Girl Talk

by Julianna Baggott

  I will say, however, that the way my mother laid the stories out—not just this one told in downtown Bayonne traffic, but all of the stories from that summer—her life was nearly tangible. It was so real that I almost felt as if I could step in and alter history. Perhaps it’s why I’ve worked so hard to get these stories right, in hopes that if I replay them enough it will seem as if I am standing there, present in my mother’s life, and I will be close enough to be able to step into her world to comfort her, to fix things. In any case, these are the facts as good as they get.

  I remember distinctly that she loved Anthony because he was pure. “Pure,” she’d say, “pure.” And then she would shrug, because she knew no other way to put it. The day they met she’d been on her way to meet a group of friends at the DeWitt on 24th Street, showing the musical Gigi, a movie she still has never seen, and Anthony had just gotten off his shift at the rendering plant. It was February and a cold, clear day. They stepped off the bus together and walked through Hudson County Park to the edge of Newark Bay, where they looked across the water to the tankers in Elizabeth’s seaport. They talked for hours, their feet freezing in their shoes.

  Anthony told her the story of his childhood. His family was in the olive business in rural southern Italy along the Mediterranean. He came to America with his Uncle Dino when he was ten years old, after the death of his mother. He was the youngest of eight sons, the baby, and his mother loved him best. It was plain. One day when he was about five years old, he was trying to untie a knot in his shoelaces with a fork. The fork jerked from the lace, flew into his face, and poked his eye out. Anthony’s mother was heartbroken. For days she held him to her breast, rocking him in a wooden rocking chair. She blamed herself for not having watched him carefully enough. And so he laid there, one eye bandaged up, gauze wound around his head, and the other eye pressed to his mother’s breast.

  Finally, the second-youngest son, the one that Anthony displaced as the baby of the family, took him aside while his mother was making soup and told him that he was a freak from the circus that they’d taken in out of pity. He told him the story of one night when their father had been out walking the hogs. It was a drought and he went out in search of mud for them to roll around in. And it was hot, so hot the birds were falling from the trees, already dead. Their father had picked up one of the dead birds in his hand when an airplane appeared in the sky, its two dim wing lamps spotlighting him. Anthony had envisioned it clearly: The nervous hogs pulled at the ends of their tethers, burning his father’s palm. The lights lifted to the trees, leafy and full of fruit. The engine coughed to a sputter; the light flickered and snapped out. The airplane lowered, gliding down, crashing through the orchard, stuttering through the trees until, finally, it stopped. Olives fell, plopping against the roof and on the ground. Their father ran to the crashed plane. On its side were the words FETUCCI FLYING CIRCUS in bright red letters. He peered in its shattered windows and saw a contortionist folded like a foldable measuring stick and a giant lady and a poodle with a tiny umbrella, all dead and gone. The boys’ mother, fat now even when not pregnant, waddled from the house as if strapped to a big bass drum, and her boys shot off in front of her. The hogs rooted through dented metal. The family circled the plane, awestruck. And then it rocked on its belly; the door swung open on its loose hinges. And a strange figure appeared. At first they thought it was a little bear in a suit with a little top hat and then they thought it was a little man, but then someone said, “It’s just a baby!” And it was a baby with a man-size head and a man-size top hat. The baby walked down the stairs, tapped his pointy shoes, and popped open his little hat and said, “Ta da!”

  Anthony Pantuliano was a smart little boy, though, and he asked his brother, “What did you do with all of the people in the crash?”

  “We buried them,” he said. “It was very sad. We all cried because no one could cry for them. You were just a baby; you didn’t know better.”

  “And the plane,” little Anthony insisted. “Where is it now?”

  The brother looked around suspiciously. “This,” he said, “this is why you must never speak of it. You were Mother’s favorite. She doted on you from the first day, because, she said, how sad a boy with no one in the world. But Father became jealous. One day while you were still a baby, he ranted through the house, slamming doors. He threatened to take you back to the circus. But Mama refused to let him. He ran to the orchard and dragged the plane with his bare hands, scrap by heavy scrap, into the sea. It took him forty days and forty nights and the fruit turned bitter and we almost died with no fruit to sell or eat.” The brother shook his head in shame.

  “And so I’m a . . .”

  “Fetucci. Yes, I’m afraid so. A circus freak—and lucky you’re not a dead one.”

  Anthony couldn’t think of another question. He believed that he was not one of his brothers. None of them was afflicted with his disproportionate body. His mother adored him, and his father called him a mule-headed runt. It was a logical explanation, and even though as he grew up he learned that it was ridiculous, there was some part of him that had believed it too deeply to ever unlearn. Once, when he was about eight, he was out walking along the shore and he found a rusted piece of metal washed up, half buried in the sand. He cried and ran back to his house and his mother. But when she pulled him to her chest, he shrugged away and ran to shut himself in a bedroom.

  When he was ten, his mother died, and a month later his uncle decided to emigrate to America. His father asked Dino to take the two youngest boys, because he couldn’t raise so many kids alone. They compromised and Uncle Dino took Anthony with him, and so Anthony became an orphan of sorts, and an American. “And that is why,” he ended, “I feel at home among sawdust and peanuts and circus freaks, the poor, sick, and deserted.” That’s the way Anthony told the story. My mother loved it.

  She laughed, although she wasn’t sure he was kidding. She said, “I’m just Dotty Verbitski from Bayonne. There’s nothing to know about me.”

  He disagreed. “Every day I look into the eyes of those animals in the slaughterhouse. I walk through their stalls. I run my hands down their bony backs. Horses, pigs, sheep. I whisper, ‘One day I will set you free.’ They are no different from me,” he said. “My fence only stretches a little bit wider to include an apartment, a store, a church. But inside, it’s a vast landscape.” Anthony’s one good eye flared. His teeth shone bright. She could smell the stench of the animals on him. “It’s countries and mountains, because I saw your face. You, Dotty Verbitski, you set me free.”

  By this point we were in front of Dino’s house. My mother parked the car by the curb, but the engine was still running. She sat there with both hands on the wheel, smiling sadly. She told me that her eyes had filled with tears when Anthony said that she set him free, that the tankers’ lights in the seaport had flickered on and each glow teetered and rose up in her teary eyes. She said that she looked up at the sky and wiped the tears back into her hair. “That fire was my mother’s fault,” she’d told Anthony, but it seemed like she was confessing to me there in the car in front of Dino Pantuliano’s house at the same time, that she was trying to prepare me for something. “She’s crazy,” my mother had told Anthony, “and I am, too.”

  When my mother, standing on Dino Pantuliano’s outdoor poolside patio in a nice section of Bayonne, asked Dino what he was doing for a living these days, he said, “Vitamins.”

  The house was really two row houses—typical of Bayonne—made into one, a version of the double-wide trailer like the ones in the Ashuelot Estates Trailer Park in Keene, but upscale with nice Persian carpets, leather furniture, Jesus statues and crosses, the ceramic face of Mary and her praying hands hung on the wall. Dino was wiry, his bronze-colored running pants, hitched up a couple inches above his waistline, swishing as he got drinks at an outside bar under a lavender awning. And his chest, bare and tan, wasn’t bad for a man of his age—sixty-odd years.

  His wife, Ruby, maybe ten years younger
, was followed around by a little Chihuahua named Jacko with his head in one of those white plastic funnels as if everything had slid through but his fat face. I found out later he had a skin condition and he couldn’t stop chewing on himself. He looked like a dog caught in a Victrola, and I had to keep myself from laughing. Typical of the similarity in looks between dogs and their owners, Ruby had Jacko’s popping eyes and underbite and quick little steps. She added to Dino’s vitamin comment, saying, “Yeah, he wakes up at the crack of ass . . . pardon my Fran-says . . .”—here, she smiled at me—“every morning. Work, work, work. Vitamins are his life.” She laid a tray of Cheez Whiz-ed crackers on a little glass-topped table. She smiled with her red lips and squinted through her popped eyes, turned, wrestled the sliding door, and waddled back inside, teetering precariously on a pair of silver open-toed high heels that my mother later referred to as “those shoes she must have stolen from Charo.”

  “So what do you do with vitamins? Manufacturing? Sales?” my mother asked.

  Dino brushed his hands in front of his face as if lazily shooing a bee. “Import, export. Nothing. You know.”

  He handed my mother a Bloody Mary with a stick of celery poking out of it and me a fresh-squeezed orange juice with bits of pulp so big I had to drink and chew. We were sitting on lawn chairs and it was hot. He stirred his drink with the celery stalk and said, “So, the punske girl is back in town. You remind me of the good old days when life was sweet and simple. You still look like an angel.”

  My mother looked down at her hands. “Oh, please,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “I thought you were married to a northerner. A doctor, of the down-there variety.”

  “Yes,” my mother said. “This is a vacation.”

  “A vacation from him?” He laughed and then leaned forward and whispered, “Those vacations are the best kind.” He sat back and popped a Cheez Whiz-ed cracker in his mouth, and, chewing, said, “You will stay with us, then, until your ‘vacation’ is over.”

  “Oh, Dino, that’s very nice, but—”

  “No, not another word.” He said it so strongly that a tiny spray of cracker flew from his mouth and I was scared of him for a moment. But then he quickly softened. He gazed at my mother, lovingly. “Anthony would be pleased to see you like this, so radiant. Not like the last time I saw you. I’ve always felt terrible about that last time. I didn’t take things seriously. I didn’t realize that it was the end, you know? You were such a sweet kid, like my own, if I’d had any.” His eyes were misty, and I could see his eyes lock on hers, for a moment guilty as if he owed her something.

  “Forget it,” she said. “Ancient history.”

  I didn’t really understand the communication between them. I was still in shock from hearing Dino say his name, that Anthony Pantuliano was real, verifiable, that he’d walked through other people’s lives and could be mentioned so offhandedly. It dawned on me then that Anthony had probably been in that house, that he had wiped his feet on that mat, sat on those sofas, stared at their crucifixes, that he’d touched things and held things. It dawned on me that I could find bits of Anthony in that house, in the trinkets and drawers, maybe even pictures of him.

  “And what’s he up to these days?” my mother said, trying to sound casual.

  “He doesn’t speak to me. I haven’t seen his face in what? Ten, fifteen years,” Dino said, and then he smiled broadly, his mouth so wide I could see a bunch of shiny gold teeth way in the back. “He finds me immoral. Anyone can believe in America when times are good, but I never abandoned my country. I stuck with my country. If being an American is immoral, believing your president, if living the good life and all of this is immoral? This,” he said, putting his hands in front of his chest, making a circular motion and expanding his arms to show us the pool, the yard, “then I am immoral.” He crossed his hands on his chest. “And God can do with me what He wants. Am I right?”

  And I thought, Of course you’re right. How could you not be right? But I wondered what Anthony Pantuliano had really been talking about. Certainly he wasn’t objecting to a sixty-year-old man in swishy running pants drinking a Bloody Mary on his patio. Dino popped another Cheez Whiz-ed cracker into his mouth, chewed a bit, and said, “The last time I saw him in person he was an angry little god, set out, I suppose, to save the world or damn it.”

  My mother switched gears and said brightly, “It’s a nice place you’ve got here. A far cry from the back room at Ferry’s where you used to beat my father at poker.”

  Uncle Dino said, “But he gave up on the game. Soon he came into Ferry’s in his fish-stained apron only to fill his silver pail with tap beer. Was it for your mother? He never drank. I always wondered about your mother. A serious woman. Is she still living?”

  My mother shook her head.

  “Sorry,” Dino replied.

  She changed the subject. “I’d think Anthony would want to see you.”

  “Ah,” he said, “one day, he will regret it. That’s what growing old allows you. More and more regret.”

  8

  I don’t want you to get the impression that I wasn’t thinking about Bob Jablonski, my missing father, and Vivian Spivy. I was. Dino and Ruby put us up in one of their guest bedrooms with two single beds, draped in red-fringed velvety blankets that matched the drapes. There was a formal chair with a red silk pattern covered in plastic in one corner; we didn’t sit on it. I spent a lot of time in that bedroom lounging around, trying to picture my father in his new surroundings. Oddly, I still think I felt more bitter envy than bitterness. I envisioned him at a Howard Johnson’s like the one we’d left behind, the orange roof reflected in the pool in front of him as he lounged in a deck chair, his real leg sunning up nicely and the fake staying forever pale and permanently laced-up in that shiny black shoe and sock; the maid in their room changing the white sheets, the trash can liner, the white towels; and Vivian floating on a neon-pink raft in a modest one-piece swimsuit—I had decided she was modest. But my father wasn’t relaxed. I imagined him fretting over not being with me and my mother, of course, missing us. I believe he loved both of us, but, moreover, I pictured him antsy about his clients’ appointments, made sometimes an entire year in advance; his car, knowing my mother would forget to take it in for its scheduled oil changes; the lawn, which was surely getting overgrown or burned out with brown bald spots. I tried to think of him as Vivian’s free-and-easy Bobby, but it was impossible.

  It was certainly within my imagination that my parents could divorce. It was 1985; the divorce statistics were staggering. To me, divorce wasn’t particularly ominous, probably because I never really believed it possible, and I was right. In the end, my parents would stick it out. Anyway it seemed that the coolest kids’ parents were divorcing. There was travel involved, back and forth between parents, and I liked traveling, anything to get me out of dull, foot-dragging summer afternoons practicing clarinet with the insatiably boring Louisa Eppitt, our lofty scales pitching and rising over the chatter of her father’s television set. Divorced kids seemed spoiled, caught in an attention war. Their mothers got jobs. The kids were often on their own without any adult supervision. I’d heard of after-school basement parties, although I’d never been invited to one. It didn’t sound too bad.

  The sticking point for my mother would be Catholicism. For some reason, she cared particularly what a handful of nuns in her convent school thought of her—even though she didn’t really keep in touch with them. But it wasn’t only Catholicism that made my mother certain that she and my father would be reunited. I asked her one of those early nights in Dino and Ruby Pantuliano’s guest bedroom, lying in our beds, which were side by side the way I’d seen them in the rooms of girls with sisters, “Do you think he’ll come back?”

  “He’ll come back,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “We have an agreement,” she said.

  “What kind of agreement?”

  “Well, in addition to our marriage, an unspoken
agreement.”

  “What are you agreeing to?”

  “We’ve agreed to overlook things, as a courtesy.”

  “Like what? The fact that I’m not really Bob Jablonski’s daughter?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I owe him a favor.”

  It sounded very bizarre to me, not at all the way I pictured marriages working. “A courtesy,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  One Monday morning she called Mrs. Shepherd on the Pantulianos’ sleek red wall-hung kitchen phone during her regular cleaning hours in our house, and the old battle-ax answered. My mother asked her if she had run into Dr. Jablonski while cleaning. But she must have said no, because my mother went on: “I apologize if his golf socks have been left out or if his clubs are cluttering the hallway closet.” Again, she must have said that they weren’t. “Did he get to the lawn?” Once more, no, and then Mrs. Shepherd must have scolded my mother for sour, week-old garbage left in the kitchen; my mother apologized with little energy and asked her to send along the mail. I could tell that Mrs. Shepherd was hemming and hawing. My mother said she’d pay her extra, and Mrs. Shepherd complied. She gave her Dino Pantuliano’s address in Bayonne.

  The mail arrived on Thursday, which would become a habit. There were no personal letters the first week. But the next Thursday there were three: one from Grandma Tati and Aunt Bobo in Boston and one with no return address but rubber-stamped as being from Tucson, Arizona, and one, to my surprise, from Church Fiske, who must have gotten the address from the envelope in which my mother had sent her thank-you to Juniper.

  The letter from Arizona was from Vivian Spivy. My mother read it aloud one time. We sat knees to knees on the edge of our single beds in Dino Pantuliano’s guest bedroom. She warned that she would read it through once and that was to be that, that we weren’t to dwell on it, for God’s sake. It read something like this: