Recovery continued, not always recognizable as such. She was like a frostbite victim rewarming and feeling for the first time the pain the iciness had protected her from, then blaming the rescue team that had brought her down from the mountain. She was always upset to discover some specific of the months she’d lost, tended to hold Pablo or me responsible for the loss. After we’d had a minor argument, the little gold locket, around her neck for more than a year, disappeared. After a fight with Pablo because she wanted to go to a movie on a night when Leon and I had a date and he wouldn’t ask us to stay home, she took off her wedding ring. It remained off. I had the impression she spent a lot of her time with Doctor Weinberger talking about her husband. She and Pablo would have an argument after which she’d not speak to him, then she’d come home from a session and greet him lovingly, remain affectionate until the next fight. She began to compare Jewish men like Doctor Weinberger with Latino males like Pablo; she could pay her husband no greater compliment than to tell everyone that Pablo was more like a Jewish husband than your average “mucho macho” Latino.
Pablo often brought the baby to visit his mother. I’d tried to make her welcome at our house but she was too concerned with imposing to come often. At some point during the early spring, Livvy began to go there with him. Pablo said that during these visits she played the little mother as though it were natural to her, told everybody of Donna’s latest achievements, held the baby on her lap, explained how I would take care of Donna when she herself returned to school in September. At home she sometimes watched Donna crawl around or play, but never picked her up or spoke directly to her.
Donna’s first sound was “Da,” which Livvy took to mean that the baby was trying to say her own name, the corollary being, she and Doctor Weinberger decided, that the name should not be changed. This made Pablo happy because (1) he thought the Da stood for Daddy, and (2) it was he who’d chosen Donna, the first name, he confided to me only now, of his adored kindergarten teacher.
It began to seem that Livvy always had to be mad at one or the other of us. At times when she was particularly fond of Pablo, she’d be irritated with me because she was sure she’d heard me call the baby Nonna instead of Donna; at other times she’d tell Pablo he was “ruining the child,” picking her up when “she wasn’t even crying.” Once or twice Pablo tried explaining that he’d picked her up because he felt like it, but Livvy reacted as though he’d made some absurd excuse. The first time I saw him become furious with her was when he pointed out that she held Donna at his mother’s house when the baby was perfectly happy, and she’d told him that was because the floor was always filthy. He wasn’t just angry and upset, he was embarrassed on his mother’s behalf because I was there. He drew himself in and coldly informed her that if she worked as hard as his mother did, maybe she wouldn’t have time to clean the floor every day. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t seen her clean a floor or do anything else in this house. Ever.
She stared at him like a little kid who didn’t believe all the warnings about electricity and has just put her finger in a socket. Then she burst into tears and ran into her room. He did not follow but stood looking after her, furious, unforgiving.
I put a hand on his arm.
“I suppose,” I said, “sometimes the recovery’s going to be more difficult than the illness.”
“I’ll pick up the baby and move to Puerto Rico,” he said through clenched teeth.
“Pablo!”
He turned to me, saw my stricken expression.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I just . . .”
I nodded, looked away from him.
“I forgot,” he said. “I would never . . .”
But I still couldn’t meet his eyes.
“I would never,” he said, “take her away from you.”
But I began to dream that I came home to find the house empty. Even the furniture was gone.
I talked to Leon about my fear that someday Pablo and Livvy would just get up and go. He said that I had to look forward to the day when she was well enough to do that, though he understood that I wouldn’t want them to be too far away. He thought there was no likelihood they would be in a hurry to leave the best set-up two young parents ever had.
I went to the two public schools closest to our apartment to ask about the possibility of tutoring a child who was having difficulty learning to read. If Mrs. Borelli would continue to come in weekday afternoons, there was no reason I couldn’t take a couple of hours during one or two of those afternoons to do something useful for someone outside of my family. I signed up to begin in a tutoring program the following fall.
The more Livvy’s brain came back to something resembling itself, the more energetic she grew, but there was nothing she cared to do with her energy except play at the computer, where she did whatever people do at computers when they don’t actually have anything to do. She signed up for exercise classes at the Y but didn’t go to them. She had no desire to care for Donna but was increasingly concerned about who did. If Rennie was in the baby’s vicinity, Livvy pointed like some alert hunting dog that smells its prey and is waiting for it to make a move. When I joked about this, Rennie allowed herself to grow a little closer to me. She did a comical routine in which, if she wanted to talk to the baby, she’d first go to the front door and listen for sounds of Livvy’s approach.
Livvy began attending Columbia in September, when Donna was one year and one week old. School took her over as it once had, and she fought less with both Rennie and Pablo. She came home exhausted, since on the days when she didn’t have a full schedule, she saw Doctor Weinberger. (She’d wanted to take five classes, but he’d urged her to start with four.) Often she went to her room for a nap that seemed to last through the night. Once or twice, when I was downstairs cleaning up the kitchen and assumed everyone was asleep, I became aware that she was working at her desk in Donna’s room.
I began using my own computer to record memories of our Italian years as only I would ever remember them.
Twice a week I tutored an eight-year-old named Maria whose family had moved to New York from the Dominican Republic during the summer.
We were well into winter when I took longer than usual, one night after company had left, to clean up downstairs. Everyone else had gone to bed and as I dried some big pots that would be in the way in the morning, I thought I heard Donna cry. I put away the last of the pots, dried my hands and went to her but hesitated at the threshold of the room. Livvy sat at her computer, typing with one hand and holding the now-quiet baby on her shoulder with the other.
She met my glance.
I said, barely breathing, “ ’Night, Livvy.”
She smiled the old pained smile I’d just begun to see recently and said, “Do you think you could manage to remember, Mother, that my name is Olivia?”
Her other name, of course, was or had been Ferrante, and that was the name she’d registered under at Columbia, explaining that it would be “a royal pain at this stage” to try to get them to change her name on all the records.
Pablo seemed to withdraw from Livvy in a way that made it easier for him to remain even-tempered when she was hostile. He ceased to make any effort to interest her in Donna, with whom her behavior was so erratic that I sometimes wondered if the baby didn’t think she was different people: There was the relaxed, reasonably affectionate young woman who cradled her at the computer table or might allow her to climb up next to her on the sofa with a picture book; the anxious student who ignored her as she paced around the living room before an exam, often banging into furniture; and then the buoyant young woman who’d not only done beautifully on some test but had been asked out by “the only other Italian at Columbia,” whom she’d had to tell (a coy laugh) that she was married.
I thought, And have a baby, but Pablo said, “If you wore your ring, you wouldn’t have to tell people.”
“I know, but it doesn’t feel—I think because of the weight I lost, it could just slip off.”
Pablo said, “I told you, they can fix that.”
She made a face. “With some awful piece of wire that they—”
“It’s not wire. It’s a little strip of metal they attach to the inside.”
“Ohhhh . . . please. Leave me alone. I don’t like the way rings feel. Okay? I’ve never worn one.”
I suppose I should be grateful, at this point, that he will not readily throw away a Catholic marriage. Anyway, the following Saturday, in what had the effect of a response to this argument, although he was startled when I joked about it, Pablo took Donna to his aunt’s brother-in-law’s jewelry store in Queens, where Donna’s ears were pierced to accommodate minuscule gold earrings. He showed her to me proudly. Curls of shiny black hair dipped over her little ears, pointing toward the tiny hoops. She reached for me and I took her from him, kissed each ear.
“Did she cry much?” I asked, wondering what Livvy would say.
She’d spent the day studying for finals.
He shook his head proudly. “Hardly at all. Charley’s the best.”
Donna was sleepy. I told Pablo that Olivia was in the baby’s room, as we still called it, though Livvy spent a great deal of time in there and often slept through the night on the big bed that was so close to her desk. Now Pablo brought Donna to that room and closed the door behind them, so I have no idea of what transpired within. But on the following Friday night, when Donna was asleep and the rest of us were gathered around the dinner table, Olivia announced that she’d joined a new group at school, Humans United Against Clitoridectomy, HUAC, which was dedicated to fighting the genital mutilation of women by the Masai and other African tribes. We stared at her. There was no way the men were going to say a word, much less make a joke, as they probably would have liked to. She confronted us all.
“You’re not going to try to say it doesn’t happen.”
As one, we shook our heads.
She turned to me. “Or tell me I have more important things to worry about.”
I shook my head again. “I can’t tell you what to worry about.”
I’m not sure Annie knew what a clitoris was, but she knew she didn’t want to hear about its mutilation and she asked Ovvy if he wanted to play cards or something upstairs. He went willingly. But Rennie looked directly at Olivia for the first time since she’d fallen over the cradle.
“What are you going to do?” she asked Livvy.
Livvy told her they were just beginning to make their plans, but someone was drawing up a list of the countries that engaged in the practice along with the products they exported to see which ones people could be pressured to stop buying. In the meantime, if Rennie was interested, Livvy would show her the letter she’d helped write that they were distributing around school. Rennie was very interested. Together they went to find the letter on Olivia’s desk.
Pablo said that if we’d excuse him, he’d just remembered something he needed at the drugstore.
There was no ism to bridge the gap between him and his wife. Somewhere along the way he’d stopped calling her O and begun to address her as Olivia. If a certain distance was suggested by anyone’s use of her full name, the distance between the two of them seemed a worse portent.
School became a way of maintaining that distance. At first it was difficult to be sure she was doing it on purpose because she was genuinely back in her element there, and it was possible that her talking about little else was simply a reflection of that reality. Then there came the night when she told us she was taking a placement exam in Italian so she could enroll for some advanced literature courses. Pablo, who hadn’t spoken during the entire dinner, said that a little Spanish would be more useful to anyone who lived in New York City.
She not only responded that these weren’t courses in learning the language, but rather ones you read great literature like Dante’s Inferno, but then added, snottily ignorant, that there were no great classics in Spanish.
“Oh?” Pablo said, his face flushed with controlled fury. “Well Señor Cervantes would be very surprised to hear this.”
Whether or not she knew of Don Quixote, she perceived that she had made a mistake and quickly began talking about her one elective, a course in basic psychology, the teacher of which was, she advised us repeatedly, so stupid compared to Doctor Weinberger that she couldn’t imagine ever again taking a psych course.
Pablo excused himself.
He began to do this frequently, though he seldom stayed out late. He made it a point to tell me that he “just hung out” at a club on Fourteenth Street called Tequila’s where there were a lot of other Latinos, drinking and schmoozing. It was the first time I’d heard him refer to himself as a Latino without saying “American” first.
Olivia got an A in her psych course and everything else. Apparently she hadn’t challenged the teacher in class but just let off steam at home. And of course in her sessions with the doctor. As she entered her second term at Columbia, the phrase “Doctor Weinberger says” was enough to make Pablo leave the table or wherever we were, and more than once he muttered in Spanish, knowing that I could hear, “Ah, yes, the sainted doctor.” It was easy to understand his hostility toward the man who occupied his wife’s brain so thoroughly as to leave no room for him. I had to remind myself, when I felt too sympathetic to him at her expense, that I had tried to convince him not to push her to get married.
Of course, I had also tried to talk them out of having this baby I adored, who in the second year of her life was acquiring language and holding me enthralled, who had already given me more happy hours than I’d been allowed when Livvy was tiny. I would sit down to record some memory of the past or idea for the future and instead I would make notes of Donna’s new words, giggle over a funny gesture, something she’d done at the park.
Sheldon called to say that he didn’t know why, but the cable guys still wanted me if I’d come back next year. I told him I would let him know in two or three weeks, but it was difficult for me to focus on the matter, although the cost of Doctor Weinberger alone made it seem like a good idea.
Donna hadn’t begun talking at a particularly early age, but from the time she did begin, she’d strung together sounds and words, and by the time she was a year and a half, she had an extensive vocabulary. She called me Mama, perhaps because that was what most of the kids in the park called the large person who accompanied them. I was always careful to call Olivia “your mama” when I spoke to the baby, but Donna never looked at Olivia at those times and I don’t think it had registered. Pablo was Papa, Olivia was Vavava, Leon, Leelee, the kids, Nennie, Nannie, and Novvy. She took attendance at our Friday dinners, asked for whoever wasn’t there, had just begun to ask why when we said someone had to be someplace else.
We’d had a gate made to close off the bottom of the wrought-iron staircase, but when the baby reached the age where she wanted to climb steps, they turned into a logistical nightmare. What we hadn’t envisioned was the different ways she could get on and fall off them, the worst being from the sides, which had very widely spaced perpendicular rails. Someone had to follow her extremely closely when she climbed them. There was no gate upstairs, which fortified my inclination to serve meals downstairs all the time. (The normal wood ones didn’t fit the opening.) Further, once she became accustomed to having someone open the downstairs gate so she could climb up, she discovered she could go around the sides and hoist herself up to the second step without aid.
Olivia got into the habit of studying at the dining table when she wasn’t using the computer. She seemed to enjoy being around the rest of us, though she became absorbed in her work and didn’t appear responsive to what was happening in the room. On this Saturday everyone else was out and I’d prepared sandwiches for her and the baby and me. When I brought them to the table, Livvy pushed aside her books, but then Donna, laughing wildly, ran to the steps.
“Do you remember when you used to climb the steps at the Piazza?” I asked Olivia as I picked up the baby and put her in the high chair.
“I loved them,” Olivia said when the three of us were settled. “More than anyplace else in Rome. I remember we used to go there all the time. It was the only place . . . After you left, I always wanted to go there with Papa, but he thought I was crazy, wanting to be where the tourists were. Anyway, he only wanted to go, you know, where his girlfriends were.”
I didn’t speak, nod, eat.
“Sometimes I went with my girlfriends. To pick up Americans. But the ones we wanted to pick up—you know what I mean by pick up, talk to—I don’t think we’d even have gone to a movie if they asked us. Anyway, we were scared of the ones who asked. They were too old.” She smiled. “I mean really old, not like Pablo’s too old. Although they might’ve been. I was younger. I didn’t see them the same way.”
I nodded, looked down, saw my plate, forced myself to begin eating.
She said, “If you think I don’t remember that you were right about everything, you’re wrong.”
I looked up, startled. She was watching me intently. There was nothing I could say.
She glanced at the baby, who had already made a fine mess of her sandwich. Donna had begun to refuse the separate pieces of bread and cheese, or whatever, that I gave her for lunch if the rest of us were having sandwiches. She wanted the “rown-up food.”
“What I don’t remember is everything from the time . . . I hardly remember the summer I was very, you know, just before I had Donna, until I woke up. I mean, I woke up in my own bed one day, and it was as if I’d been sleeping the whole time. Can you believe that?”
I managed to say, “Sure,” although it was very difficult to speak. I heard a noise in the hallway and prayed that it wasn’t any of our family coming back already.
Olivia Page 41