Monte

The plane was supposed to start boarding at noon but was delayed two hours, so my mother, grandmother and I decided to grab some coffee and a light breakfast at TGI Fridays (it was the only restaurant in the airport). Unfortunately, they had stopped serving breakfast at 10, oddly enough, so my grandmother and I settled on a cup of tortilla soup while my mother stuck to coffee.

It turned out to be one of those dinner table chats that I remember and love about my childhood. The kind of intimate discussion that makes you wish you could capture it all on tape to watch and rewatch for the rest of your life. My mother and grandma talked of births and deaths and food and of the old New York, the New York I remember from childhood.

Every January, my grandfather would close the family restaurant for vacation, and all his daughters reserved January for their wedding days. My mother got married in January, my aunt Eleana got married in January, but when I asked about my aunt Josie’s wedding, my mother laughed and said, “No. Josie wanted to get married in October.” I asked why, but then the answer dawned on me. Josie didn’t want to get married in October—she had to get married in October before people, including her own mother and father, noticed she was pregnant. My mother recounted Josie’s wedding day when she had to sew the stitches that had come undone from Josie’s expanding belly.

“So what about my mom?” I asked grandma. “What terrible things did she do when she was young?”

“Oh, that reminds me!” my grandmother said. “Your sister found the Playgirl pictures in her closet!”

My jaw dropped and I turned to my mother. “Playgirl?! You had Playgirl magazines?!”

My grandmother told the whole story: When my mother was in high school, she somehow got a hold of a Playgirl magazine and tore out several of the pages and glued them to the wall inside her closet. I couldn’t believe it! My own mother looking at Playgirl magazines!

When we finally arrived in New York, I couldn’t wait to see this for myself. As soon as we entered the house, I rushed to my mother’s old bedroom, opened the door to her closet and crouched inside to get a look at her stash. I couldn’t believe it. After 35 years, the old pictures were still there, a dozen pictures of pee-pees and wee-wees all plastered to the inside of her closet, right behind a shoe rack bolted to the wall.

I can just imagine my mother, a young girl, opening her closet door each morning to pick out shoes and blowing kisses to the naked men on her wall before skipping off to school.