Cold Pink Wine

The first time I met Mary Lou she held a bottle of cold, pink wine in her left hand. I opened the front door and she grabbed my head and pushed it into the side of her face.
“Oh, I have heard all about you,” she said and seemed to want to take my head away from me.
We ate breaded, fried veal cutlets and mashed potatoes and drank the pink wine that night. I was about eleven. It was nearly two years after my mother served my father divorce papers. And Mary Lou was one of her first new friends, post-divorce friends. The red and white kitchen lit up like it never had and it was the crash of a new life—the light of a huge presence.
When my mother was officially divorced, she was convinced to go to Pinky’s, one of those piano bars that divorcees and widows go to the minute they find themselves alone at a kitchen table. She went with a group of women she met at Leon’s beauty shop in Grosse Pointe Farms. On her first night, the forty and fiftysomething women left my mom there without a ride, in an attempt to get the divorcee who hadn’t had sex in lord knows how long laid. But she was just petrified.
These women became my family.

Mary Lou, though, became like a second mother, for a while. Mary Lou smoked, drank and said fuck all the time and even got my mother to utter it a few times.
For the next seven years, I sat at our red formica kitchen table and listened to Mary Lou tell me and my mother stories. They met at Pinky’s. Mary Lou lived in Detroit in a highrise. We lived in an aluminum sided new house in a suburb filled with old mansions and ivy colored stone walls. My dad was in construction and could never buy one of those “old houses.”
Mary Lou eventually came over regularly on Sundays for dinners of sauce, meatballs and sometimes more breaded veal. She’d end up on the couch fast asleep, her tiny belly extended. On Sundays, we started eating around 3 and didn’t end until about 5. Then at around 7 or 8 my mom would fry up some dough and we would dip them into bowls of sugar. This was one ritual that stayed the same pre and post divorce.
Mary Lou had long gray-black hair that swooped into a lengthy curve above her right shoulder. Her skin was the color of the raw, fleshy inside of an eggplant and her eyes, the gray of freshly laid cement, and she always wore high heels and lipstick. Her lipstick was not applied that often and would gather in round balls at the corners of her fleshy lips. She fascinated me. Her hands were knobby and brown and adorned with gold and silver rings bursting with jewels of many colors. Her fingernails were long and curled under and were always painted in bright reds.
I used to take photos of us three sitting there at the red formica table. My brother usually ate before us or as quickly as he could and left the table, in fear of all the women, I think.
It was a totally warped Norman Rockwell scene. And even then I knew it so I used to do things to slow down the time just to try and understand it all and to see it. These women drinking and laughing and chain smoking and eating and burping and talking about dicks and fucks and all that was a very new occurrence in the kitchen and I seemed to get more out of it than I did out of my social studies books or even my friends at school.
Needless to say, Mary Lou seemed like the most interesting person I had ever known. She wrote poetry and while reading it now makes me think oh, hallmark cards, at the time the poems spoke to me and my bleak, depressed little self as if they were written by Auden.
Mary Lou used to model for the Detroit Auto Shows. They called her and the other models Ford Girls. One Sunday she brought over her Ford Girl photos. She eventually became a buyer for Montgomery Ward’s and traveled frequently to New York City to shop for clothes for the store until she was busted for shop lifting. She had one daughter who was gay and lived in San Francisco with her lover and another who lived in Michigan and had at one time dated a man who became Frisco on General Hospital. Mary Lou rocked. So, I would go to the kitchen and slowly fill glasses of water to slow down the time and listen to them talk without me in front of them.   
Some of their stories were about their own childhoods. These women who seemed so old talked about smoking cigarettes the first time, their first kiss. Trolley cars in Detroit. The crowded streets in the city that are now deserted. Other stories were about Pinky’s. One night Mary Lou told my mother to tell me the story about Dead. But my mother stayed silent and just looked over at Mary Lou. Now my mother tells the story all the time. But when Mary Lou started it, she told it like this:
“Dead had the hots for your mother. Or, really, your mother’s breasts. He had to be about 90 years old. His face was so wrinkled and yellowed you’d swear he was a corpse.  He barely ever moved from that corner. He’d sit there and order... What did he order?
“Vodka,” my mom said, not pronouncing the d.
“He’d get drunk and just fix his eyes on those udders of your mother’s. Then he’d slowly move off his chair and shuffle over to a seat next to your mother. Your mother would whisper and make obscure words up. Dead thought her boobs were talking to him in some secret language. He’d get all frustrated and have to leave.”
“He dropped dead at the bar,” my mom said.
“Hoochie oochie ow wow wow,” Mary Lou whispered and stared down at her breasts and shook her shoulders. “Do it, Mary-ooch,” she said.
“I can only do it when Dead is around,” my mom said.
But that was enough for me, anyhow. I pictured my mother shaking her breasts in some slobbering old guy’s face at the bar. It was all so hilarious but I would never know how hilarious it was unless Mary Lou told me.
Before Mary Lou, me and my mother spent most of our time avoiding the kitchen table by sitting and eating only in the family room or she would sit in her bedroom, chain smoking with a bowl of food in front of her. I would sit at the red formica table usually alone or in near silence with my brother if he wasn’t at football practice.  She would make these amazing meals in what seemed like five minutes -- tender breaded filet mignons with a cap of tomato sauce and potatoes baked with parmesan cheese and onions, pounded, breaded veal with mashed potatoes and pasta with broccoli and bacon. Eventually, she made her Chicken Divine, her divorce dish. On Sundays, though she would always whip up a huge pot of sauce with meatballs and sausage and then another pot without meat. Then she’d serve me and take a small plate for herself to her bedroom.
When Mary Lou started coming over, my mother sat at the kitchen table. When Mary Lou was over, my mom would even add her own anecdote here and there. Mostly, the anecdotes were about some crazy thing my father did or about one of his old friends who sometimes came to Pinky’s. “Of course,” my mom would say, “they were cheating on their wives.”  Then she’d end each tale with, “He was bombed.” Mary Lou showed us the pleasure of the pu pu platter and tropical drinks at Hoy Tin on Jefferson Avenue in Detroit. We’d sit in a high top round table in a glassed in part of the Chinese restaurant that overlooked the river. My mom ordered scotch, Mary Lou had wine and I was able to order one of those drinks that came in a voodoo glass.
I joined Mary Lou and my mom and their other friends at Pinky’s sometimes when I was a teenager, usually for a birthday or just any kind of celebration, which there were many. I ate stuffed mushrooms which came plated in a circle around a bowl of rich ranch dressing and then there were the hot fried mozzarella sticks. The bar was brightly lit with a line of overhead lights that traced the shiny black bartop.  There was an alcove near the back of the long bar dotted with tiny round tables holding short candles.  Near the front door was a baby grand piano surrounded by bay windows that looked out onto Jefferson and just past that the murky Detroit River. Roy played piano.
Mary Lou sometimes sang with Roy. Her standby was “Send in the Clowns.” It made most of the patrons cry, my mother included. Mary Lou and my mother were quite a pair. My mother, the fallen good Italian girl in Grosse Pointe, with her K-Swiss tennis shoes, cannon-ball sized breasts and shield of bleached blond hair and Mary Lou, a size 2, always in heels, Jewish and living in a high-rise on the Detroit River. They cruised men at the bar but mostly my mom just went for the friendships she was forming.
Mary Lou loved my mother’s sauce. Her tiny stomach would stick out like a pumpkin after dinner and she would fall asleep on our green and red plaid couch.
As I became a surly teenager, I counted on Mary Lou to remind me that I was not just any teenager but oh so special and to not let my mother “bring me down” as she said. She would take me aside and whisper, “that woman is going to bring you down. But you do what you have to do.” My mother was a little possessive of her only daughter, her youngest. Mary Lou taught me to drive. We took her car down and around Lake Shore and Kercheval and she pretended to not be afraid. She would just mention how uncomfortable all the joggers and bikers looked along the lake. “Why would you want to do anything that made you look like you are in such pain.”
When Mary Lou got sick me and my mother barely mentioned her sallow color. My mother used to just pass her the Pepto Bismol if she grabbed her stomach.
My mother decided to move from Grosse Pointe to Clinton Township, about an hour away from Mary Lou. Too far for someone with cancer to drive. It was mostly to get away from the house my mother shared with my father. But also she was feeling the old world pull of her brother and sister who told her she should be closer to “the family.” Clinton Township, unlike Grosse Pointe, was filled with Italian grocery stores and people with last names like ours.
This is also when my mother started to take baking seriously. She made Italian S cookies, all butter and flour with a bit of vanilla, a bit like a cross between a savory butter cookie and a biscotti.  She made them every chance she could. For someone’s birthday, for holidays, even Halloween and Valentine’s Day. She sat alone at the new round glass kitchen table and smoked until the buzzer went off, then she limped to the oven. She always had a slight limp since she fell to the floor of the garage when she was cleaning out the attic over 20 years ago. She would pack the cookies in a big tupperware container and separate each layer with wax paper. They never broke even when she sends them to me now in Brooklyn.
The last time I saw Mary Lou she told me to try not to watch too much of my internal TV. Internal TV was what Mary Lou always called my mother’s inability to talk about what was bothering her.
Mary Lou was in the hospital, that last time. Her face was sunken and yellow, nearly the same color as her coffee and tobacco stained teeth.  Her bald scalp was hidden under a purple bandana. She wore bright red lipstick that stuck to her now thin shineless lips.
“Mary Lou is going to die,” my mother said to me as we drove home. When we got home we sat at the kitchen table together in front of a cup of coffee, my mother’s full ashtray and a coke for me. The defeat in her eyes looked like what I had seen in old women dragging a lifetime behind them in their Kroger bags at the grocery store.
“I’ve been so selfish. I haven’t seen her that much lately. I was just so tired. Too tired,” my mom said. “I hate hospitals.”
“She knew that,” I told her. 
I smoked in front of my mother for the first time after the funeral.
I was hoping you’d end up like her, not me, she said.

Italian S Cookies
Ingredients:

2 cups of Crisco
2 cups of sugar
6 eggs
1/2 cup milk
7 cups of Five Roses Flour
10 tsp. baking powder
1 or 2 T. vanilla

Beat sugar and eggs until creamy. Add Crisco and beat some more. Add milk and vanilla.
In another bowl, mix flour and baking powder. Add this mixture one cup at a time to the egg, sugar and Crisco mixture. Mix well.

Flour your hands well and make round balls. Form the balls in 2 inch rolls and then into S.

O(form ball)   |(roll into line)    S(form S)

Bake at 375 for 10 to 12 minutes. Cookies should be slightly brown around the edges, but not completely brown. Cool and shake powdered sugar on each cookie. Or, you can make a glaze (but do this only at Easter, please).

To make glaze:
Mix together 1 cup of powdered sugar, 3 T. or more of milk and flavoring of your choice.

**This recipe makes 90 cookies.

Comments

[jane]

oh man, i'm crying here. excellent story Rose. love it.

[morgen]

my heart hurts from this. it may be the bourbon and seven I've been drinking, but it may also be the ineffable melancholy pain of missing something I never had--good writing makes me feel that way. don't ask me to explain that one.

[judes]

Happy birthday, Rose!

[jane]

and at least, crisco!!!! i never really understood what crisco is and what its use is. if it is just vegetable oil why is it white?