City of Margins

by William Boyle

  Spanky’s is pretty quiet midafternoon like this, Bennie Gibson the bartender sitting there with a racing form, two skeezy alkie ladies drinking at the far end of the bar. Gibson could be thirty-five or fifty-five; he’s one of those guys. Pennants hang over a wall of bottles. The Knight Rider pinball machine is bunched up in the corner next to an unplugged jukebox.

  Mikey orders a beer. Gibson brings it without any talk. It is his birthday the next day—that wasn’t a lie. He’ll be twenty-one, which means he can sit here and do this legally. His mom is inviting her brother, Alberto, over for “dinner,” which isn’t really dinner but a big feast in the afternoon. She’ll make everything Mikey loves. Ravioli and chicken parm and garlic bread. Uncle Alberto will probably bring a new girlfriend and want to talk about Atlantic City. The conversation will come around to his father, and his mother will start crying, saying she wishes he could be with them.

  He misses his father, sure, but he’s mad as hell at him, too. Jumping like that. Pussy move. Leaving the debt for him and his mother. He hasn’t done anything to help, of course. How could he? His mother’s stuck paying it off a little at a time. She’s got a decent job, working as an aide at that nursing home in Coney Island, but everything’s on her shoulders—taxes, repairs on the house, the car, groceries, bills, and the gambling debt—and he’s just mooching off her.

  “Hey, Gibson,” Mikey says.

  Gibson looks over his racing form. “What, kid?”

  “It’s my birthday tomorrow. Do a shot with me. I’m buying.”

  Gibson nods. “What’re you having?”

  “Jäger.”

  “Christ.”

  Gibson pours two shots.

  Mikey lifts his glass, and Gibson lifts his.

  “Happy birthday to me,” Mikey says.

  ROSEMARIE BALDINI

  Rosemarie drains macaroni in the strainer over the sink. Mikey should be home by now. She’s worried, but she always worries. That’s her way. She looks at the clock. Quarter to seven. She got home from her shift at Sea Crest an hour ago. The bus was running behind schedule. It had been a long day there. Mrs. Rindone was off the deep end, swatting at her, calling her a bitch. Her boss, Ava Bifulco, was nowhere to be found when she needed her help. The creepy janitor stared at her while she ate lunch, his eyebrows wild, something bronze and pasty gooped under his nose. When Rosemarie started working as a nurse’s aide almost twenty years ago, she thought she was doing good, but it’s hard and sad, and it’s worn her down, and she floats through her hours at Sea Crest on autopilot, trying to avoid looking too closely into the lost eyes of some old forgotten woman whose daughter only visits her on holidays.

  It’s too early for dinner. Even if Mikey comes in the door now, he won’t be hungry. He’s almost never hungry anymore. He’s getting too skinny. He doesn’t think she knows he drinks so much, but she does. It’s hard to be a mother. No one tells you that. Or they do when you’re a teenager, and you don’t listen.

  She mixes the macaroni in the pot on the stove with some of her gravy. She puts the lid on to keep it warm. She’ll heat it up if she has to. Why does she even cook like this anymore? All she ever eats is toast and fruit. Force of habit. As if cooking like this will summon back Mikey’s father, her Giuseppe.

  She walks down the hallway and looks out the curtained window in the front door, expecting to see her son unlatch the gate and come bounding up the steps. But there’s no sign of him yet.

  Raising Mikey alone the last two years hasn’t been easy. She didn’t bargain for all the other sorts of trouble that Giuseppe’s death would bring. You’d think just grieving your husband would be enough. Of course, Mikey’s an adult now. Twenty-one tomorrow. How’d that happen? She should be letting him go instead of trying to pull him closer, but he dropped out of college and moved back in with her, and her belief is that no mother should turn away from her child.

  College. She should’ve pushed harder for Brooklyn College or St. Francis instead of letting him go to New Paltz. She had a feeling about that place. Her brother, Alberto, he’d spent some time up there, and he’d said it was a place city kids go to college, they take some LSD, they wind up getting tattoos and living in tents in the woods with rabid dogs. She wonders if Mikey has ever taken LSD. She’s not even sure what LSD really is. And he did get a tattoo, right on his chin like an idiot, and now he’s got a scraggly beard to hide it. And what he did to his ears with those plugs. His earlobes droop like he’s ninety. There are these holes there you can stick your finger in. When he wants to upset her, he plays with the holes.

  Back in the kitchen, she sits down at the table and doodles on a notepad. She wishes, as she does so often, that Giuseppe hadn’t been a coward and taken his own life. That’s how she views him now. A coward. Pure selfishness, doing that. Sure, he’d fallen down a hole with the gambling, but there had to have been some other solution. If he’d just come to church with her more, put his faith in God, instead of being scared into believing that there was no way out.

  Twenty-five grand was a lot of money, but it wasn’t the end of the world. She knew that for a fact now. Big Time Tommy Ficalora, who Giuseppe owed, he came around a week or so after the funeral and told her she could pay off the debt little by little. “It’s not going away,” he said, “but I’ll give you some space because I’m a reasonable guy and I have sympathy for your situation.”

  And here she is, a couple of years later, she’s paid off a fifth of what he owed, and Big Time Tommy’s not charging her the vig. You ask her, that was a respectful move.

  Maybe she should hate Giuseppe, spit on his memory, but she can’t bring herself to do that. He was so funny. He wanted to be a comedian, was a comedian. He taught math at P.S. 231. Two nights a week, before the gambling was at its worst, he’d go to comedy clubs in the city and perform. He never wanted her to come. He said he wanted her to wait to see him until he got his act down to a science. Fifteen years, he said that. He wasn’t much of a drinker, but he got in trouble in the bars betting on baseball and basketball and football. The trouble peaked when he bet the Bills over the Giants in the Super Bowl. When that placekicker missed the field goal at the last second, Giuseppe was done for. Then he managed to get deeper in those final few months before he saw no other option and took the coward’s way out.

  Rosemarie doesn’t feel forty-six. She remembers being a girl and thinking about numbers like forty-six like she was looking up at them. Her mother was seventeen when she had her, so Rosemarie was almost thirty when her mother was the age she is now. Her mother died of heart failure at fifty-five. Her father died of a brain aneurysm at fifty-two. At forty-six, she’s both an orphan and a widow, and that’s just not a very good family track record. She stays up nights, worrying that she has only six years left, or maybe nine years. She prays and prays about it. She wants a long life. She wants to see Mikey get past whatever this phase is and find a nice Italian girl and settle down. She wants a good job for him, two or three kids, and she wants his family in this house. She’ll move into the back bedroom off the kitchen, and he and his wife can have the master bedroom. She imagines herself holding her grandbabies on the recliner in the living room. She imagines singing them to sleep, “Ninna Ninna” or “That’s Amore.”

  The front door clangs open now, and Mikey comes stumbling into the house. He’s had a few beers, she can tell. Not even seven o’clock on a Wednesday, and he’s drunk. He pauses to find his balance on the radiator by the stairs down to the basement.

  Rosemarie stands, traces the cap of the pen she’s been holding against the palm of her hand, digging it into her skin, and then falls back into her chair. “Where’ve you been?” she asks.

  “Robbing a bank,” he says.

  “Very funny. You hungry? I made macaroni.”

  “I’m not hungry.” Mikey sits down across from her at the table. His eyes are bloodshot. The stink of cheap beer emanates from him.

  “I can’t give you some macaroni? You need to eat. You’re wasti
ng away to nothing.”

  “Ma, please.”

  “Your birthday is tomorrow.”

  “I know.”

  “Uncle Alberto’s coming over. He’s bringing sfogliatelle, rainbows, and cannoli. I’m making ravioli with chicken parm and garlic bread. Your favorites.”

  Mikey nods. “Who’re you feeding here?”

  “Uncle Alberto likes to eat.”

  “You should bring all this food to a homeless shelter.”

  “Homeless shelter? What’re you saying? It’s your birthday. These are your favorites. You can at least eat on your birthday, can’t you?”

  “Feed people who need to be fed, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “You need to be fed. Have a bowl of macaroni.”

  Mikey exhales dramatically. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll eat. You want me to eat? I’ll eat.”

  “There you go,” Rosemarie says.

  Mikey gets up and goes over to the stove, plucking the lid from the pot. He rummages around in the overhead cabinet and comes out with her favorite red mixing bowl. He empties macaroni into the bowl with the big wooden spoon she’s left behind on a dish on the other front burner. He goes to the fridge and gets the small jar of grated locatelli. He pours half the jar over his macaroni.

  “What’re you doing?” Rosemarie asks. “That’s my mixing bowl. Get a normal bowl. And that’s too much cheese. Locatelli’s not cheap. We need some for tomorrow.”

  Mikey smiles. “What am I doing? You wanted to feed me. Well, I’m eating.” He uses the wooden spoon to shovel macaroni into his mouth. Grated cheese dusts his jacket like cigarette ash. A couple of pieces of half-chewed pasta fall to the worn linoleum.

  “Sit down. Take off your jacket. Eat normal.” Rosemarie motions for him to sit back down.

  He does sit, pulling the bowl close to him and continuing to pig out on the macaroni. He’s not enjoying it. He’s doing it for show.

  “What good is this?” Rosemarie asks. “Why are you even eating? You eat for sustenance, not to make your mother look like a jerk.”

  “A jerk?” Mikey says, his mouth overflowing.

  “That’s what you think of me, right? I’m just some jerk who feeds you and gives you money and makes your bed.”

  Mikey swallows hard, almost choking. “You give Big Time Tommy all your money. Because of what a fuck-up Dad was.”

  “Don’t badmouth Daddy.”

  “I wish you were smarter.”

  “That’s such a cruel thing to say.”

  Mikey pushes his bowl away and goes into the bathroom at the opposite end of the kitchen, slamming the door behind him. She needs a new door there or new hinges. She’s afraid one good shove will bring it tumbling down. She hears the sink running at full blast, and then she hears Mikey retching. Maybe he’s a bulimic. She’s seen shows. You eat and you puke, and it’s a whole thing. Or maybe he ate too much too fast. Or maybe he drank too much, and the food just didn’t sit right.

  “You okay in there?” Rosemarie calls out.

  The sounds stop. “I’m fine,” Mikey says.

  “You want some ginger ale and pretzels?”

  “Jesus, no.” He swings the door open, and he’s standing there, wiping his mouth.

  “Aren’t you cold, walking around in that little T-shirt?” Rosemarie asks. “Go down to the basement and get one of Daddy’s old jackets.”

  “It’s summer.”

  “He’s got this nice brown corduroy jacket, you remember? It’ll look good on you. I used to love to see him in it. The way he dug his hands into his pockets. I bet some of his toothpicks are still there.”

  “You sure he wasn’t wearing it when he jumped?”

  “What is wrong with you right now? What kind of thing is that to say? Angry at the world’s no way to be.”

  Mikey walks past her and goes to the fridge and gets a can of Coke. He pops the tab and takes a long swig.

  “You’re gonna puke again,” Rosemarie says. “You want to puke again? You want to wind up in the hospital?”

  “For puking?”

  “You think you’re a hotshot. One day you’ll learn, you’re not so big of a hotshot.”

  “Believe me, I know I’m no fucking hotshot.”

  “That mouth! Disgraziato.”

  “Maybe I will go down and get one of Dad’s old jackets. Maybe I’ll put it on and go jump off the bridge just like him.”

  Rosemarie crosses herself. “God forbid. Take it back.”

  “What is this, the schoolyard?”

  “Take it back.” Her legs feel wobbly. She sits at the table and puts her head in her hands. She rocks back and forth. “Why would you say that? You think it’s a joke? You think I’m not afraid of losing you, too?”

  Mikey puts his Coke can on the counter, and it’s a terrible, lonely sound that fills the room, the can clanking against the wood, the soda sloshing around.

  “I’m not gonna actually do it,” he says.

  She’s crying before she can stop herself from crying. She’s thinking about how she felt all those long hours that Giuseppe was missing, how she feared he was dead in a ditch, shot by one of Big Time Tommy’s henchmen. She’s thinking how it was even worse when the police told her that he’d washed up on the beach in Dead Horse Bay with all the broken bottles and old shoes. She’d heard about Dead Horse Bay. It was where the boiled bones of horses had been dumped back when there were rendering plants in the area. This was in the early part of the century. Then it was a landfill. Then it was the place where Giuseppe Baldini was deposited. Whatever he was thinking in those final moments, however trapped he felt, she was sure he must’ve at least thought of her, of their first happy years together in the house. She wonders if he had doubts after landing in the water. Knowing he wasn’t a good swimmer wrecked her. She’s sure the impact didn’t kill him and that he struggled to stay afloat before drowning. Her poor Giuseppe.

  Mikey leans down next to her, and she feels his hand on her back, not quite patting her, not quite comforting her in any meaningful way, just there, a hot slab on her shoulder blade. “Oh, Ma,” he says. “I’m sorry I said that.”

  “Do you hate me?” Rosemarie asks, and she turns to him, imagining the boy he was, happy in the driveway, pitching a Spaldeen against the garage, listening to ballgames on the radio with Giuseppe. One day he was a boy and loved nothing better than to come in after playing outside and eat whatever food she’d prepared—squash flowers, spedini, meatballs—and then one day he was no longer a boy and he’d go quietly to his room and shut the door and blast his music.

  “I don’t hate you,” Mikey says.

  “The way you talk to me, you must.” She wipes tears from her eyes and can taste a stray tear on her lip. She thinks of crying at Giuseppe’s closed-casket wake. She thinks of Mikey on a chair, sitting with Father Borzumato, who was there but was disgusted with Giuseppe. Which was understandable. Her husband threw away God’s greatest gift, life.

  Mikey’s hand moves on her back, scrunches up so she can feel his knuckles pressing down and then releases back into a flat, stiff position. “I don’t,” he says, and then he stands and his hand is off her, away from her, headed back for the Coke on the counter.

  “How’s your stomach?” she asks.

  “It’s fine. I’m fine. It was just from eating like that.”

  “I don’t think you hate me.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Can you talk nicer to me? Please. Just try.”

  He finishes the Coke and drops the can in the garbage under the sink. He lets a loud belch rip. “I’ll try,” he says.

  She dabs at her cheeks with a crumpled paper napkin she finds on the table. “Thank you,” she says.

  He heads back for the front door. “I’m gonna go out,” he says.

  “Where?” The concern in her voice is obvious, even as she tries to mask it. He must mean the bar.

  “The library. And then maybe Wolfman’s. I want to get some books and videos.”

&nbs
p; “You need money?”

  “I’m okay.”

  And then he’s gone, out the front door, and she’s alone at the table, tearing pieces off the napkin she just used to soak up whatever was left of her tears.

  AVA BIFULCO

  After Don leaves, Ava’s washing the dishes while Nick sits at the table with a stack of student papers, sighing his way through, slashing at the stapled pages with a red pen. AAA has called to let her know that the Nova was safely delivered to Flash Auto. The bourbon and scotch are still out. Don’s left a couple of cigarettes for Ava so she doesn’t have to go to the corner store. “Such a nice man,” Ava says, snapping off her yellow rubber gloves after finishing the last bowl and dangling them over the edge of the sink and then lighting a Pall Mall with a book of matches from La Palina. She grabs the Cento can and sits across from Nick while she smokes.

  “It was nice of him to help you,” Nick says. “He about drained Dad’s scotch. And for someone who doesn’t like to eat, he really plowed through that spaghetti.”

  “Shush up,” Ava says. “You’re so critical.”

  “You got a little crush?”

  “He’s nice.”

  “I’ll tell you this: I don’t want him for a stepdad.”

  “I would’ve been stranded out there without him. This day and age, in this city, not a lot people are kind enough to stop and help. I could’ve died.”

  “Everyone breaks down. I was worried, but you’re stretching it a bit. I don’t think you would’ve died.”

  “That Belt’s a roller coaster. Who knows?”

  “You get his number? He live around here?”

  “He said he lives over by the school.”

  “P.S. 101 or St. Mary’s?”

  Ava taps ash into the can. “P.S. 101.”