Eventually, Ma came and stood in the doorway. “For goodness sake, Anna. Josie wasn’t even Catholic.”
“This not for Giuseppina—it for you. You and mi Luigi,” Nonna said, without looking up.
I glanced at Ma. Whenever Nonna called Dad her Luigi, we knew she was serious.
Nonna paused briefly to shake her hand in the direction of the doorway. “Someone die outside-a you door like that? It a maledizione, Dahlia. A maledizione.” She returned to her sprinkling. “Ave o Maria . . .”
“A what?” Ma said. Then she raised her hand. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”
However, the way she was staring at the sidewalk—as if she saw Miss Pennypacker lying there beneath Nonna’s holy rain—said otherwise. A shudder I will never forget passed over both of us at the same time. That’s when I knew the maledizione was real.
I didn’t even have to look the word up in the Italian-English Dictionary to understand that it was some kind of Italian curse. No longer hungry, I fed the rest of my pie to Princie and went inside.
AFTER THAT, I cut through Mrs. Guarino’s yard out back and entered by the kitchen door, careful to avoid the contaminated patch of sidewalk. I snapped the drapes in the front room shut as soon as I was safe inside.
“What do you think you’re doing? I can’t even see my puzzle.” Ma squinted at the Taj Mahal, still unbuilt on her card table, but I noticed she didn’t get up to open the drapes.
It took a few days of working in the dark before she even mentioned it again. “You don’t believe that foolishness Nonna was talking about, do you? That stuff about the mala whatever it is.”
I wondered if I should tell her that three nights earlier I’d sat straight up in bed, certain I’d heard Miss Pennypacker’s voice. Just a nightmare, I tried to reassure myself, but then Flufferbell, who had taken to sleeping at the foot of Agnes’s bed, stirred and meowed in the direction of the window.
“You think those drapes could keep death out if it had a mind to pay a visit?” Ma said before I had a chance to speak.
“Better than nothing,” I answered feebly, still hearing the voice that had cut through my dream: Fluufferbell . . .
“People from the old country believe some strange things, you know—especially the women. You can’t listen to—”
“Jeffrey’s mother believes it, too. She says the whole street better be careful.”
Even though I knew better than to use her name, Ma bristled at the mention. “Gina Lollobrigida? So now you’re listening to that paragon of wisdom?”
“She says death comes in threes.”
Faster than I’d seen her move in years, Ma jumped up from her seat and flung open the drapes, drowning us in light. “With any luck, she’ll be number two. Or I will—if I have to listen to any more of this claptrap.”
“Ma!”
“I’m sorry, but I’ve had about all I can take of these superstitious fools. Your Marie Curie would be ashamed of you.”
But before she was back in her chair, Ma’s body contradicted her with another shudder.
SHE WAS RIGHT about Marie Curie, though. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a scientist after all. That night I replaced the chemist’s picture with one of Joan of Arc holding her sword. Now, there was a heroine who understood what I was up against.
“I thought you were supposed to be Jewish,” Ma muttered when I caught her standing in front of it.
“Half, remember?” I said. “And why do you care? You didn’t even want me to go to Hebrew school.”
“Hmph.” She folded her arms across her chest. “Who do you think gives you the bus fare every week?”
Ma and I had stopped talking about the maledizione, but whenever I caught her scowling at the street, I knew she was on the lookout, too.
WE DIDN’T HAVE to wait long, either. It was only a few weeks later when the car we all dreaded pulled up in front of the house and Nancy got out. I almost screamed when she marched right across the patch of sidewalk where Josie had fallen. Like most people, she had no idea where she was walking in this world.
It seemed Agnes’s mother and her husband had moved again. Some place closer to home. “From what I hear, they’re still having their troubles, so it’s not likely she’ll take her back anytime soon, but . . .” She lowered her voice, but I already knew the rest.
Afraid my sister might be number two, I shuddered like Ma had when the light hit her too hard that day in the parlor. Not that Agnes was about to clutch her heart and drop like Miss Pennypacker. No, if the maledizione came for her, it would be the other kind of death.
Ma described it as the kind that leaves behind a question mark instead of a corpse. “Sometimes those are worse,” she said. “When they’re in the ground, at least you know no one can hurt them anymore.”
I took to watching Agnes when she slept just in case the department or the maledizione or Miss Pennypacker’s ghost tried to spirit her away in the middle of the night. Sure, I was used to seeing kids come and go, but Agnes was my sister now. There was no way I was going to let them take her away.
But then a few days later, I heard Ma saying Mrs. O’Connor from the next street had a stroke. A bad one, Dad added, making it obvious that she was number two. For a minute I was almost relieved that it hadn’t struck our house, just like I’d been a little glad that Agnes’s mother was caught up in the same thing that killed Jimmy’s mom and kept his father away. But that night I saw young Joe O’Connor walking through the neighborhood, clutching his head like Agnes held on to that penny in her sleep, and I realized the maledizione was never something to celebrate.
FORTUNATELY, AT TWELVE and three quarters, I had so many other things on my mind I soon forgot the curse. Every day after school, I went straight to Cynthia’s, where I stayed till it was time to set the table for supper. “Just homework,” I told Ma, when she asked what the heck I was doing over there all those hours.
“Your sister and brother miss you.”
“They’re little kids, Ma. They need to play with their own friends.” Then, catching the stricken look on Agnes’s face, I recited all the assignments they gave us in honors class. “I thought you wanted me to go to college.” College. It was the word to end all arguments as far as Ma was concerned. Her holy grail.
There was another reason I went to Cynthia’s, though, and it—or should I say he—was even more compelling than a death at our doorstep.
I’d known Henry Lee most of my life, but somehow never noticed the smooth roll of his shoulders when he walked, the contrast between his skin and the pastel shirts he untucked as soon as school got out (polished, but cool all at once), or the hair that was as black and shiny as my sister’s.
I knew I shouldn’t tell Agnes. She was already jealous enough of the blue diary I wrote in every night, never mind a boy. And besides, she was still a kid. But I couldn’t help myself. I told her everything. Even when I’d first gotten my period, I’d blurted it out.
She studied me skeptically from across the room. “Nuh-uh. You’re lying.” So I’d showed her the box of Kotex and the elastic belt to prove it.
At first, she took it with her usual stoic quiet. But just when we were about to fall asleep, she flicked her light on. “You mean you’re going to do that right here in our room? Every month?” Her eyes went round as coins as she stared at the twin bed where she still climbed in with me some nights. “Disss-gusting.”
“Jeez, Agnes. You sound like those guys in the Old Testament who made the girls go sleep in a hut.”
Her reaction to Henry Lee was even stronger.
“Only boys I like are Jimmy and Jon,” she said, scrunching up her nose like she did when she smelled liver cooking in the kitchen. Then, when she’d had a moment to think about it: “You’re not going to kiss him, are you?”
“How do you know I didn’t already?” I teased. She raced out of the room with her fingers in her ears.
Once when I lingered too long on the phone in the foyer with Cynthia, rhapsodizing
about the wonders of Henry Lee, I caught Agnes standing beside me, jump rope in hand. I’d given up stuff like jump rope when I started junior high, but she never stopped asking me to play.
Her eyes narrowed. “Jimmy’ll get him with his baseball bat. That’s what he’ll do to Henry Lee!”
I covered the receiver with my hand. “You’re supposed to be outside playing. Go!”
But when she upped the ante by threatening to tell Ma, I hung up and followed her into the backyard. “What do you want to play—Chinese or plain?”
“No Chinese!” she said a little too quickly. And then, unconsciously mimicking Dad—stern face and all: “In this house, we play regular jump rope.”
IT ALL STARTED a few months earlier when my aunt Cille got the same aggressive cancer that took my mother. She left Jon and me a generous educational trust, a weathered book of Hebrew that had once been Sylvie’s, and a sorrow I couldn’t explain to anyone.
Though I only saw her twice a year, Aunt Cille was my link with the lost part of myself. Who else knew that I had my grandfather’s chin or my mother’s endless (sometimes dangerous) curiosity? Who would tell me stories about how my grandparents had first come to this country, or remember the many times my inquisitive mother had wandered off and gotten lost—at the beach, in a museum, once on a crowded city street?
For two weeks, the mysterious alphabet contained in the book sat on my bureau beside Sylvie’s picture like Agnes’s cigar box. Then one day—perhaps propelled by that same spirit that made my mother wander—I picked it up. It was another week before I got up the gumption to tell Ma I wanted to go to Hebrew school.
“But you’re not— I mean, we’re not—” she stammered. “Heavens, I wouldn’t even know where to begin, Zaida.”
But when I told her that my friend Julie’s mother had offered to introduce me to her rabbi, and that Jimmy would ride the bus to class with me, she stopped what she was doing. “You’ve got this all planned out, haven’t you? Just like you always do.”
It seemed significant that I went to Hebrew school to find myself and ended up finding Henry Lee. Though he lived down the street from Cynthia and was in several of my classes at school, he seemed different when I ran into him outside the synagogue.
“Are you . . . Jewish, too?” Then I took in the gym clothes and immediately felt my face go hot.
Pretending not to notice the dumb question or my even dumber red face, Henry smiled, indicating a dank-looking building next door. “I have a wrestling class in—” He paused to consult his watch. “Fourteen minutes. I’ve got this thing about being early, though.”
“You study wrestling?” I asked, looking at him like a stranger. “I thought you liked, um, debate club. Stuff like that.”
“A person can be more than one thing, right?” He laughed. “Besides, wrestling and debating really aren’t that different.”
By then it was time for me to go inside, but that day during class, I found myself thinking less about Hebrew and more about the smooth muscles that were usually hidden beneath Henry’s button-down shirts, the whiteness of his teeth when he smiled, and the similarity between wrestling and debating. What kind of boy said things like that?
I glanced out the window at the place where we’d talked and shuddered like I had when I felt the maledizione. This was a different kind of spell, though.
From then on, I asked Jimmy to take me on the early bus so I’d arrive fifteen minutes before class started like Henry Lee did.
“What other boy at school is such a master of time?” I asked Cynthia when I watched him start his paper route every day at precisely 3:48.
“What’s the big deal about that?” She giggled. “You must be the first girl I ever knew who got a crush just because a kid is punctual.” Then we put Bobby Vinton on the record player and practiced dancing slow together like we did every afternoon. It was easy to lean against her smooth chest and imagine Henry Lee’s cool, untucked yellow shirt, but when she tried to think of Kevin Spinelli, my breasts got in the way.
“You’re not supposed to get them till you’re thirteen, you know,” she said, like it was some kind of law. Then she glanced down her shirt to see if something might have sprouted since she’d last checked.
Ma agreed. “You want to know why I never wanted to take in girls?” She stared at my chest accusingly. “There’s your answer.”
Nonna saw it differently. When we went bra shopping at Hanley’s, she barged into the fitting room and stared at the breasts that were spilling from my first bra.
“Bellissima,” she pronounced them right out loud. Fortunately, we were the only ones in the store. Then to my horror, she flung open the curtain to show me off to Mrs. Hanley.
“By the time she’s fourteen, she’ll need a C cup,” the clerk clucked.
“Girl take after her Nonna.” She put her hands on her hips, stuck out her own drooping watermelons proudly, and strutted across the store.
Laughing, the clerk did the same. “I was the first girl in my class to get my friend,” she boasted. “First to need a bra, too.”
At that moment, it seemed as if for all the blood and mess and ache, there might also be something fun about this whole business of becoming a woman. Inside the dressing room, I stuck out my own chest and laughed at the mirror. Bellisima!
On the way home, though, Nonna warned me to watch-a for the boys, watch-a for the men. It sounded like one of Agnes’s jump rope singsongs, but Nonna was dead serious.
“Some-a the men, they don’t know you still a little girl. And some-a them”—(Here she widened her eyes like she did when she talked about the maledizione.)—“they don’t-a care. Tell you papa those kind bother you.”
Dad? Was she kidding? I didn’t know who would have keeled over from embarrassment first—him or me.
I glanced at Nonna, wondering if she knew it had already started. Drivers as old as my father leaned on their horns and whistled to me on the street; men who, only a year earlier, had petted my head like they did with Agnes and Jon winked at me in a new way; and some of the boys in class turned as red as I did when I caught them staring at the curves my baggy sweaters couldn’t hide.
But when Jimmy’s old friend Bruce Savery got me alone one afternoon at the playground and asked if I’d ever been to the Sugar Shack, Nonna’s threats came pouring out of me, accent and all: “You want-a me to tell my father?” And then, reverting to myself: “Or should I just call the cops?”
“Hah. You think the cops care about you?” he spit back at me. “You’re a foster kid. A Moscatelli, for crying out loud. Chief Wood hates—”
That did it. Forgetting I was Jewish, I said a quick prayer to Joan of Arc. Then, making use of Nonna’s when-all-else-fails advice, I kicked him right in the you-know-where. Who knows what might have happened if a couple of Jimmy’s rat buddies hadn’t come along?
“You okay over there, Z?” one yelled to me, using Jimmy’s nickname. I immediately recognized Crazy Duane, the kid who’d been thrown out of school for carrying a switchblade.
“Nice friends,” Brucie muttered before he stumbled away, clutching his crotch.
Crazy Duane’s laughter echoed from across the playground. “Good job, Z.”
HENRY LEE, MASTER of time, was different. Though I was pretty sure he liked my chest, too, his eyes were mostly on my face. It wasn’t long before he started walking me to Cynthia’s house after school.
The second time it happened Cynthia shot me a look and discreetly fell back to walk with three eighth graders from pep squad.
I was so intoxicated with the smell of Henry’s English Leather I hardly heard what he was saying, never mind what the girls were whispering behind us, but I could feel the envy. He might be in the advanced class with the kids they called finks, but Henry Lee of the untucked shirts and the wrestling muscles? He was cool. Even the eighth graders knew it.
Cynthia, too. She began to consult the clock when he started his paper route. “Three forty-eight again! How does he do i
t? Do you think he might go to the dance at St. Edward’s?”
“No might about it. He is.” I told her I planned to wear my new skirt. “All I have to do is convince Ma to let me go. And Jimmy to walk me there.”
My face must have revealed how likely that would be since the dance was on a Friday—the night Jimmy reserved for “his own life.”
At first, I’d been as offended as Ma and the kids by the very idea. But as I played records in my room or watched for Henry Lee to appear with his newspaper bag from Cynthia’s window, I began to understand.
“If he can get Kevin to go, my mom will drive,” Cynthia volunteered.
Henry Lee hadn’t given me his tie tack like the older kids did, and (no, Agnes) he hadn’t kissed me, but all of that was coming soon. How did I know? Because when I asked Cynthia’s Ouija board if I was going to marry him, the needle swung toward YES with only the tiniest nudge.
As for children, the Ouija board predicted none. Not that I didn’t like babies, but there was no way I was getting stuck in a parlor, fitting puzzles together and reading about other people’s lives like Ma did.
IF I HAD any lingering fears of the maledizione, they were wiped out at the dance when, to the tune of “Roses Are Red,” I leaned against Henry Lee’s mint-green shirt for real; or later when we followed the kids who snuck outside for a Pall Mall or a Newport. Though neither of us smoked, the sweet smell of tobacco would always bring it all back: the cool Henry Lee standing in the dim light, hands in the pockets of his chinos, teasing me about nothing. And everything. The way the night air entered our bloodstreams, stealthy as hormones, and mysteriously remade the world.
He waited until everyone had gone inside to kiss me, but whenever I remembered the pressure of his mouth, I would taste smoke.
BY THE END of the school year, I was pinning Henry Lee’s tie tack to my collar every day: “You’re only twelve, Zaida. Much too young for this nonsense,” Ma said in her exasperated voice every time she found the little pearl in the wash.
“Thirteen in a month,” I reminded her. Then two weeks . . . tomorrow. “Thirteen!” I shouted on the morning I became an official teenager. “Now I’m like you, Jimmy,” I told my brother at breakfast.
All the Children Are Home Page 12