Sometimes I Dream in Italian

by Rita Ciresi

  I wondered what number Phil ranked on the list.

  “I don't understand it,” Phil said. “For the past month, Lina seemed to be more—well, you know, normal. She was going to Scout meetings at school and helping Richie learn how to read. She took Pammy shopping for new shoes and then they had lunch at the West Farms Mall. She let Pammy throw a penny in the fountain. She even was playing piano again—just a little, a half hour a day. It drove me nuts, listening to those scales, but I thought, if it makes her happy, why complain? She had the names of some teachers. She was going to call one. Now I can't imagine her taking lessons or putting any kind of strain on herself.”

  “She's doped up,” I reminded him.

  “She can't stay that way forever,” Phil said. “In the meantime, there's all this lying I have to do, all this covering up for her. People ask me, ‘How's your wife, what's wrong with her?’ What am I supposed to tell them?”

  I shrugged. Dirk had told me that in medieval times they believed that depressed people had too much bile in the blood or the spleen. And I had told Dirk, I thought they looked at people's auras. And Dirk said, If there were auras, yours would be green with envy for your sister, and black with rage around the edges. I'm glad I'll never have to live with it.

  I cupped my Earl Grey in my hands.

  “Did you know this man?” Phil asked.

  “What man?” I asked, completely thrown off guard.

  “Come off it,” Phil said. “The guy Lina… went around with.”

  I hesitated before I shook my head.

  “But you knew about him?”

  “I suspected,” I said. “But I don't think she tried to kill herself because of him.”

  “Well, why?” Phil asked. “What was it?”

  It was genital warts, I felt like telling him. It was an abortion. It was feeling so lonely that your chest aches and feeling so bizarre you wonder if there isn't a sick little man living upstairs, like Rumpelstiltskin, weaving weird dreams in your head. But I didn't say any of that to Phil. “You heard the doctor,” I said. “There doesn't have to be one reason why.”

  “It doesn't make sense.”

  “Since when does Lina make sense?”

  “Since when does anything?” Phil asked.

  We looked at each other, for so long and so hard I heard the fluorescent light over the sink flicker and hum, and I felt a strange energy in the air. Then, out of nowhere, a low sound buzzed, startling me.

  “That's the stove alarm,” Phil said. “Did you set the timer?”

  We got up and went over to the oven. Phil fiddled with the clock, trying to fix it, until I finally leaned over him and turned the dial around to its starting place, and the buzzing stopped. We stood there, looking at each other, and again I smelled the detergent on his shirt, and there was a moment when everything hovered. Then the back door slammed and Pammy marched in, like a little version of Lina with her black hair and eyes.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded, and as we stepped back from each other, Phil sharply said, “Nothing. We're not doing anything.”

  Five minutes later Lina drifted in, looked dispassionately at the new appliance, and told Phil in a monotone voice, “I wanted a double oven.”

  The next day the kids went back to school and Phil returned to work. I sat downstairs and read, and after a while I heard Lina get up from bed and go into the bathroom. The pipes creaked and then I heard the pounding of the water. I looked at the clock to time her. “You'll check on her every quarter of an hour, won't you?” Phil had asked anxiously that morning, a question I knew was really a command: Just keep Lina from overdosing on lithium or slitting her wrists in the shower.

  Ten minutes after the water stopped and the blow-dryer went on and off, Lina called me upstairs. To my surprise, she was fully dressed and sitting at the vanity table. She looked at herself in the mirror, a comb in her hand, studying the dullness in her usually shiny black hair. “I need a trim,” she said. “Let's go to the beauty salon.”

  “Sure,” I said, sitting down on the unmade bed, on what I knew was Phil's side. “We could do that.”

  “You'll have to drive.”

  “That's fine,” I said.

  “We'll have to go downtown. That's the only place I want to have it done.”

  “Okay,” I said, which for some reason prompted Lina to throw her comb down on the vanity table, turn around, and glare at me.

  “Stop acting like everything's normal,” she said. “Because it isn't.”

  I bit my lip. I knew I wasn't supposed to upset her, but I went ahead anyway. “If things aren't normal, who's to blame?”

  She turned around again. I watched her comb her long dark hair until I felt like I was going to explode from curiosity and anger. “Why did you try to kill yourself?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “I just felt like it.”

  “But why did you feel like it?”

  “I can't explain. I've tried. Phil asked me. Sixty times. I couldn't answer.”

  She plugged in her curling iron, and while it was heating up, she put on some cream blush and powdered her nose. I propped some pillows—Phil's pillows—against the headboard of the bed and leaned back, watching her.

  “You always seemed so lucky,” I said. “I always envied you.”

  Lina snapped her compact shut. “What in the world for?”

  “I don't know,” I said. “You had Phil—”

  “Oh Phil,” Lina said impatiently. “I haven't had sex with Phil in—”

  “Don't tell me,” I interrupted—convinced she'd say something that would kill me, like two days.

  Lina tossed her compact back onto the vanity table. “I wish Phil would just throw me on the floor and—and—and—”

  “I could stand some and,” I said.

  “—whatever!”

  “I'll take some whatever too.”

  Lina took up her curling iron and wrapped just the bottom of her hair around the hot wand. “What happened with Dick?”

  “Dirk,” I corrected her, annoyed. “It didn't work out.”

  “Phil said you two were kaput,” Lina said.

  “What else did he say?” I asked.

  “That you seemed lonely.”

  “That's a given,” I said. “Since I live alone.”

  “Why don't you—”

  “What? Get a cat? I hate cats.”

  “Get a dog, then.”

  “I don't want an animal,” I said. “I want a man I can stand.”

  “Let me know when you find him,” said Lina. “Maybe he has a twin.” She finished flipping under the ends of her hair, switched off the curling iron, and took out her mascara. “Do you ever fantasize a man is raping you?” she asked, as she leaned forward and darkened her eyelashes.

  “What kind of question is that?” I asked.

  She held the mascara wand away from her eyes. “Answer only if it's appropriate,” she said.

  I hesitated. “Sometimes.”

  “And does it feel good?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Otherwise, why fantasize it?”

  “What feels good about it?” Lina asked, in a mock-therapist's voice.

  I sank my head farther into Phil's pillow. “I guess… the loss of control. But knowing you're still in control, because you're the one who's dreaming it.”

  Lina waited a minute for the first coat of mascara to dry, then began to apply the second. “I've been fantasizing about dying,” she said. “For days I've been curled up on the bed, trying to imagine what happens when you lay down your life.”

  “You're supposed to go through a tunnel of light,” I said.

  “Mmmm,” Lina said. “Now that sounds like some good and. Or whatever.”

  “And be reunited with your loved ones,” I added. “Can you imagine being reunited with Mama and Babbo?”

  “Sure,” Lina said. “In hell.” She snorted. “Can you imagine what they'd say?”

  I cleared my throat and growled like Babbo, “This
is one devil of a scorcher we're having here.”

  Lina shook her mascara wand at me the way Mama used to threaten us with her worn-out wooden spoon. “I told you to go up, not down—but you don't listen!” Lina recapped the mascara. “Do you ever imagine Mama and Babbo the way they are now?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You know.” She looked down at the carpet. “All worms… and bones…”

  “Of course not,” I lied. “I believe in a soul, don't you?”

  “I don't know my soul,” Lina said. “I only know my ugly face—”

  “Lina, your face is anything but ugly.”

  “And my sagging body.” She picked up a lipstick, opened it, rejected the color, and chose another. “When I was thinking about dying,” she said, “I kept imagining what would happen to my body. I kept wondering if all those rumors we heard when we were kids were true—like your appendix bubbling up and hissing in the coffin, your fingernails sprouting like claws, and your hair growing to your feet.”

  “That's morbid,” I said.

  Lina puckered up and spread gloss over her lips. “Then I thought about the horrible color the morticians would use on my lips—coral or bright pink. And Phil weeping as he said, ‘If only she could have seen what a bad makeup job they'd do on her, she never would have killed herself!'” Lina closed her lipstick and turned back to me. Her made-up face looked hard and steely, ready for a fight. “Ready?” she asked.

  I got up from the bed. “Sure.”

  “You have to drive,” Lina reminded me again.

  “I'll drive you,” I said.

  “I think I'll stay doped up for a while,” Lina said. “I like the thought of being driven.”

  We took Lina's Saab onto the Wilbur Cross Parkway toward downtown New Haven. The sky was a uniform shade of blue, like a plastic picnic dish, and the bare trees stood out in relief as we whizzed through Wallingford into Hamden. After ten minutes the tunnel loomed ahead, like two uniform mouse ears painted onto the side of the mountain. I stripped off my sunglasses and tossed them into Lina's lap; Lina turned to me and smiled.

  “Oh Angel, the real tunnel!” she said. “Ricordi? Remember?”

  As we zoomed into the darkness of the tunnel, we shouted in gleeful unison just as we did when we were two giddy girls: “Who turned off the lights?”

  About the Author

  RRITA CIRESI is the author of the novels Blue Italian and Pink Slip and the story collection Mother Rocket, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. She lives with her husband and daughter in Wesley Chapel, Florida.

  A Delta Book

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

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  Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Copyright © 2000 by Rita Ciresi

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-49113-8

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