by Nino Ricci
“Is he?”
“What did he tell you?”
“He said you came on to him.”
“Do you believe that?” She was practically shouting. “Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know what to believe.”
“He’s so full of shit.”
“He’s my friend.”
“Some friend, he’s a fucking liar. Do you believe him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re just as big an asshole as he is, I don’t give a fuck what you believe.”
And she was out of the car, the door slamming behind her and then the screen door of the house.
Something had happened, probably not as Vince had described it and yet real enough for me to use her uncertainty against her, her not knowing what I would find acceptable. Yet at bottom I didn’t believe she had wronged me in any way, that our argument had been anything more than the lingering need in me to escape her. For an instant I wanted to go to her and explain these things, console her, show her how I’d failed her. But I couldn’t see any way from there to the real truth of how things were between us, couldn’t bring myself to give over this single, hard grievance I could hold against her.
With Vince it was the same. As the summer went on I saw less and less of him, using what had happened with Crystal like a wedge, putting him off until we both seemed to have acknowledged at some level the arbitrariness that had marked our friendship from the outset. In the fall he went on to community college in Windsor and we stopped going out together entirely, occasionally running into each other in town and agreeing to call, though we never did; and within a few months he’d begun to treat me whenever we met with the same special deference he’d shown me in the first tentative stages of our friendship, and it was hard to imagine then that we had ever dared hold each other in contempt, had ever been close enough for that.
Crystal and I didn’t speak for several weeks after our argument. But then one evening she phoned.
“Hi, stranger.”
My heart sank at the sound of her voice, at the thought I’d somehow come round to starting up with her again.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to make any moves on you, I just wanted to see how you are.”
She’d given up her job at Diana’s and was working full time at the Fotomat now, having decided not to go back to school in the fall.
“It’s so cliquish and everything there, everyone’s such assholes. Anyways I’d rather make money.”
Afterwards she never called again. But driving through town I often passed her in her little Fotomat booth at the Erie Mall, went out of my way sometimes to catch a glimpse of her there, looking staunch and mature in her uniform and her pinned-back hair and still brightening then at the sight of me, waving and shouting out as I passed as if nothing unkind had ever happened between us.
XVII
We had built another two greenhouses on the farm, joined to the ones from a few years before like reflections, their spreading lake of glass now filling the field that edged Tsi’Umberto’s house. Together the group of them formed a space exhilarating in its vastness, with its long vistas of posts like colonnades, its network of wires and pipes and machines, its glint of metal and glass; and the farm now had the modern, efficient feel of a factory, of something that had dwarfed us, made us irrelevant, grown larger somehow than the sum of our individual histories. One evening the lawyer came by, Mr. Newland, and set out a thick sheaf of documents on our kitchen table which my father and Tsi’Umberto and Rocco and Aunt Teresa set their signatures to in turn, Mr. Newland talking to them the whole time in an oddly casual way about taxes and shares and assigning them titles, president, vice-president, treasurer, as in some children’s game.
“I’d keep an eye on Teresa if I were you,” he said. “She’s the one with the real power in this organization, make no mistake about it.”
And in the sanction of these documents and titles and seals some new final order seemed to have taken shape among us, fixing us like the last coming together in a story or film.
My own role in this order seemed defined exactly by my exclusion from it, by how little I’d known of these changes and plans before they’d come to pass. Even Domenic, who had impressed me with his stubborn commitment to his small, private aspirations, doggedly finishing out his grade twelve and getting accepted into carpentry at the community college in Windsor, had finally instead been quietly drawn back into the family, going to work full time on the farm, morose but also grown larger somehow, more estimable, as if he’d compressed into a single chosen future the force of all the others he wouldn’t have; and this, too, had come to pass as from some natural rhythm in the family I’d lost touch with, a silent cryptic molecular working I remained unassimilable in. We’d recently bought a new stake truck, the inscription that had been on the doors of the old one, “Mario Innocente & Son,” so familiar that I’d long ceased to think about it, replaced now with “Innocente Farms Ltd.,” shadow-lettered green, white, and red on each door in a wide rainbow arch; and it struck me how far my father and I had remained from the simple promise of that original inscription, the vision in it of some inevitable working out between father and son.
But I saw these things now as from a great distance, my father, the farm, my life there, felt only my imminent parting from them, the sanction my outsideness gave to my release into some new, unknown, uncontaminated future. I saw my father sometimes working alone in the conservatory we’d built off the boiler room, tending the vines and fig saplings and orange trees he’d planted there, kneeling like a child to build small protective basins of earth around each plant that shimmered blue with fertilized water like tiny oceans when he filled them; and it seemed possible then to imagine him grown old and calm and contented, pottering secretive amidst his vines and trees like some country gentleman. I wanted to leave him like that, safe in the small space of his private projects, had the sense seeing him there that things could be all right with all of us, that our histories, what we had wrecked and what we had lost, hadn’t crippled us beyond redemption.
Yet it was odd when we’d so clearly prospered that my memory of our years on the farm till then was only of setbacks, the constant sense that we verged always on the brink of ruin; and still now in the perpetual arguments among my father and uncle and aunt there seemed the continuing need in us to remain forever vigilant against the brunt of whatever catastrophe we’d shouldered upon ourselves, even Rocco now drawn into this grammar, his demeanour changed, underlain with a hard weary restraint as if he had failed at some important thing. All along we’d seemed caught in this tension between initiative and retreat, bravest exactly when the worst had happened, as if we found in our ill fortune a kind of absolution, and then afterwards clutching our fear again like a talisman, living our lives with the same frugality, the same sense of threat, as the peasants in Italy who’d wondered from one year to the next if their harvest would last the winter. When I thought of us there on the farm, it was always with this feeling not so much of having moved forward as of having struggled to remain the same, forever stranded as on an island within the tight logic and rules of what was acceptable, how far we could reach.
We’d taken a trip once with Tsi’Alfredo and his family, had packed our cars in the dead of night and driven through a chill October dawn to Niagara Falls. The trip had lasted just that one day, unfolding from our cars like a circus, all our provisions, food and pop and beer and sweets, pulled from our trunks at parks and roadside rest stops and then packed away again, our tiny caravan already wheeling back through the deadened streets of Mersea by midnight; and we’d seemed summed up in the trip like a parody of ourselves, in our avoidance of restaurants and motels but then this bounty we carried with us like gypsies, in our taking a trip in the grey cold of late October when the time for holidays had long passed, half the sights by then already closed down for the season and even the falls themselves seeming hopelessly remote in their autumn desertion. Self-contained as
we’d been, the world had seemed to flash past us like some foreign planet, a place we visited but didn’t belong to, dazzled briefly there by daylight and then our cars fading back again like satellites into the night.
The summer before my departure for university I began to visit the Amhersts again. At some point I’d started including their street as part of the route I took on my weeknight drives, instinctively slowing near their house as if to glean some secret from it though it presented always the same blank façade, the same glow of curtained light, the aloof nighttime calm; and then finally one night I found myself at their front door being ushered in by Mrs. Amherst, all their world suddenly as vivid before me as if I’d just left it although over three years had passed since I’d last been there.
“Victor, what a surprise! Come in, come in, I’ll call your sister for you. Look how big you’ve gotten, almost a man now.”
But the awkwardness was plain on her at seeing me again, something in her seeming to want to repel me even as she led me in.
I was left to wait in the living room, Rita appearing a moment later in the arched entrance. For an instant I didn’t recognize her, so much had she grown, her body seeming stretched like a cartoon character’s, long and adolescent and thin, small breasts forming cones in the cloth of her dress and her hair cut into a page-boy that made her face appear haughty and gaunt like a model’s. But then her small, childish shrug of awkward greeting brought her suddenly back to me and I felt a stab of emotion, surprised somehow at the sight of her, as if she were someone I’d ceased to believe in.
“Hello, Rita.”
Though already I felt some gap open between us, whatever possibility or hope I’d sensed in the instant of recognizing her seeming to vanish before I could name it.
“Hello.”
Mrs. Amherst set a glass of Coke out for me on a coaster and then left us, Rita sitting across from me in an armchair. She had pulled up toward the front of it with her feet on the floor and her hands on her lap, at once childlike and primly mature, her every gesture seeming caught in this contradiction, as if some younger, more familiar Rita had been trapped in the body of this awkward, guarded stranger.
“How have you been?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“How’s school going?”
“It’s okay.”
We talked uncomfortably like that for a few minutes, Rita fidgeting in her chair, kicking idly at the floor an instant or biting a nail but then suddenly reverting to a gloomy self-consciousness.
“How’s Elena?”
“She’s all right, she’s just upstairs. We’re sisters now and all that.” Though at the mention of Elena her eyes had darted towards me for an instant with a bright, guileless animation. “But I guess you already knew about that.”
“About what?”
“You know, so we have the same last name and all that, Mom and Dad had to go to the lawyer and stuff.”
We parted clumsily, standing in the hall a moment a few feet apart.
“Maybe I’ll come by again.”
“Okay.”
I returned perhaps half a dozen times in what remained of the summer, in the evenings usually, wanting somehow to avoid recalling the Sunday familiarity of a few years before. The Amhersts for their part seemed to oblige in this, remaining always shadowy in these visits as if they’d relinquished Rita to me now, Mr. Amherst out in the garage half the time at work on some project, the light shining hazy above his workbench there to the dull sound of his sanding and careful hammering, and Mrs. Amherst ushering me in and afterwards out again all bustling energy and hospitality but only the sense of her present in between, her muted sounds from the kitchen as we watched TV in the rec room, her muted voice from some upstairs phone. But without their earlier rituals my visits seemed to give way to a kind of formlessness, simply these dead, aimless hours that Rita and Elena and I spent hardly speaking watching TV, shaped only by the parentheses Mrs. Amherst enclosed them in.
“All right now, girls, up to your room.”
I’d expected something more from Rita and Elena, not this adolescent inarticulateness and inertia, the sense I had of simply being an adult among children. Elena seemed always to sit in sullen resistance to me, broodingly, reprimandingly pretty and watchful and lank; I could hardly bring myself to address her, had the sense always that she was seeing right through me.
“So I guess you and Rita have it pretty easy in the summer, just hanging out and watching TV.” Always a hardness in my voice despite myself, a failed nonchalance that came out as accusation.
“We have swimming lessons and all that. We don’t get to watch TV much except when you come.”
I imagined that if I could only get Rita away from Elena during these visits then some shadow between us would fall away, that we’d grow suddenly familiar to one another with a simple sureness and rightness. Yet alone with her there was only a deflated awkwardness between us, almost a boredom, Rita’s attention wandering from me then as if I were a sort of haze she couldn’t fix on. Whatever line of force there was between us seemed to need other people to pass through, as in the loud, the-atrical childishness she’d put on sometimes around Elena, always a contempt in her then in the way she’d play on Elena’s earnest going along with her that seemed a twisted deference she showed me because I was the outsider, less familiar now than Elena, less certainly won. I thought at first it was only when I was around that this unlikeableness came out in her, this way she seemed to glance off the world as if at once to control and evade it; but then more and more I noticed how Elena catered to her with the hurt tentativeness of being used to her rebuffs, how Mrs. Amherst always spoke to her with an edge of forced indulgence.
“Rita, you know you shouldn’t be wearing those shoes in the house.”
Once I arrived after there’d been an argument of some sort, sensed at once the house’s tension, the embarrassment in Mrs. Amherst at being caught out. But there was something else in her as well, the need to make clear to me what Rita was, as if to remind me where she’d come from.
“You’ll go directly back to your room when your brother’s gone.”
In the rec room Elena and I sat in gloomy silence, Rita on the floor cross-legged and stiff-backed in front of the TV, closing us out.
“What’s your mother angry about?”
“I dunno, some plants Rita broke or something.”
“Does she get angry much?”
“I dunno. Not really. Sometimes.”
Rita turned up the volume of the TV. We sat silent in the noise, Rita’s back blocking our view.
“It’s too loud,” Elena said. “Mom’s gonna get angry.”
But Rita gave no sign of hearing her, continuing to stare into the screen as if we weren’t there, holding us in thrall even while she shut us out. For several minutes we sat silent in our places and she hardly moved; walled up like that in her wilfulness she seemed dangerous suddenly, seemed to have taken some hard malevolence into her like a changeling.
“I guess I better go,” I said finally.
Mrs. Amherst saw me out, still tense with the pressure of concealing and disclosing.
“Mr. Amherst’s just watered the lawn, you’ll want to stay off it on the way out.”
And before I’d stepped out the volume had already died on the TV downstairs, Rita’s shadow disappearing an instant later up the stairs toward her room and then her door closing with a hard controlled thud, ceding nothing.
When the fair came to town at the end of the summer I offered to take Rita and Elena to Children’s Day. They were dressed in blue jeans and Bee Gees T-shirts like uniforms when I came for them, seeming made small again in their girlish suspense at appearing in their public incarnations.
“This is all they’re allowed,” Mrs. Amherst said, handing me two five-dollar bills. “Don’t let them force any more out of you.”
But in the car Rita pulled quarters and dimes from her pockets, a few crumpled dollar bills, and began to sort through the
m ostentatiously.
“Where did that come from?”
“Just allowances and stuff.”
Canny, evasive.
“Well you’re not allowed to spend it.”
But she continued her silent counting, carefully folding the dollar bills, carefully slipping them back into her pocket.
At the fair I quickly grew bored in the noise and heat, the crowds of children, my embattled waiting while Rita and Elena made the rounds of the rides; I’d imagined some sort of sharing with them like a parent’s indulgent husbanding of possibility but was merely the half-forgotten chaperon, visibly out of place amidst the midway’s tinselly forced excitement. As a child I’d awaited the fair each year as I had the feast days in Italy, the din of it audible from our back field, its skyline of rides and lights seeming to turn the rest of the town into merely the fair’s dingy outskirts; but then each year it had seemed to grow smaller and more tawdry, the island it formed like an illusion whose spell was broken once you’d sensed the edges of it, and it was hard to remember now in this onrush of children and noise what wonder had ever coloured it for me. Once I’d wandered alone into the barns beyond the midway where the competition animals were housed, the midway blare giving way to the murk of barn light and to straw-hushed animal sounds, and it was that image of the fair that most stuck in my memory now, as if I’d discovered then some older, truer fair still going like a spectre at the midway’s edge.
Rita and Elena met groups of friends as we went along, forming tentative congregations with them.
“You guys should try the Whirl-a-Wheel, it’s wild. We’re going to go on it again later.”
“I dunno, I think I’d throw up or something, it looks scary.”
But there was just this sidelong appraisal and then they moved on, this coming together and drawing apart. Rita would seem to need to impress herself on the others but then after some first boastful assault she’d lose interest suddenly and retreat into listless silence, attention slowly shifting away from her as from a threat.
