At the beginning of summer I had managed to get a job at the Superstyle Lingerie Company where my mother worked. I was especially keen on working so I could spend money on clothes and books as I pleased.
My mother was impressed at how easily I had talked myself into a summer job at the factory. Mother had been told I should get a social insurance card before applying. But when I called for information, I was told I was not old enough to be issued one. I took matters into my own hands, and called the factory owner and asked him if he could make an exception since I only wanted a summer job.
“You called the Syrian boss?” Mother was stupefied.
“Who else would I have called if I wanted the job?” I told her.
The boss seemed cheerful on the phone, or amused, and told me to report for work the next day. Two days later, though, he stopped my mother on the stairs and told her, in slow French, that I had to work faster because, by law, he couldn’t give me less than fifty cents an hour, even though I was underage.
The factory was on a side street off Jean-Talon Street, two blocks away from St. Hubert Street where I liked to go shopping. The owner and the office staff were all Syrian or maybe Lebanese, but the workers called them the Syrian bosses; the forelady in charge of the operators was French Canadian. But most of the workers were Italian, with the exception of two very wide, obese, elderly Syrian or Lebanese sisters who worked at the “finish” table, which is where I was placed. Lifting their feet seemed to require more effort than they could muster, so they moved around the large table by shuffling their heavy bodies along. They only spoke Arabic to each other and looked at me suspiciously. Our role in the manufacturing of white and pastel-coloured nylon ladies’ panties was to cut the threads left by the over-lock machines on the seams and cro tch.
After the boss’ reprimand, I watched the two ladies attentively. After years at this job, they had developed a rhythm to their movements as they got up from their seats, lifted dozens of packaged panties off one bin, carried them to their posts, untied the bundles, cut three threads off each pair, re-stacked them, and finally threw them back into another bin.
By the afternoon, even with all the windows open, the air in the factory became as heavy and condensed as a Turkish steam bath. The women’s movements around the table became more laboured, their fleshy underarms dangling from their sleeveless dresses, and flapping against their bodies as they dragged the heavy packs of underwear. They sat at opposite sides of the table, and looked like two massive Buddhas guarding and controlling with nimble hands the movement of the bundled panties from the overlock machines to the finishing table to packing.
I didn’t exchange many words with them. Outwardly I felt as sticky and uncomfortable as they looked, but it didn’t bother me. I knew that by the end of summer my stint at the factory would be over. By the third day, I was going to the bins as frequently as the other ladies, and the boss never complained about me again.
Since I’d gotten the summer job, I played less and less with the French kids, who suddenly seemed so much younger than me. But I spent hours on the phone with my friend Antoinette, though I still wasn’t allowed to go by bus to her house on Saint-Michel. During her last visit to my house, one Sunday afternoon, she had showed up wearing lipstick. My father said he didn’t trust her parents, who came from Campobasso, and were too liberal and lenient with their three daughters. After that Sunday, whenever the phone rang, he always ran to answer it. Once, five minutes into my conversation with Antoinette, my father pulled the phone out of my hands and listened.
“I know the tricks used by some boys,” he said later. “They have their sisters call for them. But you won’t fool me.”
With Antoinette, I mostly talked about the new high school, Saint Pius X, which we would both be attending in the fall. At the end of June, our seventh-grade teacher had taken the whole class to visit. The long corridors with rows of lockers next to each classroom, the large cafeteria, and the gym all still smelled of fresh plaster and paint, and seemed ready to contain all the fun teenage activities that my reading of Archie comics promised.
Together we had selected a pattern for a new school uniform tunic that her mother would sew for us. The pleated ones sold at the store we thought were too boxy and babyish, but every time I asked to go to her house to get measured my father would give me some reason why I couldn’t go.
I was afraid to push him on the issue, knowing how preoccupied he was over the Ville Verte project. At the last council meeting at the end of summer the project was rejected, and he couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone as to when or whether he would get his investment back.
“What do we do with the five lots we bought?” Uncle Tony asked.
“We can grow lots of tomatoes in the summer,” Father joked bitterly.
“We’ll try again when a new administration is elected in the fall,” Principe reassured him. “These things take time.”
That summer Father’s back had given out, and he often worked in pain, but he didn’t want anyone to know, for fear that contractors wouldn’t call him during the busiest time of the year. In the evenings, he’d sit on the balcony, the breeziest part of the house, sweating and cursing the humidity and making fun of the English homeowners gardening in the heat.
I often watched him peruse the thick book with the onion-skin pages containing illustrations of columns, friezes, and mouldings, which he had brought from Milan. Now he laid bricks, row upon row of red or white bricks. And sometimes he had to carry his own loads up the scaffolds because the contractors couldn’t afford manovali to assist the mastri, as in Italy.
“We look like Christs, carrying crosses,” he said, about the V-shaped wooden box with a long handle that they used to cart bricks on their shoulders.
“Che bella scoperta!” he’d say, referring to Christopher Columbus, when he was upset at something. “Couldn’t he have discovered a better country? Here you can’t work in the winter for the cold, and then you die of humidity in the summer.”
Each evening, Mother would rub Heet on his back, and he’d put a leather vest lined with sheepskin over his bare torso to help the product penetrate better. In the impossibly hot air of the apartment, the combination of smells from the medicinal cream, the wool, and his sweat was overpowering. He insisted that the sheepskin vest also helped absorb the humidity. How could my father and my whole world have changed so much in one summer?
On a particularly hot and muggy day, Father had returned from work in a cheerful mood. A contractor friend of his was close to getting a big contract in the city’s west end, and he’d asked Father to go with him to help give an estimate.
“Teré,” he told my mother. “You should see the house I saw today, in Westmonte. Now that’s a house! All stone! It belongs to a big Jewish doctor. We went inside to look at the ceilings, and we had to take off our shoes; the carpet was this thick! But you wouldn’t believe how cool it was inside.”
“They have a ventilatore to make it cool?” asked my mother.
“What ventilatore? The plasterer told me that they use the same furnace that heats it in the winter to remove the humidity. I’m going to try it with our furnace.”
“Are you crazy, in this heat? How can heating the house make it cool? You believe everything they tell you.”
“You women don’t understand anything about these things. It’s the humidity that kills us here, not the heat.”
My brother was still out at the park with his friends, and I was on the phone in the hallway just outside the kitchen. My mother was busy preparing supper, spreading freshly cut homemade pasta on the kitchen table, which was covered with the white sheet she reserved for this purpose. In the centre of the hallway, Father fidgeted around the oil furnace, which had been idle since the spring. He checked the on-off lever, then shook the pipe going up along the length of the corridor wall into the kitchen.
Mother looked at me
and gestured with her eyes, as if to say: “This is a good time to talk to your father.”
I cupped the phone and asked out loud. “What should I tell Antoinette about this Sunday? Can I go to her house for the measurements?”
“We’ll talk about it on Sunday,” Father answered, seeming overly preoccupied with the furnace. He proceeded to light it up. As its belly burst into flames, it started spewing smoke, black soot, and unbearable heat all over the house. I hung up the phone and ran into the kitchen.
“Turn that thing off before we all die,” screamed my mother. “The heat has really made you go mad!” The smoke engulfed the kitchen almost instantly.
We could hear the thumps of my father kicking the stove, yelling over and over, “Che bella scoperta! Che bella scoperta!”
“Have you gone crazy?” my mother yelled. She became frantic, pacing back and forth in the kitchen. She picked a dishtowel and moved toward the hallway, tried to fan the smoke away. I did the same. She bumped into my father, who pulled the towel away from her. In the skirmish, she tripped, lost her balance and fell right in front of the blasting furnace. I rushed to help her up, but father pushed and kicked me to get me out of the way, so he could move toward the side of the furnace to turn off the hot lever with the towel. Then he helped Mother get up, ran to the kitchen and opened the back door, fanning the smoke out with the towel. After the air cleared, he threw the towel at mother’s face and went to sit on the balcony.
Crying, Mother checked the cut-up pasta, but it was covered with blackened soot. I tried to wipe the strands of soft dough, one piece at a time, but she pulled them from my hands angrily and threw handfuls of it in the wastebasket. Then she started pulling at her hair and shaking uncontrollably. “I’m going to pull the last hairs left on my head if he keeps on talking this nonsense” she screamed, directing her words toward the balcony. “He’s acting like a pazzo.” I tried to hold her still.
“What is the matter with you?” I yelled at the top of my voice at both of them.
From the balcony, father shouted, “Who is pazzo here, eh? You and your daughter, that’s who! Things will change around here from now on. And forget about Saint-Michel on Sunday. And I’ll tell you one more thing; she’s staying at the factory with you instead of going around with that puttanella from Campobasso.”
“You’re crazy if you think I’m staying at the factory,” I yelled back. “I’m going back to school with my friends.”
“Don’t you scream at me or I’ll give you another one of these,” he said, walking toward me and showing me the back of his thick hand. He didn’t need to shout to make his point.
“Stop it now,” Mother said. “Let’s worry about cleaning up this mess.”
By the time my brother returned, everyone had calmed down, though the walls in the hallway were blackened, and the place smelled like a chimney. Then, Mother prepared some store-bought macaroni with chickpeas, and we all ate silently. I figured Father had spoken out of anger, and couldn’t possibly be serious about school.
“If only this humidity would stop,” Mother said at one point, wiping her forehead with her dirty apron. Without realizing it, she streaked her face with black soot.
“Ma, you look like an Indian,” my brother said, and we all had to laugh. To me she looked more like a sad chimney sweep.
“If we stay in this country, we’ll all become Indians,” Father added.
The following Sunday morning, before lunch, one of Alex Prinicipe’s insurance agents came to the house. Father decided that though he couldn’t do anything about getting his investment money back, he could do something about the life insurance policy he had bought from Principe. The agent noticed the black smoke streaks on the ceilings, even though Mother had spent all of Saturday washing the walls. Father told him that our furnace was defective but didn’t go into details. The heat had not relented and Father had, at last, discarded the sheepskin vest, and took to splashing cold water on his torso every hour or so. The agent spoke in a curt tone, even though Mother served him coffee and anisette cookies as usual.
“You’re making a big mistake,” he told Father. “In this country, you need as much insurance as possible. What about fire insurance? Anything can happen.” He pointed to the ceiling.
“Insurance is nonsense, an American invention,” Father said. “Why should I kill myself working to pay for something that will pay me only if I die? What kind of investment is that?”
“You still have two school-aged children. If something happens to you, they won’t be left in the street.”
“They’re able to work,” he said. “My daughter has a job already, and Luigi wants to learn a trade. They won’t starve.”
Nothing had been said about school since the last outburst, and I was afraid to bring up the subject. My mother, busy serving refreshments and preparing lunch, didn’t object when Father went ahead with the cancellation of his life insurance policy. After the agent left, Father organized the papers scattered all over the table. “Nice investments he sold me. They should call it death insurance policy. If he thinks I’m dying in this country, he’s crazy.”
“Will you stop talking about dying?” Mother said, raising her voice.
“Well, I’m telling you, whether you want to hear it or not,” he answered loudly. “I’m not dying in this country! I’m going back to Italy, dead or alive. I’m going back.”
“You’re talking nonsense,” Mother added. “Where do you think you’re going with two children growing up here? Are we going to go back and forth like zingari?”
“I should never have come here; I should have stayed in Milano,” he screamed.
“Milano! Milano!” my mother mocked. “That’s all I hear. What did Milano ever give us after all the years you struggled there?” Their voices were getting louder and louder.
“You don’t read the papers. I do,” Father yelled. “Things are booming in Italy today. Have you heard about il miracolo italiano? Have you? Even in the paese, they’re buying cars, while here I have to beg for work from these crooks.”
“Who is making all these miracles, when in Italy they’ve thrown all the saints off the altars? We’re not even supposed to believe in them anymore.”
My father laughed. “See? I’m talking about the economy; you talk about saints. Ehh!” He gathered his papers and left the kitchen.
Mother kept on talking above the sound of running water coming from the bathroom. “All I know is that, at least, here, we’re all together. We work, we eat, we have a nice apartment, even if that deal doesn’t come through. What else do you want?”
“Well, I’ve been struggling since the age of twelve. Everyone has to look after themselves now. As Mussolini said, ‘Chi mi ama, mi segue.’”
I started setting the table for lunch. When Father returned, drying himself off with a towel, I asked, “Can I go to Antoinette’s this afternoon for the measurements?”
“What measurements? Didn’t you hear me? Here everyone has to look after themselves. You’re staying at the factory with your mother.”
“I’m not even fourteen,” I said. “I want to go back to school.”
His tone was calm. “What’s the point of going to high school if you can’t go to university?”
University seemed a long time away. “But I want to! You want me to stay at the factory and cut threads for the rest of my life?”
“The rest of your life?” my father laughed. “Don’t you ever want to get married? You know, it costs here to get married. You don’t just go to church, sign papers and you’re married. Look at Alfonso’s wedding—the hall, the flowers, the cars, the photographers. Ehh! There’s no end. Everything we do here costs money. Where do you think I’ll get it?”
I looked at my mother for help, but she was suddenly taken up with cooking, and never looked my way.
My father kept talking as if the decision had been
taken and the discussion was over. “In five or six years, you’ll be married, having children, and staying home. School will have been a waste. Instead, think of putting aside a few thousand dollars for your future.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. And neither my mother nor Luigi, who had just joined us, seemed to react. She kept stirring and tasting the pasta, while my brother fidgeted on his seat, eating some bread. I threw the cutlery down on the table and walked to the living room, crying.
“Hard-headed bull,” my father said in his joking voice.
After a while my mother called me, “Come eat your pasta before it gets cold.”
“Eat it yourself,” I shouted. I sank my head into the sofa armrest, and there I spent the rest of that Sunday afternoon.
35. BACK TO SCHOOL, FALL 1961
SUMMER WAS FINALLY COMING TO an end. We could feel it in the crisp breeze as my mother and I walked along St. Hubert Street during our lunch break from the factory.
“What nice air. If it could only stay like this for the rest of the year,” said my mother, trying to engage me in conversation. I didn’t answer. She was right about the air, but I wasn’t about to agree with her. I now spoke to both my parents as little as possible.
I had just walked out on her at Maison Diana after she had bargained a discount on a fall coat she had tried, and then at the cash, she had insisted on not paying the tax. “Mais voyons donc, madame,” the saleslady had said in a disgusted tone, pulling the coat from my mother’s hands as I left the store, my face flushed in embarrassment.
Mother followed me, muttering—“Tell her to keep it”—not the least bit bothered by the abrupt treatment. She also took my sulking in stride and, once outside the store, she tried to appease me. “Don’t worry about the saleslady. Don’t you know that they’re all zingare? They’re used to the haggling. They expect it.”
I gazed at the store window and caught a glimpse of my mother pushing a strand of hair away from her face. She turned her head and said, “I’m so ugly. I look like a scarecrow.”
The Women of Saturn Page 17
