Advice for Italian Boys

by Anne Giardini

  Zoe paused and then leaned into him, resting her left hand on his shoulder, bringing her lips down to his ear. He could feel her breath moist and warm against his cheek and neck.

  “You’re right, Nicolo. Of course you’re right. But still, you have to admit, it’s pretty good entertainment.”

  A beat of laughter, a drawn breath, her hand pulled from his, that scent like a garden or pastries that lasted only another instant, and then she rushed away, her hands flying into the air to deflect or receive a volley of reproaches and demands cried out by the cooks and other servers.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Zoe was shorter and thinner and paler than Nicolo remembered, and more boyish, with only a suggestion of the swell of hips and breasts, although she carried herself extended to her full height as she approached his table at the Vaughan Bakery the next Saturday afternoon. She had pale pink polish on her nails, which were cut short. She wore dark grey trousers, a shirt, as pink as the inside of a shell, that was unbuttoned at her throat, and black shoes, roundtoed, with a small, inward curving heel. Nicolo started to rise from his chair, but Zoe moved so quickly that she was seated in the chair opposite him before he had stood up completely. He sat down again.

  “Would you like a coffee?” he asked. “A latte?”

  “I ordered tea on my way in,” she said. “They said they’d bring it over.”

  Nicolo couldn’t understand how she had achieved this; he had been watching the door and had not seen her pass through it.

  “I came in through the kitchen,” Zoe explained. “I worked here for about three years when I was younger. My first paying job. They’ve always done their own baking, and my mum thought I might put on a few pounds being around so much temptation, but all that happened is that I was put off dolci for life.”

  She pronounced dolci properly, as if she had learned the word as an infant.

  Nicolo had obtained Zoe’s telephone number from another server at Palazzo Enrico, and had asked her to meet him. He felt intensely curious as to why she seemed both familiar and unusual. She reminded him of the times when he had gone to watch one or the other of the Enzos play hockey. Although the players were all dressed alike, he didn’t need to watch the game for more than a minute before he could make out which one was his brother. The bulky padding, the skates, the sticks, the rapid movements—none of these could conceal the familiar set of his brother’s head on his shoulders or the angle of his torso leaning into his stride. There was something about Zoe that he recognized in this same way, although he was certain he had never met her before the wedding shower. He would have remembered her hair, which was thick and glossy, like curling, pulled-copper wire, brushed back at the sides and at the front and held in place with a row of the kind of unadorned flat silver clips that he associated in some way with hair salons. He could not have forgotten, if he had ever seen it before, the unguarded appearance of her brow, where the skin was as pale and smooth and plump as the surface of the bread dough that his nonna set out to rise twice every week; he felt as if he wanted to run his thumbs across it to test its temperature and texture. He was drawn by the steadiness of her gaze. There was nothing tentative about her that he had yet seen. She emanated calm, but made him feel an almost overwhelming possessive anxiety. He sensed that she was exceptional, rare in some way that he did not yet understand. And he felt that his advantage—for here she was, sitting across the table from him, giving him her full attention—was likely to be fleeting, that others would soon see what he had seen, and that they, whoever they were, rivals or challengers or usurpers, would inevitably try to displace him, although he could not have said what standing he thought he had or might ever have with her. More truthfully, if asked, he would have had to concede that he had none. All he had, somehow and without any basis for it, was hope.

  “How do you know Angie? From school?” he asked. He heard in his voice an interrogatory tone and he stopped to take a deep breath.

  “I know it’s not obvious, because we don’t look anything alike, but we’re cousins, more or less. What I mean is that Angie’s father and my father are cousins. I was adopted by my parents when I was a few months old. Angie and I are the same age; I am just over a month older, five weeks I think. I’m December of’ 76 and she’s January of ‘77.”

  The tea arrived, brought by a wide-hipped woman wearing a white apron on whom Zoe bestowed a quick smile. Zoe poured some of the tea into a cup. She added milk and honey, lifted the cup, and then set it down in its saucer without drinking from it. Nicolo began another question, but Zoe interrupted him.

  “Okay,” she said. “Here’s my story. I don’t usually tell it all in one go, but you’ll hear it somewhere and I might as well give it to you all at once.”

  Nicolo nodded. He wasn’t sure what story she was going to tell him, but he didn’t want to interrupt her as she began.

  “My mother was just over seventeen when she had me. She was from Sturgeon Falls, a small town up north of here, about a half-hour drive west of North Bay. She had a boyfriend, I don’t know who, and one thing led to another and she found out she was pregnant. She left home before her parents found out, and came to the city all by herself on a bus. She was completely on her own; she didn’t know anyone. She’d hardly even been out of Sturgeon Falls before coming here. She worked for a while, waitressing in a restaurant somewhere, and then eventually I was born. When she went into labour she took the bus to the hospital and checked herself in—I’ve tried but I can hardly imagine it. Then, three or four days later she was let out with me, and it was the middle of the winter and she was cooped up in this basement apartment that social assistance helped her to find. She didn’t have money for a stroller or even to buy a coat for me, and she didn’t have a television or books, just a small radio that she’d brought with her, so what she did was she would go out during the day and in the evenings and walk around the city with me wrapped up in her scarf and buttoned inside her coat. She was trying to figure out the city and how it worked, how people lived, where they went for work, what they did with their time, how other people interacted, how they managed their lives.

  “She saw my mum out with her own baby, my brother Marco, in one of the parks one afternoon when I was maybe two months old. My mum was pushing Marco in a big, broad pram; you know the kind people used to have—high, and navy blue and shiny and British, with crests, like a boat on wheels? My father had gone out and bought it the day Marco was born. Even then, that kind of thing wasn’t usual and it caught my mother’s attention. It looked to her as if my mum knew what she was doing. Inside this huge buggy was baby Marco propped up in blankets and pillows in his blue knitted cap and mittens and booties and a warm coat. And then there was my mum, perfectly competent, doting and fussing and checking all the time to make sure that Marco wasn’t too cold or overheated.

  “My mother followed my mum home that first day, and another few times after that. I think she must have checked it out pretty carefully. The house was in a normal, family neighbourhood, not rich, not poor. No other kids yet, just Marco. A husband. Someone who came home from work every evening about five. Groceries being carried into the house in armloads. Friends and relatives coming and going. Maybe she came close enough that she could smell dinner being cooked at night—sausages, garlic, tomato sauce, baking bread—I don’t know. And then I guess she got a bit desperate. She had to go back at the end of every day to that basement, and I think it was worse than you can even imagine. Grim. Depressing. She was still just a girl. She had never had any fun and she didn’t have anyone to talk to except her caseworker, who can’t have cared, really, and the city was cold and confusing—it ignored her. And having a baby dependent on her overwhelmed her.”

  Zoe paused, but she didn’t ask Nicolo whether he wanted to hear the rest. He felt certain that she could tell from the way that he was listening—attentively, without interrupting—that he did want to hear it. He was watching her as much as listening, observing how her lips formed the words, ho
w her face remained unguarded. Her expression was that of someone not bothered about being judged. He was so determined not to appear to be critical in any way about any of what she was describing that he held himself absolutely still, and he had to remind himself once or twice to draw the next breath.

  “So, then, one afternoon in February, early February, about two o’clock in the afternoon, Marco’s in his crib napping and mum’s in the kitchen cooking and she hears the doorbell and she opens the front door. She sees my mother standing there with this bundle held up in front of her, and she thinks at first that this is maybe a beggar like back in Italy trying to sell her something. My mother pushes this scarf toward her and she says, ‘I hear that you’re good with babies.’ And then somehow it happens that my mum has the wrapped-up scarf in her arms, and I didn’t weigh a lot but I was too heavy to be just rolled-up fabric, and so she looks down and the bundle starts to move and unfold in her hands. Now she thinks it’s a kitten or a puppy, and she hates animals let alone whatever this woman has dragged in, so she’s half letting the scarf unwind and half pushing it away. But my mother takes a step back and then my mum sees that it’s me, a baby. I am just waking up, my mum says, but I’m quiet and skinny and not too clean, at least compared to the way she kept Marco. And my mum looks up at my mother and she said that she can just tell. She can tell that my mother has had it; that she isn’t able to take care of me at that particular moment. My mum has a new baby of her own, so she knows how much care a baby that age needs. So she makes a decision. She pulls me in toward her, and then she stands there in the doorway while my mother backs away some more. As she’s going backward down the steps my mother says, ‘I’ll be back for her.’ And then she turns and walks fast down the street, not looking back, and my mum carries me inside and makes me a bottle from some canned milk and corn syrup and she sits on a chair in the kitchen and rocks me in her lap for a long time. She didn’t even know my name.

  “I didn’t go back to sleep, she said; I just stared up at her. Eventually, she undressed me and checked me all over. Skinny. She said I was skinny—sciupata—she still says that about me now—but otherwise, she sees that I’m okay or maybe she would have called the police. She gave me a bath and dressed me in some of Marco’s clothes and propped me up in Marco’s bouncy chair. She said I didn’t cry much and I stayed awake all that afternoon, as if I wasn’t used to napping, and so she carried me from room to room on the little chair and I kept my eyes on her while she cooked and tidied.”

  Nicolo couldn’t help himself. He asked, “And your mother never came back?” He realized as he said this that the story couldn’t work that way; Zoe knew too much about her mother, more than she would have known if she had last seen her as an infant. He bit his lip.

  “No, she did, about ten o’clock that night.”

  “What did your dad—Marco’s dad—say?”

  “He got home at his usual time I guess, after work, and he was really upset. He was worried that my mother wouldn’t come back for me and he was sure that there was some law that neither of them knew about, that it must be illegal to have a stranger’s baby, or that my mother might be crazy and would go to the police and report me missing or charge them with kidnapping me. He would have reported me to someone, but he didn’t know who he was supposed to go to, and he didn’t want to involve the police if that wasn’t the right thing to do. But my mum was calmer. She convinced him that it would be wrong to get my mother into trouble without any real reason. Eventually, she talked him into waiting until at least the next morning, and they decided that if my mother didn’t come back by then, they would go together to the priest and ask him what he thought they should do; they were both certain that the priest would know the right thing. They had this perfect faith, you know? And my mum said that she was certain that my mother would come back; she said that she knew in her bones that if my mother hadn’t intended to come back she would have said goodbye to me when she left, and she hadn’t. While she was waiting, my mum made up a bag for my mother with some clothes for me and some food and a baby blanket, a few things like that. But all that happened was my mother came back that night, fairly late, and said thank you, and took me away along with the parcel that my mum had made for her.”

  “And then?”

  “She did the same thing another few times later in the spring and in the summer, in the same way, leaving me with my mum for a day or a half-day or an evening. My mum tried not to ask her too many questions. She felt that she was doing something that my mother seemed to really need.

  “Until July second, which was a Saturday, the holiday weekend, and my dad was home and so he’s the one who opens the door—he hadn’t laid eyes on my mother before that—and when he sees her, he does the strangest thing, for him, because he’s not normally the kind of guy who—he’s not usually like this: he sees her there holding me on the doorstep and he sees I think what my mum hadn’t really seen, that she’s just a girl, and he stretches out his arms to her and folds us both inside, like a hug but longer, more protective, and they stand there a long while with me between them. He said my mother was stiff at first, like a plank of wood, but then she slowly became more and more relaxed until he thought she was almost sleeping, standing there with his arms around her, even though it was the middle of the day. And he thinks that’s what made up my mother’s mind, that this was okay, that this might be somewhere that I could stay for longer.

  “She wouldn’t come inside. She never would come inside the house; it seemed to make her nervous. So my dad gets some folding lawn chairs from the garage, and he sets them up on the front lawn, and they sit in front of the house in the shade into the late afternoon and figure out the arrangements. She leaves me with them that time overnight, and when she comes back the next day, he and my mum have been to a local lawyer’s office and have had the papers made up, and Bepina and Pasquale from next door come over to be the witnesses. It was simpler back then to do these things I guess, and it wasn’t adoption, just temporary custody, and there was no father involved, my mother made it clear that whoever he was he wasn’t ever going to be in the picture, so that made it easier, there was no one else whose consent was needed. My mum said she realized she had to make it flexible, so that my mother would feel that she could come and see me, but she also made it clear to my mother that this was a long-term deposit, until I was grown and able to make decisions myself, and that she wouldn’t be able to check me in and out like a library book. So that was the deal and it pretty much worked out, give or take.

  “Eventually I became a Trapasso too, around the time that they enrolled Marco and me in kindergarten. A name change isn’t difficult to get, and it made it easier for people to understand and for my parents to fill out forms and enrolments for all of us. They mixed us kids in together and treated us all the same. Like Marco and the others—there’s also Tina and Joseph and Emma and Stephanie—I learned dialect at home before I learned how to speak English.”

  “And did you see your own mother again?”

  “She came to see me twice when I was growing up, once when I was six and a second time when I was eleven. Just short visits. A few hours, even though she’d come all that way. She’d moved out west to Vancouver almost right away, and later she moved out even farther, to one of the smallest islands off the coast that you can actually live on, Lasqueti Island, population about three hundred. I took the train and then two ferries out to see her there for a few days during the summer after I finished high school. She sends me parcels once in a while, something that she finds and thinks I might like, books or shells or stones, one time a purple silk scarf that she wove herself on a loom. I mail her cards at Christmas and on her birthday, and I’m pretty certain my mum and dad have sent her some money over the years. She’s had a hard time—a few hard times.”

  “You don’t sound mad at her.”

  “I have been. I was furious with her most of the time I was growing up. I felt like one of those birds, you know, cuckoos, whose parents
are too lazy to raise them and so they roll their egg into another bird’s nest. There is no point, though. I’ve long since realized that I can’t go through life angry with her. It’s just self-pity—and what reason do I have to feel sorry for myself? My mother made a really good choice when she left me, one of the better decisions she’s ever made. My job is in child protection. I see the kinds of homes that kids have to grow up in. My mother picked the kind of place for me that she didn’t have as a child but that she probably wanted, somewhere she would have been supported even if they didn’t understand her. My family is great; I have two brothers and three sisters and my mum and dad are wonderful. I don’t think they even remember most of the time that I wasn’t theirs from the start, except that, of course, I don’t look at all like any of them. It was harder on Marco, sometimes, having me always around, having to explain me, and having me steal some of his thunder. He would have been the oldest if I hadn’t come along and he would have had his parents to himself for at least a while longer. That bothers me a bit, that I caused that, although I know there really isn’t anything I could have done to fix it; it’s something he’s had to work through for himself. The only issue I think I still have apart from that is that I can’t help feeling that where I ended up seems arbitrary. You know? I could have been brought up Greek Orthodox or Lithuanian or WASP or Jewish. I could have been anything. Why this family, this culture, this place, and not some other one?”