Page 64 of Mafia Princess

“You’re wrong,” I say quietly. My voice is firm, though. Her words played on a loop in my childhood, cursing marriage and men and my father. I didn’t even realize how much of my objection to marriage came from her until now. She’s the one who told me over and over, when I was way too young to understand, that marriage was a trap, a curse, a pit of quicksand to be avoided at all cost. As she splattered my little plastic plate with dinner, she cursed my father for not being home, cursed her life, her marriage, and the institution in general. Somewhere along the way, my impressionable little kid brain internalized it.

But marriage isn’t a trap. Not for me. For me, it’s the net that caught me on the way down when I was falling off the tightrope she put me on all those years ago. It’s a support system, someone who will always be there for me because he has no choice, either. That’s not a bad thing, though. It means he’ll work harder than anyone else ever would because we know we have to make it work. Even when it’s hard, we are there for each other, making the other grow, making ourselves better for the other. Marriage means someone who tries to understand me when I’m irrational, to love me even in my most unworthy moments. It means learning to think of someone else’s needs, to stop being selfish and running from reality.

My husband didn’t ruin me. He threw me a lifeline, and now he’s slowly saving me, pulling me from the quicksand she pushed me into when I was too young to understand what it was, too young to take a step and get out. Her toxic beliefs are hardwired into my brain, screwing me up for life. That’s the curse. Not marriage.

“You buy into it, don’t you?” she muses, watching me. “All your father’s lies. The Life. I’m too smart for that. I wasn’t going to be part of it. They’re all sick bastards, every one of them. I wanted my own life.”

“And it looks like you fucking found it.”

We stare at each other across the table for a long minute. Mom gets up to get an ashtray and crushes out her cigarette before sitting back down.

“Your father’s the monster,” she says again, a familiar refrain from my childhood. “All of them are. The way they treat us. We’re nothing but a conquest, some dumb thing to stroke their ego and their dick. You think you won’t wind up that way, but mark my words, as soon as you’ve served your purpose, that new husband of yours will trade you in for a younger model. See, once you have kids, you’re not so tight anymore, and he’ll want a young one again so he can show his prowess, make him feel powerful when she worships him, make the other men admire how many sluts he can get to spread their legs for him.”

“Not every man is like that,” I say. “And not every woman does what you did when a guy cheats on her. I’m sorry Dad was unfaithful, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that you hurt me.”

“Don’t judge me,” she snaps. “Once you see what you’d do to get his attention, how you lose your mind sitting home night after night, knowing you have nothing to look forward to for the rest of your life, living on nothing but the fuel of your own rage while some teenage whore at one of his clubs gets his affection, the gifts, everything you once got. You’ll convince yourself that maybe it’s because he didn’t get to pick you, that it was all chosen for him. That if he’d gotten to choose for himself, he would have chosen her. Everyone deserves love, after all.”

I shiver, remembering King’s words.

Mom laughs. “You already know it’s true. You’ll be a fool once or twice, but pretty soon you’ll see the truth. He doesn’t love the first one or the fortieth. He just keeps shoving his dick into more of them in desperation to fill the empty cavern inside him where his heart should be. He can’t love those girls any more than he loves you. He can’t love anyone. That’s what the mafia does to you. It makes men monsters, and women into empty shells.”

“Stop,” I say, slamming my palm down on the table. I let her control me for too long, not just my body, but my brain. She told me lies, and she knew I wanted to trust her so badly I‘d believe them. But no more.

Mom jumps, licking her lips nervously and glancing around like she forgot where she was, who she was talking to. She reaches for her cigarettes and pulls out another one.

“I’m sorry if your father abused you, too,” I say. “I’m sorry if Dad cheated on you, though I’m guessing it had at least something to do with you not wanting anything to do with him. He shouldn’t have done that. But I didn’t come here to hear about what a monster Dad is. I know what people say. He likes women. He’s killed people. He’s far from perfect. But he doesn’t abuse children. Nothing excuses that.”

She smirks and lets out a stream of smoke. “How old’s his currentgoomah?”

“Twenty-seven,” I say. “Yeah, she’s young. But she’s not a child.”

She sits there smoking for a few minutes before speaking. “I thought I’d strike out on my own, you know. Have a glamorous life. Be a Broadway star. You know what they told me?”

I shake my head.

“They told me I was too old. That I should’ve started earlier. I wanted to take acting classes, you know, but where was I going to get money? My father wasn’t going to give me money. If I contacted him, he would have been furious, would have sent me right back home. And your father, of course he wasn’t going to support me. At thirty-five, I was already done with life. I had no purpose in my marriage, no prospects as an actress, no skills to get a job…”

“What have you been living on the past ten years?” I ask. “Welfare?”

She gives a mirthless laugh. “I’m still married to your father,” she says. “I wouldn’t qualify for help. I did things… The things a woman with no prospects has to do to get money.”

I close my eyes for a second. I don’t want to feel for this monster, but I do. She’s my mother, after all. She may be a monster, but she’s a human one. I have compassion for her the way I would if a stranger told me this story. Because that’s what she is. A stranger.

I never knew her then. Kids don’t know their parents at that age. Parents are rulers, providers, protectors, jailers, and sometimes heroes. They are not complex human beings who make mistakes and have flaws and opinions and dreams that they gave up. Even having parents who talked to me about those things didn’t really make me see them that way, as someone with internal struggles equal to mine.

I’m just starting to want to know my father as a person, now that he’s not in control of my life. I could stay in contact with my mother, try to get to know her, too, with all her hurts and failures. I could save her.

But then I think of something King said. That people make their choices, and that makes them who they are. They do right or they do wrong, and each choice adds to the sum of their character.

My mother made her choices. She hurt me. Maybe she hurt my brother. If she’s telling the truth, and Dad somehow found out, and she made him think Jonathan was the one hurting me, then she got him killed. And yes, she has a horrible life now, but it’s one she made for herself. I won’t invite it into my life. After all, I want kids. I want to be a good mother. And a good mother would never have someone in her life, and one day her kids’ lives, who’s made the choices and done the things my mother has done.

There’s one thing that might have swayed me. Maybe that’s the real reason I came.

To see if she’d changed.

And now I know.

Because the last choice she’s made, the one she made today, the one that lets me know she’ll never change? That was her choice not to apologize.

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