Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

  Birdie was probably the smartest person Isola knew. She had taught Isola and Nina, and some of the others too, a lot of English, even though Birdie couldn’t read and wasn’t allowed to go to the school. When Mr. Gracey wasn’t around her father let her drive the mule. And once, when Birdie and Isola were at the Company store and were hungry for a tin of crackers, Birdie took the crackers up to the clerk and told him she was going to buy them on credit. The man snatched the tin away from her and told them to get out of the store, calling Birdie a “crazy nigger.” To Isola, Birdie wasn’t being crazy, she was being smart. And brave. Isola would never have dared ask the Americans for credit like the grown men and women did.

  “You gonna git in trouble, Missy,” Step Hall told his daughter. Sometimes he said it the way any father would, but sometimes, like when he heard about her asking for credit, he said it in an awful, quiet way, and his face went darker than normal, and you could tell he was worried and there was nothing he or anybody else could do.

  Two fish swam by and Isola shot her arms into the water to catch them. The hem of her dress fell, and the water soaked her dress halfway up. The fish got away.

  “You got to sneak up behind ‘em,” Birdie told her. “You git over here, stir ‘em up, chase ‘em my way.”

  “I’m going to get one myself,” Isola told her, but she stirred the fish Birdie’s way just the same. Birdie lunged for the fish, landing on her knees.

  Isola knelt down in the cool water next to Birdie. They moved their arms through the water and watched the ripples travel slowly to the edge of the pond. She could feel the grass at the bottom of the pond swaying with the currents against her legs, and her dress lift and move with the currents too. Little silver fish swam around them.

  “What they going to do with the man when your Papa brings him back?” Isola asked.

  Birdie shrugged. “What else? Bury him.”

  “I wonder if he’s somebody we know,” Isola said.

  “Probably,” Birdie answered. “Listen to that. They be looking for me soon enough.”

  A woman had started singing, far off. That meant more people were back in the fields working. A lot of times they sang while they worked, or they repeated funny rhymes that didn’t make any sense. Birdie and her people worked, but not like the Italians. Birdie could play, or “dawdle,” as her Papa called it, and she wouldn’t get whipped for it. Isola worried that she would get a whipping when she got home, or worse, that if her family went back in the fields to work and she wasn’t with them her father would get in trouble, maybe get put in jail like they were going to do with Mr. SanAngelo.

  “I better go,” she told Birdie, and she stood up in the water. “My Papa will be coming back and we have to go work.” Her dress felt heavy as she stood, and the water poured from the skirt. She looked down at it. The cloth unfolded and a long silver fish tumbled out. She grabbed it before it fell into the water. Birdie shrieked, then laughed.

  The fish squirmed in Isola’s hands. It was cool and slippery and it gave her goose bumps to be touching it, but she couldn’t let it go. She had never held a fish that alive, fresh out of the water, before. She splashed out of the pond with Birdie following, and she threw the fish on the grass.

  “Did you know it was in there?” Birdie cried. “Didn’t you feel it?” And she patted her own dress, as if a fish might be hidden inside her clothes too, and be ready to drop out and scare her.

  “I didn’t feel it,” Isola said. “I didn’t even know there was no fish near me.”

  They bent over and watched the fish. Birdie laid her hand on the fish’s side, then pulled back quickly. “Slimy,” she said. “Let’s make a puddle for it.”

  They dug clumps of dirt and grass with sticks and started building a levee around the fish. Then they scooped water with their hands and splashed it into the levee but most of the water seeped into the ground. The fish flipped around and moved its mouth and stared out at the sky with its shiny eye.

  “Fish pie,” Birdie said. “Like mud pie. Scoop faster.”

  A few inches of water filled the mound they had built, and the fish moved around in the water, on its side. Its gill opened and closed. Isola poked a blade of grass into the gill, then pulled it out again. They splashed more water on the fish.

  “A fish drowns in air,” Birdie told Isola.

  Isola watched the fish, its mouth and gills opening and closing. She had never thought of it that way. She tried to imagine what it was like in the night for the black man whose boat had tipped over. Did he work his mouth in the water the way the fish worked its mouth in the air? She took a deep breath, wondering what it would be like to have water come in and fill your lungs when you breathed. She couldn’t understand how breathing could kill a fish.

  “A man drowns in water,” Isola said. She laughed, then stopped.

  Her Papa had told them about a man drowning once, when they lived in Senigallia and he worked on a fishing boat. They had to pull him in with a fishing net, and there were fish in the net with him. The fish they brought home and sold. The man they brought home and buried. They couldn’t make money any more in Senigallia, that’s why they’d left. Things were bad. The government was bad, her father said. But things were bad here, and Isola knew that all those pennies her father saved were to buy them passage back to Italy, not to buy his own farm here like he’d said in the beginning. “I’m not gonna die in this place,” he told his family. “I’m gonna die back home.”

  They heard a noise just outside the woods, a man’s voice, and a girl crying out. “It’s your Papa,” Isola said. “Must be they found out who the man is.” They stood away from the fish and looked at each other. They hesitated, then moved near the edge of the woods, toward the road, so they could hide and watch the wagon go by. Before they reached the road the man shouted out, closer. He sounded angry, and the girl cried. They ducked behind some bushes and waited.

  It was Mr. Horton, who worked for the Company. He was pulling a black girl into the woods, and one of his hands was over her mouth. They could see the pistol tucked into his pants, the way all the boss’s men carried their pistols. Mr. Horton yelled at the girl, “Shut up,” he told her. He was pulling at her clothes, and pulling at her.

  She cried and slapped the air. She was a big girl, older than Angelina, and when she turned just so they saw who it was: Lecie Titus, Birdie’s cousin. Birdie rose up on her knees, as if she would stand up and go help her. But instead she put her hand on Isola’s arm, and Isola looked at her, and there was nothing they could do.

  Mr. Horton pulled his pistol out of his pants. He tossed his hat and pistol on the grass and the gun shone there, silver. And then he pushed Lecie onto the ground and climbed on top of her. When she cried out he slapped her face, and then he kept his hand on her neck.

  Isola stared, horrified. She knew what was happening, though no one had ever told her about such things. She felt Birdie’s fingers pressing into her arm. All she could think was if she had stayed home and done what her mother had told her maybe this wouldn’t be happening to Lecie. She thought of sewing, how she hated it, but how she would learn to love it, and would help her mother take in sewing and they would make a lot of money and save it all and then go back to Italy like her father said.

  Mr. Horton stood up and wiped his hand across his face. He picked up his hat and the pistol and pushed the pistol back into his pants. “Get to work,” he told Lecie, “before your whole family catches hell.” Lecie stood up, whimpering. She moved away from him, and then she turned and ran, the back of her ragged dress wet and covered with mud. Horton bent over and brushed at his knees. He put the hat back on his head and walked out of the woods.

  Birdie and Isola stayed crouched behind the bushes, hardly daring to breathe. Finally they looked at each other. Birdie’s eyes were bright with tears that hadn’t fallen. The girls stood slowly, keeping their eyes on the spot where it had happened. The woods were so quiet. The birds sang, the woods smelled rich and muddy and green, and ev
erything was so peaceful. The pond lay still and peaceful and white under the green branches. Everything was rich and beautiful. But as they moved closer to the pond, they saw the matted spot on the ground where Lecie had lain with Horton on top of her. And then near the pond there was the little levee they had built, with the silver fish still in it, but most of the water was gone. The fish’s mouth moved slowly, with long rests in between.

  Isola picked up the fish. It felt dry, and pieces of grass and twigs stuck to it. She threw it back into the pond and it floated. They ran out of the woods as fast as they could.

  There was no one on the road or in the field across from the trees. The sun burned down on them, and the air was heavy with the humidity that seemed to rise right up out of the damp earth.

  They headed back toward the Titus land, where people were working. They saw Lecie out there, her head just showing above the tall green cotton. She was leaning against a zoppa, standing still, not chopping the weeds. Others worked around her, nipping off broken branches, chopping at weeds, humming, calling to each other. But Lecie stood off by herself, looking at the ground.

  Birdie broke away from Isola and ran down the road.

  “Birdie Hall, ain’t you got home yet?” old Lud Titus called to her. Isola tried to follow Birdie, but then stopped. She knew she had to get home herself or she would be in big trouble. “Wait, Birdie,” she called.

  Birdie turned and looked back at Isola. “Stupid,” she called over her shoulder. “Stupid Dago.” Then she ran home.

  Magic

  LIZ ROSENBERG

  When I was a child, Christmas was a borrowed holiday. It wasn’t for Jews. We couldn’t live with it, and yet we couldn’t seem to live without it. We drove in slow, loopy circles on December evenings to admire our Christian neighbors’ lights. The green Buick dipped and swayed along the streets, like a boat skimming waves, while my father sang “Sweet Molly Malone,” and “Mack the Knife” in his pleasant, fading monotone.

  I sat in the back seat, my breath fogging the car window, and clung to a baggy pouch of green leather upholstery that had torn loose from the back of the seat, but which I believed had been placed there by some genius who understood about children and automobiles.

  Each year we would undertake the pilgrimage to Oyster Bay, to visit the yard of the Christmas Man. His house and shrubbery were loaded down with blinking, flashing lights, as if he were signaling some catastrophe to the rest of the Milky Way. It was said he lived alone. A mannequin Santa, oversized and lit from within, leaned drunkenly against an upstairs window. Christmas carols blared through loud-speakers attached to the porch, and a battery-operated Santa waved from the middle of the front lawn. His red sled was filled to the brim with sourballs—there must have been thousands of them—each one wrapped separately in cellophane. A clumsily hand-lettered sign invited each child to take one. I’d choose a red candy, shout “Thank you!” toward the loud-speakers, and skid away on the soles of my galoshes to the safety of the warm car, where I would join in my father’s refrain as we nosed toward home: “Alive, alive o-oh! Alive, alive-o-oh! Crying cockles and mussels, alive, alive-oh!”

  On other, less thrilling evenings, riding home from my grandparents’ apartment in Brooklyn, I would count all the lit houses we passed, like stars in a valley; windows framed in blue and red and green, each shrub with a spiral of lights; or, more rarely, a menorah with three or four of its orange electric candles lit, glowing behind a living room drape.

  On Christmas Eve I was loaned out to help decorate the Piscatellis’ tree. Marie Piscatelli was my best friend. She lived three houses down and four around the corner. Two hemlocks, encircled in greenish-blue lights, guarded either side of her front porch, where I would stand shifting my weight and stamping my feet like a small, embarrassed horse.

  These were confusing evenings—irresistible, because the Christmas decorations were so delicate and baroque, so unlike anything at home. There were clear glass baubles with snowy religious scenes inside; gilt decorations as pointed as needles at both ends; silver ornaments dusted with white frosting like the sugared dates set out for us on the Christmas china. It was somehow humiliating, too, because none of these things were mine. I had to be careful around them.

  This need for caution made me exquisitely clumsy. On Christmas Eve some devil in me emerged; I would fall into the fine-needled tree and knock things loose, my arms swinging like windmills. I remember one hand-blown ornament I dropped on the rug; it slipped down between my fingers, then exploded like falling snow.

  Marie’s mother tried to console me. She liked me because I was polite, and a good eater. I dismantled the stuffed artichokes she served before dinner, tasted the veal and peppers, lasagna, antipasti, hard cheeses, button mushrooms, and roasted chestnuts. I sipped wine like an adult and, when pressed, took seconds of the pastries she bought at the Italian bakery in Hempstead. Marie’s father had ulcers. No magic for him. He lived on cottage cheese and canned pears, and spent his weekends cleaning the garage, whereas Marie picked at her food and swallowed her green peas whole, like bitter pills.

  By the time my parents came for me I would be stretched out on the living room sofa with a cup of cocoa cooling in front of me, half asleep; stupefied by the bright, blinking Christmas lights indoors, the pyramid of gifts beneath the tree, the heavy dinner. In fact, I was a little tipsy.

  My mother would tighten her hand around mine as we walked home, and we came as close as we ever did to a theological discussion.

  “Remember, this is not our holiday,” she would remind me.

  “What’s our holiday?”

  “Hanukkah.”

  But Hanukkah was already a dim memory, a faint sweet odor of melting candle wax. “Why can’t we have Christmas, too? Everybody else does.”

  “Christmas is for Christians. It’s to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Do you believe in Jesus Christ?”

  “No,” I said, “but neither does Mr. Piscatelli. And you don’t even believe in God.”

  There was a heavy silence. We walked a little faster. “We celebrate people’s birthdays all the time,” I told her. “What’s so bad about this one?”

  “You’ll understand when you’re older,” my mother said.

  But Christmas was a child’s holiday. That fact was inescapable. Adults gave things in such abundance it made you dizzy and sick for a month, like falling under a spell. If it was a holiday for children, wasn’t it mine as well, by right? I tried to unravel these mysteries while I staggered down the block, swept along by my mother’s strong hand, but always I was too sleepy to figure it out, asleep before I’d even had my bath.

  Christmas morning, early—before my parents had had their first cup of coffee—Marie would call me up. It was time for the Listing of the Presents. Mine was a short list and I went first. After I had finished I waited in a long silence while Marie enumerated her gifts in lavish and scientific detail: pink coral earrings from her parents, and a glow-in-the-dark radio; from her aunt and uncle an angora sweater set; a silk petticoat from one grandmother and from the other a gilt-edged catechism; French chocolates sent by distant cousins; two stuffed bears; a chintz bedspread for her canopy bed; slippers made of rabbit’s fur, and brand-new Barbie doll outfits, which she would elaborate down to each gold hem or tiny shoulder pad.

  Most of these gifts were from Santa Claus, who was no acquaintance of mine; a sort of rich cousin to Jesus Christ. My parents divided things equally between the two holidays—eight tiny presents for Hanukkah, and one big, practical one for Christmas, despite my mother’s reservations—a new winter coat or, one year, a bookshelf for my room. We weren’t an extravagant family, and I was content with little luxuries and the few big necessities.

  Then one year I fell in love with a red sled. This had for me the symptoms of a genuine infatuation. I had seen it gleaming, languishing against the brick face of the hardware store downtown, and had admired it from a distance, and studied it up close from every angle, like a chandelier.
It was expensive. My father’s pharmacy was going through hard times; he’d recently had to lay off two part-time employees. Still, the vehemence of my longing made the sled both realer than life and slightly unreal to me—like the shapes in the fireplace that leaped up green and blue when my father sprinkled on a special powder made of sulfur and hydrochloride. If I stared into the fire for a long time—till the top of my forehead grew hot to the touch—I would begin to see things in the flames, as I did in summertime, watching cloud formations swim overhead. When I nagged my mother about the sled she just looked grim and said, “We’ll see” and “We’ll see” till at last one day, riding by the store, I saw that it was gone for good.

  Eight nights in a row the Hanukkah candles burned down to blackish nubs, nothing like the sanctified oil in the Bible. I nibbled at the burned edges of the potato latkes. No one was surprised when, a few days later, I dragged myself home from school with a sore throat and high fever.

  I would have to miss Christmas Eve at the Piscatellis’ that year. I overheard my mother talking with Marie’s mother on the phone. In compensation came a platter of Mrs. Piscatelli’s sugar-dusted dates and walnut-stuffed figs, which sat at the foot of my bed like disembodied things. My mother wheeled the TV set into my room and brought me tiny paper cups of ginger ale and a stack of comics on loan from my father’s store. She even offered to play Go Fish with me—an invitation which stunned me so that I forgot my sickness for an hour or two, as I hid beneath the covers reading the new comic books. My mother was not a playful woman; we’d never played games together, and I wouldn’t have known how to start, even if I had wanted to.

  On Christmas Eve my fever climbed higher, and anxious phone calls went back and forth between my house and the doctor’s office. I soon lost track of time. It seemed to me that I had lain in bed for weeks and was now better. I kept pleading to go to the Piscatellis’, begging my parents to walk down the street with me. But even the tears were scalding on my face, and hurt me. The wallpaper by my bed was patterned all over with teakettles which began to issue clouds of steam and then to shriek. My mother kept coming to me in the gloomy half-light with aspirins and damp washcloths. She and my father would walk me, wobbly legged, to my small white vanity, on which the vaporizer percolated like a coffeepot. I sat drenched in sweat and Vicks VapoRub, surrounded by billowing clouds from the vaporizer, under the thick towel my mother held over my head, commanding me to breathe, breathe deeper.