The Complete Series

by Angela Scipioni

  “That?” Joe said, waving his own hand in the air dismissively. “That’s performance, that’s all. C’mon, I promise I won’t do anything crazy... just one little dance... Look,” he said, gesturing to the crowded dance floor. “It’s almost half over already. You’ll be out of here before you know it.” He held his hand out to her.

  Warm from the liqueur, swooning from the attention Joe had been giving her, she wanted to tell him, Try just a little bit harder... Please convince me.

  “And after all,” he said, “You did practically kick me out of Burger King.”

  With a laugh, Lily rose to her feet, took Joe’s hand, and followed him out onto the dance floor.

  Joe took Lily’s right hand in his left, and gently placed his right arm around her waist. “That’s it -” he said, as they began to sway back and forth to the rhythm. “You got it.”

  Lily couldn’t help but notice the irony - the guy she had shunned at her drive-up window was the one she had been fantasizing about dancing with when she arrived, and the one who held her now, who steadily and confidently led her around the floor, as the mirrored globe that spun overhead cast stars all around. Almost like fairy dust.

  As the music subsided, the crowd broke into applause, and Cecelia ran out onto the dance floor. “There you are!” she called. She was nearly frantic. “What the heck happened to you? I’ve been looking all over for you!” When Cecelia noticed who Lily was with, her eyes widened. “Hi,” she said to Joe. She stood staring.

  “So where’s the fire?” asked Lily.

  “Oh, right – shit! We gotta get outta here. Danny’s brother said that the club owners are here and they are proofing everyone in the place. So unless you have an ID that says you’re eighteen, we hafta make like a coupla hockey players and get the puck outta here!” Cecelia turned to Joe, “It’s been lovely, I’m sure, but she has to go now. If they see you with an under-aged girl, you’ll get busted, too.” Cecelia grabbed Lily by the wrist as they erupted into laughter and headed for the door.

  The return address on the envelope announced that Lily’s future would begin the moment she extracted the letter and read the first sentence. She slid her finger under the flap, giving herself a paper cut.

  “Ouch!” she brought her finger to her mouth, and sucked on the cut, noticing the metallic taste of her own blood. Each step through the thick cool grass and back toward the house felt long and heavy as she unfolded the paper, assaulted by the words, “Thank you for your recent audition with SUNY Purchase. We regret to inform you that we are unable to extend admission to you at this time...” The letter went on to expound on all the great and famous people who had been rejected from great and famous schools, but Lily didn’t care about any of them. All she cared about was that she had spent the last two years dreaming of her life as a student at SUNY Purchase and all she had to show for it was a form apology and a paper cut.

  She handed the letter to her mother. Tears came to her eyes, but she didn’t cry. Tears rolled down her face, but she didn’t weep. Her body was having the experience, but somewhere deep inside, Lily felt shut down, as though a vault had been slammed closed and the wheel had been spun, with her still inside.

  “I’m so sorry about this,” her mother said. “What rotten luck.”

  Is there any other kind? Lily thought.

  “But they said you did a great job, right?”

  But not great enough to get in.

  “Look,” said Lily’s mother, holding the letter up to Lily’s view and pointing at the copy on the page, “It says right here that they only have room for about a thousand new students - out of the whole country. The chances were pretty slim in the first place.”

  Not for the thousand who were accepted.

  “What about the other schools?” her mother asked. “You received five acceptance letters this week. What about Geneseo, or Cortland? Fredonia is lovely...”

  Lily left her mother rattling off attempts at comfort, as she mechanically walked up the stairs to her room and lay on the bed. She woke up two hours later to the sound of the ringing telephone, and despite her wish that the day had been a dream, reality came rushing back with consciousness.

  “Lily -” called her mother from downstairs. “Telephone.”

  Lily flopped over onto her stomach, and reached for the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “I’ll absolutely take one Lily of the Valley,” said the voice. “And I won’t take no for an answer.”

  33. Iris

  “Alla faccia di chi ci vuol male!” Auntie Rosa said, lifting the glass of red wine Iris had poured for her from a miniature bottle. An eruption of laughter forced her aunt’s head to jerk back and her mouth to fly open. Iris was partly amused at her spontaneous expression of pure joy, partly disgusted by the view of her mouth it afforded her: the plastic and metal of crowns and bridges, the bits of masticated peanuts, the bumpy pink tongue. Had it not been for the testimony of her dental work and the wispy cloud of white hair that topped her head, Auntie Rosa might have seemed a giddy girl, buckled into the seat of the Boeing 747, airborne and soaring its way toward its destination of Rome, Italy.

  “Now you have to tell me what that means,” Iris said, touching her glass to her aunt’s before taking a sip of wine, then setting it down in the round indentation on the tray table. She picked up the pen and spiral notebook she had brought along for the purpose of jotting down all the expressions and impressions she would encounter on her very first trip to another country. That is, if you excluded the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.

  “Doesn’t faccia mean face?” Iris asked. She remembered that word from some slang term she had heard from some of the Gates Italians, though no one seemed to know exactly what the rest of the expression meant.

  “Yes, it does!” Auntie Rosa said. “Brava! Let me see, I guess you could translate it, ‘in the face of those who wish us evil.’”

  “It sounds better in Italian,” Iris said, intent on transcribing the words. She had never studied Italian, but had gotten straight A’s in high school French. One of the things she loved about Italian was that it was written exactly like it was pronounced. “Is it f-a-c-i-a?”

  “Oh, gosh darn it, honey, I’m not really good at the spelling, but I think it has two c’s. I never wrote in Italian, I only spoke it to Ma and Pa, God rest their souls,” she said, making the sign of the cross.

  “That’s OK, I have my pocket dictionary,” Iris said, enthusiastic to be learning something she could actually put to use right away, unlike chemistry formulas or logarithms, which she was more than happy to leave on the other side of the Atlantic.

  “Carne o pesce?” the dark-haired stewardess in a green apron with a lopsided “A” emblazoned over her heart inquired of Auntie Rosa. Iris looked at her name tag: Lucrezia.

  “Io carne, per favore,” Auntie Rosa said. She turned to Iris and said, “You can choose between meat and fish. I’m having the meat.”

  Lucrezia handed Auntie Rosa a plastic tray divided into compartments; in one, a rubbery-looking slice of hard-boiled egg with a fluorescent yellow yolk sat atop a chunk of iceberg lettuce. In another, a multicolored dessert substance jiggled with the vibration of the plane. Iris wished she could have a peek at the main course, concealed under a thick foil cover, before making a decision. Lucrezia’s scowl suggested that was not an option.

  “Carne for me, too, per favore,” Iris said. She knew her r’s didn’t roll quite the way they should; she would have to keep practicing.

  The emotional and physical upheaval of the previous days had exhausted Iris. She vowed to put all thoughts of Lily, their mother, and Chestnut Crest out of her head as she sipped appreciatively on free wine. She discovered she was ravenous, and dug into her meal of airplane food with gusto. As they ate, Iris asked Auntie Rosa about the people they would meet, and how they were related; Auntie Rosa’s descriptions were more confusing than clarifying, but they helped her to stop worrying about those she had left behind and start won
dering about those she would soon encounter. Oblivious to the look Lucrezia gave Auntie Rosa the second time she asked for an extra roll for the scarpetta (Iris jotted down the word for the Italian rite of mopping your plate with bread), her aunt finally wiped her mouth with a napkin, looked with astonishment at her empty tray and remarked, “Goodness, I must have been hungrier than I thought!” a phrase Iris had her heard pronounce whenever a heaping plate sitting in front of her miraculously found itself empty; in other words, every time she had a meal.

  By the time the cabin crew had finally finished pushing and pulling their carts up and down the aisles, all Iris could see from her window was the reflection of her face against a black background of nothingness. Not a quarter of an hour had passed since the cabin lights were dimmed and the movie projector set in action, when Auntie Rosa’s jaw dropped, and she began snoring. Iris reached under the seat for her carry-on bag, and extracted a hardcover copy of The Agony and the Ecstasy she had purchased for seventy-five cents at the used book store; even though it was a novel, she thought she might glean some information about the life of Michelangelo Buonarotti. Performing the ritual by which she became acquainted with any new volume, she put the book to her nose as she fanned its pages and sniffed, read the back cover and jacket flaps, then closed her eyes for a moment, and hugged it to her chest. She could hardly grasp the fact that she, Iris Capotosti from Rochester, would be granted the opportunity to behold masterpieces like the David and the Pietà with her very own eyes. That she would stroll through grandiose piazzas, light candles in cathedrals built hundreds of years ago. That she might see the Pope, walk through the ruins of the Roman Forum, swim in the Mediterranean sea, admire the peaks of the Alps, throw coins in fountains, float down canals in a gondola, ride on a train.

  The steady, high-pitched whirring of the jet engines reminded her that her body was being propelled over the ocean at an altitude of thirty-three thousand feet. She tried to divert her thoughts from the black void above and below and all around her, and hoped that the mechanical miracle that kept the jumbo jet high in the sky would prevail for the duration of the trip. She was not interested in sleeping, and when she closed her eyes, her imagination painted colorful scenes of Grandma Capotosti’s steamship crossing of the Atlantic decades earlier. How different it must have been for her, back then, sailing in the opposite direction, in steerage. How elemental, frightening, life-changing.

  Her thoughts traveled back to the year of college she had just completed; she was pleased with her academic results, but disconcerted by her lack of conviction and direction. She was fairly certain she wouldn’t become a physical therapist after all. That had been her plan, but nothing was etched in stone, was it? If she had the time and money to waste, she would just keep taking courses that interested her, like last semester’s Body Movement class that made her briefly consider a career in dance therapy. Or more English electives; the effusive praise from her Creative Writing teacher made her wonder whether she might become a journalist, maybe even a novelist. Then she thought of the three college graduates who had worked with her at McDonald’s; they all held degrees in English. Iris could hardly afford to run up four years’ worth of student loans and find herself back there selling Egg McMuffins. But summer had yet to begin. She would decide about next fall when the time came. She would cross that bridge when she came to it.

  Iris leaned back in her seat as her thoughts wandered back to the young Irene Capotosti and her transoceanic voyage. Did she and Anselmo have a plan of their own back then, or were they looking for the fastest, most definitive way out? Were they pursuing a dream when they boarded that ship, or running away from a nightmare?

  As she opened her book, she wondered whether this trip would leave her with more than a mouthful of phrases she would soon forget, an album full of snapshots that would soon fade, a notebook full of scribbling that would gather dust on a shelf. She hoped so.

  Six hours later, Auntie Rosa had bantered their way through customs procedures, infecting with her laughter the officers of polizia, guardia di finanza and carabinieri alike, without distinction of uniform or rank, who chuckled at her quirky pre-World War II Abruzzese colloquialisms, and congratulated her on the loveliness of her niece. At least that was the gist of the comments she translated for Iris.

  Just outside the Customs area, Iris was greeted by a blur of incomprehensible salutations and double-cheek kisses by the chattering crew loosely defined as “relatives,” who were waving in the air a black-and-white photograph of Auntie Rosa taken at Dolores’s wedding in 1958. The effusions were finally interrupted long enough for the group to herd out the door of Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport the mismatched battery of bulging luggage, while Iris considered how cool it was for a country to have a native like Leonardo to name an airport after, instead of just presidents. Her first kiss of Italian sun stirred Iris from her airplane-induced stupor, welcoming her to a fresh new day on the old continent. She blinked slowly in the bright light, her eyes as unfocused as her thoughts as they took in her surroundings. She felt detached, displaced, as if she were in a trance, or a dream. She figured that must be what they meant by jet lag, and that she would recover after a good night’s sleep.

  Her sense of dreamy displacement ballooned after indulging in the heaping dish of pasta placed before her at the table of cackling relatives. She could not recall a single phrase in Italian, so absorbed was she in savoring the fresh plum tomatoes and basil and olives and capers and all the Mediterranean flavors she had always craved, and she found herself slipping more deeply into a dreamlike state as people refilled her tumbler with table wine poured from a big bottle labeled “Castelli Romani.” The wine went down much better than her father’s Thunderbird, which had made her gag the only time she tried it (if you didn’t count the time in the gazebo with Rick Rotula), or the overpriced Lambrusco she sometimes drank with her friends at the 2001 Club, which turned everyone’s teeth and tongue purple under the strobe lights, like those tablets dentists used to detect tartar buildup.

  As lunches overflowed into dinners, she looked on from the sidelines while a parade of smiling faces belonging to people whose names she could not remember were introduced to the American girl called Iris. Iris? Come il fiore? Yes, Iris, like the flower. Tantalizing tastes, inebriating smells and breathtaking sights rushed at her senses from all directions, jolting her from one dimension to another, where the peals of church bells were alternated with those of laughter. Roaring, liberating laughter, the kind that made you “wet your pants,” as Auntie Rosa howled, squeezing her legs together under the table and dabbing at her eyes with a linen dinner napkin. Never had Iris seen her aunt laugh so much. Or eat so much. And never had she herself felt so free and unencumbered, despite her total dependence on others for her survival. Stripped of responsibility, constricted to dependency, she felt as if she were on the outside looking in, and was delighted by the vision of herself as a lucky little girl in wonderland.

  “Vieni, Iris!” Fabrizio said to her after dinner the third day, motioning with his arm for her to join him. “Come for a ride. Rome by night!” Fabrizio was the oldest son of the family, relatives of relatives from Scurcola, who were hosting Iris and her aunt in Rome. Barely a year younger than Iris, he liked to practice his English with her; he was tall and lanky, with chestnut eyes and a square jaw that might have made him look like the type that played hard-to-get, had it not been for the smile that never abandoned his face for longer than it took to say “mamma mia.” Iris thought he must have plenty of girlfriends.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “You will see,” he replied. “Ciao, Mamma, ciao Zia, ciao tutti!” he called as he waved to his mother and Auntie Rosa and the rest of the family and neighbors who were still gathered around the table, having coffee and thimbles of Sambuca, the digestivo selected for its purported powers to neutralize the after effects of the mounds of spicy tomato and bacon sauce of the bucatini all’amatriciana they had devoured. Everyone they had met so far, re
gardless of age or connection, referred to Auntie Rosa as “Zia.” Their aunt. Just like back in Rochester, where she was everyone’s “Auntie Rosa.”

  “Ciao tutti!” Iris mimicked, waving to the group as she turned and walked out the door which Fabrizio held open for her.

  “Divertitevi, ragazzi, voi che siete giovani!” Fabrizio’s mother called after them.

  “Oh, they’ll have fun all right!” said Auntie Rosa. “At their age!”

  The elevator touched down on the garage level of the condominium with a jolt. Fabrizio slid back the grate and pushed open the doors; as they stepped out onto the concrete floor, he said, “You remain here. I come back.”

  “Okay,” Iris replied. After standing in the semidarkness for a moment, she jumped at the sound of reverberating machine gun fire. Ba-ba-ba-bam! Ba-ba-ba-ba-bam! “What the heck?!” she cried, her eyes darting around, searching for signs of movement in the shadows. Over dinner one of neighbors who spoke English had been talking to Iris about the recent kidnapping of Italy’s ex Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Just weeks earlier his body had been found in the trunk of a car, murdered by the Red Brigade terrorists. What if …

  A moped rounded the corner and screeched to a halt in front of her.

  “Vieni!” Fabrizio said, gunning the engine before scooting forward on the seat, in order to make room for her. With each flick of his right wrist on the accelerator, a new round of machine gun fire exploded and ricocheted off the concrete walls and ceiling of the garage. “Stai comoda? You OK?” he asked her, as she settled into the most secure perch she could find on a saddle made for one.

  “Um, I guess. What about helmets?” she asked.

  “Helmets?” he repeated. It wasn’t clear whether it was the word or the concept that he was unfamiliar with.