Sometimes I Dream in Italian

by Rita Ciresi

  When Lina and I were young, we looked upon the Pockabookies with absolute dread. Never mind Michelangelo, the Medicis, Mona Lisa, and all the folks we someday would learn about during our college art-history classes. For us, being Italian meant being Pockabookie-issima. Horrors!

  Lina and I wanted to look and act like Marilyn Monroe— before she killed herself, of course—with sultry bedroom eyes, lush big lips and tits, and a rear end that curved like the back end of a Studebaker. Marilyn had all-American looks, said the magazines. We read Life in the waiting room of the dentist's office, and we believed it.

  After a short conference with some of her older girlfriends, Lina told me the way to avoid becoming a Pockabookie was to drink a lot of ginger ale, a beverage that in our house was considered highly American. Lucky for us Babbo worked for a soda distributor, and we could swill all the Dixon Park ginger ale that we wanted. Unable to figure out why we suddenly had lost our taste for orange soda and root beer, Babbo brought home case after case of ginger ale. Then, after another conference with her girlfriends, Lina broke the bad news. “Not only do you have to drink tons of ginger ale,” she said, “but you can't eat anything along with it.”

  I squinched up my face. “Sounds like Lent,” I said.

  “I think it's called a liquid diet.”

  Lina and I thought about the cannoli and cornetti that Babbo brought home from the bakery, the spumoni we got whenever we visited our aunties, and the frosted cookies that we ate at Communion parties and wedding receptions, and decided the Pocka-bookie Lady Diet could vaffanculo for all we cared. We didn't have a scale anyway and were weighed only at the beginning of the school year in the nurse's office, where we also had to bend our head forward to be checked for lice and listen to the nurse exclaim about how our hair was so dark and thick compared to the blond locks on the Irish kids at Saint Aidan's.

  Looking for latent signs of Pockabookie-ism, Lina and I undressed in front of each other and reviewed our body parts. “You've got a fat culo,” Lina said, tweaking my buttocks, and I said, “So you've got a flabby back” and grabbed a roll of fat above her shoulder blades until she yelped in pain. We both decided we had hammy upper arms, and to remedy the problem Lina swiped two moldy old volumes from a Funk & Wagnalls set that was rotting on the shelf in the church basement. Every night in our room we furiously swung S–T and J–K–L up and down in butterfly movements and jumped one hundred jacks, until Babbo shouted at us to stop shaking the whole house—unless we wanted to end up without a roof over our heads.

  “You mean floor,” Mama hollered. “Your father means the floor. We want a floor beneath our feet.”

  “Screw the floor,” Lina said. “And who cares about the roof? Sky's the limit, baby.”

  Lina and I were going to be movie stars. Right next to the Pockabookie Factory stood a Mark One Theater, and every weekend the management catered to the local population by showing matinees imported from Italy. On Saturday mornings the manager climbed a tall ladder and rearranged the letters on the marquee to announce:

  OGGI! OGGI!

  DUE FILMI ITALIANI!

  Then, in English—although we didn't have the vaguest idea why real Americans needed to know that the Mark One intended to play Italian movies—the sign was translated in smaller letters:

  TODAY! TODAY!

  TWO ITALIAN HITS!

  The Mark One played anything and everything Italian they could get their hands on: spaghetti westerns and potboilers that featured B actors, an Italian version of Dracula, artsy films with Roberto Rossellini and Marcello Mastroianni, two-handkerchief sentimental dramas with Claudia Cardinale and Gina Lollobrigida. Sometimes they played American movies dubbed in Italian, like Some Like It Hot and The Singing Nun. Once they even ran The Bridge on the River Kwai, which made Lina and me wonder how they translated all that whistling into Italian.

  People came from all over New Haven—in big dented cars with duct tape patching the vinyl seats—to crowd the theater. After the success of The Godfather, some of them sported the popular bumper sticker: MAFIA STAFF CAR: KEEPA YOU HANDS OFF! Lina and I were mystified by this. We had heard The Godfather was a movie where a man slept with a horse. We wondered why and how but were resigned to never finding out, since this movie had been banned by the Church and was listed under the heading CONDEMNED by our archdiocese newspaper.

  Desperate to get to Hollywood, where we hoped to act in the very movies that The Catholic Transcript was so quick to condemn, Lina and I made halter tops out of the same red bandannas we had used for our Annie Oakley Halloween outfits. We rolled the cuffs of our shorts to the tops of our thighs and pretended we had on white go-go boots instead of our fuzzy pink slippers. In our room we practiced a song-and-dance routine that we intended—someday—to take on the road. We called ourselves “Two Italian Hits,” a name that seemed vaguely reminiscent of the phrase Mama used to disparage women who put more than powder and lipstick on their face. Bombshells, Mama whispered in a fierce, urgent voice, as if these women were on the verge of exploding right in front of her like latent grenades. It was the same way she said Sexpot when the radio announced, that long-ago day at the beach, that Marilyn Monroe had committed suicide.

  The Two Italian Hits fizzled out faster than fireworks. Only Lina made it on the stage, by acting as Fiona and Eliza Doolittle in the high-school productions of Brigadoon and My Fair Lady, roles that won her a scholarship to Hartt School of Music. But her schooling—and her career—was cut short when a Trinity College boy got her pregnant. So she married Phil. And had Pammy. And then, three years later, Richie. I went off to Vassar—back then, a former women's college that was not Catholic, which led Mama to suspect I was a dyke—then stayed in Poughkeepsie to work for a major greeting-card company.

  Back home, on the day the Pockabookie Factory closed for good, the final whistle pierced the air at 4:00 P.M., and the ladies came out in a mob, one last time, each carrying a white vinyl box purse with a gold clasp in addition to the standard black leather pocketbook. For years afterward you could always spot former Pockabookies out in public by looking for that white vinyl purse, which became their trademark.

  The factory stood vacant for a long time. Weeds grew up around the cement building, which was plastered with signs that stated THIS BUILDING IS CONDEMNED, and then the flimsy plywood fence surrounding it became covered with obscene half-Italian,half-English graffiti. The Mark One Theater closed for good. And one day—shortly after I realized I would never return home for good again—the tractors came and demolished both buildings.

  Mama's birthday came in June, just one month after Babbo's, and when I went back to help celebrate, Mama reported the researcher had made some progress. “She got some of the Pockabookies to talk,” Mama said, her lips pressed tight together as if to indicate that she would never do such a thing.

  “For fifty bucks an interview,” Lina said, “who wouldn't?”

  “They shouldn't talk,” Mama said.

  “They might need the money to eat,” I said.

  “Don't they have family to feed them?” Mama asked.

  “Don't you read the newspaper?” Lina asked. “Old people these days are eating dog food.”

  Mama paused. “I see those oldsters in the grocery store, buying Chef Boy-ar-dee.”

  “Canned spaghetti: the equivalent of Alpo,” I said, and Lina made bow-wow noises until Mama shook her head.

  “I have Great-Zia Giulia over for dinner almost every other Sunday,” Mama said. “But still she went on the interview. She asked me to drive her. Downtown of all places. I refused. But I heard she got someone else to take her.”

  A smile spread across Lina's face.

  Mama looked at Lina sharply. “I might have known you'd be the one! And before, you couldn't be bothered giving Great-Zia the time of day.”

  Lina shrugged. “So what? I was curious. When we got down to Yale, I told the secretary Great-Zia didn't speak English very well, so I would have to go in and translate.”

&n
bsp; “So?” Mama demanded. “What was this researcher lady like?”

  “She had a southern accent,” Lina said. “She actually said y'all.”

  Mama nodded her head. “Just like they do on TV.”

  “And she kept on using words like gender and economic disparity,” Lina said.

  “So Great-Zia really did need a translator,” I said.

  “She acted like she needed a bodyguard,” Lina said. “The whole time we were in the researcher's office, she kept her white Pockabookie purse on her lap, like the woman was going to steal it. After it was all over and she collected her cash, Great-Zia shook her head and asked me, What was the point of all that?”

  “Didn't they issue checks?” I asked.

  Lina smiled wickedly. “After the first day of interviews, the researcher found out that checks wouldn't cut it for the Pockabookies. They wanted cash on the nail, or they wouldn't cooperate. Great-Zia stashed her bills, and out on the street she hung on to her pockabookie for dear life, like a mugger was on every street corner.”

  “I've always wondered what the Pockabookies kept in their purses,” I said.

  “Rosary beads,” Lina answered. “House keys, but never car keys. Laminated holy cards. A list of the Sorrowful Mysteries. A key chain from the Statue of Liberty.”

  “Freud says a purse represents a woman's vagina,” I said.

  Mama gasped. “Watch your mouth.”

  “Oh, they never stuck anything in there,” Lina said, “that didn't belong to their husbands. And even that, infrequently.”

  Mama gasped again.

  “Close your eyes and think of England,” I said.

  “Or see Rome—and die,” Lina suggested.

  Mama crossed herself as we burst into raucous laughter.

  The next time I came home was the Fourth of July, for a family picnic that Mama—because of the mosquitoes—insisted on holding out in the garage, with stinky citronella candles burning on the folding tables. Mama sat sentinel under the garage door, a turquoise flyswatter poised in her hand, ready to crush any bug that dared to enter. Pammy whined about not having toasted marshmallows for dessert, Phil complained of a headache, Babbo ate too many B&M beans, and the corker came when Baby Richie plopped his pants, and Lina discovered she had gone through the last diaper.

  Lina stuck Richie into his car seat and asked if anyone wanted to come along on a diaper run. “I'll get a little exercise—why not?” was Mama's response. She got up from her chair, walked five steps over to Lina's new minivan, and sat down in the front seat, her flyswatter still in hand. Lina gave me a pleading look. I sighed, got up, and climbed into the backseat next to Richie. I cracked the window as Lina drove to the 24-Hour Store, which stood on the corner where the Pockabookie Factory used to be.

  Because it was a holiday, the 24-Hour Store was crowded. Customers were in every aisle, from the car supplies to the dairy case. Mama clutched my arm. “Don't look now,” she said, in what she probably thought was a quiet voice, “but we're the only white people here.”

  “No shit,” I said, just as loudly. Then I looked over at her and realized, with dismay, that she still had the turquoise flyswatter in her hand.

  “Leave that flyswatter in the car, Mother,” I said.

  She looked at me threateningly, the way she used to when I was a kid and she stood over me with a wooden spoon in her hand. “You never know,” she said, slapping the flat part down on her hand. “You never know when you might need to use it.”

  I walked away. I went over to the candy aisle and selected an Oh! Henry bar. Even though I had been eating hot dogs, hamburgers, eggplant parmigiana, and lasagne all day long, I felt like I needed chocolate to get me through the rest of the evening.

  As usual, Lina played the fussy consumer. In the next aisle over,Richie was bawling and Lina was on the floor on her hands and knees, sorting through the big bales of Pampers and Huggies and loudly complaining, “They're all girl diapers. All's they have is girl diapers in his size.” She stood up and looked angrily at the big black guy, dressed in a too-small red smock, who stood behind the counter.

  “These are all girl diapers,” she said. “Don't you have any boy diapers in size Large?”

  The man stared back at her and smiled.

  Lina squinted her eyes at him. “Lee?” she asked, in a much nicer tone of voice. “That you?”

  “Lina. Hey, what's happening?”

  Mama looked over, her flyswatter raised. She frowned when she saw Lina had left Richie on the ground to move closer to the counter. Mama went over and swooped Richie up. By then the smell of his diaper had gotten so bad I had to move two aisles away.

  After an initial blank of memory, I recognized Lee as a guy from Lina's high-school class. I suspected, from the way they greeted each other, that Lina had done drugs with him—smoked pot behind the bleachers in the football stadium or snorted coke out in one of the wooded areas that students needed a car to get to, like Lighthouse Beach or Fort Nathan Hale Park.

  After she had chatted with Lee a while, Lina finally asked, “You married?”

  Lee shook his head. “Got myself a kid, though.”

  I looked over to see Mama's reaction. But just at that moment Richie howled and screamed in Mama's arms, which prompted her to smack him a good one, right on the butt, with her flyswatter. I opened my Oh! Henry bar, in spite of the fact that I hadn't paid for it, and began to nibble at the chocolate before I opened my mouth wider and gnawed on the nuts. Lina opened her Dooney & Bourke purse and ended up paying for both my candy and a package of girl diapers.

  When we got back to Lina's minivan, Richie continued bawling. He didn't want to get into his car seat. “Get in!” Lina shrieked, in a nasal voice—as if she were holding her breath— while Richie arched his back and struggled. We all rolled down the windows on the way back, even though Mama said it wasn't safe to do that anymore in this neighborhood.

  “Why do they—” Mama said, and I rolled my eyes, because I knew they always signified either blacks or Jews. “Why do they always say what's happening?”

  “Why do guineas always say che si dice?” Lina asked.

  “Because that's what you're supposed to say when you see someone you know,” Mama said. “Someone you recognize.”

  “What does che si dice really mean, anyway?” I asked.

  “I don't know,” Mama said.

  “You say it, and you don't know what it means?” Lina asked.

  Mama shrugged. “Why do I have to know what everything means all the time? Why do I have to think?”

  “Because you're not an animal,” Lina said. “You're a human being.”

  Mama raised the flyswatter. Lina reached over to grab it. The steering wheel slipped and the van veered.

  “Madonna mi!” Mama gasped. “Do you want to get us killed?”

  Better dead than red was one of the slogans someone had spray-painted on the side of the old Pockabookie Factory. Next to it, someone else had scrawled, Better dead than Italian. As Lina struggled and then gave up trying to pry the flyswatter from Mama's hand, yelling, “Go ahead! Just go ahead and act like an old guinea lady, but leave me out of it!” I knew she was thinking along the same lines. The very Italian-ness, the Pockabookie-nish of Mama—her need to shake the throw rugs out of the second-floor windows and her obsession with cleaning the lint out of the dryer—was exactly what drove Lina and me crazy, because we knew we had inherited some of it, and the whole thing made us feel nuts ourselves.

  Over the years, to deal with Pockabookie-ismo, Lina and I had tried turning it into a joke. For Christmas one year, I got Lina The Mafia Cookbook by Joseph “Joe Dogs” Iannuzzi, a former chef for the mob. Lina bought me videos of The Godfather I and II and a book called How to Speak Italian Without Ever Talking. This book showed black-and-white photographs of dark, swarthy men with spread collars and gold chains and women in calico aprons wielding rolling pins and wooden spoons, gesticulating to get their points across. Among the messages they conveyed in I
talian sign language were Go fuck yourself! Your mother's a whore! Holy Mother of God, why did I have to have such kids like you? Cool it, creepo! and Don't bust my chops, bonehead!

  When we got home and walked into the hot, steamy house, Phil was resting on a chair with a cold washcloth over his eyes, Pammy was stacking alphabet blocks on the floor to spell out SHUT UP, WISEGUY, and Babbo was snoring on the couch.

  Lina gestured toward our father. “He's asleep again,” she said. “I can't believe it; he's always asleep.”

  Lina dumped Richie on the floor and I listened, sickened, as his diaper squished. With the toe of her $125 flats, Lina kicked Babbo's leg. “Yo, Dad,” she said. “Yo!”

  Babbo came to, startled, with a snore.

  “What means che si dice?” Lina demanded.

  Babbo rubbed his bleary eyes and looked blankly at us— his two girls, with our slicked-back hair, thin thighs, and sticklike arms—as if he hardly recognized who was speaking. “Chi sa?” he said. “Who knows?” And then, as if the question had taxed his brain far too hard, he instantly fell back into slumber.

  When I got back to Poughkeepsie, I looked up the expression in the nonverbal Italian dictionary Lina had given me. The photo showed a real goomba, his hair slicked back with Vitalis, gesturing with characteristic Italian friendliness at a Pockabookie lookalike who was crossing a street.

  Che si dice? Hey, che si dice?

  And the translation beneath: How's it going? How you doing? With instant recognition, two Italians hail each other on the street.