Worn Masks

by Phyllis Carito

  Aunt Maggie knew her place, that of an old maid, living in the home of her parents, and then her brothers. She never found a suitor that would give her security. She answered to her brothers after both her parents passed. She was always shaking her head and shoulders, saying, “Oh, hush, hush. Stata gitt.” Mary Grace’s mom said she had a bit of a nervous condition. This command to stay out of Aunt Maggie’s living room, and that Uncle Paul would not be going up to his room shook Mary Grace with uncertainty.

  Some weeks later Mary Grace peeked through the bars of the banister at the top of the stairs, where they had told her to stay. Even her mother had gone downstairs. Mary Grace watched as they removed Uncle Paul on a stretcher from Aunt Maggie’s apartment. She watched the men in white coats carrying him on a board covered in a white sheet. “Gone for good,” was her mother’s explanation as the door closed behind the stretcher and the back of a bald man whose head was white and smooth as his coat.

  Mary Grace ran down the stairs, planning to follow the white truck, but her mom caught her arm and said, “Upstairs!” Mary Grace pulled away, and as she passed through the front door, whipped it closed behind her.

  She hesitated for just a moment as the glass shattered, then she ran, ran until she couldn’t run any longer, the stitch in her side cutting off her breath. She slipped into the park through a hole in the chain link fence, sat on a swing and proclaimed, “I am going to stay here forever!”

  Hours later her dad came to get her. His eyes were red and he had about him the sweet pungent smell of Uncle Paul. For just a moment he looked at her, pushed the hair back from her eyes. “Oh, bambina mia, your momma is very upset. You broke the window in Aunt Maggie’s door. You have to pay for the window.”

  Mary Grace’s dad took her hand, and they walked home, hand in hand, without another word.

  The Attic and The Porch

  Chapter 6

  The Attic

  IT WAS SHORTLY after Uncle Paul died that Mary Grace extended her bathroom to attic visits. The visits to the attic consisted of moving from the top step onto the attic platform, moving to different sections of the floor, where her dad’s tools where kept, where Aunt Maggie’s trunk was, and finally into Uncle Paul’s room.

  On the rare occasion that she talked with her mother, she still tried to ask questions about Uncle Paul, but the answers remained cryptic and brief.

  “Was Uncle Paul Daddy’s older brother?”

  “That’s why he got Papa’s pocket watch, and that’s not around anymore either. Now you mind you p’s and q’s, Maria Graziella. Children should be seen and not heard,” her mom demanded with bitter saliva escaping at the corner of her mouth.

  Mary Grace wanted to know, but she didn’t know how to find out about Uncle Paul. Whatever tidbits she gleaned, she pictured: a pocket watch, gold, with scrolling carved around the edge, and a chain looped onto it. Yet, she could not put in words what she wanted to know about Uncle Paul having the pocket watch. She could only focus on the picture forming in her mind, placing each detail in order. This was a habit she had of thinking about how something looked, smelled, felt in her hand. Mary Grace could sit very still and look out as if to nothing, but the picture would be fully formed in front of her.

  “Such dilly-dally, wake up. Go clean the . . .” her mom would say. And poof, the image, the thoughts, would be lost, whatever it was; the cracks in the sidewalk, how a flower squeezed out from the speck of dirt in between the crevices; how the sun made her mother’s shadow even bigger, and always overlapping Mary Grace’s. Mary Grace preferred the shadows though, not to live in the burning sunshine where everything gets unmasked. Isn’t that where the truths lived about Uncle Paul, in the shadows, not in the open light? To be seen was to be exposed.

  There was an order to how everything was placed in the attic room. She saw the shapes and patterns—there was a faded rectangular spot of about three feet by four feet in the middle of the wooden floor, where a rug used to be, and under the front corner of the cot; which was covered in wool army blankets. There was a pair of worn, brown, leather shoes, and one had a broken lace. But, something was different since Uncle Paul died. Every other time she had come up, after the first time she dared to ascend the steps; there had been a picture drawn in charcoal tucked into the side of the mirror. Some of them were of a cat or dog, but most were of a bird soaring across the sky. There were no more new pictures. She wondered where he had gotten them, and where they had gone to now.

  Every detail of the room stayed with her. The light switch was attached to a string that turned on a bare bulb in the center of the ceiling. The doubled pastry box string then was strung across the room and attached to small eyes hooks by the wall next to the door and in the opposite direction to the window frame by the bed, tying together all the angles, squares, and rectangles across the room and into her photo-memory.

  When she closed the door she saw her foggy reflection, or was it Uncle Paul’s eyes she saw, on a small square of mirror hanging over a hook, the silver reflective almost all flecked away. Next to it was a faded towel hanging from a large nail. Why would her father and aunt leave all of Uncle Paul here?

  The Porch

  On un giomo che fa molto caldo or a summer scorcher, the kind of day that brings light waves in front of your eyes, heat that prickles your skin like a thousand spiders inching over it, and everything moving in slow motion, Mary Grace was shaken from the daze of the heat by a stranger. It was during a run of crackling hot summer days, “Hot like the year you were born,” said Aunt Maggie, who Mary Grace had joined on the porch. Against the house was the folding chair Uncle Paul used to sit on, and another that was her mother’s, lined up along with an old wooden kitchen chair, and ending with Aunt Maggie’s creaky rocking chair. On the other side of Aunt Maggie’s chair was a small table with one leg propped up on a pack of her father’s matches. In the right front corner was a wooden box with empty seltzer bottles ready to be changed out.

  Mary Grace had heard neighbors say Aunt Maggie was a fixture on that porch, but she didn’t quite know what they meant. She knew Aunt Maggie was different than her mother, who most times didn’t primp herself. Aunt Maggie was always checking her curly hair in the hall mirror before coming out onto the porch. Often on the porch she spent time filing her perfectly shaped round nails and polishing them with a light shade of pink polish. Then she stretched her hands out along her long thighs until the paint dried. Mary Grace sat next to Aunt Maggie, and was allowed to stay if she was quiet. She knew how to be around Aunt Maggie. Unlike her mother who would react differently each time you approached her, Aunt Maggie always was ready to show her soft under body to Mary Grace. Mary Grace counted the wooden floorboards, with the grey paint mostly peeled away. Each person passing nodded their hellos to Aunt Maggie, and some she answered and some she grumbled under her breath “busy-bodies.”

  It was late in the day, but the heat had not subsided. After a while a man approached with a cupped cigarette in his palm, dragging his feet in heavy brown leather shoes. He had a bulbous nose, pocked skin, and large round eyes—all so similar to Uncle Paul. Mary Grace wondered if Aunt Maggie was thinking the same thing, when suddenly Aunt Maggie was on her feet, and the man was stopping right at their stoop.

  “I thought I’d come by and tell you I saw the cugini. They were sorry about Paul. It wasn’t the same going to the old country without Paul. Sad, sad.”

  Aunt Maggie nodded at him, but didn’t seem to be able to speak. Mary Grace came up behind her.

  “Ah, the bambina. They asked about her. Sad they would not have another picture of her. They loved his sketches. That sister-in-law of yours never even told them about Paul.”

  Then Aunt Maggie blurted out, “Let it all rest. My brother, rest-in-peace, did everything he could. Ah. It is so damn hot.”

  “Yes, fa molti caldo. I just was passing this way to go to the cleaners.” He lifted the coat over his arm upward. Tell Luigi I said ciao. Ciao.”

  His eyes met Ma
ry Grace’s for a split-second. Who was this man? How did he know her Uncle Paul? What was he talking about?

  She tried to ask Aunt Maggie, but her shoulders were shuddering and she said in a barely audible voice, “Oh, hush, hush. Stata gitt.” Mary Grace decided Uncle Paul was trying to get a message to her. Mary Grace closed her eyes, thought about the details of the attic room, pictures that were carved in her mind’s eye.

  The Attic

  She would never be able to explain what happened next, and why when she visited the attic later that evening, sat on the floor against the door thinking about the man they had seen, it was the first time she noticed the box. She would say she never could decide if that box had always been there and that day she was directed to it, or if Aunt Maggie had somehow, between the time of the man’s passing on the street and when she had dinner with her parents, brought that box there.

  Mary Grace never sat on the cot. She wasn’t sure if it would squeak or even collapse, as slight as it seemed. She always sat on the floor, and that day, she sat against the door facing the bed. With the late sun coming through the window at just the right angle, the light drew her eyes to the object under the back leg of the cot. She crawled over and reached under to find a tin box.

  Mary Grace found in the box a faded photograph of Uncle Paul in uniform together with a lady, squinting and smiling under a feathery hat, standing in front of a stone church. There was a commendation for saving the life of Rocco Santelli, and a yellowed article talking about the ice floating on the East River that late January day. There was also an identification badge for the Department of Sanitation, a pocket watch, and two notebooks of drawings inscribed in faded blue ink: by Paul Maschere per mia bella, and by Paul Maschere per le due mie belle.” There were pictures of the lady, the church, fields, the attic room, the tiled bathroom, a frozen river, and of Mary Grace’s face and eyes.

  She held the books tight against her chest, the stale air in the attic keeping everything still and heavy. She sat there until they were banging on the bathroom door. “Unlock this door! What are you doing? Come out of there.” She put everything back in the box, tucked it back under the cot, and quietly descended the attic stairs.

  Daddy

  Chapter 7

  “GO BACK TO sleep,” Mom called.

  “I’m thirsty.”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  “What’s the matter?” Dad mumbled.

  “Nothing,” Mary Grace whispered.

  “Now you woke up your father. Just go back to sleep,” Mom said.

  “What’s wrong with the bambina?”

  “Daddy, I had a bad dream. I’m thirsty.”

  “Spoilin’ her, you’re always spoilin’ her.”

  Dad brought her water and as Mary Grace sat up, he placed her hands around the cup. She felt the coolness of the ceramic mug, and then his large warm hand on top of hers, guiding the water to her mouth. With his other hand he pushed her hair back away from her eyes.

  “You better take her to the bathroom before she has an accident.”

  “What?”

  “The bathroom,” Mom said.

  Mary Grace tugged on his arm.

  He put on her slippers. “An-di-amo. Let’s go.” Her father stretched the word out slowly.

  He unlocked the kitchen door and led her down the hall to the bathroom, put on the light, and pulled the door partially closed. “I’ll wait.”

  He went back down the hall, took the cigarettes out from behind the plant, lit up, and stood at the top of the stairs.

  The toilet flushed. “Wash your hands.”

  The water turned off. “Shut the light.”

  Mary Grace walked toward him, as he put the cigarette out in the dirt around the plant, and he smiled at her sleepy face. He guided her past the open stairway back into the kitchen and relocked the door. He brought her into the living room, tucked her in on the couch turned bed. Again, his hand swept across her forehead pushing the hair back, patting the top of her head. “Go to sleep now, bella.”

  She heard him get back into his bed.

  “You’re spoilin’ her.”

  Mary Grace blinked awake. Daddy? She was so thirsty. Where was she?

  She was in their bed. She was being a daughter. Her dad had died over ten years ago. She had kept a perfunctory calling ritual to her mom, as promised to him, every, or almost every month, since then. And, now she was here in their bed.

  She couldn’t think. Maybe it had been a mistake to come. How many days had she been here repeating to herself her friend’s advice: Think of her as a stranger who has no one. You would be kind to a stranger.

  Locked In

  Chapter 8

  MARY GRACE RELUCTANTLY maneuvered her mother’s wheelchair into the makeshift hairdressers, next to a woman who was sitting stiffly in a straight back chair, as if her body was mimicking the chair. The woman was quiet, her clothes hung draped on what seemed like a once much fuller body, but now they dwarfed her frail frame. Mary Grace nodded at her and then looked away. There were other women at different stations, two of them with their heads under the dryers, heads full of curlers. One was in a quiet sleep and the other kept calling out, “Lady, will you help me.”

  Another woman at the sink, her hair stringy and white, startling next to her warm brown skin, was crying and begging for someone to come to her. Mary Grace could hardly make out the unfamiliar words resonating in another tongue: “Ven aqui, por favor, ven aqui,” over the noise of the spraying water, and humming hair dryers, the woman across from her repeating “3-4-5-5-5, 3-4-5-5-5,” as her pale and shaky hands tied and untied shoe laces wound on a soft board, and opened and closed little felt pockets. The board sat across her lap, locking her into her wheel chair. She rocked and called out the numbers.

  The hairdresser came over and ran her fingers through her mom’s hair, asking, “So what shall we do for you today?” Mary Grace was taken by how warmly she touched her mother, this stranger. She was torn between two thoughts—What’s wrong with you, can’t you see she’s not responsive? And, why would you treat her so nicely, when she’s been such a bitch all her life?

  There were two other women, who wore no expressions, for whatever tautness their facial muscles once practiced were gone, and they seemed to look through everyone. Mary Grace wondered if their gazes were really inward, looking upon some place where they were locked in their minds.

  Why had she brought her mom down here? The nurse had thought it would be a good idea for Mary Grace to see more of the facility since she hadn’t had time on her previous visits. Well, not visits to her mom really, but to fill out paperwork, to bring her clothes so they could sew nametags in them.

  “How long has she been here?”

  Mary Grace realized then that the hairdresser was speaking to her, asking about her mother.

  “Two weeks, yeah, about two weeks now.”

  “They must have given her a shower. They must have washed her hair.”

  “Um, I don’t know.” Mary Grace felt her body tensing. Was she supposed to know?

  She could not stop searching around the room, glancing from one woman to the next, for some sign of connection. Was there any reaction as the hairdresser washed, combed, and cut their hair? Suddenly the woman trapped in the wheel chair was screaming, “NO, no, no.”

  “It will be okay,” Mary Grace managed. Although she did not know what would be okay. What could ever change what was logged in this woman’s brain, tattooed deep into the layers of her life? At first the woman went on screaming, then large blue eyes locked onto Mary Grace, who repeated, “It will be okay.”

  And the woman became quiet. Then slowly she began to mumble and speak again “3-4-5-5-5, 3-4-5-5-5.”

  The hairdresser was moving from one woman to the next. “I will start your mom as soon as I put the color in these gray curls.” The hairdresser said tousling the full head of hair of the lady who sat like a slipcover placed over the chair.

  Mary Grace nodded, but she was
thinking back to the week of her grammar school graduation. “Why can’t I have my hair cut at a beauty parlor? I want a style. It is my graduation.”

  “Maria Graziella, clip, clip and I’ll have it done.” Her mom had given her no further explanation, no space for conversation.

  Couldn’t she just leave her mother here? They would take her back upstairs if she said she had to go. She could bolt. Nothing but flight instinct pounded in her head.

  How long had she spent blocking out the years with her mother? What did she have of hers alone that could be imbedded as the memory of her life?

  Yet, she didn’t want to go home. She was worried about Aunt Maggie. She seemed sluggish, not herself. Mary Grace squirmed in the chair. She quickly glanced over at her mother, who in the past wouldn’t have allowed this fidgeting. “Ants in your pants, Maria Graziella, sit still.”

  Although she promised Dad she’d take care of her mother, right then, running away from everything she’d ever known, finding some adventure, some wild and wonderful experience to put into her head, creating the memory of her life was all she wanted to do.

  Seeing Black

  Chapter 9

  IN HER MOTHER’S room, Mary Grace pushed the wheelchair near the window. She sat next to her mother and told her, “It is sunny out and very hot. You’d like this place, you can’t open the windows.”

  After a while, Mary Grace said, “Well, here we are, and you’re still looking right through me.” Then she got up, walked closer to the window, and looked out over the parking lot three floors down. She could see her car.

  “You know, I’ve been cleaning out the house. I’ve been to talking to Aunt Maggie, too. You hate that, don’t you? I started with your clothes, your closet, where you hung your dresses.” She looked back toward the window, not down but at her mother’s reflection in the glass.