Pink Slip

by Rita Ciresi

The drip coffee maker—Swedish—sat beside the Jenn-Air range. Strauss hadn’t washed it. I dumped the grounds, which were tinged with white mold, then grabbed a sponge. Housework always helped clear my head. I scrubbed the basket and the glass pot. If I could have done so without causing commentary, I might have run eight ounces of vinegar through the machine. Something told me Strauss was not the type to regularly clean out the filter system.

  In the refrigerator I found a six-pack of Czech beer down to its last two bottles, a half dozen eggs far beyond their expiration date (I took matters into my own hands and chucked them into the wastebasket), two cans of picante V-8, more root beer (Dr. Brown’s), and some tiny containers of Chinese takeout that probably dated back from last week. I tossed those too. The coffee beans, dark and rough, sat in a Rubbermaid container on the freezer door. I peered into the cold compartment long enough to find out Strauss liked pierogies and took pity on the Girl Scouts, buying enough thin mints to necessitate stowing some in the freezer.

  But why was I thinking of Girl Scout cookies at such a dire time? Because I was afraid to let myself think about what I’d read, and because my self-centeredness and ignorance embarrassed me. Since my own father had emigrated as a teenager, I simply had assumed Strauss’s father had done the same. Yet once they “became American,” Daddy and all of my uncles had served in World War II. Where had I imagined Strauss’s own dad had been—Fort Dix or Valley Forge? Playing bocce beneath the vineyard cypress trees? Wearing a black shirt and saluting Il Duce? Why hadn’t it even occurred to me that his father could have gotten left behind? In the one college course I took in modern European history, we had learned that the destruction of Jews in Italy was not as thorough as it had been in other countries—but we also had read an account of the cleansing of the Venetian ghetto and the moving story of a physician who committed suicide rather than surrender the names of hundreds of other Jews left in that storybook city. I knew that the husband of one of my favorite authors, Natalia Ginzburg, had been arrested and died in prison, leaving her to care for three children. Countless times I had read and reread Giorgio Bassani’s beautiful novella, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, in which the hounding of the homosexual doctor became a metaphor for the eventual persecution of the Jews by Fascist forces.

  While Strauss was shaving—I was pretty sure that was what men did after they showered—I ground the beans, filled the pot with water, and then dripped the coffee, hoping that when he came downstairs he would be so pleased and distracted by the rich smell of java roasting that he wouldn’t notice I was looking at him in a different way. If there was one thing I felt moral about, it was the right to privacy. But I had just violated Strauss’s, and now I would have to pay. I wouldn’t be able to joke about Scrooge McDuck or laugh when Strauss told his own occasional mild Jewish joke (the rabbi always one-upping the minister and the priest), which he insisted (and I agreed) was a harmless practice. Worse, I would have to wonder—on a daily basis—if the very fear he had expressed in the interview (reading it had made him seem more interesting; how could it not?) affected my feelings for him. Even worse, I would have to wonder—or cease to wonder—what strange pushes and pulls from his past affected his feelings for me.

  The immediate dilemma—of having to hide the knowledge I wasn’t supposed to have—was a big one. Save your pity, his father had said. So mine would have to go into the bank, until Strauss asked me to withdraw it. From that moment on, I knew I would be waiting for him to tell me the story, plagued with a tremendous amount of guilt for using his father’s bad fortune as a thermometer of his romantic interest in me.

  Everyone had a right to secrets. But when you grew close to someone, I thought, wasn’t the list supposed to grow shorter, not longer? In addition to the Rodgers and Hammerstein tapes, there were plenty of things I’d kept hidden from Strauss already. Under my bed I had stowed my chapters of Stop It Some More. I hadn’t told Strauss that in my mother’s house there was a toilet (always referred to, in reverent tones, as the Commode—as if it were some technological wonder) that flushed only when you pulled on a shot-bead chain suspended from the ceiling. I stopped wearing my miraculous medal the moment I began seeing him. I said nothing about my abortion. I didn’t disclose how close I was to Dodie. I put a thick blanket over my bad feelings toward my mother and father.

  Nor did I tell him I had made my own little contribution to the annals of anti-Semitism.

  On that hot July Saturday in 1976 (the year the whole world seemed wrapped in bicentennial red, white, and blue), my father was working overtime and Carol, my mother, and I were sweating in the kitchen, stuffing ricotta into manicotti shells. My mother, who claimed she could smell trouble a mile off, heard a car door out front. She wiped her hands on her apron, went into the front room, and returned to the kitchen, whispering, “Polizia. What’d you do now?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Carol said—an unnecessary command, since my mother was staring straight at me.

  “I didn’t do nothing—” I said, before I blurted out, “They’re at the wrong house.”

  “You know something,” my mother said. “What were you up to last night?”

  Rather than admit I was flat on my back next to Runway Number Two at Tweed New Haven Airport with Tony Adano on top of me, I told her what happened afterward. Tony drove me home by the back alley of Schlottmann’s Dry Goods, where I had the bad fortune of witnessing my cousin Jocko shaking a can of black spray paint. The car passed too quickly for me to figure out what Jocko actually did. But Schlottmann just had fired Jocko’s girlfriend for skimming a few bucks every day from the cash register, and what use Jocko had for spray paint I could well guess.

  I hinted as much to my mother. Mama yanked Carol up. “Go tell Auntie Beppina,” she said. Like me, Carol had grown up on a steady diet of Hawaii Five-O, The Mod Squad, and other cop shows, so she rose to the melodrama of the occasion and bolted out the back door as if the success of this hour-long plot depended on it. Mama turned back to me. “And you—you. You don’t know nothing. You don’t say nothing—”

  “But, Ma—”

  “Family first. Keep your mouth shut. Let Uncle Gianni fix Jocko’s cart.”

  A loud knock thudded on the front door. My mother turned off the stove burners and went to the front. From the kitchen I saw her crack the door. I cringed when I saw the cop was black.

  The officer started to say something, but Mama interrupted. “Let me see your badge,” she said, as if the only way a black guy could become an officer of the law was by renting a police costume from the Halloween store on Temple Street.

  The cop produced his badge. Mama leaned over and read the officer’s name the way she read the church bulletin and her holy cards—silently moving her lips.

  The cop finally snapped his badge away. “You Mrs. Diodetto?”

  “That’s my name.”

  “Like to talk to your son.”

  “He’s not home,” Mama said, not bothering to add that her son—whoever he was—had yet to be born.

  “Where’s he at?” the cop asked. “A friend’s? Down the corner?” The cop looked over Mama’s shoulder and pointed at me. “She the sister? You girl, you know where your brother at right now? Or where he at last night?”

  My mouth started to open, then closed when Mama turned and gave me a murderous look.

  “Which son of mine you looking for anyway?” she asked the cop.

  “Name’s Gia-como.”

  “Gia-como,” Mama corrected him. “My nephew. Two doors down.”

  Satisfied she had stalled the cop long enough for Jocko to hide, Mama shut the door and came back in, wiping the sweat off her brow with the back of her arm.

  “Ma,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Jocko sprayed a Nazi sign. On Schlottmann’s.”

  Mama’s forehead wrinkled. “You sure? You saw?”

  “Not positive. But I think so.”

  “What’d he do that for?”

  “You know his girlfri
end, Paola—the one they call P.T.?”

  “In the fishnet stockings? Don’t ever let me catch you in those fishnets. Madonna, that girl means trouble.”

  “Schlottmann fired her,” I said. “For stealing.”

  “So Jocko sprays a Nazi sign? He could have sent her a valentine, it would have been safer and cheaper. Santa Maria, what a stupid kid! And that Schlottmann—”

  “What about him?”

  Mama thought about it. “I guess he’s seen that sign before.”

  Schlottmann had an accent. Some people said he even wore the numbers. I knew I was supposed to feel sorry for him. But the truth was I disliked him, even hated him—because all those years my mother had paraded me in and out of his shop to buy my back-to-school wardrobe: a pair of black patent-leather Mary Janes, red rubber boots, a wool plaid kilt fastened with a gold safety pin, and a white cotton blouse with a Peter Pan collar. Schlottmann looked scornfully at my mother when she complained loudly in Italian about the prices, as if he could not understand from her intonation the gist of her dissatisfaction.

  I hated Schlottmann because once Mama sent me down to his store and I couldn’t find what I was looking for. When he came up behind me—certain, I’m sure, that I was wandering up and down the aisles with the intention to shoplift—and asked me what I was looking for, I was so scared of him I couldn’t remember the word for lightbulb in English. I felt like such a tongue-tied idiot—so stupid, so unworthy of ever moving beyond my mother—and I blamed him for making me feel ashamed.

  I hated Schlottmann because my mother brought me to his store to buy my first bra, and she insisted on coming into the one dressing room, where the curtain didn’t even close all the way, and after I finally got the stupid thing on, she said loudly—in English, this time: “That doesn’t fit—I told you to try on the smaller one first.”

  Schlottmann heard her, and I couldn’t stand him for that. But the spray paint changed everything. Schlottmann suddenly became someone else for me—not the man I hated, but the man I was supposed to side with. It was a miraculous metamorphosis. But I had seen it happen countless times before—the way an obnoxious great-aunt who contracted cancer or an utterly loathsome kid at school who got creamed in a car accident suddenly became a saint.

  “Stupid kid,” my mother repeated. For even Mama, who had little tolerance for Schlottmann—who always said he should have moved out of the neighborhood while the going was good—realized the gravity of that swastika on the back-alley door. Not for nothing had Uncle Gianni spent four years as a sous-chef on a submarine in the Pacific. Not for nothing had my own father sweated to death on radio duty at Fort Bragg, playing poker to combat only boredom, not enemy soldiers, as he waited, along with the rest of the world, for the war to end.

  That was the line that Uncle Gianni took when he came home and found out Jocko had just missed getting sent to juvenile detention because there weren’t any witnesses. All the way up and down the street you could hear Uncle Gianni yelling, his voice rising to a higher pitch with each exclamation:

  You stupid fucking kid!

  We fought a war over that!

  I shit in a pot for four years!

  Your uncle got the skin cancer!

  My best friend lost his leg!

  Your girlfriend’s a fucking slut!

  You’re heading straight for jail!

  Then arriving back where he had started, Gianni yelled the whole argument out, point by point, all over again.

  You stupid fucking kid!

  Etc.

  The hollering went on for fifteen minutes or so—long enough, at least, for my father to use the Commode after dinner, which usually was a quarter of an hour operation, and probably long enough to make Jocko wish he had been sent to J.D. rather than subjected to the wrath of his own dad. Then the voices faded and my own parents started snapping at one another and I went outside and sat on the stoop to watch the fireflies hang and blink, hang and blink. The whiz and pop of Roman candles—set off illegally by my schoolmates over the airport marshes—was punctuated by the thud of M-80s in the distance.

  On the front porch of Gianni and Beppina’s house sat Dodie, a yellow number-two pencil tucked behind his ear as he studied his homework in the half-dark. He was one of two students at our high school chosen to take accelerated math in a special summer program held at Southern Connecticut State College. Auntie Beppina and Zio Gianni let him go only after determining it wouldn’t cost them nothing.

  I went over. Dodie and I were friendly to each other at home, but we kept our distance from one another in high school—he was top–job dork material, while I was still making up my mind if I was a pothead or an egghead or just another slut from the shore. But between us—especially at family gatherings—there was still an understanding that we were the only sane ones on the street and that we would have to stick together.

  “Hey,” I said. “Whatcha doing?”

  “Calculus.”

  Although math was Dodie’s forte, it was my downfall. Along with PE, at which I was hopeless, algebra was the biggest barrier to my getting a college scholarship—unless you counted the way I dressed and talked. My speech—and even Dodie’s, until he went off to Duke—was laced with obscenities and fraught with double and sometimes even triple negatives.

  I cocked my head toward the back porch to get Dodie’s read on the Jocko situation. He shrugged.

  “You knew he did it,” Dodie said. “But you didn’t say nothing?”

  “A cop came over. A black cop—”

  “I know. I’ve heard about nothing but all day—”

  “And my mother, she told me to stai zitta.”

  Dodie shrugged again.

  “Don’t look at me that way, Dodie. She’s my mother.”

  “Yeah,” Dodie said. “She’s your mother. And if you keep on doing what she tells you, you’ll never get out of your father’s house.”

  The force of Dodie’s disapproval was so strong, I almost turned and walked away. But I stood my ground and told him, “I didn’t do nothing wrong. It wasn’t me who used the spray paint. And I’m stuck living where I’m living, so how the fuck am I supposed to live like I’m somewhere else?”

  Then Dodie put down his calculus book and we got into an argument—our first exposure to philosophy, other than the brief foray into Saint Thomas Aquinas’s teleological proof presented to us in CYO by a visiting Jesuit from Yale Divinity School, who blinked when he walked into the church basement and saw us slouched on the green folding chairs, the girls dressed in halter tops and miniskirts and the boys in their muscle T-shirts and holey dungarees. Although we didn’t know it at the time, that night Dodie and I fought about our responsibility to family versus our responsibility to ourselves and society. Then we sat silent on the front porch until long after sunset, watching the moon hang like a big white china plate in the sky. That was the last time I ever talked about that incident with anyone. But I thought about it from time to time, especially when I got stuck with those Holocaust manuscripts at work—almost as if God had handed them to me as a penance. I even looked for a testimony from Schlottmann inside the manuscripts. But I found nothing.

  Schlottmann kept silent. He washed off the black paint from his back door and continued as before. Business as usual. Some people said he should have taken the hint and gotten out of the neighborhood. He should have taken it years ago. “This isn’t Westville,” my mother said, as if it needed to be pointed out that our neighborhood was Sicilian to the core, its main drag lined with Catholic churches and panetterie and tabaccherie, instead of delicatessens and the Hadassah thrift shop, the Mishkan Israel cemetery, and a low brick building—unmarked—where people who seemed foreign, almost alien, gathered to worship on what we thought was the wrong day of the week.

  When Strauss came downstairs and leaned in the doorway of the kitchen, I greeted him with a steaming blue-stoneware mug. As he accepted it, I realized this was another first in my life. The previous night for the first time I ha
d made a bed with a man. And this morning Elisabetta Diodetto—who had vowed never to serve food to a man after years of waiting on her father at the table—served a guy coffee.

  And got thanked for it too.

  Strauss leaned against the counter and sipped his coffee. I leaned against the opposite counter and drank a few sips from my own cup. We smiled, shyly, at each other. Finally, because it seemed important to admit to something, I said, “I’ve discovered your deepest, darkest secret.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “You own a Petula Clark album.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And Herb Alpert’s A Taste of Honey—”

  “I won’t deny it.”

  “You play baseball.”

  “I’ve already admitted to that.”

  “And patronize the Girl Scouts who set up card tables in front of the grocery store. You also have three illegitimate children.”

  “You’ve covered a lot of ground this morning.”

  “That was a long shower you took.”

  “Fucking on the floor—as you called it—gave me kinks in my back.” He smiled. “Lisar, you were spying on me.”

  “Guilty.”

  “And now you’ll have to pay.”

  “How?”

  He came over to me and put down his coffee. He took mine from me and pushed it back on the counter. “By telling me yours.”

  “Never.”

  He stood in front of me, close, so I felt the drawer handle on the small of my back. He put his arm around me and his fingers pressed against the top of my neck, brushing against my still-wet hair. “I’ll have to guess, then.” He paused. “I’m hoping—almost to the point of praying—you like older men.”

  “Certain customers,” I said, “have been known to please me.”

  “And you like to wear men’s clothing.”

  “From time to time.”

  “You have a pierced navel. What? You don’t? I thought I felt something hard down here last night.” His hand was inside my shirt, his own denim shirt, caressing my tummy. “Was it here?”