The Unexpected Salami

by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

  “Why would she say a stupid thing like that?” Stuart smiled. “This is an expensive town and I don’t reckon I’m any angel.”

  We laughed at that, which punctured the tension. Mrs. Ganelli went to answer the phone. Stuart leaned over and said, “I think you should stay for Rachel—she and you make a good team.”

  “I heard that!” Mrs. Ganelli said before picking up the receiver. “Please, Stuart, don’t be a cupid.”

  “I’m going to see Rachel again tonight. I’ll tell her you said so.”

  “Oi,” Mrs. Ganelli said, like a footie player. Stuart guessed my thought and knew better: “That’s a Yiddish oy, not a footie oi,” he explained. “How can you see her anyway?”

  “They’re pretending they’re engaged,” Mrs. Ganelli answered. I wasn’t ready to tell her it wasn’t pretend anymore. “Wrong number,” she said to the phone. Then she handed me a piece of paper with her account number on it so I could transfer funds for Stuart to use, to get going again.

  16

  Rachel: THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER

  “How come we didn’t hear about your fiancé?” Louis said, as I climbed on to the minibus.

  I wanted to reflect on my emotional night with Colin. Fat chance: everyone on the bus was waiting for my answer—including Fred Kaluzny, Mr. Stray Quote.

  “A month after Colin proposed to me back in Melbourne, his uncle developed a tumor. He’s very close to his uncle—I never thought he was going to go through with the move to New York. I didn’t want to talk about the engagement in case it fell through.” I was disengaged from my anti-probing lie. I could lie all morning if I had to.

  “Too bad, Rachel,” Mrs. Ricasio said. “I was going to set you up with my handsome young gynecologist after the trial. He prefers women with dark hair.”

  Raj and Greg snickered at her inadvertent vaudeville joke.

  “You two are awful,” Mrs. Ricasio said, “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “I think the ADA’s assistant will be disappointed if he gets word of your engagement,” teased one of the quieter alternate jurors whose name I still hadn’t processed—Lisa, or Paula?

  I held up my palms in theatrical protest. “Enough, guys, enough.”

  “Something’s not adding up,” Louis said. He pushed start on his Walkman. “I’m going to pump it out of you.”

  “Louis, there’s nothing there.”

  “What?” he asked loudly, from a more rhythmic universe.

  Humid, still air trapped and amplified that singular fragrance of industrial New Jersey. Even though the air-conditioning was broken, Fred asked the driver to hit the automatic window button to close out the smell. “Lefties,” he then said, “die on average nine years earlier than everyone else.”

  “I’m a lefty,” our Rockette said from the seat next to the driver. “My longevity line goes from my joint to my wrist.”

  When the bus talk shifted to lefty death, my psychic weight lifted some. The Statue of Liberty’s hand loomed in the horizon. I thought of Grandpa Ganelli’s arrival-in-America story, and how he had exaggerated it for his grandkids’ entertainment. I fished in my knapsack for the bag of marbles and rolled two on my knee.

  Grandma Rosa rarely acknowledged her dead, annulled, turned-atheist-on-his-seventieth-birthday husband. Once, baby-sitting us, she caught us throwing frozen frankfurters out of our bedroom window (for what reason I haven’t the vaguest idea). We were seven and nine, old enough to know better, and therefore banned to the kitchen, where Grandma Rosa was knitting a blanket for my father.

  “Just like your grandpa. Always with the pranks. Eat your Froot Loops.” Had Grandpa Ganelli’s humor skipped a generation, like twins? Would a child by Colin be as science-serious as Dad? Would it have my Italian-Jewish-brown eyes or Colin’s Irish-English blue? This marriage was supposed to be a finger in the dike. I had to stop thinking like this.

  The jury van let us off on Centre Street. A media zoo had formed outside the courts.

  Safe in our guarded quarters, Kevin played Omniscient Bailiff but wouldn’t fill us in. “Finish your muffins—we’re starting on the dot.”

  In our regular kindergarten-style single file, we entered the packed courtroom. Ms. Gorsham, the ADA, was heavily made up; she’d never been before. I couldn’t wait for halftime analysis back in the jury room.

  “Mr. Presticastro, call your next witness please,” Berliner said.

  “Maria De Meglio,” Presticastro said.

  That explained the cameras. Maria De Meglio had been rumored too devastated by her arrest to testify. The courtroom hushed. Louis and I were jurors numbers eight and nine; we were front row flush left, right near the witness chair. Mrs. De Meglio was fat yet tiny; the court clerk secured phonebooks for her to sit on. Mrs. De Meglio’s mouth seemed two sizes too small for her soft, fleshy jowls, like it would hurt her to eat a big bite of hamburger. This was our nefarious defendant?

  “Please state your name.”

  She looked straight at the jury. “Maria De Meglio.”

  “Your address for the record?”

  “196 Sullivan Street, Manhattan.”

  “Good morning, Mrs. De Meglio.”

  “Good morning.” Mrs. De Meglio was wearing a red and white shift that could have been bought off a Woolworth’s rack. I’d caught her tan orthopedic shoes as she walked to the stand. Her fashion sense reminded me of Grandma Rosa’s.

  “For the record, why do you think you’ve been asked to testify today?”

  She looked straight ahead. “On July first, 1991, my grandson checked into the hospital and almost overdosed. I was, how you say, not myself. How could a nice boy like Bruno who never did anyone wrong end up at Saint Peter’s mercy?”

  “Relevance!” Gorsham protested.

  “Your Honor, state of mind!” Presticastro said.

  “I’ll allow you to proceed, but Mr. Presticastro, please keep this kosher.”

  “I went home and cried. My daughter has no husband. He was killed in a car accident. My husband, may he rest in peace, died before Bruno was ever born.” Her accent was raspy and old-worldly.

  “Relevance!” Gorsham protested.

  Berliner stole a quick look at the reporters. They were on the edge of their seat. I could tell that he didn’t quite mind the media attention.

  “She may proceed.” He glanced over to Presticastro. “But move this along!”

  “She works two jobs to support Bruno. There is no man for him, no, how you say, role model. So I took him fishing and bought a gun so I could take him hunting, like Poppa did with my brothers back in Italy. The gun was loaded because we shot rabbits a week earlier.”

  “There is a big difference between a rabbit and—”

  “Leading!”

  “Sustained.”

  “Mrs. De Meglio. Did you shoot Derrick Johnson with your hunting rifle?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Louis poked the side of my leg twice. Our cryptic code for “what a load of shit.” But I’m listening to you, Mrs. De Meglio. Heroin pushers deserve it. What about our kids, Grandma? What about Stuart? It amazed me how right-wing the courtroom setting was making me.

  “Mr. Presticastro tells me I was wild with anger that day. I don’t remember. They say I shot him, I must have shot him.” Mrs. De Meglio paused to sniffle. “I am a decent, church-going woman. I never done anything bad. After he was in the hospital they wouldn’t let me see him. My daughter brought a Polaroid camera and took a photo of him, because they wouldn’t let me see my grandson. Imagine, my grandson might die, and all I could see was that photo.”

  “Mrs. De Meglio, I would like you to look at exhibit forty-nine.”

  Presticastro passed Mrs. De Meglio the photo her daughter had identified the previous day. We had not been allowed to look at it then.

  “Is this the Polaroid of your grandson?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I remember it. And the district attorney—”<
br />
  “Ms. Gorsham?”

  “Yes. She showed it to me after I was arrested. I think she showed it to me. I was so upset.”

  “Are those your initials?”

  “Yes. So I think she showed it to me—”

  “Have you seen it since?”

  Mrs. De Meglio burst into tears. Jesus, no one can give her a tissue? I reached in my pocket for a tissue and held it up for the court to see.

  Berliner glared at me. “Can someone please give Mrs. De Meglio a tissue? No one from the jury is to give her a tissue. A neutral tissue, please. Mrs. De Meglio, please try to answer the question.”

  “No,” she said through her sobs. The clerk handed her a tissue box.

  “Your Honor,” Presticastro said, “I would like to pass the photo of Bruno De Meglio to the jury.”

  “May I look at it first?” Assistant Hunk asked. “There were two photos her daughter took. I just want to make sure it is the one corresponding with our evidence sheet.”

  “I have no problems with that,” Presticastro said.

  Cohen showed it to Gorsham. She nodded. “Oh, yes,” Cohen said, “This is the right one. I’ll just pass it over to the jury for you,” he said, headed straight for me, even though Louis’s seat would have been the logical starting point. He pressed his thumb into my hand during the baton pass-off.

  “I’ll do that next time, Mr. Cohen,” Presticastro said, his annoyance seeping through. For Presticastro to say Cohen was making personal contact with the jury would sound cynical. He’d only handed the photo to me. Cohen liked me, for sure. I looked at his finger. No ring.

  “Ms. Ganelli, when you are done looking at the Polaroid, please pass it around,” Presticastro said.

  In the photo, Bruno De Meglio looked worse than Stuart. He was so young for a heroin addict. Where did he get the money? What did he steal or did he hustle like Jim Carroll? Fourteen was young when you look at it under a microscope. Would I kill for a grandson? You bet I would, I determined. Shit, was the court artist sketching me? I tried to keep expressionless.

  “Thank you, Mrs. De Meglio,” Presticastro said when Fred Kaluzny passed him back the photo. “Your Honor, I have no more questions.” As Presticastro hovered in front of me, I could see his cranberry corduroy slacks had bare patches where his thighs had rubbed together. A court-appointed slob.

  “Let’s take a twenty-minute break, and then, Ms. Gorsham, you can start your cross-examination.”

  “Good Morning, Ms. De Meglio,” Gorsham began.

  “Mrs. De Meglio,” she replied.

  “Mrs. De Meglio, forgive me. I only have a very few questions for you, Mrs. De Meglio. Four, to be exact.”

  Mrs. De Meglio nodded nervously.

  “The first one is, did you know Derrick Johnson before you shot him?”

  “I do not know such trash!”

  “But did you hear of his name before?”

  “Bruno once talked of Derrick, his friend.”

  “Thank you. The second question is, when did you know that Derrick was your son’s dealer?”

  “I called all his friends. I needed to know who put my grandson at Saint Peter’s mercy.”

  “When was this? The day of the shooting?”

  “No, two days before.”

  “So you had time to think about this terrible predicament your grandson was in?”

  Mrs. De Meglio looked over at Presticastro. I was getting furious on her behalf. Even I could have protected her better from these questions. Our feisty rosary-bead vigilante was screwing herself. Couldn’t he have rehearsed this obvious line of questioning with her?

  “Mrs. De Meglio, you must answer the question,” Berliner said.

  “Yes. But I was not myself. I was in a stew.”

  “You were in a stew for forty-eight hours though, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  Presticastro was staring at his nails. He’d obviously gone into the trial a defeated man.

  “Thirdly,” Gorsham said, “I am going to give you my own photograph. Can you identify who is in this photo?” A poster-size blowup was brought forward to the witness stand. The jury didn’t get a look at it.

  “Do you recognize this photo?”

  Mrs. De Meglio’s face dropped.

  “Objection!” Presticastro said. “This was not the size I approved earlier.”

  “We have simply blown it up for easier viewing,” Gorsham said.

  “Overruled,” Berliner said. His face was hard to read. What was this photo?

  “Your Honor,” Gorsham said, I would like to enter this photo as exhibit fifty-three.”

  The clerk recorded the evidence.

  “Mrs. De Meglio, can you tell the court what the photo is of?”

  “Derrick Johnson,” she said, very low to the ground.

  “Finally, Mrs. De Meglio, did your grandson, who according to our earlier witnesses has now recovered—”

  “Objection!”

  “Sustained. Ms. Gorsham, please watch your relevance.”

  “Mrs. De Meglio, did your grandson ever tell you how old Derrick was?”

  “Fourteen,” she said softly.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear that.”

  “Fourteen.”

  “The same age as your grandson Bruno?”

  Mrs. De Meglio nodded. I really wanted a look at the blowup now.

  Cohen brought out an easel, and Gorsham put the photo on it so we could see. It was Derrick Johnson; his brains splattered over the room.

  Several jurors gasped. “Ayyyyeee!” Derrick’s mother screamed. “He was only a boy!”

  Even though I have twenty-twenty vision, I pretended to fiddle with a contact lens. In the few seconds I squirmed, I spotted a reporter I hadn’t seen before, leaning in to catch every last jury reaction. I knew her from where? And then it came—Jennifer, my brother’s girlfriend his senior year at the High School for Art and Design. About five years back she wrote an article for one of those women’s magazines on penises she had known. One penis she called Dr. Hook. Ingrid was in the living room with my folks, showing them photos of the happy couple’s funky home in Minnesota. I showed Frank the article in the kitchen, where he was cooking pasta. Frank laughed at my audacity, but he wouldn’t tell me if he was the proud owner of Dr. Hook. He whistled a high C through a dry ziti until I left him alone. Think of anything, Rachel, anything, to keep from processing that picture. I wanted to run out of the room, but, abruptly, I let out an extended shrill sound, an animal being slaughtered.

  Louis grasped my hand. “Are you okay? Rachel?”

  The court artist turned a page on her pad.

  “Jurors, Ladies and Gentlemen visiting the courtroom,” Berliner said. “This is a rough part of the trial, but I will have to ask you to try and keep from reacting. You must keep an open mind. We will take a fifteen-minute break so Mrs. Johnson and Ms. Ganelli can pull themselves together.”

  I grabbed the closest chair to the door when we returned to jury quarters. My hand was trembling. Everyone was embarrassed for me.

  “Rachel,” Louis said, “tell us what’s in your head. Why aren’t you talking?”

  I wasn’t talking? I felt like I was talking. My brain was on over-drive.

  The De Meglio trial was the proverbial straw on the camel’s back. The infected blood of disaffection, seeping through all these months, had finally blitzed my brain. Colin. Jesus, Colin, my fiancé of sorts. My second one. How could I have humiliated Will, the nicest guy in this or any universe, when the invitations for our wedding had already gone out? (Boom!) I’d let a stranger on a plane pinch my nipples when I couldn’t even go beyond a kiss and that shower with Colin. (Zing!) My remoteness from my mother. (Wham!) How could my selfish mind drift into dried macaroni when before me were families who had endured personal holocausts? Derrick Johnson’s mother’s words echoed with me again. He was only a boy. My emotions, like Derrick’s brains, were all over the room.

  “Wham!” I said.

  “
Rachel—do you want a Lifesaver?” Greg asked. “Rachel?”

  “Let her be,” someone said. “She looks ill.”

  “Shh, Rachel. You’re incoherent. It was a ghastly photo. Don’t try to talk. Take a breather.”

  Until the trial, my proxy for religion had been the fine tuning of knowledge. Where am I on the map of the world? Where are we all on the plane of infinite planes? Pop culture and place as secular reference points.

  Why suffer unanswerable questions when there’s the option of folly? Spending forty minutes pinning down that Ethel Maye Potter was Ethel Murtz’s maiden name on I Love Lucy soothed me. And if I could get five others to remember a precise moment that drew blank faces from my elders and younger cousins—like the week in the early 1980s that the ass-hugging Sasson jeans changed their pronunciation because of a hair salon owner’s lawsuit—I had proof of my exact seconds on Earth. If you don’t accept the juggernauts of a Messiah and past lives, how else but through common popular ground can you tell yourself we’re in the morass together?

  Fred poured several inches of his Perrier into a paper cup for me.

  And that map, I thought, the one Jorge at the public library had gotten a facsimile of for me. The great old map from the 1800s in the Library of Congress which shows the second expedition of the vessel Pinta returning from a voyage around the island of matrimony. There are many rough waters to cross—Gulf of Flirtation, Whirlpool of Reflection, Undercurrent Bay—but then the journey leads to calmer waters of comfort, delight. The ship’s final path led to Land’s End, one hundred feet from Port Hymen. Inland from Port Hymen looms the holy church.

  It hit me in new dimensions, like I’d just purchased a relief map of my life: cold facts weren’t enough. I wanted Colin near me so that love could fill the doubting gap. But did we really love each other? And by obsessing on Stuart, I was trying to do good without someone of the cloth patting my head. I was pounding square pegs into round holes. I had to let Colin and Stuart be. They were square pegs. Oh how shameful, another part of me said suddenly, all you are thinking of is Rachel, Rachel, Rachel.

  “Shameful,” I said.

  “Yes, shameful,” Greg said, snagging a pretzel from the table, “she knew what she was doing.”