by Rita Ciresi
“Even if they did get out,” Carol said, “I doubt they’d go for women.”
Mama narrowed her eyes. “Every time I turn around you’re telling me there’s more of that funny stuff in the world,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”
That’s exactly what she said—Holy Mary Mother of God, non posso crederci—when she found out, six years ago, that my cousin and best friend Dodici was gay. It was Holy Week. We were all in the kitchen making lasagne—Carol chopping a dozen hard-boiled eggs, me slicing the meatballs, and Mama stirring the sauce and the noodles—when the phone rang. We knew it was Auntie Beppina the moment the conversation degenerated into a lot of spitty Sicilian that neither Carol nor I could follow. We figured Auntie Beppina and Mama were talking about something gross, like piles or boils or some great-aunt’s carbuncles, until Mama hung up and returned to the kitchen, gesturing with both hands back toward the phone.
“Auntie Beppina … she calls … from the emergency room … she goes to me … she says … Madonna, Dodie’s a uomo.”
Carol let out a gleeful bleat. “Homo,” she corrected Mama, at the same time I told my mother, “You don’t take people to the emergency room for that!”
Mama pressed her lips together. “It’s Zio Gianni—on the table at Saint Raphael’s—he got so mad at Dodie, he lost his breath and had a heart attack.”
“Whoa, Ma,” I said. “Backtrack.”
Mama gestured to the phone again. “Auntie Beppina … she says Dodie comes home today for Easter—from that school—with the name that sounds like a dog, I always forget—”
“Duke, Ma,” I said.
“—and what’s he got on him? In his ear? An earring in his ear. Auntie Beppina, she don’t say nothing. Zio Gianni, when he gets home, it’s the first thing he notices. And he goes to Dodie, What you got in your ear? and Auntie Beppina, she tries to save Dodie, she tries to tell Zio it’s something to do with a fraternity, but Gianni, madonna mi, you know what a temper he has, he tells Dodie to get that earring out of his ear or get the—” Mama paused. “You know Gianni, he used the F word.”
Carol and I let out mock gasps, which seemed to convince Mama that we were appropriately shocked. She lowered her voice to imitate Zio Gianni. Get that earring out of your ear or get the F out of this house, he says—and Auntie Beppina said he got so mad he didn’t even give Dodie a chance to make the choice, he just reached over to rip out the earring. Dodie started bleeding—”
My stomach sunk. Carol let out a nervous laugh, which showed she still held a grudge against Dodie—and me—for making a scene at her wedding by slow-dancing, complete with lunges and dips, to “Strangers in the Night.” She probably was still pissed that I rebuffed her efforts to throw me the bouquet. “Stand in the back,” she had whispered, “on the right, and I’ll wing it right toward you. But what’s the matter with you, giving me that face, don’t you want to catch it? It’s not like it’s cheating, it’s not like it’s a sin, and even if it is, just go confess.”
To keep the peace I had stood where Carol told me, but when that ballistic missile of lilies of the valley and baby’s breath came careening toward me, I dodged it, an act that my mother observed and frequently commented upon for at least two years afterward. Dodie also created another minor scandal that same afternoon, by remaining seated in front of his plateful of melting spumoni and soggy wedding cake and ignoring the pleas of the obnoxious deejay (All eligible bachelors are called up to the dance floor!) to catch the garter. My mother also noted his refusal but had not commented upon that.
“The blood!” Mama repeated. “The blood, Beppina says, squirted from his ear—”
“Ugh!” Carol said. “It’s like van Gogh. Or J. Paul Getty the Third.”
“And now Zio Gianni’s on the new heart machine at Saint Raphael’s—that’s gonna cost a few bucks,” Mama said.
“What happened to Dodie?” I asked.
“He got the F out,” Mama said.
She sighed. She went over to the stove, and I knew the repetitive motion of stirring the sauce would calm her down. I went back to slicing meatballs. Carol finished chopping the eggs and started cubing the mozzarella.
“I can’t believe it,” Mama murmured. “Non posso crederci—”
“What are you, blind, Ma?” I asked. “This is common knowledge.”
Mama stopped stirring. “You knew about him?” she asked. “Why didn’t you say nothing? You could have told Auntie Beppina. She could have stopped him—”
“Get with it, Ma,” I said. “You can’t stop people from being who they are.”
“Especially when they’re the original three-dollar bill,” Carol added.
This reference seemed to confuse Mama, who never dealt with money beyond the ten Alexander Hamiltons our dad gave her every Friday so she could buy groceries and pay the bills on Saturday. After Daddy died, Mama always went to a male teller at the bank—claiming the women weren’t good at math and were more likely to make a mistake—and told him to give her the same amount (Ten tens, I want, she kept saying, one hundred altogether that makes) from her social-security check. Then she wondered why the amount that once had lasted her only a week wouldn’t cover expenses for an entire month. Only after Carol and I had used a calendar and a calculator to illustrate to her this complex problem could Mama finally fathom it.
“You girls,” Mama muttered. “Half the time I don’t capisce what you’re saying.”
Carol looked at Mama and enunciated very clearly, “Dodie’s been gay—omosessuale—since the day he was born.”
“But that was the same day Lisa was born!” Mama said, and Carol and I looked at one another with disgust. Here once again came the reminder that on the cusp of the 1960s, some strange chemical must have floated through the New Haven water supply—an aphrodisiac that overtook even the grimmest of adults (like our parents) and made them rut like rodents. In 1959 Carol and Dodie’s brother Jocko were born a week apart, and eleven months later Dodie and I appeared on the scene. Dodie was born eight hours ahead of me. He was delivered by the same doctor—who jokingly christened us Romulus and Remus—and he slept right next to me in his own fiberglass crib. We looked so much alike, my mother often told me, that everyone assumed we were twins. The only way the nurses could tell us apart was by looking at the sign posted on Dodie’s crib that announced in Magic Marker: CIRCUMCISED.
Of course, they also could—and did—check our plastic hospital bracelets, so tiny there was hardly room to sport our preposterously long names. I’ve never really minded my Italian name—Elisabetta Diodetto—because it was bent into the very American Lisa once I started school, and Lisa it had been ever since. But Dodie had a cursed name that came from being the unfortunate twelfth grandchild on my dad’s side. Had I arrived just eight hours earlier, Dodie would have been numero tredici—number thirteen—and his parents, just like mine, would have been far too superstitious to use that name. Dodici then could have been given a normal Italian name—Vitti or Weegie or Chickie or Chi-Chi.
Carol popped a cube of mozzarella in her mouth. “Ascolti,” she said to Mama. “I’m going to explain it one more time: Dodie was born tootie, and Lisa wasn’t.”
“But Auntie Beppina says he just turned that way,” Mama said, as if Dodie were a loaf of bread that had suddenly gone stale. She kept stirring the sauce and murmuring to herself the whole time Carol and I chopped the mozzarella and the meatballs and then took turns grating the parmesan, a one-pound chunk that made our arms ache just to look at it. “We’ve never had a finocchio on my side of the family.… Of course, Dodie had that infection when he was a baby … he caught the mumps, you girls didn’t … he used to bang his brains against the side of the crib until he fell asleep, maybe it did something weird to his head.… ”
“Lisa did that too,” Carol said.
“I did not!” I said.
“I remember,” Carol insisted.
“So you wet the bed,” I said.
Mama went on. “Dodie never we
t the bed … he was a good boy … but so short …”
“Ma, name me a Sicilian man over six feet tall,” Carol said.
Mama kept on murmuring as she took the flat lasagne noodles out of the boiling water with a pair of tongs and draped them over clean kitchen towels on the back of two chairs. “I told Beppina, she should have given him an American name, a name everybody could pronounce.… I told her, she never should have let him play that xylophone … she never should have let him go to that school—chi sa what they do in South Carolina—”
“Ma,” I said. “That school is called Duke University. That school is in North Carolina, and they gave Dodie a huge scholarship to go there—get it through your head.”
Nothing seemed to penetrate Mama. She continued mumbling to herself, like a praying woman or some psycho shuffling down the chips and dips aisle in the Stop & Shop. “She said it was a diamond earring: does that mean he’s engaged to another boy? They say … they say times are changing … I don’t know … I’ve never really thought about it … I don’t know anybody like that. But do you suppose? Those men who work at the Pier One store? I had a feeling, I had a feeling when Dodie was born, it was a full moon … he came out culo first.… ”
Carol pointed at me. “Lisa came out bass ackwards too.”
My mother looked at me suspiciously. “Dodie always liked you, Lisa.”
“They’re still friends,” Carol said. “Dodie’s been writing her. I know. I’ve seen the mail when it drops through the slot.”
“Mannaggia,” Mama said, the alarm in her voice enough to indicate she thought I could catch homosexuality through the U.S. Postal Service. “You two write! What does he say in his letters? Does he say? How he got the way he got?”
“How did you get the way you are?” I asked Mama, and she stepped back a little as the sauce began to boil and spit. She turned down the burner.
The lenses of Mama’s eyeglasses clouded over with steam when she dumped the boiling water from the noodles into the sink. “They say God made everyone,” she said. “Even Son of Sam.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” I said.
The arrest of serial killer David Berkowitz—who claimed he heard the voice of God through his parents’ dog, and the God-Dog told him his duty in life was to pop off women—had been all over the papers that year. And Mama, who had the bad grammatical habit of letting articles drop from her speech—You got moneys to pay for that? You need fruits from the store?—kept wondering how Son of Sam could come from that religious group she always prefaced with the definite article, which belied her fear and respect: The Jews. You don’t think of the Jewish boys being mass murderers, she’d said. Aren’t they supposed to be nicer than that?
I got up from the table in disgust when Mama, who just wouldn’t let it go, finally said, “Maybe Dodie could become a priest …” and I pounded up the stairs so loudly I almost didn’t catch her saying, “Ah, me, ah, me. I’m his comare. He’ll always be my godson. I guess I gotta love him.”
The lasagne that Easter tasted dry as hate. Mama had forgotten to put down a layer of sauce first, and she was so distracted by this newsflash on Dodie that she left the mozzarella off the entire third layer. For months afterward she kept asking me, “How did you know about Dodie? He must have told you,” until I figured out the repetition of the question indicated Mama’s own worst fears about me. Because Dodie was this way, I had to be that, a fear practically confirmed when I transferred from Albertus Magnus College in New Haven to Sarah Lawrence in my junior year, and my parents insisted on driving me into Bronxville to drop me off, following me into the dorm while I unpacked, where my father expressed his keen disappointment that there was no view of Yankee Stadium from my room window, and my mother, gazing down at the quad, told me, “I thought you said this was a girls’ school.”
“It used to be a girls’ school,” I told her.
“Hmm,” my mother said. “What do you call that?”
I went over to the window and gazed down on a group of girls butched out in buzz cuts and work boots. “Dykes,” I told my mother, and resumed unpacking, leaving my father to translate into Italian—in far more detail than was necessary—this concept so foreign to my mother.
Mama gasped. “That’s no way to have the children,” she said, looking hard at me, and I knew she was remembering Dodie and thinking, Takes one to know one. I shrugged. How could I tell her I had already let more than a dozen boys fork me by the time I was eighteen? How could I tell her I knew about Dodie as early as when we were both eleven years old? On a sweltering summer day at Lighthouse Beach, we cousins had amused ourselves for over an hour with chicken fights—Carol riding on top of Jocko’s shoulders, and me on Dodie’s. As Carol and I pushed and shoved at one another to see who would get toppled first into the water, sometimes I would look down and see—when there wasn’t too much seaweed in the harbor—that Jocko got a hard—on whenever Carol straddled him. No matter how hard I squeezed his head in the vise of my thighs—so repeatedly he had to have known what I was doing—I never provoked the same response in Dodie.
Sometimes I found it convenient to blame Dodie for this sad fact: Although I loved Proust and Chekhov, the Brontë sisters and Beethoven, Verdi and Brahms, and even Mahler and Wagner, although I dreamed of someday writing a novel that would pull on its audience as wrenchingly as a Puccini aria or resound as gloriously as Bach’s most magnificent choral music—deep inside of me still burned the soul of a stupid and simple girl, who wanted nothing more out of life than to induce in every man she met a good hard boner.
After Carol and I tossed Security Man back and forth between us, finally parking him in our father’s old La-Z-Boy and even leaning him back on the footrest to make sure he was comfortable, Mama went into the backyard with a tin bucket to see if the lawn had sprouted any dandelion greens she could fix in a salad for supper.
Carol and I stayed inside, contemplating Security Man’s strange anatomy. “Who’d be scared of that wimpy thing?” Carol asked, as she picked up her knitting again. “He looks like some gag gift Margaret should have gotten for her bachelorette party.”
The previous week our cousin Margaret had thrown herself a stag-ette party at the Elks Club. Assuming it would be a reverse version of the stag parties our dad had routinely attended when we were young—which probably involved a lot of cigar smoke and blue movies and G-strings dangling over empty shot glasses—I had not attended.
“So how was that stag-ette?” I asked Carol.
“Oh, Margaret went all out,” Carol said. “She hired these Chippendale wanna-bes—”
I squinched up my face. “That’s disgusting,” I said. Then I asked, “What was it like?”
Carol gave a low, moronic laugh. “You know. They wear bikini underwear and those little bow ties like Playboy bunnies. They’re nothing but muscle and washboard abs. I mean, there’s absolutely no hair whatsoever on their chests, so they must shave ’em.”
“Do they have hairy legs?”
“Who the hell looks at a man’s legs?”
“I do.”
“You’re weird. You’ve always been weird,” Carol said, clacking her number-nine needles, and I remembered that time she got boiling mad at me when I made a joke about Al Dante’s firm noodle, and she said, You probably want men to do perverted things to you, like suck on your big toes and pee in your mouth, and I said, Yeah, preferably when we’re both riding around on a Toro lawn mower.
“Well, what do you look at?” I asked.
“I’m a married woman,” Carol said.
“So what do you look at?” I repeated.
She shrugged. “Their face and their ass.”
“So how was their face and their ass?”
“I don’t know. I was so drunk, I kept watching their crotch. I’m sure they stuffed ’em with zucchini, no man could be so big.”
“How gross,” I said.
“Mmm,” Carol said. “They’re all muscled and oiled and you get to hoot at them—”
“That’s reverse sexism.”
“Fuck it. It was fun. You shoulda been there. You’ve never seen such tight buns. One of them did the limbo under a broomstick. Mama stuck a five-spot in his thong bikini.”
“Jesus!” I said, and looked over at Security Man, as if I half-expected him to give me a wink.
“She took off her glasses first,” Carol said.
I clucked my tongue. “Chippendales are probably all gay.”
“Go on,” Carol said, wrapping her yarn around the needle. “Then why do they dance for women?”
“It’s a paycheck.”
“One of them did look like he had on eyeliner,” Carol said. After a sly pause she added, “Why don’t you ask your kissing cousin?”
I slit my eyes at her. “He’s not my kissing cousin,” I said. “He’s my regular cousin. Yours too.” I got up and released the lever of the La-Z-Boy. Security Man fell forward and bounced back, like a whiplash victim. I steadied his head. Remembering how rude Carol always had been toward me and Dodie, my sisterly feelings took a nosedive and disappeared completely the moment Carol said, “Auntie Beppina says sometimes you spend weekends with Dodie. What do you two do together anyway? Go antiquing?”
“He’s my friend.”
“He’s a queen.”
“No fucking duh,” I said. “Why do you have to make such a big deal out of it?”
“I’m not making a big deal out of it. I really don’t care what Dodie does with—well, whatever.”
“Whoever.”
“You should tell him to be careful.” Carol clacked her needles. “I mean, that gay cancer thing—”
“It’s not gay cancer. It has a name—”
“—is scary. Auntie Beppina’s about to go bonkers worrying about it. She’s afraid he’s going to get what Great-Zio Oozie had.”
Daddy’s Uncle Oozie, toward the end of his life, was covered with strange spots that we kids, who had watched one too many a catechism movie, took for leprosy. Our parents must have made the same mistake, because we were not allowed to go within six feet of Oozie’s wheelchair. Twenty years later The New York Times taught me that his ravaged skin was not the result of a Biblical plague, but just a disease called KS that struck old Italian and Jewish guys and had moved, mysteriously, over to gay men.