All This Talk of Love

by Christopher Castellani

  “And you’ve never known me to be cold.”

  “My point exactly. It’s so unlike you, in such opposition to the Frankie Grasso I’ve come to know, that I have to think it’s some sort of block. I suggest psychoanalysis.”

  “I suggest we pretend you didn’t suggest that.”

  If anything, Frankie strives to be colder, to keep his distances. He’s already deep in emotion; the last thing he wants is to go down the rabbit hole of Freudian exploration. Emotion continually threatens to disarm him. Like all the Grassos, he’s a junkie for it. It is to avoid wallowing in emotion, and to train his mind to focus on reason and analytics, that he walks through sleeping neighborhoods and abandoned parking lots until he’s too tired to feel anything, until all he can do is stumble up the stairs and pass out on his futon. It was to avoid emotion that he chose to live apart from his mother and father in the first place. He’d have gladly leapt into their mouths. And if he’d stayed, they’d have swallowed him whole.

  Frankie’s problem is that already, in the first minutes of a five-day visit, in his parents’ company, he misses them. They wander through the parking lot, his mother’s arm around his waist, his father’s hand on his shoulder. He doesn’t realize until he’s with them how unsteadily he’s been walking. As the emotion junkie can’t help doing upon homecoming, as Frankie does too often lying in bed alone in Boston, he adds up the years he’s been given with his parents and compares them to those he’ll spend on people and ambitions beyond their reach, like PhDs and selfish lovers and pretty Irish middle school teachers. These are years Tony both granted his brother and denied him, and they are too short. To be the youngest child, his mother has told him, is a curse of sadness.

  Frankie imagines the day when the train will pull into Wilmington and no one will be waiting for him on the platform. It’s always with him, that day. And so already—as he takes the wheel of the enormous Sedan Deville and drives out of the shadow of the Delaware Memorial Bridge and onto the highway—he wants to tell his mother and father, Thank you for letting me go, and thank you for welcoming me home, and if you ask me right now to stay for good, I just might say yes and never look back.

  BLACK FRIDAY, AND Christiana Mall’s all jazzed up. Prima drags Frankie and her mother here to help them with their Christmas lists—they’re hopeless shoppers—but she’s got an ulterior motive.

  She loves the festivity of the mall, however manufactured it might be. She loves the archways of green garland above each storefront, the roving carolers in petticoats and top hats, the wraparound lines of kids jumping up and down waiting for Santa Claus. Even Frankie’s eye roll at the human toy soldier that welcomes them to the food court doesn’t kill her mood. As obnoxious as her brother is, it’s a blessing that he comes home, and she remembers, once she spends a little time with him, that he has his charms. Though they have few everyday things in common, his very presence, his Grasso heart beating close to hers, calms her.

  Caffè Meditteraneo is offering free samples of Sicilian pizza. Prima takes three. “Between the holidays and a month in Italy,” she says, “I’ll be fat as a house.”

  “Don’t let that happen,” says Maddalena.

  “I’m just so hungry these days,” Prima says. “It’s all the planning. I need an assistant.”

  “Dancing’s very good exercise,” says her mother. “Instead of being so busy for no reason, you could take a samba class. They’re opening a new studio up near you. I promise, the more you dance, the less tired you look.”

  Frankie grabs a slice of pepperoni. “You two are masters of passive-aggressive antagonism,” he says, which causes both his mother and sister to laugh, Maddalena because she doesn’t understand the words, Prima because he’s right.

  “We’re not going to fight today,” Prima says.

  “Who’s fighting?” says Maddalena. “I’m looking for presents.”

  Maddalena’s wearing her new brown leather pencil skirt, which Prima bought for her birthday in September. “You still have the figure,” she had reminded her. “You should enjoy it.” Prima would never have chosen the outfit for herself, but it works on her mother. Frankie’s jeans are too tight and torn at the knee, and his hair’s a goopy mess, and this, too, works, though she’d never let any of her boys out of the house looking like that.

  They stand before a display of $200 orange and lime cashmere sweaters. “You need to wear more color,” Maddalena says to her.

  “These make me want sherbet.”

  “I’m serious,” she says. “Look at you.” Prima’s got on her khaki-and-maroon ensemble, bought over five years ago, the most comfortable outfit in her closet. “You buy ‘in’ clothes for me, but you walk around in a sack. Your friends don’t tell you to dress more—what’s the word?—hip?”

  Prima shrugs. “I’m not as hip as you, Ma,” she says. “We’re wasting time here. They’re not even on sale.” She guides them away from the display, toward the less pricey shops on the other side of the fountain.

  “Whatever happened to those nice girls from college you used to go around with?” Maddalena asks.

  “Linda and Audrey? What made you think of them? They’re around. I think Audrey lives not far from here, actually.”

  “You don’t see her?”

  “We have our own families, Ma. We lost touch.”

  You should have friends, Maddalena thinks. If you did, you wouldn’t say, at your sons’ birthday party, “It’s a wonder I’m not a drunk.” Maddalena wrote about drunks in her letters to Mamma. She asked God about them in church. She thought back to the ones she’d known—an uncle in Santa Cecilia, a Russian lady at the dress factory—and remembered them as angry people, but Prima wasn’t angry. Now, though, as they walk through the crowded mall together, she thinks, No, those people weren’t angry. They were lonely.

  “I’m getting you one of those cashmere sweaters,” she says to Prima suddenly, interrupting whatever she’s saying to Frankie. “So you better tell me which color you like.”

  “You’re still on that, Ma?” Prima says. “They’re a rip-off.”

  “I want to do something nice for you this year.”

  “There’s only one thing I want from you.”

  “Frankie, what do you think? Which color?”

  “I’ll take a medium,” he says. “In cantaloupe.”

  Prima shakes her head. Then she can’t help herself, she has to ask: “So, do you have anybody special in your life who’d look good in that sweater?”

  Again the trademark Frankie eye roll. “Subtle segue there,” he says. “Please change the subject.” He picks at his fingernail as they walk, and won’t look up at her or his mother. “I think I’d rather hear you fight about Italy.”

  “Come on, Frankie,” Maddalena says. “I tell you my stories. You never tell me yours.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “I don’t believe you,” his mother says.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “You have a boring kid. I’d think you’d want that.”

  That’s anger, not playfulness, in Frankie’s voice. Prima’s finely tuned to how quickly, and without warning, a man can cross the line from one to the other, especially when he’s being teased or probed. She’s learned how to push Tom and her boys close to that line, get the information she needs or make the point she needs to make, then retreat at the last second before they blow up. This approach leaves them thinking they got away with something, and what man doesn’t glory in that?

  “Leave him alone, Mother,” Prima says.

  “You brought it up.”

  “Let me put it this way,” Frankie says. “I’m not lonely.”

  Later they sit and rest awhile on the benches by the fountain. They’re surrounded by shopping bags. At Prima’s direction, Frankie’s bought a monogrammed pullover for his father, a tie clip for Tom, and various gift cards for her sons, all gifts thoughtful enough to be appreciated but cheap enough for Frankie to afford. Frankie buys nothing for anyone in Boston, though P
rima reminds him, gently, that Delaware is tax-free, and if he was going to get something for a certain nameless special person, now would be the time. She even offers to make the purchase herself if he wants to hide it from their mother, but he ignores her. She’s helped Maddalena finish all her shopping, too, except the gift she’ll get for Prima on her own steam, which better not be one of those sweaters or she’ll return it immediately. Again, Prima reminds her mother that for Christmas she wants only her blessing—which includes her cooperation with the Italy trip—but this, too, is ignored.

  She finds a handful of pennies in her purse and gives them to an adorable little girl who sits beside her, looking even more bored than Frankie. Her grandfather looks over, smiles, and thanks her. The girl casts her arm back and pitches each penny as far as her matchstick body can make it fly, delighted by the splash and the ripples it makes on the water. In a year or two, Prima thinks, she’ll be too old to enjoy this. She’ll be too self-conscious. For a moment, Prima sees not the little girl at all but the twins at her age, at five, maybe six. They had the chubbiest little hands then, couldn’t keep their balance, could barely outrun the neighbor’s dachshund. Now Matt’s an all-state pitcher, written up in the News Journal for his finesse and speed around the bases; now Zach’s the team’s most reliable goalie. What will become of this little girl in ten years, when she reaches Allison Grey’s age? Does her grandfather have any idea how much the world has changed, how dangerous it’s become? Yet another reason Prima should be happy with what God gave her. Sons. The world was made for sons.

  Allison Grey is everywhere. All the girls Prima sees have her shiny, innocent-seeming face. Every boy stops to check her out, consider her, tick his head in recognition and invitation. In the mall today, Prima spotted her listening on a headset at Sam Goody, and again pulling apart a pretzel at Auntie Anne’s, and again in the ladies’ room coughing into a clenched fist. She’s always singing that same song, always stretching her naked limbs. What Prima saw in the basement shocked her, turned her stomach, and yet she can’t stop herself from playing the scene over and over in her mind—the moonlight on Matt’s muscular back and behind, Zach strutting fully erect to the bed, their playful confidence and ease, all three of them. The next morning, Allison gone, Prima couldn’t look Matt or Zach in the eye, but by the afternoon she watched with pride as they devoured the egg-and-sausage sandwiches she’d fixed them. After they conked out on the couch wearing only their boxers and a T-shirt, she brought down blankets, laid them over their gently breathing bodies, turned down the TV, and kissed them both on the forehead.

  And then—it has to be said—as the evening came on and Ryan flew back to Syracuse and the boys woke and she vacuumed and prepared dinner for them to take in the car to Penn State, Prima felt closer than ever to her twins. Closer and, strangely, relieved. She had seen everything. And after everything, what more could they hide?

  At Allison Grey, though, Prima’s still mad as hell. Every time she sees her—driving her beat-up Toyota down Concord Pike, pumping gas, in the school newspaper running for student council, bagging her groceries—she wants to grab her by the neck. She should be warned. But the girl is never there quite long enough. She’s always turning the corner. Prima’s gone so far as to look her up in the phone book, but there are too many Greys in Pennsylvania and Delaware, and she has no friends in common with her parents, and to ask Matt or Zach is to risk their not having gotten away with something. Last Saturday, Prima went to Ethan Allen and wandered the showroom for an hour, just in case Allison and her mother wandered in. It’s possible the girl lied about that, too, in some boneheaded attempt to impress her. Who does she think Prima is, anyway? Her future mother-in-law? The thought of this made Prima angrier than ever. She has a plan for this week, once school’s back in session, to observe her—just observe her—and if the girl can stay still for one minute, maybe Prima will figure out what it is about her that she can’t shake.

  “Somebody’s done for the day,” Frankie says. He points his thumb at their mother, now dozing beside him on the bench.

  “I’m just resting my eyes,” says Maddalena, without opening them.

  “One last stop,” Prima says. “Come on.” She pats her mother on the thigh, gives Frankie a wink. “We can do it.” It’s time to reveal her ulterior motive, even though she herself feels sluggish. For a moment she considers abandoning the surprise, worried that it will ruin an otherwise pleasant afternoon, but the junkie in her will not let her.

  She leads them to Macy’s. They weave among the fragrance counters, then up the escalator to the home section.

  “What did we lose here?” Maddalena says.

  Prima finds Arnaud, the flouncy fellow who helped her earlier in the week and promised to be working today from two to eight.

  “Miss!” he says. “I’m ready for you!” Then he rushes off.

  “What’s this, now?” says Maddalena. She crosses her arms.

  “An early Christmas present from the Buckleys to the Grassos,” Prima says.

  “Am I included in this present?” asks Frankie.

  “Aren’t you a Grasso?” says Prima.

  In seconds, Arnaud is back, grandly wheeling two sets of luggage—one two-piece, one five-piece—on a big plastic cart. The first, Frankie’s, is black, to match every article of clothing he owns; the other, her parents’, is a rich burgundy. Both sets are fashioned from the finest leather.

  “Jesus, Prima,” Frankie says. “Your subtlety continues to amaze.”

  “Take it back,” Maddalena says to Arnaud, waving him off. “We don’t want it. Get it away.”

  Arnaud’s big, toothy smile fades. An old lady behind him stares. He says to Prima, “Miss?”

  “OK, Mom,” says Frankie. He puts his hand on her shoulder. “Now you’re being dramatic.”

  “I’m sorry,” Prima says calmly to Arnaud. She takes her mother’s arm and pulls her out of the aisle, away from the staring old lady, toward a dimly lit display of china. Frankie follows close behind her. “You’re going to have to explain this to me again,” she says.

  “We haven’t explained it enough?” says Frankie.

  “Oh, I forgot. You’re a united front.”

  “I just understand where she’s coming from, and you can’t seem to.”

  “Because where she’s coming from is just plain stupid. We’re doing this for her, Frankie, not to her. And definitely not against her. I tried to tell you that, but you’re the one who can’t seem to understand.”

  “It will only make her sad,” Frankie says. “You don’t think she’s sad enough? You want her to be worse than she already is?” His expression is pained, like she’s the enemy holding his loved one hostage. “There’s an expression, ‘You can’t go home again.’ It’s from a novel—”

  “Do not start quoting shit to me, Frankie. I’m not an idiot. I know that expression. I think he was wrong, whoever wrote it. I think you can go home anytime you want. You just have to be a grown-up about it.”

  “Her whole family over there is either sick or dead. I can’t imagine what that’s like.”

  “We’re her family,” Prima says. “We’re not sick or dead. That should count for something. For everything, actually. Not to mention what Dad wants. You saw how excited he got when I told him.”

  “Dad, who basically had to kidnap her to get her to come here? I find it rather ironic that he’s trying so hard to bring her back to the village now.”

  “Nobody kidnapped anybody,” Prima says. “You only hear her side of the story. I talk to Dad.”

  “And Mom talks to me.”

  “That’s enough,” Maddalena says. “We both talk to you both. Can I say what I feel now?”

  “Unless you changed your mind and aren’t going to be so selfish, then I’d prefer not to hear what you feel.”

  Maddalena stares at her. “I’m saying, listen to this: Frankie and I had a good idea the other night. We were talking, and we said, Let’s go somewhere else, all of us. Ca
lifornia. Canada. Or Paris. If all you want is for us to be together, we can be together in Paris.”

  Prima shakes her head. It’s the only response she can muster. She has a specific reason for Italy over Paris or Canada or California or anywhere, and an argument she could make, but not now, not here. She can’t acknowledge the reason to herself, let alone to her mother or Frankie. Her hunch might not even be true. She’s tried to put it out of her mind as a possibility, but nothing stays down for long, and when it comes up, it surprises her, and she starts to cry.

  “Well, this has been great,” says Frankie.

  THEY WALK TO the car, Frankie and Maddalena a step or two behind Prima, without saying more. They pass a trio of animatronic elves, a dozen Allison Greys, a long mirror in which Prima spots herself and looks away. The harder she tries, the less her plans come together. The breakdown in logic infuriates her.

  Between putting the keys in the ignition and turning them, Prima says, “Fine. We won’t go. You win.”

  “It’s not about winning,” says Frankie from the backseat.

  “We’ll go to Paris,” Maddalena says. She puts her hand on Prima’s shoulder. “My friend Arlene says Paris is better, anyway. You can switch the tickets?”

  Prima shrugs off her mother’s hand. “I’m driving,” she says.

  She drops them off without coming in to say hello to her father—an act of rebellion she’ll pay for later—and heads straight home. Tom is outside in the drizzle, stringing lights on the holly bushes. He’s wearing a pair of old jeans, a Syracuse sweatshirt, and a baseball cap that offers little protection from the icy rain. “I’m almost done,” he says before she can scold him. As he fiddles with the cords, knees in the mud and rain pelting them both, she tells him what’s been decided.

  “The luggage really freaked them out, huh?” he says. “I gotta say, I didn’t think that was such a great idea. Not everybody likes being put on the spot.”

  “My intentions were good,” Prima says. “If they’d only trust me—” She stops. She doesn’t want to cry in front of Tom, not over the trip, not out here in the rain like a hysterical housewife, for the neighbors to see. And yet she can’t seem to control the waves of emotion swelling and crashing inside her. She wonders if this acute, uncontainable emotion, like her burning feet, like the weight she’s put on, can be blamed on the change of life. And suddenly she’s furious again.