We Were Beautiful
Page 6
“Fiona, you know that Saturday is one of the most important days of the year.”
I can think of only a handful of important holidays in June, but none of them are this weekend. She’s got me stumped.
Fig laughs. “Is it maybe—” She pauses, making Nonna swat her again. “Cannoli Day?”
“Yes!” Nonna says, grinning. “So, which of you is going to—”
Fig puts her finger on her nose. “Not it!” She looks at me. I narrow my eyes at her, but she just keeps tapping her nose, like that lets her off the hook. “Sorry,” she says.
“Sorry about what?” I ask, starting to worry a little.
Nonna grabs my hand and pulls me toward the hall that leads to her office.
“Wait here,” she says, depositing me outside her office. She disappears down the hall, but returns in a moment with a big brown-and-white bundle wrapped in plastic, which she hands to me. I take it in both arms, noting there is a hanger in the midst of it. I carry it back into the kitchen, where Fig is standing, trying desperately not to laugh.
“What is this?” I ask, holding the hanger and watching as the plastic bag unfurls toward the floor.
Grace pushes into the kitchen with her hands full of the empty pastry baskets. She takes one look at what I’m holding and starts laughing. She doesn’t even bother trying to hide it. Mary pokes her head in to see what the noise is about. In only a few moments, the kitchen is filled with half a dozen Brunellis, the dairy guy, and the produce woman. And they’re all looking at me.
“Try it on!” Grace says.
That’s when I realize I’m holding a costume.
“Um, I don’t think—” I say, holding the bag as far away from myself as I can. Fig walks over, lifts the plastic, and removes the costume from its hanger.
“It’s not that bad,” Fig says, but her voice isn’t that convincing. She wrinkles her nose. “Okay, it is pretty bad, but at least you’re totally covered. No one will know it’s you.”
“What is it?” I ask, still unable to figure out anything from the mound of fabric that Fig’s holding in her arms.
“It’s a cannoli,” Fig says, like the answer is obvious.
“A cannoli?” I repeat. This makes everyone in the kitchen start laughing again. Fig shoots them a dirty look, but this only makes them laugh harder.
“You might as well try it on,” Fig says. “They won’t stop until you do.”
“I’m pretty sure seeing me dressed up as a giant Italian pastry isn’t going to make the laughing stop,” I say, but Fig has already unzipped the costume and is holding it open for me to step into it.
I let her help me zip it up and then accept the headpiece, which is a large poof of white fabric. I place it on my head and lower the front flap down, noting that I can still see out of the thin fabric. As expected, seeing me dressed up does not make the rest of the staff stop laughing. I feel my cheeks heat up, but then Joey walks over and claps me on the back.
“Welcome to the family,” he says over the screeching guitar riff spitting out of his earbuds. One by one, everyone comes over to welcome me. Grace is the last person to walk over.
“It’s official,” she says. “Once you don the costume, you become an honorary Brunelli.” She gives my shoulder a hard whack before leaving the kitchen. I pull off the headpiece and look at Fig.
“Once a Brunelli, always a Brunelli,” she says. She makes her eyes go big. “The only way out now is if you die.” This makes me smile, but inside I’m thinking, If I have to wear this thing in public, I might just die of embarrassment.
After work, I hurry back to Veronica’s apartment to clean up a little. The apartment is empty, making me curious about what Veronica does all day. I leave a note for her before heading back to meet Fig at the restaurant. I write that I’ll be back before dark, which is as specific as I can be considering Fig won’t tell me anything about where we’re going.
I stop at a store on the way back to the diner that has tables set up out front, where every kind of cheap touristy junk is featured: Giant foam hands with I ? NY on them. Snow globes with tiny plastic Statue of Liberty figures inside. Bobble heads of Yankees, Giants, and Nets players. A jar full of sticks that claim to be magic wands sits at the back of one of the tables. The guy manning the tables is staring at me, curious.
“What happened to your face?” he asks. I’m surprised at how blunt he is.
“Accident,” I say, trying to keep it short.
“Must have been a bad one,” he says.
“Yep,” I say. Duh, I think.
“I got me a scar too,” he says, lifting his shirt. In the midst of all the hair fleecing his stomach, there’s a thick, red scar.
“Wow,” I say because what do you say when a complete stranger whips up his shirt to reveal a ginormous scar bisecting his ginormous stomach?
He grins at me and lowers his shirt. “You want to buy something?”
“What about one of those,” I say, gesturing toward the wands. He grabs one, holds it up, and taps it. A shower of ribbons shoots out of the end, making me jump. I pick up one and tap it like he did. A long black snake erupts from the end, making me scream and the man laugh. He explains the color coding on the ends. I decide to buy one of the yellow ones, handing over three dollars. I stuff the wand into my bag.
“The name’s Julio,” Scar Man says.
“Mia,” I reply.
“Be seeing you, Mia,” he says because, apparently, we are now friends.
“Thanks,” I say, partly because of the wand and partly because he didn’t treat me like some exhibit in a traveling freak show. I start back toward Brunelli’s, smiling.
The sidewalk is packed with people, mostly women pushing kids in strollers and joggers heading toward the park. A woman pushing a double stroller (one seat occupied by a baby, the other occupied by a Chihuahua in a sparkly pink dress) forces me off the sidewalk and onto the street. A cyclist swears as he has to swerve around me.
“Watch it!” he yells, looking back over his shoulder as he passes. He stares at my face a beat too long. He narrowly misses running into the open door of a produce truck. He shoots a dirty look back at me as if I’m the cause of his near accident.
I duck my head, my good mood vanishing in a flash. How many times is this going to happen? There are so many people in New York, literally millions more than were at home. Every time I turn around, someone is staring at my face, and it’s getting old—fast. Even before the accident, I definitely wasn’t the most self-confident girl in the world. Now? I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
Suddenly, spending the afternoon hiding out in Veronica’s apartment doesn’t sound so bad. I stop in the middle of the sidewalk and make an abrupt 180.
“Yo, Mia!”
Reluctantly, I turn and see Joey walking toward me, his arms filled with boxes.
“Little help?” he asks.
I close my eyes and touch my cheek. I’ll just go help Joey, I think. Then I’ll leave.
I take the topmost box from Joey’s arms. Inside are easily a hundred wooden dowels. I walk ahead of Joey and hold the door for him. I step in to see Nonna standing on a stool behind the counter trying to hang one end of a banner that reads Cannolis at Brunelli’s in big, sparkly-gold print. Half a dozen Brunellis surround Nonna, all with their arms out to catch her if she falls and all yelling at her to get off the stool. Joey places his boxes on a table and walks over to where they are all standing.
“Good God, Mother—” Grace says.
Nonna fixes her eyes on her. “Watch your language,” she says. She looks back at the nail just out of her reach. “If I could just—” She lunges upward to hook the end of the banner. She manages to hit the nail, but throws herself off balance in the process. She tips sideways, and Joey catches her before she falls too far.
I notice Fig standing off to one side, unfolding a piece of paper. She’s reading it so intently that she hasn’t noticed I’m back. I decide that with everyone distracted
, I can slip out, but I’m not fast enough.
“Mia!” Grace says. “Dowels. Kitchen. Now.” She’s not one to waste words. I head for the kitchen, outside of which Grace is making a hurry-up motion with her hand.
Fig is still reading when I walk past her. “Hey,” I say. She jumps and presses the sheet of paper against her chest. Her cheeks flush as she folds the paper and stuffs it into the front pocket of her jeans.
“What’s up?” she says, trying for casual, but her voice sounds strained, and I can’t help but wonder what she was just looking at.
“Mia!” Grace says even louder than before.
Fig smirks at me. I have to walk past Grace to enter the kitchen. She says something under her breath that I don’t quite catch. Fig follows me into the kitchen.
“What’s that?” Fig asks, pointing to the magic wand that’s sticking out of my bag. I put the box of dowels on the island, then hand her the wand. She tilts her head at me, one eyebrow raised. “Is it real?”
“Try it,” I say. While she’s looking more closely, I pull my camera out of my bag. I hide it behind my back and turn it on as I instruct her on how to use the wand.
She taps it once on the counter and points it straight in the air. As she lifts her arm, I hold out my camera, adjusting it so that the whole screen is filled with her face. The chicken shoots out of the end of the wand like it’s trying to take flight. I click the shutter once then twice, catching her mid-scream on the first one and laughing in the second. And then I realize what I’m doing, and I feel sick. The last photo I took was almost a year ago, and for the last year, I guess some part of me decided that was the last photo I’d ever take.
“Show me,” Fig demands. I look up at Fig slowly. She’s grinning at me and trying to angle her way over my shoulder to see the screen. I hold it up and she shrieks. “This is so completely awesome,” Fig says. She’s grinning like crazy. “Help me,” she says. I help her twist the chicken back inside the end of the wand. “Come on,” she says. “I have to find my mother.” I start to put my camera back onto the shelf, but then Fig turns. “Bring it,” she says.
Gina is in the cooler in the back, sorting through huge wheels of cheese and big slabs of roast beef. Just seeing the big hunks of meat makes me consider going vegetarian. Somehow when the meat is sliced, you can forget that it was once an animal’s leg, but the meat in the cooler clearly looks like animal parts with the skin off. Yuck.
“Mom,” Fig says. “Look what Mia gave me.” Gina takes the wand from her, and Fig tells her how to work it. Then, behind her mother’s back, she makes her eyes go big and pretends to hold up an invisible camera.
I nod, watching for the right moment. When the chicken springs free from the wand, Gina lets out a blood-curdling scream. I’m so startled, I almost drop my camera, but I manage to get a shot of Gina’s face before it goes totally purple and before the cooler starts filling with more of the family, wanting to find out what the latest drama is all about.
“Fiona Imogene Greico!” Gina begins, making a grab for Fig, but Fig’s too fast for her. She’s already darted out of the cooler and behind one of her uncles. Gina lunges at me next, trying to grab my camera. I scramble back, almost tripping on a jar of pickles on the way out. Gina starts yelling and waving her arms around. Unfortunately, she’s still holding the wand with the rubber chicken hanging out of it. The flopping chicken and her incoherent words only make us laugh harder. Gina yells at Joey to do something. Joey shrugs, but turns to Fig and me.
“That wasn’t nice, girls,” he says. It’s good that his back is to his sister, because he’s having a hard time keeping a straight face.
“Tell them they could have given me a heart attack,” Gina says.
“You could have given her a heart attack,” Joey repeats dutifully. We both apologize. Gina glares at us for a long moment, her arms crossed, but then she’s smiling and shaking her head, clear she was only fake angry. She nods toward the front. We walk out of the kitchen, followed by Joey. The door swishes closed behind us, cutting us off from the kitchen.
“Nice one,” Joey says, high-fiving first Fig then me.
“I heard that!” Gina yells.
“We better get out of here,” Fig says. She grabs two gingerbread women for us and we slip outside.
I follow right behind Fig, who is walking really fast. I have to hurry to keep up with her. She stops at the curb and leans against the street post, laughing.
“That was the best,” she says, handing me one of the cookies. Fig waves her hand in the direction of the diner. “Big families like mine are all about the noise and drama,” she says. She nibbles on one of the arms of the gingerbread woman, frowning as she chews. “Well, mostly,” she says, softly. She bites the cookie again, this time taking the whole arm. Then she looks at the cookie. “It’s kind of creepy,” she says.
“What?” I ask, surprised at how serious her voice is.
“Gingerbread cookies,” she says. “I mean, look—” She holds out her armless cookie and shrugs.
“I guess,” I say, looking at the uneaten cookie in my hand. Fig is quiet for another moment, and then she shakes her head as if she’s trying to get rid of something. She smiles at me, but her smile is a little thin, like she’s trying to stretch it too far and it’s not quite big enough to fit.
“Let’s see the pictures,” she says, motioning to my camera. I turn the camera back on and push the play button. I click the back button exactly three times until the first photo I took of Fig, the frightened one, fills the screen. I hand the camera to her and she laughs. She clicks forward once. Then again.
“This one is awesome,” she says, tilting the camera so that I can see that she’s looking at the one I took of Gina. She tilts it back to look at it again, fooling around with the zoom so that her mother’s mouth is big enough to fill the screen. “You can almost see her tonsils,” she says. “You have to send this to me.”
I nod. Fig clicks the camera’s back button too many times and I reach out for it, but I’m not fast enough. Fig stares at the photo that I know is there. The only picture I had saved on my camera. Then she looks up at me. I see the one thing I hate in her eyes: pity. She doesn’t resist when I take the camera back from her. I click the off button and tuck my camera back into my bag. I fight the urge to touch my face.
“Is that from before?” Fig asks. I look up at her, angry, trying to embarrass her into silence. “I mean, before you . . .” She looks at the right side of my face, the ruined side.
I turn my face away from her. Maybe if I don’t say anything, she’ll stop.
“Mia—” Fig begins. I know she wants to make me feel better, to tell me it’s not that bad. I know she wants to say what everyone says, that I don’t look that different. But I don’t want her to say any of those things. They are all a lie. Besides, it’s not even me in the picture. I should know. I’m the one who took it.
“That’s my sister.” I can barely breathe as I say it. I pray she heard me over the city noise. I don’t want to have to repeat myself.
“She’s pretty,” Fig says. I close my eyes and force myself to breathe. “Mia—” she says.
“She’s dead,” I say.
Her chin snaps up and her eyes get huge. She opens her mouth to say something and then shuts it again.
“Where are we going?” I say, cutting off the inevitable I’m sorry or When? or worse: How? I know my voice sounds angry, but I’m not. Not really. I just don’t want to talk about it. I look over at Fig, daring her to say anything else, but she doesn’t. She just slips her hand into her pocket, touching the paper she has folded there.
“It’s a secret,” Fig repeats, although I don’t know whether she means the paper in her pocket or where she’s taking me. Maybe both.
Or maybe she’s sort of asking about the photo on my camera, asking if it’s a secret too. But it’s not. Or if it is, a lot of it is a secret to me too. My psychiatrist told me I’ll remember more with time. When I’m ready.
“Come on,” Fig says. She walks toward the curb, tossing her partially eaten cookie into the trash can on the way. I drop mine in too. It breaks in half as it lands beside Fig’s. They lie on top of a folded newspaper, almost but not quite holding hands. I follow Fig across the street. I’m grateful for the noises of the city—the cabs and the construction and chatter—which fill the silence between us. I try to focus on the noise, but I can’t. All I can think about is the way those two cookies were lying there side by side, broken. Just staring up at the sky.
Chapter Six
Fig tells me we have to walk several blocks to get to her “secret.” We travel down narrow streets lined with trees and shops selling everything from old vinyl records to giant papier-mâché pigs with wings. Fig pulls me into a shop named Deux Gros Nez. A sign inside claims that they have everything a discerning shopper with a prodigious proboscis would want. Shelves are filled with snoot boots (like earmuffs, but for your nose), heavy-duty handkerchiefs, and imported smelling salts. I know Fig brought me here to cheer me up or distract me or just to give me some time, but I find myself falling for it—for her weirdness and her laughter and the way she seems to brighten everything around her. We try on some sunglasses with attached rubber noses—for your small-nosed friends, the packaging reads. Fig decides to buy a pair and insists on wearing them back out onto the street.
Another few blocks and we leave funky and enter swanky. Huge skyscrapers replace the brownstones and briefcases, and power suits replace beaded purses and torn jeans. It’s so different from Maine, where the trees seem to outnumber the people a billion to one. And where if you go for an early run, you better wear a bell. You don’t want to surprise a bear on his morning walk.