All of that changed with Max.
I found him endlessly fascinating and had an overwhelming need for the people in my life to know all about him. It was impossible to stop talking about him to my parents, or Lou, or Doug, or, frankly, anyone who would listen.
In fact, talking itself was the best thing about Max.
Besides his smile, and how tall he was, and that he liked all of the old movies I did, he and I talked for hours about everything.
We talked at school before Classic Movie Club, then afterward about the movie we’d just seen, and then later, on the phone, about school and our families, about politics and baseball (he’s a White Sox fan, ugh!), and about the world in general. There were no uncomfortable pauses or goofy utterances or trying to sound cool—the conversation just flowed. I noticed that we both naturally avoided slang, and we agreed that every kid in the world saying exactly the same thing over and over again sounded idiotic. But the best part of talking to Max was the simplest—he made me feel interesting. As someone who had never opened up to many people outside of her family, it was a wonderful, weird sensation to have such close attention paid to my thoughts and opinions. It was as if, in my years of mental and emotional solitude, I’d warehoused a vast array of exotic information, and I’d finally found someone to share it with. Whether it was sports or movies or yeah, even slang (Max informed me that “hipster” was actually from the 1940s; I countered with “geek,” enlightening him on its early-1900s German origins), we usually ended up talking about how something began. In the three weeks leading up to my birthday, if Max didn’t think of me as a girlfriend, then I was definitely a friend who was a girl. It wasn’t what I wanted, but I had to admit that our constant chatter was a good way, maybe the best way, to get to know each other.
And then, when he asked me to the spring dance—something I had wanted so badly—I couldn’t have cared less.
That’s because, a few seconds earlier, he said something even better.
He told me I was gorgeous.
Actually, he didn’t use the word gorgeous and maybe he didn’t realize he was paying me a compliment, but he’d said it, and then he asked me to the dance.
Let me clarify—he kind of asked me.
We were staring at a flickering screen in the theater room at Fep Prep, just me, Max, and Doug, with Doug grazing from a family-size bag of Munchitos, his junk food of choice. He’d recently been on a “great Italian directors” kick—we watched films by Fellini, Antonioni, and Rossellini—and had developed a minor obsession (he was easily obsessed) with the director Vittorio De Sica. First we watched The Bicycle Thief, which was the saddest movie I’d ever seen, and then Marriage Italian Style, which was about a guy cheating on one girlfriend with another girlfriend. It starred Sophia Loren, with whom Doug developed another minor obsession, and we moved on to an old Hollywood film she starred in called Houseboat.
Sophia Loren was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.
On-screen, her face glowed and her body shimmered.
It was at that moment—the greatest of my life—that Max whispered, “Hey . . . you look like her. Especially your eyes. You have little bits of gold in there.”
I thought I heard him wrong. I was scared to move, scared to breathe, and the seconds that followed felt like hours. Finally I said, “Who?”
“Her,” he said, nodding at Sophia, whose face filled the screen like a sexy angel. I didn’t know what the scene was about and didn’t care—all I knew was that Max told me that I looked like her. I was about to say something witty (i.e., stupid) when he said that his mom was forcing him to go to the dance and that maybe I should suffer too. I said something back like, “Yeah. Whatever. Maybe,” while trying to stifle a smile that, if I’d allowed it to run its course, would’ve dominated my face.
“I mean, we could meet there,” he said, still staring at the screen.
“I guess so.”
“Shh!” Doug hissed.
“If you go and we run into each other, you know, well . . . great,” Max whispered.
“Great,” I said in as casual a tone as I could muster, even though my heart was almost thumping out of my chest. Maybe it wasn’t the hearts-and-flowers way that I’d hoped he would ask me, but he’d asked me, and it was enough. I was going with, or meeting, or running into Max at the spring dance!
“My mom keeps telling me that I need to meet other kids, and that, quote, it’s not going to happen by spending all of my extracurricular time in a geeky movie club, end quote,” he whispered. “I reminded her that every kid with half a brain is a geek about something. With me it’s motorcycles. I’ve got this vintage Triumph Thunderbird and she promised that if I went to the dance, we’d get it out of storage. Have you ever ridden a motorcycle?”
“No, but I can drive a car,” I said shyly, and felt a small blush cover my cheeks.
“You can?” Max said, looking at me more closely, giving me the happy shivers.
“Shh . . . for the second time!” Doug said.
I leaned in and whispered to Max how I’d sat next to my dad in the Lincoln a thousand times watching him turn the key, put the convertible top down, and drop the long, flat car into drive. One afternoon when I was thirteen, when he was at the bakery and my mom was out with Lou, I grabbed the Lincoln’s keys. Ten minutes later I was stuttering down Ashland Avenue—too much gas, too hard on the brakes, squeal of tires, repeat—until a red light came out of nowhere. I jammed both feet on the brakes as the Lincoln shrieked to a halt, rear wheels smoking and my heart punching my chest.
I looked to my right and a guy in a Mustang shook his head.
I looked to my left and it was my mom in her little Fiat, a red-lipstick slash of disapproval on her mouth.
“And then what?” Max whispered.
“She surprised me.”
After she followed me home and the Lincoln was safely in the garage, I expected a stern speech and punishment. Instead, she told me that normal society would expect her to say that driving at age thirteen was wrong, but that she didn’t agree. She said it was important to play by the rules, but that sometimes it was just as important to know how to break them, too. So the disobeying-the-law part, driving without a license—yeah, obviously that was wrong—but not the learning-to-operate-a-car part. As a teacher, my mom encouraged the accumulation of knowledge. If I wanted to learn to drive, she would teach me.
“That was cool of her,” Max whispered.
“So cool.”
I didn’t tell Max about what happened next because it didn’t seem to have much to do with the story. In fact, I wouldn’t realize until later that what my mom said at the end of our conversation was the real story—that it was best not to tell my dad about my little joyride. I should’ve been relieved that she encouraged me not to tell my dad about taking the Lincoln for a drive, but it surprised me, and I asked why not.
“It might upset him,” she said, looking away. “That old car was presented to your grandpa in 1965 to celebrate the birth of your dad, his first child and oldest son.”
“Presented?” I asked. “You mean like a gift? From who?”
“Just . . . friends,” she replied vaguely, and for some reason my mind went immediately to the Men Who Mumbled.
“What about Uncle Buddy?” I asked, thinking of his beater convertible. “Was that a gift for Grandpa too? To celebrate the birth of his second kid?”
“No,” my mom replied. “Buddy bought that car himself.”
Back then, the idea of Uncle Buddy buying a convertible so he could have one just like his older brother made me sad for him. Of course, what I feel now—that he’s a twisted, world-class bullshitter who was jealous of my dad when they were kids and hates him now that they’re adults—is completely different. However, at the moment, telling Max the story in the darkened theater room, all I could really think was, I’m going to the dance with Max! Or at least going to a dance where he would be.
“Listen,” he said, pushing brown cu
rls out of his eyes. “After I get this dance thing out of the way, do you want to go for a ride on my motorcycle? As soon as I get my license, I mean.”
“Yeah, sure . . . I guess so,” I said breezily, with my heart about to burst.
“People, please,” Doug said. “There’s rude and there’s pathological. For the last time, and with feeling . . . shh!”
I mouthed “sorry” to Doug as he settled back with junk food on the left and a root beer on the right. Watching him, I realized that Max was partly correct. Yeah, most kids with half a brain are geeks about something, but others require no brain at all.
Like Billy Shniper, for example.
Bully the Kid displayed zero evidence of having anything remotely resembling a cerebral cortex, yet he was a geek about teasing Doug.
Over the course of the school year, his bullying had progressed from frequently to constantly in pursuit of the goal he had yet to accomplish—making Doug cry. After Max witnessed one particularly intense display, he told Doug that he was going to intervene the next time it happened, and didn’t care what Bully the Kid said or did to him.
Doug smiled sadly and said, “Did you learn nothing from About Face? The only way to combat violence is with nonviolence. Aggression begets aggression.”
“Yeah?” Max said. “Well, someone needs to beget a fist in Billy’s mouth.”
Doug shook his head. “Dinwiddy turned away from violence. Bully the Kid or no Bully the Kid, I shall do the same.”
I had to admire Doug—his commitment to passivity was rock solid. He had created a set of rules for himself and vowed never to break them. I’d been boxing for years, where physical engagement inside the ring came with a set of hard and fast rules too. You played by them or were disqualified. You respected them or did not compete.
At that point in my life, rules were important to me.
I thought that if I followed them, they would apply order to the universe.
I foolishly believed they kept chaos at bay.
I didn’t know yet that the lesson my mother had taught me—knowing how to break or even ignore the rules—would become the only rule I would follow.
8
THERE'S NOTHING LOUDER or more disruptive to a family than prolonged silence.
Before my grandpa’s funeral, my dad and Uncle Buddy spoke only on a functional basis about orders and inventory. In the days that followed, that stilted conversation broke down even further, descending into monosyllabic grunts.
And then something so sad happened that it forced them to speak, at least briefly.
It forced them to make funeral arrangements again.
Grandma Donatella had returned to work almost immediately after Grandpa Enzo died, reclaiming her place behind the front counter. She had always been a tiny bundle of energy, constantly in motion—boxing up cookies and cakes, ringing the cash register, scrubbing display cases—but now she sat motionless on a low metal stool watching customers come and go with her mouth drawn down. Whenever someone from the neighborhood asked her how she was doing, her eyes filled with tears as she silently reached into a display case, removed a heart-shaped cookie, and broke it in half. She began to complain about her own heart, how it ached for my grandpa, and then how it just ached, and then she died too. She had made good on her promise to join my grandpa a presto—soon.
After she was placed inside the Rispoli mausoleum, my dad and Uncle Buddy stopped speaking completely.
The silence between them was so deafening that I had to leave the bakery kitchen if they were both there at the same time.
It was as if my grandma were the last structure standing after an earthquake, and when she died, everything in the family quietly fell to rubble.
In that short period between my grandparents’ deaths, Uncle Buddy’s work habits had grown erratic; now they were just plain weird. He came in late and left early, mixed batter and dough in a lazy, halfhearted manner or not at all, and barked at customers if they were too slow in making up their minds. Sometimes he just sat in the kitchen smoking a Sick-a-Rette, staring hard at my dad, as if the power of his hateful gaze would force my dad to do or say something. I was unsure of what that something was, but then it didn’t matter anymore because Uncle Buddy stopped coming to work altogether. Instead, he used his keys to come in after hours and rummage through the kitchen, storage rooms, and basement, ripping open boxes, splitting sacks of flour, pushing over shelves. My father would find the mess, shake his head, and clean it all up, muttering, “He’ll never find it.”
“Find what?” I asked, picking up broken dishes.
My father shrugged, answering vaguely, “Whatever he’s looking for.”
“Dad?”
“Yes, sweetheart?” he said.
His eyes were full of a sad sense of looking beyond the here and now, it rattled me a little, and I lost the nerve to ask more about Uncle Buddy. Then something caught my attention, and I glanced past him at thin lines of smoke seeping from the Vulcan. “Something’s burning!” I said.
“Damn it! The melassa biscotti!” he cried, dropping the broom and rushing to the oven. A plume of black smoke rolled up to the ceiling as he pulled open the door, yanked out a tray of smoldering cookie lumps, and threw it on the mixing table. The stink of scorched sugar filled the room and I gagged a little. Overhead, fire sprinklers coughed and spurted streams of tepid water. My dad leaned on the table with both hands, hanging his head, and then pounded it with a fist so hard that I jumped. “It’s all ruined! Everything!” he shouted into the indoor thunderstorm.
“It’s just cookies,” I said.
“No, it’s everything! Everything,” he said, and then moved so quickly across the room that I jumped again. He was staring at me intently, almost like he was going to cry. “Sara Jane, you’re the oldest. You’re so smart and so . . .” He trailed off, then pursed his lips and bowed his head. When he looked up, the possibility of tears was replaced by something cold and rooted on earth. “Innocence fades for everyone,” he said slowly. “If a person has any hope of survival, it must be substituted for plain reality. Listen to me closely, not with innocent ears, but with the ears of an adult. If something happens, you need to know about our family . . .”
“What could happen?” I said, a shudder racking my body.
“Anything,” he said in a voice that I’d never heard before. He had made the leap into plain reality and I had to join him. I stopped shaking, or at least tried my best, as he said, “I have to tell you important things about our family business. And about the bakery . . .” He paused as his eyes flicked past me.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“Yeah, what is it?” Uncle Buddy said from the kitchen door, striking a match and lighting a Sick-a-Rette. Its rotten-garbage smell mingled nauseatingly with burned molasses as he came toward us, a little grin on his lips. “Or should I say, where is it?”
My dad squared his shoulders and positioned his body sideways, a boxer setting his stance.
Uncle Buddy did the same thing, cautiously.
I moved closer to my dad, determined not to leave his side, mirroring his posture without realizing it.
Uncle Buddy chuckled. “Well, look-it here, a daddy-daughter boxing team. Hey, Sara Jane, before you unleash the stunning power of those spaghetti arms on old Uncle Buddy,” he said, his laugh turning to a sneer, “just remember it was me who made time to get you into boxing, not him.”
“But he’s my dad!” I said, surprised at the acid in my words.
“It doesn’t make him right,” Uncle Buddy declared. “Remember what I’m teaching you, kid, it’s an important life lesson. Just because he’s your dad does not make him right. In fact, your dad recently made a very wrong decision that could be very, very bad for your family.” He smirked at my dad, saying, “You’re surprised I know about that, huh? Stupid old Buddy? Well, stupid old Buddy has been hacking your voice mail and peeking at your e-mail . . . techniques just like the government uses.”
“Buddy,�
� my dad said, his voice full of warning.
“I know, I know . . . not in front of the kiddies, right?”
“Sara Jane can handle anything you can dish out and more,” my dad said.
“Oh, please.” Uncle Buddy chuckled again. “She’s still mooning over a kiss that happened five years ago.”
“Three,” I mumbled. I’d never heard my uncle’s mocking tone directed at me. It crushed my heart a little, but I also realized that I was curling my left hand into a fist.
“Come on, Anthony. Enough of the playacting and bullshit. You know that I know all about that notebook,” Uncle Buddy said.
“What notebook?” I said.
“Buddy,” my dad said, this time almost growling.
“I’m tired of looking for the damn thing, and besides, it’s not like you’re going to need it anymore,” Uncle Buddy said. “Just give it to me and then you and your little family can go on your merry way to wherever they send your kind of people.”
“They who?” I said. “What does he mean, ‘your kind of people’?”
Uncle Buddy grinned at my dad, the Sick-a-Rette stink-smoldering between his lips like something scooped from a litter box. “You want to tell her or should I?”
My dad paused, his jaw rippling, and said, “Even if I did give it you, Buddy, you wouldn’t know what to do with it. It’s too dangerous for someone like you.”
Buddy’s smart-aleck smile stayed in place, but his voice was ice. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means someone . . . who wants to be like me,” my dad said slowly. “And you’re not, Buddy. You’re not like me.”
“Maybe I could be,” Uncle Buddy said, in a tone both angry and wishful, “if you give me the notebook.”
My dad remained silent, his face full of iron, as he shook his head no.
Uncle Buddy said, “Okay, kid, here’s exactly what we’re talking about—”
My dad cut him off abruptly, saying, “Sara Jane, go wait in the car.”
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