When the World Was Young

by Tony Romano

  “Is everything okay?”

  He stepped away from her. “Yeah. It’s nothing.”

  She peered beyond him. “All right. Take care of what you need to take care of.” She tried to suppress a smile. “What’s her name?”

  A surge of panic. “No, no, it isn’t that. It’s my sister.”

  Before he crossed he stopped and leaned back. “You sure you don’t need me to walk you home?”

  “You go. I’ll be fine.”

  That brilliantined prick had his arm resting along Victoria’s shoulder blades. Just his arm. One stiff arm that you could have hung a winter coat on. More than a head taller, he had to stoop considerably, though he still managed to strut, a loose-kneed, bicycle-pedaling sort of strut that Santo once thought was something. But now those limber-kneed legs looked as if they were tromping through so much muck. When Santo came up on them he would call out Milano’s name, and the prick would turn and offer that shit-faced grin, slide his arm off Victoria’s shoulders, and never betray even a trace of alarm.

  “Hey, Milano.”

  And there it was. The easy turn. The slow smirk. But his arm didn’t move, not until Victoria sidled away from him. Then his hands dropped to his sides. Long creamy fingers. A girl’s hands.

  “Santo, my man.”

  Santo stared down his sister.

  “Where’s Benito?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I left him on the corner—in the middle of Ashland.”

  “Uh-huh.” The only comeback he could think of was her tired line: You’re so funny I forgot to laugh. So he waited.

  “They’re here,” she said. “Everyone’s here. Zia’s got him.”

  Santo considered this while chewing on his lower lip.

  “So, whattya up to, Eddie? Doin’ a little babysitting?”

  Victoria folded her arms and turned away from him, shifted her weight abruptly to one side. Eddie put up his hands. “Just walking, my man.”

  Santo had seen those same hands balled into fists. He’d seen the damage done by those white knuckles. Seeing his mitts out now in resignation, Santo realized with sudden clarity that Eddie never mixed it up with anyone unless he had two or three friends behind him. Santo felt his own hands tightening.

  “Just walking, huh?” Santo said.

  “A little walk.”

  “With my sister.”

  “With your sister.”

  “You were probably gonna stop at church, right? Say a few novenas. Light a few candles.”

  Eddie couldn’t conceal the slow smirk that he must have believed made him appear harmless but never did. Except maybe to one sixteen-year-old.

  I’ll wipe the sidewalk with that smirk, you prick.

  Santo moved one step closer to him. He straightened his back. The procession had started up again, and Santo figured that by the time each of them got three or four shoves in, the Madonna would be glaring down on them. He thought about blood on his uncle’s shirt. He thought about one of the women in black pulling the two of them apart, yelling Basta, Basta, kicking them with her black-bottomed feet. He thought of a dozen reasons to step back, but he just wanted one swift crack at Milano’s chin. One little swipe.

  As the Madonna passed, the three of them stood fixed there. Waiting. The streets were once cobblestone, Santo thought. The stones were still there, buried beneath years of asphalt, which was a mystery to him, all that blackness. Cobblestone he could understand. A portion of the domed roof of the church loomed over the sidewalk trees. How they built the spire, he couldn’t even begin to imagine. He scratched at the back of his neck and peered around for the moon. This was one of those moments, he thought, when the moon should have been there, waxy white against the blue-black night.

  Later, when he tried to recall what finally drew his attention away from his rage and his scattered thoughts about stone streets and domed roofs, Santo couldn’t decide if it was the stricken look on Victoria’s face or the first caplike pops of the closing fireworks behind him.

  He turned. Bricks of firecrackers had been unraveled and threaded along someone’s chain-link fence, and starbursts of light fired in rapid succession. Eighty packs of firecrackers blazing one after the other. Down the street at the corner his father, Agostino, stood nose to nose with a bulldog of a woman—her teeth bared and body coiled. When she spoke her one hand slashed the air while the other remained poised outward toward Agostino, fingers splayed, like she wanted to choke him. She jabbed at him with a finger, the bun of steel-gray hair at the back of her head loosening with each poke.

  Agostino was one mass shrug, shoulders so tight his neck disappeared. His head angled sharply to the side, he put his palms out toward the old woman and eased them apart, like he was drawing open a lace scrim. Santo had seen that gesture before, a gesture meant to calm the woman. His father glanced behind him, his eyes darting, searching, then faced her again.

  A cherry bomb exploded. Then another. A spatter of five or six more. The smoke thick and rising in ash clouds, black pollen, the sulfur bitter and metallic.

  His father backed away and began to turn from the woman. There was nothing else to do. He wiped his hands along his trousers.

  The blast from an M-80 rocked Santo on his heels. The sidewalk shook. He moved to cover his ears, then let his hands drop to his sides. He needed to take this all in. His eyes burned, but still he gazed through the smoke.

  The enraged woman stepped closer to Agostino, still ranting. There was no pacifying her. She poked at his chest. Another woman appeared then. Much younger. A stroller at her side. She tapped on the old woman’s shoulder, mouthing Mama. Pleading, she pulled on the old woman’s shoulder. Come, she motioned. Come. Please. She seemed pinned for a moment between the old woman and the infant, grasping firmly at her left and rocking gently on her right. She teetered there, struggling, then suddenly turned and marched away, pushing the infant, her gray wool sweater too hot for June curling behind her.

  2

  Like the dust that collects at the tops of doors. That’s how I feel sometimes, thought Angela Rosa. So when the butcher Larry with the Polish last name suddenly started paying attention after years of waiting on her, Angela Rosa didn’t complain. He’d lumber out from the back room with a fresh cotton apron, wiping his soapy hands across his chest and flashing a snaggletoothed grin. “Rosa,” he’d say. “What’s cookin’?” No one but her mother had ever called her Rosa, but Rosa sounded right coming from this fair-skinned butcher with the scrubbed fingernails. Hands offered glimpses into a person’s private world—she’d discovered this soon after arriving in America; studying hands was safer than meeting the eyes—and clean hands, especially on a butcher, indicated tenderness. Three scars crisscrossed along the ends of the two fingers that held the meat down viselike, but Angela Rosa had never seen any signs of the knife slipping—only the deep thrust and sweep and satisfying slash of the fat blue blade across the block cutting board. She admired the fluid efficiency of those hands, how they could instantly calibrate the force needed to split bone or shave fat or just wrap a square of waxy white paper around a meaty steak in four sharp tucks that came away so clean you could almost slip the package in your purse. She’d felt that precision in her own hands.

  Standing in her kitchen on a Saturday morning after a late night at the feast, staring at the cut flowers on her table, she decided on sirloin for dinner. Eight steaks. Medium thickness. Fried. She could already see the glint of the butcher’s knife, feel the weight of the white package in her hands as she strolled home. The olive oil, the garlic wedges sprinkled along the top of the steaks. Dicing Benito’s portion in tiny pieces. She hoped he’d be hungry by then since he barely touched his breakfast and wanted only to return to sleep. Both her husband and Benito sleeping soundly at eleven o’clock on a Saturday. Agostino must have returned home from the store later than usual last night because of the feast. She wished he would go back to his tailoring and keep normal hours. He’d be up already and out of the apartment for his morning wal
k. Her boys were already loose in the neighborhood. She couldn’t keep track anymore. How could anyone expect her to keep track?

  She pounded twice on the bathroom door with the bottom of her fist, a cue for Victoria to turn off the shower already. The shower was new and everyone was fascinated by it. “Vittoria? Alora?” She didn’t know if her nagging or her stories about the aqueducts back home did any good, but Angela Rosa couldn’t stop herself. Victoria had to learn. When Mama was a girl, she’d tell her, a small basin of water was all anyone could hope for.

  “Where is everyone?” Victoria wanted to know when she finally made it out of the bathroom.

  Angela Rosa had begun to dry a stack of breakfast dishes. “How much water you use?”

  “The lake is drying up, Mama?” She pulled a cereal bowl out of the cupboard. “I know. The wells. But we don’t have wells, Mama. We have Lake Michigan. That’s why you came here, right?”

  Anthony and Alfredo would whine some when she scolded them, but at least they’d show remorse, sincere or not. But this one. This one would be her end, she thought, one of Lupa’s lines.

  “Where’s Papa?”

  “Sleep.”

  “He’s still sleeping?”

  “He sleep.”

  “What time did he get home?”

  And then that familiar shadowy glance that riled Angela Rosa, Victoria’s eyes focusing just beyond her. A glint of concealment in those eyes. Her family, even Agostino, would keep things from her. They had the edge. They had the words. She cursed the years she spent isolated within her small circle of Italian-speaking neighbors. And the ten years of piecework for Zenith, where she became more or less proficient at Spanish, isolated her further. She found it ironic that lately she’d begun to think more and more in English. Her very thoughts seemed new to her.

  “He come home when he come home. No you busyness.”

  Victoria slurped down a spoonful of Cheerios. “You can’t even talk in this house,” she muttered. “Cripes.”

  “No tell that.”

  “It’s not a bad word, Mama. Relax.”

  “No, you relax.”

  “I’m eating. I’m sitting. I’m relaxed.”

  Maybe she was too rough on Victoria. For her own good. And maybe all mothers were treated this way in return. It was too late now to let up, though. Victoria would understand one day. Angela Rosa quickly pushed aside the idea that she’d not been much kinder to her own mother, which came through more in the things she’d failed to say or do than in any direct encounters. She turned inside herself then. She never had the nerve for the bitter tablets that Victoria’s tongue spit out.

  Victoria dropped her bowl in the sink. “What time did you get home? Did you see the Madonna pass?”

  “No, no, I go before. Benito he cry.”

  Victoria’s eyes swept the apartment. “Who’s got my little guy anyway?”

  “He sleep.”

  “He’s down for his nap already?”

  “He sleep.”

  Suddenly Angela Rosa gripped the counter near the sink, leaning into its coldness. She slapped down the ladle she’d been drying. Though she’d fully recovered from her labor with Benito, sometimes a thunderclap of pain laced its way around her pubic area and just seized her. Held her there for a pulsing moment or two.

  “You okay, Mama? You gonna throw up?”

  The thought of throwing up hadn’t announced itself till then, and now it seemed like a real possibility.

  “No, no. Va bene.”

  She breathed slowly through her mouth and rocked on the balls of her feet. Everything would be okay, she repeated to herself.

  Victoria had been looking for an opening, a moment of intimacy maybe—a moment was about all she could hope for with her mother—a pause where she could slip in a mention of her plans for the night. “I’m going to stop by Darlene’s tonight,” she’d say, without a trace of apprehension in her voice. Maybe drop the plans in her mother’s lap as she passed at the sink. But now there was no lap and there’d be no easy way to broach the subject without seeming heartless. Lately her mother viewed Victoria’s every move as an attack. Her mother had been poisoned by Lupa, of course. The reason Victoria wanted to visit Darlene, the logic went, was to insert a dagger in Angela Rosa’s back. If that’s what they believed, Victoria reasoned, then that’s what they believed. Though she did little to dispel those ideas, maybe enjoying the power she held over them, she wished things were different. She was tired of struggling. There was a time not long ago when she looked to Santo for guidance. She studied him, watched him smile and kid his way out of the house, and imagined herself doing the same. But when she tried, she seemed outside herself and couldn’t even muster a grin. She’d pace around the apartment as if she were inspecting cracks in the paint. And even if she’d been able to find a way out of the box she’d created for herself, it wouldn’t have mattered. She understood that now. She understood it like none of her brothers ever could.

  “Why don’t you sit down, Mama?”

  To Victoria’s surprise, her mother put out her hand for assistance. “Va bene.”

  Victoria guided her to a chair. “What happened?”

  “One day you understand.”

  “You having cramps, Mama? You know, your period?”

  Angela Rosa glared at her. Menstruation was a private matter to be dealt with and not discussed.

  “Forget,” Angela Rosa said.

  Victoria glanced through the screen to the gray porch. By the way, I’m going by Darlene’s tonight, she thought. She tapped the table, then pulled back her hand. She thought about her mother scrubbing the screen. You remember Darlene, right? She stole a peek across from her. I told you I’m going by Darlene’s house tonight, right? She could wait, let the sun come down, and when the last bite of dinner was swallowed she would rise from her chair, pat her full belly, and announce, “I’m going out,” or “I’m going to the store,” and maybe everyone would mistake her for Santo. Her damn brother. Who thought she needed him last night. Which is what she needed to talk to Darlene about. What happened last night.

  She couldn’t talk to Santo. He’d walked her home stone-faced the whole time. And she didn’t think she wanted to talk to Eddie, not about her father. She needed Darlene, who would sit there with her elbow hooked along the back of the chair, cracking chewing gum, unfazed by anything Victoria could say. Yet she’d be there, nodding, taking in every pause and keeping every secret safe. The incident with the old woman raced through Victoria’s mind like some old news footage that kept slipping off its sprocketed wheel. She saw Papa, then the old woman’s hands, then Papa’s shoulders, their movements disjointed and abrupt. She tried to convince herself that the man could have been someone else, not her father. She’d only seen the back of him, really, through all that smoke. And the woman could have been some lunatic, upset over the way he’d walked by her. But it was Papa all right. Not his usual confident self maybe, but unmistakably him. She couldn’t think of any reasonable explanation for his being there with the old woman, so she tried one preposterous theory after another. The old lady’s hem was crooked. Papa had sewn a crooked hem. Victoria would be upset, too.

  She had a fleeting impulse to bring up last night with her mother to find out if she knew anything at least, but her mother would erupt. “No you busyness,” she’d say. If Papa ever opened the restaurant he always talked about—Mama’s restaurant, next to the bar—that could be the name: No You Busyness.

  “You help today,” Angela Rosa said.

  It wasn’t a question. It was never a question.

  “You bring clothes down.”

  They studied the glare on the peach vase between them, both thinking about simpler times, days when they took comfort filling that kitchen, two girls conspiring, not so much against Papa and the boys, but to ward off the feeling of being outnumbered.

  “Okay, Mama,” Victoria said. She turned the vase. “I’ll bring the clothes down.”

  A shimmer of light
quivered through a crack in one of the blinds, and Agostino knew by its intensity that he’d slept late. He lay there bleary-eyed and still heavy from sleep, convincing himself that the Apennine hills dotted the morning sky just outside his window. A stand of spruce trees undulating and melting into the powdery-white horizon. Olive trees so close he could touch their corkscrew branches. Fragrant cherry trees. A canopy of grapes.

  Sew your dick to your pants, Vince had told him over and over again. Each time, his brother would grab his crotch and perform the procedure with mock precision, the imaginary sewing needle rising and falling in long, sweeping loops. Sew your dick to your pants. What did Vince know about it? He had his whores. Even if Vince found the wife he said he sought, would he give up the whores? Sew your dick to your pants. A reassuring thought at this point.

  He’d tried. He’d really tried. Of all people, Vince should have understood. Women were like drink to Agostino. And like his brother, he was weak. Though no one would believe him, and maybe he didn’t believe it himself, he wished sometimes that he looked more like Vince with his expansive forehead and jutting chin. And that ridiculous crookback lurch of a step. But Agostino had too much of his mother in him. A small dark face with thick brows and long lashes. Women were drawn to that face, a fact he’d never taken any particular pride in, but one he never denied either.

  He heard himself starting to rehearse what he might one day need to say to his wife, and he kept returning to “I have weak.” He knew how to say it correctly, and he knew what he’d say if he confessed in the language she best understood, but he suspected I have weak would inflict the least hurt.

  He moved to the window and forced himself to peek through the glare at the rooftops and back porches. Though he still yearned for the mountains of his past, there was a beauty about the city, too, that he couldn’t explain. He thought it might have to do with the sounds from the street. A lawn chair scraping against the sidewalk in front of Mio Fratello’s that interrupted the slow drone of the neon arrow overhead. Tires gripping asphalt. Sounds he could never have heard back in his village. Sounds, he decided, were innocent.