Between Courses

By day I am a waitress in my father’s Italian market and cafe.  By night I am something else again – “Aunty Fun” to my thirteen nieces and nephews.  Right now it is day, in fact, my birthday, and I’m standing at the top of the back stairs that lead from our apartment down to our store.  I’m stalling.

            You’d stall too if you had a family like my family, a family that puts birthdays right up there with national holidays.  You know the kind.  My sisters hire singing birthday-grams, they “balloon” people at work, they stage surprise parties, and once, on the occasion of my brother-in-law Ed’s fortieth birthday, my sister, Rosa, the rich one, rented a billboard a block down from my father’s store and had Ed’s face plastered on it for God and all of Chicagoland to see, and it read: “Hey, Ed, Thank God you’re not dead!  You’re forty instead!”

            My thirtieth was this pseudo-surprise soirée hosted by my four sisters right downstairs in the store.  And I have to admit, it was a beautiful party, all cozy and candle-lit, with just my family and a few close friends.  But that was then, ten years ago when my life was still an unopened envelope, and this is now.  The way I see it, there should be a law prohibiting birthday parties after the age of thirty.  They could stick it in there with the law against cruel and unusual punishment.

            This year I had a little talk with my sisters, asking them to please save the fancy parties for their kids.  My nieces and nephews are the recipients of the world’s most lavish birthday parties.  My oldest sister, Rosa, the rich one, actually rented a hot air balloon once for her daughter’s eighth birthday.  It was tethered, but still . . .  Another year she had a dress-up theater affair where she and Ed escorted another daughter and five of her friends in a limo to see Donny Osmond in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  And just last month my other sister, Marina, the hypochondriac nurse, rented out a movie theater for a private showing of the latest Disney film for her son and forty of his closest friends.  I say to my sisters:  “These are not parties, these are extravaganzas.”  But when it comes to celebratory events of any kind, my sisters don’t listen to me.

            They promised me, this year, just a family dinner at Rosa’s.  They promised.  But they’ve promised before.  I’ve found out the hard way that when it comes to surprise parties, anything goes:  lying, forgery, voice disguise, and, I’m ashamed to say, once, in a desperate last-ditch effort to save the surprise, my sister Rosa, the rich one, even stooped as low as kidnapping.  That’s what I said, kidnapping.  She abducted my baby sister Angie right out of her dorm room.  Angie’s roommate was this close to calling the police.

            So you can see why I’m hoping that downstairs I’ll find only a few helium balloons, a hand-lettered butcher-paper banner reading “Bona Ano, Sabina!” and my mother’s famous birthday bread.  But I’m worried because my sisters are sneaky.  They can’t pass up the opportunity for a good party, especially for an “eth” birthday party -- twentieth, thirtieth, fortieth.  Add to that the guilt my sisters feel because they are married and I am not, and they are mothers and I am not. 

            Only Mama knows how I feel about turning forty.  To be perfectly honest I’ve been nervous about coming face to face with it.  There are so many things I thought I’d have by now: a husband, children, a home, a bridge group, a car pool, a stroller.  Reasonable cravings, to be sure.

            I’m leaning here against this cold plaster wall, deep in thought.  For the most part, I live right here in the present, day to day, minute to minute, without mothball nostalgia or airy hopes, because what is hope if not expectations with confidence.  And I have neither.

            I promise you, I will not whine about my life. There are no complaints there.  Nowadays people consider themselves lucky if they had two straight, non-alcoholic, non-abusive parents who raised them.  I consider myself blessed because I have two loving, faithful, hard-working, unselfish parents and four wonderful sisters.  Not to mention an extended family including aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews.  You won’t find a loser in the bunch . . . well, I do remember some whispering way back when about a second cousin once removed on Papa’s side who was an inventor, which in our family is good, but I guess he invented some kind of kinky sexual device, which in our family is bad, really bad.  But other than him . . .        

            And I promise you I won’t complain about the family business.  My sisters and I had to pull our own weight, even when we were very young, but we certainly weren’t held prisoners; we weren’t chained to a stove.