Sometimes I Dream in Italian

by Rita Ciresi

  Felicia and Terry glared at us, and we glared at them.

  “You do drugs, girl?” Felicia finally asked Lina.

  “What do you think?” Lina said.

  “You got any?”

  Lina sauntered over to the second row of lockers and twirled her combination. She opened the locker door with a bang and brought out her split-leather purse. Then she reached into a hole in the lining, waggled her finger, and drew out a Baggie sealed with a twistie.

  Lina and I had smoked pot together only a couple of times before, mostly at family picnics, when we disappeared with our cousin Gus into the bushes at the base of the mountain at East Rock Park. It was one thing to smoke with your cousin, yet another to light up with your sworn enemies. But maybe this was Lina's plan. Nothing united Roger Sherman kids like doing drugs and standing up to teachers. If we got high together, we'd all stay out of trouble.

  Terry cleared off the bench. Felicia produced matches and a pack of Zig Zag, and within a minute Lina had inexpertly rolled and lit up a joint.

  “Hurry, hurry,” Terry warned. “Matron gonna come back.”

  “Matron's off drinking coffee,” Lina said.

  “Matron gettin’ off with her wand,” Felicia said, before she took a deep toke and pulled in so much smoke she started to cough. “Where you get this good stuff?” she asked Lina.

  “The Home Ec teacher,” Lina said.

  “She deal?”

  Proud that she had pulled one over on Felicia, Lina smiled. “Yeah, and she promised to make us pot brownies at the end of the year. Send us home flying high.”

  We all laughed and leaned lazily against one another. We passed the joint until it burned our fingers to hold it. Nobody had a roach clip, so Lina had to grind out the joint on the bench and save the stub for later. I sat very still, closed my eyes, and listened to the hum of the fluorescent lights. The voices of Terry and Felicia and Lina sounded slow and far away.

  “I hate this school,” Terry said. “Shit-brown floors. Puke-green walls. Can't wait to get out.”

  “What are you gonna do?” Lina asked.

  “Find a boy with a big dick,” Terry said.

  Felicia whooped. “You gonna find a boy who be a big dick.”

  “What's so great about dicks, anyway?” I asked.

  Lina gave a loud yawn and said, “Seen one, seen ‘em all.”

  “You find the right one, you get out of New Haven,” Terry said. “You go to New York, Atlanta.”

  “I got a cousin lives in Atlanta,” Felicia said. “She say the white girls got names like Ashley and Ruthie Sue. Say they got last names like Titsworth.”

  Lina hollered with laughter, and I opened my eyes to keep from falling as we pushed and shoved at each other on the bench.

  “What your tits worth?” Felicia asked.

  “Five thousand,” Lina said.

  “Mine—five million,” Felicia said. “Each.” She stood up. “Any of you guls lesbos?”

  After we all shook our heads, she lifted her tank top and yanked down the cups of her black bra, revealing her bulging breasts and dark, stiff nipples. “I should have showed these to Mr. Oliver,” she said. “Could have gotten me out of cleaning toilets.”

  “You think he's good-lookin'?” Lina asked.

  Felicia pulled up her bra and rearranged her tits beneath her shirt. “Dreamboat,” she said. “But a dumb fuck.”

  “They say he from North Carolina,” Terry said.

  “What they got down there, besides firecrackers?” Felicia asked.

  “Ku Klux Klan,” Lina started.

  “Baptist Church,” I said.

  “Preachers in pickups,” Terry said.

  “Cotton,” Felicia said.

  “Tobacco.”

  “Uncle Toms.”

  “Restaurants called Sambo's.”

  “Fried chicken.”

  “Barbecued beans that make you fart.”

  We laughed. Felicia squinted and then started to snap her fingers, her eyes seemingly growing narrower with each snap. She went over to the corner and dumped the contents of the waste-basket into the sink. Then she turned the wastebasket over her head. “Hey man. Nation of Islam, man.”

  “Huey Newton,” Terry said.

  “Bobby Seale,” Felicia said.

  “Malcolm X,” Terry said. “Malcolm.”

  “You look like the Pope,” I said, and Felicia took the pail off her head and pointed a purple fingernail at me.

  “Why don't you guinea girls go to Catholic school?”

  “Our father lost his job,” I said.

  Terry laughed. “Got kicked out of the Mafia.”

  Lina slitted her eyes and said, “You probably don't even know who your father is.”

  “I wish I didn't,” Terry said. “Sick of him sticking his dick in my face.”

  “Bite it,” Felicia advised.

  “Chop it off,” I said.

  Terry snorted. “Then I gotta do the same to my brothers.”

  “I know your brothers,” Lina said. “Your brothers stopped us one day on Division Street.”

  I was having trouble concentrating, but I finally bore down on my memory and brought up the image of the long dark brown car with a clicking muffler that had trailed Lina and me home along Division Street a few months earlier, soul music blaring. Then the car radio went dead and all we heard was the clanking muffler and the loud motor of the car. A boy leaned out of the window, whistled, and yelled, “Hey, spics!”

  Lina turned and glared. “We aren't spics.”

  We kept on walking. The car slowed down more and continued to trail us. After a while the same boy called out, “Hey, guineas!”

  Lina turned and put her hands on her hips. “What do you want?”

  “Just looking,” he said, and the boys in the backseat laughed. They began to call out taunts I knew were directed solely at Lina. I never was the object of male attention when Lina was around, and over the years I had learned not to turn when boys whistled so I didn't have to hear, “Not you, dogface, your sister!”

  “Show us,” the boys called out. “Come on, girl. Show us your white ass.”

  “I'm not white,” Lina said. She pulled up her sleeve and held out her forearm for inspection. “I'm green. I got green skin.”

  “You got hairy arms, girl,” one boy shouted, and another said, “You from the Planet Ape!”

  “Same planet as you!” Lina hollered, and we laughed and broke into a trot, then ran home.

  I looked at Terry. “We know your brothers,” I said, even though I didn't have the slightest idea whether or not the boys in the car had been related to Terry. “Your brothers were the ones who set off the firecracker at the assembly.”

  We broke into raucous laughter.

  The assembly had been called after the last cafeteria food fight and featured two speakers—a black lady and a white lady—from the city of New Haven social-work office. They stood up on the stage in the auditorium and talked into microphones that hummed and squeaked. They referred to themselves as group facilitators. Their goal was to brainstorm and blue-sky about eliminating unnecessary racial tension at Roger Sherman High. They told us if we just thought about it for half a second, we would see how stupid racism really was, since underneath we were all human beings. Then the white lady blabbed on and on about that experiment we were all so sick and tired of hearing about, about the brown eyes and the blue eyes, until somebody behind me grumbled, “Who care about eyes? It's the skin that counts.”

  Then the black woman stepped up to the microphone. “Let's begin by brainstorming about the origins of racism,” she said. “Any ideas about why we live in a racist society?”

  Complete silence.

  She raised her voice so she sounded like a television preacher. “I said, any ideas about why—”

  “Some folks black, some white!” a voice in the audience rang out.

  The woman nodded encouragingly. “Very good,” she said. “Excellent start. Other thoughts?�
��

  Silence, except for a few burps and laughter.

  “Any thoughts on why racial tension is so prevalent in your school?” she asked.

  “School run by the Mafia!”

  “Principal's a nigger!”

  “Lunch ladies white! Lunch ladies tell who to leave the cafeteria!”

  The two speakers looked at each other, and then the white woman made a time-out sign with her hands and stepped up to the microphone. “We believe in conducting discussions in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Do you all know what Robert's rules of order are?”

  “Fuck that Robert!”

  “He an asshole!”

  The black woman looked challengingly at the audience. “Do you think it's fair to call someone names if you don't even know him?”

  “Show us.”

  “Bring Robert here.”

  “Take one look at his face and we say asshole or not.”

  A great roar of laughter and some scattered applause broke out, interrupted by a loud hiss from the back of the auditorium. We turned and saw a cascade of multicolored sparks burst off the back bench. Then came a pop, another shower of neon-green sparks, and a high-pitched whistle began to screech. It was the kind of earsplitting firecracker known as a Whistlin’ Dixie, and it caused enough smoke and commotion to set off the fire alarm and send us all out into the courtyard, where we smoked cigarettes and passed joints until the fire department came and the all-clear finally sounded.

  “Italian boy set off that Whistlin’ Dixie,” Terry said.

  “How do you know?” Lina asked.

  “Think a black boy would buy anything named Dixie?”

  “Who cares who did it?” I asked. “I missed math. It was great.”

  Felicia yawned. “Those ladies at the microphone out to lunch,” she said.

  “Think we're stupid,” Lina agreed.

  “Think we're not supposed to see black and white when we look at other people,” Felicia said. “They blind? They look at other people, what they see?”

  I opened my eyes—half-closed with sleepiness from the pot— and looked at Felicia. For a moment I saw only the red veins in her eyes, and then the chocolate iris, which was almost identical in color to my own. Then the shrill bell that signaled the end of gym clanged, echoing for a moment afterward in my ears. We broke out the Visine and abandoned the sponges, the Bon Ami, and the toilet brushes as we wandered on to our next class.

  Mine was Latin. Mama had made me sign up for it so I would have at least one class that wasn't completely full of black kids. The class was small and taught in the same room where they held Health. A crude drawing of a uterus, two long fallopian tubes stretched out as if to embrace and strangle the spectator, had been on the blackboard since the beginning of the year. Somebody had stolen the eraser.

  We were translating a bunch of aphorisms from the worn-out textbooks. The first one, Cogito, ergo sum, fell to Raymond Williams. He looked down at his book and followed each word with his finger. “I'm thinking,” he said slowly. “So I be.” He looked up at the teacher. “Be what?” he asked.

  The teacher looked puzzled. It felt like forever waiting for her to speak, and I wondered why I thought so much depended on her answer.

  PART TWO

  Donna

  WOMAN

  NOW LINA AND I had grown into what my parents called “dooie-donnies”—due donne, two women. I lived (regrettably solo) in a drafty apartment in Poughkeepsie, Lina and her husband, Phil, in a tony Wallingford suburb where the lawns shone emerald-green from 2,4-D. Whenever I went home—which wasn't often—our neighborhood looked more and more gutted, and the storefronts once known simply as the baker's or the shoemaker's were either boarded up or converted into pawnshops or twenty-four-hour Laundromats. My parents’ home, which had seemed small to me even as a child, now seemed tiny as a miniature cottage placed beneath a Christmas tree. Because the foundation had settled unevenly into the ground, the whole house seemed to lean to the left, toward my grandmother's old house— recently occupied by a family of seven who came from (as Mama said) Lord knows where. I figured God knew where Haiti sat on the map, even if my mother didn't.

  It was Babbo's birthday, and Lina, Mama, and I—exhausted from the unseasonably warm May heat—were slurping sour lemonade from twenty-year-old drinking glasses that once had been imprinted with hamburgers, fries, and golden arches, but that now bore only the big feet, Bozo hair, and toothsome smile of Ronald McDonald. Lina was chewing on her ice when Mama reported that some Yalie researcher was snooping through the neighborhood, hoping to interview some of the former workers at the now-defunct New Haven Pocketbook Factory—better known as the Pockabookie Ladies.

  Lina spit her ice into her glass. “What's he gonna ask the Pock-abookies—why they always wear black? Why they always shout che si dice across the street at one another? How many times a day they go to church, and how many whiskers they've got on their chinny-chin-chins?”

  Mama said the researcher was a she. What's more—here Mama paused and lowered her voice—the researcher was colored.

  Lina snorted. “That oughta go over big in this guinea neighborhood.”

  “It's going black now,” Mama said.

  To steer her off that well-worn subject, I asked, “How do you know what the researcher is like?”

  “She went to Great-Zia Giulia's house,” Mama told me.

  “And Great-Zia probably slammed the door in her face,” Lina said. “Probably thought she was peddling The Watchtower.”

  “Say what you want,” Mama said, “those Mormons have the faith.”

  Lina and I looked at each other and burst into laughter. “Jehovah's Witnesses, Ma,” I said.

  Mama rattled the ice in her glass. “I can't keep ‘em straight.”

  Lina spoke slowly and carefully, as if she were addressing a toddler. “One kind is white and male. They have crew cuts and ride Schwinn bikes. The other kind is black and female. They walk and wear Easter hats.”

  Mama pushed out her lips in puzzlement. “Which kind can't dance?” she asked.

  “Baptists,” I said. “And the kind that can't talk are like the guy on the oatmeal box.”

  “Shakers,” Mama said.

  “QUAKERS!” Lina and I shouted back.

  Mama frowned and crooked her finger at us—which prompted Lina to suggest she looked just like the ladies on the Ragú commercials—then disappeared into the kitchen to finish making dinner. Feeling lethargic, Lina and I took our inspiration from our father, who was lying on the sagging couch, fast asleep. While Mama rattled pots and pans, we propped our sweaty lemonade glasses on the worn carpet and lounged on the faded armchairs, pulling the dirty white stuffing out of the holes in the nubby fabric and then cramming it back in again.

  “I feel guilty about not helping Mama in the kitchen,” Lina said.

  “Yeah, so do I,” I said. “But not enough to actually get up and do it.”

  We sat there—like two lazy bums, as Mama would say—until Lina's husband, Phil, came back from the park with their two kids. Not even the noise of a toddler and a screeching baby could wake our father up from his deep sleep.

  “Yo, Babbo,” Lina said, snapping her fingers sharply in his face. “Yo, Birthday Boy—svegliate—wake up!”

  When Lina finally roused Babbo from his sleep by kicking him once, in the shin, with her handmade Italian flats she had bought downtown on Chapel Street, Babbo lumbered over to the table and grunted with satisfaction to smell baked ziti cooling on the top of the oven. He then grunted with dissatisfaction as Mama detailed all over again, this time for Phil's benefit, the story of the researcher and the Pockabookie Ladies.

  “Probably gonna write a book,” Babbo said, ripping a hunk from the loaf of bread that Mama passed him. “Gonna force those ladies to say they were exploited by the factory.”

  Lina and I held our tongues—and were tempted to hold our ears—as Babbo went on and on about how, back then, the Pockabookies were damn happy to have a j
ob. In those days people weren't too proud to pull a ten-hour shift putting handles on pocketbooks. It was honest work and put the pasta e fagioli on the table.

  While we were eating our bruschetta and salami, Mama got up and fetched the ad that the researcher—a sociologist, Mama said, in a dubious tone—had placed in the weekly bargain newspaper, explaining the purpose of her study. After Mama read the ad aloud—pausing at phrases such as work ethic and economic gain and division of labor—Lina and I translated it for her.

  “The researcher wants to know why the Pockabookie Ladies worked,” I said.

  “You work to eat,” Mama said.

  “She wants to know why some women worked and others didn't,” Lina said.

  “Easy—some husbands made more.”

  “She wants to know how it affected their families.”

  “Dinner was an hour later,” Mama said.

  “She wants to know how it affected their relationships with their husbands.”

  “Fatti i fatti tuoi,” Mama said. “As they say in America: MYOB.” She pressed her lips together, and Lina and I laughed hysterically until Phil chided us. He didn't approve of the way we treated Mama.

  “Bug off,” Lina said sharply. “She's our mother.” Which made us laugh even louder to cover our shame and our guilt that we— such modern, crazy girls—could have come from such an old-fashioned, dressed-in-black mother, who did not differ very much from the Pockabookie Ladies themselves.

  Here they come—eccolè!—the Pockabookie Ladies! The factory whistle blew at 3:59 each afternoon, and the drivers dumb enough to come down the avenue at 4:00 had to stop their cars for the long file of ladies streaming out of the factory. The Pocka-bookies did not believe in crossing at the light. They cut across the avenue wherever it suited them, like a horde of water buffalo charging across a river. If you sat in one of the waiting cars—or followed behind the ladies on the street—you heard nothing but a babble of Sicilian, the squish of their flat, padded shoes, and the fat swacks of their hands, which they used to slap and poke and prod one another to drive home the point of their stories. The Pockabookies wore nude-colored knee-his that plastered the black hair on their legs against their skin, sleeveless paisley muumuus in lurid color combinations, and, always, black crocheted sweaters on top. Each had her own black leather purse to carry, courtesy of the factory. The ladies appreciated such largesse. Who were they, anyway, to expect decent treatment from their employers? Just plain old Pockabookies!