Don't Sing at the Table Read Free Page B

need eight to ten hours of sleep, so early to bed is a house rule. “It’s time for the Lily White party,” Viola used to say around eight in the evening. Some party. Sleep was part of her master plan to get more work out of you the following day. This good habit sustains me, and now I’ve passed the habit along to my daughter.
    A particular summer day at Viola’s house stands out in my memory. I am one of seven children, Viola is one of six herself, so we shared the big-family dynamic. Therefore it was rare that we were alone, just the two of us. But on this particular day, we were. I was in college and was spending the summer with her, and had a job as a fry cook in a local restaurant. I had one day off a week, and Viola looked at my day of rest as an opportunity to get things done around the house.

    Viola: the hostess with the mostest.
    So I washed her car.
    Cars in particular, their care and maintenance, were important to Viola; they were an outward sign of opulence and another gleaming ray of the sun called the American dream. She told me about my grandfather’s car on their first date, and how much she admired it (running boards, rumble seat). Various photographs of her from the age of sixteen feature her in the foreground, and a car gleaming in the background, the ultimate sign of working class success.
    Throughout her life, she took care of her cars like jewels. Cars were markers of particular eras in Viola’s life, and memories were built around them. In the late 1920s, Viola drove a Nash Roadster. My grandparents owned a Packard in the 1940s, the “it” car of the moment, and then moved on to Cadillacs, the ultimate stature vehicle, American designed and built, like the blouses in the factory. When I was little, their 1962 Cadillac Sedan de Ville was charcoal gray with fins, with a pale silver leather interior. Her 1960s work car, a Ford station wagon painted dull gold, was often filled with bundles of blouses that needed sleeves turned, or tickets affixed. When her grandsons bought her a car later in life, it was returned to them in pristine condition upon her death, plastic seat covers intact. When my father graduated from college, the first in his family to do so, they gave him a mint-green 1954 Pontiac convertible. A car was the highest reward you could get in the Trigiani family.
    But that summer I was washing Viola’s 1970s car, a Mercury Grand Marquis four-door sedan, paying special attention to the hubcaps with a scrub brush. You would think that washing a car is not something you have to learn how to do, but Viola had taught me her technique years earlier and her expectation was that I would follow orders. She didn’t leave my efforts to chance. She oversaw my progress through the kitchen window. Once a forelady, forever a forelady. She did not restrain herself when it came to pointing out any missed spots.
    Viola maintained her car’s interior no differently from her own living room. We dusted, swept, vaccumed, and buffed. The carpet mats were shampooed. Then, once the interior passed her inspection, and before you scrubbed the outside of the car, Viola would take a squeezed lemon from the kitchen and set it on the dashboard, close the doors, and let the summer sun fill the car with a fresh lemon scent. (Throw the lemon out when it turns black. On a hot summer day, that takes about fifteen minutes.)
    To wash the exterior of a car, begin with two buckets of water, one spritzed with dish detergent (not too much, just a quick blast of soap), the other bucket with clean water. Have a garden hose close by. You also need a scrub brush for the hub caps, a bottle of bleach to whiten the rims, a cup of white vinegar to add to the clean, cold bucket of water for polishing the bumpers (later), and a pile of moppeens (old dish towels).
    Begin by swabbing the roof (without missing any spots!), then the hood, then the sides, and finally the windows. Soak the moppeens in