La Stella d’Oro

 

by Rita Ciresi

 

    “Star water” was Mama’s solution to every mess. No fancy, expen­sive detergents for her—she dumped a capful of blue bleach into a metal basin full of hot water, watched it burst into small, glistening bubbles, and gave it her own brand name. She used star water to scrub the counters and stove, the tub and tile and toilet. She used it to soak out stubborn stains in anything from a tin pan crusted with burnt maca­roni and cheese to a tablecloth spotted with grease. The smell of it—lingering in every room for hours after Saturday morning chore time was over—made Lina and me depressed. With its disgusting stink and beau­tiful name, star water seemed to epitomize the lack of glamour that pervaded our lives. Just a whiff of it reminded us that we probably weren’t destined for fame and fortune, but for ordinary lives, for chapped hands that reeked of ammonia instead of Chanel #5, Tabu, or Jean Naté.

    “When I grow up,” Lina vowed, “I’m never going to touch a single rag, sponge, or scrub brush.”

    “I’m going to have a maid,” I said.

    “I’m going to send all my evening gowns to the dry cleaner,” Lina said. “I’m going to throw out my underwear after the first time I wear it.”

    That sounded fine by me. I got stuck wearing everything Lina had outgrown, from the holiday dresses with the velvet cummerbunds and satin collars to her yellowed undershirts and underpants. I could hardly bear the shame. Lina’s blouses lapped about my wrists, and her knee socks, which had lost all their snap, crept down to my ankles. The clothes that Lina wore became costumes on me.

    I would have given anything for a closet full of brand-new outfits. But when I complained, Mama said, “You can do whatever you want with your cash when you’re filthy rich.” She never used the word money—she called it cash or bucks. And she never said rich without putting filthy, stinking, or disgusting in front of it, as if people who had more than a spare dime wallowed like pigs in a perpetual state of sin.

    Because she despised money, Lina and I loved it. We planned on glit­tering with gold and dripping with diamonds, owning several houses, a stable of race horses, and a fleet of yachts. I was going to be a famous writer. Lina was going to be a star—not in Hollywood, where most 11-year-olds longed to be—but in Italy, where an opera singer could reign as queen. Lina had a clear, beautiful voice that even Mama, who was as parsimonious with her compliments as she was with her purse, called “a gift from God.” The key word there was gift. “Just remember where that voice of yours came from,” she said, whenever she thought Lina was too full of herself. “And don’t be getting too many ideas about where you’re going.”

    Mama blamed Nonna for puffing Lina up. Mama’s mother lived next door, in a neat little white house with a trellised rose garden in back and overstuffed chintz-covered furniture inside. After school, Lina would report home to Mama and then escape to Nonna’s, where she was treated to a Stella d’Oro cookie frosted with vanilla and sprinkled with almonds. She spent the rest of the afternoon there, practicing pi­ano or reading a book on the floor, leaping up and down every twenty minutes to either wind the crank of Nonna’s cherry wood victrola or change the thick, scratchy 78 rpm records.

    Nonna was what most people called eccentric. She sat perfectly straight, her wrinkled little hands in her lap, her left foot tapping out a tune on the carpet. Her right foot had been amputated, years before, because of problems she had with diabetes. She hardly ever said any­thing, but her lips moved silently to the songs she listened to over and over again: Maria Callas singing Mi chiamano Mimi, Beniamino Gigli belting out Celeste Aida. Lina loved this music too. On Saturday after­noons, she sat faithfully by Nonna’s left foot to listen to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. But if the opera was in German, Nonna switched it off. One of the few words she said in English was Nazis.

    Nonna subscribed to Il Progresso, but she also had the Register de­livered to her door. Lina took it off the front porch and brought it in. She read the headlines to Nonna, then the obituaries, Ann Landers, and the horoscope column, which was called “Omar Says.” Nonna was a Virgo; Lina was a Leo. “A temptation may present itself this after­noon,” Lina read aloud. “Beware of schemes to get rich quick. The evening hours bring unexpected news. A long-lost family member soon may visit!” Because Mama thought astrology was a bunch of baloney, Lina was thrilled with it. To visit Nonna was to embrace the possibil­ity of handsome strangers and sudden turns of fortune. Omar promised her as much passion as the music.

    Although Mama seemed to breathe easier once Lina was out of the house, I got the message, loud and clear, that I wasn’t supposed to fol­low her even if it did hold the promise of a Stella d’Oro. “Those two are two of a kind,” Mama said, as she handed me my consolation prize, half an apple and a couple of stale Ritz crackers spread with a thin layer of peanut butter. “Listening to the same songs over and over again, all about love and killing yourself. Driving yourself pazza over nothing, is what I say.” Accepting my silence as a sign that I was on her side, Mama looked out the window and glared at Nonna’s house. “Just what we need, another kook in the family,” she said. “Another rotten egg!”

    That egg—rarely alluded to—was Lina’s namesake, Mama’s younger sister Pat. Both Auntie Pat and Lina had been christened af­ter Nonno Pasquale, ending up with the unwieldy Pasqualina for a name. We knew, from looking at old photo albums, that Lina had been called Patty when she was a baby. “Patty’s first tooth,” the cap­tions written on the white borders of the pictures said. “Patty on the potty.” Then something mysterious happened. Several photo­graphs—probably of Auntie Pat—were missing from the album, the four dark corners used to mount them left behind. Auntie Pat had done something foul that caused her to be taken out of the book, and Mama and Babbo, anxious to forget the old Pasqualina, began to call the younger one by a different name.

    Lina hated her name. “Sounds like a fat old washerwoman,” she said.

    “It’s a nice Italian name,” Mama said.

    “I’m American,” Lina said. When that failed to get a rise out of Mama, she added, “And I’m going to change my name when I grow up.”

    Mama clucked her tongue. “Be satisfied with what you’ve got.”

    “Why should I be?” Lina said. “You weren’t. You were the one who changed it on me. Why’d you switch me, anyway?” When Mama didn’t answer, Lina said, “It makes me feel weird. I feel like I’m two people in one, like there’s somebody inside of me that wants to come out!”

    Mama pressed her lips together. “Kook!” she said. “Get over here, and I’ll clean that mouth of yours out with soap. I’ll soak your crazy head!”

    Lina ran upstairs. Out of loyalty, I galloped after her. Behind our closed bedroom door, Lina vowed she was going to run away and live with Auntie Pat.

    “But you don’t even know her,” I said.

    “She lives in New York,” Lina said, as if that told all. “On Carmine Street. I wrote down the address from the box she sent me.”

    Auntie Pat was Lina’s godmother. Every year on Lina’s birthday she sent a box of books that were too educational for Lina’s romantic taste. While Lina revelled in stories about young girls, usually orphans, who triumphed over adversity, Auntie Pat sent sturdy volumes that chroni­cled the true lives of women. Over the years Lina had collected a row of books such as Marie Curie: Pioneer in Science, Clara Barton: Nurse to a Nation, and Maria Mitchell: Girl Astronomer. Mama scoffed at the books and Babbo shook his head. After writing a thank-you note to Aunt Pat, which Mama carefully scrutinized, addressed, and mailed, Lina put the books on her shelf and forgot about them. I was the only one who read them, who was taken in by their tales of undaunted femi­nine courage. I guessed that Auntie Pat, when she was my age, had as­pired to be a heroine. But now, according to Mama, she worked doing God-knows-what for some big city publishing outfit. Nonna went to visit her, twice a year, to see her favorite operas—La Traviata and La Boheme. Auntie Pat never visited her back.

    “She looks like a race horse,” Lina said, scrutinizing one of the pho­tos of Auntie Pat left in the album.

    “She looks like Jo in Little Women,” I said, “after she sells her hair.”

    “I hate Little Women,” Lina said. “It’s not written right. Jo should have ran off with Laurie and been rich and famous instead of marrying that stupid old professor.”

    “I wonder why Auntie Pat never got married.”

    “She looks sort of ugly in the pictures,” Lina admitted. “But I bet she’s changed now. After all, she lives in New York. She’s probably stunning.”

    “I bet she has a mink coat,” I said. “And diamonds and high heels.”

    “I bet she doesn’t go to church on Sunday,” Lina said. She looked closer at the picture. “She probably got into a fight with everybody over a man.”

    I liked that idea. “Maybe she wanted to marry someone they didn’t like.”

    “Maybe she lives in sin with a man,” Lina said. “Maybe he isn’t Italian. Maybe he isn’t Catholic. Maybe he’s a foreigner. Maybe he’s a Negro!”

    We looked at one another, excitement in our eyes. Anything was pos­sible when it came to Auntie Pat. The more Mama and Nonna didn’t talk about her, the more our imaginations ran wild. Auntie Pat had been a lonely, misunderstood child, perhaps a victim of a baby switch in the hospital, brought home to the wrong family. As a girl, she had outshone our homely, ill-tempered Mama in every way; as a teenager, she ran wild; as a young woman, she sought her fortune in the city. She rose from the ranks, first working as a cocktail waitress, then a go-go dancer, before she graduated to a high-class call girl ensconced in a penthouse in midtown Manhattan. She was the epitome of slutdom, a bonafide brazen hussy whore who slipped rolled-up bucks into the slit of her cleavage. We loved her.

    Once Lina, who liked to put on shows for me, decided to present an imitation of Auntie Pat. After Mama had sent us upstairs to go to sleep, Lina ordered me to put on my pajamas, get into bed, and close my eyes. As I sat there with my eyes squinched shut, I heard her rac­ing about the room, slamming drawers, rustling in the closet, and then shutting off the overhead light. “Okay,” she finally whispered. “Open.”

    She stood at the other end of the room, her silhouette bathed in light from her bedside lamp, which she had muted by balancing a notebook on the shade. She was stripped down to her panties, a silver Christmas tree garland wrapped around her shoulders like a boa. She thrust her right hip forward and then her left, manipulating the gar­land to expose first one slightly swelling nipple, then the other. She slit her eyes, licked her lips, and lowering her voice into a sultry, throaty drawl, she began to sing a song that was popular that year, a song that Mama switched off every time it came on the car radio.

 

The minute you walked in the joint

I could see you were a man of distinction,

A real big spender,

Good-looking, soooooo refined.

Say, wouldn’t you like to know what’s going on in my mind?

So let me get right to the point

I don’t pop my cork for every guy I see.

Hey! Big spender,

Spe—eeend, a little time with me.

 

    I tried to whistle, but I hadn’t mastered the art yet. I snapped my fingers, cooed at her, and cupped my hands to my mouth, forming a trumpet that continued to play the tune for her. Then Lina danced, a provocative bump and grind that made what little fat she had on her thighs and belly quiver. As I played my trumpet louder and louder, Lina grew bolder. She pinched her nipples between her thumb and fore­finger and tweaked them at me. She straddled the garland and pulled it up slowly between her legs, purring with pleasure. She flung the gar­land to the floor, turned full circle, leaned over at the waist, and thrust out her behind. Slipping her thumbs into her panties, she began to inch them down over the mound of her buttocks. I giggled wildly.

    Then the doorknob turned. My laughter went dead as Mama stood grim-lipped in the door. “What’s going on here?” she demanded.

    Lina pulled up her underwear. “I’m getting dressed,” she said.

    Mama stared at Lina. “Put on your pajamas,” she finally said. “Cover up your filthy body right now. Right now.”

    I looked down at my bedspread. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lina walk over to our chest of drawers. Her back toward Mama, she got dressed.

    Mama marched over to the lamp and snatched Lina’s notebook off the shade. “Good way to start a fire!” she sputtered. Then, spying the garland on the floor, she strode over and picked it up, crumpling it to­gether in her hand. “What is this?” she asked. When Lina didn’t an­swer, she turned to me. “Speak up, or you’ll get it too.”

    A year earlier, I would have begun to blubber and blurt it all out, but now, intensely aware of Lina’s threatening stare, I chose not to say any­thing.

    Mama shook the garland at me and then at Lina. “Don’t you ever let me find you up here—” she floundered for words “—waggling your can around like some sort of cheap I-don’t-know-what. Don’t you ever, ever again!”

    Our real punishment was doled out at the breakfast table the next morning. “When you have to undress,” Mama said coldly, not looking at either one of us, “you’ll do it one at a time, in the bathroom or in the closet, or with the door open. From now on, no closing the bedroom door.”

    My heart sank. Now there would be nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, from Mama’s unconditional tyranny. It was too dark to play outside af­ter supper. The cellar was cold and damp. In the kitchen, in the parlor, in the dining room, Mama always found me. I couldn’t even be safe in the bathroom. There wasn’t a lock on the door, and in her relentless quest to have a clean house, Mama often called out “Knock, knock!” then let herself in to arrange towels on the shelf or scrub the sink. “Don’t strain,” she told me, as I sat on the toilet. If I was in the bath­tub, she said, “Remember to wash down there.”

    Where could I escape? Lina, at least, had Nonna’s house. As she flew across the yard, leaving me stuck in the cold kitchen with the ap­ple, the Ritz crackers, the hum of the refrigerator, and Mama’s sour comments, I resolved to find my own place. I decided to become a book­worm. Twice a week I trudged back and forth to the public library with an armload of books. Venturing into the adult section one day, between the high stacks that I thought contained every book ever written, I dis­covered a big, webbed chair in front of a tall window. It fit my body just right. I thought of it as mine. There, curled up with my feet tucked under me, I lost myself in marvelous tales of boats lost at sea, women roughing it in the wild west, and children abandoned in the wilderness.

    The library had many more volumes along the lines of the kind Auntie Pat sent Lina. I read them all—Harriet Tubman, Florence Nightingale, Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen Keller. I both loved the women and hated them. They were so bold and courageous, but they seemed to prove that in order to do something important, you had to look revolt­ing. I couldn’t bear to believe that, but the line drawings that graced the front covers of the books told the whole story. These women were too tall, too hefty, too self-righteous in their squared-off collars and heavy skirts. They had prominent noses and double chins. A dispropor­tionate number wore glasses. They were ugly.

    I vowed I would never let myself get like that. As the light began to fade through the library window, and I packed up my books and started to walk slowly home, I often thought about who I wanted to be like when I grew up. But I could think of no one. Unlike Lina, I had no name­sake to follow, no path to claim. I didn’t have the guts or the looks to be like the actresses I saw on TV or the models in magazines. Although I liked the librarians who smiled at me on my visits, they looked faded, dowdy, and dusty as books that hadn’t been checked out in a long time.

    The thought of becoming like Mama made me shiver. My teachers all were nuns, and I hoped, and even prayed to the God I was rejecting, that I would not get the calling. Choose somebody else, I whispered ev­ery night after I said my Act of Contrition. Please, please. The only teachers who weren’t nuns were the gym instructors—large, imposing women who wore whistles on cords around their necks, sensible-looking shorts, and crisp white cotton anklets. I didn’t like them because they gave me Bs. Even Lina, who excelled at gym, hated them. “Dykes,” she said. Seeing the confusion on my face, she explained, “You know, lezzers. Women who look like men.”

    “Oh,” I said.

    “They stick together. They like each other, just like women like men.” To create some suspense, Lina lowered her voice. “They do unnat­ural things,” she said. “With vegetables. Cucumbers and zucchini. There’s a girl in my class who’s a lez. I heard she used a frozen hot dog and it thawed inside her. They had to take her to the emergency room to get it out.”

    I laughed. It seemed too fantastic to believe—and yet, coming from an authoritative source such as Lina, it had to be true. My giggles gave way to an uncomfortable feeling, then pure fright. The thought of any­one sticking anything up me seemed the grossest violation. I was sure it would split me in two and change me forever.

    After that, I worried about myself. I was sure there was something wrong with me because I didn’t like boys. The boys at school were al­ways winking and nudging each other, deliberately burping out loud and cupping their hands beneath their armpits to simulate fart noises. My boy cousins I resented because they were accorded privileges Lina and I were not. They were allowed to play outside until it was time for supper, while Lina and I were called inside to set the table and help serve food. After supper, they ran back outside while we had to clear the table and wash the dishes. During summer, they stayed in the yard long after we had been called in, eating ice cream, playing hide and seek, and lounging on the hoods of their fathers’ cars.

    I was sure there was something wrong with me because I sometimes slipped the National Geographic off the rack in the library and sneaked the magazine back to my chair, where I traced, with my fin­ger, the thick bellies and heavy gumdrop breasts of the naked aborig­inal women. And there was something wrong with me because I liked to look at Lina. Hadn’t I hooted and clapped when she had danced in front of me? And wasn’t one of the reasons I hated having the privilege of closing the bedroom door taken away was that now Lina sometimes undressed in the bathroom? Now I could no longer sneak as many glances at her out of the corner of my eye, no longer catch as many glimpses of her nubby little breasts or the tuft of hair that seemed to be growing in a perfect triangle where her body met her legs. Yes, I was a dyke be­cause I could not stop myself from looking and because there were times when, after we had turned out the light, I could not stop myself from pressing my hands against my flat chest or cupping them over that strangely wet and warm place on my body, wondering when things were going to start happening to me.

    But things always happened to Lina first. It wasn’t fair, but it was the way. As Lina grew, Nonna began to call her la signorina, the little lady. Mama constantly fought with Lina over insignificant things, then tried to get me to side with her against Lina. But Lina won my loyalty. I couldn’t help but admire her. She walked around as if she floated far above everyone. She sang a lot, spent hours folding the clothes in her drawers, and brushed her hair one hundred strokes every night. She confiscated an empty Dixon Park soda crate off our father’s delivery truck and parked it by her bed. Covering it with a flowered bath towel, she christened it her “vanity.” On it she placed her hairbrush, a comb, and a tiny pocket mirror she had won at the St. Joseph’s bazaar. Every night she knelt in front of it, as if it were a shrine, arranging and rear­ranging the same three items.

    It was inevitable that Mama would comment on the makeshift van­ity the moment she spotted it. “What’s that?” she asked.

    “It’s—where I want to keep things,” Lina said.

    “What’s wrong with your chest of drawers?”

    “I have to share it.”

    “I guess you think you’re too good to share.”

    “I didn’t say that,” Lina said. “I said—I wanted some place of my own.”

    Mama looked threateningly at Lina. She stepped into our room, went over to the vanity, and one by one, picked up the three items that sat upon it, inspecting them carefully. Holding the pocket mirror by the tips of her fingers, she set it back down on the crate. “Self-pride stinks,” she said. “Just remember, SPS.”

    That spring a fourth item appeared on Lina’s vanity. Nonna began to complain about pains in her stomach. She was tired; she didn’t feel right. “Stones,” Mama said, in the same sour tone she used to order cod liver oil or bunion pads from the druggist. Furtively, just as I gained all my other knowledge of the human body, I looked it up in the Funk and Wagnalls at the library. The picture showed an ominous cluster of peb­bles nestled within the curve of a catsupy red kidney. Mama forbid Lina to bother Nonna until her stones passed. But they would not budge, and Nonna went into the hospital to have them removed.

    Before she went, she gave Lina a yellow tin of Jean Naté from her collection of talcum powders. She said it would help Lina remember her. Lina set the coveted tin beside the pocket mirror. The day of Nonna’s surgery she must have twisted back the cap a hundred times to take a whiff. When Lina went out of the room, I was tempted to sprin­kle some of the fine white talcum on my hand, but I knew Lina would smell it on me and get angry.

    The following day—a Saturday—Mama grudgingly promised to take Lina to the hospital. I would have to stay behind, not being visit­ing age. Full of envy, I sprawled out on my stomach on the bed, watch­ing her get ready. After sorting through her clothes in the closet for what seemed like forever, Lina finally chose a white cotton blouse and a red plaid kilt that closed with an oversized gold safety pin. She set them on a chair. “I’m pretending I’m getting ready for a date,” she said.

    “Who’s the man?” I asked.

    “He’s handsome, rich, and famous.”

    “Where are you going?”

    “To the theater. To see the opening of a fab-ulous show. Afterwards, we’re going out for cocktails.” Lina took off the top of her pajamas, then her bottom. She stood there in her undershirt and underpants, dreamy-eyed. “Then after that, we’re going back to his penthouse.” She reached down and picked up her powder. Sprinkling some in the palm of her hand, she rubbed a little under one armpit, then the other. She took off her undershirt and rubbed some on her breasts. Then she stretched out the waist of her underpants and sprinkled some powder down the front, and rubbed a handful on the inside of her thighs.

    She looked like a clown who had whitened all her secret parts in­stead of her face. After Lina had put on her clothes, Mama stopped in the door, wrinkling up her nose. Spotting the yellow tin on Lina’s van­ity, she held out her hand. Lina reluctantly surrendered the powder to her.

    “I guess I don’t need to ask who gave you this fancy stuff,” Mama said. She held it to her nose and sniffed. I was sure she would confiscate the powder, but she handed it back to Lina with a short comment. “Soap and water will take care of your smells,” she said. “Remember what I told you the other day.”

    After she left the room, Lina furiously wiped the top of the con­tainer and replaced it on her vanity. “What did she tell you?” I asked.

    “Nothing.”

    “But she said she told you something the other day.”

    “She didn’t tell me anything,” Lina said. “Besides, you’re too young to know.”

    “Know what?” Feeling the injustice of being younger more than ever, I kicked my bedspread in anger. “It’s not fair,” I said. “You get to visit Nonna and have powder and do everything first.”

    “I’m older,” Lina simply said.

    “So I act better. Mama says so.”

    Lina lowered her voice to a whisper. “What do I care about Mama?”

    “And I’m smarter than you, too.”

    “So I’m prettier. That counts more.”

    “It does not.”

    Lina smiled to herself as she moved the safety pin that fastened her kilt an inch higher. “It does too. Just you wait and see.”

    Her smugness killed me. I was sure she was right. Pretty girls did seem to get all the attention. People always took notice of Lina before they looked at me. The rule seemed to be that if you took two girls, or two sisters, one would be beautiful and daring and lusted after—like Auntie Pat and Lina—and the other would be shriveled as a dried-out sponge, her inability to be beautiful translated into an obsession with being right and being clean. I was sure this was my fate, and I hated Lina for usurping the better role from me.

    “SPS,” I told her, before she left for the hospital. “SPS!”

    Despite my warning, Lina returned with an even more haughty look on her face. “Nonna was connected to a whole bunch of tubes and wires, just like Frankenstein,” she said. “And she had a long set of stitches that looked like a big black caterpillar crawling across her stomach.”

    I burned with jealousy. I had never seen a real scar. I couldn’t wait to catch a glimpse of it. But Nonna stayed in the hospital one week and then another. Mama refused to take Lina back. She spent a lot of time on the phone, whispering with relatives about complications.

    Complications needed no explanation. Many of our great-aunts and great-uncles already had had them—the hushed “turn for the worse” that sent Mama to church with a fistful of quarters, each one dropped into the tin collection box purchasing the bright flame of a vigil candle. Vigils were the only item on which Mama would spend money freely. She kept a roll of quarters in a chipped coffee cup in the kitchen cabinet expressedly for this purpose.

    Lina and I surreptitiously watched the supply of quarters dwindle, only to be replaced by a fresh roll. Every day when we walked back from school we circled around another block so we could pass by Nonna’s house, hoping as we rounded the corner that we would find the shades up and the lights on. Nothing doing. Lina’s shoulders slumped as we crossed the yard and went back home to Mama.

    One day, when we practically had given up hope, I spied a light in one of Nonna’s side windows. We raced forward, Lina outstripping me and reaching the back porch first. She pressed her face to the glass and didn’t take it away. When I got to the porch, breathless, I jostled her to the side and looked in, too.

    It was an awful sight. The overhead light in the kitchen was on, and the mark of Mama was everywhere: in the stringy grey mop and stiff broom that leaned against the wall, the metal basin and rags that lay on the counter, and the bottle of bleach and tin bucket that sat squarely on the floor.

    Lina took her face away from the glass. “She’s dead,” she said.

    Her flat voice sent a shiver down me. “Mama’s probably cleaning be­cause she’s coming home,” I said.

    “They’ll come back here after the funeral,” Lina said. “For the party.”

    Although barred from funerals, we had been to many of those par­ties. The kitchen table was loaded with rolls and butter and pastries and cookies. The immediate family sat on folding chairs in the dining room, shaking people’s hands and weeping softly as they accepted peo­ple’s condolences. The air smelled like rotten flowers and fruit and cof­fee. The men were dressed in black suits and ties and the women in black dresses with delicate 14-karat gold crucifixes—worn only for Easter, Christmas, and funeral masses—dangling around their necks.

    I looked up at Lina, wanting her to tell me what to do. I would not start crying until she did. She did not.

    She put her hand on the door. “I’m going in,” she said.

    ‘What for?”

    “I just want to go in.”

    “We better go home and ask Mama—”

    “I hate Mama!” Lina said. She turned the knob and the door creaked, like in a horror movie, before it gave way. The smell of star water hit us immediately. The bright white counters, stove, and refrig­erator created a glare, like snow.

    “I don’t think we should be here,” I said.

    “Nonna would want us to.”

    “There might be a ghost.”

    “I hope there is,” Lina said. “I want to talk to her.”

    “I hear one,” I said. “I hear somebody, Lina!”

    The noise came from the stairwell, the sound of one foot on the stairs, then another, coming down slowly, to haunt us, kill us, spirit us away. “Let’s go, let’s go!” I said, unwilling to leave without Lina. But she stood her ground, forcing me to stay.

    The ghost got to the bottom of the stairs and crossed the living room. When she appeared in the door, she was tall and broad-shouldered and dressed in a black jacket, white turtleneck, and black knickers, like a horsewoman in one of those books about girls who want to be jockeys. Her black hair was cropped short, as if someone had shorn the hair to follow the contour of a cereal bowl plopped upon her head. She had eyes only for Lina. “Pasqualina?” she asked, holding out her hands to be hugged.

    Lina stepped back. Resenting not being singled out, I rushed forward and threw myself in her arms. “Auntie Pat,” I said, “it’s me, it’s me!”

 

* * *

    The party went more or less as I had imagined it. Lina and I watched as people filed by to hold Mama’s hand. Auntie Pat stood behind Mama, refusing to sit in one of the folding chairs. A beautiful death, the relatives said. She looked lovely.

    “They did a wonderful job with her,” Mama agreed. I wondered how she could say that. Lying in the coffin, Nonna had looked like an old, sunken doll with too much red on her cheeks and lips, the sort of woman Mama would have referred to as a made-up hussy had she met her on the street.

    “Lovely, my eye,” Auntie Pat said later, as she parked her imposing form between Lina and me on the sofa. Lina moved a good three inches away. “Talking about her as if she were a bride. Putting so much paint on her you could hardly see the true character of her face. It was a travesty.”

    Because I had no idea what that word meant, I kept quiet. Lina did, too. She looked especially uncomfortable sitting on the couch in the room where she had spent so many hours with Nonna. She kept looking around at the victrola and the piano and the records, probably thinking about how she would never get back her refuge again.

    “So, girls,” Auntie Pat said in her crisp voice, “we have a lot of catching up to do. Tell me about yourselves. What are your favorite subjects at school? What are your hobbies?”

    By prodding Lina—she always turned to Lina first—Auntie Pat learned that Lina got As in everything at school, that she liked Language and Music the best, and that someday she wanted to be a mu­sician.

    “You play piano, of course,” Auntie Pat said, looking at the upright. Mama, who was sitting on the piano bench next to one of her cousins, looked back. “And I’ve heard you like to sing. Where do you take lessons?”

    Mama glared at Auntie Pat.

    “I don’t have lessons,” Lina said.

    “Why not?”

    “I don’t know,” Lina said crossly. “I just don’t.”

    “You should have a teacher,” Auntie Pat said, “someone to encourage you and give you advice.” She looked at Mama. “Why don’t you send her?”

    Mama rubbed her forefinger and thumb together, as if she were feel­ing for a bill that didn’t exist. “She takes music at school.”

    “But she should have private lessons.”

    The word private—like the word money—made Mama scornful. “She already has enough ideas in her head.”

    “And what’s wrong with ideas?” Auntie Pat asked. “They’re very good things to have.”

    Mama turned to her cousin and said, “Lina thinks she’s going to be a stage actress.”

    “I do not,” Lina said hotly.

    Mama laughed. “La stella d’oro! The golden star!” she said.

    Auntie Pat clearly didn’t approve of Lina’s ambition. You could tell she was struggling to decide whether to side with Mama or Lina. In the end, Lina won out. “And what if she does want to be a star?” Auntie Pat finally said. She turned to Lina. “Let me tell you right now, you can be whatever you want to be.”

    Lina sat there with her shoulders hunched, tears clinging to her eye­lashes and beginning to roll down her face. “No, I can’t!” she blurted out. “I’ll never be, I’ll never be!”

    The room went silent. All the relatives turned and stared. Lina stood up, ran across the room, opened the front door, and raced out of the house. Mama clucked her tongue and shook her head. Turning to her cousin, she said, “Il bordo.”

    Lina was on the brink. Not wanting to be the one who pushed her over, I avoided her in the weeks to come. It wasn’t hard to do. After the party was over, after Auntie Pat took herself back to New York (where, Mama said scornfully, she would “rejoin her lady friend”), after the for-sale sign went up in the front yard of Nonna’s house and the back­yard became a playground for my cousins, Lina grew morose and with­drawn. She went for long walks by herself after school and pretended to be doing her homework for hours every night after supper. She wrote things in a notebook that she referred to as her diary, and every morn­ing she put on gobs of the powder that Nonna had given her, so that even I, who liked the smell, got a headache.

    One morning I came downstairs just in time to witness Mama slap Lina’s face. “You’re a woman now,” Mama said. Lina stood there, her body stiff and rigid as Mama hugged her. She let Lina stay home from school. All day long I puzzled over this, but when I came back home and asked Lina for an explanation, she told me to mind my own business.

    By then I was getting used to such remarks, hardened to that sort of treatment. I was sick of being ignored, and even more tired of people trying to get me to take sides with them—Mama, Lina, and Auntie Pat. I wanted to be on my own side, wherever it was, and whatever it might mean.

    Summer was coming. I waited for it with high hopes, and when it fi­nally arrived, I cleared out a small square of dirt behind the back hedge and pretended I had my own house. I played until the light be­gan to grow dim and Mama called me in. I got ready for bed to the pulse of the crickets. Sometimes, from Nonna’s yard, the loud voices of my boy cousins wafted into the bedroom. I watched them from my bedroom window. They were sprawled on the ground, plotting their futures as they stared up at the sky.

    Every month Mama made Lina soak her blood-stained underpants in the bathroom. It was looking into that water, watching the bubbles glisten and fade, that I realized with a sinking feeling what the stars held for me.