I would lie in my own twin bed on those silent nights and try to aggrandize Church into something he wasn’t. I tried to imagine that kiss he gave me beside his garage on Cape Cod, tried to pluck Anthony and my mother out of their smoky love scenes and replace them with Church and me, but Church always failed, the scene bubble-popping because of one of his smart-ass remarks. Every once in a while, though, when Church was upset, scuffing up in L.L. Bean moccasins and fiddling with his string bracelets, I thought I could love him then. He became sweet and vulnerable, his eyebrows slanting, more like the star-crossed Anthony Pantuliano staring dreamy-eyed at his love, Dotty.
The day I told him that my mother’s father was going to die of a heart attack, Church was in one of his hopeless, distracted moods. He said, “She loved him. Your mom, you know, she really loved her father.” We were sitting on the curb between two parked cars in front of Judy’s Arcade two blocks down from the Pantulianos’. The kids inside were pale and fat, hunched over Ms. Pacman and Joust, their faces greenish and flashing. It was abysmally hot, too hot for Jacko to be outside. The streets were junked up with nail salons and Cigarette Cities and liquor stores. Church had just found out that his dad had bought a 20-foot speedboat and that he and Daisy, his girlfriend, were going for a coastal cruise. “I could kick my dad’s ass,” he said in all seriousness.
“You could probably kick both of my dads’ asses,” I said. “One’s got a fake leg and one’s half-blind.”
“I can’t believe you have two dads. Jesus. One is bad enough.”
“You know, my parents met at your parents’ wedding.”
“Well, that’s how they got fucked over. That marriage was cursed.”
I nodded, squinting up into the sky, just white, no color. I thought about Church kissing me and I wondered if he was going to do it again. I could feel exactly what it had been like to have his hand resting on my little breast. I even knew which one it had been. I was feeling like Anthony Pantuliano’s daughter. What would Anthony do at a moment like this? I was desperate for some kind of drama. I was ready for my own romance, not my father’s romance, running off with a redheaded bank teller, not my mother’s romance with her first love. I glanced down at Church’s knee, a bony knee etched with fine blond hairs. I put my hand on it and stared off across the street.
Church said, “So, you want to do it?”
And I said, “Do what?” But I didn’t look at him and I knew what.
“Are you going to make me say it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I’m going to make you say it.”
“Well, shit,” Church said, standing up. “If you think I’m going to say it, you’re crazy.”
10
When my mom confided in Elsa Pawelski, her good friend from Mt. Carmel Church, what it was like to have sex in the backseat of Uncle Dino’s car, the failed rubbers, the blinking lights, Anthony’s shining penis blue, Elsa decided to tattle. She told her own mother that Dotty Verbitski was no longer pure and had been stained by an Italian boy from Assumption. Mrs. Pawelski delivered the news to her prayer group, which started a daily novena. In the fish shop, customers started to whisper and snicker at the Verbitskis and at Dotty, too, when she took money at the counter, which she often did now that it was summer. One Friday, the shop’s busiest day of the week, Mrs. Verbitski shouted at Jimmy McMillan and his two friends standing in line, “What’s so funny? You a comedian? You want to tell us what is so funny to you? You dirty little mick.”
Jimmy stopped laughing. He looked up at Mrs. Verbitski and Mr. Verbitski, who now had a knife poised above a trout’s head, and then at Dotty sitting on a stool behind the cash register. “Your daughter’s doing time with Anthony Pantuliano,” he said. “Doing hard time, if you know what I mean.” And he rocked his hips and grabbed his dick. The women in line sucked in their breath, but no one said a word. His two friends started laughing hysterically and hurried out of the store. McMillan walked to the door slowly, tipped his hat. The only sound was the little ting of the door’s bell and the clunk of the door as it shut tight.
Mrs. Verbitski said in a low voice, “Get out, all of you. Get out.” One by one, the customers shuffled out the door. The littlest old lady asked in a loud voice, probably because she was a good bit deaf, “Will you be opening later?” It being a Friday, fish was critical.
“No,” Mrs. Verbitski said. “No. Leave—now.” And she walked to the front of the store and pushed the last few customers out, flipped over the OPEN sign to CLOSED, and locked the door. Mr. Verbitski lowered the knife and laid it on the block. He wiped blood from his fingers across the front of his apron.
My mother was stunned. She slid off the register stool and brushed the wrinkles out of her skirt, idly. She didn’t say anything.
My grandmother banged her fist on the door, on the wall, the fat of her arm shaking loosely. She said, “Who are you? Who are you?” She looked at her daughter, Dotty, and turned away. “Kurwa!” she cursed, meaning “whore.” “I cannot look at your face!” She screamed it. “I cannot look at your ugly, stupid face! I should have known you were not a virgin, the way you take your large marching steps! Everyone must know it. You whore. Kurwa! You are nothing but a kurwa.”
My mother stood there quietly, her eyes darting around the fish shop. She felt sick, the smell of seawater suddenly pressing in. She turned and ran out the back door, tripping over the little step. She fell on her knees and threw up on the gritty pavement. She was already pregnant, but she didn’t know it. When she stood up, she could still hear my grandmother’s shrill voice, now directed at her father. Dotty stood up, blood trickling down both of her red knees.
My mother knocked on Anthony’s door that summer night in 1966, and Uncle Dino answered. He was taller then, but still with a thin frame. He was wearing a white T-shirt, his hair black, thick, wet. He took one look at my mother’s ruddy face, her red eyes, her knees bloody from falling in the alley, and he ushered her in, helped her to a seat in the living room.
“What happened to the punske girl?” he asked.
And my mother started to cry harder. “Is he here?”
“No,” Dino said. “He’s out with his photography, always taking pictures of the street, you know. But he’ll come home before he works the late shift.”
“I can’t stay,” she said. She was afraid of what my grandmother might do to my grandfather if she was gone too long. “But I’m not going to be able to see him. My mother knows everything, and she’ll keep us apart.”
“Oh, well, if it’s true love, nothing can come between you. Look at me and Bitsy,” he said, walking quickly to the kitchen. Bitsy was a woman he’d been dating. “Her brother chased me with a crowbar, yelling, ‘Fucking wetback,’ and it doesn’t matter. Soon we’ll be married.” Within a year, Bitsy would end up getting run over by a milk truck. Even though my mother didn’t know that then, the idea of Bitsy—a raggedly thin, blinky librarian type—and Dino Pantuliano didn’t really fit her notions of triumphant love. He came back with a wet dishtowel and handed it to my mother, and she pressed it to her knees.
“Tell him that I love him,” she said. “Will you do that?”
Dino patted her shoulder. “It’ll work out, kiddo. Things work out.”
“Just tell him,” she said.
“Okay, okay,” he said.
My mother jogged home, her feet swishing out behind her, her knees now sore, bruised. She stood outside the back door and caught her breath. The alley stank of dead fish, the narrow strip of sky muddied with clouds. She walked up the stairs, took the key from above the doorjamb, and unlocked the door. The room was dark, except for a slice of light thrown from the lamp on the street. It lit my grandmother’s swollen feet soaking in a tin tub of Epsom salts. Dotty could see my grandmother’s shoes halfway across the room, and my mother knew that she had thrown them to test her luck. Both were lying flat on their laces, heels up. A bad omen.
My grandmother started talking from the dark, not looking at her daught
er. “When I was a girl in Poland, we celebrated Dozynki. My first harvest working, I was so proud. They chose me to be taken by my feet and hands. The farmers swung me out over the harvest grain, the flax linens, with bread, salt, and copper coins beneath it, and then after, I danced with the landowner. Later at night, I fell asleep at the celebration and he woke me. I was alone. He covered my mouth. No one heard me.” My grandmother was staring into the dark room at nothing, her face expressionless. “When we are babies, we are so perfect. You,” she said, looking at her daughter, “were so perfect, but then you grew and grew into a woman’s dirty body, brudny, brudny,” she said, meaning “dirty, dirty.” “And you throw it in the garbage. You know nothing about anything.”
“Why didn’t you tell me anything?” my mother asked. “It isn’t my fault that I’m stupid, that I know nothing. It isn’t my fault that I’m no longer a baby.”
“Tomorrow,” my grandmother said, “your father will put you on a bus to the country to go to schooling with the nuns. You can pack your suitcase. We will see what they do with a kurwa like you.”
My mother was crying, her cheeks red streaked. She started to walk to her room, but my grandmother said one more thing. “I know that you are pregnant. Do you want my advice? Walk through a hole in a fence, and you will miscarry. Step over a stick on a rope and with any luck, the baby will choke in you and come out dead. That’s my advice to you.”
My mother hadn’t known she was pregnant, but now she was certain of it. My grandmother was always right. My mother had felt hungry and weak and sick. She walked quickly past my grandmother to her bedroom and threw up in her garbage can. Then she lay down on her narrow bed, curled up into a ball, and stared out her small window. She thought of climbing out it, down the fire escape, but then what? She’d walk to the slaughterhouse? Back to Dino’s? She thought maybe Anthony would come for her. But if he did, what then? She tried to envision leaving Bayonne with Anthony, only to get a couple miles out on the highway and run out of money. And now pregnant on top of everything else.
She imagined Anthony walking through the slaughterhouse, his finger deep in the sheep’s wool, running his broad hand down the bony backs of old horses. She felt something like the bones of her chest breaking, crumbling, but she stood up. She packed her bag. There was nothing else to do.
When she lay down to sleep that night and many times since, she thought of my grandmother as a young girl, flying out over the grain and flax linen, brave and careless, her skirt rippling at her legs, and then the landowner, his hand over her mouth, her small ribs pressed beneath his weight, how she became someone different, how an entire life can change on a dime. My mother wanted to believe that she could become a different person, that maybe it was possible to change who she was, not for the worse, but for the better. I remember my mother whispering to me in Dino and Ruby’s guest bedroom, “I thought she was right, you know. It had felt so good, being with Anthony. I thought I was a no-good whore.”
In the morning her father took her to the bus station. My grandmother was sleeping off a drunk, her deep breaths rattling from her bedroom.
He said, “I can’t go in the station with you. I just can’t.” He lifted her suitcase out of the backseat and put it down on the sidewalk between them. He hugged her tightly, awkwardly lunging over the suitcase, lifting her slightly, throwing off her balance. He whispered in her ear, “She’s wrong, you know. Dead wrong.” He let go of her then and she tipped back to the ground, heavily. She hated him for being weak and yet she loved him for his small acts of love, all he felt allowed to give her. He rubbed his eyes and wiped his nose with a handkerchief pulled from his back pocket.
She picked up the suitcase and walked into the station to buy the ticket. She waited for the bus inside. The loud wall clock ticked over her head. When she finally boarded and the bus heaved away from the station, she saw her father’s car still parked on the side of the building and her father inside, his eyes hidden by the shadow of his brimmed hat.
11
Juniper Fiske called her son often at the Pantulianos’, always kite-high and almost singing, her chirping voice, Church said, squealing like a wineglass when you circle the rim with a wet finger. I listened to Church say, “Really?” and “That’s nice” over and over.
“What?” I would mouth. “What is she saying?”
And he’d roll his eyes. He’d cover the phone with his hand and say something like, “She’s in a tizzy about grapes sprayed with pesticides in Paraguay or some shit.”
And then Piper would get on. Church would tell me later that she’d plod off to her room, shut the door, and give the real story, that Juniper was losing it, paranoia, that she was popping new little pills that made her do some kind of hopped-up June Cleaver impersonation. One night Piper found her clanging around the basement trying to snip wires that might in some way be monitoring her pathetic life. “As if anyone could bear to listen in on this horror show,” Piper would say.
Church’s dad made a rare call one day, but Church said his father seemed confused, like he couldn’t remember that he hadn’t sent his son to a military academy. Guy Fiske said things like, “Well, this experience will toughen you up, all right” and “I’m not going to bail you out, son; you’ve made your bed” and “This is for your own good. Structured environments improve young men.”
Church said, “You know I’m in Bayonne, right? I’m living with the Pantulianos. They eat leftovers and watch Barney Miller. You know this, right?”
Guy was momentarily flustered, and in a panicked, disoriented moment he put his girlfriend Daisy on the phone. Church said, “Uh-huh. Yeah, look—I’m no fucking four-year-old. You can save your goochy-goochy-goo for some kid you see on a leash in the mall.”
After the call from his dad, two things happened—I’ve linked them because both incidents hinged on Church’s deviant behavior: (1) he started stealing things from the Pantulianos and (2) he began to think we were being followed by a little old lady in a rusted-out Chevy.
Yes, I had stolen something, too—the photo of Anthony Pantuliano as a set-jawed young man with his wash of black hair—but the things that Church stole were strange. He didn’t take money, although there was cash in the house—once, I saw Dino counting out wads of bills at his little office desk to the voice-over of a baseball game and the quiet smacking of mitts. And not jewelry—Ruby’s dog’s-eye-size gemstone rings couldn’t possibly be removed from her arthritis-swollen knuckles, not without taking off a finger. Instead Church stole, for example, a refrigerator magnet prayer card with the bleeding, thorn-pierced heart of Jesus on it, followed by one of Ruby’s old bowling balls, Dino’s baseball cap with two beer cans attached at the sides with straws that could reach to his mouth, and a crocheted toilet paper cover stitched in red, white, and blue, bicentennially inspired, no doubt. Everyone was eyeing Church suspiciously, but the items were such a strange assortment that a motive was hard to pin on him.
And then there was the old lady. He’d seen her only twice, he said, definitely following us, but whenever we were out walking around the neighborhood, he’d get shifty and nervous. He wasn’t scared so much as exhilarated. He wanted desperately to catch the old woman, for someone to believe him. He’d tell me to dodge down alleys. He’d grab my arm and say, “See, see—it’s that old lady again.” But to me an old lady was an old lady, hunched and gray headed. It never seemed like the same old lady, and usually it wasn’t. He’d say, “Nope, nope, not her. Next time I see her, though, next time, I’ll go right up to her. I’ll prove it.”
I asked my mom if she thought Church was kind of crazy. I hadn’t divulged all of Piper’s information on Juniper, but I was beginning to think maybe it was something genetic. I’d always heard rich people were eccentric—Michael Jackson had just started wearing his face mask at public appearances and Hugh Hefner was conducting business at the Playboy Mansion in his bathrobe.
My mother was teasing her own hair by this point. When I asked the question, she rear
ed from the skirted vanity table, took a long drag from her cigarette, and said, “We’re all crazy. Haven’t you noticed?” And then she kind of giggled. “Look at me! My God, I’m severely imbalanced.” And she bent over laughing.
Later that day, Church and I were slamming Slurpees at the 7-Eleven to get cold-ache head rushes. Sitting against the brick wall next to the pay phone, I decided to be direct. “What are you doing with all that stuff?”
He said, “What stuff?”
“All that crap from the Pantulianos’. You’re taking it. Everyone knows it’s you.”
“I am not. Why would I want that stuff?” And that’s when he changed the subject to the little old lady in the rusted-out Chevy parked by the curb, peering at us, her beady eyes just barely visible over the giant wheel. “There she is again,” he said.
“Look, just admit it.”
“C’mon, let’s move. Just wait. You’ll see. She’s tailing us.”
“Why would some old lady follow us?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Some biddy who gets her rocks off ogling. She’s a, you know, a watcher, a voyeur. Hey,” he said, like a tough guy in a movie, “the city’s full of weirdos.”
Girl Talk Page 12
