Jaime Franchi's Open Salon Blog

The Day in Question

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 12:06:28 -0400

I don’t know how your mind works, but inside mine is a courtroom. On the most difficult nights, when sleep fails, attorneys plead their arguments, present their evidence, and rarely, if ever, rest their case. Sometimes I worry that I’ve been too hard on my children and lawyers build cases for and against my reactions to their misdeeds. Sometimes they debate a long-over argument I’ve had with my husband. But mostly, when sleep is elusive and the prosecution is feeling particularly accusatory, it’s because something during the day has reminded me of my father, and the courtroom drama plays out the scene of our last phone call on the fourth of July.

When I was small enough to believe everything my parents told me, my dad said that the fireworks that lit up the sky were for me, to officially kick off my birthday celebration. My birthday wasn’t until the seventh, but with the first scream of a bottle rocket in the night’s sky, it was my party. History courses later taught me about the Revolutionary War and our independence from the British, but deep in my heart, right up until my thirty-third fireworks show, I believed it celebrated me. Literature courses taught me that this was called hubris. And hubris, I learned, was often the catalyst that brought down tragic heroes.

The last time I saw my father was Father’s Day. I’d brought my kids to meet him at the Italian restaurant we frequented when I was growing up. My youngest was two then and needed to be chased throughout the place, throwing pasta and crayons. She grabbed for the cutlery on the table from her highchair, and when I removed every sharp instrument from within her reach, she shrieked so loudly that every diner stared me down. I don’t remember what we talked about, if we were able to get a word in between the reprimands and our meal. I waved off dessert and gestured for the bill. Cut it short. It was Father’s Day for my husband too, after all. I gave my father a quick air kiss to his cheek as I wrestled kids into car seats in the unseasonably hot, humid air. I climbed into my driver’s seat, and he into his.

And then I got out. I walked to his driver’s side door, pulled him out of the car, and hugged him for the last time.

I let go too soon.

I see that now.

The Prosecution calls its first witness. It’s me. I can recount the Fourth of July, almost four years past, with surprising detail. How the weather was picture perfect in the morning, a slight breeze keeping off the sweat of humidity. And how surprised I was that my boy, four years old then, hadn’t woken up with a fever. When we put him to bed on the night of the third, it was a foregone conclusion that he would be sick and our holiday a bust. That was when I had called my dad.

He’d answered on the first ring, like he was waiting for me. “Hey Baby!” he said, happy. He was always happy to hear my voice on the other end of the line. You might think that would have prompted more calls from me, but it didn’t. I told him that since Jacob was sick, we’d be staying in for the Fourth.

“Maybe we’ll grill up burgers in the backyard, watch the fireworks from the driveway.”

He said yes before I even got the question out. “That would be lovely,” he said, a delicate word from such a solid, masculine man. I could still hear it: “Lovely.”

And I felt good, satisfied, content to have offered the invitation; to have been the one of us three grown children to call. The invitations coming his way had been dwindling. Clinical depression had made him no pleasure to be around those days. He’d often come unwashed, and talk about aches and pains. He’d given up trying to find a job and had just gotten approved that spring for social security, even though he was only 62. At Easter Sunday at my sister’s that year, a family friend had said to him, “You’ll get more if you wait three years.” I actually rolled my eyes when he replied, “I won’t live that long.”

Someone mimed a violin. I laughed. I wish I hadn’t.

July 4, 2009 was a bright, sunny day, made more so by the fact that the sickness that had plagued him the night before had disappeared from our little boy. Suddenly, the day held infinite possibilities. There was a pool party, a barbecue. I had to take care of a few technicalities, and then we’d be off.

I left to run some errands, like food shopping for a dessert to bring. It was at the car wash that I made the call, killing two birds, so to speak. Dad picked right up again. He was happy again.

“Jacob’s feeling better,” I told him.

“That’s fantastic!” he said. His enthusiasm is a detail I wish I could forget.

“We’re going to head over to our friend’s pool party instead,” I told him. A thought floated past me - invite him? - but I chose to brush it off.

His voice faltered a bit, but he rallied. “That’s okay,” he said, his voice higher than usual. “I’ll call somebody. I’ll figure something out.”

We hung up, and I held my cell phone in my hand. I stared at it for a long time after we’d hung up, hesitating. I thought about calling him back, calling off the party at the pool, disappointing my friends and the kids. But the guy with the towel in his hand called to me in a Spanish accent. He nodded toward my minivan, indicating that it was ready. Though my dad’s voice weighed heavily in the pit of my stomach, I drove away.

And never heard that voice again.

An hour into the party, the sky darkened and clouds rolled in. Rain washed out any fireworks for that night. Water poured down the windows, making designs in their currents. I held the phone in my hand again as I watched them. In my defense, I wanted to call him. But I felt too guilty.

I have no defense. I am guilty.

The phone call wouldn’t have mattered. I think he was already dead by then, but we knew for sure when we found him on the night of the sixth.

My birthday marks the anniversary of the day we made arrangements and chose the spot where we buried him. I mark the holidays with the significant details of my ending relationship with my father, how it all went down, and as spring wound itself into summer last year, the third since he’s gone, I felt thick and heavy with regret.

On Independence Day, we drove down to the ocean, both kids in tow, for a good old American day of warm beer and sandy chips. We were meeting friends down there, the old kind who knew my dad and understood. There’s a special affinity I hold for people who’ve met him. They could appreciate what’s missing. They know.

The air was thick as we went over the bridge, the fog making it hard to see past just a few cars ahead of us. We could hear the crash of the waves on the shore, but the fog obscured the water. The tape of our last conversation played in my head on repeat, even as I tried to beat it back with the grooves of Bob Marley and the yells of arguing children. It was a lousy way to say goodbye to my dad, even if I had no way of knowing that this was what we were doing. I wanted so badly to rewrite that script, to extend an invite, to change my words, to alter the course of events. But I can’t.

Try as I might to conjure happy memories, and there are plenty, the time of celebration between Father’s Day and my birthday brings back that phone call and those feelings, always lingering under the surface, bubbling to the top with every glass of wine or doo-wop song on the radio. But as I drove through the fog on the bridge that morning, it felt as if the sky was reaching down to greet me, lowering itself to my level just to plant a reassuring pat on the back. Or maybe I can let myself believe it was a hug.

And maybe, if I’m really kind to myself, I can feel that the fog was Heaven itself, descending upon me with a verdict of neither innocence nor guilt.

But with forgiveness.

Scout's Honor

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:05:19 -0400

I’m going to preface this by saying that I am no Angelina Jolie. While you might find yourself tempted to draw comparisons between me and that sexy orphan saving-woman of the world, try to remember that although there are some striking similarities, I’m just your average, you know, soccer mom.

But where Angie and I overlap is in how we’ve sacrificed in our daily lives to defer to a greater cause. Whilst Angelina had put off her wedding to Brad Pitt until every citizen of the United States could exercise their own equal rights to marriage (I would totally have done that too - Brad would just have to wait for me), I too forfeited personal advancement in deference to the greater good.

Because September has always acted as New Years to me, I started off this school year with some resolutions. I would be a better, more organized, more involved mother. I would make my kids proud. I would volunteer at bake sales, join committees, show up to PTA meetings, and sign on as class mom. My daughter started Kindergarten this year and was excited for her first year of cheer, which met for practice twice a week from August through November. My son played soccer, attended religious school, and moved up from Tiger to a Wolf Scout. Since I work from home, I have the luxury (on good days, I call it that) of taking them to and from each practice, game, event, and meeting. By the end of December, I’d stuck to my resolutions, for the most part.

It turns out some people had noticed.

At the December monthly den meeting for the Boy Scouts, speeches were given at the beginning, per usual. We were all a little anxious for the leaders to finish about fund raising results and for belt loops to be given to mark accomplishments in bowling and good manners. Santa Claus was expected to ride in on the town’s shiny red firetruck with presents for the kids, and they were all rowdy as a result. My daughter was practically vibrating next to me, so I was only half-listening when they called for a new committee chairperson. It seems some of the Webelos will be moving up to Middle School next year, and they’re taking their parent volunteers with them.

In between the Scout Master’s disappearance and Santa’s magical appearance, my son’s Scout leader turned to me. “He was talking to you, you know,” she said.

I looked to either side of me. “To me about what?”

“To be the next committee chairperson,” she said, a smile on her face atop the beige scoutmaster button-down she wore, decorated with patches and buttons, each marking progress made by our troop.

“What does a committee chairperson do?” I asked her, for two reasons. The first was to stall, and to process what was being asked of me. The second was also to stall.

“The organize all of the den meetings, to coordinate activities, that sort of thing,” she told me. And then she waited, expectantly. I looked at the current committee chairperson, a gentleman dressed impeccably in his own beige uniform.

I shook my head. My throat constricted a bit as I realized that I could not ever consider taking a leadership role of any kind in the Scouts. That meant that I was breaking the resolution I’d made early in the year. But there was a stronger resolution inside me that knew, with certain finality, that participating would break something in me.

“You can’t be a leader if you’re gay,” I said to her.

Her eyes widened, as if I’d just come out.

I hadn’t.

“Are you gay?” she asked me.

“No,” I said.

She shrugged as if to say, “Then it doesn’t matter.”

But it does matter. If my son was raised in a loving home with me and a female partner, then I would not be allowed to wear the uniform. If I preferred soft breasts to hard chests, the Scouts would disapprove, and I would not be invited to be a leader. The fact that the Scouts approved of me, deemed me safe even as news of a 23 year old scout leader from Garden City was arrested for possession of child porn, filled me with discomfort. It seemed that “safety” and “straight” were synonymous to the Scouts. I didn’t feel like I deserved some kind of extra bonus for inclusion into their club just because I happened to prefer men over women, sexually. And if my son ever voiced a preference for the same sex, he would be unceremoniously rejected, no matter his prowess in bowling, or his sparkling manners (the sparkle might be the first tip off), or years of service to an institution that has shown him only the merits of community, hard work, and honor.

I tried to explain this to my son’s leader, and realized I sounded overly serious in the festive atmosphere. She said she would probably agree with me, if she stopped to think about it. My conclusion was that she didn’t. Maybe most of them didn’t. I didn’t believe that I was in a room of hard-hearted bigots. Most of them probably felt the same affection for their gay brothers and sisters as I do. I took a look at the leaders around me, decorated with badges and pins. The women didn’t seem especially feminine, nor the men masculine. They pronounced “we-blow” without any sense of irony. They just seemed like people who loved their kids.

Like I do.

So why then, do I feel so conflicted? If my son wasn’t so excited to be a part of the Scouts, didn’t enjoy the camping trips and the projects so much, if the kids weren’t so cute and earnest, if the leader didn’t introduce so many interesting projects, I would have pointed my kid way away from an organization that has taken such a strong anti-gay stance. But he does. And I do too.

But I cannot put on that uniform, to wear that badge that says that I support their bigotry. I don’t. And for the first time this year, in breaking the resolution that I would get more involved in my children’s activities, I felt like it was working. My cupcakes were found lacking at the bake sale and my class-mother duties suffered because it turns out creative craft ideas are not my strong suit. Yet, I finally felt like I was a mother my kids could be proud of.

As for Angelina, she ended up marrying Brad Pitt after all, at the behest of their children, despite the lack of nationwide same sex marriage legislation. Just like me, her kids propelled her to an institution where not all were welcome.

Chalk that one up to another in our long list of similarities.

The End of the Beginning

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:05:38 -0400

I respond “Yes” to everything: every Pampered Chef, Tastefully Simple, Tupperware, Lia Sophia party invitation that comes my way. It’s not that I wouldn’t rather drive a nail through my eyes than sit in a neighbor’s living room listening to a well-rehearsed spiel about the latest domestic Ponzi scheme, but rather because some obscure Tuesday night a few weeks into the future doesn’t seem real to me. I don’t believe, in my heart of hearts, that, say May 21st, will actually happen, not while I’m standing in my kitchen in April. I make simultaneous commitments, often promising to be two places at once. It stems from my lack of ability to say no, but also from this time-doubt condition I have.

I’m the youngest of three, and I’ve always surrounded myself with an older group: my husband, our friends, our parents. A consistent fuss has always been made about my age. So much so, that it became part of my identity. I’m the baby of the group, of the family, and often of the office. While others celebrated the milestones of graduations and big birthdays, mine were usually parties marking beginnings: bridal showers, baby showers, champagne clinked at the purchase of our house, a dinner out to mark a first day at a new job.

My husband was pretty well-seasoned by the time we met, in his mid-thirties to my twenty-one. As such, I had a lot to learn. The basics: paying bills, keeping my car insured, figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I rented an apartment in a carriage house behind a restored estate. A two-bedroom that I thought I’d negotiated to a rent that I could afford, but found out later, was being supplemented by my now husband. I painted the walls lavender and bought wineglasses and invited my girlfriends over to gossip and play house with me. When my friend Toni’s cat had kittens, I adopted one and brought her home to my apartment and boyfriend, marking the beginning of my adulthood. I was now paying rent and responsible for another living being.

They managed to surprise me for my bridal shower, a big to-do in a fancy restaurant where we drank watermelon martinis while I opened an enormous pile of gifts. We honeymooned in Italy because we had money then and knew that life was going to interfere soon. We knew that now was the time to traipse all over Europe, before life grew too complicated with kids to ever come back. I humored the notion, and enjoyed the sun-drenched days of walking cobblestone streets filled with art and wine, to lava-sand beaches that burned my feet, and the icy-cold depths of the Mediterranean. It was June of 2002 and being New Yorkers and newlyweds brought us lots of attention. Nine months earlier our part of the world lost our collective innocence. It marked the end of an era. But that June was a beginning for us.

When we said goodbye to Italy, I made a vow to Maria and Anthony, the owners of the last hotel in Positano where we’d stayed for ten nights that we would come back on our fifth anniversary. Being in the first thrusts of matrimony, I couldn’t imagine that day, but it made me feel better about leaving. But by then, we’d added another kitten to our mix, and I was anxious to get back to feeling their weight on my chest and the vibrations of their purrs against my body while I slept.

As luck and circumstance would have it, I was in the heavy throws of child labor on our fifth anniversary and Italy was not in, or anywhere near, the picture. Baby bottles and breast-feeding, infant carriers and product recalls, pediatricians and preschools consumed the next few years as I jumped, feet-first, into the lifestyle of young motherhood. I wore yoga pants and pushed a jogging stroller. When my second was born, I upgraded to a sit and stand stroller - where the baby reclined, but my toddler could stand on a platform. We called it his skateboard stroller.

I went back to school and completed my bachelor’s degree and started graduate school. Somehow, the days started to pile up behind us. In one year, we lost one of our closest friends to a worn-out esophagus and a hospital glitch. Then my father died.

The darkness and ugliness of death making pock marks on the clean whiteboard of our marriage and lives felt like abominations. They didn’t fit my idea of what our life was or was supposed to be. When we were talking on the phone one afternoon, my dad and I discussed the new senior housing that he was to move into. “This is a new phase,” I’d told him.

“My last phase,” he said. I didn’t argue. He was right.

Even though he was only sixty-two, he’d written the narrative of his life and could visualize, with a clarity that I will never understand, the end. Not so me. Up until his funeral, I didn’t really believe, not in any actual sense, that it was possible for my father to die. I couldn’t picture my life, not without both parents on the front lines ahead of me, insulating me from my own death by their single layer.

And yet it happened anyway.

He was young. Our friend was young. And so while their deaths hurt, they felt like asterisks, side notes in the arc of our time, our marriage, our lives. They didn’t define us.

We considered making plans for a trip for our ten year anniversary last year, but they were half-hearted. Something about being married for ten years didn’t compute. I couldn’t identify with a marriage that long or what it implied about me: that our marriage wasn’t young, and by extension, neither was I. No, I looked into a three day cruise to the Bahamas, or a car trip out East on Long Island. But since I never truly believed that the day would come, we were left unprepared when it did. We ended up in a local restaurant, the kids with us, throwing utensils and arguing while my husband and I made eyes at each other over their heads that said, “This is our life now.” We grinned over spilled milk and clinked glasses of champagne.

I’ve heard people say, “Small children equal small problems,” implying that the older our kids get, the more complicated their lives grow, the higher the stakes, the more serious the consequences of their problems. My husband has always dreaded that time, and has repeated that phrase to me at different points over the years. Rather than worry about teething and separation anxiety, there are state tests next year. My son wants an X Box to play “Call of Duty” with his friends and we have squared off in the fight of, “But everybody else is doing it!” My daughter has prematurely adopted teenage slang and a penchant for lipstick and tops that hang off her shoulder. They traipse off to school for six hours a day, out of my sight. I trust that there are no gunmen heading for their school .

Still, the days of driving, of sex and drugs and drinking are far off, and try as I might to imagine their elementary school sized legs long and gangly as teenagers, I cannot. They are young. And by extension, goes the thought, so am I.

My husband doesn’t think the way I do. He’s not as optimistically unrealistic. Maybe it’s because he’s had to play the role of the elder in our marriage, or because he’s actually older. Whatever the reason, when I called him from the vet’s office yesterday, the kitten I’d adopted way back in the beginning of us on the silver antiseptic table in respiratory distress, he was more broken up about putting her down than I was. “This feels like the end of something,” he choked out.

I knew what he meant. The beginning of the end: watching our remaining parents grow older, our children go through more serious hardships, our marriage itself seasoned now, no longer young. But I hate to think of it that way, while we’re in thick of the middle of our lives. I don’t want to anticipate the end, even if it were possible for me to do so.

And so we’ll move forward, making plans for days that astonish me when they arrive, love our kids and each other, and try to appreciate the parents and pets we have right now. We’re less green definitely. No longer innocent.

This is the end of our beginnings. But not the end of us.

Top Ten Things I Do Not Care About

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:05:14 -0400

Chris Christie’s lap band and his weight before or after. I care more about what comes out of his mouth than what goes in it.
Where Tamerlan Tsarnaev is buried. I saw a group collecting money to ship him to Russia. Sorry childhood cancer, I’ve got more important things to donate to? Bury him in Boston. Piss on his grave if it makes you feel better. Or throw him in the Hah-Bah.
Hillary Clinton’s wardrobe and/or haircut.
Where the Obamas vacation.
Who Mark Sanford’s mistress is or where she lives or why he considers her his soulmate. How he got the majority of votes over Elizabeth Colbert Busch, however, interests me immensely.
Ariel Castro’s bad childhood, his drunk mother, his abusive father or whatever sympathetic tidbits the media dredge up.
What you think Thomas Jefferson would have thought about AR-15s.

What you think Jesus thought about homosexuality.
What she was wearing the night she was raped.
Sports.

Originally posted on www.jedmorey.com

Ugly Tax: A Vomit-Whore Love Story

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 21:02:29 -0500

In our twenties, birthdays meant limo rides from Long Island into “the city.” Seven to ten girls, whomever my sister and I were close to at the time, most repeaters, but always some new blood. The girls were always much cooler than I ever was - my relation to my sister was my ticket to entry. My hair never quite reached the heights or lengths of their’s, my clothes never as tight, my eyelashes shorter and lacking. Still, I was accepted as Lisa’s sister, and then liked on my own.

Our collective memories from those days all included Tony the limo driver, whom we hired every January. Tony was tall and tan (even in January) - his olive oil skin a Boehner-orange. He wore pinstriped shirts open at the collar and escorted us wherever we wanted to go. The first year, our first stop was at Smith and Wollensky’s - a fancy steak joint where we took turns kissing the maitre d’ upon arrival before we escaped to the ladies room to pee off the beer (for them) and vodka (for me). Hair fluffed, lipstick replenished, we headed back out the door (smooching the doorman) and into the stretch, vamping for pictures (natch.) That doorman could count on us the next six, seven? years running, on making the traditional stop, kissing our traditional kisses. We were nothing if not dependable.

The clubs we ended up at were fun and loud. We danced on bars, flirted with strangers, and created stories that we could tell each other on the ride home, and rehash over and over until January rolled around again, and Tony and Smith and Wollensky beckoned. Most of the time, I paced myself, and saved the vomiting for when the limo pulled up to my house in the dawn’s early light. But there was the time I never made it into the club at all. A combination of starving myself during the day to look best in my outfit that night and mixing drinks that should never be mixed sometimes took a toll on me. So much so that one year, the most I experienced of the city was the green metal can in front of Polyesters that served as the receptacle for that night’s fun. I missed everything, sleeping off my drinks in the limo: the fist fight the girls got into over a poster of Eric Estrada, everything.

There was a night when I made it into the club, met a number of men all named Vinny, each of whom bought me several mixed drinks. Dances were danced, conversation screamed over booming music, hair consistently fluffed in bathroom mirrors. I, for all intents and purposes, was awesome.

Until I stepped outside to get some air. The fresh, cold air hit me in the face so hard, concentrating the liquor, spinning my head into a Gravitron of nausea. There was no green metal receptacle available. But miraculously, amazingly, propped up against a door was a sizable paper bag, the perfect barf bag, placed just so for me. (The next morning, the fuzzy recollection and my experience as a deli counter-clerk had me sit straight up in horror, knowing that I had puked in an early morning bagel delivery.)

Ahh. My twenties. To be young and irresponsible.

It’s a good thing that’s all in the distant past.

For her (let’s just say not twenty- or thirty-something) birthday this year, my sister had an in. She could get us a free limo, procured by a guy she called “Gangsta”, and entrance into the most exclusive NYC nightclub. So exclusive that I had never heard of it. It was table service only, which meant that we had to purchase four bottles of booze for $250 each. The thousand dollars was to be split between ten girls, making it a bargain of a night. We dressed, we primped, and we ate (barely anything) and drank (champagne cocktails before the limo, vodka in it.)

The cool girls around me don’t intimidate me at my advanced age. Luckily I am entrenched in maturity and at a place in my life where I do not fear the judgement of others. Except, you wouldn’t know that when we discovered the music situation in the limo. There was a hookup for an iPod and a setting for one’s Pandora station. Excitedly Dawn, a girl who would never have deigned to look my way in high school (not that I care about that stuff anymore) grabbed my iPhone and plugged it in.

“What the fuck?” she said, when my stations came up on the screen for all to see. There it was. Neil Diamond Pandora. Loudon Wainwright. Journey. For the love of all that is holy, I had a station dedicated to everything Air Supply.

I drank up.

At the club, the doorman took a look at us girls who are decidedly not in our twenties any longer. A quick word on his walky-talky and the asking price of entry was now $1500. I’d like to think it wasn’t an ugly tax. I’d like to think that I’m still hot. I’d like to think Air Supply is cool in some retro-nerdy way.

But even I know better.

Our table for ten was cut to a table for five and the four bottles of liquor were now at $400 apiece. To my mind already clouded with fuzzy judgement, I felt that charging four hundred for a thirty-five dollar bottle of Ketel One meant one thing: that I needed to drink every single drop. So as not to waste that money. Does that make sense to you?

Me neither.

The rest of the night is a strobe night blur, with dancing and screaming conversations. At some point, as in every time I have more than one sip of liquor, I confessed my undying love to each of my friends. I told them how happy I was that we were friends. I told them each every single thing I loved about them. I am the opposite of a mean drunk. I am an absolutely lovely drunk.

Until the cold air hit my face and I relived my twenties, face in a plastic bag, heaves and tears, the whole way home.

Ugly tax, indeed.

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