First three chapters:

THE PROS & CONS OF NEIGHBORS

by

Lorraine Devon Wilke

One

            One is obligated by moral duty to love one’s child. One is not obligated to like them. A conundrum when it comes to my fourth, my third daughter, Teresa – or Tessa, as she insists we call her now.

            Recently I searched through my journals of the past several years looking for an entry about her but could find nothing. Perhaps that’s not so strange, as she has been an enigma to me since she finished high school. As I look back, it seems her senior year was the pinnacle of her life…from that point on little has happened to bear out this great promise.

            Convinced of her own abilities, which do seem apparent or, at the very least, measurable, she decided to try for a job in the movies or TV out in Hollywood. She insisted that if after two years she had gotten nowhere, she would try something else. Well, it’s been more than three years and she has nothing to show for it all but some acting classes. In September she will be 26.

            So what’s the problem with Teresa? For sure, I don’t know. I feel a great disappointment. Not simply because she’s failed up to now, but that endowed with so much talent she hasn’t employed it for anything useful –- and she doesn’t show signs of improving.

      January 15, 1999 – the journal of Leo Curzio:

#

On a day when all she wanted to do was mourn the father so often longed for and buried just hours before, Tessa Curzio sat on the bed in which she was surely conceived and felt posthumously sucker punched.  She looked down at the twelve-year old journal splayed across her lap and realized it truly was a Pandora’s box come to life; a dubious gift from a dead man who had little to say in life but clearly plenty upon departure.  She snapped it shut and flung it across the room with enough force to shatter her mother’s purple vanity lamp.

Damn cheap Target vanity lamp.

A clock that followed it to the floor lay in the broken glass keeping time. 5:17 pm. The beginning of the next uncomfortable phase of her life.

Two

Not even a private tantrum could go unnoticed. Not in this house.

As if on cue the door flew open and oldest sister Michaela, tight chignon and Talbot classics all in place, swept in with a frown and a large tray of hors d’oeuvres. Only four years apart, she and Tessa were opposite in so many critical ways they struggled to be even marginal friends, a status they’d admirably put in abeyance as they both tried to “rise above” during this challenging weekend. Noting the shards on the worn Oriental she’d vacuumed just earlier that morning, Michaela stifled a retort only when she caught the look on Tessa’s face. “Oh, honey, I know…I know,” she whispered, miscalculating the motive behind the lamp’s demise. She left her tray on the dresser and came to Tessa with sympathetic arms. “It’s so hard to lose him…I know.”

With Michaela patting her rigid shoulder for what seemed far too long without comment from somebody, Tessa finally took a deep breath. “Um, Mickie…thanks…I just need to be alone for little while longer, OK?”

Michaela, relieved, pulled quickly away. “Absolutely, take your time. Just do me a favor and clean up the lamp before you come back down. Mom doesn’t need anything else to be upset about today.” Rising, her eyes caught the box of journals Tessa had pulled out from under the bed; the tone shift was sharp and immediate. “Wow…really? Well, don’t let her know you’re already rifling through Dad’s stuff. She’d actually like to look through everything first, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Tessa shot her a withering glare. “It’s just some…books.” A swift jerk of her ankle kicked the box back under the bed. Michaela picked up her tray and with an icy shot back, swooped back out the door.

Tessa had found the box of mildewed date books at the behest of second eldest sister, Suzanna, a sibling of a totally different color. Stylish and edgy, with a brashness that veered perilously close to rude, Suzanna was an ass-kicker and Tessa adored her. She was also the agent provocateur of the family; a role sparked decades earlier by their parents’ appalling response to her ill-conceived pre-marital pregnancy. That this blessed event jumped the wedding by less than a month did little to mollify Leo and Audrey Curzio’s Catholic fury, a potent force that shattered their relationship with their daughter who they denounced as a whore at the time (her divorce five months later did not help matters). Suzanna was never able to forgive them; even years later when they offered awkward apologies about dogma and overreaction. Revenge was exacted by her phenomenal success in business, far exceeding that of her father’s, and by raising a lovely boy who was well adjusted despite the early fetal months of bastardhood.  She had also taken it upon herself to keep the family legacy honest, dispelling rose-colored revisionism wherever it cropped up. Exasperated by a uncharacteristic bout of Daddy-idealizing on Tessa’s part the night before, Suzanna had suggested that her little sister find a box of the journals he so copiously recorded and read at least one of them, “particularly 1999” with its insights about Tessa specifically. “You need some perspective,” Suzanna had ominously declared.

So Tessa had dutifully looked and regretfully found the box under the bed. Apparently there were other boxes somewhere, no one knew where, but this one held at least nine or ten year’s worth of minutia spilled onto the pages of yearly date books given to employees of the book binding company where Leo had spent the bulk of his adult working life. Date books meant for appointments and note keeping but utilized more tellingly by Leo for his journalistic ramblings over the last 45 years. As instructed, she found 1999, which now lay on the floor amidst dust and broken purple glass.

Suddenly exhausted, Tessa curled up in the perfumed sleep habitat of parents who now seemed oddly unknown, realizing for the first time, after many years of wondering, that she finally knew what her father thought of her. Interesting how a dead man could so easily suck breath from a living solar plexus. Like the mythical cat and the unsuspecting baby.

A quick rap on the door snapped her reverie. She sat up and fluffed her hair. “Who is it?” she trilled casually.

“It’s me, Tess…what are you doing in there? Is someone with you?” Ronnie, Tessa’s younger brother and closest sibling, was already slurring as he cracked the door and squeezed his face in, goofy with a grin. “Are you having sex on Mom and Dad’s bed to assuage your aversion of death?”

Tessa couldn’t help but smile. There was just something about Ronnie. “Go away, idiot.”

“OK, sis, I got it…you’re processing your grief by rolling in Dad’s sheets. Gross but oddly titillating.”

“Ronnie!”

“Hey, who am I to judge? Just don’t take too long, whatever you’re doing. Mom’s tilting and Michaela’s about to snap.”

As the door clicked shut and he stumbled back down the hall, Tessa squelched her annoyance at the second interruption of the hour, realizing, mostly, that she didn’t want to go back downstairs…down into the swirling eddy of sobbing, dramatic people seeping slowly into the small Chicago brownstone to mourn a man who now felt like an imperfect stranger. The rising cacophony was avoidable, signaling the arrival of aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, various brothers and sisters, and certainly a priest or two. Clearly no choice but to postpone her internal combustion for a more solitary time.

Straightening the bed, she was perversely pleased to see mascara streaked across her father’s starched pillow case. She retrieved the assaulted journal from the floor and sat at her mother’s vanity, opening the pages once more to Leo’s crinkly handwriting: “I feel a great disappointment. Not simply because she’s failed up to now, but that endowed with so much talent she hasn’t used it for anything useful.”

At least he said she had talent.

Three

Chaos reigned downstairs. Children, large and small, ran about screaming and laughing as if this were a birthday party. People were crammed into every room of the house and the ambiance was oddly electric, as if they were waiting for a rock star who would never show up. Mounds of food covered the table, Leo’s favorite Sinatra music soundtracked the event, and a significant crowd huddled around the weeping Audrey who, despite honest grief, was clearly comforted by the white-hot focus of her nascent widowhood. Michaela and Suzanna whisked about being the “big girls,” making sure everyone was taken care of, while oldest brother and now “man of the house” (as Audrey had anointed him last night), Duncan, held court in the dining room, expounding on his father’s virtues to a rapt group of church groupies. Baby sister Bella, red-eyed and clearly reverted to “baby girl” mode, was tucked into her mother’s side, while Ronnie slumped in a corner chair across the room, taking it all in with cynically dry eyes. He was the only one who noticed Tessa coming down the stairs with a look that signaled the plates had shifted. She squeezed into the chair with him. Ronnie gave her a blurry once-over.

“Why do you look like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you want to throw up.”

“I was reading.” A long pause until it finally struck him.

“Is that what you were doing up there? You found the box?”

“I did.”

“You read 1999?”

“The first page.”

“You wanna drink?”

“Yes — no…it’ll just give me a headache.”

“Christ, don’t you already have one?” He put his arm around her and squeezed; the shot of empathy shook her resolve for a second, threatening to unleash either a crying jag and or an unseemly burst of some other hysteria that would likely bring down the house. She thought better of both. At that moment Michaela approached, again with the hors d’oeuvres.

“Is that thing attached to your arm?” Ronnie asked as he stuffed a crostini into his mouth.

“Somebody’s got to help around here, Ronald, you might want to try it. Hungry, Tess?” Tessa’s face told her she wasn’t. Michaela reached down and patted her shoulder, still convinced of their shared grief. “We all miss him, Tessa, it’s just going to take time.”

Ronnie lurched out of the chair, stomping off to the bar set up on the breakfront. Michaela looked after him, bewildered. “What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s…turmoiled.”

“More like loaded. Little shit. Have you talked to Mom yet?”

“What do you mean, yet? Of course I’ve talked to her. ”

“I mean, since we got back here.”

“No…why?”

“She’s on her third drink, carrying on that it wasn’t a stroke, that the doctors don’t know what they’re talking about, that she’s pretty sure the last prescription probably poisoned him…I wish Duncan had been quicker to put out that fire.”

Duncan was a highly successful product liability attorney who’d made a name and several million in a case that involved a child’s death caused by a drug later recalled by the FDA. He had become somewhat of a celebrity and certainly an expert, garnering public support and a pulpit style that edged too often toward high-pitched pontification. Ronnie once likened him to couch-era Tom Cruise (an uncanny comparison that did little to win him Duncan’s favor). There was talk of politics. Duncan’s beautiful wife, Amelia (with a startling resemblance to Gisele Bündchen, she’d once commented that Tessa and her sisters had “peasant bodies”), as well as his two exemplary teen boys, regarded him as a bold and righteous crusader. Tessa thought he might just be an ambitious prick. Probably sour grapes; Duncan’s financial and general life success stirred bona fide envy in her, as did his inexplicably close relationship with the father who seemed far less interested in his other children. Her current pique had to do with his receptiveness to certain church folk who’d ridiculously queried, “What really happened to Leo?,” as if some grand conspiracy was at work rather than a simple, unfortunate stroke. Duncan’s consideration, however brief, lent weight to the notion, which seemed particularly foolish in light of Audrey’s predilection for drama. He ultimately quashed the theory, but the damage had been done.

Tessa looked over at Duncan now on a roll in the adjoining room and shook her head. “He can’t help himself. Ask a question, get a speech. And what’s wrong with dying of a stroke anyway? Is there some shame in that? Would he be any less dead?”

Michaela sighed. “She’d prefer he not be dead at all.”

“She’d prefer he not be so mundanely dead. A faulty drug, some exotic disease, anything to get the sainted man one more paragraph in the obits.” Tessa looked over at her weeping mother and just shook her head. “He’d still be dead so what the hell difference does it make?”

Michaela threw her a sharp look. “A little harsh, don’t you think?”

Tessa sank deeper into the chair. “Sorry. Guess I’m not enjoying much of this hoopla.”

“Our father just died, hoopla is called for.”

Suzanna approached with drink in hand and a scowl that showed some accord with Tessa. “I may embrace the family legacy and become an alcoholic.”

Michaela snorted. “Why? Oxycontin lost its appeal?”

“Don’t be a bitch. I only use Oxy when there’s opportunity to enjoy the buzz. Suffice it to say, I’m drug-free at the moment.” She plunked down in the chair across from Tessa with a sigh. “She just asked me for the tenth time if I’d thanked her lately.”

Michaela knew the thread. “For giving you a perfect father? I’ve gotten that a few times myself.”

“She better not ask me,” Tessa growled.

Both girls looked at her with surprise; Suzanna took the bait. “Are your teeth actually grinding?” Before Tessa could answer, the light dawned. “Oh my God, you found the box!” Suzanna squealed somewhat sadistically. “Did you find 1999?”

“What are you guys talking about?” Michaela had missed the conversation the night before.

“The journals…Dad’s journals. After that ridiculous wake with Duncan’s homage to our sainted father and all the rest of that hearts and flowers bullshit, I figured Tessa could use a reality check on dear old Dad. She’d never read any of his journals so it seemed an opportune time.”

Michaela bristled; clearly the subject was not one of universal agreement. “Christ, Suzanna, can’t you even let your little sister grieve without pulling her down into your muck?”

“Have you ever read any of them, Mickie?”

“No, and I don’t intend to. Sneaking into private journals after a man dies is pretty close to unconscionable in my book…but maybe that’s just me.”

“Don’t be an ass. He wanted us to read them.”

“Really? And who told you that?”

“He did! On the cover page, read it: ‘I want my children to know me better than I knew my own father…these journals are my gift to them.’”

“Why do I find that hard to believe?”

“Because you’re a denier. I can show you, for God’s sake. Stop chasing the good daughter award for five minutes and I’ll show you.”

Michaela picked up her tray and huffed off. Suzanna looked at Tessa, rolled her eyes and finished her drink. “You need to talk about it?”

“Not yet.”

“Yeah.” They sat in silence for a moment; then both got up and walked into the crowded living room.

(To be continued…..)