The Forum

By Sharon Douglas

Is it true that death is only hard on the living? We’ve all heard of the afterlife review, where loved ones see the impacts of their actions on the lives they left behind. What if the grief that haunts the living is not an indictment of guilt but an invitation to participate in this forum? 

This is the imagined framework of The Forum, a dialogue-driven memoir written from the perspective of the afterlife. It charts the 40-year love affair between a swashbuckling Brooklyn raconteur named Ray Mazzara, and Gigi, a scrawny and bookish suburban kid reeling from the death of her 36-year-old father. 

From her spiral into addiction, an adolescence spent spinning through the revolving doors of mental hospitals, and her ultimate recovery, Gigi’s single-minded obsession with Ray is the lens through which she filters every experience. Separated for more than 20 years, Gigi and Ray reunite late in life. The love they forge is powerful enough to redeem the decades apart, but as Gigi struggles to define her future, Ray dies.

Anyone who’s suffered the anguish of loss and the longing to restore love after death will thrill to this tale of redemption. For all the heartache inherent in our flawed and imperfectly led lives, the truth revealed in The Forum is that where life ends, love lives on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sharon Douglas
• Release date: Nov 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781540188724

Book preview

Chapter 1 - Genesis

Gigi: I was fourteen.

Ray: She was ten.

God: Already you two can’t get your stories straight.

Gigi: There was never a time when I didn’t know his name. I must have heard it first at my grandparents’ house in Queens. Mikey and I spent more time there than we did at home on Long Island, given as how our illustrious mother deposited us on Ma and Pa’s doorstep after we lost our dad. We were only little—Mikey was seven and I had just turned ten—so Ma would feed us dinner around five in the afternoon. After she washed and dried the dinner dishes and sponged the crumbs off the floor around our dangling feet, the ritual phone calls would begin. Mikey and I would watch the coil of yellow cord pull from the wall, twist and contract, as she waited for him to pick up the phone in the place, which is what they called Pa’s women’s sportswear factory. By seven-thirty, we had our hands clapped over our ears as Ma screeched into the phone, demanding to know why he was still there. Pa’s answer was always the same: I’m waiting for Ray.

God: So what you’re saying is he was always late.

Ray: Somehow she got a hold of a regulation Navy sailor’s hat. She was sitting at the bar in The Metro, her uncle’s wine-and-cheese place in the Village. I figured she’d spent the night at their apartment and was tagging along with her Aunt Julie, who came in every afternoon to set up. Gigi must’ve climbed up on the barstool and was trying to figure out how to fold her sailor’s hat when I came up from the basement. I did a double-take; she was a dead ringer for Shirley Temple. I sat down next to her and showed her the right way to fold her hat, then I told her to stick it under her mattress that night to flatten it into the right shape. Oh, God. Oh—I’m sorry, God. Figure of speech, but oh, I knew it even then.

God: No problem, I get that a lot. Tell me what it was you knew even then.

Gigi: Half the time he was late. The other half, he apparently never showed. But I remember the first time I saw him there. I was fourteen. Fourteen going on thirty is what what my mother always said. It was after hours at the place and it must have been pretty late because the other women who worked in the office had already gone home. I was sitting at one of the steel desks in the front office, spinning in circles in one of those rolling office chairs while my grandmother furiously punched numbers into the adding machine, which coughed out subtotals every few seconds.

My grandmother rode into Brooklyn with Pa on Tuesdays and Fridays to help with the bookkeeping and payroll. If Mikey and I were off school, we got to tag along. I loved it there, the whole floor buzzing with the sounds of dozens of machines, and all the workers erupting into multilingual raptures over how adorable we were. Normally, they were terrified of my grandfather; even I could feel the tension ripple through each row as spines stiffened and heads bowed when the boss stampeded past. But when his grandchildren were there—well, who could fault anyone for stopping the clock to bundle them up in hugs and coo over their undeniable cuteness.

The place was a gray and noisy labyrinth cut through with towering metal shelving that cordoned off the floor into functional units, each group waving its flag of ethnicity with the proud insistence of a United Nations member state. Rows of sewing machine operators dominated the 30,000-square-foot space. At intervals, branching steel poles hung with garments loomed over the gunmetal gray workstations like IV bags swaying overhead. Most of the operators were Eastern European. Graziela Lubiezec was my favorite for the sheer joy of saying her name and the way she swiveled around on her stool when she saw me coming to pull me into a full-body hug. I only found out after she died of lung cancer that she wasn’t yet thirty years old, with four-year-old twin daughters at home, and that everyone called her Grace. I had long since outgrown the place by then. So strange—at the time, all the workers there seemed so old.

The symmetry broke down around the rows of operators. Off to the left were the pressers, all four of whom were black men. They stood all day, sweating in front of these giant hissing ironing machines. The one named Jerry Banks had this pink and flattened scar across the back of his hand from where he’d gotten it trapped inside the machine. You know, once they place the fabric a certain way and lower that arm on the presser, it locks down and blasts bellows of steam. He told me it happened years earlier when a machine jammed at the dry cleaners where he worked. During one fifteen-minute morning break, after I asked him why the pressers ironed fabric before it was even shaped like clothes, he let me touch the soft mottled skin across his knuckles.

In the far left corner near the building’s single wall of windows sat the finishers. I call them windows but in truth they were only opaque orange rectangles possibly designed to keep sunlight from distracting the factory’s inhabitants. The finishers were my favorites, a klatch of little old Italian ladies who sat hunched over finished garments, tightening loose buttons and snipping threads. They were probably my favorites because they didn’t sit behind machines, so I felt free to drape myself across their laps while they were trying to work. Of course, none of them spoke more than a few words of English but that never got in the way—I was such a little ham that my hugs and giggling were as good as Esperanto.

Rounding out the smorgasbord of nationalities were the cutters, three or four middle-aged men who were all Jewish like us. Just outside the office door, on my way to the restroom, I’d pass one end of their enormous steel table, over which hung what looked like a giant rotisserie spit that held bolts of fabric the size of underground tunnels. The cutters couldn’t talk because of the vast distances between them, although their work was the most collaborative, it taking multiple arms to pull the fabric across the table and mark the designer’s patterns over them like the chalk outlines at a crime scene.

The coolest thing at the place was the literal smorgasbord: at lunch time, each nation would retreat to its own corner and warm up all manner of ethnic delicacies on hot plates that materialized from under various work tables. I don’t think I ever ate whatever it was my grandmother brought for lunch because these women just loved to feed us. Mikey shied away from the plastic plates thrust under our chins but I happily skipped from one station to the next, sampling anything and everything, basking mostly in the way the ladies smiled when, eyes bulging, I enthusiastically nodded my appreciation.

It was after I’d made my social rounds and had a belly full of food I couldn’t pronounce that I’d embark on my full-body exploration of the forest of dusty metal shelves that carved walls into the open space. Mikey liked to crawl over the rolls of fabric that weighed down the lower shelves surrounding the cutters. He once fell asleep in there and my grandmother whipped everyone into a frenzy searching for him. I was more of a climber, yanking at the dented cardboard boxes shoved into every available space, pulling the lighter ones onto the floor for closer examination. I learned to bang on the sides of each box before picking through its contents in order to avoid a confrontation with the families of German cockroaches who made their homes in the honeycomb of corrugated panels.

Many of the larger crates held oversized spools of thread standing upright like pine cones in fancy dress. Some of the smaller boxes held a mad assortment of buttons into which I’d plunge my fist. I remember the cool caress as they closed around my wrist, their buttonholes like the eyes of tropical fish nibbling at my arm, some tiny and smooth, others dressed in linen gowns. Back when I still refused to leave the house without my Kermit the Frog stuffed animal, I remember finding a flat container filled with designer labels. I nabbed a needle and thread from the finishers, then sat on the floor sewing Bill Blass and Polo tags onto the back of Kermit’s little green collar.

There were other amusements after the five o’clock exodus that emptied the factory floor. The giant rolling canvas bins used to push stacks of garments from station to station around the factory, we transformed into go-carts. Mikey and I would push each other around in them, racing through the abandoned maze of machinery. After all that, we’d head back to the front office to pester Ma. There was a coat room off the office with a narrow couch generally covered in samples—prototypes of new garments provided by the designers—and a twelve-inch black-and-white television dominated by static balanced atop another stack of rickety cardboard cartons in the corner. Mikey and I spent the latter part of every visit elbowing each other for space amid the clutter during the interminable wait for my grandfather, who seemingly never wanted to leave, whether or not he was waiting for Ray.

On this particular night, Mikey was hogging the couch, fast asleep in the back room of the office, and I had just finished nosily rifling through one of the bookkeeper’s desk drawers, when I heard the elevator rumble up to our floor. The top half of the office door was Plexiglas, so I watched as he swung open the door, the whole frame rattling as the boy who followed him inside slammed it behind them. I remember my grandmother looking underwhelmed at their arrival. She picked up the office phone and pressed the intercom: George, Ray’s here! But somehow I knew who it was before she ever said his name.

At the time his presence registered only in terms of the Richter scale. It was years later that I sat examining the one photograph I had of him, taken when I was sixteen and he was still timeless. All I remember from that day in the factory was that he looked like a navy blue refrigerator, work pants and matching shirt. He came in laughing, although the blond kid who stepped inside behind him wasn’t. My snapshot of him captured his soft raw umber hair and long sideburns; a boxer’s nose half-fixed; shallow dimples masked by half a day’s beard that cast shadows along the furrows that held his smile in parentheses. Ray's face was complicated: a cleft beneath a full lower lip, a strong chin below an elliptical scar couched in a New York jawline. There’s a certain type of New Yorker who all have that cast to their jaws, Harvey Keitel, De Niro. He was one of those. Except they were only tough guys in the movies.

What made me jump wasn’t the way he filled up the room, it was the reverberation. He sounded just the way he looked, Brooklyn-strong and cocky. But his laughter rang true, and his smile wasn’t a sneer. It was genuine machismo, a good-natured bring-it-on backed by unfathomable confidence. And his confidence inspired the same in everyone else. Nothing was so broken that Ray couldn’t fix it. He was there to solve the problem, put the men at ease, the women stand up straighter, and the kids wonder how they could ever live up to the swaggering expectation he embodied. He was rugged, a work horse, with pale green eyes that squinted into half moons when he laughed, which was always.

This is Ricky. Ray dropped a huge, callused hand onto the kid’s shoulder hard enough to make him jump. You and him are about the same age.

"How do you know how old I am?" I demanded. I knew who he was but how did he know anything about me?

And that’s when I first heard that laugh—like God’s own thunder, shaking the heavens. Oops, sorry God, figure of speech. But looking back, I knew it even then.

God: Happens all the time. What was it you knew even then?

Ray: That this was the girl for me. And that all I could do was wait.

God: And did you?

Gigi: That he was the one. And what a strange girl that made me. I mean, that son of his was gorgeous, shaggy blond hair, indigo eyes, and thick like Ray, with this V-shaped torso. But the image of Ray eclipsed all else. I was galvanized, buzzing with electricity. But eventually Pa materialized, and it was another whole year before I saw Ray again. Still, I became attuned to the sound of his name, which, from that day on, made me flush with that same live current.

God: Pretty grown-up feelings for a fourteen-year-old.

Ray: I kept close tabs on that little girl. I had met her uncle—she called him Big Mike; I called him the Chief—at a construction supply store on Flatbush Avenue back in ‘68. There was a customer in there, black dude named Lenny who I’d known for years. Saved a girl’s life in Prospect Park. You remember the night. Right by the gate, some punks were knocking this dame around, pushing her back and forth between them and laughing. I lived across the street and heard her hollering as soon as I climbed out of the work wagon. I ran toward the sound just in time to see this black guy rear back and spin, kicking and punching, knocking those punks senseless with their own beer bottles. They ran like hell in my direction, and I was happy to finish the job. By the time I got inside the park, this girl was swinging from Lenny’s neck, kissing him like he was home from the war. He ended up marrying that broad! Got a nice little family now.

Anyhow, the Chief and Gigi’s Aunt Julie, her mother’s kid sister, walked into the construction supply place while I was yukking it up with Lenny and suddenly it's old home week. Turned out they knew Lenny too on account of him and his old lady being regulars at The Metro. I was introduced and told my story about being there when Lenny met his future wife. Me and the Chief got to be friends after that. I’m not a fan of Greenwich Village—I’m Brooklyn all the way—but when something breaks, everyone calls Ray, so I spent plenty of time in the basement of The Metro.

That’s how I met Gigi's grandfather too. George Greenberg. That man was a saint. Named the factory Saint George Sportswear, and I’m telling you, he lived up to the name. I haven’t run into him since I got here, God, but I know George Greenberg’s got to be close by if even I made it in. The Chief used to joke that he knew he was going to hell, but if he was going, then I was, too, and he used to say, Ray’ll have the place air-conditioned by the time I get there.

Anyhow, Julie called me a month or so after we met and told me her father had a crisis, middle of winter and the boiler conked out at his factory in Flatbush. Had a hundred ladies in gardening gloves trying to operate sewing machines. ‘Course I had three nursing homes with the same problem I had to take care of before I headed to the factory so it must have been close to midnight when I got there. I sussed out the problem and knew it would take a while to fix. I told George to go on home, promised I would have it all toasty warm by sunrise. But he told me he had plenty to do in the factory while I got busy on the boiler.

It was damn near sunrise when I got it all working and I just assumed he’d gone home, but when I came upstairs, there he was, rolling garment racks out onto the bay for a six a.m. pick-up. What a worker that bird was, never stopped. I lived six blocks from that shop and I don’t know how many times I’d be on my way home from a job and look up and see the lights on in the factory. So I’d go up, see if he needed a hand. Oh, no, Ray, I’m okay, he’d tell me. Pushing machinery across the factory, with dirt on his face and sweat soaked through his dress shirt, but he’s okay. Unreal that bird. Finally got it through his head that I wasn’t leaving until he let me help him and we’d go at it together.

Top-notch human being, that George Greenberg, hell of a guy. And his favorite thing to talk about? Gigi. Well, he didn’t call her Gigi, of course. Sha, Shar. He had three or four grandkids but all he talked about was that one. We were sitting in his office drinking day-old coffee after hours one night when he took out his wallet and showed me a snapshot. Yeah, I know who she is, I told him. That’s the little girl with the sailor’s hat. Broke both their hearts when he left New York.

God: I guess there are some things even you can’t fix.

Gigi: Precocious was the word on every report card and I've lived long enough now to understand that wasn't entirely a compliment. All I knew was that I liked grown-ups better than kids my age, and I’d felt that way my entire life. Kindergarten was kind of fun but ever since I started grade school I was picked on. I think I was in second grade the first time I ran into the house in tears after being tormented on the school bus. My dad calmed me down and explained that I needed to consider the source. He said the names they called me were not a reflection of who I was but of who they were. There was no practical application of that knowledge, but it was reassuring to know my dad thought I was tops.

I think what hurt me most was not understanding what was wrong with me. My whole life up to that point I’d been told I was special. Now it was dawning on me that special only meant different. I started examining myself in the mirror. Okay, so I was a runt. When they formed teams in gym class, I was the one they picked right after the little retarded kid. It didn’t help that my mother kept my curly hair cut short so it stuck out from my head like a soiled cotton ball. On the school bus, they called it a Jew-fro.

I dreaded recess with its utter lack of structure. On the playground I buddied up with the Albino girl, whose wispy white hair and translucent skin were trumped by eyes as pink as the bellies of the white mice our third-grade teacher brought in for science hour. Naturally, the other kids called her Pink Eye; my nickname was Worm, an apt description for the kid in the corner with a book.

Spending most of my life between book covers made me a favorite with teachers, which further inflamed my peers. When we got old enough to be graded on schoolwork, I developed a whole cadre of enemies by refusing to let anyone peak at my answers to the questions on our math and vocabulary quizzes. I confess this was not out of any inborn integrity. If any one of those kids had been nicer to me outside the classroom, I might have considered it. But instinctively I knew that even if I did let them cheat, it wouldn't spare me their taunting in the schoolyard and on the bus ride home.

Contrast this with the reception I got from adults. To them, I was a delight. They let me engage them in conversation, where I basked in their laughter and attention. With people my mother’s age I felt comfortable. I could be myself, that one piece of notoriously bad advice parents give kids who don’t fit in.

In light of all that, I never questioned my attraction to Ray. It only hurt to watch him walk away. When he winked and ruffled my hair on his way past that night in the place, I followed him and Ricky as far as the elevator. When the door slid shut, a fist of angry frustration clenched in my solar plexus and made it hard to breathe or swallow. Had I been even a few years older, nothing could have stopped me from chasing after him. The strange thing was I knew he’d have let me. He felt it, too. I know he did. To Ray, I knew I could be something special.

With that single encounter, everything changed. I remember the drive home from the place that night, squished into what passed for a back seat in my grandfather’s beloved Dodge Dart, cherry red with a triple white racing stripe splashed up and over the fender. That was the first time I cried over him, and you’re right about feeling something I was too young to name. I look back and see the sheer impossibility of it, wanting something so badly and lacking any personal power to make it so. God, how I hated being a kid, knowing all I could do was wait.

God: Everyone’s always waiting for Ray.

Ray: Listen, I’ve been surrounded by youngsters my entire life. I’m one of ten kids, remember, and long before my son was Gigi’s age, his mother was dead and I was what they now call a single parent. Back then, they just called it being a father. My old man made a fortune during the Great Depression. He had a dozen different businesses all going at once, and he never said much, but he taught us all how to work. So that always came natural to me, turning kids into engineers. Some caught on right away, some never did.

Gigi was something entirely different. She could learn anything, and fast. But it wasn’t about how smart she was. There was something else. Or something more. Tiny as she always was, everyone in every room always knew she was there. People were drawn to her. There was a warmth, always a smile. I read somewhere that kids are made out of love, so when they’re met with love, they melt into it. Gigi never lost that. She had that same quality until the day I died.

God: Sounds like she wasn't the only one melting into love.

Gigi: I was fifteen when my grandfather went to war with the labor unions. Honestly, I don’t know any of the details of what went on there, only that my grandparents relocated from New York to Florida practically overnight. It was left to my Aunt Julie to pack up and sell the house in Queens where they’d raised their three kids. I remember being in the place one night with my grandparents and the factory floor was barren. Only the dusty metal shelves were left. Every machine, every box and roll of fabric—vanished.

On the way back to the office from the floor, I stopped in the ladies’ bathroom. The time clock was mounted on the wall between the two restrooms, above which were slotted metal racks still holding the workers’ timecards. They’d take down the cards and slide them through the mouth of the clock, which would time-stamp the cards. The clock made this whir-click sound at regular intervals.

The factory was deadly silent when I came out of the bathroom. When the time clock sprung to life, it scared the bejesus (sorry!) out of me. I spun toward it and that’s when I saw the sign. It was taped to the clock. In block letters, someone had written:

RAY DID IT IN 5 DAYS

God: It took me six.

Gigi: Precisely.

Chapter 2 - The Metro

Gigi: In the middle of one winter night in 1977, The Metro burned down. And I do mean down. It was the next day when Julie and I drove up in her yellow VW Bug, and it was a war zone. It actually looked like a war zone my grandmother once painted. Only it looked like the draft she did in charcoal before she added any color. The whole building was gone. There was only this empty lot filled with ash and strewn with debris, as if the building had blown up rather than melted down. The fire trucks had already been there, so everything was coated in foamy soot; you could taste it. Even so, there were spots still smoldering as my uncle shuffled through, unearthing the remains with the toe of his work boot.

Ray was there in the midst of it all. I watched him slice away the orange caution tape along the side of the corner lot, then Big Mike motioned to him. The two knelt at right angles and began pulling at a gnarled hunk of sooty metal. Son of a bitch! Ray bellowed as he and Mike wrestled out from under a melted orange vinyl booth what turned out to be The Metro's antique cash register. My Aunt Julie hollered at them to put on their work gloves but neither of them even looked up.

Let’s go get these guys some coffee, she said. It’s fucking freezing out here. And it was, but it was such a surreal combination of conditions, that I hadn’t noticed it even though there was rarely a time I wasn’t cold. I watched the steam streaming out of my my uncle’s nose and my brain registered it as smoke, as if he had swallowed the fire that had taken his livelihood. I was watching them, captivated, when I felt Julie’s fingers dig into my shoulder, steering me back toward the car. As if reading my mind, she mumbled, Don’t worry; they’re not going anywhere.

But I was already a step ahead of her, scheming how I could convince my mom to let me spend one more night at their apartment.

God: You can be very convincing.

Ray: I’m up to my knees in the wreckage when I look up and there’s Gigi in a pair of bright yellow pants and a sky-blue windbreaker, holding two cups of coffee from the diner. Her whole body was shaking from the cold, way beyond shivering, practically convulsing. I gave her a big smile, acted like I’d just noticed she was there when the truth is I saw her even before she climbed out of her aunt’s car.

God: Why the act?

Gigi: Oh, it was easy back then. That was before my mother delegated all child-rearing authority to Frank. In the good old days, she had no problem with the most general coverage, like I’m spending the night at Ma and Pa’s. And she was okay with me sleeping over at Julie and Mike’s, just not every weekend. I overheard her telling my uncle one time that she didn’t want them turning me into a bar fly!

God: Sounds like a guilty conscience.

Ray: Tough guy. Stupid, I know. If I learned anything in those final days of loving her, it’s how much it hurt her, me being such a hard-ass.

God: Well said.

Gigi: Feeling guilty would imply she was capable of thinking about someone other than herself. Dr. Reade once told me that the problem wasn’t only losing my father; it was losing my mother at the same time. Since then I’ve developed some compassion for her. I realized she was thirty when she found herself widowed with two young kids. When I was thirty, I could barely figure out how to pay my rent. Listen, in a Norman Rockwell world, after our father died, she would have gathered my brother and me to her bosom and reassured us that even though Daddy was gone, she had enough love for two parents, etcetera, etcetera. Instead, she simply opted out.

God: Glad to see you’re not bitter.

Ray: Because that couldn’t have been further from how I felt. Sounds crazy but when I saw her standing there smiling at me, my first thought was finally. That’s what I meant when I said I knew all I could do was wait. From the time I first met her, I knew there was nothing I could do to bring her back to me. But at the same time, I always knew that she would come back.

After she handed me my coffee, she asked if we were allowed to be poking around in that mess. I guess her Aunt Julie had repeated the fire captain’s warning to steer clear of the area, that it wasn’t safe. Seeing her standing there shivering in the middle of it made me realize that, at the very least, it wasn’t safe for her.

God: Because the rules, of course, didn’t apply to you.

Gigi: The only thing I felt bitter about back then was how for years after my father died, an unending stream of neighbors and friends of the family would lean in and ask in urgent whispers, "How’s your mother?" Never, How are you and your brother, only how’s your mother. I wanted to spit back: I have no idea. She’s been in her bedroom for the past two years.

God: It’s a testament to your father that so many people cared.

Ray: I made my own rules.

God: And then you broke them.

Gigi: You’re right, Lord. It’s been over forty years since our dad died and I have yet to meet anyone who had anything remotely negative to say about the guy. By all accounts, he was a gentle soul who loved us to distraction, a real mensch.

He knew he was dying. He’d had his second heart attack three years prior, when I was seven and Mikey was four. It’s staggering by medical standards today, but he needed a single bypass to correct the heart defect he was born with. A single bypass, and the doctors told him he had less than a fifty-fifty chance of making it off the table. Ma told me he used to ask people whether they thought he should risk it. In the end, he chose not to. Instead, he apparently spent every spare dollar collecting those penny-ante life insurance policies advertised in the back pages of magazines, the offers requiring no medical exam, good for a thousand here, nine hundred there.

And you’re right, Lord. I have no right to feel sorry for myself. I milked that newfound freedom of mine for all it was worth. I built a whole lifestyle around it. It didn’t take me long to figure out that as long as my mother believed I was "fine," I’d have no interference. I’d be spared her sporadic attempts to assert herself as head of household.

God: You were parentified. When I joked about you not being bitter, I didn’t mean you didn’t have a right to be angry. You did and you do. What was hard for everyone to watch was how you turned that anger on yourself.

Ray: You’re quaking in your boots, I told her, and right away, she got mad. I’m not scared of you. I’m just cold, she tells me. Why in the world would you be scared of me? I said. This girl had no idea that even then, I’d have taken a bullet for her. Talk about being a tough guy. She was tougher than I was!

God: Don’t kid yourself.

Gigi: My whole life, I’ve heard about how self-destructive I was.

God: Not your whole life.

Ray: She was always all smiles around me! Even that day outside the old Metro when I asked how her grandfather was doing down in Florida and she told me how sick he was, her only complaint was that she was cold. I told her I had a flannel shirt in the work wagon and she followed me out to where I was parked. She jumped into the front seat before I could get around to the driver’s side.

What’s with the grin? I asked her.

What? Nothing. Just happy to see you again.

Yeah, why?

I think about you all the time.

Me? What makes you think about me?

She shrugged but something I said must have embarrassed her because her eyes dropped to her lap. I guess you made a big impression.

Yeah, well you did too. Even back when you were a baby. That got her to look at me and her eyebrows climbed halfway up her forehead.

You knew me when I was baby? she asked, excited.

Pretty much. I taught you how to fold your sailor’s hat, I told her. That made her eyebrows get all squiggly.

Sailor's hat? How old was I?

You said you were ten.

Wow! I had no idea. No wonder . . .

No wonder what?

No wonder I feel like I’ve always known you.

I never let on, but what was even stranger was the feeling that I’d known her all my life. How’s your grandfather doing down in Florida?

Oh . . . He’s got lung cancer. She looked up at me and her eyes were glassy with tears. But he said it’s only temporary.

I handed her the beat-up legal pad I used to scope out new jobs. Give me his phone number.

Are you gonna call him?

Well, naturally, I’m gonna call him. Why else would I want his number?

Then that big smile of hers made a comeback. Want mine, too?

I never did see that shirt again.

God: Did you ever ask yourself why she got attached so fast?

Gigi: Things certainly didn’t start out that way. I remember Pa carrying me around with his arm bent at the elbow and me perched on top like a parakeet, eye-level with him. He called me Gorgeous and Beautiful as if that were my name! He adored me, spoiled me, as they say, never stopped telling me how special I was.

God: He wasn’t the only one who thought so.

Ray: You kidding? I wondered why I got so attached so fast.

God: That really never came across.

Gigi: Certainly there was a time I knew that to be true. It may be a fantasy, but I wholeheartedly believe our father loved us kids unconditionally. Not with Pa’s brand of blind and swooning adoration but something else entirely. He created a universe where my mother, my brother, and I were nurtured and safe. Dad spent every spare minute of his time with us, but he was strict, too. He washed my mouth out with Ivory soap on a few occasions, and my brother and I both got spanked with a belt from time to time.

It’s tough to explain how a kid knows she’s loved unconditionally, but I did know, and I believe my brother did, too, although Mikey was too young when we lost him to be able to catalogue the memories we shared. Still, he remembered that every Saturday morning, while my mother slept, Dad would take us along on errands. For us, that meant going to the drug store and picking out pink rubber Spalding balls we called spaldeens. It meant a handful of change for us to drop into Woolworth's gallery of gumball machines that spit out ten-cent toys. (Dad being a dentist, toys were allowed, gumballs were not.) It meant teaching us how to play dots and then spending hours with us drawing tiny lines on scrap paper.

The man hand-crafted puzzle books for me to work my way through on weekend mornings, probably as insurance against my waking them before daybreak. These were sheets of eight-by-twelve paper folded in half, each half page featuring different word games for me to solve. Loving us meant solemnly dispensing tiny pink fluoride tablets with a proffered Dixie cup of tap water while Mikey and I stood in front of the bathroom sink as if to receive Holy Communion. Occasionally, he’d subject our teeth-brushing techniques to the rigor of chewable disclosing tablets, which terrified us as the red dye clung to the remaining plaque.

Our father died three days into Chanukah in 1972. He’d always honored the tradition of presenting Mikey and me with little gifts on each of the eight nights. We were avid treasure hunters, so Dad would stash our presents in unlikely corners around the house. For a good year and a half after he died, we’d reach into the linen closet for an old set of sheets or dig out the bicycle-tire pump in the garage, and out would tumble a gift-wrapped toy.

Contrast this heartfelt, hands-on attentiveness with my mother’s rather cavalier approach to child-rearing. I may be overstating this and I confess my earliest impressions are colored by years of having such suspicions confirmed in matters large and small. But when I think back even to those halcyon days, I see her hanging back, looking on, not engaging unless she had to. As a kid, I lacked the perspective to distrust her unspoken messages; instead, I distrusted my own worth. It was even worse for my brother because he was still young enough to be defined by his need for her. I think Mikey always believed that one day, Mom would saunter out of her bedroom cured and he’d be the proud recipient of a loving, doting mother. I held no such illusions.

Yet I grew into an understanding that her failure as a mother was something separate from the love she felt for us. Mikey grew up to doubt that love ever existed. I never doubted that our mother loved us, only that her love felt altogether qualified, conditioned upon our meeting unspoken standards of excellence. As long as I showed her what she wanted to see, she loved me. And that didn’t just start after Dad died and I learned the importance of being fine. It’s unfair to say I’d sensed it since infancy but that’s the way it always felt. There was all this pressure to be the cutest, the smartest, the best little girl in the world. It wasn’t even that I felt I wasn’t good enough, only that I was under this constant pressure to perform.

It didn’t help to hear the constant criticism the women in my family leveled against just about everyone. How many times did my grandmother comment on some woman walking into a restaurant: How could anyone go out looking like that? Doesn’t she have mirrors in her house? It’s only in retrospect I see it, but how could a kid not fear that same judgment would be leveled against her?

When my father died, so did my vain attempts at achieving such ideals. In the four-plus years between his death and the arrival of my mother’s knight in shining armor, I adopted a facade of world-weariness, perhaps what you called bitterness. It didn’t help that my mother pledged fealty to the highest bidder. When at last she emerged from her cocoon as a butterfly on the arm of this man who insisted he would step into the role of father, well, I wasn't buying it. Not that he was selling anything. Frank made it clear from the start that his position was not negotiable. No amount of performance or simulation was going to sway him one degree off course. His professed mission was always that he was trying to build a family—his four boys plus me and Mikey—and his objections to the status quo were those conditions deemed disruptive to the process.

Most of those conditions came in the form of human beings. When he first showed up on the scene, Mikey was going through this phase of throwing temper tantrums, going on hunger strikes, peeing on the curtains, and setting his bed on fire. Frank had a habit of talking about us in the third person as if we weren’t in the room, and I remember him telling my mother, Michael will be fine. Sharon’s the one with the real problems. So by that time I was getting some pretty conflicting feedback in terms of my wonderfulness, judgments that made me suspect that the opinions held by my father and grandfather—oh, and the teachers at school—were outliers.

At least I was in good company, because Frank had a problem with just about everyone in our lives, from my mom’s most far-flung friends to Ma and Pa and Julie and Big Mike. For starters, he had a real issue with us spending too much time with my grandparents. My grandparents! In Frank’s defense, he placed equal blame for the imbalance on my mother, understanding that Ma and Pa filled the gap of guardianship that yawned open after Dad died. Nevertheless, my grandmother was appalled. As the rules changed and new boundaries were erected, I remember her saying, You know, I didn’t exactly steal you kids.

I get that it was disruptive to have my grandparents stop by unannounced, swooping in to carry me and Mikey out to eat when now there were four other kids in the house. But Frank went much further than that. He had philosophical issues with my family. He branded the dynamic situational ethics and dubbed it the Greenberg Curse. It came down to this: Frank Fuhrmann was a man of absolutes. Life and everything it comprised fell cleanly under the columns of right and wrong. No mitigating circumstances applied. He preached integrity above all else and painted us a picture, telling us that if his family were starving and there were a million dollars that didn’t belong to him piled high on a table, he wouldn’t touch a penny of it. (Spoken like a man who never had a starving family, I know.)

Situational ethics meant allowing one's definition of right and wrong to be determined by what’s expedient, and that, of course, was wrong, wrong, wrong. And that is what he saw in the way Pa and Big Mike operated: the fact that my grandfather folded up shop and fled to Fort Lauderdale owing the labor unions half a million dollars; my uncle and Ray tapping into the electric pole outside of City Hall to get free electricity during the renovations. Frank’s argument was ostensibly not merely philosophical; he claimed he didn’t want me and Mikey influenced by that behavior because, in his words, they won’t see George’s seventy-hour work weeks, they’ll only see the shady deals.

Frank’s issues with people ran far and wide. I don’t know the details of what he and my mother discussed, but I can tell you she walked away from life-long relationships with friends and relatives rather than risk Frank’s condemnation. Her first cousin, a woman she’d been so close to growing up that they were called the Greenberg Sisters, was one such casualty. Upon being banished, this cousin said, Well, I hope he never disappoints her because now he’s all she’s got.

God: And did he?

Ray: When I was helping George fold up the factory, we were working around the clock. One night, we took a coffee break around two in the morning and I could see he was upset. It took a lot of convincing—guys like him don’t open up easy—but he told me what was going on with the bird Gigi’s mother was planning to marry. Turns out this joker had a problem with George and Roz spending too much time with those kids. And he had an issue with the kids spending the night with their grandparents or their aunt and uncle. George never let on to the details but the look on his face was just tragic. Then he shook his head and tried to smile, said he was just exhausted and probably overreacting. But in that instant, something in his gaze shifted and I swear, just for a minute, the guy looked homicidal.

It was the following winter when Gigi first sat with me in the work wagon outside what little was left of the Metro. When I asked her how George was doing and she told me about the lung cancer, she looked up and it was the damndest thing. It was like George looking at me that night all over again—first this terrible sadness and then pure hatred. A minute later she started to cry. I had no idea what was going on.

God: How is that possible?

Gigi: The one thing he never disappointed in was providing what my step-brothers called the Gold Coast lifestyle. But it was far from a happy marriage. Hell, even back in the ‘70s, no one who knew them gave the marriage six months. On our side of the family, people thought she was nuts taking on five guys. But beyond that, there was this constant bickering back and forth between them, although that might be too mild a word for it.

They’re both very bright, which was something they openly admired about one another. But even Frank’s boys acknowledged how difficult he was. German, my mother would cluck under breath. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about was one of Frank’s standard and frequent retorts. And my mother took the bait every time. There’d be a big sigh and she’d suck the air in through her front teeth. You know what, Frank? This went on constantly. And it wasn’t as if my mother was always on the defensive. Even Ma told my mother that she didn’t have to take him to task on everything. You’ve just got to let some things go, she tried to tell my mom.

The thing I always believed would save them was the way they looked whenever the other one walked into the room. They lit up. Both of them did. There was such a spark between them.

God: Sounds more like an inferno.

Ray: God, I've gone through this in my head a thousand times. Gigi and me, we always had this connection. Always. When she vanished in ’87 without even saying goodbye it was like taking a knife to the gut. Then I find out a hundred years later that she thought she meant nothing to me and that’s why she left. That all those years it hurt her thinking I didn’t love her. To this day, I don't understand how she could have believed that, but that was my torment, coming to understand the damage I’d done. If I had it all to do over again, there’s so much I would have done differently.

God: Wasn’t ’87 the year Tina gave birth to your son?

Gigi: I hated being a kid, hated myself for being a kid. As if there’s an age requirement for emotions to be valid. And it might have been nice to have a father again if he didn’t happen to be the one thing standing between Ray and me. In truth, the two were mutually exclusive. The parents pulled me one way and I broke and ran in the opposite direction. But they were bigger and stronger and they had the last word.

God: But now it’s your turn. Speak.

Chapter 3 - City Hall

Ray: Got a call from the Chief—heard the phone ringing from the cuyb where I parked the work wagon. They’d found a place, new location for The Metro. Building was a historical landmark, the old Flushing City Hall in Queens. He had this genius idea to turn it into a dinner thee-ate-er—Manhattan-style cabaret entertainment in Queens. He was a real chef, that bird—how else do you get to be 300 pounds—so of course it would have a big dining room downstairs, and a barroom, then a two-hundred-seat thee-ate-er upstairs.

Nothing with the Chief was ever easy. It being a landmark meant they couldn’t outright buy the place; they had to bid for a thirty-year lease on it. And they couldn’t just tear shit down and renovate. A lot of it had to be restored. Well, he hadn’t called me soon enough ‘cause I’d have taken one look at the place and told him to run like hell.

The building hadn’t been occupied in seventy-five years. There wasn’t a standing wall or ceiling. When I met him there the following day, he was grinning like a possum eating horseshit, had the keys dangling from his thumb. What the hell do you need keys for? I asked him. Every window was busted out; we could have climbed in. Which was apparently what three generations of vandals had done. But as soon as I saw those keys, I had it all figured out. He didn’t call me to get my advice. He called to enlist me in this genius idea that me and him would renovate the place!

God: Good thing you didn’t quit your day job.

Gigi: Sure, I was excited we were going to see Julie and Mike. But I was more excited that Ma and Pa were back. That said, my bohemian aunt and uncle weren’t as much fun when Ma and Pa were around. When it was just me and them, they’d let me smoke their Marlboros and stay up as late as I wanted. I mean, these were the relatives who’d sit at the kids’ table at holiday dinners and coach us in spooning Jell-O into the grown-ups’ shoes lined up at the door.

But at the moment, I was just over-the-moon at being able to spend time with my Pa, who, incidentally, looked like hell, pale and gaunt. Even his London Fog raincoat sagged off his shoulders in dingy folds. This was a guy who people compared to Burt Lancaster, who even the kids at school thought was the most glamorous grown-up they’d ever met. He certainly was the coolest. Do you remember Mr. Wizard, the game he’d play with all my friends?

This was in elementary school, right around the time Dad died. I’d be at some kid’s house in the neighborhood and tell whoever was there that I knew this guy named Mr. Wizard who could read minds, and that I could it prove it to them. I’d tell the kid to pick any card out of a deck and show it to me. Then I’d call Pa at the place. Middle of the day, my grandfather’s running a freakin’ factory and here I think nothing of calling him three or four times a week to play Mr. Wizard!

So my grandmother or one of the other bookkeepers in the office would page my grandfather and when he picked up, I’d say, Is that you, Mr. Wizard? And he’d start this slow chant: Diamonds. Hearts. Clubs. Spades. When he hit the one the kid was holding, I’d start talking again. Uh, yes, Mister Wizard, my friend Biff is here and he can’t believe I know someone who can actually read minds, so I told him I’d call you and have you tell him what card he’s holding. Ace - two - three - four . . . My grandfather recited the cards and when he got to the right one, I’d just say, Thank you, Mr. Wizard, I’ll put Biff on the phone now. And Biff would turn white and damn near drop the phone when Pa called out his four of spades or whatever it was. Brilliant, huh? Absolutely brilliant. God, but how I loved that man.

God: You love him. Present tense. The love doesn’t end, you know.

Ray: Quit my day job? Are you kidding? Someone had better be working. Julie and the Chief were used to running a cash business, closed the bar every night and stashed decks of it at the bottom of the Frosted Flakes carton on top of the refrigerator. But it took us two years to open for business and there had to have been 250,000 cash dollars poured into the place without a dime coming in. To this day, I swear that’s what pulled them apart. I tried to tell them, God, but they had their hearts set on creating this big entertainment venue.

One thing I can say, the Chief was a working bastard. Fourteen, sixteen hours a day. Julie, too. And I brought Ricky and his friends, turned out a whole generation