A Kiss Under the Christmas Lights

by Peggy Jaeger

  “Nothing’s wrong, Mama,” I said as every adult eye at the table impaled me and then assessed my plate with squinty-eyed stares.

  It is always assumed in an Italian family if you are not eating you are either sick, worried, or dying.

  I’m not kidding.

  “I’m just tired from studying and then being outdoors all morning in the cold air.”

  “I told you she wasn’t dressed warm enough, Frankie,” Aunt Gracie said. She scraped a fingernail along something stuck in one of her top teeth. She got it out, examined it, and then stuck her finger back in her mouth, chowing down on whatever little morsel it had been.

  “You need to eat, baby.” Daddy reached over and grabbed my hand. “You need to get those brain cells all pumped up for your exam on Monday.”

  “I know, Daddy. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”

  “Gia, I know a guy who’s looking for a numbers person,” Uncle Sonny said. “A new business venture he’s putting together on the Lower West Side. One of those trendy cybercafes. Frou-frou coffees with names no one can pronounce, big-ass muffins and breads and stuff. He could use someone with a math brain like yours to help him with the books and the spreadsheets. I could put a good word in his ear for ya.”

  He was seated across the table from me, his bright blue suspenders sitting over his old-as-sin, used-to-be-white, wife-beater tee. The only time Uncle Sonny ever wore an actual shirt was when he left the house. Any time he was inside, no matter whose house it was—his own or someone else’s—he removed his dress shirt, electing to be comfortable in his undershirt and pants. The suspenders were a necessary item, not a sartorial statement, because he’d gained some substantial weight in the past few years and hated the wincing feeling of a belt around his ever-expanding waistline. His pants hung underneath his bulging abdomen and would have fallen to the floor if not anchored by the suspenders.

  Before I could respond, Mama beat me to it.

  “Salvador San Valentino.” Her voice rose to a pitch that could summon dogs. “You will not give my bambina’s name to any of your wise-guy friends, do I make myself clear?”

  “Frankie, honey,” Sonny said, all sweetness and light oozing from his voice, a smile Nonna always termed oily across his mouth. “No worries. This guy’s legit.”

  “No one you know is legit,” she shot back, rising and moving around the table with the filled pasta bowl to give refills.

  She slapped a wooden spoon the size of a cup measure onto my brother Gianni’s plate with a thwack. “It’s bad enough everything you own fell off a truck.” She moved onto my youngest brother, Edoardo’s plate. Thwack. “And that you associate with people on police wanted lists.” On to Antonio. Another thwack. “But you’re Joey’s brother, so I overlook all that.” Thwack onto Nonna’s plate—although she hadn’t eaten any of her first pasta round yet. “But I draw the line when you want to involve my baby girl in the businesses of your low-life, crooked friends.”

  With a final thwack to Daddy’s plate, she slammed the bowl, which was almost as wide as she was, back onto the table and picked up the gravy boat.

  “Who wants sauce?” she snapped, her crystal-blue gaze flitting with anger around the table.

  “Here, Mama.” Chloe’s husband, Matt, stood and took the antique piece of imported Italian china from her. “I’ll do it. You sit. Eat. You must be tired from working at the church all day and then making this wonderful meal for us all.”

  Gently, he nudged the gravy bowl from her hands, charming her with his dashing smile and melted-chocolate-colored eyes.

  Unable to resist smiling back at him—he was after all the golden son-in-law since he was a doctor and had given her two more grandchildren to fawn over—Mama patted his cheeks. “You’re such a good boy, Matteo. I’m so happy my Chloe married you.”

  From next to me, I heard my brother Paolo mutter, “Suck up,” and I choked a laugh into my napkin.

  “Did you get a glance at the new guy today?” Daddy asked Mama, diverting her wrath away from his brother.

  “What a looker.” She lifted her wineglass to her lips. “He’s got a face that should be in the movies, not in a pulpit, right, Gia baby?”

  “You met him?” my sister Chloe asked as she held her new daughter, Arianna. “Is he nice?”

  I nodded and shoved a forkful of pasta in my mouth and prayed I wasn’t blushing.

  “He was very helpful to the volunteers.” Mama spooned some fresh grated parmigiana cheese over her pasta. “But he couldn’t stay long. Fr. Mario called him back to the rectory. Something about the bishop’s upcoming visit. But he’s a looker, all right.”

  I could feel the heat rising up my neck. I took a huge chug of my own wine.

  “He’s saying the nine o’clock mass in the morning,” Mama told the table. “We’ll leave at the usual time.”

  By that she meant we had all better be ready by eight thirty to march out the door in famiglia.

  This family did everything important together: eat, live, die, attend church.

  Sometimes living in such a close-knit family is a little bit suffocating and a whole lot of claustrophobic.

  How to be a Good Italian, Lesson 3:

  Family comes first, last, forever,

  and you do everything together. Always.

  “Gia,” Chloe said, breaking into my thoughts. “Come and help me with your goddaughter. She needs to be changed.”

  She rose and grabbed the diaper bag sitting in the living room with one hand, her other hand holding her two-month-old. “Lorenzo, be a good boy for Nonna and Papa,” she told her two-year-old son with a kiss to his head.

  Up in Gianni and Paolo’s old bedroom, which now served as an all-things-bambino warehouse, Chloe held the baby up to me and said, “Here. You do the honors.” Once she handed her over, she plopped down into the rocking chair Mama had rocked all six of us in and let out a sigh that tugged at my heart.

  I laid Arianna down on the changing table Nonna had brought over from Italy with her seventy-five years ago, and tickled her little belly. Her toothless grin stared up at me. She was already a heartbreaker and owned my own heart and soul completely.

  “Okay, baby sister.” Chloe folded her hands across her stomach. “Spill. What’s up?”

  “What do you mean?” I popped open the crotch of the onesie, pushed it up to Arianna’s tiny waist, and bent down to kiss her soft, swollen, little baby belly.

  “Your face went the color of Mama’s sauce when they started discussing the new priest. What gives?”

  Chloe is nine years older than I am and one of the smartest women I know. At times she’s been more of a mother to me than our own, like during the horrible two years Mama went through chemo treatments for breast cancer when I was eleven. Chloe was the one who helped me buy my first bra, taught me about my period, and listened to me when I had questions about boys, sex, and what constituted appropriate dating behavior for girls who came from families like ours: overprotected.

  I could talk to her about anything. Anything, except this. There was no way I could explain the way I’d reacted to Santini. No way I could confess I had the hots for an almost-priest. No way I could say the words out loud that would brand me a puttana.

  I changed Arianna’s diaper and told Chloe I was tired from studying and stressing about my upcoming exams.

  “I wanted to sleep in today, but Mama yelled me out of bed at seven.”

  Chloe chuckled. “I remember those days when she used to do that to get us all up for school. I swore she was the alarm clock for every kid on our street.”

  “No lie. I could have slept ’til noon. I’m just supertired, and I can’t wait until this whole exam session is over.”

  I could tell she didn’t quite believe my excuse, but that’s the wonderful thing about Chloe. Unlike our mother, who vigorously browbeats and badgers you like a Vegas mob boss until you can’t stand it anymore and you wind up confessing to things you didn’t even do, Chloe doesn’t push.

&nb
sp; I picked up my goddaughter, gave her a slew of kisses across her cheeks, and handed her back to her mother.

  Later on, when everyone who didn’t live in my parents’ home anymore left for their own houses, I lay in my bed, my exam prep book open on my lap, staring up at the wooden crucifix on my wall.

  I said a silent prayer the next time I met the good father I would be able to act normally and not like a middle-school girl with an adolescent crush on the new, hot teacher.

  ****

  After another sleep-deprived night, I was in the back seat of Daddy’s classic Buick sitting next to Nonna, on our way to St. Rita’s.

  “The new guy’s doing mass by himself,” Mama said from the front seat as she checked herself in the car’s mirror. “I heard it from Dottie Allegari yesterday, who heard about it at choir practice.”

  My insides did a fast little jig, and I regretted eating the second helping of sausage Mama had shoved on my plate for breakfast. Outwardly, I tried to appear calm.

  Daddy parked, and I was in charge of helping Nonna get out of the car and into the church without falling and—God forbid—breaking a hip. A serious fall was a daily worry for the family as Nonna shuffled around my parents’ house, always dusting, straightening, or cleaning something, whether it needed it or not.

  Mama and the aunts had talked recently in hushed voices about possibly putting Nonna in the nursing home where her brother Vito lived, but she heard them whispering and screeched in Italian she would put a curse on them all and their families if they did.

  Ninety-three years old, and she still hears like a bat.

  Chloe and her family were seated in our family pew. We greeted them with kisses and hugs like we hadn’t seen them for decades instead of just last evening, and I immediately grabbed my goddaughter. She was sleeping soundly and looked like one of Botticelli’s cherubs: chubby, pink cheeked, and bow lipped. I was so in love with this little bambina, there were days I just wanted to steal her away from my sister.

  The organ struck a chord, signaling the “all rise,” which we did, and the choir began singing.

  St. Rita’s is an old church dating back to before the First World War. Befitting the architecture of the day, it has a huge domed ceiling, and the altar is a plaster fresco of carved doves and angels surrounding the communion table. Stained-glass windows depicting Christ’s march to crucifixion border two walls, a marble walkway from the back of the church to the front running up the middle.

  Since Christmas was a little over two weeks away, the Ladies’ Altar Society had bedecked the church in splendor. Several eight-foot fir trees surrounded the outer perimeter of the altar, each filled with hundreds of white, sparkling lights. For a hot second, I wondered if the head of the society knew Uncle Sonny’s “light guy.”

  Dozens of cardinal-red poinsettia plants, just coming into bloom, sat along the sides of the steps leading up to the altar and were scattered around the priests’ chairs.

  The lit Advent candle was positioned off to one side of the lectern, two of the four candles blazing brightly. Yards and yards of fresh boxwood were strung along the beginning of each pew, making the church smell like a Christmas tree farm. In all, the ladies had done an outstanding job. It truly felt like Christmas.

  While I held and rocked a sleeping Arianna, the choir sang their little hearts out and the procession up the aisle began.

  First, the standard bearer, holding the six-foot golden crucifix, a task my father had done until his heart attack a few years ago had left him too weak to lift the heavy, solid cross.

  Next, the lector holding the Bible in an act of reverence above her head. When I was younger, my brother Paolo had been grounded for a month when he made me burst out laughing by saying as the lector went by, “Stick ’em up, lady!”

  Mama had gently cuffed him on the back of the head, while Nonna flicked a finger to his temple, both of them saying at the same time, “What is wrong with you? You’re in church, for God’s sake. A little respect,” and then crossing themselves.

  They totally missed they’d been disrespectful by taking the Lord’s name in vain, but hey, I wasn’t going to tell them and risk a head ticking of my own.

  Two middle-school-aged altar servers decked out in black cassocks with white shoulder capes came after the lector, looking sleepy and bored, much the way I imagined my brothers routinely looked when they’d done this job.

  Next and last came Fr. Santini.

  I’d lain in bed wondering if seeing him was going to affect me the same way it had the day before. Would my pulse go all wonky and erratic again? Would I feel like I was fighting for air? Would the area at the top of my thighs shake with—God forgive me—need?

  Fr. Santini smiled at Mama, and then his gaze drifted to Arianna and finally up to mine, and…nothing. Not one bit of the mind-numbing lust I’d experienced yesterday shot through me today. My mind processed he was still gorgeous, even more so in his resplendent vestments, but that was all. No toe curling, no leg shaking, no heart pounding. Niente. Nothing.

  He hadn’t acknowledged me, hadn’t raised an eyebrow in recognition, or smiled a little wider. He just kept singing and walking.

  Well.

  For the first time in over twenty-four hours, I relaxed, chalking yesterday’s unusual out-of-control emotions up to lack of sleep and test anxiety, much as I’d told Chloe the night before.

  The congregation sat when instructed, and the mass began.

  Just before Fr. Santini was about to speak the Gospel and give his homily, Arianna began to fuss and squirm. I tried to calm her by cooing and rubbing her back, but she’d have none of it. Her tiny, chubby little hands were balled into fists, her beautiful bow-shaped mouth pouted and pulled in all directions, her face a little mask of torment. Just as her body straightened and arched, her little fists standing upright as if ready to do battle, I heard Chloe suck in a breath and then a rumble and a gurgling noise so loud several people in pews around us turned toward it.

  Before I realized what was going to happen, Arianna pulled a full-body shudder, and a humongous explosion filled with the unmistakable aroma of fresh baby poop shot from her. The air around us instantly turned toxic, and the diaper secured to Arianna’s tiny baby butt suddenly grew watery and warm through her bunting.

  “Rianna pooped,” Lorenzo declared to one and all in his outside—not inside—voice.

  Chloe wrapped a hand around his mouth as he started to giggle with adorable two-year-old glee. Nonna shot steel daggers from her rheumy eyes at him, and before she could tap him on his head, Chloe dragged him onto her lap, ever the protective mama lioness.

  “You gotta lay off the prosciutto, Chloe baby,” Mama leaned over and told her older daughter. “It’s not good for the bambina.”

  Chloe nodded, her hand still planted over her son’s lips, a nervous laugh so close to the surface of her own mouth I could see her lips spasming in an attempt to keep it in.

  “I’ll take her.” I reached down to grab the perpetual diaper bag that had become an appendage for my sister. The gratitude swimming in her eyes filled my heart.

  Now that the gastronomic bomb torturing her little tummy was expelled—Gesu, was it ever—Arianna was all baby smiles and grins, wide awake and happy to be alive, despite her little bottom being smeared with icky baby sludge.

  As silently and unobtrusively as I could—and do you know how hard it is to be unobtrusive when carrying a baby who smells like the equivalent of a sewage-treatment plant in your arms?—I made my way down the center aisle to the back of the church as Fr. Santini began the Gospel reading.

  Downstairs in the basement bathroom, I managed to get Arianna changed without heaving up the extra sausage Mama had given me, although it was difficult at best. The parish ladies’ room smelled like a chemical waste plant when I unwrapped the diaper and then removed it. To get to the diaper, though, I had to navigate through all Arianna’s abundant layers.

  Chloe had dressed her daughter as if she were going to be t
aking a vacation to Antarctica. In addition to the onesie over the diaper, I had to remove her little buckled shoes so I could take the baby tights off her in order to separate her legs enough to clean her baby private parts. Over the shoes and tights, Chloe had outfitted her in a fashionable baby unitard. Once I had it unsnapped and flayed backward under her back, I got the shoes off, then the tights, then the onesie, and at last, the diaper, which was now leaking watery brown liquid out the stretchy sides.

  I used about fifty of the baby wipes Chloe had stored in the changing bag to get every last little bit of noxious, sticky, and gooey baby poop out of Arianna’s chubby leg wrinkles and folds. Every time I wiped a spot clean, she’d wiggle and flail her legs, despite how I held her, and she wound up redirtying the wiped spot. For a brief second, I feared I wouldn’t have enough towelettes to get her all cleaned and fresh.

  Holding onto her, I opened the bathroom window to try and get some cool, fresh air in to circulate and rid the room of the overpowering odor.

  When she was finally poop free, changed into a fresh diaper, redressed, and everything was back in the changing bag, I was sweating like a working farm animal and had to figure out a way to wash my hands since they were filled with the baby.

  The sink was two yards at least from the changing table and the security strap had been removed, so I wasn’t confident in letting her just lie there and hope she didn’t fall off.

  Now that she was wide awake, she was fidgety and squirmy.

  Attempting to hold her in one hand while I washed and dried the other and then reversed the whole procedure for the other hand seemed way too hard.

  Chloe had a gigantic bottle of hand sanitizer in the diaper bag she insisted everyone who held the baby slather on themselves before she’d fork her over. It was easy to squirt some on one hand and rub it into the other while my body stood guard in front of the changing table, anchoring my goddaughter in place.