Brother Frank

By Lisa Scottoline

Mother Mary knew the secret to great parenting.

Don’t try too hard.

And I mean that in the best way.

The thing that both of my parents gave us in abundance was love.

That came naturally to them. 

They didn’t have to try very hard at all.

My brother Frank and I were adored, unconditionally.

They thought everything we did was great.

It was the only thing they agreed on, until they divorced.

Their love for us was all out of proportion with any reality.  For example, I remember getting ready with my brother to go with my father to the World’s Fair in New York City.

Yes, that would be in 1964.

Welcome to The History Channel, or in other words, my life.

I was born in 1955, so I was nine years old at the time.

Believe it or not, I just had get a pencil and paper to do the math, including carrying-the-one, which shows my great affection for you.

I remember telling my mother that I was excited about seeing New York.

And I remember distinctly what she said to me, which was, “Honey, New York is excited to be seeing you.”

Wow.

That’s love.

Or maybe delusional behavior.

But either way, I grew up feeling pretty great about myself.  

And not because I got good grades in school or for any other reason, except the fact that I breathed in and out.

My father was the same way.

I remember that after I had become an author he would come to my signings, and someone said to him, “you must be very proud of your daughter” and he said, “Lady, I was proud of her the day she came out of the egg.”

I’ve told that story before, I tell it all the time, because I think I have the same attitude, and think it’s one of the reasons that Francesca and I are so close.

I just adored her, the moment she came out of the egg.

I still do.

And I said all the dumb things to her that my mother said to me, like “don’t study so much” and “it doesn’t matter whether you get A’s, just so you’re happy” and “stop reading so much, it will ruin your eyes.”

And paradoxically, Francesca turned out to be a wonderful student and accomplish great things, despite me telling her that she didn’t need to bother.

And I can’t say I caused that, or even that it planned it, only that when I think back to my childhood, I realize that there was absolutely no trying going on in my household, at all.

We just were.

And that applied to little things as well, like Halloween costumes.

Nowadays, Halloween costumes have been raised to an art form and there are parades in my town, where they give out a variety of prizes for the most original costume and such.  All of the costumes are homemade, and I can see how hard the parents and kids tried to make a wonderful costume.

But we Scottolines never tried that hard.

For Halloween’s when I was growing up, my mother went to Woolworth’s and bought a costume in a box.  It had a plastic mask that was stiff and attached to your face with a cheap piece of elastic that would undoubtedly break by the end of the evening.

Which was fine because the mask was too hot to wear anyway.

You could’ve welded in my Halloween mask.

I remember being Cleopatra five years in a row, and thinking back on it now, I realize I wore the same costume.  

I mean the same exact costume, which my mother must have re-boxed after Halloween and put away, only to present to me the next October.

“Cleopatra!” I would say with delight, each time.  

Because for me, Halloween was when you got to be Cleopatra.

No one ever suggested you could actually change costumes, and I couldn’t imagine why you would want to.

If you could be Cleopatra, why would you be anybody else?

I had diva tendencies even then.

Which Mother Mary evidently encouraged, being something of a diva herself, even though she was only 4 foot 11 inches.

Size really does not matter, people.

The costume was a sheath of turquoise polyester with pseudo-Egyptian hieroglyphics on the front, and the mask was authentically Cleopatran because it had triangle hair on either side of the face, a snake for a headband, and really bad eyeliner.

And I remember loving Halloween, with my father taking us from house to house, me swanning around in my Cleopatra dress and my brother in his pirate headscarf with a fake-silky blouse.

He was a pirate for five years in a row, too.

That was before we knew he was gay.

But he did look damn good in that blouse.

We’d carry paper bags to collect the candy and orange cartons to collect pennies for UNICEF, though we had no idea what that meant, only that it was a good thing to do and made a lot of noise when you shook the container.

All my memories of Halloween, like most of my childhood, are happy, filled with polyester, preservatives, and sugar.

We were happy because we loved each other and it showed.

My parents told us so, and hugged us, and kissed us.

When we fell and skinned a knee, it was a tragedy.

No injuries were ever walked off in the Scottoline household.

They were fussed over, worried about, and cured with food.

No failures or setbacks were ever shrugged off and anytime we were rejected by anybody or anything, fists were shaken.

“It’s their loss,” my father would always say.

And my mother would curse. 

One time, in my lawyer days, she wanted to go to my law firm to yell at one of the partners for working me too hard.

I stopped her, saving the day.

For them.

Because an entire law firm was no match for my mother.

Now, that’s love.

Copyright © Lisa Scottoline