one who made sure we stopped to see Jack’s dad when we were up in Westchester, and I’m the one who invited him—and the woman who was his fiancée at the time, soon to become his wife—to the surprise thirtieth birthday dinner I threw for Jack.
Did they come?
No. But his father did write out a big check and stick it into a card with his apologies for being busy elsewhere that night. The card was one of those generic ones you get in a box of cards, not even a “special son” or “thirtieth birthday” one.
Jack was hurt when he found out I had extended an invite and his father turned it down, and his mother, Wilma, was livid.
“He’s a bastard,” she told me privately. “I don’t like to badmouth him to my kids. But he always has been a bastard, and he will be to his dying day.”
Which, sadly, wasn’t all that far off.
Not long after the party, we got one of those chilling early-morning phone calls: Jack’s sister Jeannie, with the news that their father had suffered a fatal heart attack.
Jack’s since had a hard time dealing with all that was left unreconciled—or at least, in his perception—between him and his dad.
He’s thanked me, many times, for trying to bridge the gap, for what it was worth.
Anyway, time is helping to heal.
And I think a fresh start is in order.
We’re a couple of months into this calendar year, and so far, there’s been nary a major life change in the Candell household.
Yet.
2
The next morning:
“Happy anniversary!”
That’s me, to Jack, all kiss, kiss.
“Er…anniversary?”
That’s Jack, to me, all deer in headlights.
I know what you’re thinking: typical male, forgot his wedding anniversary already. This honeymoon is more over than cargo capris. From here, it’s all downhill, like that old Carly Simon song where married couples are fated to cling and claw and drown in love’s debris.
Well, I, Tracey Spadolini Candell, am here to say: Wrong!
Of course Jack and I are still happily married.
And it isn’t our wedding anniversary.
Jack just thinks it is.
But not for long.
“Wait…we got married in October, Tracey. This is March…” Jack’s eyes dart to his watch calendar, just to be sure. “Right. March.”
He looks relieved.
“I know.” I perch on the arm of his favorite chair, which he sat in, fresh from his morning shower, newspaper poised and stereo playing, right before I kiss-kissed him. “But it’s the eighth. We met on the eighth, remember?”
“Of December,” he says, after another brief mental calculation. “We met on the eighth of December.”
“Right. But this is kind of like our diamond anniversary, if you think about it.”
Apparently, Jack really is thinking about it, wearing the same expression he had the other day when I asked him what inning it was in the Knicks game he was watching.
Look, I’m no ditz. I’m not a big sports fan either, but I’ve been married to this one long enough to know basketball games have quarters and baseball games have innings. When I said inning it was a slip of the tongue because I was weak from hunger at the time, and we were supposed to be going out to dinner after the game was over.
He hasn’t let me live it down. “Hey, guess what, Mitch? Guess what, Jimmy the Doorman? My wife thinks basketball has innings. Har dee har har.”
Good stuff. I’m surprised Conan hasn’t called.
“Diamond anniversary?” he echoes now, wearing that same my wife is slightly crazy look.
It doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it did back when we were newlyweds and I was much more emotional and touchy. Probably because I, too, have a look: the one I flash at him whenever he stands cluelessly in front of the open fridge telling me we’re out of butter, or mustard, or milk.
Um, no, hello, it’s right here in this gi-normous-can’t-miss-it plastic jug, see? All you have to do is look beyond the week-old container of moo goo gai pan you insisted you’d eat for a snack, and the wee jar of quince jam that came in a gift basket from some Client back in December, which you also claimed you’d eat for a snack, and, voila! Milk.
Like my friend Brenda once told me, love might be blind, but marriage is no eye-opener.
“I sway-uh, Tracey, no married guy I’ve ever met can find anything around the house,” she said in her thick Jersey accent, “not even when it’s right in front of his face. Scientists should do some kind of study and find out why that is.”
I figure scientists are still pretty wrapped up in global warming and cancer, but as soon as there’s an opening, I’m sure they’ll get to it. Because it really is strange.
You know what, though? I don’t really mind Jack’s masculine faults. In fact, I find most of them endearing. Except for the one where he farts under the covers and seals the blankets over my head, laughing hysterically. He calls it the Dutch Oven.
I figured all guys also do that. But when I asked my friend Kate about it, she reacted like I’d just told her Jack was into golden showers.
“What? That’s disgusting,” she drawled in her Alabama accent. “Billy would never do that to me!”
As if Billy—who is a total douche bag—isn’t capable of flatulence, or, for that matter, far worse behavior where Kate is concerned.
But I won’t get into that at the moment. So far, I haven’t dared get into it with Kate, either. I’m waiting until the time is right to mention that I saw her husband walking down Horatio Street in the Meatpacking District late one night with a woman who wasn’t Kate.
Granted, I was walking down the same street at the same hour with a guy who wasn’t Jack.
However, I had just come from my friends Raphael and Donatello’s place, and the guy, Blake, was a friend of theirs and while infinitely gorgeous and masculine, not the least bit threatening to my marriage, if you catch my drift.
Blake and I were both a little loopy from Bombay Sapphire and tonics and were singing a medley of sitcom theme songs when I spotted Billy and the Brunette.
They weren’t kissing, or groping, or even holding hands, but there was definitely something intimate about the way they were walking and talking. As in, she might have been a colleague but she definitely wasn’t just a colleague, and they might have been coming from a restaurant but they definitely weren’t coming from a dinner meeting.
And she definitely, definitely, wasn’t his sister. For one thing, I know—and strongly dislike, but that’s neither here nor there—his sister, Amanda.
For another, if that woman turned out to be some other unlikable Billy sister I haven’t met, then there’s something distinctly Flowers in the Attic about their relationship.
How do I know Billy and the woman aren’t platonic? Sometimes I just get a feeling about things for reasons I can quite put my finger on, and that was one of those times.
Blake—who must have met Billy at Raphael and Donatello’s wedding three years ago but probably wouldn’t know him if he fell over him, which was not unlikely in his Bombay Sapphire-fueled condition—was oblivious to the situation.
He launched us into the theme song from One Day at a Time as I saw the rest of Kate’s life—as a divorcée—flash before my very eyes.
Maybe I was jumping the gun. Maybe they really were just colleagues.
Blake elbowed me as I stopped singing and turned to watch Billy and the woman get into a cab together.
“Tracey, you’re supposed to back me up. Let’s try it again,” Blake said, and sang, “Thiiiis is it…”
“Thiiis is it,” I obediently echoed in tune, watching the cab make a right turn onto Hudson, heading downtown, instead of continuing on the next short block, making a right onto West Fourth and heading uptown.
Billy and Kate, of course, live uptown. Shouldn’t he have been heading home at that hour on a weeknight?
And even if she lived downtown, if they were going their separate ways, shouldn’t they have gotten separate cabs? There were plenty around. Believe me, I checked.
I know, I know, I said I wouldn’t get into this whole Billy thing at the moment, but I can’t help it. It’s been weighing me down for weeks now and even though I know it could have been perfectly innocent, I also know that it wasn’t.
Getting back to Jack—who doesn’t know about Billy on Horatio Street and who, I’m absolutely certain, would never be heading downtown in a cab with a strange woman at that hour of the night—he’s still waiting for my explanation about our diamond anniversary.
“Twenty-five is the silver anniversary,” I explain to Jack as patiently now as I do when he’s being Ray Charles in front of the fridge, “and fifty is gold, and seventy-five is diamond.”
“We haven’t even been alive seventy-five years,” he says just as patiently in his reasonable Jack way, and looks longingly at the section of newspaper he was about to unfold.
“Not years—months. We met at the office Christmas party seventy-five months ago today.”
“Really?”
He actually looks moved by this news. The fact that he tends to find me endearing is part of the reason I love him so much—and find him endearing in return. Except when he’s Dutch Ovening my head. But I guess there’s a little leftover frat boy in most grown men, Billy aside.
(Or maybe not, because Billy’s recent behavior—all right, suspected behavior—strikes me as pretty damn immature and reckless. Not to mention immoral.)
“So it’s our seventy-five-month anniversary?” asks my endearing Jack. “I can’t believe you actually keep track of these things, Tracey.”
I’ll admit—but not to him—that I actually don’t. Not until this morning at around 6:00 a.m. when, unable to sleep, I glanced at the kitchen calendar and happened to realize what day it was—right around the time the circus freaks kicked into high gear up in 10J.
“Well…happy anniversary,” Jack tells me. Then, having concluded being endeared by my observation of our milestone, he goes back to reading the sports section of the New York Times.
“Wait…Jack?”
“Mmm.” He turns a page.
“So it’s been seventy-five months since we met. Wow!” I say brightly. “And almost two and a half years since our wedding.”
“Yup.” He’s reading the paper.
“Remember when we didn’t want to come back from our honeymoon?”
He snorts a little and looks up. “Who does?”
True. But we really, really, really, so didn’t want to.
Maybe because we had the most amazing honeymoon ever: we went to Tahiti and stayed in one of those huts on stilts above the perfect, crystalline aqua sea. I had been dreaming of doing that but didn’t think we could afford it. Jack surprised me.
Naturally, we spent much of that week lolling around that lush paradise scheming ways to escape our dreary workaday life. Anything seemed possible there, thousands of miles from this claustrophobic Upper East Side apartment with its water stains and dismal, concrete view.
The honeymoon flew by and the next thing we knew, we—and our luggage—were careening home from J.F.K. through cold November rain in an airless Yellow Cab that smelled overpoweringly of wet wool, mildew, chemical vanilla air freshener and exotic B.O.
“Remember how we both wanted to quit our jobs and move away from the city,” I go on, “but you said one life change per year was your quota?”
“Yee-eess…”
I have his full attention now, but he’s not letting on. He’s pretending to be captivated by a story about Yankees spring training. Which, ordinarily, really would captivate him. Except, I know he’s suspicious. He must realize where I’m going with this.
“Then remember how on our first anniversary I asked you about it again—” (I’d have bugged him sooner but I’d gotten over my initial impulse to flee when spring came early and our building was sold and the new owner nicely renovated everything) “—and you didn’t want to talk about it because you had just gotten promoted?”
This time, he doesn’t bother to answer.
“You know, I haven’t even brought this up in ages,” I say, “because I’ve been feeling like things are going great and why rock the boat…”
Renovated apartment, Jack’s promotion to assistant media director at Blaire Barnett, my move to junior copywriter…
Yeah, aside from what happened with Jack’s father, things have been relatively even-keeled lately. Much more even-keeled than ever before in my life.
Except…
The circus freaks moved in overhead, and someone’s shitting all over the building, and we can’t afford to live here, and I don’t think I can take another day of riding the subway or lugging stuff around or brainstorming clever taglines for Abate Laxatives—although I just had a sudden brainstorm. Hmm…
Mental Note: explore working the Mad Crapper into the Abate campaign.
“I feel like it’s time, Jack,” I tell my husband, getting back to my other, more palatable brainstorm. “Seriously, we’ve been together seventy-five months and I really feel like we need a major change.”
“Tracey, we can’t move to Tahiti.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
He sighs and folds the paper, putting it aside. “You want to have a baby?”
Huh?
“A baby?” I echo. “No. I don’t want to have a baby—yet,” I add, because presumably I will one day soon wake up with the urge to reproduce.
At least, that’s what my friends keep telling me. Including Raphael, who is about to become a father at last. Not via the original old-fashioned means, since his significant other—Donatello, his husband—is also ovarian challenged.
Not via a surrogate, either, which was one of their earliest plans. When I (and every other female they’ve ever met, plus a good many they haven’t) refused to lend them a womb—not that I don’t adore and wholeheartedly support their efforts—Raphael and Donatello decided to go the more recent old-fashioned route: foreign adoption.
Sadly, that didn’t work, either. You’d be surprised how many countries forbid a monogamous, healthy, well-off gay couple to adopt from their overflowing orphanages.
Or maybe you wouldn’t be. Maybe you don’t approve, either. But let me tell you, Raphael and Donatello deserve a chance as much as any stable, loving couple, and they are going to make terrific daddies. I know this for a fact, because they’ve had plenty of practice on the parade of foster kids they’ve been caring for over the past few years. Now one of those kids, Georgie, is going to become their son.
As for me…
“My biological clock isn’t ticking yet,” I inform my husband. Then I add cautiously, “Is yours?”
“Nah. I just figured you’d start thinking about it sooner or later. Or now.”
You may be wondering why this is only coming up after two-plus years of marriage.
Well, it’s not. It’s been brought up (by me) and shot down (by Jack) before.
I actually thought I might be pregnant when I skipped a period right around the time we got married. My ob-gyn said it was probably due to wedding stress. Still, I took a pregnancy test on our honeymoon. Of course it was negative.
Even then, I wasn’t entirely convinced. When I did get my period, I was actually disappointed, and went through a brief period during our newlywed year when I was gung ho to start a family. After all, hadn’t I always wanted children? Hadn’t I been told enough times by my evil ex-boyfriend, Will, that I have birthing hips? Hadn’t I once even won a Babysitter of the Year award from my hometown Kiwanis Club? (I was seventeen. Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about my high-school social life.)
So, yeah, I’ve always wanted to start a family for legitimate reasons.
Mostly, though, I just hated my job as account executive and I was desperate for a way out.
At that point, anything—and I mean anything—round-the-clock morning sickness, childbirth without pain meds, endless sleepless nights, death by firing squad—would have been better than taking the subway to midtown every morning and dealing with my anal-retentive boss, account group director Adrian Smedly and an array of bitchy Clients.
Luckily for me, Jack didn’t think an eight-week maternity leave was sufficient incentive for motherhood. At the time, I was a little miffed. But since it takes two to make a baby the original old-fashioned way, and I couldn’t find a willing sperm donor ( just kidding ), I reluctantly set aside the baby dream—half hearted and short-lived as it was.
Not so long after, I found my salvation—or so I thought, pre-Crosby Courts—when I was at last moved into the Creative Department.
Meanwhile, Jack and I pretty much dropped the baby-making subject. I figured it would come up again, though, when one of us found a burning desire to procreate—or play hooky from work for a few months.
Or forever.
Which is how I feel right about now.
Seriously. I need to get out at some point. I’ve been at Blaire Barnett, aside from a brief foray as a catering waitress at Eat, Drink and Be Married, for my entire adult life. I’m so over agency life. And city life.
Things have to change.
So last night when I was eating overpriced turkey on overpriced bread with overpriced lettuce and drinking an overpriced Snapple, while keeping one eye out for cockroaches, trying to ignore the deafening crashes from 10J and watching the ten o’clock news with its usual urban murder and mayhem, I came up with a plan. A good one.
Nope, pregnancy isn’t my proposed ticket out this time. This new plan doesn’t involve nearly as much physical pain. Or sex.
Unless, of course, I need to use my wiles to bribe Jack.
Just kidding. I don’t really do that.
Much.
“So, look, I think we should start thinking about moving,” I tell my husband, officially launching Operation Fresh Start. “We said we were going to do it someday, and we’ve got the down payment.”
Thanks to his dad, who surprised us with a pretty big chunk of change for our wedding gift. I say surprised because even though he was filthy rich, he also was never the most generous guy in the world, and like I said before, he and Jack weren’t on the best terms.
But he had mellowed a little over the years, and he did give us money to use toward a house. Jack—who, as a media planner, is proficient with handling large sums, though it’s usually the Client’s tens of millions and not our own tens of thousands—decided to invest it in a CD until we need it. That sounded like a good idea to me, and Jack and I have always been on the same page about our household finances.
Unlike my parents, who have always argued over money—not that they’ve ever had any.
Also unlike Kate and Billy, who have also always argued over money—not that they’ve ever had any shortage of it, as bona fide blue bloods.
Anyway, Jack might be getting an inheritance, too, once his father’s will is sorted out. Jack Candell Senior had remarried a few months before he died, and his new wife is contesting his will, which left everything to his kids. She says he made a new one leaving—surprise!—everything to her. Only there seems to be some discrepancy about that.
Even without a cut of his father’s fortune, though, Jack and I can probably afford a decent house in the suburbs.
“So,” I say to Jack, “we’ve got the down payment, and I think we should start thinking about a move. Out of the city.”
Jack looks at me, shifts his weight in his chair. “I don’t know.”
Okay, the thing is…I didn’t ask him a question, so why is he answering one?
“You don’t know…what?” 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).
