But Lisa had tried and failed also!
“It’s okay, honey,” Bea said and stroked her cheek. She touched a tear that Carla didn’t know had slipped from her eyes. “Tell me. Were you very scared the whole time?”
She had clapped. She remembered her stupid, stupid clap. Jesus, I opened my fingers to clap! Her whole body shivered with the memory: she had loosened her hands just as they crashed. That’s why Bubble had been ripped from her. She had opened her hands. Because she was so eager to think everything was okay. Just like this stupid old Jewish woman who wanted to feel everything was okay. Well, nothing was okay.
I opened my hands and killed my son.
“Okay, babe, okay, babe,” Manny pushed Bea away and smothered her face.
Someone in the room was sobbing.
“Talk about it, honey,” Bea’s silly glasses were tossing above the waves in Manny’s hair.
“She don’t have to talk about any fucking thing! She don’t want to! Leave us alone!” Manny yelled at Bea even though she was a yanqui, as Manny called them, yelling without any worry about his Christmas tip.
“I don’t remember,” Carla said to the glasses as they were tossed back by the storm. “I can’t remember anything!”
That’s right. Don’t tell them anything.
11
Carla was carried places. Picked up and put down, regarded doubtfully, and sometimes ignored. She was silent or as silent as they would let her be. Manny nagged her at first. Especially about using the crutches.
“Your muscles’ll get weak,” he said.
She didn’t bother to point out the obvious: that no matter how much she used her crutches the broken leg’s strength would be diminished. She said, “Leave me alone.”
All their conversations were arguments, only she didn’t fight for her side, except to be silent and refuse. The first was about how they would go home. It surprised her that Manny tried to convince her they should fly back to New York. She expected understanding.
“I understand,” Manny said. “But, babe, you know what they say. It’s like falling off a horse. You got to get right back on.”
What does he know about horses?
“It don’t have to be on Transcontinental. They’ll pay for any airline we want.”
“I don’t care about the money, Manny. I want to go home by train.”
“It ain’t the money! You think it’s the money? They’ll pay for any way we want. They’ll pay for a car. I’m just saying, you can’t give in. We won’t go anyplace ever again.”
“Good.” Carla nodded at him. “Good!” she repeated with as much strength as she could muster.
Talking hurt her. She complained to the doctor that her chest and sides ached every time she moved; a deep breath could be painful. He said her ribs were bruised. She had thought it was from all the crying, but the doctor told her that probably something had whacked into her during the crash. She couldn’t cry without feeling sore; she couldn’t yell either. Or laugh. Being unable to laugh was not a problem, however.
She decided that the bruise was the loss of Bubble, the wound from where he had been torn away. They identified what was left of her son from the hospital records and what she had known in her heart became fact to the world: her two-year-old son was dead. Evidently he had been found in a horrible condition. Even Bea Rosenfeld agreed that Carla shouldn’t look at his body.
They went home by train. That was scary, too. At one point the brakes screeched and the car lurched. Carla screamed and buried her head in Manny’s chest. He said, “It’s okay, babe, we’re coming into a station.” She hit him as hard as she could in the arm. He didn’t even flinch. She decided that once she was back in Little Italy she would never travel again.
And yet all of her hadn’t returned home to Mulberry Street. On the plane was where she really lived. Over and over she considered the choices she had made. She wondered if moving from the window seat to the aisle had been an error. She decided no. The ceiling had completely collapsed on the outer seats. The man missing an arm had been on the aisle, the window seat beside him had disappeared and that was also how his arm had been severed. And she knew that the man seated directly in front of her by the window had been killed. She had overheard him introduce himself to his neighbor and his name was listed among the dead in the newspaper.
No. If she had stayed put she would be dead. That was how close she had come, a last-minute decision made for a reason she could no longer remember. She could see herself squashed and sliced by the metal. She had to squeeze her eyes shut and curse in a whisper to shoo away the picture from her brain. Even in this misery she didn’t want to have died.
Carla read in the papers that Lisa the flight attendant had lived. All of the crew survived. Sure they did—they had safe seats and belts that worked. The reporters wrote that the flight was a miracle, the landing a great accomplishment, that by rights everyone should be dead. They were full of stories of bravery, especially one man whom the papers called the Good Samaritan. He had saved—an especially bitter fact for Carla—a couple of kids from burning alive in the wreck. From all the coverage, Carla got the impression she was supposed to think the crash was almost a blessing in disguise.
The worst thing was Bubble’s coffin. It was heartbreakingly small: a little mahogany box with tiny handles, its wood and brass highly polished, the length so short there could be only two pallbearers. She had come to the funeral with her grief exhausted, determined to be dignified. But the sight smashed her.
The best thing about the funeral was that no one was bothered by her weeping. Her grief was no longer solitary; she had plenty of sorrowful company. For most of the service her mother’s red face and bloodshot eyes blocked her sight of the priest and the small coffin. Her aunts wailed behind her. At the graveside her two closest friends linked arms as Bubble’s miniature casket descended into the earth. Their heads bowed toward each other until they touched and made an umbrella. Carla turned her back on this last sight of her son and moved under their covering, not to be shielded, but to be comforted.
Her relatives and friends visited every day after the funeral. Her mother sent her new husband home to California and slept on the living room couch. They made meals, they pushed Carla in a wheelchair when she got tired of her crutches. Her mother even held a tissue under her nose and said, “Blow,” as if she were a baby.
Each night the apartment was full of her relatives’ talk and it came around again and again to the lawsuit. Manny was the first to bring it up with Carla. “Tony’s got us the name of a lawyer to call,” Manny said. Tony was his illegitimate father. “He’s a big shot. His sister lives in one of Tony’s buildings. She’s an artist or something.”
“No,” Carla said.
“I’m calling him,” Manny said.
About a week after the funeral she overheard Manny tell her mother and aunts and uncles at the kitchen table that two other lawyers had phoned asking for the job. She lay still in her dark bedroom straining to hear them as they ate lasagna and argued in mumbles. She could distinguish her mother’s voice. Her mother was upset and she kept contradicting Manny about something. At one point Carla thought she could make out what her mother said: Don’t talk about money for a dead baby.
That’s right, Carla cheered her mother on. She worried Bubble’s soul might be punished for their greed. She had never seriously considered the consequences of people having souls until then, but it seemed to her there was no point in taking chances. Bubble was being judged now, if anything the Church said was right, and she thought: There’s nothing to judge about him except us. God will judge him by the kind of people we are.
At the funeral Father Conti had said babies were innocent and have a special place in Heaven, that Leonardo was smiling in Jesus’ lap. Carla remembered the boys in junior high used to say Father Conti liked to give them long hugs and asked to hear details of masturbation in confession. What he had to say didn’t seem to her hypocritical; it sounded foolish and that hu
rt her feelings.
The voices in the kitchen became frantic and angry. Her mother’s got loud enough for Carla to hear her say, “Listen to me, Manny. You’re going to be sorry!”
That convinced Carla to attempt to use her crutches and get closer, to be able to hear ail of what they were saying. Her bedroom was at the end of a narrow hall opposite Bubble’s room. His door was kept closed. The sight of its glass knob (scavenged from the luxury building where Manny worked) was a rebuke. When he was alive, Bubble’s door was never shut and the knob was out of sight. Now it was the first thing she saw if she left her room. She was stopped by its facets; like a hypnotist’s watch they held her vision and mesmerized her. She forgot the crutches and the airless hallway smelling of tomato sauce. She felt Bubble in her arms, she smelled his hair, she heard him make demands.
“No!” she whispered intensely to scare the memories away.
There was shushing and quiet from the kitchen.
“Carla?” Manny called.
She didn’t answer. Her left crutch began to skid on the bare floor of the hall. She wedged it against the wall and waited silently.
“Nothing,” Manny said. “She’s sleeping.” He resumed their discussion about the lawsuit in a whisper.
Carla fit herself into the narrow hall, so narrow there was hardly room for the spread of her crutches. She wedged the rubber tips into the crevices and hung like a puppet, limp from her shoulders down. She didn’t like to use the crutches because she couldn’t get the hang of swinging her weight forward without the handles digging into her armpits. Her body was a misery, aching the full length, from broken leg to bruised middle to sore underarms. She loathed her body anyway: bony and weak, her skin dusky and loose. She wished she could shed herself. That’s why she cherished sleep: her energy and freedom of movement returned and so did her baby boy. From her position in the hall some words became audible, but not enough. She moved closer, the tips squeaking against the wall and floor.
“He told me we can sue the government here in New York,” Manny said.
Aunt Mary, whose voice was always loud and complaining, said, “The government! What did the government do, for Chrissake?”
“They don’t make the airlines use infant seats,” Manny said.
Carla wished her mother would interrupt again and stop them. Tell them: You don’t take money for a dead baby. If not, then she would have to, even though the prospect of facing her aunts and uncles made her sick with exhaustion. She couldn’t eavesdrop indefinitely, though. The crutches were wearing through her skin. Her shoulders felt as if they were about to pop out of their sockets.
“What difference would an infant seat have made?” Uncle Bob asked. He had a degree in engineering, the only college graduate of the older generation, and he enjoyed thoughtful discussions. His question was posed with a mild curious tone, the inquiring student.
“Who knows!” Aunt Mary complained as if the issue were mystical and irritating.
“Carla was holding him on her lap,” Manny said. “You can’t hold on to a baby—that’s why you have to have a car seat when you drive.”
“We used to put Pete on the floor in a little bed,” Mary said. “Remember? Nothing ever happened.”
“You were never in an accident!” her sister Florence said.
“It was safer that way!”
“Mary, how can you be so stupid? There’s nothing holding them down.”
“Excuse me. I don’t understand.” That was Uncle Carmine talking; he was all business, a practical man. “You don’t sue the airline?”
“No,” Manny said. “We do. We sue the airline, the government, the manufacturer—”
“Sure! They made the plane badly! That makes sense!” Aunt Mary banged something, gaveling her verdict.
“Will you shut up, please,” her sister Florence said calmly. “Let him finish.”
“I don’t remember what I was saying,” Manny said.
“Listen to me, Manny!”
That was Carla’s mother. Exasperated, ready to take charge. Carla was thrilled to hear her mother take command. She would shut them up.
“Listen to me!” her mother repeated.
“He’s listening,” Aunt Mary whined. “You’re shouting. We’re all listening. What is it?”
“I’m telling you, Manny, don’t use the Irish lawyer.”
“He was born here!” Manny complained.
“He’s an Irishman,” Carla’s mother insisted. “The Irish like doing two things: drinking and stealing from Italians.”
Under the best of circumstances Carla didn’t enjoy listening to their collective wisdom. She had thought at least her mother was defending the dignity of her loss. A surge of rage came up through her crutches. She bolted down the hall clumsily, whacking the tips into the wall and the floor, jarring her shoulders and head. “Get out of here!” she yelled as she reached the kitchen entryway. “I can’t take listening to your stupid opinions!” She lost control of the right crutch attempting the turn. She reached for the wall, missed, and stopped a fall by taking hold of the nearest support, the refrigerator handle just inside the entrance. The working part of the kitchen was narrow and painted yellow. At the far end, open to the living room, was a small dining ell, almost entirely filled by a yellow Formica table with a metal band around its edge. Right now the table was especially dominant; Manny had put in the extra leaf to accommodate her aunts and uncles. “It’s none of your business! You don’t know anything about it!”
They ignored her scolding. Aunt Mary smiled idiotically at her, as if Carla were a toddler having an amusing tantrum.
Aunt Florence called out blandly, “Hello, honey.”
Her mother turned to Manny and accused him: “I thought you said she was sleeping.” Manny was out of his chair in a rush to prop up Carla. Both uncles peered at her as if she were a total stranger. Uncle Carmine added a frown to his perplexity, the way he might if caught in a subway car with a rude and deranged panhandler.
“Get off me!” Carla yelled at Manny.
He ignored her and wedged his shoulder under hers, becoming a crutch. “Let go of the other one and I can get you over to my chair. You want to sit?”
Carla looked at the crammed box of the dining ell. The yellow paint seemed to have aged since she last noticed it, the color changing from what had been a bright mustard to the dried-out and dingy look of something left out overnight. Five very old, wrinkled and foolish faces watched her. They were packed into the space like eggs in a carton. “I’m not a child!” Carla yelled at them.
“Of course not,” Uncle Bill said.
“I want you to leave. This is my home. I want to be alone with Manny.”
“That’s not very nice,” her mother said, using a familiar phrase of criticism.
“I don’t give a shit about being nice!” Carla yelled back. She was crying, although she felt angry, not sad. “There’s nothing to be nice about,” she mumbled in a blubbery voice.
Manny picked her up. He wasn’t much bigger than she, yet lifting her appeared to be effortless for him. She was furious at his presumption. She yanked on his thick black hair. “Put me down!”
He cursed at the pain and shouted: “Let go! That hurts!”
“Put me down!” She pulled again, outraged and glad to hurt him.
Manny cursed and pleaded, “Let go! I’ll take you to your room and get them out.”
“We’re going, we’re going—” Aunt Mary called.
Carla released Manny’s hair. “My mother too!” She didn’t care if they all hated her or if she never saw them again. She was more than indifferent to their opinion of her; she wanted them to dislike her. She wanted the connection to them severed from both ends. “I want you out of here, Mama. Go home, Mama,” she called back almost in tears. Manny bumped the foot of her broken leg into the wall and that sent a pang up to the tender spot where it was mending. She moaned.
“Sorry,” he mumbled and hurried her into the bedroom, dumping her on
the bed. He immediately touched his hair—tenderly, as if expecting to discover raw scalp.
“Get them out!” Carla shouted.
Aunt Florence appeared in the doorway. “Honey, we’re just crazy old people. Don’t pay any attention to us. We love you.”
Carla pressed her face into the bed and held her breath. Her leg ached. She concentrated on the pain. Vaguely she heard her mother complaining, probably about where she could go. Go to California, Carla pleaded in her head. She was thirsty. She couldn’t get herself a drink since the crutches were still in the kitchen. She mused: It’s a good thing Bubble is dead, I couldn’t take care of him. Aware of the callousness of that thought, Carla was disgusted. She pressed her lips together; squeezed her eyes tight, and voicelessly shouted into the mattress: You’re horrible. You’re horrible. You’re horrible.
Eventually Manny came in with her crutches and offered her espresso or tea or beer. She said no and sat up to watch him. Manny straightened the room, gathering the clumps of tissues and disheveled magazines and half-empty glasses of juice and cans of soda. She followed his every move.
“What?” he asked after he was done and she was still staring.
“Where did my mother go?”
“Florence’s. Just for tonight.”
“I don’t want her to come back here.”
“She’s not.” Manny looked exhausted. But he seemed to have unlimited energy and no tears. She hadn’t seen him cry, really weep, over his son’s death. He had teared up a little at the priest’s sentimental talk about Bubble bouncing in Jesus’ lap—“Leonardo knows only His goodness, blissfully ignorant of His awesome power.” Manny had lingered at the graveside. Her mother commented on it while Carla pressed her face against the limousine’s glass and looked up, above the level of the headstones, wishing to see unlimited sky. A helicopter buzzed past and her mother said, “Poor Manny. Look at him.” Carla turned and saw her husband at the foot of the opened ground, a solitary and unmoving figure. There was something unusual about the sight, apart from the fact that he was in a suit and standing sentinel by a grave. She didn’t know what—until he moved. It was seeing him at rest, stilled and sorrowful. That was the last time for such calm. Since then he had fussed around the house, serving drinks, rushing out to buy forgotten groceries, making mysterious phone calls in a hushed mumble. Whenever her eyes met his, Carla talked to him with them, in the silent and expressive language of their marriage. He answered in the clumsy words of their grief: “Can I get you something? Does the leg hurt? Are you hungry?”
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