South Beach
The sound was soft at first, a scratching that seemed to be part of the hip-hop song blasting from the open windows of the vintage bronze Mercedes as it pulled up next to the white Lincoln I was sitting in.
An unnaturally tan, pear-shaped man, wearing a plaid golf hat and sunglasses, stepped gingerly onto the gas station's oil-stained concrete in a pair of shiny penny loafers. He wheezed as if he had asthma and tucked the tail of a pink, buttoned-down shirt into the waistband of a pair of gray sweatpants, which were stained at the knees. I saw that the muffler of the wide four-door model car was almost touching the ground.
The man grunted and stretched his arms out as if he'd been driving for a long time. He turned in my direction and sniffed the air with a grimace. The wind had shifted and the aroma from the nearby Fresh Kills Landfill, also known as "the dump," wafted over the top of a long line of leafy green trees, cleverly planted to camouflage the rolling hills of garbage facing the Staten Island Mall. The man slammed his car door shut, turned on his heels with a military twist, and marched into the store. Although there was a driving boom box beat thumping out of the windows, I was sure now of a dissonant muffled tapping coming from the sagging trunk of the Mercedes.
It was club night and my new friend Francesca "Frankie" Dacosta had stopped at the gas station near her house on the western shore of Staten Island to buy a six-pack of peach wine coolers and a bag of ice. I had met Frankie a few days before, at the grocery store on Forest Avenue. I was standing in the produce aisle holding a large bunch of collard greens. My fingers felt the leaves as if they were braille, as if some message decoded along the thick stems and fine veins could explain why Raymond, my husband of forty-two years, was gone. It was so unfair. He had been hammering a nail into the wall so we could hang the framed photo of our last trip to the Grand Canyon when he fell to the floor. The doctor said a blood vessel had burst in his head. Six months and one day after we both retired from thirty-seven years of teaching in the New York City public school system, we thought our lives were just beginning.
I sat up night after night for two weeks listening to Blind Willie Johnson's sorrowful blues, a moan accompanied by bottleneck guitar, raw emotion that echoed my grief, Dark was the night, cold was the ground . . . I didn't want to die, but living without my Raymond took the sweet out of everything.
Frankie turned a corner in the supermarket and saw me standing in the produce section holding the collard greens like a wedding bouquet. Silent tears poured down my face onto the front of a red silk blouse that had been my husband's favorite.
"I wanted to take a picture, but my good sense took over and I gave you a pack of tissues and took you home with me," Frankie told me later.
* * *
I opened the passenger door of the Lincoln and was about to get closer to the sound when Frankie came flying from the store like she was being chased by demons out of hell. The loose black shift she wore was hiked up above her pale knees and she pressed the sack of wine coolers to her chest. She tossed the bag of ice onto the backseat, barely missing my head.
"Get in! Lock the doors!" She barked commands and I followed orders. Frankie jumped in the car and hit the power lock three times. She pressed another button and the windows rolled up at lightning speed.
"You're sweating. What's going on?"
"There's a really creepy guy in there. He's trying to get the attendant to give him half a gallon of gas in a mayonnaise jar, thirteen matches, and six yards of silver masking tape."
"Sounds like he's making a recipe or something."
"Or something." Frankie wiped sweat off her upper lip with a handkerchief.
"I think there's a body in the trunk." I rolled the window down a few inches. "Listen."
"That's crappy music." She waved the handkerchief in front of her face.
"Listen," I shushed her. We both heard a loud thump.
Just then the driver of the Mercedes strolled out of the store cursing the gas attendant's mother. I rolled up the window and looked over at Frankie. Then my head snapped back toward the Mercedes when I heard a crash. The man had thrown the empty mayonnaise jar against the side of the building before getting back in his car. The Mercedes took off, leaving behind a trail of smoke, the smell of burning rubber, and the echo of screeching tires.
"He's headed toward the dump. Should we . . ."
Frankie pressed her lips together and shook her head. "Marie, honey, this is Staten Island. We should be blind, deaf, and dumb." She brought two fingers to her lips, closed her eyes, and pressed her other hand to her ear.
"Maybe it was a big dog," I said, sure it wasn't.
"Yeah, and maybe it won't snow this December," Frankie countered, pulling into Friday evening traffic on Richmond Avenue.
"What if it's somebody you know?"
"I don't know the kind of people who'd be locked up in the trunk of a car, do you?"
"He was acting so crazy. I just know he's going off to do something bad."
"He's a bad man. What do you want to do about it, Marie?"
"We didn't do it already, so I guess we leave it alone."
"Thank you. Enough already about that bum."
We stopped talking about the guy, but I couldn't stop thinking about him.
We took the long way to Frankie's house. She liked driving through Todt Hill where the wealthy lived. Frankie said Paul Castellano of the Gambino crime family had lived in a house that was an exact replica of the White House, down to the flagpole flying both the American and Italian flags. I read somewhere that Todt was a Dutch word for dead. There was a large cemetery nearby and I also took note that there were no sidewalks or public transportation in the neighborhood.
On the day we met, Frankie invited me to her South Beach home and a meeting of the Staten Island Ward Widows of America. After her husband Ignacio died, Frankie had painted every room in her house bright yellow—with the exception of the bedroom, which she painted red velvet. Frankie had a sweet tooth, and sleeping alone for seven years hadn't made her any less lonely for companionship, or desserts. Although the widows took turns making dessert, Frankie had a great recipe for cannoli, which was to die for.
"Marie," she said, "for you, I'm making cannoli. I want to bring some sweetness back into your life."
She worked real hard to make me smile again.
Making the cannoli was an all-day affair. The recipe had been given to her by her mother-in-law, along with the responsibility to pass it on to the women in the family. When Ignacio died of a heart attack on his job as an electrician for the city, Frankie had been inconsolable for months. She read an article in the New York Times about a group of widows who met every month for dinner and companionship. Those were the things she missed most, and so for the past seven years she and her friends had been meeting monthly in each other's homes to eat together and put some sweetness in their lives.
Frankie, Olympia, Celia, Theresa, and Angelina were well into their sixties, and all but Angelina were either widowed or divorced. At first the women eyed me a little suspiciously. It was rare to see a black woman in this part of Staten Island—especially in this famously clannish Italian stretch of Hickory Boulevard—although I had recently learned that in the seventeenth century early settlers on the island had been French Huguenots and freed slaves. I didn't say much at that first meeting, and after brief introductions the conversations started in as if I weren't even there.
* * *
Today the women arrived at the front door of Frankie's home within minutes of each other. Celia was the first. Frankie had invited her after months of listening to her complaints about being a jailhouse widow. Although Celia's husband wasn't dead, she was hoping he'd die in prison where he had been for the past three years serving time for bigamy. His wife in Ireland showed up on their doorstep one day demanding back–child support for a teenager he claimed to know nothing about.
"Excuse my French, ladies, but that Irish fucker ruined my retirement. I'm supposed to be lounging on a beach i
n the Bahamas with a cold cocktail in my hand."
Angelina, still as thin and girlish as she was in high school, had a bum for a husband. Tito had terrorized her from the moment she met him in high school, bullying her into marriage at sixteen and getting her pregnant every ten months for the next six years. She finally had her tubes tied after saying a few dozen Hail Marys. She wasn't a widow, but she dreamed about it. She was an honorary member of the club and a portion of every meeting was dedicated to exploring ways to kill Tito. They had poisoned him, hired someone else to kill him, put a spell on him, and each month looked forward to concocting the most creative murder so that Angelina would be eligible for his pension. Tito had left the family years ago, so in a way Angelina was living like a widow, but without the pension. She earned income as a wedding seamstress and had a team of well-behaved children who helped make her home business a success.
Olympia, loudmouthed and vain, divorced her husband thirteen years ago, but she still cooked him dinner every night and delivered it to him in the basement of his Kensington Street home, where he'd lived since the young secretary he left her for left him when he ran out of money. His business failed and his hair fell out. Still, he was the father of her two daughters and she was grateful for that, but was hoping he'd die soon and put everyone out of their misery.
That day she wore a bejeweled patch over her left eye because her recent self-improvement had been laser surgery so she wouldn't have to wear trifocals. She had a tall weave of teased hair that fluffed around her face like blond cotton candy; Frankie said she looked like a disco pirate and I had to agree. The only thing missing was a parrot on her shoulder and a cutlass in her hand.
After Theresa's first husband died in a mysterious fire, she got involved with a married man who strung her along for ten years before marrying her. She was still mourning her dead husband while trying to keep the new one interested.
"Come on, Frankie, give me the recipe. Bennie would buy me a fur coat if I made cannoli like this," Theresa said.
Requests for Frankie's secret cannoli recipe were always appreciated, but she declined with her usual answer: "If I told you the recipe I'd have to kill you. This one goes with me to my grave, ladies, since it looks like neither one of my sons want to make me a grandmother."
"What's the matter with your Gianni? He's a handsome guy, got a good job in the city," said Angelina, already a little tipsy from her second glass of chianti.
"Too damn picky, my Gianni. He's thirty-five years old and still no wife." Frankie dabbed at her mouth with a linen napkin.
"You should've left him in Sicily with your brothers for a few years."
"My brothers would've killed him. He likes to read books. They're fishermen, they gut fish for fun. Gianni hates fish. He barely lasted a week every other summer. One good thing came out of it, though. He speaks perfect Italian."
"Theresa, you got anybody for Gianni? Is your youngest married yet?"
Theresa was well respected as a matchmaker since she had miraculously married off her homely thirty-year-old niece to a retired boat captain in Sardinia and successfully introduced a young cousin with a limp to a cab driver who lived in Sunnyside.
"My Sheila's married three times already. The oldest is married to her job. Works for a lawyer in Bay Ridge but she spends most of her time in the city. She seems to have a taste for married men," Theresa complained.
"Just like her mother." Olympia poured more chianti into my glass.
"What do you mean, Olympia? Ben was almost divorced when I met him. We got married right after his divorce was final."
"Ten years later, wasn't it?" Olympia smiled at me and winked.
"Olympia, I swear I'll put your other eye out and it won't be temporary."
"Frankie, your son Charlie, he's connected, isn't he?" Olympia changed the subject.
Frankie's look could have sliced through the Italian marble fireplace. Her voice was cold and dropped to a whisper: "My son Cicero is in construction like his father. He's a legitimate businessman."
"I didn't mean anything . . ."
"Cicero's a good boy. He brings me a box of assorted from Alfonso's Bakery every Sunday, and my Gianni, he works with me in my garden. He bought me a Madonna to put in the backyard. He'll help me install it before the ground freezes. Gianni, he's a good boy. A little queer with the books and all, but I couldn't be more proud of him. He teaches English at a private school on the Upper East Side."
"My Nardo saw him coming out of a double feature at the mall last week," Celia offered.
"Was he with somebody?" Angelina asked.
"All alone. So sad. He's so good-looking." Celia picked up the framed photo of Frankie's youngest son from the buffet.
"Movie-star handsome," Olympia said, passing his photograph around the dining room table.
"I know I can find somebody for him," Theresa insisted.
"Staten Island is like a village. Everybody knows your freaking business and thinks they can improve it." Olympia adjusted her eye patch.
"So, girls, how we gonna kill Angelina's husband this week?" Frankie asked, passing the dish of cannoli around a second time.
"What about poisoning his favorite dessert?" I suggested.
The women all laughed. "We tried that years ago. Don't you watch CSI: NY? It's got to look like an accident."
"Tito didn't come for dinner. The kids called him a dozen times, but he won't answer. It's not like him."
"Do you think he's gambling again?" Olympia asked.
"Maybe. Some fat guy driving a Mercedes came by the house looking for him. He reeked. Who wears Old Spice anymore?"
I glanced over at Frankie.
"Debt collectors," Frankie said, smiling.
* * *
A week before Christmas, Frankie invited me to stay the week at her house after I confessed that all I did was listen to the blues and cry into several glasses of red wine every night. Neither of us felt like traveling during the holidays and we didn't want to be alone. Her sons worked on the holidays and at most dropped by for a glass of wine and a quick meal. My husband and I were both orphans and never had children. I felt so alone in the world without him. We made a few friends over the years among our colleagues, but they were all couples.
Frankie was surprised when her son Gianni called to say he wanted her to meet his girlfriend. She invited them over for cannoli and coffee the day I arrived.
When Gianni told his mother his girlfriend's name, Luzette, she thought the girl was French. He didn't tell her she was black.
"Nice to meet you, Mrs. Dacosta, Mrs. Greene," the petite caramel-colored girl whispered.
"Mrs. Dacosta was my mother-in-law. Francesca was my mother's little girl. Call me Frankie and speak up."
"Ma! A pleasure, Mrs. Greene," Gianni said, shaking my hand and grinning like he'd won the lottery as he looked back and forth between me and his mother. The ladies were right, he was movie-star handsome and the young lady he brought home looked like a model. I felt sorry for that pretty little whispery girl, not because Frankie was mean but because it couldn't have been easy meeting the mother of a man who was so clearly a mama's boy. Gianni hung their coats and scarves on a hook by the front door.
Frankie led us into the dining room we had spent all day decorating with garlands of fake holly and bowls of silver balls. She picked up the platter and offered Luzette a cannoli. The girl took a small bite.
"The cannoli . . . It's . . ."
"I know. Pretty good, huh?" Gianni mumbled through a mouthful.
"I don't think I've ever tasted anything so good. How do you make them?"
"I'd have to—"
"Ma, let's install the Madonna," Gianni cut in before his mother could threaten the life of his beloved.
"Tonight? It'll be dark soon."
"I know, but let's do it now. You know I don't have much time during the week, and weekends . . ."
"Yeah, I can see you've been busy." Frankie eyed the girl up and down.
"Ma,
do you mind if I check the scores?"
"No, the remote is on the shelf behind the TV."
"Why do you put it there?"
"I get exercise when I change the channels."
Gianni turned on the TV, then flipped through the channels. He didn't seem to find what he was looking for.
"I'm getting you a satellite dish for Christmas," he said.
"Get yourself a—" Frankie's mouth opened, eyes wide. She stared at the TV as if the Holy Mother herself had appeared on the screen.
"The body of a man missing since late fall was found at the Staten Island dump this morning. He allegedly fell asleep in a dumpster and was crushed nearly beyond recognition by the industrial compactor at the Fresh Kills Landfill. The body has been identified as Tito . . ."
"Angelina's Christmas present!" Frankie exclaimed, then powered off the TV.
At that moment the kitchen phone rang. Gianni practically ran to answer it. A few minutes later he came back into the dining room buttoning up his coat.
"Ma, we gotta go. Cicero's truck broke down on the Verrazano Bridge. We'll be back in a flash. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Greene." He grabbed their coats and Luzette's hand and they disappeared into the night laughing like young people should when they're in love.
There was an awkward silence after they left.
"He never brought a girl home before. I thought he was gay."
"So, what did you think?"
"Can I be honest here? I always thought black was beautiful, before it was a popular opinion. Beautiful, yes, but not one of us. She must be pretty special for him to bring her home."
"I must be pretty special too."
"You're black?" Frankie laughed, and so did I. "Do you know how they met? Gianni said she was an angel of mercy. She took care of him after the ferry crashed back in October. I thought she was a nurse."
"A French nurse." I smiled.
"We should call Angelina, congratulate her." Frankie started putting away the cannoli.
"I knew it wasn't really a dog in the trunk of that car."
"Oh yes he was," Frankie said, biting into another cannoli.
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