The Girls with No Names

by Serena Burdick

  “Yeah,” Grazia said. “The last thing we need is a stinking cousin around. There are already too many of us.”

  The girls linked arms. “You’ve made our lives miserable, so we’ll make yours miserable,” Alberta taunted.

  It was my twin cousins who taught me to be cruel. I learned how ruthless women could be long before I learned the wicked ways of men. First thing they did after I unpacked my bag was order me to light the gas lamp hanging from the ceiling.

  “You have to turn the knob all the way or else it won’t catch,” Grazia said.

  When I struck the match there was a flash and boom of gas that singed my eyebrows clean off. Mama and Marie ran into the bedroom while I held my face in pain.

  “You trying to burn the building down?” Marie cried.

  “No, ma’am,” I said.

  “You girls take care to teach her right, you hear?” she said to her daughters, who nodded and smiled.

  They kept right on harassing me. If either one of them chipped a cup, or stained a sheet, they blamed me. They’d claim they were missing a comb or hairpin, and say I’d stolen it. My drawers would be searched and sure enough, there would be the missing item tucked in with my underclothes. I’d declare my innocence, and one of the twins would start crying at what a wicked liar I was. It amazed me they could produce tears on cue. Aunt Marie would crack my knuckles or swat my behind with a wooden spoon. Afterward, she’d pull me into her plump bosom and kiss my head, crying and saying how sorry she was.

  The boys were kinder, especially Ernesto. He’d quietly help me haul the coal bucket and empty the ashes from the stove. In the winter, he showed me how to trick the gas meter by sliding an ice chip in instead of a quarter and we’d have free gas for days.

  Ernesto was fourteen and sold newspapers with his younger brother, Little Pietro. Little Pietro was only seven years old and seemed to think the joy of life came from stealing apples. No matter how many times the applecart owner, Mr. Finch, caught him and dragged him home, and stayed to watch and make certain Aunt Marie beat him proper for it, there were always more apples in Pietro’s pockets.

  Then there was Marie’s eldest son, Armando. He was handsome and intimidatingly quiet. He worked as a clerk in a fur factory and wasn’t around much. Aunt Marie said it was because of a woman, which made her wail that he was going to leave her. Mama told her it wasn’t natural for a grown man to stay at home with his mother. It was natural to find a wife. “I’m here to help you now,” she’d said, putting her arm around her sister and kissing her wet cheeks.

  Mama was more affectionate with Aunt Marie than she had ever been with me. And yet, when we were out of earshot of others, which was rare, she’d tell me this was temporary and things would get better, even though I’d never once complained. Despite the twins’ meanness, I liked the bustle of the place. It was Mama who seemed unhappy, lying awake nights, tense like a dry twig ready to snap.

  By winter, our circumstances really began to wear her down. I could see it in her eyes, in her nervous hands and shrinking waist. She’d gotten a job at the shirtwaist factory where the twins worked, and the long days were hard on her. Nine straight hours on weekdays, and seven on Saturdays was grueling. Sunday was her one day off, and Marie insisted the family go to church. We’d never gone to church in Katonah. Mama and Daddy said it was too far, but I figured—even though they prayed—that they’d rather not face the Lord who’d taken all those babies from them.

  I imagined it was for her sister that Mama put on a show of pretending to love church, when what she needed was to lie in bed and regain her strength. I told her I’d go to work for her, but Marie didn’t believe in girls working outside the home before they were fifteen, and Mama told me I couldn’t get my working papers until I was fourteen anyway, which still put me a year out.

  Secretly, I was grateful not to work. It was a comfort being with Aunt Marie all day. She’d drag me along Mulberry Street to haggle with the food cart owners. “What is this?” she’d cry, finding the single, sprouted eye on a potato, or a tiny bruise on an apple. “How can you charge for this? It should be free! You expect money for worthless food? I will have to throw away half. Therefore, I will pay only half.” She always got her way, the sellers shaking their heads when they saw her coming.

  Aunt Marie knew all her mother’s Sicilian recipes. We’d scrub the floor clean, then roll out long strips of pasta along the boards, hanging them to dry from the backs of the chairs, Marie talking the whole while. She told so many stories I couldn’t keep them straight. But I loved the steady flow of her voice. She taught me to stew tomatoes and bake loaves of bread made from flour as white as snow, the centers soft and squishy, nothing like the dense bread Mama and I had made from ground wheat berries in the cabin.

  At night, the family sat around the table—even Armando, who somehow managed to make it home for his mama’s cooking—eating and talking, competing to be heard, the apartment warm and smelling of garlic and fresh bread. Marie told stories about Mama and her sisters and all the trouble they used to get into, their behinds welted with their daddy’s belt buckle on a regular basis. They’d sing Italian songs I didn’t know. The music made me think of Papa, and I’d picture him sitting alone in our cabin with his violin on his knee wondering where we’d gone.

  After dinner, even though Ernesto and Little Pietro had been up at the crack of dawn to sell newspapers, they’d head out to Columbus Circle to sell more. Armando would slip away without explanation and Marie would shake her head and settle in at the table with Mama and a fresh pot of coffee. I’d be given a look that I was to give them privacy and I’d spend the evening in my bed with a boring old newspaper while the twins lay on their bed with a confiscated fashion magazine, giggling and angling it so I couldn’t see their feminine secrets. I pretended I didn’t care, but I was dying to get a look at those glossy pages.

  Even with my worry over Mama and the daily tortures from the twins, I was happy. The rowdy life of a crowded tenement filled up the quiet, dead space inside me. The woods of Katonah, the cabin and Papa became distant and dreamlike.

  Then I met Renzo.

  It was early spring and most of the dirty snow had melted from the courtyard. Armando had moved out for good, and for weeks Marie shuffled about the apartment weeping and wringing her hands, falling to her knees in prayer and kissing the cross around her neck.

  One day, she pulled me to my knees next to her and hugged me to her chest, smelling of onions and pine soap. “Thank the good Lord you and your mama came to me. You are my salvation.” She pinched my face in her hands, kissing my cheeks with wet lips. “My daughters are hard workers, but selfish, wicked girls. Threatening to quit their jobs if I don’t let them go to those dance halls in costumes that cost a week’s wages! They can’t be trusted. You, you are good. I see it in your eyes. You and Ernesto are all I have. And then there’s Little Pietro.” She threw her head back. “Always running off, always in trouble. He will be the death of me if the girls don’t kill me first.” She clasped her hands to her chest and dropped her chin, a prayer of salvation for her children flying from her lips. Then she rose abruptly, went into the bedroom and shut the door. I stayed where I was watching a mouse scurry along the wall and disappear down a crack in the floorboards as Marie emerged in her black church dress. She pulled on her satin gloves and took her straw hat from the hook on the wall. “I’m going out. I expect dinner on the table when I return.”

  I scrambled to my feet as she shut the front door. Marie had never left me alone in the tenement, and I took in the emptiness, sliding my eyes over the objects in the room feeling deliciously free. I could find the twins’ magazines, use their hairbrush, try on their stockings and their Sunday dresses.

  Since I didn’t know how long Marie would be gone, I decided it wasn’t worth the risk and busied myself by slicing onions and potatoes, then putting the meat to stew and setting the bread to rise. Durin
g the winter, the sounds from the outside had been reduced to banging feet in the stairwell and distant voices from the tenement above. With the arrival of April, windows were flung open and the courtyard noises echoed up, comforting and distracting, jump rope chants and shouting ball games.

  When I finished preparing dinner, I went out to sit in the courtyard and wait for Marie. The ball game had moved into the street and I watched two little girls roll up their jump rope and run away down the alley.

  The weather was mild and warm. A patch of sun lay over the bricks where a boy sat on an overturned crate rolling a cigarette. He wore a faded derby hat, with brown, crudely chopped hair sticking out from under it. He gave me an easy smile that filled me with nerves and I quickly looked away, wishing I’d worn my hair twisted up like the twins instead of braided down my back. Ever since I’d grown out of the dress Mama got me when we left Katonah, I’d become acutely aware of my looks. I’d been given a blue, cotton hand-me-down of Grazia’s that accentuated my eyes and I had taken to inspecting my shape in the cracked mirror on the bureau.

  The boy stood, offering his crate with a tip of his hat. “I’m Renzo.”

  “Signe,” I answered, smoothing my skirt over my knees as I sat on the wobbly crate.

  Renzo whistled. “That’s no Italian name.” He propped a foot on the crate next to me, leaned his elbow on his knee and pushed his hat farther back on his head. “I seen you go in and out of the Cascilois’, but you don’t belong to them, do you?”

  “I do so,” I said.

  He raised a suspicious eyebrow and lit his cigarette, blowing smoke into the sky and pointing to a window above my head. “I been living in that tenement since I was born and the first time I saw you was a few months back, trailing Mrs. Casciloi up the stairs. So, either I’m blind or you’re new, and I ain’t blind.”

  He leaned close, his warm eyes on mine, and a flurry of activity started up inside my chest. I dropped my gaze. “It’s my business where I come from.”

  “Fair enough.” Renzo finished his cigarette, crushed it under his foot and sat on the ground next to me with his back against the wall. “If the Cascilois are anything like my family, there are far too many stories anyway. I’d rather sit in silence.” Leaning his head against the bricks, he closed his eyes which allowed me a free look at him. He seemed about the age of Ernesto, fifteen, maybe, his features thin and boyish, only without the shadow of hair on his face Ernesto did his best to shave clean in the basin in the front room. Renzo’s cheeks were as smooth as mine.

  I stood up, resisting the urge to reach out and stroke my fingers over them. “I should get back.”

  Renzo nodded, keeping his eyes shut. As I went up the stairs to our tenement, a strange feeling moved through me and I felt hot from the inside out.

  Every day after that, Marie left the house in her fine black dress and gloves and told me she expected dinner on the table when she returned. She’d come home just before the others, never saying a word about her absence. I suspected she was spending her afternoons in church, since her stories became threaded with biblical references and moral endings. She caressed the cross around her neck like a nervous tic, quoted scripture and prayed on her knees for hours.

  I was lonely and bored and took to sinning like crazy while my good aunt was out praying for our souls.

  As soon as Marie left the house, I prepared food for dinner, then hurried into the bedroom to steal a dab of toothpaste from the pot the twins kept hidden under their bed. I’d rub it on my teeth, pinch my cheeks and bite my lips red before making my way to the courtyard. I’d started rolling my hair at night like I’d seen the twins do, and wearing it high on my head with wavy poofs around my face.

  Renzo was always waiting. It became a ritual, him smoking with his foot propped next to me on the crate, the side of his worn shoe pressed against my thigh, the leather softening into me, my head dizzy with his presence and the warmth coming off the bricks.

  By the time I turned fourteen, spring gave way to a broiling hot summer. Renzo and I no longer sat in the courtyard, but at the table in our tenement, drinking strong coffee like grown-ups. I never asked why he wasn’t out working with the others. I didn’t care. When his eyes moved from the top of his mug to my face and his mouth formed around a word, all I could think about was the way he kissed me that first time hidden under the stairwell in the courtyard, and all the times he’d kissed me since.

  We made plans. We were going to get married and have a two-bedroom apartment all to ourselves, with a full kitchen and hot water that came pouring out of the tap. Renzo swore he’d be nothing like his father. “He’s a fisherman and a fool,” he said. “Does whatever’s asked of him. Says it’s better than where he came from and he knows not to complain. I’d complain. He’s clean broke no matter how hard he works and comes home smelling of rot.” Renzo banged his hand on the table, his hat jumping where it lay next to him. “It’s because his English is no good. People don’t take him seriously. I was born here, and I’m going to find me a job as a chauffeur driving one of those shiny cars. I heard—” he leaned forward, coffee splashing over the rim of his cup “—if you go to upper Manhattan where the houses are real big, they hire private chauffeurs and give them rooms of their own.”

  “What about our apartment?” I said, dotting at the spilled coffee with my napkin, worried about explaining the stain to Marie later.

  Renzo smiled like he always did when I mentioned my place in his life, and I no longer cared a wink about the stain. “You can be a housemaid and have a room all your own too. We’ll sneak into each other’s rooms like we do now.”

  “Sneak?” I raised an eyebrow and he reached out and took my hand, stroking the back of it with one finger. A burning sensation ran through me.

  I had only myself to blame for standing up and leading Renzo into the bedroom. At first, he held his hands politely on my hips while we kissed, but it didn’t take long before they roamed elsewhere. I understood now how Papa’s hands on Mama’s waist made her melt into him, why she gave in all those times in spite of not wanting any more dead babies. When Renzo and I finally lay on the sheet with nothing but sticky skin separating us, I knew I had become the worst kind of sinner. One who enjoys it, and knows that no amount of damnation in the afterlife would stop me doing it.

  I’ve paid the Devil back so many times since you’d think God would stop punishing me. Maybe it’s because I still don’t regret it. Those few months with Renzo—being wrapped up in the summer heat and the sounds of the city being washed away on our breath—took away a sadness I had always thought was the larger part of being alive.

  It didn’t last. In August of that summer the twins got their final revenge. Grazia discovered one of Renzo’s socks on the floor near the bed and scooped it up, dangling it like a prize. “What’s this?”

  My heart stopped at the sight of it. I shrugged, playing it off. “What does it look like?”

  Alberta sat cross-legged on the bed, smiling delightedly. “Mmmm, let’s see. Why, I’d say it’s a sock!”

  Grazia grinned, swinging the thing back and forth. “The strange thing is, it appears to be a man’s sock. What man could it possibly belong to?”

  They both stared at me, waiting.

  “How should I know?” I said, but my face was pink with guilt.

  “Oh well,” Grazia said, and tossed it onto my bed, the sock crusty with dirt. “Ernesto must have changed in our room. Why don’t you give it back to him?”

  “He’s not home,” I said.

  “Leave it for him on his bedroll. Tell Mama he misplaced it, and find the other while you’re at it.”

  I glared at her and slunk into the living room. Mama and Marie looked up from the table, but didn’t question me as I shoved the sock at the end of Ernesto’s bed and hurried back to the bedroom.

  The next morning, Ernesto didn’t say a word about it and neither di
d the twins. When Marie left that day, I searched for the filthy thing, but it was nowhere to be found. I told Renzo about it, but he wasn’t worried. A sock was a sock, he said, and who could trace it to him anyway? To be safe we stopped seeing each other for a week. It was torture. I ached with missing him, and was bored out of my skin.

  When nothing came of that sock, we figured it was forgotten and Renzo and I took to our old ways, blinded by our need for each other.

  Then, on a warm, wet day, we heard thumping up the stairs. The tenement door opened so fast that all we had time to do was grab our clothes from the floor. It didn’t matter that I’d never met Renzo’s mother. I knew her the moment her wide hips blocked the bedroom doorway and I froze with my dress held to my chest, a light spray from the open window dusting my bare hip. It was the same woman I’d seen that first day shouting out the tenement window. She waved that blasted sock in her hand like a war flag.

  Renzo yanked up his trousers and pulled his shirt on with a look of horror. I expected him to say, “Mama, this is Signe and I plan to make right what we’re doing and marry her so you needn’t worry.” He didn’t say a word. Not even when his mama slammed her fist into his arm and smacked the side of his head, screaming in an Italian I didn’t understand. Renzo cowered and let her beat him like a child, his shoulders heaving. She wasn’t a big woman. He could have stopped her if he wanted, and yet he stood letting her smack red welts into his cheeks. I wanted to lunge at her. Fight Renzo’s fight for him.

  Maybe I should have. Maybe if he’d seen that I was as strong as his mama things would have turned out differently. As it was, I stood mute while she shoved him out the door, glaring over her shoulder and spitting a string of Italian words at me.

  To this day I know that woman put a curse on me.

  Getting dinner on the table that night was like preparing the last supper. I was so shaky and nervous I thought I might throw up. When Marie came home I couldn’t look at her. By the time Ernesto and Little Pietro arrived, followed within minutes by Mama and the twins, I wanted to blurt out everything I’d done and get it over with. That sock was the twins’ doing and I knew it. They were sure to tell if I didn’t.