The Clancys of Queens Read Free

chasing me around and around the dining room table with a broken yardstick, screaming, “
Che cazzo!
How many times with the yardsticks!?”
    When I’ve had my fill of yardstick pole-vaulting, I climb over the four-foot chain-link fence that separates Grandma’s backyard from Tina and Lenny’s, go through their back door without a knock, and weave my way from the kitchen to the living room. The Currancis’ house was its own universe of periwinkle and crystal, with the smell of Aqua Net and Chesterfields embedded in the wall-to-wall carpeting. My five-year-old version of an acid trip was to stand dead center in their living room doing pirouettes, with my head tilted completely backward, watching the room whirl by upside-down.
    The half-cocked head of Tina, complete with jumbo pink curlers, painted-on eyebrows, and crooked lipstick, pops into my line of vision mid-spin. “Eh! Ya gonna make ya’self sick, you don’t stop that!” I snap out of it, “Sorry. Mornin’, Tina!” I throw my arms around her waist in a genuinely loving hug but with the less savory secondary intention of sneaking a peek down at her golf-ball-size bunions.
Wow.
And then I’m off.
    In three running leaps I cross the concrete driveway that separates Tina and Lenny’s house from Anna and Joe’s, and land at the Paradises’ side door with both my arms straight up over my head like Mary Lou Retton after sticking a floor routine. Their kitchen window is just to the left of the door, and I shout up into it, “I’m heeeeerrrre!!!” In no time, Anna’s plump frame appears in the doorway, “G’mornin’, my sweetheart!”
    She opens the door into her tiny sunlit kitchen full of glowing, ’70s-era, harvest-gold appliances. White lace curtains frame the windows, and a ceramic relief of fruit hangs on the wall above the small round oak table—it’s about the most pleasant five square feet on Earth. I hop onto a chair at the table and wait for Anna to pour me a glass of orange juice, cut by half with water, as always. We don’t say much, but it couldn’t be any sweeter. Anna leans into the counter and smiles as I sit there drinking my juice, and when I’m finished, I kiss her on the cheek and skip on out again, this time back to Grandma’s house.
    If Tina’s place is preserved in my memory like some tacky funhouse, and Anna’s is a scene from a Norman Rockwell painting, then the two-family house that my grandparents share with Aunt Mary is something of a towering Japanese pagoda. Grandma and Grandpa live on the top tier, Aunt Mary is in the middle, and the bottom level is a finished basement with wall-to-wall folding tables where all thirty members of my immediate family come together for holidays. (In order for us to fit, we kids had to crawl under the first two rows of tables to get to our seats. When someone yelled, “Dinnertime,” all eighteen of us would drop onto all fours and make our way through people’s legs and around chairs, like a great tide of mice.)
    I run back up Grandma’s stoop, shoot through the door, up the stairway, and into her kitchen, ready for my debriefing on the day’s mission. Let me explain. If other kids spent the odd weekday off from school at Chuck E. Cheese’s, say, I might spend mine at Key Foods working up a scheme with my grandmother to get around the ten-per-customer rule on sale items. I can see it now. The two of us are huddled behind a display in the canned-food aisle, and she whispers the plan into my ear: “You take ten, and I take ten. And then you wait on the other line, by yourself, and if the cashier looks at you funny, you say, ‘My mother sent me, ALONE, to get these cans of tomatoes.’ Then pay and walk out! We’ll meet up outside, a few blocks down, on the corner.
Minchia!
”
    So I was trained to be ready for anything. But today’s particular mission holds great significance for Grandma, which I know, because she had been preparing me for it every day for a week.
    “You eat the