Just then Colleen padded barefoot into the living room wearing Sidney’s old plaid bathrobe over a black lace nightgown.
“Who the hell is this?” Rose asked him.
“Who the hell are you?” Colleen replied.
For once, my mother had nothing to say.
“You should’ve called first, Rosie,” Sid said.
My mother walked the eight, hot, long blocks back to the hotel. She hadn’t counted on my father making a new life for himself. Now what was she going to do about hers?
* * *
The thought of my father with other women did not sit well with my mother. She lay awake at night in the cramped bedroom of her new, furnished rental at Lakeside Villas–which was neither a villa nor anywhere near a lake—and couldn’t stop picturing him having sex first with one woman, then with another. One night she woke up panicked and drenched in sweat. In her nightmare every room in Sid’s Horizon Village condo was filled with unmade beds.
While they were together, she had only disdain for my father; now she was obsessed with him. She began to stalk him. She lurked behind a clump of bushes when he was due home from work and watched as he escorted different women carrying Corningware casseroles and grocery bags up to his third floor lair. She put her ear against the wall of the laundry room, which was adjacent to his bedroom, but could only make out a word or two, especially when the machines were running. The moans, however, came through loud and clear, driving her into a frenzy. It took every bit of her self-control to refrain from breaking into his apartment and smashing the lovebirds with Sid’s new seven-piece Teflon pot set. (She watched as he walked the empty box to his trash chute one night, and his attempts at homemaking without her drove a stake through her heart.)
She stopped hanging out in the laundry, but continued to call him and hang up at odd hours during the night, why, she couldn’t really say. To hear his voice? Make him sick from interrupting his sleep? Stop possible lovemaking in progress? And she went to the King of Poultry, skulking around the parking lot, trying to discern which women he favored that day with an extra meatball.
She spent one entire night cutting my father out of every photograph in both of the albums she brought with her to Florida. She also figured out the code to his answering machine, (fifty-one, his lucky number at the race track), and called in to listen to his phone messages four, five, six times a day. She felt physically sick every time she heard a
female voice confirm a date, “call to say hello” or tell him about the pot roast she just made. My mother was in trouble.
Never a believer in psychiatric care–or afraid, perhaps, of what she’d find out–she finally relented and went to see a shrink.
“It’s really quite simple,” Dr. Brot told her. “You’re obsessing. You believe that Sidney is your property, always has been. No matter that you left him. Now that he appears to be managing without you, moving on as they say, you want to reassert your control. It happens all the time.”
This did not make my mother feel any better. Valium, however, did. The doctor also advised that she move far enough away from my father to require a plane ride.
Back at her apartment, she studied a map of the East Coast. She didn’t want to return to New York; it was too difficult to meet men there. Miami was appealing because of its abundance of rich, elderly men, but too close to my father. Deciding to rule out the entire state of Florida, she came upon Hilton Head, South Carolina. “Hilton Head,” she said aloud. “Hmm, I like the way that sounds.” My mother sang snatches of “One Day My Prince Will Come,” as she pulled out her suitcases and began packing.
Meanwhile back at the condo, my father and Colleen were making plans to marry as soon as their snowbird friends came south for the winter. He had grown tired of dating and was ready to settle down again. For a nominal fee, he procured Horizon’s main card room for their wedding reception. After a ceremony at a local justice of the peace, they’d gather with their guests for platters of miniature potato and kasha knishes and an assortment of Danish, all courtesy of The King of Poultry. Colleen suggested serving cold shrimp with cocktail dipping sauce, but my father blanched at the expense. They bought a dozen boxed wine coolers at Costco that they stored under their bed. After much deliberation, my father decided to throw in two bottles of vodka and a few quarts of orange juice. No one but he and Colleen drank the stuff; they would take whatever was left back to their apartment after the party. At the time I was twenty-four and living on my own in New York. My father called and invited me down for the celebration. Fearing that if my mother found out about the nuptials she’d attend the party and go berserk, he swore me to secrecy.
On a sunny Saturday afternoon soon after the start of the new year, I watched as my father married Colleen. The reception afterwards was a big hit with their neighbors and friends and, as previously decided with his partner, my father passed out twenty percent off coupons for purchases made at the King to all of his guests.
A month later my mother found out about my father’s marriage from my cousin Joyce, who was always looking for trouble. But by then my mother was pursuing a wealthy octogenarian in the greener pastures of a Hilton Head condominium development.
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