Free Lady Parts by Andrea Martin

whether you don’t care for it or understand it,” I said smiling reassuringly, “can you just say to me, ‘Andrea, you were wonderful? I loved seeing you up there.’ Can you do that?”
    “Yes,” said my dad as he continued to look out the window. “From now on, I’ll never say anything else about your hair.”
    Dad kept his word. He never criticized a performance of mine again, nor did he ever mention my hair. From 2001 until he died in 2009 at the age of ninety-two, whenever he saw me in anything, he would say simply, like an obedient child, “You were wonderful. I loved seeing you up there.”
    2013
    “Your dad loved you, Andrea,” Paul Trusciani explained. “He probably said the things he said because he wanted to help you.”
    I was in Maine. I was staying at the Black Point Inn. I had come here to talk with Mr. Trusciani, now eighty and a long-time business associate of and best friend to my dad. I needed him to fill in the blanks so I could finish this story. I had been working on it for months and couldn’t find an ending. I was hoping Paul had some answers.
    I met him at his grocery store, Paul’s, on Congress Street in downtown Portland. The space in which his grocery store stands has been the home to other grocers since 1900. All the years I lived in Portland, I’d walk by the store and never notice it. I was shocked at how absent I was in my youth.
    “Your dad wanted to be successful. And he was. He was legendary. He had an eighth-grade education but was a marketing and retailing genius. He was my mentor. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have this supermarket. I loved your dad. Everyone did.”
    “Was he a perfectionist? Was he critical of the people who worked for him?” I asked.
    Paul laughed. “Johnny used to say, there are two kinds of luck in the world. Good luck and bad luck. And the harder you work, the luckier you get. He hated it when people would tell him how much they liked his stores and restaurants. ‘You can’t learn from that, Paul,’ he’d say. And so, with his employees, he wouldn’t tell them what they did right, he would tell them what they did wrong. Then they could fix it and make it better. Bob Cott, who handled John’s advertising, told me that John was probably the most conscientious, customer-driven client he had ever worked for. Your dad actually read each and every customer card. He expected absolute perfection from every one of his employees.”
    “But, Paul, that kind of pressure to be perfect is hard on a child. The message when I was growing up was that I was never good enough, that I never looked good enough.”
    “Your father was tough on women, tough on your mother. Appearances were important to him.”
    Paul laughed as he remembered an incident where my mom came into my dad’s office and said she had just been to Weight Watchers and had lost six pounds. “She was so excited,” Paul explained. “Your father looked at her and said under his breath, ‘Look behind you, Sybil, and you’ll find them.’
    “He was hard on Liza too [my dad’s second wife], always on her for what she ate and how she looked. He kept after his women. Listen, your father believed in persistence and determination. He wanted to help people succeed. And he wanted to help you. I bet he thought if you changed your hair, you would look like a Hollywood actress. Your dad loved beautiful women. He loved movie stars. He couldn’t tell you how great you were because then he wasn’t helping you, but if he could tell you how to look or wear your hair, like the Hollywood stars he saw in the movies, he could help you be as successful as they were.”
    “You know what my father asked me after I won my first Tony Award? He said, ‘Now do you think you’ll get a break?’ It was preposterous, Paul. A Tony Award is the highest honour in the theatre.”
    “Listen, Andrea, all I can say is that your father was very proud of you. But he was never satisfied with what he had. He pushed