At the Copa

 

by Marisa Labozzetta

 

On the bus, the woman seated next to Vita has a transistor ra­dio. Someone always has a transistor radio, and they usually listen to Dr. Solomon Schlepman who seems to be on the air twenty-four hours a day.

“Dr. Schlepman, I need to buy a new car, should I finance it through the bank, through the dealer, pay cash, or rent one? . . .” “Dr. Schlepman, my daughter hasn’t spoken to me for two years because she says I insulted her black boyfriend. Now she’s getting married and wants me to pay for the wedding. Should I disown her, try and find her a nice Jewish boy, or take black English les­sons? . . .” “Dr. Schlepman, my husband has been unable to make love for eighteen months. I would like to know what are the causes of impotency and how can it be resolved? . . .” And un­hesitatingly Solomon Schlepman gives his answer.

Dr. Schlepman. Doctor of what? Medicine? Philosophy? Divin­ity? Whatever. How wonderful it must be to know the answer to everything. To anything. And what about dreams, Dr. Schlepman? Are you an expert on them too? Can you tell me why each night for the last two weeks I’ve dreamt of making love with a different man: the bagger at Food Town; the principal at my old school; Peter Jennings. That’s a no-brainer; you’re horny, you’d probably say. What do you expect after not having had sex for three years? Then why do I have not the slightest sexual drive in my conscious life? I can’t even come when I masturbate. If you don’t use it, Vita, you lose it. But the dreams, Dr. Schlepman. Okay, so you haven’t lost it. It’s just been sublimated. You are living in your dreams. You are like your mother, Vita Alfieri. You are a dreamer.

 

“Almost ready, Vita?” Sadie Alfieri had asked only twenty minutes earlier.

Vita was slipping on her Aunt Carmelina’s World War II vin­tage muskrat coat in front of the gold leaf bevelled hall mirror. She loves the coat. It weighs heavily on her shoulders, unlike mink, or today’s synthetics; still it makes her feel luxurious, like Rita Hay­worth or Ginger Rogers in those Million Dollar Movies she used to watch as a child.

“Do you have enough carfare, Vita?”

Of course she had carfare. Why does every morning have to be like Vita’s first day of kindergarten? She felt nauseous like she had that muggy September when her mother dragged a nervous Vita down the center aisle of PS 160’s auditorium and Vita proceeded to puke in front of a hundred five-year olds and their parents.

She began to fasten the satin covered hooks and eyes, but stopped for a moment to examine the name embroidered in beige script on the right front lining—Carmelina Passalacqua, such a long name to embroider; the coat maker must have hated her aunt. But then again, the coat maker was probably Italian and used to long names.

“Why don’t you get yourself a new coat,” Vita’s mother said, scrutinizing her from behind.

They never looked at each other face to face, but addressed their reflections in the mirror, and, even then, Vita tried to avoid her mother’s eyes as she put a white cashmere-like scarf around her neck. Like cashmere. Just as good as cashmere. Feels like cashmere. But it’s not cashmere. Not much in her life is authentic. She lifted her long hair out of the coat and let it fall around the collar. It was almost the same color as the coat and got lost among the fur. A quick glance at Vita, and one might have thought the coat were hooded.

“Huh, Vita? Why don’t you get a new one? Always with these old clothes. I don’t know what it is with you. When I was young, we were poor. We had to wear hand-me-downs. My mother would cut up my sister’s old winter coats to make one to fit me, and here you are still wearing my sister’s old coat, God rest her soul. Well, at least we know where it came from and what she died of. Not like those rags you get from that Praktikly Worn Shop. They could be a dead person’s clothes, and you would never know how they met their demise. Maybe from something contagious, or worse, they could have been murdered!”

Passalacqua, Vita thought. Imagine if people really knew what names could mean. Passalacqua—passes water or in other words, pisses. Carmelina Pisses. She laughed.

“Go ahead. Laugh. Gives me the creeps to think of you in those clothes. And you ought to cut your hair. How long do you think you can pass for eighteen? In a few months you’ll be forty. Forty-year-old women shouldn’t have long hair just like fifty-year-old women shouldn’t wear low neck lines. You can always tell a woman’s age that way: long hair drags you down, and that crapey neck gives it all away. Hurry up or you’ll be late for the Copa.”

“I’m not going to The Copa, Ma. I’m going to work.”

“That’s what I said, The Copa.”

“The Copa Cabana was a nightclub, Ma. I work at The Cabana Club. I make bathing suits.” They had been through this before.

“Copa, Copa Cabana—whatever. I’ll make some aglio olio for dinner, okay? I got a craving. You feel like aglio olio?”

“Right now? At eight in the morning? No.” She caught her mother’s disappointed expression in the mirror.

“Well think about it at lunchtime. Work up the desire. That way when you come home from The Copa, you’ll be thrilled.” She started to sing, “At the Copa, Copa Cabana. La da da da da. Do you remember the time your father and I went to Havana and I danced with Batista?”

How could Vita remember? She wasn’t even born yet. She can barely recall her father who died when she was three. One living image. That’s the only recollection she has of him, one vision of his smiling face growing larger as her baby swing with the wooden security bar that he has just pushed comes boomeranging back towards him.

 

 “You’re late,” Bobby Haas says, pointing to the clock, as he unlocks the door for Vita to enter the Cabana Club, turquoise and purple walled, a fake palm tree standing in the center. The paper leaves are not so much faded as they are coated with dust making them a pale olive green.

“The bus was hijacked by Cuban midgets.” Vita calmly re­moves her coat. Bobby smiles. He appreciates a clever lie. He is six years older than she, successful, attractive in a slick way (Vitalis hair, Old Spice cologne, his mandibles perpetually working away at a wad of gum,) married with three children; a good catch one might have said twenty years ago, one might still say if real mink is more important than fidelity.

Vita takes her place at one of the sewing machines in the back room of the store. She had wanted to be a social worker, but her mother discouraged her.

“It’s not a nice clean job like it used to be. I remember the social worker. She was respected. When she came for home visits, the families treated her like royalty. Nowadays, those do-gooders are lucky if they leave with their lives!”

So at thirty-nine, Vita was just as her mother had been: living with her mother, working as a seamstress. Only Vita’s mother had had a child and made gowns for high fashion models in Manhat­tan, while Vita, never married, assembled spandex bathing suits for middle-class women in Queens.

Vita sits in a row with two other seamstresses: Svetlana, a grandmotherly rotund Russian refugee and Antonia, a twenty-three-year-old recent arrival from Naples. They are cramped in the small quarters and their elbows sometimes knock into one an­other’s as they stretch and turn fabric beneath the needle shafts. A few feet away, Bobby unrolls yards of hot pink and black leopard spandex and cuts out the patterns that were custom designed to fit his clients. There is room to expand into a closet that is too big even for the hundreds of bolts of fabric stacked up high against its back wall, but Bobby refuses to give up any part of the storage area, which is separated from the working room by louver doors. This is where Bobby takes inventory with Antonia, where he used to take it with Vita, where he pretends he is Sonny Corleone and his penis is the longest this side of the Hudson.

Vita can still feel the hard cardboard ends of the bolts digging into her bony back as Bobby faithfully pressed up against her, lifted a skirt or pulled down slacks, grabbed her buttocks and madly screwed her every Friday afternoon at five o’clock for years. Bobby never forced her to do it, never forces Antonia, never promised raises or jewelry or even a future, never threatened to fire her when she decided to end it. Bobby is straight that way. He has something to offer, and if you’d like to take advantage of it, everyone’s needs will be met, everyone will have a good time. It put a little excitement into the work scene, provided Vita with a reason to buy sexy panties, gave her something to look forward to besides aglia olia for dinner. When she found herself thinking about him before she fell asleep at night and first thing in the morning, when she began to crave the smell of his Dentyne breath, when he started kissing her before he did anything else to her, she knew it was time to stop. Dr. Schlepman, she guessed, would have advised her to do exactly that.

The phone rings at 9:55. Rosie the salesgirl has a bad case of stomach flu. Why didn’t she call him sooner, he wants to know. She couldn’t get out of the bathroom long enough, she tells him. Now, at the eleventh hour, he must make a decision. Who will be Rosie for the day? Who is most expendable from production, which in his mind is always behind schedule? Each time Rosie is out, he presents himself with the same agonizing dilemma, and each time he comes up with the same logical answer. Standing in the doorway of the back room, he takes stock of the situation, while Vita has already begun to close up her machine.

Vita is his best and fastest seamstress, yet Svetlana curses the computers and the customers, and Antonia’s English is still poor.

“Vita.” Motioning with his index finger, he gravely summons her, as though he were about to send her down to Washington for a day in the oval office.

“Rosie’s out,” he says.

She nods and picks up the list of appointments from the front desk.

The day is filled with pink robes—women who have a physical problem and must be discreetly dealt with. Instead of a white robe, they are given a pink one that unbeknownst to them, clues in the staff on how to behave.

Ten a.m.: Nancy Woodward—the mastectomy case. Vita goes into the back room and lifts the prosthesis red two piece off the shelf. Although it’s January, the schedule is booked solid and that does not account for walk-ins. It’s the cruise season: Cancun, Tor­tola, the Grand Bahama Islands. This year everyone seems to be going to Costa Rica. A few old timers will stick to their condos in Miami or West Palm Beach. A ride across the George Washington Bridge sounds exotic to Vita.

While Nancy Woodward eagerly takes the red suit into one of the two dressing rooms, she hesitates to pull the green and white striped cabana styled curtain across the rod.

“Go ahead,” Vita says, smiling. “I made it myself. Go on. My name is Vita.”

She shoos her off like a child to bed. The woman takes in a deep breath and draws the curtain. While she is changing, a new client enters the shop. She is well into her fifties but convinced no one perceives her to be more than thirty-five with her long bleached blond hair and tanning salon complexion. Vita has to admit, the hair does not drag down this svelte lady, rather it adds a sultry air to this already sensuous woman who is accompanied by a dark mustached man in his late twenties. He is more than her lover; he is her spokesperson, a Ken for this Barbie who merely smiles while he points to the sample of a string bikini pinned up on the wall. It appears as though if she were to open her mouth, she might confess to all: her age, his lovemaking prowess, her fat bank account.

Vita approximates Barbie’s size and hands her a black dummy of the suit. After Barbie emerges from the dressing room, Vita po­sitions her in front of a computer’s camera while Vita stands in front of the screen that projects Barbie’s image. A bun wrap: Vita extends the fabric on the image to cover the woman’s full butt with the movement and click of a mouse. Breast firmer: She me­chanically inserts bones on either side of the skimpy cups. She clips the crotch one quarter of an inch. Center front bottom lift. She adds an inch to the waistline of the bikini until it skirts the belly button and covers a patch of flab.

“I think the bottom’s too high,” Ken says with a smirk. Vita takes off the inch she has added and an additional one that will probably leave a fringe of pubic hair showing on the finished product.

“Would you like a removable strap for swimming?”

“She’ll take her chances.” Ken winks.

“All set.” Vita clicks off the computer. “Which do you want?” She addresses Ken who is already studying the fabrics tacked up on a wall. He chooses the silver lame. Figures. “It’ll be ready in a week.”

“But we’re leaving for Acapulco in two days.” A condo left by her late husband no doubt, probably considerably older than she, of the generation that bought in Acapulco’s investment heyday. From the register, Bobby clears his throat.

“I think we can do it,” Vita says. She knows the skimpy suit will take no more than half an hour to assemble. She’ll stay late.

“Vita, would you take a look at this,” the prosthesis client tim­idly calls. Vita waits until Barbie is back in the other changing room before she opens the curtain. Barbie’s breasts might be a slight bit sagging, but they are big and all there.

“It’s gorgeous,” Vita tells her.

“You can still tell.”

Vita speaks softly as the woman studies herself in the mirror. “What you are still seeing is what’s inside. I can’t do anything about that. But on the outside, no one can notice a thing. You look beautiful.”

The woman smiles.

“Red’s a sexy color you know. It becomes you.”

Now the woman is genuinely blushing. Vita feels good.

“Save me from this one,” Svetlana begins to tremble as Vita picks up an orange and white polka dot one piece from the back shelf. “Four times I make over this suit. Four times! A magician I am not!”

They have been working on fitting Margaret Schaeflin for three months, and still the woman is not satisfied. After severe, nearly lethal, dieting, she is plump with hanging flesh all over her. Once Bobby made the mistake of telling her that they made bathing suits, not new bodies. Margaret left in a rage, threatening to have his license taken away. A week later she was back. That was the problem; she always came back. Today she takes the suit into the changing cabana, unhappy that Rosie is not there to wait on her.

“Let me see it when you have it on,” Vita tells her. After fifteen minutes, the woman calls her back in.

“It’s not right. I still look fat.”

Vita examines the suit; there is not much more she can suggest. They have already put on a skirt to hide her rippled veiny thighs, a drape to camouflage her distended stomach, padded cups to defy gravity and lift the breasts, giving the illusion of cleavage. She admits that a solid, perhaps black, would have been more flattering; however, Margaret has it in her mind that black is for old women, and she is only forty-eight.

“It’s not right. Rosie promised me. You’re all out to get me. Everyone’s out to get me.”

“Mrs. Schaeflin, most people are not out to take anything from you. We can refund your deposit and hope you find satisfaction elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere? There is no elsewhere! There is no second chance. You people are the only game in town and you know it. I was de­pending on you.”

“You realize there is only so much a bathing suit can do.”

“I’ll have you people sued up the kazoo! Your advertisements say: solve your problems: custom made bathing suits. My husband left me for a twenty-three-year-old. They live in the same apartment building. I want to sit at the pool and make him jealous. This is my only chance.” She points to the suit.

“Are you sure your body was the reason he left?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, maybe he was just restless. Give him a little time. I’m sure he’ll wake up.”

“Do you think I don’t know what I see in the mirror?’

“If that’s the only reason he left, then he wasn’t worth it.” “Are you saying I wasted twenty-six years? Of course he was worth it! He was my life!”

Throughout Vita’s childhood her mother had exhibited nothing but disdain for men: Vita’s grandfather had deserted her grand­mother and eight children, leaving them to resort to stealing away in the middle of the night from one tenement to another because they couldn’t afford the rent. “Sono tutte bestie,” her grandmother would say about the male gender—they’re all beasts. Word had it that Vita’s own father was less than ideal, a handsome ladies’ man who spent more time puffing Di Nobili cigars and playing cards at the Cafe Paradiso than repairing shoes at his father’s shop. But somewhere along the way, her mother began to romanticize him and their relationship, lauding him so as a husband and provider, just stopping short of having him canonized.

“Why don’t you play with it a little more and see if you can come up with something.” Vita leaves Margaret alone.

“Get her out! We need the dressing room,” Bobby orders.

The store is filling up with customers. Bobby splits his time running back and forth from the cash register to the pattern table at the back room.

“I can cut,” Antonia says.

 “Just sew!” he tells her. “Just sew!”

Margaret Schaeflin has not left the dressing room.

“I’m gonna throw her out,” Bobby mumbles to Vita.

She persuades him to let her try one more time rather than cause a scene in the crowded shop, and goes into what has be­come Margaret Schaeflin’s private cabana.

“How are you doing?”

Margaret, still analyzing herself and the bathing suit in the mir­ror, does not answer.

“You know, my mother used to tell me a funny story. Would you like to hear it?”

Margaret shrugs her shoulders. Vita takes the stool from the corner and sits on it.

“My mother’s family comes from Bergamo. Have you ever heard of it? It’s a beautiful hill town outside of Milan, which you know can be a terribly foggy city. Sometimes the fog is so bad you have to feel around the buildings to know where you’re going, and they often close down the airport. Well, my grandmother had two brothers who were very smart and very good looking, Gior­gio and Stefano. My great grandfather wanted to send them to Milan to the university. They were going to become lawyers. But in those days, men couldn’t exist on their own; they needed to be taken care of.”

“Only in those days?”

“Anyway, my grandfather found them an apartment, but then he had to find a woman who could cook and clean for them, do their laundry. This wasn’t easy because it had to be someone who would not become involved with the boys, someone who the boys would never be attracted to. So, he found this plain young girl from Bergamo, who was chaste like a nun—beyond reproach. Well, the boys studied and paid no attention to Celestina, her name was Celestina, and she took good care of them and didn’t meddle in their affairs. Then one night, Giorgio came home and heard these sounds coming from Celestina’s room. He stopped in front of her closed door and listened more carefully. It was un­mistakably her grunting and moaning. When he called out to her to see if she was all right, she said, ‘Oh yes, fine.’ And so he went on to bed. The next morning, when my great-uncles got up, they found no breakfast made for them, no clean clothes laid out. An­gry, Stefano knocked at Celestina’s door. There was no answer. He opened the door and nearly fainted. There in her bed was not only Celestina, but her infant daughter who she had given birth to the night before! Well, of course Celestina’s mother was immediately brought to Milan. Outraged, the woman asked, ‘Who did this to you?’ And Celestina meekly looked up at her mother and said, ‘I don’t know. It was too foggy!’ Get it?”

“She was a tramp.”

“Exactly!”

“So?”

“Don’t you see? This was supposed to be a chaste girl, a girl ‘beyond reproach.’ Get it?”

Margaret doesn’t get it.

“The point is that things aren’t always what they seem to be, or how they appear to be. What I’m saying is, maybe you’re husband left you for reasons you have never even suspected. When did he start to pull away from you?”

“When I began to lose weight. The more I changed, the more he changed, yet he had always complained about my being fat.”

“Are you a good cook, Margaret?”

“Oh, yes I used to be—strudels, stroganoff, dumplings. But when I started to diet, I put us both on very strict menus. I don’t understand why he was so miserable; he lost tons of weight too. He ended up looking so good he got a twenty-three-year-old!”

“Do you think he’s happy now?”

“Well, when I see him, he doesn’t look it, but I’m sure he is.”

“Why, Margaret? Why are you so sure? Do you think this new girlfriend is a good cook?”

“I doubt it. They’re always going out to eat.”

“You have something she doesn’t, Margaret. And that’s what he missed, and still misses.”

“What are you saying?”

“Food, Margaret. You both loved food. That’s why he left you and that’s how you can get him back.”

Margaret is intently listening. A smile breaks out on her face. “Have you ever made osso bucco?” Vita almost whispers the word and lets it magically roll off her tongue. Margaret shakes her head. “I’ll give you the recipe. Try it tonight. Ask him to stop by. Better yet. Leave it at his doorstep with a sweet note that says you were thinking of him. Maybe one of those Hallmark cards.” Vita runs out over to the counter where she grabs a piece of scrap paper from next to the register.

“What were you doin’ in there so long?” Bobby’s jaw is so taut is barely moves as he speaks. “I thought maybe she convinced you to be her roommate.”

“Shh! I’m writing down a recipe.”

“You’re what? Vita, the store is bustin’ with customers. We have a nut hauled up in a dressing room, and you’re playin’ Betty Crocker!”

“No. Sadie Alfieri.”

Bobby is about to grab the pencil from her when a smiling Margaret Schaeflin emerges from the cabana in her street clothes. She takes the recipe and pays Bobby the balance due on the bath­ing suit.

“I’m not even gonna ask, but thank you,” Bobby tells Vita. “Now go over to that redhead—another pink robe.”

 

More mastectomies, a double colostomy (twins), skinny ladies, fat ladies, young ladies, old ladies. By the time Vita finishes the string bikini for Barbie, it’s nearly six-thirty. Svetlana and Antonia left an hour ago; Bobby is rolling up several bolts of fabric.

When Vita phones her mother to say she’ll be late, Sadie Alfieri informs Vita that she decided not to make aglio olio afterall. She made chicken chow mein instead.

“You did good today, Vita. I’m gonna give you a raise—fifty cents more an hour. You deserve it—not just for today.”

“Thanks.” Those are the ones Vita usually has trouble with, the you deserve it ones, the ones for herself.

“You could use more help on the floor,” she says.

“Rosie can handle it.”

“It’s too much for one person—even Rosie.”

“You saying you wanna work the floor?”

“You need me there.”

“I need you to sew.”

She clips her last thread and turns off the sewing machine. Just sew, Vita. Just sew. She goes for her coat.

“You’re making a mistake, Bobby.”

“I’m makin’ a mistake?”

“Yeah.”

He is quiet for a moment.

“All right, all right. Two days a week you work with Rosie. I can get someone else to sew.”

She smiles.

“Hey, Vita. You wanna take inventory?” He has his back to her as he puts the bolts into the storage closet. Vita knows he stays in that position in anticipation of a rejection.

“What do you say, Vita?”

“I don’t think so.”

He nods.

“You still get the raise, you know. And the job. You’re okay, Vita.” He slides the last bolt on top of the others, unable to face her.

She slips on her coat. She is hungry now.