Begin Again: Short stories from the heart

by Mary Campisi

  Mrs. Olivetti gave me one last look, muttered in Italian, then turned and headed back into the house, to her garlic and grease and rooms with crucifixes dangling from the walls.

  “I… I have to go,” Mary Alice said, her dark eyes staring at her slippers. They were the same style as her mother’s, two shades cleaner.

  “Here,” I said, wedging open the door enough to shove the cannoli into her hands. “These are for you.” I turned and ran down the street toward my house wishing my mother hadn’t decided to be hospitable. Then I wouldn’t have been standing on the other side of the Olivetti’s screen door, wouldn’t have smelled the garlic and burned grease. Wouldn’t have heard Mrs. Olivetti’s shrill voice saying my name as though it were evil. I wouldn’t have noticed anything.

  But I did.

  The next day I saw Mary Alice leaving school. “Hey, Mary Alice. Wait up,” I said, hurrying to catch up with her.

  She slowed but didn’t look at me. “Vivi. Hi.”

  I knew what I wanted to say, I just didn’t quite know how to say it—a first for me. We headed down the hill, past the smokers puffing on their afternoon fixes, past the line of evergreens, stiff and secretive, toward the railroad tracks and the shortcut home. “About yesterday,” I started, stopped.

  “Thanks for the cannoli.” She kept her gaze fixed straight ahead.

  “You’re welcome.” I didn’t look at her either.

  “They’re my favorite.”

  “Oh. Good.” I paused. “Good.”

  “We used to make them but it’s been a long time.”

  I kicked the gravel on my side of the tracks. A spray of tiny stones flew in the air, scattered on the ground. “They’re a lot of work.”

  “I know.” She let out a small sigh, “Thank you.”

  “Mary Alice, what was your mother saying about me yesterday?”

  She stumbled, regained her step and shifted the stack of books she carried to her other arm. “Nothing.”

  “She said my name three times.” I didn’t add ‘like I was the devil’ but I thought it. “What was she saying?”

  “Nothing. Really.”

  I stopped and waited until she looked at me. “You planning on going to confession Saturday?” I asked. “Because I know you just lied.”

  She shook her head, stared at me with those dark eyes. “Vivi, my mother’s from the old school. She expects things to be a certain way.”

  “So? What’s that have to do with me?”

  “Well, she expects people to be a certain way, too, the way they act, the way they talk, the way they dress—”

  “Mary Alice,” I cut her off, “What did she say about me?”

  “She said you’re bold.”

  “Oh.” I took that as a compliment.

  “Outspoken.”

  True.

  Mary Alice looked away. “And your clothes weren’t,” she hesitated, sucked in a breath, “proper.”

  Jean shorts and a T-shirt? “Is that all?” The old bag was insane.

  “Your name.”

  “My name?” Vivian? “What’s wrong with my name?”

  “She said it wasn’t…” she stopped, cleared her throat. “She said it wasn’t a real saint’s name.”

  That did it. “You go tell that psycho mother of yours that Vivian is too a saint’s name. Saint Vivian, otherwise known as St. Bibiana, was born in Italy, which your mother should know and she’s the patron saint of working women, torture victims, epileptics, those suffering from hangovers, and insanity. You tell your mother that.”

  “Vivi.”

  “Is that it?”

  Mary Alice looked away, said nothing.

  “Is that it?” I said again, wishing the old witch were here right now so I could tell her about Saint Vivian, especially about the insanity part.

  “It’s not about you, Vivi,” she said. “It’s about me.”

  “What?” Her mother was going to make her wear two rosary beads around her neck instead of one? Add a little extra elastic to her pants? Another dab of holy water on her wrists? What?

  Mary Alice turned to me, her eyes bright. “She said I can’t see you anymore.”

  That, I did not expect. It was almost funny to hear the most unpopular girl in high school tell the class president that she wasn’t allowed to hang around with her anymore. But somewhere deep in my gut, it hurt. Maybe it was the rejection, the feeling as unfamiliar as the word. Or maybe it was the glimpse I’d just been shown of what life was really like inside the house with the daffodil shingles and the statue of the Virgin Mary stuffed in the flower bed.

  “I’m not going to listen to her though,” Mary Alice said, swiping at her cheeks with the back of her hand. “She only goes to the grocery store and church, and once in a while she gets a ride to Walmart. She doesn’t even drive, you know. She’ll never find out.”

  I stared at Mary Alice. “You can’t. You know you can’t.”

  The tears really started coming then. “Why? Because she’s my mother? Because it’s a sin to disobey her?” Her shoulders were shaking. “Because if I don’t stop seeing my friend, my only real friend, it’s a mortal sin?”

  I did not want to hear her say she was sacrificing her soul for me, the friend who bet on what size underwear she wore. I thought I was going to be sick right there, all over the black metal railroad tracks.

  “You’re my friend, Vivi. You’re a good person. My mother’s wrong. I’ll go to confession every week if I have to, but I’m not going to stop seeing you.”

  I swallowed hard, pushed away the tears burning the backs of my eyelids. Mary Alice was risking everything for me, her friend.

  I’d like to say I taught Mary Alice a lot that year and that she was a better person for knowing me, but the truth is, I was the one who became the better person. Maybe I introduced her to more of my friends and she had a regular seat at our lunch table without the mandatory pizzelles and even got invited to a few parties, which she never went to, but I was the one who learned that life was about more than labels—on clothes or on people. Mary Alice and I used to walk along the railroad tracks and discuss Dostoyevsky’s, Crime and Punishment, Tolstoy’s, Anna Karenina, and Kakuzo Okakura’s, The Book of Tea.

  “I’d take the dozen roses any day,” I said referring to The Book of Tea.

  “Not me.” She smiled and shook her head, her long black braid swinging back and forth against her white cotton shirt. “It’s the beauty of one. That’s what Okakura’s trying to get you to see. Simplistic beauty.”

  I laughed. “I’d still take the dozen roses.”

  Sometimes we’d sneak outside at night and meet in my backyard. Blackness had a way of peeling away facades, pushing truths and real emotions to the surface. There were no expressions, no faces to be seen, or gestures to be interpreted. There were only words and silence, and often it was the silence that spoke the loudest and said the most. It was during these times that I learned Mary Alice dreamed of becoming an opera singer and used to whirl around the house singing La Traviata until her mother told her she’d never find a job doing that and should stick with a more practical profession, like teaching first grade.

  Mary Alice told me about the sheet music to Carmen she kept hidden under her mattress and how sometimes she still sang when no one was home. I told her I didn’t know what I wanted to do other than get out of this small town and go to a college ‘mixer.’ She dreamed of visiting Rome, attending Mass at the Vatican on Easter Sunday. I thought I would own a summer house in Malibu, maybe Ft. Lauderdale, too. Mary Alice preferred a small cottage in Maine near the ocean where she could read Thoreau and sing at sunset without anyone telling her to stop.

  We both wanted, we both needed, different yet the same in our desire to be accepted for who and what we were and could become. We snuck into my bathroom one Sunday afternoon and I showed Mary Alice how to put on eye shadow, Cover Girl, Shimmer Blue, and lipstick, Coty’s, Palest Pink. She taught me how to count to ten in Italian and say, I’d lik
e another slice of pizza, please.

  “Do you think you’ll get married some day?” she’d asked me one night as we huddled together in the dark beneath an old willow tree in my backyard.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. You?”

  “I’d like to.” And then. “What’s it like to kiss a boy?”

  “Huh?”

  “What’s it like to kiss a boy?” she repeated, her voice laced with innocence and curiosity.

  “Nice,” I said, thinking of Jack Sandovich’s firm lips moving over mine. Very nice.

  “How do you know what to do?” She sounded worried. “I mean, how do you know?”

  “Well, you just kind of figure it out. And the guy kind of leads you along. You’ll see.”

  “I guess.”

  “Honestly, Mary Alice, what are you worried about? You got a boyfriend you’re keeping from me?”

  She laughed then. “No.”

  “Anybody you’re thinking about?” A vision of Alex Delensen spun before me in all of his golden beauty, and parked itself right alongside the lie we’d all told Mary Alice about him having a crush on her. My gut twisted with guilt and something a lot like shame. Please, don’t let it be Alex.

  “Well.” She giggled. “Maybe.”

  “Who?”

  “Kevin Surgaugh.”

  “Kevin Surgaugh? The ‘I’m going to be a priest,’ Kevin?”

  “Don’t tell anyone, please?”

  “You know I won’t.” I never told anyone about what Mary Alice and I talked about. It was too private. Too honest. Too real.

  Somewhere along the way, Mary Alice Olivetti had become my best friend. We never went to the movies or football games together or shared any of the social activities my other friends and I did. Our friendship was deeper; it didn’t just scratch at the conscious self, poking and prodding for plausible answers. It dug in, scraped out, found a nesting place that even miles and college wouldn’t separate. We promised to visit each other in school, discuss theory and literature, maybe even go to a mixer together.

  We had our whole lives in front of us.

  I was going to Syracuse and Mary Alice to St. Bonaventure. It was still hard to believe that Mrs. Olivetti had given permission for Mary Alice to leave town and take up residence in a place that housed thousands, not all of them practicing Catholics and fewer still, Italian. I guessed the Saint at the beginning of the name helped.

  But in June, six days after graduation, everything changed. Mr. Olivetti had a heart attack, ended up in the CCU of Heath Memorial and just when everyone thought the worst had passed, he suffered a huge stroke which paralyzed his left side and put him on permanent disability. That was the end of St. Bonaventure. Mary Alice withdrew her admission without a whimper of protest and found a full-time job in the kitchen at Heath Memorial.

  “I’m sorry, Mary Alice,” I said. Sorry and guilty; she’d wanted college so much more than I had and yet, she was the one staying behind.

  She’d shrugged, worked up a small smile. “It was God’s will.”

  “I guess.” Why did ‘God’s will’ always have to be connected to something horrible? Why couldn’t good things be ‘God’s will’ too? Why did Umberto Olivetti have to have a heart attack and a stroke? Was it just to keep Mary Alice home?

  “You’ll still come to see me.” It was a statement that fell out like a question.

  “I’ll try.”

  “You can still go to St. Bonnie’s.” I hated the sad look in her brown eyes. “Next year. You’ll see. Maybe even next semester, who knows?”

  She didn’t answer, just smiled and took my hand between hers. “Thank you, Vivi. Thank you for being a wonderful friend.”

  I simply nodded, unable to say anything, unwilling to say good-bye, my gaze fixed on the black rosary beads dangling from her neck. I bit down on my bottom lip so hard I tasted blood. Mary Alice turned away then, started walking toward her home, head high, black braid swinging against her white cotton shirt.

  My mother called me at school three weeks later to tell me there’d been a terrible accident. Horrible, actually, she’d said. Mary Alice had twisted two strands of rosary beads around her neck, gouged both wrists with a crucifix and nearly bled to death before her mother found her sprawled on her bed, covered in blood.

  She tried to kill herself, Vivi.

  Oh my God. Oh my God.

  I tried to visit her once when it first happened, when she was still in the psychiatric unit but her mother had signed an order stating that no one but family could see her.

  I have to see her, Mom. I can help her, I know I can. Please. Please talk to Mrs. Olivetti and get her to let me see Mary Alice.

  Vivian, stop. You can’t help her. That’s why she’s in the hospital.

  I can help her. I know how. There are things I can tell her.

  She tried to kill herself. Do you understand?

  I can help her. I can help her. I can help her.

  She’s not the same Mary Alice. They’ve got her on medication….

  I can help her…

  In the end, I went back to Syracuse mourning my friend and cursing Mrs. Olivetti and the church for their part in Mary Alice’s ultimate demise. And there was no doubt in my mind that they, with their stringent expectations and impossible rules, heaved on her with such persistency and forcefulness at such a young age, had weighed her down, stolen her choices, made her believe that it was wrong to think about herself, wrong to desire anything outside of family and church, wrong to ask questions that might lead to uncomfortable answers. Wrong to think her own thoughts.

  Had she believed there was no way out, felt smothered by demands and disappointment, chosen death in flesh over death in spirit? Had the very institutions that should have protected her, family and church, in the end destroyed her?

  I saw Mary Alice seven months later outside St. Richard’s before five o’clock Mass. I almost passed her by but my eye caught the slippers; the same style as Mrs. Olivetti’s, soiled to the same grayish-brown. I called her name but she didn’t turn around.

  I walked up to her. “Mary Alice?”

  She’d gained weight, twenty, thirty pounds. The plain muslin housedress she wore pulled around her middle and fell to her ankles. Her hair, which had once been plaited into a shiny fat braid falling halfway down her back, was dull and short. There were three sets of rosary beads around her neck, one blue, one black, one white. But when she lifted her head, it was her eyes that shocked me most. They were empty.

  “Mary Alice?” Where was the girl who wanted to be an opera singer, the one who hid Carmen under her bed and recited passages from Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea?

  “Mary Alice?” I said again. “It’s me, Vivi.”

  “Vivi.” She mouthed the word as though she were a child learning a foreign language. “Vivi.” It fell out in a monotone of indifference. Her shoulders slumped forward, her eyes grew heavy. “Vivi,” she repeated once more just as Mrs. Olivetti swooped down on her, refusing to meet my gaze and herded Mary Alice up the steps of St. Richard’s where the congregation would pray for salvation and redemption, all in the name of the church.

  I watched them enter St. Richard’s, watched the lifeless bloated shell of my friend disappear through the weathered oak doors, and then I turned and started home, wishing my mother had told me the truth.

  Mary Alice Olivetti was already dead.

  The End

  Pretending Normal grew out of The Death of Mary Alice Olivetti. Like the short story, it centered on human frailty and family but it offered hope and forgiveness rather than the stark effects of despair and disillusionment in Mary Alice’s story.

  Pretending Normal has an alternate ending which I’d like to share. I thought of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman but when I wrote this ending I wanted there to be a greater arc of love, forgiveness, and choice. Having Frank Polokovich die in the car that had given him so much happiness was a bit anticlimactic. What about Sara? She might have given her fath
er a gift by letting him die, but what of herself? She’d live a life of guilt and torment, and could end up with the same issues as her father. I toyed with the ending for weeks, bouncing back and forth and finally settling on one that provides hope for Sara as she learns and embraces the truth about human frailty, family, and forgiveness.

  Alternate Ending for Pretending Normal

  At first I don’t hear the noise.

  I’ve just said goodbye to Nina and am thinking about heating up leftover spaghetti and meatballs for dinner . . . maybe tomorrow we’ll have Porterhouse steaks . . . he’ll like that. I am almost to the garage when the low rumble of the Chevy’s motor fills my ears.

  Dad? Dad! I run to the garage door, grab the knob and turn, but it’s locked. I thrust my body against the old wood of the door, slamming myself into it over and over, but nothing happens. It is then that I spot the letter from the mill on the ground. Dad’s bold print is on the other side. I’m letting you go, Sara. You’re free… let me be free, too. Love, Dad.

  I cram the letter into my jeans pocket and scramble to the back of the garage where I climb the stack of cinder blocks and peer in the window. Plumes of pale gray smoke cloud the garage, crowding around the Chevy like a net. My father is in the driver’s seat, head thrown back, eyes closed.

  …let me be free, too. His words float to me on puffs of smoke, filling my throat, cutting off oxygen. Tears burn my face, grief and guilt scalding me, promising to choke the last breath of life from me as though I am in the seat beside him.

  Then the other words come to me … And the horrible thing for these poor sons of bitches is when some do-gooder shuts off the engine and opens the door, thinking he’s trying to save a life when all he’s doing is prolonging a death…

  I sink to the ground, try to block the murderous sound of the Chevy’s engine. One minute … two … three …