The Evening News

by Tony Ardizzone

  There is no paper. The paper had not been any good. The men in the street had told Nonna that. Shouting up to her windows, waving at her with their angry fists. She had yelled from her windows for them not to make so much noise. Two men tried to explain. Then what is good? Nonna had asked them. You tell me. I want to know. What is good? She is shouting. A car on Loomis slows, then passes her by and speeds up.

  These, the men had answered. Rocks. Nonna is afraid again as she remembers. She had pulled her drapes tightly shut. But still from behind her open windows she had been able to hear all through the long night the shouts of the men who kept her awake and the rocks, rocks, rocks, thrown at the squad cars patrolling the streets and through the windows of the alderman’s office.

  She hears the water. Splashing up to the feet of Christopher Columbus, the boy who stood at the sea’s edge thinking the world was round like a shiny new apple. Nonna knows history. She memorized it to pass the citizen test. Columbus asked himself why he first saw the tall sails of approaching ships, and then the apple fell from the tree and hit him on the head and he discovered it. Nonna is smiling. She is proud that Columbus is paesano. Sometimes when she studied and could not remember an answer, she would hit herself on the head. That knocks the answer out of sleeping, she says. Though sometimes it does not, and Nonna thinks of her own head, how once it had been full of answers, but now many answers are no longer there. She must have lost them when she wasn’t looking. Should she pray to Saint Antonio? But he helps only with things, with objects. Maybe, Nonna thinks, when she puts something new inside her head, something old must then fall out. And then it is lost forever. That makes sense, she says. She laughs to herself. It is the way it is with everything. The new pushes out the old. And then— She puts her hands to her head.

  There is only so much here, she says. Only so many places to put the answers. Nonna thinks of the inside of her head. She pictures brain and bone and blood. Like in the round white cartons in the butcher’s shop, she says. The same. She makes a face. All those answers in all those little cartons. Suddenly Nonna is hungry. She wants a red apple.

  A group of girls sits at the fountain’s edge. Nonna hears their talk. She looks at them, cocking her head. Did they just ask her for an apple? Someone had been asking her a question. I don’t have any, she says to the girls. She pats the pockets of her black coat. See? she says. No apples. She wonders what kind of girls they are, to be laughing like that on the street.

  They must be common, Nonna thinks. Their laughter bounces up and down the sunny street. Like Lucia, the girl who lives downstairs, who sometimes sits out on the steps on summer nights playing her radio. Nonna often watches the girl from her windows; how can she help it, the music is always so loud. A polite girl, Nonna thinks, but always with that radio. And once, one night when Nonna was kneeling in her front room before her statue of the Madonna, she heard Lucia with somebody below on the stairs. She stopped praying and listened. She could not understand any of the words, but she recognized the tone, and, oh, she knew what the girl and the boy were doing. The night was hot, and that brought back to her the thin face of her Vincenzo, and she was suddenly young again and back in terrible New Jersey, in her parents’ house, with young Vincenzo in the stuffed chair opposite her and around them the soft sound of her mother’s tranquil snoring. Nonna shakes her head. She knows what she must feel about that night. She was trusting, and Vincenzo was so handsome—his black curls lay so delicately across his forehead, and his smile was so wet and so white, bright—and she allowed the young boy to sit next to her on the sofa, and she did not protest when he took her hand, and then, when he kissed her, she even opened her mouth and let his wet tongue touch hers. Oh, she was so frightened. Her mouth had been so dry. On the street now she is trembling. She is too terrified to remember the rest. But the memory spills across her mind with the sound of the girls’ easy laughter, and she moves back on the pink sofa and does not put up her hands as Vincenzo strokes her cheek and then touches her, gently, on the front of her green dress. And then she turns to the boy and quickly kisses him. The light from the oil lamp flickers. The snoring stops. She looks at Vincenzo, and then she blushes with the shame of her mortal sin, and now if Vincenzo does not say they will marry she knows she will have to kill herself, and that in God’s eyes she has already died.

  Nonna is still, silent, standing in her guilt on the street, afraid even now to cross herself for fear she will be struck down. She feels the stifling weight of her sin. Vincenzo then moved back to the stuffed chair, coughing. Neither spoke. She began to cry. The next morning Vincenzo spoke to her father.

  There are boys at the fountain now, talking. Nonna looks up from the crack in the sidewalk she was staring at. The girls sit like bananas, all in a bunch. One of the boys flexes his arm muscles, like a real malandrino. The girls look at him and laugh. Nonna recognizes Lucia. She wears a tight pink top and short pants. Why doesn’t she hear Lucia’s radio? Nonna wonders. A voice inside her head answers her question. Because the girl is with the boys. And when you are with them, Nonna says out loud, you do not need the radio.

  They look up. Nonna knows she must avoid them. They heard me, she whispers to herself, and now they will throw apples at me. Santa Maria, madre di Dio. She feels awkward as her feet strike the pavement. From behind she hears them calling.

  Nonna! Hey Nonna! Who were you talking to? Hey, Nonna!

  Nonna begins to run, and as she does her heavy purse bangs her side, up and then down, again and again. Then the sound of their laughter fades away, and Nonna slows, feeling the banging inside her chest. Now they heard, she thinks, now they know my sin, and they will tell everyone. And then everyone, even the old priests here in Chicago, will know. I’ll have to move to another neighborhood, she tells a fire hydrant. I’ll pack my pans and the Madonnina and flee. But I have done that already two times. First, from New Jersey, and then when I was punished by the machines who flattened my house down. Nonna does not count the move from Naples, when her family fled poverty and the coming war, nor the move from her parents’ house when she married Vincenzo.

  He would not have wanted her to be so lonely, she thinks. She is lucid, then confused. Vincenzo understood why she could bear no children; it was because of their sin. Perhaps now that everybody knows, she thinks, she would not have to move any more. Maybe since the whole world knows, I can finally rest where I am now and be finished with my punishment. And then I’ll die, Nonna says. And then, if I have been punished enough, I will be once again with my Vincenzo.

  Her legs turn the corner for her. They are familiar with the streets. Nonna is on Flournoy, across from the church of Our Lady of Pompeii. At first the building looks strange to her, as if she were dreaming. The heavy wooden doors hang before her inside a golden cloud. She walks into the cloud. It is the blood in her head, the bone and the brain, she thinks. She pictures the fat butcher. The church’s stone steps are hollowed, like spoons. Again she feels hungry. As she walks into the sunlight she wonders why she is wearing such a heavy coat. Nonna asks the doors her question. The doors stand high before her, silent. She pulls on their metal handles. The doors are locked.

  She could go to the rectory and ask the priests for the keys. But they never give them to me, Nonna tells the doors. The priests tell me to come back for the Mass that evening, and I ask them if they don’t think the saints and the Madonna are lonely with no one praying to them in the afternoon, and they say there are people all over the world who are praying, every moment of the day, but I don’t believe it. If it was true, it would be a different world, don’t you think? She presses her cheek against the wood. Don’t you think? she says. Don’t you understand me?

  Then she hears something behind her and she turns. A dog. Panting before the first of the stone steps. Its ears are cocked. It is listening. Nonna laughs. The dog gives her a bark, and then from the middle of the park across the street comes the sound of a boy calling. He jumps in the sun, waving a dark stick. Nonna points to him. The b
oy is dark, like the stick. A Mexican. So it is a Mexican dog. And Nonna says, I would tell you that boy wants you, but I don’t know Mexican, and if I spoke to you in my tongue from Napoli you would just be confused. The dog turns and runs, as if understanding. Again Nonna laughs. What is she doing at the top of the stairs? She knows the church is kept locked in the afternoon because of the vandals. Haven’t the priests often told her that?

  Her hand grasps the iron railing. She must be careful because of her legs. They get too tired from all the time holding her up. When she reaches the sidewalk she stops and faces the church and kneels, making the sign of the Cross. Then she walks again down Flournoy Street.

  Why was I at the church? she thinks. She makes the sign of the Cross and then smiles as she walks past the rectory, and now she remembers the church-basement meeting she attended because of the paper she signed. It is good to sit with paesani, she thinks, and she pictures the faces of the neighborhood people, then the resolute eyes and mouth of the woman who gave the big speech. How much intelligence the woman has! Nonna notices that her hands are moving together, clapping. It is good to clap, good for the blood. She stops. But only in the meetings. The woman had said once and for all that it was the mayor’s fault.

  Vincenzo, Nonna whispers. She sees his still face sleeping on a soft pillow. His mouth is turned down into a frown. Vincenzo, I tell you, it was not your fault.

  Nonna closes her eyes. She feels dizzy. It was the meeting, all the talk, the smoke. Then she realizes that was years ago, but she feels she had just been talking with her Vincenzo. Had he been at the meeting? No. Vincenzo died before the neighborhood changed. Before the students came. The stranieri. Before the Mexicans crept into the holes left by the compari. Then she must be walking home from Vincenzo’s funeral. It was held at Our Lady of Pompeii. No, she had been driven to the cemetery in a long black car. Where is home? she thinks. Where am I walking to? And she pictures the faces of her parents, the rooms in the house in Napoli, the house in New Jersey, Vincenzo’s house, the house in Chicago and the dust and the machines. Then—

  Two rooms.

  Nonna remembers where she lives.

  So. She must go there. She worries that she has left something burning on the stove. Was it neckbones? Was that what she had taken out for her supper? Or was it meat in the white cartons? Had she bought brains? She cannot think. Her legs are very tired. She will eat, if it is time, when she gets home.

  The color of the sky is changing, and the traffic grows more heavy in the streets. It must be time, Nonna says to herself. She wishes to hurry so she won’t be late. She does not like to eat when it is dark out. When it is dark she prays, then goes to bed. That is why there is the night, so people have a time for that.

  Nonna approaches the street corner, and when she sees a woman coming out of a doorway with a bag full of groceries she remembers that she is out shopping. So that is why she has worn her heavy coat! But first she took a walk. The afternoon had been very nice, very pleasant. Did I enjoy myself? she thinks. It is difficult to decide. Finally she says yes, but only if I can remember what I am outside shopping for. What is it? It was on the tip of her tongue. What was it that she needed?

  She turns at the door, and as she opens it she realizes that this is no longer the Speranza Bakery. It is now the Mexican food store. She is frightened. Her legs carry her into the store. The dark man behind the counter looks up at her and nods. Now she cannot turn around and leave, she thinks. She hopes the Mexican will not ask her what she wants. What would she say? Her feet move slowly down the first aisle. Her hands draw together the flaps of her coat.

  Well, she thinks, I must need something. She does not want a can of vegetables, nor any of the juices in heavy bottles. She sees the butcher’s case and tries to remember if she needs meat. Then she pictures neckbones in a pan atop her stove. She must hurry, she thinks, before they burn.

  Cereal, vinegar, biscotti in paper boxes. Cottage cheese or eggs? Nonna’s heart beats loudly when she sees the red apples, but she remembers how difficult apples are to chew, and she is too impatient now to cut them first into tiny pieces. Nonna smiles. Vincenzo had always said she was a patient woman. But not any longer. Not with hard red apples and a sharp knife.

  Then she sees the bananas and, excited, she remembers.

  What she needs is next to the counter. In plastic bags. Nonna is so happy that tears come to her eyes. So this is why she was outside, she thinks, why she is now inside this strange store. She had wanted to try the freckled Mexican flat breads. Hadn’t someone before been telling her about them? Nonna holds the package in her hands and thinks. She cannot remember, but she is sure it had been someone. The woman with the petition paper, or maybe the girl who prayed for babies in the bookstore. Someone who explained that her punishment was nearly over, that soon she would be with her Vincenzo. That these were the breads that were too simple to have been baked with yeast, that these did not rise, round and golden, like other breads, like women fortunate enough to feel their bellies swell, their breasts grow heavy with the promise of milk, but instead these stayed in one shape, simple, flat.

  The dark man behind the counter nods and smiles.

  Perhaps, Nonna thinks as her fingers unclasp her purse and search for the coins her eyes no longer clearly see, perhaps bread is just as good this way.

  THE FLANNERY O’CONNOR AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION

  David Walton, Evening Out

  Leigh Allison Wilson, From the Bottom Up

  Sandra Thompson, Close-Ups

  Susan Neville, The Invention of Flight

  Mary Hood, How Far She Went

  François Camoin, Why Men Are Afraid of Women

  Molly Giles, Rough Translations

  Daniel Curley, Living with Snakes

  Peter Meinke, The Piano Tuner

  Tony Ardizzone, The Evening News

  Salvatore La Puma, The Boys of Bensonhurst

  Melissa Pritchard, Spirit Seizures

  Philip F. Deaver, Silent Retreats

  Gail Galloway Adams, The Purchase of Order

  Carole L. Glickfeld, Useful Gifts

  Antonya Nelson, The Expendables

  Nancy Zafris, The People I Know

  Debra Monroe, The Source of Trouble

  Robert H. Abel, Ghost Traps

  T. M. McNally, Low Flying Aircraft

  Alfred DePew, The Melancholy of Departure

  Dennis Hathaway, The Consequences of Desire

  Rita Ciresi, Mother Rocket

  Dianne Nelson, A Brief History of Male Nudes in America

  Christopher McIlroy, All My Relations

  Alyce Miller, The Nature of Longing

  Carol Lee Lorenzo, Nervous Dancer

  C. M. Mayo, Sky over El Nido

  Wendy Brenner, Large Animals in Everyday Life

  Paul Rawlins, No Lie Like Love

  Harvey Grossinger, The Quarry

  Ha Jin, Under the Red Flag

  Andy Plattner, Winter Money

  Frank Soos, Unified Field Theory

  Mary Clyde, Survival Rates

  Hester Kaplan, The Edge of Marriage

  Darrell Spencer, CAUTION Men in Trees

  Robert Anderson, Ice Age

  Bill Roorbach, Big Bend

  Dana Johnson, Break Any Woman Down

  Gina Ochsner, The Necessary Grace to Fall

  Kellie Wells, Compression Scars

  Eric Shade, Eyesores

  Catherine Brady, Curled in the Bed of Love

  Ed Allen, Ate It Anyway

  Gary Fincke, Sorry I Worried You

  Barbara Sutton, The Send-Away Girl

  David Crouse, Copy Cats

  Randy F. Nelson, The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men

  Greg Downs, Spit Baths

  Peter LaSalle, Tell Borges If You See Him: Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism

  Anne Panning, Super America

  Margot Singer, The Pale of Settlement

  Andrew Porter, The Theory of Light and Matter

&
nbsp; Peter Selgin, Drowning Lessons

  Geoffrey Becker, Black Elvis

  Lori Ostlund, The Bigness of the World

  Linda LeGarde Grover, The Dance Boots

  Jessica Treadway, Please Come Back To Me

  Amina Gautier, At-Risk

  Melinda Moustakis, Bear Down, Bear North

  E. J. Levy, Love, in Theory

  Hugh Sheehy, The Invisibles