An Italian Wife

by Ann Hood

  And Penelope, knowing where all the girls were, knowing she would have to face her room alone, and see all of Deborah’s stuff there like nothing had happened, said yes.

  “I just have to check something,” she told Julie. “I’ll be back in a flash.” She had never said I’ll be back in a flash before, and it sounded stupid.

  Penelope went into her room and without turning on the overhead light because she did not want to see Deborah’s jean jacket tossed casually on the bed, or her Simon and Garfunkel album covers or anything Deborah, she retrieved the end of the joint and smoked it, every bit.

  “I’m high as a kite,” she said out loud to the room. She was thinking and speaking in clichés. This had to stop.

  Julie had left her door ajar and Penelope hesitated before pushing it open. The apartment looked different. An Indian blanket thrown over the lamp made the light diffused and tinted red. Julie was standing in the dark, drinking from a water glass full of wine.

  “I didn’t think you were coming back,” she said.

  Penelope shrugged. “My room is kind of creepy.”

  Julie walked over to her and stroked her hair. “You poor baby,” she said softly.

  Penelope stood still, stiff.

  “I don’t need to practice kissing, you know,” she said. “I kiss boys all the time.”

  “Do you fuck them?” Julie asked, her voice so soft that Penelope wasn’t sure she was hearing right.

  “Sure,” she said. She was perfectly high, the way she liked most, when her body felt like it was being lifted up even though she wasn’t moving at all. A light breeze moved through her hair, tickled her neck, touched her collarbone. Penelope closed her eyes and enjoyed it.

  “You went and got high, didn’t you?” Julie said. “I can smell pot in your hair.”

  That’s when Penelope realized that it wasn’t a breeze; Julie was touching her with her fingertips. Goosebumps rose on her arms as Julie’s fingers moved, light, light, to her shirt, right at her nipples.

  “Do you like having sex with those Maxwell Academy boys?” Julie asked.

  “I do,” Penelope said. This wasn’t a lie, though technically what they did was not sex. There was a rumor that Amy Brear let boys put it in her butt because that way she was still a virgin. Penelope considered asking Julie about this technicality, but her brain was too fuzzy. All of her energy and power seemed to be in her nipples. Amazing. Amazing that so much could be centered in such a small part of her body. She remembered when she broke her baby toe, back in junior high, how she couldn’t believe how much a tiny thing like that could hurt. For days, all she could think about was that toe, as if all of her blood and nerves were in that one place.

  “Your toe?” Julie asked.

  Penelope laughed. Had she said it out loud?

  “I broke it,” Penelope said, trying to stop laughing. “And all I could feel was my toe.”

  “That’s why I hate pot,” Julie said. “It makes you stupid.”

  Julie pressed the glass of wine, now half-empty, to Penelope’s lips. “Have some,” she said. And when Penelope gulped some wine, Julie whispered, “Good girl. Good girl. Does anyone ever call you Penny? Hmmm?”

  Penelope wanted to explain that she hated that name, that her mother called her that. The one time she could remember seeing her father, he’d called her Penny.

  “I want to call you Penny,” Julie was saying. “Penny. Penny. My Penny.”

  Penelope’s head was spinning ever so slightly. She liked having the spins, liked lying on her back and watching the lights and walls and faces spin past her.

  “Not here,” Julie said, laughing softly.

  She was tugging Penelope to her feet when she had not even realized she’d lain down. Walking into the bedroom, Penelope bumped into the walls. Like a pinball machine, she thought, which made her laugh again. Hard.

  “Use similes,” she said.

  “Okay,” Julie said, nodding her pretty head. She had curly hair, like Slinkys. Penelope reached up and touched it, and told her that.

  “Your hair is like Slinkys,” she said.

  When Julie pulled off Penelope’s shirt, her small breasts pointing into the air because no one wore bras anymore, Penelope said, “I like boys, you know.”

  “Absolutely,” Julie said. “There are no lesbians on this bed.”

  “None,” Penelope said, yanking her jeans off, and her little yellow panties, too.

  Julie’s tongue began to trace the same path her fingernails had. Hair, neck, collarbone, nipples. She hummed “Penny Lane.”

  “Because,” Penelope said, “I don’t know how they do it, you know?” It was something the girls discussed. How did lesbians even have sex? There were theories, but none of them made any real sense.

  “I don’t know,” Julie murmured, Penelope’s left nipple in her mouth. “The only thing I know is that whatever one woman does to another, the other woman has to reciprocate.”

  “Uh-huh,” Penelope said, not understanding. All she could really concentrate on was the electric buzz that seemed to emanate from her nipples to down there. She wished she could explain it to Julie, but her words were so blurry.

  She watched Julie’s Slinky hair bounce as her tongue moved down Penelope’s ribs, and belly button, and then down there.

  “Whoa,” Penelope said, or thought she said. Her thoughts were getting even more jumbled. No boy had done this, and why not? she wondered, because surely this was the thing she’d been waiting for, maybe her whole life, this tongue making light circles, around and around, until Penelope’s back was arched and she was pulling on those Slinkys and she was making noises like she was an animal.

  “What?” she said when her body stopped shaking. “What?”

  “I don’t know,” Julie was saying into her mouth, kissing Penelope with her mouth tasting of . . . tasting of Penelope. “Maybe they do that?”

  Penelope couldn’t make sense of what she meant. Until Julie said, “My turn, Penny Lane.”

  “PREGNANT?” PENELOPE’S MOTHER SAID. They were driving down Route 95, heading south toward Rhode Island.

  It was the sunniest, bluest-sky day ever, Penelope thought. Her head pounded. Her body felt bruised and sore, but in a good way. She woke up this morning and decided that she would have sex with the next Maxwell Academy boy she was with. All of it. She would have sex with every boy who kissed her. She was not a lesbian. She would prove that.

  “A girl gets pregnant,” she said, looking out the window and enjoying shocking her mother, “and she has no choice. You think they want that baby? I mean, she’s seventeen years old.”

  “And the boy?”

  Penelope shrugged. “The same, I guess.”

  “Do you think that’s what happened with my parents?” her mother said softly. “Too young. No options. Sure, they would have kept me if they could, but how could they?”

  Penelope gave a big exaggerated sigh.

  “She almost died, Mom, and all you can think about is you.” This actually wasn’t true. Deborah didn’t even come close to dying. The razor hurt too much, and the few cuts she managed to inflict were not deep at all.

  “Excuse me, love,” her mother said, all fake British. “I’m on my way to possibly meeting the woman who gave birth to me. I think I’m allowed.”

  Penelope didn’t answer. She and Julie had just been wondering how girls did it together, that’s all. Hadn’t they talked about that? Hadn’t they both said they didn’t know?

  “You don’t do anything like that, do you?” her mother asked.

  “Oh no,” Penelope said. “I give blow jobs and have sex with women.”

  “Honestly, Penny,” her mother said, wrinkling her entire face in disgust. “Can’t you ever be honest?”

  “I guess not,” Penelope said.

  The radio played “Bridge over Troubled Water” for the millionth time.

  “I hate that song,” Penelope mumbled, spinning the dial to change the channel. It reminded her of D
eborah, poor Deborah locked in the psych ward, still pregnant, her parents arriving from Chicago any minute.

  She stopped. The Beatles were singing “Penny Lane.”

  “I thought you hated that song,” her mother said.

  Penelope didn’t answer her. Instead, she sang along.

  THE WOMAN AT THE DESK had on too much lipstick and old-fashioned cat-eye glasses, rimmed with rhinestones.

  “I’m sorry, but only family is allowed,” she said, not looking at all sorry.

  Penelope saw her mother twitch slightly at the word “family.”

  “But you see, I am family,” she said.

  The woman’s eyes scanned the paper she’d retrieved.

  “No Martha,” she said finally.

  “I wouldn’t be on the list. It’s complicated, but—”

  “She’s dying,” the woman said. “The family’s been called and they’re all in there, waiting.”

  “All of them? Are there a lot of children?”

  The woman nodded. “Italians,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You know.”

  There seemed to be nothing more to say. Penelope waited to see what her mother would do next, but her mother didn’t seem to have a plan. She wished she’d thought to get a joint from someone. Tonight, she would meet them down the hill and take acid with them. The acid was called Purple Haze, and it was in sugar cubes. All you had to do was let the sugar dissolve in your mouth, and before you knew it, you were tripping. Just yesterday that had frightened Penelope, but after everything that happened last night, she found herself wanting to do it.

  Her mother walked across the small lobby. She sat on one of the faded couches. The place smelled like pee and strong disinfectant, the kind they used at school to cover the smell if someone puked. Penelope sat beside her.

  “I have papers from the hospital. I was born on Valentine’s Day, 1919. Josephine Rimaldi gave birth to a baby girl that day and gave her up for adoption to a family in Vermont.”

  She had repeated this information about a million times in the car. Penelope sighed. She thought about her own father, a real loser who had been married to her mother just long enough to get her preggers and then disappear. Whenever Penelope asked her mother why she’d married him in the first place, she said he reminded her of someone else. He’d shown up once, when Penelope was eleven. Her mother wouldn’t let him in the house, so Penelope had stood at the door to talk to him. He’d smelled of booze, and swayed in the doorway, a big man with a nose like Barney Rubble and pale-blue eyes. He said, “You’re a Collier. Don’t you forget that.” “Okay,” she said. He handed her a blond doll with eyes that opened and shut in a creepy fluttering motion. She hadn’t played with dolls since second grade. “Take care now,” he told her.

  Penelope had no desire to go looking for Jim Collier. Why was her mother so obsessed with finding this woman?

  All of a sudden, her mother was on her feet, practically running across the lobby.

  “Stop! Please!” she called.

  A sad-looking woman was lighting a cigarette with trembling hands.

  “Are you related to Josephine Rimaldi, by any chance?” her mother asked.

  “She’s my mother.”

  Penelope watched as her mother took in this stranger’s face, as if she was trying to find some resemblance to her own.

  “I think she’s my mother too,” she said finally.

  The woman laughed. She inhaled her cigarette, then let the smoke out in a slow stream.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  Her mother repeated the facts again.

  But the woman shook her head. “There’s been some mistake,” she said. She frowned. “I remember talk about a baby who died,” she said, her frown deepening.

  “I can understand changing the story. In those days—”

  “She’s dying,” the woman said. “There’s no point.”

  Before Penelope’s mother could say anything else, the woman was snuffing out her cigarette and moving away.

  Penelope rushed toward her, her heart suddenly full.

  “We’ve come a long way,” she said.

  “This isn’t the time,” the woman said. Her dark eyes had gone icy.

  “It’s all right, Penny,” her mother said.

  Penelope watched the woman walk back down the hall. Her mother put her hands on Penelope’s shoulders.

  “It’s all right,” she said again softly.

  BACK IN THE CAR, “Bridge over Troubled Water” played on the radio as Penelope watched Rhode Island pass by. She couldn’t explain why, but she felt a tenderness toward her mother. It felt like the night, like a sky overflowing with stars, like love.

  In a few hours, she would be back at St. Lucy’s. She would sneak out with the other girls and run down the hill to the spot where the boys would be waiting. She would give herself over to one of them. She would put that sugar cube under her tongue and take her first trip on acid. At some point, maybe just as the sun was coming up, she would find herself back in Julie’s apartment and Julie would scold her for taking drugs. But she would lead Penelope into her bed and undress her and whisper to her. Your turn, she would say, as she began the journey down her body.

  Even later, in a year or two, St. Lucy’s would close and merge with Maxwell Academy. By then, Penelope would have taken dozens of acid trips. She would have tried speed and cocaine and snorted heroin once. She would have slept with more boys than she could name, on beaches and in cars and in the narrow beds in the dorms of Maxwell Academy. She would keep making love with Julie until St. Lucy’s closed and Julie moved to San Francisco. That day, Penelope would go with her to Logan Airport to say good-bye. She would sit by the gate crying long after Julie looked over her shoulder one last time and blew her a kiss. By then her mother would have died, swiftly, from pancreatic cancer, not even knowing that Penelope had gotten into Brown.

  “I don’t understand,” Penelope said.

  “What, love?” her mother said. She didn’t take her eyes from the road.

  “Anything,” Penelope said.

  America

  JOSEPHINE RIMALDI OPENED HER EYES, PULLING HERSELF from that place that is neither sleep nor wakefulness. That place was where she spent most of her time now. Voices swirled around her, but who they belonged to she could not say for sure. Faces appeared in front of her own, and she struggled to identify them. Was that blond girl her own lost Valentina? Why was her Elisabetta dressed like a soldier in army-green fatigues? Who was this young girl dressed like a gypsy who kept visiting and begging Josephine for stories? She studied each of these faces with great seriousness, wishing they would speak to her in Italian.

  After all this time, Josephine still could not grasp the complexities of English. Words here and there made sense to her. Water. Hungry. Cold. Sometimes she even managed to ask the nurse who she liked, the young one with all the dark curls, if she’d had a gentleman caller. “Tommy Petrocelli?” Josephine asked politely. “He come to see me today?” She had to practice the words before she said them and still she managed to forget the “today” or to mix up her verbs. “He see me?” she might say. Or, “He come to me?” But she never had to practice the name. “Tommy Petrocelli?” she said, and nothing more. And always the nurse—the one she liked with the dark curls, or the stern overweight one with the haircut like a man’s, or the silly one with the blue eyes and wispy hair—always the nurse shook her head. “Sorry, Mrs. Rimaldi, Tommy didn’t come today.”

  The blue-eyed one was staring at her now. “Mrs. Rimaldi?” she said in her little girl voice. “You awake?”

  Josephine frowned. “Si,” she said, adding silently, you stupid girl. At least she hoped she said it to herself. Words slipped out of her sometimes like seeds from a watermelon: Pop! Pop! Other times she opened her mouth to send a torrent of words out into the world and nothing came at all.

  The silly nurse wore a rose-colored uniform with pale-blue teddy bears all over it. Her hair, a froth of pale blond, was kept
in a messy pile on top of her head with a fat silver barrette shaped like a butterfly. Once, when Josephine was staring at the thing, trying to figure out what it was sticking out of her hair like that, the girl had grinned at her and said, “Oh! You like my barrette, Mrs. Rimaldi?” She had taken it off, her hair falling around her like cotton candy, and opened and closed it right in Josephine’s face. “It’s a butterfly,” the girl said in that loud voice people used when they spoke to someone who didn’t understand English very well. “See?”

  A butterfly? Josephine thought of the dusty wings of butterflies, blue spotted with black, or the sunset orange of a Monarch. If you touched their wings, they couldn’t fly anymore, that dust the magic that lifted them up. This cheap thing looked nothing like a butterfly.

  Josephine was wondering if she had conveyed any of this to the nurse, or if it was all in her head, when the nurse leaned forward and put the ridiculous barrette in Josephine’s own white hair.

  “You look so pretty!” she said, grinning like the idiot that she was. “Here,” she said, wheeling Josephine over to the mirror that hung on the door. “See for yourself.”

  Josephine squinted at the image in the mirror. But all she saw was a very old woman, hunchbacked and wizened, with thin white hair with an ugly thing jutting from the top of her head.

  “You can keep it,” the nurse said. “I have a million of them.”

  Now the girl was calling to her. “Mrs. Rimaldi? You know what today is, don’t you? Remember, I told you yesterday?”

  Every day when a nurse came in she said, “Good morning, Mrs. Rimaldi. It’s Monday, the second of June.” Or whatever day and month it was. Some nurses would quiz her later. “What day is it today, Mrs. Rimaldi?” As if it mattered whether it was June or February, Monday or Thursday.

  The girl was looking at her so expectantly that Josephine tried to please her. “Monday?” she said.

  The girl laughed. “Well, no, it’s Saturday. But it’s your birthday today.”