Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
Plenty of time to notice the previous night’s stew took forever to warm, the espresso to brew, the milk to steam. My shirtwaist suddenly felt cumbersome, my skin tacky, and my braid dragged on my neck like I’d tied it with a ribbon of iron.
The old man’s curtains drooped to the sill; the windows refused to open. I flung the door to the garden wide, not to let the air in, but to let some of its awful denseness out.
Towels hanging on the line strung between the vegetable pots were still soggy in the bubble’s damp warmth. I retreated inside, swept the old man’s shoe forms off the carved wooden chest, and lifted the lid, intent on finding something fresh to dry the dishes.
A doily embroidered in pink roses greeted me. Roses like the ones in my dream, their color deep as the day they were embroidered. I traced along the design’s edge, so like the blush along Benedetta’s cheek. An afghan followed, appliquéd in red apples. Next came a shawl, trapunto speckled across its frothy white like fresh-fallen snow.
I climbed atop the table and wrapped the shawl around the hanging fixture’s plain metal frame, then pulled the chain. Soft glowy patterns cut through the bubble’s growing gloom and dismissed the doldrums.
I pushed the old man’s tools to the benches, scrubbed the table, and laid a cloth, bright with embroidered strawberries. Benedetta would love this. Maybe I could invite her up. Tea and a little conversation. Like other people.
I dug deep into the wooden chest, seeking napkins. I found a photograph instead, framed in filigree and colored in the sepia of the time.
Three crosses, draped in white crepe, rose from a freshly turned plot in a walled garden. One cross was so small, it all but disappeared in the bulk of the other two. An ancient fig tree protected the crosses, and hand-tinted poleggio and pervinca, flowers meant to comfort the spirits of dead children, sprouted from the surrounding stones.
A couple knelt beside the grave. About the Lattanzis’ ages, they dressed in traditional clothes found in old family trunks. The woman’s sleeves were long and wide, gathered at the wrists, her skirt voluminous with vertical creases, and her headdress tied under her chin in the typical sign of mourning. The man’s jacket was short, close to his body and buttoned to his neck. He held the lady’s shoulder. His posture spoke of sadness, deep and profound and too heavy to bear.
The old man. I’d know the hollow of that cheek anywhere.
It felt strange to see him strong, younger than my poppa. His hair had once been so dark and full, his face unwrinkled. I presumed the woman to be his wife, the lady responsible for the contents of the chest, for the old man’s garden.
Her face was turned away from the camera, revealing only the downward slope of an eyebrow and the curve of her cheek. I put a hand to mine, smooth as hers in the photograph, and imagined a time, in the far, far future, when my skin would crinkle as hers did in my vision by the strawberries.
Without the sickness, I’d never have known of her, nor the old man. Would never have met Benedetta. Good things sometimes came from bad. Mamma used to say so. Did good things ever come on their own?
“What is going on?” The old man stood in the doorway, a familiar leather satchel under an arm, his expression steel, his tone granite. He looked to the tablecloth, the afghan, the doily, the shawl shading the ceiling fixture.
I slid the photograph behind the stove. “I wanted to surprise you.”
He laid the satchel on his bench. “You were successful.”
“You don’t like it.”
“I don’t understand it.”
“You told me this is my home. That we are family. I wanted to make it pretty.”
“Ah. And as a modern woman you don’t need permission before pawing through my things.”
“If I marry Carlo, these would be my things, too. That’s part of the agreement. Take Rosina Vicente’s daughter off everybody’s hands and he doesn’t have to wait for his inheritance.”
The old man tilted his head. “Is that what he told you?”
“Well, no. Not exactly.” Not at all.
“Exactly what did he tell you?”
“Nothing. We went for a walk. Look, that’s not important. What’s important is that everything in the chest is so beautiful. Somebody loved these items. Somebody wanted them to be used.” I retrieved the linens, hands shaking, folding and refolding, but they refused to reassume the compact and precise arrangement in which they’d been laid. I gave up and slammed the lid. “I don’t like the world I created. It is heavy, and harsh, and slow as sludge. But the one you’ve created is worse. Work and sleep, work and sleep, work and sleep. Life is so big. It’s so very, very big.”
The old man took his place at his table. He unrolled a length of leather. “And yet you placed yourself into a bubble.”
Fine.
I went to replace the shoe forms, smallest to largest, huffing. A red cloud descended. My throat tightened, my stomach cramped, my palms went moist. Every part of me filled with the awareness, the awful finality. “The DiGirolamos are dead. That’s why you didn’t send Carlo to deliver their shoes. You knew they were sick, and you didn’t want him to catch it. You’re like me. You’re exactly like me. You see things, know things.”
The old man took his time about answering, like my words were a package in need of careful handling. “I know everybody knows the DiGirolamos were here on Parade Day, that you saw them, saw their children.” He pointed to the satchel. “Mending. Perhaps it would be better if you stayed home today.”
I took a step back, gaze darting corner to corner, though where I thought I would go I still don’t know.
People die. They die all the time. And at that place, in that time, they were dying from a sickness, a sickness carried on a sneeze and spread by a war we hadn’t caused, we couldn’t cure, and we were helpless to control.
Yet people still blamed me. I was trapped, caught in a bubble far more compact than any the curtain had manufactured, populated by every superstition our backward world could produce.
I shuffled through the shoe forms and saw the feet those forms had measured, the shoes made with them permanently emptied. Boys and girls, mothers and fathers, teachers and seamstresses, cooks and cabinetmakers, a congregation sucked into an ever-widening sea of red. A sea filled with the lost dreams, the unfulfilled talent, and the unrealized promise of their unlived years.
Eleven
In the normal world, a week measures no more than seven days, each of those days lasts a mere twenty-four hours, and each of those hours slips past minute by relentless minute. In the bubble world, time ceased to have meaning. Every stuporous second extended into an infinity in which all things happened, but nothing progressed. What did hours and days matter when each resembled the last? I slept. I woke. Prepared food and took baths. The sun rose. It set. So did the moon. The world turned on its axis, yet in the bubble, all we perceived was an increasingly unwieldy, unrelenting, and inexorable Now.
And despite the lengthiness of every moment, the typewriting school’s deadline for making an application loomed. I needed a job.
Etti pulled on my skirt. “What if Mamma and Poppa die?”
I wrung out the mop and set the bucket into the corner. “They won’t die.”
“What if they do? Mamma says we cannot stay with you.”
I combed that question out of my hair, tucked my clothes in properly, straightened my skirt, and checked the set of my collar. “You boys be good. I’ll check on you later.”
“There’s no more bread.”
“There’s soup on the stove. Don’t touch the burner. Eat it cold if you have to. There’s tea already brewed if your parents want it.”
“You make a lot of tea.”
“It makes your parents feel better.”
“Can you make them hotcakes? Hotcakes would make them feel better, too.”
Not my hotcakes. “Maybe I’ll do that when I get back.”
Fipo called me into his parents’ room. “Poppa threw up again.”
I sent Fipo for the mop, wrung out a cool cloth from the basin on the dresser, and placed it over the tailor’s fever. His breathing was labored, his face hollowed and haggard.
Germs didn’t grow in the bubble world, so the Lattanzis did not get worse. Germs also didn’t die, so the Lattanzis did not get better. They still needed to breathe, still needed to sleep, still needed to use the toilet, so I held to the hope that given the time, the Lattanzis would build resistance. Meanwhile, they needed to eat, but if they could not keep their food down, the Lattanzis would starve.
I headed out the door. I had to do something. Find something to take away the agita. The old man wouldn’t like it if I went to the pharmacy, but the reasons for his disapproval grew fuzzy. Something about not liking the pharmacy lady’s tea.
Benedetta called to me from her landing. “Are you going out?”
“Yes. Is there something you need?”
Her hair was tousled, her face wan. She lay a hand over her bulge. “Find me a box of sleep. What I wouldn’t give to be able to lie on my stomach again.” She moved toward the bathroom. “So sorry. Can’t wait. I’m bursting.”
Now I had a double reason for going to the pharmacy. Maybe the druggist had something to make Benedetta more comfortable. I could bring it up to her. I warmed to the idea. An excuse to see her that didn’t involve the boys or my fortune-telling.
The old man’s warnings suddenly seemed laughable. He got his pills from the pharmacy. No logic I shouldn’t go there to get something to help Benedetta, to help the Lattanzis.
Unless Carlo’s warning about the monsters were true.
“Signorina?”
Like my thought had poofed him into existence, Carlo stood between me and the street door. “I didn’t mean to startle you. You were lost in thought, gazing to the ceiling like you saw stars. Are you going out?”
I had on my coat and hat. Of course I was going out. “How do you keep getting in here? How come you never knock?”
“I have a key, signorina.”
A key. Like he was one of the family. “Excuse me, please. I don’t have time to chat.”
“The don had mentioned it might be better for you to stay close for a few days.”
I clenched my fist, letting every nail slice a groove into my palm. “And because you have a key you think it is your job to keep a list of everything I should and should not do? Maybe you should see the don now. See if he has any further restrictions.”
“Please, signorina.” His tone went from conversational to contrite. “At least let me accompany you.” He indicated the satchel under his arm. “I’ll bring these to the don and come right back. He doesn’t have to know.”
I stood to the side so he could pass.
“Five minutes. No more.” He darted up the steps, his pace demonstrating none of the damp despair which pulled at all else in the vicinity.
Of course I didn’t wait. Carlo belonged to Don Sebastiano. He wouldn’t like me going to see the guaritrice, either.
There were one hundred and seven steps from our stoop to the grocer. Before the bubble those steps were without effort, accomplished without notice. In the unrelenting Now, the steps felt twice as many and mired in mud, weighted by the gravity of a hundred disapproving stares.
The grocer’s offerings were slim, the activity in the market subdued. Shoppers passed, aromatic with the scent of camphor and onion necklaces, worn to ward off the sickness. I looked over the stalls, feeling hopeless. This is what we had come to, camphor and onion, probably sold by the guaritrice, a woman only trying to feed her daughter, a woman whose tea upset the old man.
The clip-clop of horses cut through my sloth. A wagon approached, much like the one on Parade Day, filled with what I first took to be rolls of blankets. As they had on Parade Day, men slid caps off their heads. Ladies crossed themselves. Children were admonished to “hush.”
Down the block, a jumping rope rhyme rose in the sudden stillness. The rhythm of a little girl’s shoes slapped the cobbles in complement to the rhythm of the hooves:
“I knew a little bird,
Her name was Enza.
I opened up the door,
and IN-FLU-ENZA.”
The wagon driver stood, his voice rising over the child’s. “Bring out your dead.”
The blankets in the back of the wagon weren’t rolled. They were wrapping bodies.
We all looked, one building to the next, waiting for a window to open, a door to unlock, some notice of who had died in the night.
All remained silent. There were no takers. There couldn’t be. Not that day. Nor the next. Nor the next day after. Inside the bubble, nobody could die.
But that didn’t mean we lived.
The market activity resumed, solemn, and cautious, the shoppers wary, the merchants suspicious. A man pointed to the wagon receding down the cobbles, then pointed to me.
One woman whispered, “Strega.” Witch.
Another, “Remember her mother.”
A different man, two stalls down, muttered, “She needs to be controlled.”
“The don isn’t thinking straight.”
“That Carlo should be careful.”
“Shhhh . . .”
“Not now.”
“She’ll hear.”
And other voices, springing to protect:
“Stop it. A sickness is carried by germs. She’s only a girl.”
“She has her mother’s curtain. That’s how.”
“Pfft. It’s a piece of fabric. Leave the girl be, she’s not bothering you.”
I went on my way. The kind speakers faded, their attention returned to everyday tasks. The fearful followed, their menace coagulating in my wake.
“Her parents died, but she did not even get sick.”
“The DiGirolamos saw her. They said she looked them in the eye.”
“She has her mother’s curtain. What other mischief might she cause?”
Return to the old man’s apartment seemed impossible, the path behind crowded with enmity.
A tub of water overturned on my shoes. An odor, fetid and sharp, rose before me.
“I was washing the trays.” The fishmonger’s wife retrieved the bucket. She spit over her left shoulder. “You should watch where you step.”
Somebody jostled me and something damp and pasty soaked into the front of my coat. A rotten squash. I scraped at the clod, the seeds embedding under my fingernails.
A handkerchief appeared. I took it and scrubbed it across the stain. A gelatinous swath smeared into the mess. Snot. I dropped the hankie and looked to see who had handed it to me, but the once familiar countenances of the people in the market contorted. They melted into a featureless mass of gray. My face went hot and the inside of my nose stung.
I shed the coat, threw it over my arm, and pushed on, plodding to a new rhythm marked by anxiety and fear. Ten steps, then five, repeated once, then twice. And still, the people followed me, the pharmacy in sight.
“Get out.”
“We don’t want you.”
“Cover your eyes. Don’t let her look in them.”
I pushed into the pharmacy, the crowd pushing in behind. The druggist, eyes shadowed above his mask, rappa-tap-tapped on his counter, pointed to a notice tacked to the wall behind him—BE POLITE. GET IN LINE. WAIT YOUR TURN.
I wasn’t going to be polite, wasn’t going to get in line. I was tired and tattered and smelling of fish. A finger tapped my shoulder. A voice whispered in my ear. “Take their rage, swallow it whole, turn their emotion against them.”
I obeyed, consuming their hatred, their fear, in chunks and shards. I let it pound in my temple, beat against my chest. I imagined my tormenters sick, lying in putrid piles around me, the red dust coating the insides of their lungs and their bodies stacked like cord wood.
Power gathered behind me, like sunlight behind the curtain, except this power was dismal and desperate an
d determined to find a way out.
Another hand came out of the chaos, pulling me back from the entrance.
Carlo. All he got was my coat. “Don’t go with her, signorina. All you will find is monsters.”
The guaritrice emerged from the mess. She pointed to the crowd. “I think she’s already found them.”
The pharmacy filled. Carlo got in close, got hold of my hand. He stepped this way, then that, trying to keep himself between me and the people. So many people. I circled with him, but the crowd seemed to multiply. They pressed in. From every angle.
The guaritrice’s voice rose above the hubbub. “Let us through.”
She might have been Moses, or rather, Moses’s wife, for the way the crowd parted, falling away to either side.
Tizi rushed forward. “Are you here about the job? I knew you’d come. I keep telling Mamma, ‘Don’t worry, Fiora will return.’ We’ve been so busy. So many orders to fill. You have no idea. There are so many more here than in the last place, and—”
A hand fell on Tizi’s shoulder. “Enough, my love. We are not so busy we forget our manners. Have you even said ‘Good afternoon’ to Fiora’s young man?”
I let go of Carlo. “He’s not my young man.”
Tizi played with the end of her braid, twirling it and untwirling it as I used to when I wore my hair that way. Why had I thought she was older when I saw her from the trolley tracks? She appeared even younger than the day we first met. She looked Carlo up, then down. “If he’s not your young man, what is he?”
The guaritrice lowered her mask. She looked over Tizi’s head at Carlo. “Don’t be rude, Tizi. Signor Lelii is our Fiora’s friend of course. And how nice. We can all use a friend.”
Our Fiora. The designation puffed me up. Lightened the effect of the bubble. Nobody had referred to me as our Fiora since that last time my parents introduced me to somebody. “And this is our Fiora.”
Tizi turned her back on Carlo. “Well, I can be Fiora’s friend, too.”
Carlo touched my elbow. “Come on. Let’s go. The don will be expecting us.”
The Infinite Now Page 10