An Italian Wife (20 page)

“Just making sure you got home safe,” he said. He swayed slightly, drunk.

“Maybe you need some coffee?” Francie said. She had put the percolator on for herself anyway. “Come on.”

She held his arm to steady him and he walked in heavily.

“Go sit in the living room and I'll bring you a cup,” she told him.

From her kitchen window she could see that the party was not yet over. She poured them each a cup of black coffee and brought them into the living room on a tray.

“Ever since I came back,” Stan said, “I drink too much. I can't help myself. It makes me forget things, you know? Dottie doesn't get it. Just don't think about it, she says. But how do you stop thinking about it?” He shook his head. “She's not the sharpest knife in the drawer,” he added.

Francie sipped her coffee. She wished she had cigarettes. She liked smoking around men. It felt sexy and important.

“Do you have a cigarette?” she asked, and Stan pulled a pack from his pocket.

“Keep it,” he said.

Francie lit a cigarette, smoothing the cellophane on the red pack.

“You don't get over killing people,” Stan was saying.

“Shhh,” Francie said. She didn't want to hear any war stories.

“You don't get over—”

She leaned over and kissed him full on the mouth to shut him up. Stan didn't act surprised. Francie realized this was why he was here. She wondered if Mike had told him about the other night. She supposed this should make her angry, but instead she had that powerful feeling again. All of these husbands wanted her. They did not want their placid, bland wives with their flat chests, their pregnant bellies, their coiffed hair. They wanted someone who had suffered, like they had. They wanted someone exotic. They wanted her.

Francie pulled off her sweater and her bra. She pulled off her panties and unzipped his pants. He was thick and pink there too and she smiled knowing this. She straddled him, facing him, grasping at him to fit inside her.

Dottie Podaski's husband moaned, loud. This time, Francie was the wild one. She was wild with what she could have, with what she could do. She was wild for these husbands, every one of them. She tried to remember her husband, doing this with him.

Husbands. By fall Francie had had almost every one of them. They came to her unable to sleep, drunk, crying over what they had seen and done. Paul Lefleur would not have sex with her but very politely asked if she would blow him. She did, kneeling at his feet on her shiny hardwood floors, his one arm moving her head, the sleeve of the other flapping against her face. Matt MacGuire said he loved her. He came on Sunday mornings before church and then Francie made sure to be outside when the family drove past on their way to St. Joseph's nine o'clock Mass, all of his little daughters dressed in matching dresses, bows in their hair, his wife, Helen, smiling smugly out the window at Francie. The funny thing was, after each one, the wife showed up to invite her to this or that. She went to parties all the time now, as if by inviting her the wives would never suspect. If something was going on, surely the husbands would not insist she be invited. A new rule, Francie thought.

Late at night. Francie on Stan Podaski's lap. The neighborhood asleep. Tears on Stan's cheeks because he was a killer, a murderer. She tried to remember her husband. His weight on her, yes. And once, in his car by a lake, he had brought her onto his lap just like this. She remembered the steering wheel digging into her back, the shift against her hip. His face, blurry still, had once been close like this.

“Yes,” she said, clutching Stan's thick shoulders.

And she saw it for an instant, her husband's beautiful face.

Crooning with Dino

A
IDA CARUSO LOVES TWO THINGS.

First and above all else, she loves Dean Martin. Every Thursday night she sits smack in front of the Zenith in the living room and waits for Dino to jump onto the piano, swirling a cocktail and waving a cigarette as he sings, looking straight at her.

Second, she loves the boy in the white VW Bug. The boy has pale blond hair that hangs straight to his collarbone, a Barney Rubble nose, sometimes a scraggly patch of hair on his chin. She guesses he is a lot older than her, maybe even eighteen or twenty. Certainly too old to notice a fourteen-year-old.

He drives down the hill in front of her house and around the corner every afternoon at five. Aida watches from the small window at the top of the steps that lead to the three bedrooms in her house. Her weekly chore is to dust the glass dishes and vases and the wooden figurines that line the stairs on a shelf. They are ugly things, the vases and dishes all orange or gold, useless and fragile. Her father had bought the figurines in Haiti when he was in the Navy. They are of women with pointy breasts and men in loincloths. They collect dust in the elbows and knees, along the shoulders and fingers and feet.

She hates them, hates dusting them. But this afternoon, the Thursday before her sister's wedding, Aida likes sitting alone at the top of the stairs, a half-naked man in her lap, a dishrag in her hand, the noise of her loud aunts and uncles and parents and grandmother and great-grandmother all drifting up from below her as she waits for the boy in the white VW to come down the hill.

“Aida!” her mother yells. Her mother only yells. She cannot speak in a normal voice; none of her family can. When one of her aunts telephones her mother, Aida can hear everything she says from across the room. “Aida!” her mother yells again. Then: “That girl gives me
agita
. Her head is in the clouds all day.”

“She's a dreamer,” her aunt Gloria says. “Like my Cammie.”

Aida straightens. Her cousin Carmela—
Cammie
—dreamed of being famous and now she has her own show in Las Vegas. Now she drives a convertible. For all Aida knows, Cammie has met the Rat Pack. All of them. Frank and Sammy and even Dino.

“Cammie isn't a dreamer,” Aida's mother says. “She's a doer. Isn't she in Vegas? Isn't she at Caesar's Palace? You don't get there by staring out windows.”

Aida catches a glimpse of white in the distance and hears the egg beater engine of a VW. Her heart quickens. She presses her face to the window, feels the tiny squares of the screen denting her flesh. The white Bug comes into view. He drives slowly down the hill, his own car window down, one arm casually draped outside it. As he turns the corner she sees the golden hairs on his chin; he isn't shaving again. A sign of what? she wonders. Heartache? Laziness? Debauchery? She is not exactly sure what debauchery is, but she imagines it as something sophisticated—a rumpled tuxedo, martinis and cigarettes, late nights. With warm weather finally here, and all the windows thrown open, she can actually hear music coming from his car. She recognizes the song as one her sister, Terry, plays over and over: “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”: It's about sadness and regret and loneliness. Oh! Aida thinks. He
is
heartbroken. She wonders if she can somehow mend him, or if he can mend her. “Yes!” Aida calls out the window. “Yes!”

The car slows. Stops. The boy looks around, as if he's heard her. He even looks up, right in her direction. But he does not see her there, her face pressed to the window, yearning.

DOWNSTAIRS, THERE IS
CHAOS.
Noise and chaos. Chicken breasts split open, waiting to be stuffed. Manicotti cooling. Ricotta and eggs being mixed together in Mama Jo's biggest bowl. Mama Jo herself elbow-deep in ground beef and eggs and parsley and garlic and breadcrumbs. The aunts are sitting, smoking, wrapping candy in yellow tulle and tying the small bundles with white ribbon. Platters of egg biscuits, wine biscuits,
wandi
fill the counter. Aida feels dizzy from the smells: cheese, smoke, hair spray, powdered sugar, something frying in oil.

“Finally!” her mother says. A cigarette dangles from her lips, the ash twitching precariously above the manicotti. She hands Aida a package of prosciutto, all waxy paper and pale pink flesh. “Roll.”

Aida peels off a thin piece of the ham and pops it into her mouth. She doesn't chew right away. Instead, she lets the saltiness fill her mouth and nose, the ham dissolve slightly.

Aunt Gloria smacks her on the arm. “It's for the people!”

Aida swallows. She is immediately thirsty. “I'm a person,” she says, and takes another piece.

Aunt Gloria takes the prosciutto away from Aida, shaking her head. Right away Aunt Connie hands her a platter of fried eggplant. “Go help Aunt Angie,” she says.

The air is blue with smoke. Aida sighs.

“Eh?” Mama Jo says, nudging Aida with her elbow. “I fried all those eggplants myself. My legs are killing me. You know the boy's family? They don't peel their eggplant. Tastes sour.” Her face wrinkles up in disgust. “I had to spit it out.”

“The boy” is what Mama Jo calls Eddie, the groom-to-be. He is nineteen years old, skinny, long. Long nose, long hair, long legs. He reminds Aida of Gumby, though she's never told her sister this.

Mama Jo nudges her again. “You buy eggplant, you always buy the female. Eh?” She wags a finger thick with meatball mixture at Aida. “Female.”

Someone smacks Aida in the back of her head.
“Stunare!”
her mother says, taking the platter from her. “Why are you just standing here?”

“I don't care about this stupid wedding,” Aida says, because no one is listening anyway.

It is true. Her sister, Terry, is nineteen years old and works answering phones at Chip Finley's Ford down the street. Eddie fixes cars there. To Aida, the fact that they are getting married makes her queasy. They should go to South America; they should hike the Appalachian Trail; they should go to college, even junior college; they should learn to cook on a wok, sail a boat, play the guitar. They should do anything but get married and work at Chip Finley's Ford and stay in this town until they die.

She sees Aunt Gloria stuffing the manicotti.

“Cammie coming to the wedding?” Aida asks, hopeful.

“She's trying,” Aunt Gloria says. “That girl's busy. When you're in show business, you don't just leave everything. The show must go on, right?”

Aida watches her cigarette bounce as she talks. They are all going to die of cancer, she thinks. Every one of them.

The door bursts open and Terry and Eddie, followed by their best man and maid of honor, practically fall inside. They giggle and hold each other while everyone except Aida beams at them.

“Oh, man,” Eddie says, and heads straight for the cookies. He pops them in his mouth whole, one after another.

“Save some for the people,” someone says.

Eddie laughs and tosses a few cookies to Frankie, the best man.

“Wow,” Terry says, slowly surveying the room. The food, the relatives, the tiny bundles of dressed-up candy. “Someone getting married?” She laughs hard at her own joke.

Aida glances at the cuckoo clock on the wall. Her father bought it in Germany when he was in the Navy, and it is the one thing of all the souvenirs he bought that she likes. She does not know anyone else with a cuckoo clock. It seems exotic and fancy. While she looks at it, admiring the carved scene of birds and trees, the ivory face, the cuckoo shoots out and jerkily cuckoos once. It is five thirty. Hours before Dean Martin comes on. She plans on hiding in her parents' bedroom to watch it on the portable television in there.

Terry has kissed everyone hello, everyone except Aida. She wraps her skinny arm around her and kisses her cheek.

“Hello, little sister,” she says.

Her eyes are red and heavy lidded. Aida smells the too-sweet smell of marijuana, which is what Terry and Eddie do in their spare time. Aida found them behind the garage last fall, and threatened to call the police. It was illegal. It led to harder drugs, like heroin. But Terry had grabbed her arm hard and said, “Keep your fucking mouth shut, Aida. If you're a good little girl maybe we'll give you some.”

“I don't want drugs!” Aida had said, horrified.