The Infinite Now

by Mindy Tarquini

  Like I’d done something wrong.

  I pulled a loaf of bread from the Lattanzis’ oven. It was small, too dark, and much too hard. Nothing like Benedetta’s. I turned to the old man, my hand on my hip. “How did Carlo know where to find us?”

  The old man looked at me over his newspaper. War news and war news and war news. I’d stopped reading it. I was steeped in my own struggles, with snot and poop and piss and puke, fevers and hunger and children crying for their parents. The war was supposed to be over and it kept going. To no purpose. The Kaiser couldn’t win, no matter what battles he won. Yet the Kaiser kept fighting, even though he’d already lost the war.

  Because he didn’t want to admit it.

  The old man turned the page to the editorials. “People talk. You know how they talk. The fishmonger’s wife saw you get on the trolley. I sent Carlo to the pharmacy on a hunch.”

  I slammed the loaf to the table. Like a hammer. Why couldn’t I make those things? The recipe is straightforward—flour, water, salt, yeast. Time to rise. Time to bake. Nothing magic.

  I still can’t do it.

  In those days, girls didn’t fall in love with girls. Girls fell in love with boys. They got married, they had babies. One day those babies grew up. Those girls fell in love with boys, those boys with girls, and everything continued for another generation.

  We didn’t know another way. Our thinking was modern, but not yet modern enough.

  Everything was my brothers’ fault. Because they’d gone off to fight in the Isonzo. If it weren’t for my brothers, the old man might have thought it more important to find me a job than a husband. More important to make sure I had an education, than a pile of mending. More important I followed my dreams, than everybody’s expectations. If it weren’t for my brothers, I wouldn’t have had to make up reasons why I wasn’t interested in walking with Carlo, wasn’t impressed with Carlo’s ability to buy a building, didn’t give a fig Carlo was the old man’s heir.

  If my brothers hadn’t been so absent, Carlo’s presence wouldn’t have forced me to a fact I didn’t want to accept: I’d kissed Benedetta. Like a girl is supposed to kiss a boy.

  And I’d liked it.

  I pulled another loaf from the oven, turned it out on the table, snatched the newspaper from under the old man’s nose. And tapped my temple. “You see things. Know things. You’re like me. You didn’t send Carlo to the pharmacy on a hunch. You sent him because you knew Benedetta and I were there. Why can’t you be honest?”

  “I tell that which is most true, and keep what is not necessary to myself. Maybe I don’t tell you enough, but truth is true whether I tell you, or not. Why were you at the pharmacy at all? Every few days, we have this conversation. Every time, you ignore me.”

  Because the doctor left me with a booklet. And Signora Lattanzi died. And the old man went for a walk when he wasn’t supposed to. Because I was trying my best, working my hardest, doing every little thing everybody thought I should do, and nobody telling me if I were doing any good at all. “Because Benedetta got off the trolley. I wasn’t planning to go there. We got there by accident.”

  “With the guaritrice, nothing is an accident.”

  Etti picked up one of the loaves and tried to take a bite. The crust wouldn’t give. He pointed to a lump projecting from its top. “Look. It has a wart.”

  Fipo made a whiny buzzing noise, like a top spinning out of control. “Everything she does goes bad.”

  His airplane whizzed over our heads and landed in the next batch of dough, rising on the back of the stove. The dough went pfft, and collapsed.

  I pulled the airplane from the gooey mess, disturbed. There was something there. Smoke and flame, exhilaration and regret, the oddest sensation of acceptance, the understanding control is an illusion.

  Not urgent, not imminent, not for years.

  Maybe I could change it. “Fipo. Watch where you toss your toys.”

  “I won’t. This was my parents’ house. Now it is mine. Mine and Etti’s. We were all here. We were happy. Then you come and Mamma’s dead and Signora Bruni is not coming back. What did you do to them? Why didn’t you like us?”

  Fipo’s words rolled over me like an oxcart. Lumbering, and long, and unrelenting.

  The old man took the airplane from me. He gave it back to Fipo and flicked his head toward the door. “Better you and Etti play in the vestibule.”

  The boys clattered out. The old man folded his paper, his face thoughtful. “Signora Bruni sent a note this morning. She does not think your bubble is a safe place for the baby. She said being on the outside is like being allowed to breathe. She says she has a whole new vision. She’s decided to stay with her aunt. In Coatesville.”

  My eyes filled, the inside of my nose stung. I took the dough off the back of the stove, slapped it to the wooden slab, and lay into it the way Benedetta would, rolling and punching and punching again. I understood why Benedetta baked so much. I wondered if she’d still feel the need, way up there in Coatesville.

  “But—”

  Her apartment, the tiny baby bed, all the pleats and bows and beautifully crocheted blankets.

  But—

  The Three Musketeers, our work in the neighborhood, our pledge to be true to one another.

  But—

  The old man, his garden, the strawberries he still struggled to ripen.

  But me. But her. But the one topic we didn’t talk about, the one topic we never would. One incident, enough to sink our friendship, separate us, cast our memories onto a sea of regret.

  But—

  “—Fipo and Etti.”

  “Signora Bruni didn’t forget them. Says she can take them if the Children’s Bureau come sniffing around again. Her aunt is willing. With so many orphaned, the authorities may not require strict proof the boys are related. She and I will have to talk further. There’s a lot to consider. As Fipo just informed us, he and Etti own the house.”

  “Fipo and Etti are our landlords.”

  The old man looked amused. “Fipo hasn’t figured out that part yet. Let’s not tell him.”

  “How long until Signora Bruni leaves?”

  “Three days. She asked that you pack up her things. Carlo can take them to her.”

  Carlo didn’t have to take them to her. I could, along with an apology, and . . . “Do you have strawberry preserves?”

  The grocer shook his head. “For Signora Bruni, I’ll bet. I sold my last jar before the sickness. Strawberries are a summer fruit, the preserves best when fresh. There may be a jar hiding in the market someplace, but maybe you could bring her peach. Or apple?”

  Word of how I helped Signora Bruni have her baby had spread. Because people talked. Oh how they talked. I was again in the market’s good graces. I didn’t know how long that grace would last, but I didn’t want to squander it. “No. The preserves have to be strawberry. Maybe you could look again. I’d be willing to pay a little extra.”

  The grocer disappeared under his counter. He made a big show rattling jars and moving boxes.

  I didn’t care. I had time. Minutes, hours, days. I thought about the packing I’d already done, the underthings and hairbrushes, diapers and tiny shirts, crocheted caps and little trimmed blankets. And I had an excuse to see her. She’d be happy for the preserves. Understand all I intended was that we’d truly remain friends. She might decide Coatesville is too far. She’d rather stay where she knew.

  And I’d promise. Oh how I’d promise to help as best I was able with the baby. Without a string attached.

  I’d even go to a library and get out a book on how best to do that.

  The grocer emerged from beneath his display, waving my quarry. Strawberry preserves. Freshly made this past summer—

  He named a price.

  —and impossibly expensive.

  I refused. “She will be eating these preserves, not putting them in the bank.”

  We haggled a while, the air seeming to shimmer with the energy. I was being successful, beha
ving like an ordinary person, like any person in the market. Then, the grocer’s face went still. It went concerned. He looked past me, eyes flicking left, then right, then left again. He put the preserves in a bag. “Take them. No charge. Send Signora Bruni my compliments.”

  I looked behind me for the reason for his sudden generosity and espied a messenger heading for the end of the block, one of those telegraph boys Benedetta had worried about. This one wasn’t looking for an address, wasn’t peering from one door to the next. This one walked quickly, eyes front, like he’d already made his delivery. I swept my gaze back. The Lattanzis’ door was behind him. I took the bag from the grocer, his eyes telling me all I needed to know. The messenger had been to our house. To deliver a telegram.

  Nicco. The ever-present passenger during my time with Benedetta, offering opinions, laying down rules, and making decisions.

  He hadn’t written, not a jot, in all the time I’d been there. Benedetta had been so worried.

  And now she’d be alone.

  A wisp, the tiniest little tickle poked at me. Benedetta would be alone. And I could be there to help her.

  A screech, a thud, and a scream stopped my thoughts and snapped my head around. People pointed, hands to mouth. The trolley, halted shy of its stop. And a bundle of rags caught beneath its wheels. The conductor, bent over them. “I didn’t see her. She ran right in front. I didn’t see her.”

  Her. I drew closer. The conductor held up what I first thought was a baby, then realized was a doll, washed and braided. A doll I recognized. The rags resolved, now a dress. I’d ironed it the day before. And blood. So much blood.

  “It’s Grazia,” the fishmonger’s wife said, and what she said was true. She looked to me. “You said she’d get run over. God forbid. You told her mother.”

  I hadn’t. That’s not how the story went.

  Fipo and Etti barreled past me. I corralled them, holding them tight to my skirt as I’d seen so many mothers hold their own children when I passed by. Fipo struggled, like the boy in the alley. “Signorina. Let me go, let me see. Did you kill her? Like you killed my mother?”

  His voice rose with each accusation.

  And the murmurings began. “She saved this girl last week.”

  “She’s been caring for her family.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  I was not brave, did not stand up, did not even go to Grazia. The conductor took off his coat. Laid it over her form.

  The old man brushed past me. “Take the boys. Go upstairs. Stay there. I will be up in a minute.”

  I didn’t fight him, didn’t protest, didn’t tell him I could take care of myself, handle life on my own. I didn’t say any of the many things I would have said under any other circumstance to let him know I was independent, secure, able to do everything myself. The little girl was dead. I’d seen her fate. I’d saved her. And it hadn’t mattered.

  I needed to leave. Never return. Start again someplace nobody had ever heard of Rosina Vicente, or her daughter.

  I retreated, the boys in tow. But they wouldn’t go up the stairs with me, wouldn’t obey my slightest instruction. They drew me into their apartment. Made me sit in the chair. Fipo pointed me to the table. To the telegram. “Read it.”

  “I can’t, Fipo. This belongs to Signora Bruni.”

  He picked the telegram off the table and held it out to me. “Read it.”

  It was short. Brutal. Written in that abbreviated diction telegrams used to keep down their cost. “Regret to inform deaths of . . .”

  It went on only long enough to say its piece. Names, ranks, date, location. Ending in “Details to follow.”

  A telegram. Delivered moments ago. Informing of more dead heroes. A telegram the grocer thought was meant for Benedetta, but which was addressed, inexplicably, to me.

  Twenty-Four

  Shut up. Shut up. Everybody needed to shut up. Carlo needed to stop seeing how I was, the old man to stop offering me things to eat, and Etti to stop asking me to read him a story. I needed their absence. I needed their indifference. I needed them to leave me alone.

  I’d bemoaned my brothers’ interference. They were gone. I’d wanted to help Grazia. She was dead. I’d looked the DiGirolamos in the eye, cared for the Lattanzis, fought with my father, hollered at my moth—

  No, I didn’t want to think about it. Wanted to leave that be. Wanted to close my mouth, close my mind, close off any possibility I’d had anything to do with anything.

  People get sick. They die.

  Kids run into traffic. They die.

  Old men forget their medicine. They die. Unless their orphaned ward stagnates time and puts everybody in the vicinity into a bubble.

  “My brothers are dead.” I whispered from under my covers.

  I sat on the edge of my bed, defiant. “My brothers are dead.”

  I pulled Mamma’s curtain aside, threw up the sash, leaned out, and shouted to the market. “My brothers are dead. My brothers are dead. My brothers are dead.”

  Nobody looked up.

  I turned. Fipo stood at the top of the stairs. “Signora Perelli says you’ve gone crazy.”

  Signora Perelli was the fishmonger’s wife. “I haven’t gone crazy.”

  “You’re just angry.”

  I flopped into the chair and pulled on my stockings. “Yes. I’m angry. Very angry.”

  Men are stupid. Will fight even when they can’t win. Even if they’ve already won. The Isonzo didn’t have to happen, didn’t have to continue. My brothers didn’t have to die. The war would be over soon. Everybody said so. And still they fought. They fought and they fought and they fought. For one more field, one more stream, one more village full of goats. Because they were men. Stupid, stupid men.

  And they ran the world.

  I tightened the laces on my shoes. “Have you eaten yet?”

  “The don gave us oatmeal.” Fipo picked at the edge of the jamb. “I’m tired of oatmeal. Can’t you make us something better?”

  “Oatmeal is easy to make.”

  “That’s what the don says. But I want something better. I want hot-cakes. Can I have hotcakes?”

  Fipo didn’t want hotcakes. Fipo wanted to see if I’d say yes.

  “If I make you hotcakes, will you leave me alone?”

  “Yes.”

  Liar. “Fine. I’ll make hotcakes. Now go away.”

  “You’re not going to make hotcakes. Because you don’t know how. You don’t know anything. And you don’t want to know anything. Except typewriting. Because you don’t want to take care of us.”

  “And what does that matter to you? Soon you’ll go to stay with Signora Bruni, and you’ll have all the hotcakes you want. Now get out of here.”

  He stomped down the stairs, opened the door at the bottom. “I don’t want to go to Signora Bruni. I want her to come here. I want everything to be like it was. Before you came.”

  He slammed the door after him.

  I wanted everything to be like it was before I came, too. I’d tried. The curtain wouldn’t allow it.

  In the way the curtain sometimes sensed my thoughts, it let itself off its hook. It covered the window, and again projected the upside-down, five-minute-forward market across the wall.

  I watched my neighbors do in five minutes pretty much what they were doing right now. What they would do tomorrow. What they would do the day after. There were fewer on the street than yesterday, when there’d been fewer than the day before, but the influenza had to end, just like the war. Life would go on and all that was happening now would turn into what had happened then and we’d forget about it and move on.

  Because there was always another war in the making, another epidemic waiting to rise. Because life was like that, the same old thing. Buildings rose, rivers changed course, but the dailyness of every day continued. People got up and dressed and went to work and went to sleep. They ate and they drank, they peed and they pooped. The next morning, they did the s
ame.

  My brothers were dead and the world kept going. My parents died and the world did the same. The future was too large to fathom, the past too heavy to bear, the present always there and infinite, and none of it had any answers.

  The curtain was my burden, but it served no purpose. And my every attempt to bend it to my will sent it full circle to kick me in the backside. The guaritrice claimed the curtain had power, claimed it could create whole worlds. But those claims were no good because every good I’d ever had in the world seemed determined to leave me.

  “I hate you.” I got up close to the curtain and said it again. “I hate you.”

  You’re useless, you’re wrong, you’re a waste of my time. “You don’t like me. Why do you stay? You were Mamma’s curtain. Now you’re mine, but you don’t help me, you don’t help anybody, you don’t show me a thing I can use, don’t warn me of a thing I can change.”

  The bubble I’d created had holes. Still vulnerable to enmity and to love, to superstition and enlightenment, to good and to bad, to joy and to sorrow. People still died, children left orphaned, babies born. The only thing the bubble had prolonged was suffering; the only thing the bubble stopped was progress. There was no world I could create whose result I could ensure, and that made the curtain dangerous.

  Dangerous when used.

  Dangerous when not used.

  Dangerous in theory. Dangerous in reality. And dangerous because I couldn’t be sure what it would do next.

  The guaritrice wanted the curtain. Since the day I’d met her. Mamma hadn’t warned me. Hadn’t told me a thing. I’d walked right in, hurting, and hollow, and desperate for help. The guaritrice was smart, she was cunning, and if I didn’t do something now, the guaritrice would get what she wanted.

  What can’t be used properly must be put away. What won’t be put away must be destroyed. I went through the old lady’s things, found a pair of shears, and I slashed at the curtain, fueled by the fury of frustration, the despondency of grief, and the unavoidable rancor of remorse. The fabric gave way, shredding in long velvet bits, the embroidery unraveling, the grommets clinking to the floor. One by one.