My Life, a Four Letter Word

by Dolores DeLuce

  I sat patiently on Mom’s new flowered couch covers with my legs dangling and watched Dad staple the long antenna wires to the wall so the rabbit ears would work. My Aunt Anna made a late entrance in her fancy new mink. The ladies made a fuss over her, but my mother huffed and walked away. Finally, Dad plugged in the television, and all the grownups turned away from Aunt Anna’s coat to look back at the TV. Mom smiled and Aunt Anna excused herself to the powder room.

  I moved closer and sat cross-legged on the floor just inches from the glass screen. I was pretending to be a little gnome because I was sitting in a forest of grownups’ legs. Dad turned on the switch and a pop of light came up, and in the middle of the glass were grey, black, and white circles. It’s a good thing that sausage and meatballs were waiting in the kitchen because the grownups got bored fast looking at the test pattern, and when Mom yelled, “Dinner’s ready,” all the tree trunks scurried off. I stared at the test pattern for a very long time, waiting for something wonderful to happen. Nothing did, but I had faith that if I kept watching, it would.

  By the end of that year, Dad had managed to save enough money from peddling with his mobile fruit and vegetable bus to put a down payment on a two-story home in Paterson, New Jersey. So he packed our precious TV and all our furniture, wrapped me in a blanket, and put me next to the dishes inside an orange crate. Then he slid me under the produce shelves of his peddling bus during the long ride to our new house.

  From the orange crate, I could see my mom sitting up front on one of the kitchen chairs, holding onto the driver’s seat with one hand and the bundle called Ginny with the other. The glassware did not complain, but I cried loudly in order to be heard over the engine and the grinding, shifting gears of the rattling old bus. Finally, Dad pulled over on the highway and came toward the bin where I was stashed. He bent down close to me and yelled, “Stop you’re cryin’ before I give you something to cry about.” Learning not to cry was a tall order for a girl with my name and nature.

  2. LOUD

  I preferred my black-and-white companions that lived in the TV over the outdoor view of bleak New Jersey skies, which clouded most of my childhood. I especially preferred TV drama to the high-decibel scenes played out around our family table.

  On spaghetti night in a kitchen that always smelled of tomato sauce, garlic, parmesan, linoleum wax, and Ajax, Mom passed a big bowl of pasta from Grandma to Dad.

  “John, that S.O.B. gave your cousin Millie a cheap, used fur. It was damaged goods, just like her, and now she thinks he’s gonna marry her.”

  “Gloria, can you pass me the brasiolli?” Dad asked.

  “And your sister, she’s another one, that cappo fresca. She told Ma that I waste your hard-earned money on too much food. She’s got a lot of nerve,” Mom said.

  “For Christ’s sake, Gloria, my mother can hear you,” Dad said.

  “Since when does ya mother talk English?”

  Ginny, my little sister with a springy curl in the middle of her forehead, pipes up in her singsong voice, “Mommy, mommy, look.” She holds out her empty bowl. “I cleaned my plate just like you told me. Can I have some more?”

  Mom scooped out another portion from the bowl. “Of course, sweetheart, you’re such a good eater. I wish your sister Dee would eat like you.”

  At that point I stood on the leatherette kitchen chair and, like the grownups I’d seen at my cousin Loretta’s wedding, I clinked my glass to get attention. Clink, clink, clink — “Hey everybody, everybody” — clink, clink. “Shut up,” I was yelling now. “I’ve got something important to say.” All moving mouths came to a standstill. “When I grow up, I’m going to Hollywood and I’m gonna be an actress.” In just five short years, my Mom had convinced me that Dad was someone to fear if I stepped out of line. But my father had never raised a hand to me, and although I was sitting across the table out of his reach, I could feel the sting of his slap.

  “Over my dead body!” Dad yelled. “No daughter of mine will ever be an actress. They’re all ‘puttana’.”

  I was only five, but somehow I knew that was Italian slang for ‘whore’. From that day on I secretly practiced acting and used it to convince Mom that I was sick enough to stay home from school while she went off to work at the factory. I was a good little method actress. I could actually give myself a fever.

  Lying in my parent’s bed and pretending to be sick, I would watch Mom get ready for work. I loved her vanity table with the beautiful beveled mirror glass and gold-trimmed tray where she kept her matching comb and hairbrush. After putting the last of the bobby pins in place to keep her wavy hair off her face, she would open the gold lipstick tube and twist it until the tube came all the way up to the top. I studied her technique. First, she’d run the deep red over her bottom lip, then carefully outline the two points of her top lip before she mashed her lips together to spread the creamy red evenly. Then she’d pluck a tissue from the matching gold Kleenex holder, place it between her lips, and blot. After one last glance in the mirror, Mom would come over to the bed and kiss me on the cheek, leaving an imprint of cherry lips.

  Sometimes when she wasn’t in a rush, Mom would share nuggets of truth about her childhood, like how she dropped out of eighth grade when her dad died and went to work to help her sick mother. She admitted she didn’t like school, so it wasn’t such a sacrifice. These were always my favorite times with my mother, when I had her to myself. I felt sad that she was leaving, yet the minute I heard her latch the door lock behind her a flood of freedom engulfed me. With everyone gone, only my grandmother was left to watch me.

  For the most part, Grandma lived within the confines of her mind and her room in the attic, so I had free run of the house. In all her years in America, Grandma learned only a few words of English, her favorite being ‘shit’, which she pronounced, Shee-ta; the other was the name of the downtown department store, Quankenbush. “Io va a la Quaken-a-bush-a,” she said every time she went downtown to buy her favorite cotton panties or a new black dress.

  She’d come out of her room just long enough to throw some leftover cold spaghetti in a pan with a half-cup of olive oil and serve me lunch on a tray in front of the TV. With Grandma, I could do no wrong except for this one day when she caught me belting out a popular song, the number one hit on the Hit Parade, ‘Hoopdi Do’. My family and I watched the Hit Parade religiously on Saturday nights. There I was, spinning in circles and howling at the top of my lungs, “Hoopdi, do, Hoopdi do, I get a fever when I think about you, Hoopdi- do, Hoopdi- do.”

  At first I didn’t hear Grandma hollering, half in Italian, half broken English, “Stata chi, stata-chi, shut up-a-you-mouth, bad-a-word.” Then she screamed even louder, “A fon cool-a-di-sodada!” and marched back to her room, slamming the door behind her. I couldn’t figure out why she was so mad. Later that evening Mom scolded me. “You owe Grandma an apology. I know she can be a pain but you know better than to curse at your grandmother.”

  “Ma, I didn’t curse. I was just singing ‘Hoopdi do, hoopdi do.’” Mom rolled her eyes, then laughed. Oh, I guess she heard it wrong; she said you were singing, ‘Foot-i do, foot-i do.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Don’t ever sing it around her again. It means ‘up yours’.”

  “Mom does, a fon-cool-a-di-sodada, mean, ‘do you want ice with your soda?’”

  Mom suddenly had one of her laughing fits that caused her to wet her pants. As she rushed off to the toilet, she said, “I’ll tell you when you get older.”

  ***

  During the weeks that the Million Dollar Movie showed my favorite films—the musicals and romantic comedies of the ’30s and ’40s—I managed to extend one sick day into a week. The Million Dollar Movie repeated the same film five times a day, for a full week. I learned every line to every song ever written for those films. If it had been that easy to learn the multiplication tables, I might not need a calculator now to multiply anything over five times ten.

  I imagined that I was an
alien from another planet who had been left on Earth with this family. Anyone not on TV was an obstacle to the world I would live in one day. If Lou Costello could make it from Paterson to Hollywood, then so could I. Hadn’t I been named after a movie star? Even on bright sunny days I preferred watching TV to playing outside with my sister and pesky cousins, who kept emigrating from Italy every few years to take up residency in our basement. In my TV haze I couldn’t tell one cousin from another, especially since they were all named Frank or Mary—with the exception of the ones who had Italian first names I couldn’t pronounce.

  I took solace from my companions who lived inside the box; dancing with Fred and Ginger in Carefree or skating with Sonja Henie in the Countess of Monte Cristo. I dreamed I’d fall in love one day like Ava Gardner with Jimmy Walker in One Touch of Venus, or magically grow up really fast like Jennifer Jones did in A Portrait of Jenny, so she could catch up and be with her true love, the much older Joseph Cotton.

  After watching The Countess of Monte Cristo twenty-one times, I wanted to be an Olympic champion figure skater like its star, Sonja Henie. Sonja, with her sidekick posing as her maid, ends up at a fancy ski lodge where she enters a skating contest as the Countess of Monte Cristo. After checking in, the girls realized they had nothing fancy to wear, so the Countess tears down the elaborate hotel draperies and whips up two evening dresses and a cute skating outfit for the competition. This movie ignited my passion for sewing and ice skating.

  Months before Christmas that year, I started bugging my folks for ice skates. With Dad up and out at 5 a.m. six days a week and Mom at the factory all day there was little time to take me to the ice rink for lessons, but they broke down and bought me my first pair of skates. By mid-January I tired of standing with the rubber guards over the blades on the worn-out Persian carpet, so I tried to skate on Mom’s shiny, waxy kitchen linoleum. Mom took pride in her floor. “It’s so clean you could eat off it.” That night when she got home from the factory and saw the damage I had done, Mom grabbed the broom and chased me around the house.

  “You little bastard, I’ll kill you! Just wait until your father gets home!”

  I kept running in circles and she kept missing me. I ran clear down the steps and into the basement, but she finally caught up to me. “I’ve had it with you and that friggin’ TV givin’ you ideas. Basta!” She came down hard on my head with the broom. “Here’s your Academy Award, you dumb Dago bitch!”

  It only encouraged me.

  Although I hated the bitter damp of Jersey winters, I bundled up and went outside in below-freezing temperatures. Mom took away my TV for two whole weeks, so I decided to create my own practice rink. Somewhere I learned that if you used hot water, it would freeze faster than cold, so I lugged bucket after bucket of hot water from the basement sink to use for my project. There in a 5’x5’ corner between our neighbor’s fence and the side of our two-story house, I poured the first bucket of scalding hot water, and by the time I returned with the next bucket, that layer would be solid and I’d pour another. This went on for several more trips to the basement until I made an ice patch large enough to practice figure eights.

  Alone on that thin slick of ice I skated in circles until dark, dreaming of the day when I could skate away.

  3. DIET

  By the time I was twelve, my vocabulary had expanded along with my waistline. Chub, Fats, Lies, and Love underscored the excess-fat breakout on my upper arms, boobs, thighs, and tummy. My sister Ginny, the good eater, had been the chubby one until I got my first period. Before that catastrophe, I could squeeze into Mom’s wedding dress with the eighteen-inch waistline and button up every satin button. Mom no longer dreamed of getting back her girlish figure, and it appeared to me that only the men in our family stayed slim. When the women hit thirty, it was time to shop at Lane Bryant’s. The females on my father’s side suffered from the Grosso family curse. The word ‘grosso’ means big in Italian, and since most of the gals never grew taller than five feet, all that cannoli had to go somewhere.

  When the whole clan gathered for what they called their ‘cousins’ club’—basically a monthly excuse to gorge—the feed was on with an eight-course dinner from antipasto to desserts. After everyone inhaled a pasta course, which included meatballs, sausage, pork, and beef from the gravy, then the main meat dish followed, which was either a roast or chicken with roasted potatoes, vegetables, and salad on the side. As soon as they cleared the dishes, out came the coffee, and the women carried trays of homemade desserts to the table. I watched as each lady sampled every one of a dozen assorted Italian pastries. “I never eat like this at home; I don’t understand why I can’t lose any weight.” This was the mantra they all shared.

  I was determined to shake the Grosso curse. Again, television provided the answer. I found a solution through the wonders of TV workouts with Jack La Lane and the popular diet shake, Metrical—the Slim Fast of the ’50s. I was convinced this combo was a sure-fire way to get me in shape for stardom. My urgency to get to Hollywood had only heightened with puberty and the discovery of my first true love, who rode through my TV on a Wagon Train. At first sight of Robert Horton, a tall, handsome, redheaded cowboy, I knew he was for me. Unlike my previous crushes, boys like Donny of the Mousekateers, or Marty of the Mickey Mouse Club spin-off series, Spin and Marty, Robert was a real man. There was something about the way he wore his guns down low around his hips that got my juices flowing.

  With the aid of vinegar rinses on my hair before going out in the sun, I commenced a natural beauty routine that I was convinced would change my brunette hair to a sandy blond like Gidget’s. I spent that whole summer smelling like vinegar whenever I broke a sweat. Along with this cockamamie beauty tip, I thought all I had to do was increase my workouts with Jack la Lane and replace my meals with Metrical.

  The only way I could swallow the chalky chocolate-like substance without gagging was to fantasize that I was on the set of Wagon Train with Robert Horton in his trailer, and we were sharing a Metrical Cocktail. I’d take a sip and say, “Oh my darling, you are such an inspiration. If it weren’t for you, I could never get through my sit-ups today.” Robert would lick his lips and move closer. He’d place his big man hands around my tiny waist and I could feel his six shooters press against my body as he breathed in my ear, “You’re almost down to eighteen inches, baby. Keep this up and I’ll get you a small part on the show.”

  Nothing short of an atom bomb would keep me from watching my cowboy lover every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. So you can imagine my predicament when Mom decided to schedule her first piano lesson for that exact hour. Our piano was located in the dining room next to our adjoining living room, just inches away from the TV. So while the folks were digesting dinner in the backyard, and with less than an hour before show time, I took it upon myself to redecorate. I figured I could move the large console TV into my bedroom, at least temporarily. Then I could shut the door and have an uninterrupted hour of romance.

  I had less than twenty minutes to drag the heavy mahogany set over carpets and hardwood. The TV was as big horizontally as our refrigerator was vertical. I single-handedly moved it through half the house while removing several yards of antenna wiring that was stapled all along the baseboard of the living room. How I manage this feat I’ll never know, but with all the strength of a frantic mother saving the life of her child crushed under the wheel of a car, I moved that console unit all the way from the living room, through the dining room, and into my bedroom.

  When my folks came upstairs with the piano teacher, and Dad noticed the furniture rearrangement, he came at me full-force. As the piano teacher cowered in a corner, Mom tried to hold him back. “John, stop it already, what will people think?” In his frustration Dad picked up my very first pair of high-heeled pumps, red patent-leather, two-inch chubby heels that Mom bought me the same day we went shopping for my training bra. One shiny shoe flew overhead like a B-52 Mustang bomber and hit the crucifix on the wall, knocking Jesus to th
e floor. The matching pump followed, hitting me smack in the middle of my forehead as Dad kept ranting, “And no more high heels and lipstick!”

  Wagon Train went off the air and I took a hiatus from dieting. Without Robert in my life, I resorted to mixing Metrical with chocolate ice cream

  4. BOYS

  I was only nine when I got my first period, and I went from Daddy’s little girl to Daddy’s big problem. Along with becoming a woman at age nine came the horrible cramps. I was still so little, and my dad couldn’t bear to see me in so much pain. To help me relax, he would pour me a double shot of sweet vermouth and then gently tickle my arms until I fell asleep.

  Between grades six and eight, I had gone from a training bra to a C-cup, and Alan Din took notice. Alan was taller and cuter than any of the six boys in my eighth-grade class, and he was my first crush who wasn’t a TV star. Alan Din was also the only non-white boy at St. Anthony’s, and the first person I ever knew from a racially mixed marriage. I learned the meaning of Eurasian after seeing Jennifer Jones in Love Is A Many Splendored Thing. Alan’s mother was a white British woman and his father was Chinese. After school, Alan and I would walk hand-in-hand while he carried my books. On the stoop leading to the porch, Alan gave me my first kiss, a peck on the lips. Over dinner that evening, I realized that Grandma witnessed the event from her attic window and had told my dad, “If Dee ever marries that Chink, at least I could get my shirts done for free.”

  In Paterson, the only Chinese people we ever saw were the ones who owned and operated Chinese laundries or restaurants, which we frequented often since Mom’s favorite thing to do besides cooking was “to go out for Chinks.” As my mom laughed at Dad’s rude joke, I sat solemnly like Jennifer Jones, knowing my romance was doomed. I should have known that my father would have no tolerance for any boy unless he was all-white, Catholic, and Italian.