Nazi Dog

(from the novel Blue Italian*)

 

by Rita Ciresi

 

In Rosa’s family, the men always seemed to die first, leaving their wives behind to mourn them. Zio Dino was the first of Rosa’s uncles to go. He was standing on the back porch, jingling the change in his pocket and whistling the theme song from “Gilligan’s Island” when a blood clot in his brain ruptured, killing him instantly. After that, Zia Pina made a sign of the cross whenever she heard mention of Gilligan. Connie was so shaken by her father’s death she could not watch Channel 8 at three o’clock ever again.

Zio Paulo came next. Cancer, Rosa’s aunts all whispered. He had it—of all places—in the penis, and it got out of control and spread and then it was all over. It ate him up, like leprosy, may his soul rest in peace.

Rosa’s father came in third. Aldo died two years after Rosa and Gary got married. His heart gave out, in the garage, on a Sunday when Gary and Rosa visited for dinner. It was over an hour before anybody found him.

Rosa, for once, had looked forward to dinner. She had good news for her parents. The stick had turned pink. She was preg­nant. And Gary was treating her with a tenderness he had never shown before. He did not criticize the way Rosa parked her car, either too close or too far away from the curb, or the way she washed both the counters and the dishes with the same sponge. He did all the laundry and walked down three flights of stairs to toss out the garbage. He insisted on balancing the checkbook and paying all the bills, as if performing simple subtraction would interfere with the gestation process. Every morning he held out his hands to pull Rosa up from the bed. “Sweetie,” he called her. “Lovey.” And he buried his face in Rosa’s mongo boobs, which, like hothouse blossoms, had burst out of her body into 40C practically overnight. “Mmmm. Aaaah.” He rubbed her belly. “Mommy.”

Rosa pushed him away. He aggravated her. He was incompe­tent. He put her bras in the dryer. He made pathetic spaghetti—worse than Chef Boyardee—for dinner. He bounced checks. He let spider webs dangle from the molding and hairballs collect on the bathroom floor. It drove Rosa crazy. But what could she do? She shrugged, yawned, told him to make her some tea, and then flopped down on the couch. Why not? She was exhausted. She would lounge on the couch like a lazy slut, thank you very much, while the man who was responsible for her appalling and debil­itating condition could trot up and down three flights of stairs toting groceries and garbage and laundry. Let Gary go out at ten o’clock at night and risk getting shot on Whalley Avenue as he ducked into the corner Seven-Eleven to buy more ginger ale and orange soda.

Because the pregnant Rosa was thirsty. She had never been so thirsty in her entire life, and she drowned the someday-heir of the Fisher family fortune with Poland Springs mineral water, Donald Duck apple juice, and the Stop & Shop version of V-8, as if the fetus’ sole form of nourishment would come from liquids. Rosa drank and peed, drank and peed, all day long. She hadn’t thrown up once (knock hard on wood), but the thought of easing pantyhose over her swollen ankles, thick thighs, and spread hips made her want to lose it. Rosa felt ready to wear a tent, and not just one of those pup bubbles out of the L.L. Bean catalog, but an enormous structure, Barnum and Bailey’s Big Top, or the Sheik’s house in the Arabian Nights. She felt enormous. But she only had put on three pounds, and Gary assured her no one else could tell yet, unless they brushed up against her and copped a good feel, in which case her rock-hard boobs would be a dead giveaway. So she could relax. Until the way she looked truly matched the way that she felt, she planned to keep the whole deal a secret. Except for family, of course.

“I gotta tell my parents,” Gary said. But Rosa wanted to tell hers first, and not by phone. No. She would do it in person, since her parents, for once in their lives, would be happy for her. According to Aldo and Antoinette’s logic, a woman who had a baby stood less chance of getting divorced. Besides, everybody loved a chubby, squalling little infant—mmm, it smelled so deli­cious, like fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies, and its silly, toothless smiles, plump-dee-dump belly, and smooth knees were enough to melt the most miserly of men. Even Rosa’s uncles, usu­ally so gruff and noncommunicative, liked to lean over the bassinet and chuck the chins of the latest additions to the fam­ily, cooing stupid things like “Bello, bello, what a fellow! Eee­nie, weenie, three cheers for bambini!”

It would make everyone so happy, this joyous event, this care­less mistake! For—it must be admitted—Rosa had been too lazy to get up and put in more spermicide when Gary—who probably had been perusing Rosa’s Victoria’s Secret catalogs an hour before—initiated a second round of sex with a thumb applied slowly, langorously, to just the right spot. It felt so good, too good to stop, and Rosa took so long to come that Gary was more than ready to enter her right afterward, and Rosa—transformed by orgasm into a sweaty, panting, ferocious beast—certainly wasn’t going to call time-out for something so mundane as another shot of unscented Koromex.

Oh well, Rosa later thought. It wasn’t her most fertile time of the month. Still . . . she turned over and silently whispered an entire Rosary before she went to sleep, just to remind God that she was still down there, needing a little extra help every now and then—like right now, right now. Then she fell into a restless sleep and worried for days and nights afterward.

Three weeks later, a scared and horrified Rosa was holed up in the bathroom, staring at the pregnancy detector stick turning an ominous pink right before her very eyes.

“Motherfuck!” Rosa cussed. “Sonofabitch! Shit!”

Gary was in the bedroom getting dressed. “What’d you do, stab yourself in the eyeball with your mascara wand?”

“I don’t use mascara!” Rosa shouted. “Your mother does! And too much of it!”

Rosa heard Gary’s belt rattle as he pulled on his pants. She heard the neat zip of his fly and then she heard him come by the bathroom door, singing in clipped British tones the tune from My Fair Lady that asked why can’t a woman be more like a man. Rosa, furious, flung open the bathroom door and threw the preg­nancy detector, still dripping with urine, straight at his smug little face.

“That’s why!” she hollered, and slammed the door shut, sit­ting down on the toilet.

What she heard next were the sounds of confusion: Gary say­ing “Huh?” and footsteps on the hardwood floor as he searched for the object she had thrown at him. Then his “What the hell”—and then, “Who-o-o-o-o-a man. Oh my God!” Then, quieter, more serious, “Oy.”

Gary opened the bathroom door and leaned on the doorjamb. The pregnancy detector stick was stuck in between his lips. “Have a cigar,” he said.

Rosa looked at him. “Don’t put that in your mouth,” she said, “there’s germs on there!”

He took it out of his mouth. “You already sound like a mother,” he said.

“That’s what I’m scared of,” Rosa said, and lapsed into her standard response to chaos. Rosa began to cry, and Gary put his arm around her and told her, “Come on, it’s not so bad.”

“So what?” Rosa said. “It’s not so good, either.”

“You said you wanted to have kids.”

“Kids are vicious.”

“I know,” Gary said. “I’ve read Lord of the Flies.”

“You just want to see yourself replicated,” Rosa said. “Men always do.”

“That’s a sexist thing to say.”

“Well, show me a woman who would wish her own face on someone else, except as a curse!”

Gary scratched his head. “But you wanted to have kids,” he repeated.

“Not now, you dorkhead!” Rosa held her stomach, as if she were in danger of puking up the fetus. It was the worst possible timing. She was up for a promotion at work, which the Baloney undoubtedly would screw her out of, and Gary was almost done with law school and getting ready to study for the bar, and Rosa never would be able to quit her job. She’d have to drag her fat self into work at nine o’clock every morning because they needed the health insurance, and now she’d never get to go to Europe or Montana or even just go out to the movies, it would be nothing but pee-pee and poo-poo and wee-wee and ca-ca for the next 18 years, until the baby got old enough to pack his bags and cart his neu­rotic self to Harvard.

Gary shrugged. Rosa could quit her job. And Gary could borrow money from an unnamed, but very reliable, source on Long Island, i.e., the parents—

“Never!” Rosa said.

Well, then Gary would get a job. That was it. One of his pro­fessors had asked him to take on a course at University of Bridgeport. He would teach the class and they would live like a king and queen forever on a lousy two thousand dollars. Paradise. Bliss. In the meantime, everyone would pet the expectant Rosa, kiss her and pat her and love her, and she could eat all the ice cream she wanted, and the whole thing would be more fun than a tonsillectomy.

“Oh, fuck you,” Rosa said. “Big time.”

“That’s the spirit,” Gary said. “I knew you’d come around.”

Gary went down to Dunkin Donuts and got Rosa half a dozen crullers, which she polished off, with two cups of coffee, in ten minutes. Then Rosa went back into the bathroom and carefully examined her diaphragm for pin pricks. She was dying to blame this whole thing on somebody else. She would not put it past her mother—or Gary’s, for that matter—to snoop around in the bath­room to find the birth control method of Rosa’s choice and then sabotage its effectiveness. Antoinette believed abstinence was the only acceptable form of birth control. And Mimi—who was dying to see Rosa get huge as a sperm whale—several times had said, “Well dear, you don’t want to be going to the PTA when you’re fifty.” Yes, that was it. Two anxious mothers, one minia­ture yellow safety pin pushed through the rubber of the diaphragm, right under the rim, and so much for the barrier method.

But there were no holes in the diaphragm. Rosa held it up to the light to examine it, then filled it with water to see if it dripped. No. No. The pregnancy was all Rosa’s fault. No, it was all Gary’s. Oh, why had he wanted it twice, he hardly ever wanted it twice, it had always been good-and-plenty on the first round before, when suddenly he got hornier than a weasel in heat, and there was Rosa, fat, fat, fat. And thirsty. And there was nothing but disgusting New Haven municipal tap water to drink! Rosa wanted root beer. Ginger ale. Dr. Brown’s cream soda, with a scoop of Haagen-Daz butter pecan floating on top. . . .

Rosa sighed. She pressed her hands on her stomach, as if it were a Ouija Board that would help her communicate with the fetal world. What did Baby want? S-L-E-E-P. M-I-L-K. M-A-M-A.

That silent little voice from the netherworld melted Rosa’s heart. She was going to be a mama. Yes, she would be a good mama to her little girl (boys were so unruly and unpleasant). She would dress her sweetie up like a baby doll, in a straw hat with a ribbon, a velvet pinafore with a fluffy crinoline petticoat underneath, fishnet tights, and black patent leather Mary Janes. Gary would call the baby Princess. Rosa would kiss the baby’s chubby cheeks over and over, like a plunger sucking water out of a drain. She would love her baby to death, with the kind of pas­sion Antoinette never, ever had shown Rosa, and did not display even when Aldo died and Rosa was transformed into half an orphan.

The Sunday that Aldo died, Antoinette commanded Rosa, “Ring the bell out the back door!” as they grew close to sitting down for dinner.

Rosa was perturbed by her mother’s loud voice. And what was wrong with saying please? Would you? Dear? Honey?

“I’ve told you a million times, I’m not ringing that bell out the back door,” Rosa said. “It’s mortifying. Daddy isn’t a cow. He doesn’t need to be called back from the pasture! Besides, he isn’t in the garage anyway.”

“Of course he’s out there,” Antoinette said.

“We didn’t see him when we walked in,” Gary said.

“Maybe he went over to Dino’s,” Antoinette said.

“Stop calling it Dino’s,” Rosa said. “Dino’s been dead for over a year.”

Antoinette threw a dirty spatula into the sink, marched over to the china cabinet, and grabbed the bell. She threw open the back door and ding-donged with all her might.

“You want something done around here, you better do it your­self,” she said.

Rosa stuck out her bottom lip in protest. Gary sighed and looked longingly over at the grocery bag that held the cham­pagne. Rosa and Gary had planned to pop the bubbly after they made their announcement. But so far, nobody had been overly fes­tive or cheery.

Antoinette plopped a pile of rigatoni into a bowl and held it out towards Gary. “For you,” she said. She held out another bowl for Rosa. “And you. And if your father doesn’t get in here in two seconds, he can go to the devil. Let’s eat.”

“Mother, wait for Daddy—”

“I rang the bell,” Antoinette said stubbornly.

Rosa looked at Gary. He shrugged. “Get it while it’s hot,” he said, and went into the dining room. He sat down at the table and waited for Antoinette and Rosa to join him before he sunk in his fork. Rosa began to chew on her rigatoni. She kept listening for the slow creak of the stairs and the slamming of the screen door, but she heard nothing.

Something was wrong. Something was not right.

It only took another couple of minutes for Gary to reach the same conclusion. He looked at Rosa and raised his eyebrows. Then he got up from the table. “Where are you going?” Antoinette asked.

“I’m gonna put more sauce on the pasta,” he said, and took his bowl into the kitchen. Rosa watched him set the bowl down on the table, then slip out the door.

“Where’s he going?” Antoinette asked Rosa. “He said he was—”

“Maybe he forgot to bring in something from the car,” Rosa said. She fiddled with her macaroni, then ripped off a piece of bread and nibbled on the crust. Antoinette kept eating her pasta. She seemed completely unperturbed by Aldo’s absence at the din­ner table. What was the matter with her? Rosa thought. Did she already know and accept that something had happened?

That’s what Antoinette claimed later. At Aldo’s wake and funeral and at the party afterwards, she kept on saying, “I had a premonition. Something didn’t seem right. I felt a dark cloud over my head all morning. I could hardly concentrate.”

Yet she was halfway through her bowl of rigatoni when Gary came back into the dining room and said softly, “Antoinette. Lis­ten. I gotta tell you something. Something important.”

Antoinette slit her eyes at Rosa. “I knew it,” she said. “You’re getting divorced.”

“Huh?” Gary asked. “What?” He looked at Rosa and Rosa shook her head at him. Drop it, Rosa silently told him.

And Gary let it pass. Because there were more important things at stake. Aldo was in the garage. His body was slumped over the work table; his face in a pile of washers. He must have had a heart attack. His body was stiff. He was dead.

Antoinette stood up and took off her apron. Then she walked past Gary and turned off all the burners on the stove. Rosa got up to follow her downstairs.

Gary shook his head at Rosa. “Don’t go,” he said. “You don’t want to see your father like that.”

“You come down and say a prayer,” Antoinette told Rosa. “You, call an ambulance.”

Gary obeyed.

Rosa went down with her mother. It was fall, and the crisp air smelled heavy down by the garden, where too many tomatoes had fallen off the vine and rotted. Antoinette and Rosa walked in through the open garage door. Aldo was hunched over the work table, his face flat on the wood, one hand dangling down by his side, the other flung across the surface of the table, grasping the far corner. He looked as if he were doing exactly what Rosa, so fatigued these days, was tempted to do every afternoon at work—put her head down on her desk and konk out into a deep sleep.

Antoinette’s voice shook. “Well, God bless him,” she said, forgetting that just five minutes before she had said Aldo could go to the devil. Antoinette made a sign of the cross and began to whisper her prayers. And Rosa, who was not sure what to do, just stood there, until a sharp, skidding sound came from the corner of the garage, and a black-and-white cat—a neighbor’s pet—jumped down from a pile of lumber, trotted by Aldo’s inert body, crossed in front of Antoinette and Rosa, and went out into the backyard.

The cat scared Rosa. It had green eyes speckled with yellow, and a long tail that stood straight up in the air. Rosa’s heart began to thump crazily. Her ears rang until she felt almost com­pletely deaf, and her voice sounded like it came from far, far away as she said, “I feel like I’m going to faint,” then fell to the floor.

When she came to, Gary and Antoinette both were bent over her and Antoinette was scolding Gary over the sound of a nearby siren. “You shouldn’t have let her look, how could you let her look at a dead person? And a black cat crossed in front of us, managgia, it’s bad luck, it’s all bad luck for the baby!”

“Are you all right?” Gary asked, when Rosa’s eyes flickered open. “I told. I had to tell.”

Antoinette stood up when the paramedics came up the drive­way. “In here,” she said. “No, not her,” she shook her head at Rosa and pointed to Aldo’s body, “him, him!”

After they found that nothing could be done for Aldo, one of the paramedics lifted Rosa up and walked her out to the garden, put her on the bench, and told her to keep her head between her legs. Antoinette finally came out of the garage and sat beside Rosa.

“He was going to do something about those tomatoes,” Antoinette said mournfully. “Now, too late. Ah, me. Ah, me.”

Antoinette made a wonderful widow. She had all the right clothes—the sleeveless black dresses, dark pilly cardigans, and sturdy low-heeled shoes with laces thin and black as licorice whips. She had the black rosary in her black purse—you know, the one Bruno’s wife brought back from the pilgrimage to the National Shrine? along with the Jesus nightlight that plugged directly into the socket, which had saved Antoinette from many a fall when she had to get up to pee in the night, which at her age—well, Madonna mia, let me tell you, you hit sixty and you may as well start wearing the diapers all over again!

Antoinette already went to mass every day, so putting in a few extra prayers for Rosa’s father proved no problem. Of course, now she had to pay extra to have Aldo’s name mentioned at Novena and All Souls Day, and the cost of lighting candles—well, one of the big ones alone cost a buck fifty! But now Father Bruccoli treated her with more respect. Last week at Confession he only gave her one Our Father for penance. And the week before he let Antoinette lead the procession when they trooped around the church for the Stations of the Cross.

Antoinette’s daily routine remained the same. She cooked and cleaned and scowled at the transvestites that appeared on the Phil Donahue Show. She played dumb about everything that had to do with Aldo and his business. Rosa’s brothers took care of it all. They sold the Plumb Easy truck, sent the extra supplies back to the manufacturer, and did the income taxes. They sat down every Saturday, combed through the bills, and went to the bank for Antoinette. They gave her seventy-five dollars in cash for the week, twenty-five of which she usually managed to save in one of Aldo’s old cigar boxes beneath the bed, just in case an­other dust bowl developed, the stock market crashed, and the country suddenly plunged into Depression.

Aldo’s death turned Antoinette into an Oracle of Doom. “You never know,” she predicted. “These days, you never know what’s going to happen these days!” Anything, anything could happen. Antoinette could slip and fall on the back porch and break her neck. A crazed drunken driver could crash into Gary’s Subaru and total it. One of Rosa’s clients, cranked up on crack, could reach out and strangle Rosa to death. Madonna mia, what was the world coming to? The country was going to hell on a handcart, New Haven was the city of sin, Gary had better watch out and convert to Christianity before it was too late, and that’s all Antoinette had to say about the state of things, amen, except for God have mercy and protect us.

But failing God’s protection, let a dog do it for you. One Sun­day afternoon when Gary and Rosa climbed the long back stair­case to her mother’s house, Rosa thought she heard a weird sort of scuffling going on in the kitchen. When she opened the back door, a huge German Shepherd woofed and lunged at them.

“Look out, it’s a Nazi dog!” Gary said.

Rosa, who had a mortal fear of canines, screamed, pushed Gary in the path of the ominous beast, and immediately climbed up on one of the kitchen chairs. Well, fuck it. Just fuck being fem­inist! Let Gary get bitten by that smelly, hairy, salivating, flea-bitten creature.

But Gary was defending himself quite nicely. “Come on, make nice!” he said, as the German Shepherd leaped up and licked his face. He caught the dog’s front paws in his hand and waltzed it around the kitchen table, singing “Hava, nagila hava, nagila hava—”

Antoinette rushed in from the living room. “Get offa that chair before you have a miscarriage!” she hollered at Rosa. “And put my Theresa down!” she told Gary.

Gary raised the paws of the dog slightly higher and glanced under its belly. “This is a boy dog,” he pointed out.

“What are you talking about?” Antoinette said.

“I’m talking Theresa has herself a very fine three- or four-inch—”

Antoinette covered her ears.

“Stop talking about penises,” Rosa said, “it’s impolite.”

“Your mother’s got to grow up sometime,” Gary said. He turned the dog toward Antoinette. “Come on, Antoinette, open your eyes and look at it—it’s all there!”

“Santa Maria, what do I want to look at one of those ugly things for?” Antoinette said. “I’m done with that stuff.”

Gary puckered up his lips at Theresa and made loud kissing noises as he backed the dog around the room. “One-two, cha-cha-cha! Strut your boy-stuff, cha-cha-cha!”

Theresa stuck out his long stippled tongue and salivated. His tail wagged excitedly and his nails skidded on the kitchen tile. The porcelain in the china cabinet began to rattle, the floor creaked, and Gary accidentally cha-chaed Theresa right into the jelly cabinet, which skidded against the wall. Antoinette drew in a breath. “Watch out for my Lourdes water cross!” she hollered.

Too late. The translucent blue glass crucifix, which purport­edly was filled with water from the famous grotto, fell off its hook onto the floor. The glass shattered. Before anyone could stop him, the dog twisted out of Gary’s grasp, leaned down his head, and lapped up the water.

Antoinette shrieked. Gary looked horribly, incredibly guilty, like a four-year-old caught messing around with some highly toxic substance. He bent down to pick up the metal Jesus that had been attached to the cross. “Body of Christ,” he silently mouthed at Rosa as he cupped the Jesus and gently lowered him onto the kitchen table. Rosa tried not to laugh as Gary apologized to Antoinette, over and over, picking up the blue glass pieces and promising to buy her a new cross, next time he went to Belgium or France or wherever the hell Lourdes was.

“Save yourself a round-trip ticket,” Rosa told Gary. “They sell those crosses at Spencer Gifts in the mall.”

“How much?” Antoinette asked.

“Too much,” Rosa said.

“I’ll get you one,” Gary said.

“Wait ’til they go on sale,” Antoinette told him.

“Then he’ll end up buying two,” Rosa said.

“Don’t you want one?” Gary asked. “I think all American con­sumers should have one hanging on their kitchen wall. Sort of like a fire extinguisher. You never know when you’ll need an instant cure for leprosy.” He scratched his arm. “Think it cures fleas?”

Theresa stuck out his long pink tongue at Rosa. Then he trotted over and nuzzled Rosa’s legs. Rosa shrieked. “Eeew. Eeew. Gary get this dog away from me, it’s smelling my crotch.”

“Hey, get your nose outta there!” Gary grabbed Theresa by the collar and yanked him away.

“Mother, get rid of that repulsive beast,” Rosa said.

“I just got her!” Antoinette said.

“It’s a he,” Gary insisted.

“He or she, that dog is gross,” Rosa said.

“Frankie gave it to me,” Antoinette said.

Rosa groaned. “I might have known.”

Antoinette leaned over and smooched Theresa on his hairy snout. Then she picked up the metal crucifix from the table and sucked face with Jesus, too. She said to Rosa, “Frankie was over here last Saturday and he goes to me, ‘You oughta get a dog, Ma.’ And I said, ‘What am I gonna do with a dog? Listen to it bark all day?’ And Frankie said I had to be careful because I was a widow. He said men were watching me, out on the street. They watch me come in and out of the house the same time every day, Frankie said. ‘You better look out, Ma,’ Frankie goes to me, ‘or they’ll come in and clean out the whole house some night when you’re at Novena.’ And I said to him, ‘I can’t give up Novena, I gotta go to heaven.’ So now I got a dog, I named it after a saint, maybe I’ll get some points for that, if it doesn’t count, it can’t harm, what do you think?”

Rosa turned away, disgusted. In the corner, Gary was kneeling by Theresa, feeding him some of Rosa’s Manischevitz matzoh crackers, which she carried everywhere to counteract morning sickness.

Theresa crunched his big jaw down on a matzoh. He chewed, looked puzzled, then took another bite.

Antoinette looked horrified. “Isn’t that a sin?”

Gary looked at Theresa and shook his head.

“Not for the dog,” Antoinette said. She pointed at Rosa. “For you to eat that.”

“Oh, goys can eat these,” Gary said. “Some goys—like Rosa—even like ’em.”

Antoinette marched over and grabbed the Manischevitz box. She squinted her eyes at the label, which announced in capital letters, NOT FOR PASSOVER USE. “Isn’t eating this like eating Communion?”

“Oy,” Gary said, in his finest little-old-Jewish-man accent. “I should hope not.”

“Then what does this stand for?” Antoinette demanded.

“It’s sort of a historical artifact,” Gary said. “Once upon a time, the Jews were in a rush to get out of Egypt. Centuries later, B. Manischevitz discovered he could make a fortune by keeping the myth alive.”

Antoinette looked at Gary like he was nuts.

“It’s supposed to be unleavened bread,” Rosa translated.

“This isn’t bread,” Antoinette said. “It’s a cracker.”

“And now for a reading from the post-structuralists,” Gary announced. He held up a cracker toward Antoinette. “This signi­fies the unleavened bread, just like the communion host—or wafer, whatever the hell you call it—signifies the Body of Christ.”

“What is this signify stuff?” Antoinette asked. “It doesn’t signify. Either it is or it isn’t.”

“Ah, but what is is, to the nonbeliever?” Gary asked. “What is being? What is nothingness?”

“What is his problem?” Antoinette asked Rosa, who simply shrugged.

Gary kept on going. “What is the nature of the universe? What is evil? Is there a Satan? And how can we solve the big mysteries of the universe, like who really buys all those enemas they sell in the drugstores?”

“My aunts,” Rosa said, and Antoinette said, “Shush your mouth and have a little respect, why don’t you?”

Antoinette knit her eyebrows. Rosa, who thought she knew her mother like a book, sensed that Antoinette was about to ask Gary something pointed. But Antoinette simply pushed up her eyeglasses. “You married a crazy kookalootz,” she told Rosa.

“Don’t I know it,” Rosa said.

For the next two weeks, Antoinette reported she spent the major part of her day trying to confine the rambunctious Theresa to a sudsy bathtub. She chased the dog around the house with flea powder and a big wire hairbrush, then covered all the furni­ture with Saran Wrap and set off one bug bomb after the other, until Rosa refused to visit on Sunday unless her mother detoxi­fied the house. “All right, that’s it!” Antoinette announced. She took her broom and swept Theresa into the backyard, where she kept the dog chained in the dusty alley on Aldo’s old horseshoe post. “Ugly hound,” Antoinette muttered. But every day at noon she cooked Theresa an all-beef frankfurter, hollering “CHOW TIME!” as she tossed the hot dog out the back window. Theresa went wild, gobbling up the wiener in two greedy bites. Gary thought this was amusing. Rosa thought it was sick, especially since Antoinette made it clear that an extra pack of hot dogs a week was an enormous strain on her budget, and from now on, her kids could bring over the pastries on Sunday, thank you very much.

Antoinette had changed. Without Aldo around, she became more outspoken. “We ought to go out to lunch sometime,” she told Rosa. “I see it all the time on TV, these women who go out to lunch. Their daughters take ’em.”

So one Saturday Rosa made the trip over the Ferry Street Bridge by herself, and took her mother out to the corner pizzeria. At Il Giardino, Antoinette and Rosa sat across from one another at a laminated table for half an hour, neither one of them saying anything. The food was slow to come, and lukewarm by the time it got there. Antoinette shook her head at the skimpy salad, the limp manicotti, and the overly-buttered garlic bread. “A waste of money,” she said, after Rosa paid the bill. “I don’t know what these women see in this lunch business.”

Rosa left two singles on the table. Antoinette stared at them.

“Fifteen percent, Mother,” Rosa whispered.

“One dollar’s good enough!” Antoinette said, reaching over her doggy bag to pluck the extra single off the table.

“Mother, leave it!”

But Antoinette already had crumpled George Washington into a tidy little ball and was whispering at Rosa to take the money back.

“Non faro!” Rosa said.

“Stai zitte and take it!” Antoinette hissed.

Why were they bothering to speak Italian, as if it were a secret language that would veil their confrontation? Everyone in Il Giardino understood Italian, and those who didn’t, understood very well that it was the language all neighborhood families used when they were having a fight. Rosa felt like everyone in the restaurant was staring at them. Four months pregnant and already showing it, she turned her big belly in the direction of the exit and stormed out. Antoinette, clutching the dollar bill and her purse in one hand, and her doggy bag in the other, caught up with Rosa and trotted next to her on the cracked sidewalk, oblivious to Rosa’s anger.

“I forgot to tell you, I’m going on a trip,” Antoinette announced. “The Holy Family Shrine in New York, we’re going to see it with the Rosary Society. Frankie’s paying for half of it. But I don’t know. It’s a lot of money. Maybe I should tell him to cancel.”

“Go,” Rosa said, through gritted teeth. “Do something with yourself. You never do anything.”

“Who’s gonna visit my compare in the nursing home?” Antoinette asked.

“Let someone else visit him,” Rosa said.

“Who’s gonna feed Theresa?”

“Mother, forget that mangy dog!” Rosa said. “It salivates and has fleas and Frankie can feed it a hot dog every day, if he’s capable of boiling water!”

“Why should Frankie boil water, when he’s got Patty to do it for him?”

“He should learn how to cook,” Rosa said. “What would hap­pen if Patty died?”

“Don’t even say it,” Antoinette said. “I never liked her, but don’t say it.”

“Frankie would have to go to Kentucky Fried Chicken every night—”

“Managgia, he’s still got a mother. You think I wouldn’t go over there and cook for him?”

Rosa walked faster. “You baby Frankie,” she said. “Frankie and Junior, you babied them both, did whatever they wanted, cooked them whatever they pleased, and now look at them!”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“They’re guinea, Mother.”

“Who’s guinea? We’re all guinea! Why be ashamed of it?”

“They’re guinea men, Mother. Just like Daddy. They’re not American. They’ve got an attitude, that shitty wait-on-me-because-I’m-a-man way of acting.”

Rosa was aware that she was starting to shriek. She looked up and down the street. Across the way, the Borrones and the Paratoris had cracked their windows, even though it was 40 chilly degrees out. A Chevrolet moved down the street slowly, a clear indication that Rosa and her mother were making an offi­cial scene.

But that didn’t stop Antoinette. She trotted along, clutching her purse and doggy bag until they came to the driveway. “Who’s got the attitude?” she said. “You do. You got the problem with yourself. You live for yourself. You always have. You gotta be different. You gotta have a job. You gotta pay 25 dollars to get your hair cut. You gotta shop at Macy’s. Caldor’s isn’t good enough for you. I could starve to death—”

“I just took you out to lunch!” Rosa said. “And you stole a dol­lar from the waitress!”

“I work hard and take what’s mine,” Antoinette said. “Not you. You spend your life giving yourself away! You work for the government—”

“I don’t work for the government,” Rosa said. “I work for the hospital.”

“You spend all day talking to those people, who don’t even belong here. You’re nicer to them than your own family.”

“So why isn’t my family nice to me?” Rosa asked.

“You don’t like your family,” Antoinette said. “You gotta be different. You gotta marry a man from New York. You gotta drive a foreign car—”

“Gary isn’t a Subaru!” Rosa hollered. “He isn’t a Toyota!”

“You gotta have a baby and—and—not even baptize it!” Antoinette said.

Rosa felt like spitting at her mother. “How do you know?” she said. “How do you know we’re not going to?”

“I asked him,” Antoinette said. “That Sunday you were over and he fed those crackers to the dog. After dinner, you were in the john with the diarrhea—”

“Skip it, Mother!”

“—and I thought I’m just gonna ask him, just see what he’s got to say for himself. And he laughed, the way he laughs at every­thing that has to do with God, you know how he is, and he tells me he wants nothing to do with those voodoo rituals, but if it makes me feel any better, I can dunk the baby under the faucet when he’s not looking.” Antoinette shook her head. “Imagine!”

Rosa pushed out her lip, vaguely aware that between her petulant mouth and large belly, she looked exactly like Benito Mussolini. Truth to tell, she was concerned. If Gary didn’t let her baptize the baby, it might die and float around in Limbo for the rest of eternity, and Rosa herself would go straight to hell, or be condemned to twiddling her thumbs for thousands of years in the grey area known as Purgatory. Rosa was planning to douse the baby with water the moment the cord was cut. She was terrified that she would give birth, and three seconds later the world would end. After all, when she was in third grade, a nun had told her the world would end on Thursday. Now every Wednes­day night Rosa said an extra set of prayers, then woke up in the morning with a vague feeling of fear in her stomach. All day long the thought of Sister Peter Simon’s predictions—and the very idea of Nostradamus and his prophecies (which Connie some­times read to her over the phone)—sat upon her chest like a big fat burp that wouldn’t come up. Nostradamus predicted that mothers who gave birth just before the millenium would gnash their teeth and dash their babies to the ground, the fire and ice would be so all-consuming. Rosa had faith. She believed it!

“Gary never said we couldn’t baptize it,” she told her mother.

“You better talk to him,” Antoinette said. “You better get this all straight.”

“It’s none of your business, Mother.”

“Then whose business is it?”

“Forget it, Mother. You don’t get it. You don’t understand any­thing.”

Antoinette crooked a finger at her. “You say that to me too much,” she said. “But you’d be surprised. I capisce more than you think.”

Just at that moment, the sun came from behind a cloud. The sidewalk was flooded with light and the lenses of Antoinette’s silver eyeglasses turned inpenetrable. Antoinette’s eyes had dis­appeared. Rosa saw only herself in the thick lenses.

What did Rosa’s mother know? What did she capisce? Was she wise to what was going on—and not going on—between Gary and Rosa? Or was she just acting like she knew something, just as she had pretended to have had a premonition about Aldo’s death, when the truth was, all she really had cared about that Sunday afternoon was sitting down to supper? If Antoinette really knew something, Rosa thought—if she were a real mother—she would take Rosa inside and make her a cup of cof­fee. She would begin by apologizing—treading lightly on the troubled waters—before she told Rosa, Dear, you hold grudges. Too many grudges. You remember too much. You hate yourself. And now you have a hard place in your heart, that no man or woman can ever melt, and if you’re not careful, it will be the death of you.

But Antoinette did not say any of that. She did not tell Rosa what Rosa already knew about herself, but wanted her mother to say, so Rosa could feel free to put her head down on the kitchen table and bawl her eyes out, just like a baby, and receive the com­fort only someone so mean and nasty needed.

Rosa was tired of playing mother and daughter. She wanted to be mother and daughter. But how could she, when Antoinette was such a sham? Antoinette stood there acting like she knew Rosa, when really she was nothing more than just another bewil­dered parent, another Great and Powerful Oz revealed to be nothing more than a shabby human being, pushing buttons and pulling levers behind a tattered curtain.

Antoinette shrugged and Rosa grew even more furious. Wasn’t it just so predictable, so hot-headed, so TV-movie Italian, to holler and scream vile things at one another, and then forget about it all the next minute? Antoinette walked Rosa to her car, the infamous Japanese car that had irked her just seconds before. “Well, who’s to say?” Antoinette asked. “Who’s to say a little change isn’t for the better? You got your family now. And I got my life. I got Theresa, I get to play Bingo every Thursday without your father grumbling about my going out at night and having to eat leftovers from the night before. I’m going on a bus trip. I’m doing all right for myself. I thought I’d fall apart, but look at me. Look at me.”

Rosa lowered her heavy body into the car and looked at her mother. Antoinette stood proudly on the curb, clutching the doggy bag, which was soggy on the bottom. Rosa noted that tomato sauce was starting to leak onto her mother’s black pilly coat.

“She never loved my father,” Rosa said to Gary, after she related the afternoon’s events—censuring certain key phrases, of course—to make herself look good and her mother look worse than ever. “He was nothing but habit. She’s glad he’s dead. She likes that disgusting dog better than she ever liked him.”

“You really got it in for that dog, don’t you?” Gary said.

“It has bad breath,” Rosa said. “And it’s always sniffing my crotch.”

“Cheer up,” Gary said. “It’ll probably get cancer from all those Oscar Mayer wieners.”

Small consolation, Rosa thought.

 

 

 

 


*Blue Italian, Ecco Press, 1996. Printed with the permission of the author.