by Rita Ciresi
“Are you sorry your parents brought you over?”
She looked around Dodie’s apartment. “None of this would have happened there.”
“You don’t think so?”
“I know so.”
I pointed out what I considered the obvious. “Auntie Beppina, there are gay guys in Italy too.”
“Yes, but they get married and have the children. He could have gotten married and had the children. Now this.”
For a second I saw it: Dodie in a Panama hat and some natty seersucker suit, posing in front of the church with the kids on Easter Sunday. His arm was around a pretty girl in a white straw hat and a blue and yellow cotton dress. Her long hair came down to her swollen belly. There was a garden, full of tomatoes and snap beans and cucumbers heavy on the vine. There was sunlight.
Then I heard an ominous train whistle in the distance, the cold hard click of heels on the marble church floor, the merry but bigoted sounds of the festa in the town square, and in the shadow of an alley, Dodie locking eyes with another man, a sliver of light glinting off the gold rims of his sunglasses …
“That wouldn’t have worked,” I told Auntie Beppina.
“Why not? People do it all the time—”
“It’s called a double life—”
“He could have lived it.” She squinted at me. “Ah, Lisa. You knew he was sick, he had that awful thing. You should have told me. I’m your comare, I always treated you like one of my own, I’m practically your mother—”
“What good would it have done?”
“You can say prayers. I could have had the prayers said—”
My voice tightened. “You think that works?” I asked. “What about all the people who died in wars? You think they didn’t pray? Who heard them?”
“God heard them.”
“And what the fuck did He do about it?”
Auntie Beppina gasped. She told me to stai zitta, imagine talking like that, if only my mother could hear me, such a crack across the face she’d give me, so hard I wouldn’t talk for weeks. Then I did shut up. Because suddenly the tickle returned to my throat, and my chest started to hurt, and I began coughing again—those rough coughs that came from deep inside my lungs.
Auntie Beppina got me water. She put her hand on my back and held the glass for me. I took some water into my mouth and spit it back into the glass. I tried two more times before I got some down my throat. Then I dumped everything out of my purse and found one of those foul-smelling lozenges the doctor had given me.
Auntie Beppina stared at me. “You have that cough—you—at the funeral—Elisabetta, you have what Dodici had—”
“It’s bronchitis. Dodie had pneumonia, Dodie had—”
Auntie Beppina held up her hand. “We could have called it cancer.”
“Call it by its name.”
Auntie Beppina shook her head. She sat down. “Oh, you two! Why do you have to live in this crazy New York?”
“Where am I supposed to live?” I asked. “I’m supposed to get on a boat and go back to Sicily?” The romanticized view of the old country she had just given me seemed more bogus than ever, especially when I remembered how she and my mother and my uncles would sit around the wooden kitchen table, prying the meat out of walnut shells with toothpicks, bitterly complaining, Ah, the heat! Ah, the drought! Ah, the hunger! Ah, the earthquakes!
“You said you were poor there,” I told Auntie Beppina. “You said there was nothing to eat. You complained, all the time, about the earthquakes—”
“But there was sun. People grew up the right way—”
“What’s the right way?”
“Not like here.” Auntie Beppina shook her finger at me. “You should come home. You don’t belong here.”
“I don’t live here,” I said. “I live in Ossining.”
“And what kind of life do you live? You’re twenty-four—”
“Twenty-five, I’m twenty-five, I’m the same age Dodie was—”
“Twenty-five and still not married, still no kids—”
“Why does everything always have to come down to that?”
“That’s why we’re here—why else are we here?”
She squinted at me. The sun had just broken through the clouds, and the light in the apartment, suddenly, was far too intense. When she got up to close the blinds, she was treated to the same refrain that had welcomed me.
Somebunny loves you!
She jumped. She looked down at her feet, then onto the window-sill. She picked up the bunny. It repeated the refrain, as if to prove that Dodie loved his mother enough to get rid of that talking dildo before he died, even if he did leave behind the condoms and the muscle-men photos and the almond massage oil—now all flung into the trash—and his wonderful wardrobe and the beautiful furniture and the copper pots—all destined for the Salvation Army, because up until then Auntie Beppina’s black trunk remained empty. She hadn’t claimed a single thing.
“Isn’t this clever,” Auntie Beppina murmured. She held the bunny to her chest. “This I’ll take.”
Chapter Twenty
Red Rover, Red Rover, Why Don’t You Come Over?
I ended up marrying a careful man—accidentally on purpose.
But let me backtrack. I’m getting ahead of the game.
It began with a phone call on the day I returned to Ossining. The leave of absence that I begged from Hook—and when he gave me trouble, finally arranged with Peg—was over. The trees that stretched their dark, wet branches over the Merritt Parkway a week before had blossomed into a bower of green. The air was crisp; the sky bright blue. It was the kind of day that made you want to hang on to your life forever.
As I drove the winding parkway, I thought there were two kinds of people in the world: those who when confronted with the worst of horrors would throw themselves on the fence, and those who would walk on their mother’s bones to keep on living. I was afraid—and relieved—to find I fell into the second category. But the minute I came to this conclusion, I was sure my Jeep would wipe out. I kept looking in the rearview to see if another car was bearing down upon me, its accelerator stuck and its steering wobbly as my emotions, but all I could see in the poorly adjusted mirror was a flash of my own eyes. I was so busy looking behind I didn’t pay enough attention ahead, and I almost rear-ended a slow-moving Pontiac.
I arrived in Ossining at the hour of day I’d always hated—the blue hour, four o’clock, when the sun began to retreat from the sky and the day started its long, slow slide into night. My duffel bag felt heavy as a dead body as I dragged it upstairs. The apartment smelled stuffy. I cracked a window in the kitchen. I walked into the living room. I wandered in and out of the bathroom, then leaned in the doorway of the bedroom. I remembered how Carol said she had moved from room to room when she brought Al Dante Junior home from the hospital the first time, to introduce him to his new world.
But no one was cradled in my arms. My apartment felt as hollow as my stomach. I realized, finally, that some of the emptiness I felt was pure hunger. I was ready to eat again. Cook again. Try to do something normal again.
I unzipped my duffel bag. As if I could wash death out of my life, I tossed all my clothes from Connecticut into a wicker basket and descended to the basement laundry room, where I stuffed everything in the Maytag. The black rayon dress I wore to Dodie’s funeral bore a label that said DRY CLEAN ONLY. I pushed the dress into the incinerator. I never wanted to wear it again. Then I went back upstairs, stripped my bed of the sweaty sheets I had been lying on when I learned Dodie had died, and remade the bed with fresh white linen. I spent fifteen minutes tossing all the rotten stuff—with many satisfying thuds—out of my refrigerator and into the wastebasket. The bulky black trash bag traced an arc through the air when I winged it into the Dumpster.
Because I couldn’t stand being alone in the apartment, I gathered my keys and took myself to the grocery store, where I walked up and down the aisles pushing an empty cart, thinking of all the possibilities n
ow open to me. Dodie had left me what I considered an enormous sum of money in stocks and bonds. I didn’t need any man to support me. I didn’t need Boorman, and Boorman obviously no longer wanted me. I could quit my job and write that novel. I could buy a BMW if the whim should strike. But my golf lessons had taught me more than how to chip and pitch—I had finally learned a little patience. I told myself I wouldn’t do anything hasty.
I fetched milk and bread and eggs before I returned to the produce section and selected, after much debate, the choicest I could find of each variety, as if I were a chef about to cook her finest meal ever—for a squadron of vegetarians. I picked a crisp head of celery and a dark, glossy cucumber, bulbous white mushrooms big enough for stuffing, a deep green head of broccoli, several yellow and green squashes, red and golden peppers, a one-pound bag of select California carrots, two cheerful navel oranges, a bunch of bananas, deep-red cherry tomatoes, an avocado that felt slightly soft to the touch, a bag of Cajun peanuts, fresh garlic, and a red onion. Then I pushed my laden cart to the front of the store, where the bag boy proceeded to pack the carrots on top of the bananas.
I glared at him. I knew I was going to be all right—make it out of the bunker and back onto the fairway—when he asked me, “Do you need help carrying this out, ma’am?” and I immediately felt like decking him.
“No, thanks,” I said, vowing that when I got home I’d pull out of my scalp those other white strands of hair that had grown in over the past week. But would that do the trick? Or had I finally turned a corner—reached the age where I would forever be known as ma’am to young boys?
The thought was frightening. But the one alternative to growing old wasn’t looking too good either. In the parking lot, I rearranged all the groceries in the bags before I hoisted them into the back of the Jeep. The thud of the hatch closing reminded me of the click of Dodie’s coffin. I got into my Jeep and put my head on the steering wheel, just briefly, before I told myself that I was back in Ossining and it was time to leave my grief behind. No tears, no breakdowns, just put the Jeep in gear and drive.
I drove. The groceries slipped in the back as I rounded the driveway into the apartment complex. Two bags up the stairs at a time, three trips up and down from the parking lot. On the last jog up, I pushed open the door to the apartment with my sneaker and heard a voice. Oh, God, I thought, there’s a man in my apartment—the dreaded convict, escaped from Sing Sing, that everyone had been warning me about ever since I moved to the suburbs. Then for a moment I had the weird sense it was Dodie speaking to me from beyond the grave, like that Twilight Zone episode that had frightened us so much as kids, in which a little boy made contact with his dead grandmother over a toy telephone.
But the amplification came from the answering machine. I switched it off and picked up the phone. The man called my name. “Lise?”
“Dodie?” I whispered.
“It’s Strauss.”
“Oh.” My stomach shrank. Then I remembered how before I left town I dared to leave a letter with Strauss’s secretary (marked CONFIDENTIAL and beginning with the salutation Dear Eben), informing him that I was seeking a position elsewhere and that I hoped when he returned he would be so kind as to write me the recommendation he once promised me. I also remembered I’d never told Strauss my cousin’s name. Maybe he thought Dodie was my new lover.
“You sound out of breath,” he said.
“I just came in the door. I just got back from Connecticut.”
“I guess you didn’t get my message—messages—then.”
For the first time since getting home, I looked down at the counter and noticed the red light of the answering machine was blinking wildly. I didn’t want to rewind the tape. Carol’s voice was still on there, telling me over and over again that Dodie was dead.
“I just got back a few days ago,” Strauss said. As if I didn’t know where he’d been all this time, he said, “From Taiwan.”
“Did you like it?” I asked, trying to be polite.
“They eat fish with the head still on.”
“Sounds like a swell time.”
“It wasn’t,” Strauss said. He cleared his throat. “I got your letter.” I waited for him to continue.
“I don’t suppose it’s been a picnic working for Hook.”
“You guessed it.”
“And so you’re on the market again.”
“The job market.”
“Where are you looking?” he asked. “Back in New York? Or Connecticut, you just said you were in Connecticut?”
Before I could answer, My plans aren’t finalized yet, he said he’d hate to lose me, but then he contradicted himself by adding, “Of course, I’ll be happy to write a letter for you. If it isn’t too late.” He cleared his throat again. “When I came back, I tried to get you on your computer. But you weren’t logged on. Peg was the one who mentioned you’d asked for a leave of absence—”
“That’s right.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, were you on an interview?”
That was the excuse I gave to Peggy—in confidence—to avoid opening myself up to her stern sympathy and my coworkers’ overly curious questions, and also to win myself a longer leave than the two days normally allotted for funerals. The last thing I wanted to admit to Strauss was that I told yet another falsehood, when he already suspected I was a pathological liar. But it couldn’t be helped.
“I took the leave for my cousin.”
“He was sick?”
“No,” I said. “He’s dead.” That was the first time I’d said it out loud, although I had said it over and over to myself, as if to convince myself it was true. He’s dead, he’s dead, Dodie is dead.
Strauss hesitated before he told me he was sorry—very sorry—for me.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Was it bad?”
“He looked like a doll. A wax doll. In the coffin.”
“Was he sick a long time?”
“No, he killed himself.”
More silence. And in that silence, I imagined disapproval. A dislike of anything emotionally excessive. And a complete lack of sympathy, an inability to understand despair.
“How are you holding up?” he asked.
I couldn’t answer.
“Are you all right?”
“What do you think?” Like a too sharp pencil, my voice snapped off and broke. “God, what do you think?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. Although I’ve given it a lot of hard thought over the past few months …” His voice trailed off I heard his office chair squeak. “Goddammit, Lisar, I can’t figure you out: Are you or aren’t you quitting your job here? And what is this stuff I hear about you taking golf lessons?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Plenty—”
“What’s the matter, afraid I’ll beat you on the course?”
“That’s a given if what I hear is true—that you’re studying with Peg’s partner. Are you studying with Peg’s partner?”
“No, we’re having a torrid lesbian love affair!”
“I hope you’re joking—”
“Rumors do fly, don’t they?”
“You’ve started a few false ones yourself,” he said.
“What, like your tale about coercing me!”
“I was protecting you—”
“If I want a savior, Strauss, I’ll buy a Saint Bernard dog—”
“You don’t need a dog—you’re getting married!”
I waited, a long while, for my throat to unknot. “I’m not getting married,” I said.
We both fell silent. The phone against my ear, I turned and looked back at the counter, where I had put down the gray plastic bags full of mushrooms and celery and carrots—way more than one person ever could eat.
Donna Dilano knew if she cooked and ate alone tonight, she probably would cook and eat alone for the rest of her life. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing. But neither would the opposite, so she told Thomas Akins …
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br /> “I do have a lot of broccoli.”
“Excuse me?” Strauss asked.
“Come for dinner,” I said. “I mean, would you like to come for dinner?”
“Yes,” he said. He would like that.
“Do you want directions?”
“No.” For the first time in the conversation, his voice sounded relaxed. “I remember the way.”
It was Friday night. No baseball for Strauss. And for me, no meat, and not even any fish, and hardly any talking, because once Strauss knocked (quietly, as if to prove he was doing it humbly) and came in, neither one of us could think of a damn thing to say. His arms were empty, and he just stood there as if to apologize for not bringing the wine. The front hall—small and crowded with my backpack full of overdue library books and my ridiculous blue-and-white golf umbrella—seemed to beat like a heart that had stopped for a moment and now began again, but with hesitation and awkwardness.
“You look different,” I finally said. He did seem like a different person, and not just because, in his absence, I had fantasized him into a man who was taller and more aggressive and even a better dresser than his present outfit—a pale blue shirt and foulard tie under a too-heavy tweed wool jacket—indicated. He looked older. Tired. Too thin. His skin seemed dehydrated and a glint of silver shone through the front of his hair.
“Jet lag,” he said.
I smiled wanly. “Beats funeral lag.” From gazing at myself in the bathroom mirror before he came, and not doing anything more to correct my image than combing down my wild hair, I knew I also looked like a wreck. Why else would he keep staring at me? I suspected he was checking out my own few white hairs that I hadn’t tweezed, until I realized he was making a concerted effort not to look back toward the door, where I had yet to turn the bolt and put on the safety chain.
“Go ahead,” I said. “You can lock it.”
After he flipped the lock on the knob and slipped in the chain, I had a feeling he was going to reach for me. But he didn’t, and I didn’t hang there long enough to make him feel like he had to touch me. Why should I have expected him to want to hold me, after all those months apart? But why else had he left two messages on my answering machine, each of them deliberately neutral, in which he identified himself by his first and last name and asked me to please call him at home—not at the office—when I got back into town, because he very much needed to speak to me. The third message puzzled me. It had come from Brooklyn. He left his parents’ phone number and told me, “If I’ve already left for home—my home—make sure you give your name to my mother or father, and they’ll let me know you called.”