Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things Read online

  Emily and I were headed to the mall one day to finish our Christmas shopping. She had just gotten her driver’s license and was practicing. Bruno was building a nearby building; I saw his company sign posted on the street in front. “Let’s do a stakeout!” I squealed. I made her drive over to the construction site, but I lost my nerve when I saw Bruno climbing out of an excavation hole and ducked under the dashboard.

  Emily was horrified. “Ohmygod, Mom. This is so high school!”

  I said, “I know, but I never acted like this in high school. In high school, I was mature.”

  Bruno saw the car and walked over. He was wearing heavily insulated canvas Carhartt overalls against the bitter wind. He put his hand on the car roof and ducked down to say hello to Emily. I quietly righted myself and said, “I… I just dropped something on the floor.” Emily rolled her eyes.

  On Christmas Eve, Bruno left a package on the porch. Very late that night, after church and long after Emily had gone upstairs to bed, I sat alone in front of the fire and opened it. It was a small painting of a luminous bunch of white bleeding heart blossoms, spilling from a vase. A friend of his had painted it. The heart-shaped blossoms were tumbling, delicate, and wild. I carried the picture upstairs and put it next to my bed.

  Christmas morning, I went to my mother’s house very early to help her get up and to get Christmas breakfast started for my sisters, their husbands, and all of our children. Mom’s illnesses all collided that morning; she stayed in her bed in the living room in front of her fireplace and we tried to have Christmas around her. There, surrounded by wrapping paper, we decided that she needed to go to the hospital, and so the day became about something else: carrying her out through the snow, getting her into a hospital room, and taking shifts to be with her. I was driving to the hospital for my shift during her overnight stay when Bruno called me. I pulled over and unleashed all of my anxiety, frustration, worry, and sadness. While I was talking to him, he pulled up beside me, got out of his truck, and held me close while I sobbed.

  We started telling people about our relationship. I broke the news to my mother, aunts, and sisters. At Wednesday morning breakfast at the Queen Diner, we all clinked our coffee cups together in a toast. Bruno came to my mother’s house to visit with her. Like Emily, Jane was polite and acted delighted. But really, what are you supposed to say when two people tell you they’re in love? It’s a setup without a punch line. In addition to his mother, Bruno had eleven siblings. He called each one of them, and then he started working outward from there, calling aunts and uncles, family friends, and business associates in the building trade. He even reached an elderly cousin in Germany who didn’t speak English.

  Bruno had three daughters living with him: Angela, seventeen, Dominican by birth and living with Bruno and his family from the age of ten (Bruno adopted her when she was fifteen); Michaela, also seventeen, born to Bruno and his former wife; and Avila, age eleven, adopted from China when she was a baby. Clare, Bruno’s oldest daughter, who like Emily was nineteen and had just started college, lived with her mother nearby during school breaks. Bruno and I never declared ourselves with our children the way we had with other people. We both assumed that our children knew that we were together and would be staying together. Because all of our children behaved well around us, we were certain that they would welcome our relationship. We were loving and involved parents, but we were also blind to the impact that our coming together would have on everyone in the family.

  Chapter Eight

  Let Me Get My Puppets

  There is no more fearsome creature on the planet than the daughter of a single father. I know this because of questions I receive for my advice column from pissed-off and vengeful daughters. I have also seen at least forty Disney movies pivoting on this ancient plotline, including both the original and the remake of The Parent Trap. I figured that even if Bruno’s lovely girls were inclined in my direction, fairy tales, YA novels, and basically every other outlet in American popular culture would have taught them how to terrify a woman in love with their father.

  Bruno and I slowly brought our relationship out into the open. We met for lunch at the Queen Diner, equidistant between our houses. We further closed the distance by squeezing into the same side of the booth together. We talked on the phone during the day and, when possible, got together after dinner. I mainly stayed away from Bruno’s house, because he had his hands full with his three daughters—Angela and Michaela were juniors in high school, and Avila in fourth grade—but also because I was afraid of them.

  These daughters were unfailingly polite to me, but I knew they were giving their father the business at home in the way that adolescents do: through door-slamming and occasional tantrums, expressing their own anxiety by punishing their father. It would be easy to interpret this as a child’s desire to interrupt a parent’s happiness, but I recalled my own experience as a teen with a single parent. The lesson was later reinforced by my experience as the divorced mother of a teen, who occasionally acted out. I knew that:

  Our children do not care if we are happy.

  Our children care if they are happy.

  Introducing any new relationship, certainly one that seems from the outset so serious, upends the tender balance in a one-parent household. Hell, my little Emily (then age four) had briefly acted like a maniac when I brought home a cat. The very few dating relationships I had engaged in while a single mother were conducted offstage; I didn’t introduce my daughter to any men I might have been feebly trying to know. But Emily had occasionally given her stepmother a hard time, and as the wronged first wife, I watched this from the sidelines with uncharitable satisfaction. Now, fifteen years later, the tables were turned and karma was handing me a bitch-slap. Furthermore, I suspected that if Emily hadn’t gone back to college after winter break, she would have found a way to join forces with Bruno’s daughters to attempt romantic-interruptus.

  Throughout the late winter, I got to know Bruno’s girls as gradually as possible (given the speed at which my relationship with their father was progressing), mainly through attending school events with Bruno and watching his daughters do things. Angela was a cheerleader for the basketball team, Michaela ran track, and Avila sang in her school choir. Sitting next to Bruno in the high school gym, we would let our knees touch. Zing. We kept our PDA to a minimum, but there was no mistaking the look in our eyes as we gazed at each other.

  Bruno wanted to keep our relationship, um… chaste, because he is Catholic as well as old-fashioned and had been giving his older daughters the somewhat quaint “no sex until marriage” talk. This was also part of our campaign to try to do everything differently. Frankly, this was one area of our lives where I did not want to do anything differently, but I respected his views and his desire to court, date, and get to know each other intimately before getting to know each other intimately. When one partner wants to go full speed ahead but the other wants to wait, the person who wants to wait usually prevails. I decided to trust him on this score, that delaying physical intimacy would be a good thing for us. At times this was a tough agreement to keep, and yet we did.

  After Bruno and I had been seeing one another for three months, I decided to test the mettle of everyone involved by taking the family on a road trip to New York City. It was mid-March. Angela, Michaela, and Avila came with us, and Angela brought a girlfriend. I had bronchitis and was both feverish and wracked by coughing spasms that sounded like a Canada goose being sawed in half. But a friend had a large furnished apartment in New York City, which I rented for the weekend. I had purchased tickets to The Lion King for this Broadway-starved family. Bruno and I were in love and thought we could conquer anything. Even New York.

  The weather in the city was bitter and March dank. Crusty gray snowbanks lined the sidewalks, which were scattered with leftover road salt and newspaper tumbleweeds. The girls did what groups of girls do: They wore each other’s boots and took turns being alternately wonderful and difficult. When they were done cycling
through their impressive spiral of feelings, they cycled through them again. Whoever wasn’t sulking at the time got to be my sidekick, walking beside me while I gasbagged on about the wonders of the city and delivered wracking coughs into my sleeve. Although I knew he had been to New York before, Bruno didn’t seem to have any particular point of view or reference to the place. Not one thing was special the way I wanted it to be, but New York always does that to me. New York dangles its spangly charms like a tennis bracelet in a Tiffany window but then snatches its magic back like a homeless guy peeing underneath a Tiffany window.

  The Lion King was family-friendly, epic, and expensive. The show features magnificent giant puppetry. As the massive puppet giraffes came striding down the aisle and onto the stage, it occurred to me: What else was I doing but trying to put on a puppet show for this family? The last time I remembered working so hard to ingratiate myself was in the early ’80s, when I worked on the overnight news desk for NBC. Part of my job was to call and wake up a prominent broadcaster whom I’ll call “Brandi” at 4:15 a.m. for her Today show live shot. Every morning I staged a mini-opera while I begged Brandi to get out of bed. “Brannnnn-d-iiiiiiii! It’s me, your wake-up pal, Amy! America needs you to tell them what’s going to happen today!”

  My epiphany during The Lion King alarmed me. I was embarrassed by my eagerness to please these teens, whose ages, combined, barely equaled my own. Two of the four girls seemed moody and silent throughout the show, and afterward no one mentioned liking it. Instead, everyone only wondered what we would be doing the next day. Bruno held my hand.

  That night I lay awake on my friend’s couch in the living room (the girls got one bedroom, Bruno the other). I could hear Bruno snoring just beyond the door. It was a particular form of old-fashioned hellfire to be so close to my beloved and yet not be able to simply crawl in with him and call it the end of an exhausting day. Our no-sex rule was working my last nerve.

  The next morning, the group looked at me with an expression that read: “… And?” So I flew into action and acted like, “Wait—let me get my puppets!” I took them to Dylan’s Candy Bar, which on a Saturday was packed, sticky, and depressing. I took them to Serendipity, but the wait for a table was two and a half hours, so instead we ate lunch at an upstairs burger emporium on 10th Avenue, the New York City equivalent of sharing a slice with Pizza Rat. Then I force-marched the whole group to Roosevelt Island on the tram. The Roosevelt Island tram is my full-on New York fantasy thrill ride. I love to dangle over the river, pondering the magnificent skyline and listening to the soaring Gershwin soundtrack in my head.

  As the tramcar dipped and swayed and the girls blankly gazed out the window, I entertained a brief fantasy that the cable would snap and dump me into the river. Only me, mind you. I would swim to shore by myself, and Bruno and his daughters would go on without me, which was, after all, what they seemed to be very good at. I suspected I wouldn’t be missed.

  Once we got to Roosevelt Island, I instructed everyone to disembark and then walk around the tram station to wait for the ride back to Manhattan. This only underscored the fruitlessness of the entire journey.

  After that, I basically gave up. The sun was starting to go down. We would be leaving the next day. I led the group into a gourmet market near the Queensboro Bridge, and we picked up bread, cheese, and fruit. We returned to my friend’s apartment, and I collapsed on the couch. Now it was my turn to sulk. After a while, I heard cabinets opening and voices in the kitchen, and when I hoisted myself up, I found all of the girls in the dining area, with bread cut and cheese and fruit laid out on plates. They pulled up a chair and made room for me at the table. We all relaxed into something that resembled normalcy. I stopped tour-guiding and started listening. Michaela announced that they all wanted to go to a movie that night. Without us. They had found a theater, figured out how to get there and back, and wanted to shake us off for the evening. I suspected that they were also deliberately giving me a break, and I was grateful.

  After they left, Bruno and I wandered through the Upper East Side. It started to snow, giant snowflakes that floated like feathers against the streetlights. We found a little Italian bistro in a brownstone with the entrance located below street level. Steam had crawled up the restaurant’s windows; the little place looked like a Tuscan postcard. We ate together, leisurely and languorously. It was our first New York City meal, just the two of us. I dropped all of my nonsense and pretense; it seemed I’d left my puppets in my other coat. I stopped waiting for New York to wow me and leaned back into enjoying this wonderful relationship, which seemed to be growing like a buried daffodil bulb, getting ready to push up through the snow.

  Until this dinner, Bruno had passively tagged along while I charged around the city. After dinner, he walked me up East 84th Street. We stopped on the sidewalk and he asked me to look across the street. There, dominating the block, stood the massive and elegant Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, which Bruno’s great-grandfather, Wilhelm Schickel—architect of many New York landmarks—designed and built in 1898. After admiring his ancestor’s handiwork, we decided to take the girls there for services the next day, Palm Sunday, before we left the city.

  Bruno looked down at me. I was hopping from foot to foot in the cold. “Amy… I have to ask you…” (Bruno has the habit of announcing a question before he asks it.) “Where do you think our relationship is headed?”

  I stopped hopping. I hadn’t thought about where our relationship was headed. It just seemed to be… headed. Going full speed somewhere. I waited. I looked down at the sidewalk, momentarily at a loss for words.

  “I… I want to get married,” I blurted out. Until that moment, I don’t think I’d possessed one serious thought about marrying Bruno. In seventeen years of singlehood, I had never once actually entertained the idea of remarriage. But the certainty seemed to have been there all along, waiting for me to shut up long enough for it to express itself.

  He said, “That’s what I want, too. So will you?”

  In my mind, I danced. I danced, and sang, and spread my arms wide, twirling like Maria von Trapp on a heather-blanketed mountaintop.

  “I will.”

  As we stood on the sidewalk, embracing, I asked Bruno to do me a favor. I didn’t want to share our news with anyone. I wanted to walk around inside our private snow globe for as long as I could. I said, “No planning, no wedding talk, no telling anyone until Dairy Day.” I’m not sure why I chose Dairy Day, which is in June, except that I love the parade in our little town and thought it somehow fitting to attach our happy news to a parade that celebrates cows. Heck, maybe we’d decorate our own Bruno-loves-Amy float and parade it down Main Street.

  The next morning, we coerced all of the girls to get dressed for the Palm Sunday service at St. Ignatius Loyola. We walked up its broad limestone staircase and entered through the massive and grand bronze doors. The interior of the stately church was a startling baroque mosaic of pinks, yellows, blue, and gold. Bruno and I sat in the pew, bookending the girls, and worshiped together, knowing what no one else knew—that we would become a family. My eyes were drawn up, following the slender marble columns toward the vaulted ceiling. There I saw a springing forth of light and color, like celebratory fireworks blooming overhead.

  Chapter Nine

  Life Renovation Offer

  FROM: Amy Dickinson

  TO: Bruno Schickel

  March 2008

  Dear Mr. Schickel,

  Thank you so much for your recent offer to assist me in renovating my life. I understand that you are a very busy person and that your services are much sought after in the tricounty area and beyond.

  You mentioned that you don’t do estimates, so my understanding is that this is a firm bid. I’d like to review the terms as I understand them.

  LIFE RENOVATION: You have agreed to help me renovate my life. This renovation will include but not be limited to:

  FOUNDATION: Building a sturdy foundation using the best materials you have at yo
ur disposal. As you may have noted from your limited inspections of my structure (thank you, by the way), this particular foundation has its strengths and weaknesses. Various alterations over the years may have compromised it somewhat, but I hope you have found that it is basically sound.

  RESTORATION: Finding the hidden gems in my existing structure and restoring, rebuilding, painting, and polishing them, if necessary.

  Insulating and protecting the premises against cold and other outside elements.

  Inspecting and stoking the furnace, if necessary.

  EXTERIOR: On the exterior of my structure, you will add:

  Beautiful trim and beautiful children.

  MAINTENANCE: You have agreed to perform all the work personally and not subcontract this work out to others. You will personally maintain the structure for a lifetime.

  PAYMENT: You will not charge me for this life renovation but may expect payments from time to time, to be negotiated separately.

  I am so happy that we will be working on our beautiful building project together. You are probably aware that I have interviewed other builders over the years for this particularly challenging job and have found all of them sorely wanting. When choosing contractors, I decided only to work with the best. I feel lucky that you happened to be available for this particular job.

  In return for my life renovation, I offer to love and cherish you for the length of the contract. I will also be nice to your kids, pets, friends, and immediate and extended family, take long walks with you, lie under the stars with you, bake pies for you, laugh with you, sing to you, love you to the core, steal glances at your handsome face, and in general let you complete me. I will also do my best to complete you.

  I will continue to let you make me happier than I ever thought possible, and I will return your affection and attention in equal measure.