Born Round Page 5

  But Mom was partial to swimming. It didn’t make her nervous the way some other sports did; there wasn’t any way for us to get scratched, bruised or knocked down. It was easy to follow, each competitor given a lane of his or her own, the goal no more complicated than getting to the wall at the end of the last lap before anyone else did.

  Most of all, it didn’t leave me out. She’d found something that Mark, Harry and I could all participate in with some success. She’d found an arena in which I had cause to feel confident among other kids my age, in which I could mingle with them from a position of strength. Good grades in school had never won their respect the way first-place finishes in the pool did.

  On top of which, I was getting exercise. I was slimming down. Not as much as I should have been, because I was eating more than I had before all the swimming—I was even hungrier. But the extra exercise outpaced the extra eating; the balance worked in my favor. Mom, I could tell, was relieved.

  To me, though, it didn’t feel like an out-and-out victory or even like clear-cut progress. It felt in some ways like a mean little joke: I’d lost some of my flab only to put what remained on more prominent display, in a bathing suit. I wished I’d tripped across a talent for fencing—and been able to tent my body in one of those beekeeper-style suits. But instead I had to squeeze into those tiny, tight Speedos, which pinched my waist so that the extra flesh there protruded all the more conspicuously.

  At a swim meet, standing behind the starting blocks, I’d glance at the narrow waist of the boy in Lane 3, to my left, and at the even narrower waist of the boy in Lane 5, to my right. Then I’d look down at my own waist and notice that the distance from the farthest point of one love handle to the farthest point of the other rivaled the distance between my shoulders. My torso wasn’t a V, the way I knew the body of a fit athlete was supposed to be. It wasn’t a straight line, the way the bodies of so many young boys were. It was more of an hourglass—womanly, really.

  When I climbed the starting block, my thoughts were less prone to turn to the laps ahead than to the spectators who now had an even better view of me and to what they might be noticing and thinking. I’d fiddle with my bathing suit and then fiddle some more, tying the strings tighter, loosening them, yanking the suit higher, sliding it lower. Did my belly and my love handles bulge less when the suit was like this? Or should I wear it like that?

  Suck in your gut. That was the mantra that went through my head. Suck in your gut. The starter’s gun was a mercy, because it got me into the water and out of view. And at the end of the race, I’d hurry to the towel I’d left behind the starting block and immediately put on the baggy T-shirt I’d left next to it. At a swim meet or a swim practice, other kids would romp around the pool deck in nothing but their Speedos, visibly happy to be free of clothing, to feel the air on their skin. I’d have on my baggy T-shirt, which went halfway down my thighs, and over my shoulders I’d sometimes drape a big red beach towel, which would billow behind me like a cape. I’d look like some burlesque of a superhero.

  First-place finishes were an answer to that self-consciousness, a protection against the old teasing. By the seventh grade no one was calling me “fat boy” anymore. That taunt wouldn’t fly and wouldn’t stick, not to someone who usually built up a lead of four body lengths by the final lap of the 200-yard freestyle and hadn’t been beaten in the individual medley all season. Sure, I carried around more weight than the other boys—I’d overhear their parents express surprise to Mom and Dad that I didn’t have the “typically lean build” of a champion swimmer—but it didn’t stop me from winning.

  I liked winning. I liked the reel of memories that it put in my head, a movie I could turn to whenever I was away from the pool and filled with doubts, or embarrassed: about my uselessness in an impromptu game of soccer; about my latest failed attempt to hit a golf ball from the tee to the fairway.

  “Frank’s a swimmer!” Dad would tell any amused, chuckling onlooker as I swung the golf club in vain. “Aren’t you, Frankie?” As Dad beamingly ticked off the events I’d won at the last meet I’d been to and the county or state records I held for my age group, I’d feel redeemed. But something about how relieved he sounded—and how quick he was to crow—made me resentful, too. What if there hadn’t been any swim meets, or if I hadn’t won anything at them? Would he still find some way to rise to my defense on the golf course? Or would he just stand a few paces farther away from me?

  I still glommed on to Mark’s friends, but now many of them were fellow swimmers, so I wasn’t as much of an interloper. I was the best swimmer in the group, after all. I kept watching, nervously, for some sign that Mark was bothered by that. But he cheered as hard as Mom, Dad or anyone else when I was in a close race. He seemed to think it was cool to be my brother. And I felt that I’d finally done something to deserve to be his.

  Mark (far left) and me (second from right) with swimming teammates.

  Mom and Dad moved us from the YMCA team to a private swim club with a more serious training program. It was the sort of operation that prepared future college superstars and maybe even Olympic contenders, or tried to. Mom talked about that all the time—the notion that I might be good enough to be an Olympian. When I was twelve, I was clocking some of the fastest times in the country—in the 500-yard freestyle, in the 200-yard individual medley—among swimmers my age. And our family was taking weekend trips to Montreal, Cincinnati and Washington, D.C., to attend regional swim meets with suitably stiff competition.

  In addition to two-hour or two-and-a-half-hour swimming practices after school every day, Mark and I would do ninety-minute workouts before school, from five thirty to seven a.m., usually three mornings a week. It was our job—my job, actually—to set the alarm for four forty-five, pad into my parents’ room and poke quietly at Mom, our driver, who would try to get out of bed noiselessly enough not to wake Dad. A few pokes and she’d be sitting upright; a few seconds more and she’d be clear-minded enough to remember that she had set an unopened Tab on the nightstand before she’d gone to bed. She’d reach for it. The crunch-woosh of that metal peel coming off the top of the can was the loudest sound she’d make.

  Sometimes, though, my alarm would buzz and I’d look at the glowing digits—4:45—and then register how pitch black it was outside the windows of the bedroom Mark and I shared. I’d think about the desolate feel of the roads between our house and the pool at this hour, about how silent and depressing the drive was. I’d imagine the cold slap of the pool water on a body not really fully awake. And instead of hitting the snooze on the alarm clock, I’d just turn the alarm off. About forty-five minutes later, I’d sense a disturbance in the room, crack open an eye and glimpse Mom standing above my bed, arms crossed, shaking her head.

  “What happened?” she’d ask, though there wasn’t much mystery about it.

  I’d grunt weakly and mumble incoherently, as if too exhausted to comprehend or respond to what she was saying.

  “Someone,” Mom would observe, “didn’t get up.”

  I’d roll over so that I faced away from her, and I’d maybe even put my spare pillow over my head.

  “Fine,” she’d say testily. “But if I’d been so fortunate as to have a God-given talent like yours, I wouldn’t have wasted it.” Mom wasn’t particularly religious, but when laying on a guilt trip, she liked to bring along backup, and she figured God was the only disapproving authority as fearsome as she.

  Over time the pressure—to be as dedicated as she expected me to be, to keep my national rankings high—wore me down. I worried that I was always on the verge of disappointing everyone: not God (I wasn’t so sure about Him in the first place, and couldn’t imagine that He’d be particularly invested in the 100-yard backstroke), but definitely Mom, Dad, Mark, my coaches. I also couldn’t stand the tedium of so many hours in the water, of 200 to 350 pool lengths every practice and at least ten practices a week (counting Saturdays and Sundays) for at least forty-eight weeks of the year.

  And t
hen, when I was about to turn thirteen, I got a way out. Dad’s firm decided to transfer him from its Manhattan office to Hartford, Connecticut, where there weren’t swim teams of the caliber we were used to, the caliber I needed if I was going to remain among the fastest swimmers nationally for my age.

  Mom asked me if I wanted to do what some talented young swimmers did and go to live with a family in Mission Viejo, California, home to one of the country’s most famous swim clubs, but I recoiled from the idea, and she didn’t press it. As attached as she was to the dream of me with an Olympic medal around my neck, she was more attached to me.

  In the Hartford area, over the course of my teenage years, I would gradually scale back: fewer morning practices; fewer hours in the pool all in all; less traveling; no more talk about the Olympics; none of the runaway nervousness I had felt whenever that talk had come up; no more fear that by setting the bar that high I’d fail all the more spectacularly to reach it. I wouldn’t quit swimming altogether, because I depended on it for a social life and for a measure of self-esteem, and because swimming was supposed to help me get into a good college, or so Mom and Dad always said, going on and on about the importance of showing colleges how versatile you were.

  Mom in particular went on about this, her obsession with college admissions manifest in her attention to the college stickers that many other parents displayed on the rear windows of their cars, advertising where their children were studying.

  “Stanford, Duke, Brown,” Mom would say, ticking off the stickers on a family station wagon just ahead of ours. “They did well.”

  She’d spot another set of stickers on another car and read them aloud, too: “Harvard, Oberlin . . . Fairfield Community College.” She’d pause before the last school, which she’d mention in a lower, sad voice. “Ouch,” she’d add. “Somebody didn’t come through.”

  I continued to swim so that I’d come through. And I continued because I knew it helped with my weight, which wasn’t where I wanted it to be but wasn’t nearly as bad as I knew it could be.

  When Mom and Dad told Grandma that we were leaving White Plains, she cried. No, wait—scratch that description, a disservice to the operatic scale of her emotions and their display. She wailed, brushing off all attempts to console her, saying, “I’ll be fine here. All alone. Like a dog.” That was one of her favorite expressions, a reliable bid for pity that she’d come to use with particular frequency since Grandpa’s death a few years earlier. Another bid was subtler, to the extent that anything Grandma said or did had any subtlety at all. Whenever one of her three sons or three daughters-in-law visited or called her, no matter how recent the previous visit or call, her greeting was the same.

  “Hello, stranger!” she’d trill, and it was the most pointed, acerbic trill you’d ever heard.

  Whenever one of them let what she considered to be too much time elapse between calls or visits, she muttered, “Better to raise pigs. At least you eat at Easter.” She made the case that mothers were more important than wives—and that her sons should never lose sight of that—with a little lesson in phonetics and in the way a person’s mouth made the letter M. “Moglie,” she’d tell her sons, referring to the Italian word for wife, “sticks on your lips once. ‘Mamma’ sticks there twice.”

  And if her sons suggested that she might get more time with them and with her grandchildren if she were willing to buck her homebound nature, leave her house on Fifth Street more frequently, and maybe even stay for a few days in a guest bedroom at one of her sons’ places, she trotted out what was perhaps her most beloved maxim, an assertion that people couldn’t change the most fundamental aspects of their natures.

  “Born round, you don’t die square,” Grandma said.

  She had more upbeat maxims, too, and these came out in the middle of a visit, once she was done with the accusations of neglect upon her visitors’ arrivals and before she had proceeded to the predictions of neglect upon her visitors’ departures. During a card game, she’d urge other players not to be too cautious by saying, “Take a chance. Columbus did.” She’d tell my brothers and me that it was important, when dating, not to “stop at the first church.”

  Grandma had such a hard time accepting Dad’s move because she’d been so spoiled for so long. From the time Dad had finished graduate school, he and Mom—already married by then—had always lived within about a fifteen-minute drive of her. Uncle Mario had seldom lived more than forty-five minutes away, and Uncle Jim never more than an hour. The ninety-minute drive between White Plains and Avon, Connecticut, the suburb of Hartford where we settled, was utterly new territory, a chilling precedent. Mom and Dad called her at least twice a week in the beginning to ease her shock and pain, and tried not to laugh when she inquired about the weather “all the way up there,” or when she asked, in mid-September, if it had snowed yet.

  That first year and for many years after, we drove down to White Plains and back on Christmas Eve, because Christmas Eve was Grandma’s big night, in terms not only of cooking—the seven fishes, strascinat, Italian cakes, Italian cookies—but also of certain rituals, especially the one in which she played midwife to millennia of religious drama.

  She had this unusual crèche. It wasn’t one of those tabletop assemblages of Lilliputian camels and wise men paying bent-head homage to a Lilliputian new family. Her crèche took up a significant patch of the front lawn on Fifth Street, and its centerpiece was a tall, broad wood shack, the pieces of which were hauled every year from a shed attached to the garage and hammered together so that Mary and Joseph would have somewhere dry to hang out from the end of November until the Big Day. They and their plaster-of-Paris entourage were more than half life size. It was as if Grandma had invited a large party of anachronistically dressed dwarfs to camp out in the yard for the holiday season.

  But something was missing: baby Jesus, who was perhaps three-quarters life size. He would stay missing—metaphorically in utero, though technically in a bottom drawer of Grandma’s bedroom dresser—until just before the midnight moment when Christmas Eve became Christmas Day. Grandma held to this pinpoint schedule as if indisputable historical accuracy were at stake and White Plains were in the same time zone as ancient Bethlehem. At 11:58 p.m. on December twenty-fourth—two minutes before the Christ child’s birth—she would dim the lights. She would put on a record of Dean Martin or someone like him singing “Silent Night.” And she would fetch baby Jesus from that dresser drawer, where he lay swaddled in the finest white linens Grandma owned. She’d cradle him in her arms, carry him out to the shack on the front lawn, and put him in his manger, nestled between Mary and Joseph. And she would cry, because it was an emotional moment and because, well, she hadn’t been feeling so well lately. This Christmas, it always pained her to say, would most likely be her last.

  Holiday celebrations—which were when the Brunis’ talent for excess really came out—got divvied up so that everybody in the family could host one. Until she grew too old to pull it off, Grandma had Christmas Eve. Uncle Jim and Aunt Vicki had Easter. Uncle Mario and Aunt Carolyn had the Fourth of July or Labor Day or some other holiday that took on more importance than it normally would, so that they, too, would have their rightful chance to put together a feast. Mom and Dad had Thanksgiving, and held on to it even after the move to Avon.

  Whoever was hosting a given holiday treated it as an opportunity—no, a challenge—to lay out more food than anyone else had at their holiday. If there were two kinds of pie at Easter, there might be three kinds of pie at the following Thanksgiving. If there were three choices of ice cream to go with the pies at one event, there might be four choices, plus hot fudge, at the next. There’d be a cake in addition to the pies, in honor of the family members whose birthdays fell in the vicinity of the holiday. There’d be cookies, and probably cannoli, because someone might want something sweet to nibble on after pie, ice cream and cake.

  But the dessert spread usually paled next to all that preceded it: the six, seven or eight kinds of appeti
zers passed around before the main meal; the main meal itself, which always included a pasta dish on top of a gigantic turkey or an enormous ham, unless the pasta dish supplemented a gigantic turkey and an enormous ham. And the amount of each kind of food was plotted with this rule of thumb in mind: If every guest decided to eat nothing but mashed potatoes, or nothing but turkey and only white meat at that, would there still be enough mashed potatoes or white-meat turkey to go around?

  The holiday pasta dishes varied from host to host. While Grandma favored her thumb-molded strascinat, Mom liked to serve manicotti, which were like oversize, thin-shelled, sleeve-shaped ravioli stuffed with ricotta and herbs. Sometimes, though, she served eggplant macaroni. Aunt Vicki and Aunt Carolyn liked to serve ricotta-stuffed shells, which were thicker and smaller than manicotti.

  Over the years, on the many occasions in addition to holidays when the extended family got together, and even on occasions when Grandma cooked just for my siblings and me, I noticed that she stopped making the dishes that Mom, Aunt Vicki and Aunt Carolyn made so well. One by one they fell away, although it might be more accurate to say they were forfeited: manicotti and lasagna to Mom; stuffed shells and pizza dolce to Aunt Vicki; chicken cutlets and a range of Italian cookies to Aunt Carolyn. I think that after so many years of competing with her sisters-in-law, Grandma didn’t have the heart to compete anew with her daughters-in-law. But I think she was also validating them—letting them know they’d arrived. In some ancient public ceremonies, a torch was passed. In the extended Bruni family, the responsibility for eggplant macaroni was.

  Some members of the extended Bruni clan, from left: Uncle Mario, Aunt Carolyn (holding their son Mauro), Dad, Aunt Vicki, my sister, Adelle (with my cousin Adele just beneath her), Mom, Grandma (with me standing over her), my brother Mark, my brother Harry (with my cousin Marc beneath him) and Uncle Jim.