by Lee Gutkind
Willie-boy stands half in the garage and half out, the rain darkening his shirt in spots. “Hiya Mrs. Lancilotta,” he calls up, taking care with each soft sound.
And before he can even finish, she says, “Willie! Call me anything but that!”
“Okay Miss Ray,” he says, widening his eyes and wrapping his lips around his teeth to hold back from smiling.
My father is walking around the back into the house. There are two gates and three doors my father has to pass through to get into my mother’s kitchen, our fort. The first door is a screen door, never locked. The second door leads into a small foyer where Penny lies. The third door has a diamond-shaped window through which we can see his head a split second before he plows into the kitchen, uproots the Daily News out of his back pocket, and tosses it at the table. Then he begins to shed. One boot scores the heat pipe, the other the wall. My mother scratches her head, concentrating on where things land so she can find them later when he says he doesn’t know where anything is, and where’d she hide them. He tracks to the bathroom in damp socks, pressing water out each step. I follow him close behind. I watch his every maneuver. I’m careful not to get in his way. Everyone is in place: the puppies in their box, Mommy at the kitchen sink, Daddy at the bathroom sink, Penny in her shadow. He leaves the bathroom door open. I watch. He dunks two fingers in the can of grease solvent. His hands chew it, blackening the sink. Handcupfuls of hot water splash his face, head, up his nose, neck, ears, gargling like a drowning gorilla all over the mirror and walls. The black never comes all off. Knuckle skin, palms and underneath his nails are black etched with oil stains built up over twenty-three years. Indelible. There are roadways in my Daddy’s hands. A whole map. He points to the markings and tells me he knows The Bronx like the palm of his hand. “Never get that grease off,” he says, “they don’t make a soap that can take the grease outta these here hands. This is the history of New York. We built this city, each brick, each ice, each coal, every frame of sidewalk.” Twenty-three years is how long he’s been in the business and the marriage and that’s how long the war’s been over. “We fought for peace. There’s been no peace since,” he reminds us, singing war-era tunes: “You made me love you. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it.” He aims this song at my mother but it feels aimed at me too, for without her there’d be no me. He laughs as he sings. When he sings, it is a refusal to talk, he sings loud and ignores the rest of us. He towels his whole head furiously and finger combs his hair through with Vaseline hair tonic, getting wet at the crotch from leaning against the sink. He walks back into the kitchen with the big white towel around his neck like a muscular peasant shouldering a dead lamb. He taps a new pack of Lucky Strikes on his wrist twice fast, rip-cords the red cellophane band with his teeth, spits it out onto the floor and pulls a cigarette out with his teeth. My mother’s eyes follow the red cellophane band as it floats to the floor.
“I get any calls!” There is little question in my father’s voice.
“No, I don’t think so.” There is a tentativeness in my mother’s tone of voice. This provokes him.
“What do you mean you don’t think so! It’s yes or it’s no!”
“What am I, your secretary?”
My father laughs. That’s not a good sign. It means he’s running out of words.
Willie-boy comes in, and stands in the doorframe, half in the kitchen, half out, ducking a little to fit under it. His hands are in his pockets. My father jokes that it’s a habit from years of Willie thieving. My father walks past Penny and steps down to the basement ducking his head as the stairs spiral down.
Willie asked my mother if she’d save some more of his earnings each week so as to be sure he wouldn’t gamble it away.
“I’ll tell you what, Willie,” my mother says, “I’ll bless your money.” She takes his dollars to her Bible. She layers the bills in between the pages of the big colorful pictures of Moses walking through the Red Sea bed. “Now your money’s blessed,” she says to him discreetly and with conviction, “now it has to go to your wife and kids.”
Willie nods, “That’s just where it’s going Miss Ray, that’s just where it’s going.”
My father stomps back up the stairs. The phone rings. I run to it, climbing on the stepstool to reach it. The voice asks for Joe. I cover the mouthpiece as he has trained me to do since the business is run out of her kitchen, and I whisper-shout, “Daddy, are you home?” The voice on the phone laughs. My father takes the phone, exhaling a gruff laugh.
“Sure,” he says into the phone, “right six,” he says, “come on over for coffee. Right. I’m here. Right. Sure bring hoodycall.” He hangs up and takes a sandwich of folded money out of his front pocket. He opens up a soggy twenty, and hands it out toward Willy, the bill’s edge woven around his thick middle finger. This bill he doesn’t fold into a tight little square hidden in his palm the way he hands me money, no, all flat open and showy like the American flag they just stuck into the moon. “Ga’ head, Shine, go on down the corner and bring back five cups of coffee and buy yourself an egg cream.”
I always thought Shine was the most beautiful last name you could have in the whole world, and of all people, I was glad Willie had it. His bright flat open hand and long fingers received the green bill and crawled back into its post in his front pocket and his smile broke loose on him. He had a smile on him Willie-boy did. He tried to contain it, pulled the corners of his mouth down, bit at his bottom lip, but once out, his smile was like an ice-cream sandwich stuck in his dark head. I loved Willie. He bought me presents when I was sick. When I was bedridden with mono, he brought me a hand puppet with one character from The Wizard of Oz on each finger, Dorothy holding Toto, Tin Man, Scarecrow, Lion, and the Wicked Witch. When Penny was nowhere to be found last week, it was Willie who said, “They go somewhere they never been before, somewhere special when they’re ready to give birth,” and true enough my mother found Penny in her bedroom up on the blue chair that folded out into the bed where I sleep. Penny wasn’t allowed there, and my mother chased her away. She went back to her dark cave hallway off the kitchen. Her whole body started bucking as each puppy covered in slimy juice shot out of her. Penny licked each one of them clean as they fumbled around blindly sucking the air as if swimming to find the surface: six puppies one slimy mass changing shape as they jockeyed into position each on a teat. When she had no more life to give suck to, she bit at their necks to pull their mouths from her. Willie brought in an empty cardboard box from the garage and settled the puppies underneath the kitchen window. The puppies’ collective mission became to climb over one another to stretch for the top of the box, to try to get back to their mother. She retreated to join her shadow on the floor next to the radiator.
Willie takes the twenty and walks out the back door and ducks through a hole in the fence to go get the men coffees. My mother bends down to pick my father’s clothes up off the floor. She tosses them down the basement steps like unwanted fish back to sea. She takes the brown basket full of dry clean clothes and tosses it down the basement steps. He walks out whistling the same tune he was singing. My father’s whistling has a whole dictionary of meanings. This particular whistle means my mother doesn’t exist and should stay out of his way. He bunks into her as he exits, as if she’s a piece of furniture he has to walk around. She leans against the great white refrigerator and slides to the floor covering her eyes with her hands. I pull at her arm to get up. She walks directly to his shelves as if something is guiding her. His shelves are the only place in the kitchen that’s off limits to the rest of us. His shelves of binders. She grabs at the binders and one falls open to the floor. His binders are full of horse racing statistics. His system. His hours and hours of thoughts and strategies. His gambling with our lives. His “one day my horse is gonna come in” promises. Hours of his handwritten notes and scrawls surround the names of horses. Some of the names are crossed out. Other names are heavily underlined. There are words written thick in the margins, like SCRAT
CHED. JOCKEY CHANGE. SLOPPY AT THE START. She grabs at them, her hands do the thinking, her hands grab a bundle of a hundred tickets held together by a rubber band. I know it’s a hundred. I help count them at night. Money. It is all money spent, she thinks as she grabs a fistful of pages. She goes to her window. She does what she knows how to do. She grabs the wooden clothespins. She snaps a page onto the clothesline. She pushes the rope. She rips more and more pages, clothes-pinning them to the rope, pushing them out over the yard into the soft rain.
“Here,” she shouts, “here’s where all the money goes. This is what he does. This is where he disappears. This is where he goes. This is where all the money goes.” She pushes the rope. My father looks up at her and laughs. Then all the men there laugh. She shouts the names of horses down onto them, as she pushes his pages out over their heads, “LOST BOY, BREAKINMYCHANCES, MOONRISE. How much did that one pay?” She pushes the rope. “SURVIVOR’S GLORY, THERMOMETERRISING. Here’s the milk.” She pushes the rope. The sun and rain come down together. “NOTMYPROBLEM, BONE ALONE. Here’s the sugar. MERCURYSSON, EMBRACEABLE. DOCTOR’S ORDER, CALLITMADNESS, SORRYLOU, ITHADTOBEYOU, Here’s all the coffee you want!!! Hey you! Here! You want coffee!” She grabs a pack of ticket stubs and flings them out all over the men standing in the yard. The stubs flutter and whirl down onto the wet cement. There is a different color for each race each day of the week. Stubs from Belmont. Stubs from Aqueduct. My father has years of stubs. My father always says never throw away a racing stub.
He looks up at her, “That’s some stunt, Lilly,” he murmurs under his breath. “Snake. Cow. Bitch.” He laughs. Then all the men there laugh. And the troops seem not far behind.
I hear Blacky yelping. I tilt the box. I reach down through all that softness. Blacky is nowhere in the box. I follow the sound. I race to the hall. Blacky is in Penny’s mouth. The radiator is silent where she lies. Penny is pressing Blacky’s head against the iron bars. I clap at her till she drops him.
She closes and latches her window then the shutters, then slides down the wall to her shadow on the floor. She swallows her tears in the back of her head as if the tears do not exist if they do not exist, but mountains from ground shells and time. I lift Blacky to her neck and he licks. She passes her eyes over Penny’s wilted belly then her hand. She calls our family physician, Dr. Riciardi. While she’s on the phone with him, her hand passes over Penny’s belly and stops quietly over one spot listening like a hand reading a Braille, she bows her head. “I’ll be damned,” she says into the phone, “there must be a seventh still in there.” She instructs me to run down the corner to the drug store on Zerega and St. Raymond’s to buy “CN,” the disinfectant. “Go now,” she instructs, “and get the money off your father.” She pushes my birth name out of her mouth, the one short syllable she was forced to don on me in honor of his mother, the one short syllable to compensate for the long last name. “Ann.” A. N. N. I filled into tiny boxes letter by careful letter on school exams. I wished she said, “Annie.” When she says Ann I get worried. She sounds distant, formal. She never wanted to name me that, but it was his choice. His mother.
I kneel by Penny and shout, “Open your eyes!” but if salami didn’t move her, I thought, forget about it, words ain’t gonna do what salami can’t.
I run out the back door, down the steps, up the alleyway to the back of the house where the alleys open up into backyards back to back two by two up and down the whole block in a row, separated only by a wire fence gut high that the neighbors talk across at the corners where four backyards touch beneath the fencing; where you can see that they really all are one, although each has been painted a different color that provides distinction all along the edges; where the trees hang fruit over the property lines and in September drop them; where in one corner Penny and Gigi and Lucky Two Balls nose each other where their tails join their bodies, and in the other corner Penny and Cocoa the giant poodle would.
I run down the block past Bow. Bow runs out at me and gets twisted up in the air and chokes. He barks through his choking like he’s underwater. At night Bow is kept in his backyard off the chain. Seven fences away from Penny, seven fences he jumped to get to her. “He raped her twice,” my mother says, “in the puppies you can see his markings clearly.”
I don’t need money, the guy down the corner store knows who my father is. I pull the murky brown bottle with the red letters CN off the shelf and the clerk nods at me and tries to hand me a paper bag, but I have the bottle by its neck and am out the door running back up the block, past Bow still barking. My father is carrying a big black piece of wood out of the house wrapped in my mother’s new plaid comforter inside my blue plastic rowboat. Black wood like a cut-out of Penny. I shout her name. Her pink wood tongue is out the side of her white wood mouth. My father says, “Maybe one we can keep,” and the back doors of the green work van slam shut.
It was the presence of this already dead one inside her that made Penny die. That was my understanding of it. She fed her puppies till she died. Then we took over with baby bottles. Five times a day we fed the puppies Similac. A whole box of puppies soft as dandelion flowers. I’d push my nose into the fur of each of them and just breathe there. They smelled safe to me. Blacky we kept. I’d bury my nose in Blacky’s fur. I sat on the kitchen floor and pushed the nipple of the baby bottle in his mouth and let him suck. He smelled safe to me.
My Mom sprinkled the CN ritualistically everywhere Penny had lain, as if a magnificent power was present in that one bottle of liquid, as if she was blessing the dog’s presence, and releasing her at the same time.
Behind the tomato rows we found six holes dug deep like for planting. Six holes Penny had dug to bury her just born. Penny knew she couldn’t take care of them, she knew she was dying. My mother strung the tomato stalks up into the light with leftover yellow wool tied to sticks. We watched the globes turn green for weeks and grow to orange pink rose then red then red then red red red.
It is the smell of CN now not of death that I remember. CN was sweet. Awful. Sweet.
ANNIE RACHELE LANZILLOTTO is a writer and performance artist of Barese heritage and a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Next Generation Leadership Program.
Dagos in Mayberry
. . . . . . . .
PETER SELGIN
Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.
—ANONYMOUS
One rainy evening not long ago in New York City I attended a reading and panel discussion featuring Italian American authors. I went because I’m a writer, and also because—though it’s not something I’d given much thought to—I am what some people call Italian American. And though I enjoyed the readings, the discussion afterwards disturbed me. At some point in their lives all of the panelists had felt discriminated against as a direct result of their Italian background. As they told stories of jobs denied and promotions withheld I listened with a mixture of unease and outrage, but also with bewilderment. It had never occurred to me that I belonged to a persecuted minority.
In the small Connecticut town where my twin brother, George, and I grew up, we were called all the usual names and treated to the customary crude jokes (Q: Why is Italy shaped like a boot? A: Because they couldn’t fit all that shit in a sneaker). But to me those jokes weren’t acts of ethnic discrimination, but part of being a boy among boys, which is to say persecuted. Had our ethnicity not furnished them with a handy means for doing so, our peers would have found other ways to torment us.
This, at least, was how I had always looked at things. Now, though, sitting at that symposium listening to those speakers, I started to wonder if maybe all my life I had been naive—or worse, in denial. As the stories of prejudice mounted I grew so uncomfortable I finally grabbed my umbrella and stormed out into the pouring rain.
It had been raining all day. As I lurched into the dark, drenched street my anger toward the four panelists rose to a fever pitch in my blood. The absurdity! The paranoia! The entrenched, perverse solidarity!
They reminded me of a support group I once attended for people with inflammatory bowel diseases (in my thirties I suffered from ulcerative colitis). As the veterans introduced themselves and elucidated their ailments I couldn’t help noticing the relish with which they inventoried their symptoms and their surgeries, displaying them like medals, dropping names of doctors and procedures as if they were celebrities in a gossip column. This was no support group, I remember thinking; this is a fan club. I never went back.
As I splashed my way to the subway I concluded that all these Italian Americans crying discrimination would likewise never be “cured” of what ailed them. They were too obsessed with it, intoxicated by their illness.
I realize now that this was an unfair assessment. But I was angry. The panelists had upset what had until then been at a kind of equilibrium, like a smoldering but benign volcano. Worse, they made me feel as if I’d had a disease all my life without knowing it. At forty, suddenly I was being forced to confront my ethnicity, something I’d never really confronted before. As I stood dripping wet on the subway platform I wondered, What has being an Italian American meant to me? Has it been a source of pain, or pleasure? Has it helped me, or hurt me? Or hasn’t it mattered?