Everything Else in the Universe

by Tracy Holczer

  It wasn’t a question. Since Great-Aunt Lilliana was Fattucchiera, she thought she knew everything. She was the reason Lucy feared tomatoes and chanting.

  “Nope,” Milo said.

  “Bah. On your father’s side. There is someone.”

  Great-Aunts Ida and Florence made tsking sounds as they pressed the dough into circles, which would eventually be deep-fried and stuffed with cannoli filling. The aunts were tiny, fluttery like birds, and all the children in the family usually grew taller than the aunts by the time they hit ten years old. No one teased them, though, or they might find a chicken foot in their soup or worse. Their lunch box.

  “Aunt Lilliana,” Lucy said, “not everyone is Italian. Plus, he has blond hair.”

  “Northern Italians have blond hair. Your aunt Catarina had blond hair, may she rest in peace.”

  “Well, now that that’s out of the way,” Papo Angelo said. “Don’t worry. We’ll make you an honorary Italian, Milo. You just have to pass the test.” Then he rang the Alaska bell beside the cash register for no reason whatsoever. Normally, he only ever rang that bell when someone tipped him. He’d been saving tip money since before Nonnina died for an Alaskan cruise she’d always wanted to go on. He claimed he was still planning on taking her, no matter when that day came.

  “What test?” Lucy said. This was news to her, and she panicked, sure she wouldn’t pass because she had so much Miller in her. But then Uncle G, Gia and Josh came in the front door to start making the Italian sausage and distracted everyone. Uncle G kissed his first two fingers and placed them on the gilt frame of the giant picture of Nonnina that hung next to John F. Kennedy and Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini, otherwise known as the Pope.

  Great-Aunt Lilliana smacked Uncle G on the shoulder. “You here to be a scoundrel?” she said.

  Uncle G winked. “Always.”

  “I’m not wearing a hairnet or a shower cap, just so we’re clear,” Gia said, and flopped herself down in one of the chairs, flinging her hair over her shoulder. Josh good-naturedly reached for a shower cap and pretended to tuck his buzzed-short hair underneath. He crossed his eyes at Lucy, and she feared her heart might race itself to death. His hazel eyes. His tanned arms and wide shoulders. Her physical reaction was baffling. Or maybe it was pheromones. Lucy had read that humans secrete chemicals in their sweat that other humans can sense and are attracted to, like bees to honey. It was all disgusting and mysterious, but she was at a loss as to what else could be happening to her.

  All three aunts stopped what they were doing and stared at Gia. She sighed, grabbing a hairnet out of the basket. Since she had blow-dried her curly hair straight, she was having a tough time shoving it all into the hairnet. “Doesn’t anyone respect the child labor laws in this family? You should at least let us unionize, right, Lucy?”

  Gia was obsessed with politics. Lucy didn’t remember the last time they’d had a conversation about anything else. She missed her cousin.

  On his way to grab a biscotti out of the tin on the counter, Josh tugged Lucy’s right braid and winked as though he knew what she might be thinking.

  Lucy wondered how Josh felt about the upcoming draft lottery. Nervous, probably, but would he go to Vietnam? Or would he be one of those conscientious objectors? Would he go to Canada? Would he burn his draft card so that he’d always be on the run from the law? Was he willing to go to prison for his beliefs? Lucy knew how Gia felt, about everything, whether she wanted to or not, but not Josh. She only knew he’d played football, wanted to be a veterinarian and was the irrational love of her life.

  As if there wasn’t enough going on, Papo turned on the music and “North to Alaska” blared over the speakers Nonnina had put up in the corners of the deli.

  Uncle G twirled Great-Aunt Lilliana around the table, the other aunts tapping their feet to the country-western tune. Josh twirled Gia, and Lucy wished it could have been her. She wondered sometimes if all her family was connected with invisible string, the kind connecting one can to another like an old-fashioned walkie-talkie. Except her. When the music blasted, everyone danced, while Lucy preferred to watch.

  “Your family is very . . .” Milo said, his eyes wide open. “Enthusiastic.”

  Lucy wondered what they must look like from the outside, dancing around in shower caps and hairnets, and sighed. Why did her family have to be so peculiar? Why couldn’t they be more respectable, like the Millers? Photographs in the freezer. Aunts who tried to heal the flu with a tomato. Grandmothers in brass urns. It was all too much. Even if she had tried to make friends last year, one look at this family, and they would have scattered like cockroaches under a too-bright light.

  She half wondered what might be wrong with Milo that he didn’t scatter, too.

  Great-Aunt Lilliana handed Lucy a bouquet of flowers.

  “But it’s only Thursday,” Lucy said.

  “And we’re going to be at your father’s party on Sunday when Joe usually takes them. What? You don’t want your uncle Ralph to have his flowers? You don’t want Big Papo or Big Nona to have theirs?”

  Great-Aunts Ida and Florence both stopped what they were doing and looked at Lucy, which made her worry about chicken feet.

  “Of course not,” Lucy said. “I just don’t like cemeteries.”

  “Bah,” Aunt Ida said. “It’s the only place where no one talks back!”

  Great-Aunts Ida and Florence both cackled while Great-Aunt Lilliana said, “Except ungrateful nieces.” Then she turned to Milo. “It will be tough. But you can do it.”

  Which was Great-Aunt Lilliana being Fattucchiera again, thinking she knew something when she didn’t. Either that, or Uncle G had told her Milo’s dad was in Vietnam, so she was taking a wild guess at how he might feel about cemeteries at the moment.

  Great-Aunt Lilliana cupped Milo’s chin in her hand and gave him one of her tight Fattucchiera hugs. The kind that usually meant prepare for the worst.

  “Now, andare avanti! Get going!” Great-Aunt Lilliana said, wiping at the corner of her eye.

  Oh, good gracious. If Milo stuck around after all this, he deserved a prize.

  “Here’s to Alaska!” Papo Angelo said while he wiped at the small glass cabinet that held Nonnina’s urn. A plain brass urn that Nonnina had picked out at a garage sale as a joke one day. When I’m dead, I don’t want anything fancy. Just stick me in this pot and take me with you everywhere.

  Trouble was, that’s just what Papo Angelo did.

  This family, a bunch of cans and string tied together.

  13

  everything else in the universe

  Lucy attempted to distract Milo with funny stories about her family so they might not seem so crazy. She talked about all manner of things while they rode from house to house delivering meatballs, keeping up a constant chatter. Like how Great-Uncle Lando had bought a box of New Year’s Eve supplies off the back of some guy’s truck at a deep discount because it was July. Blow horns and clackers and bags of exploding confetti. There were even a bunch of HAPPY NEW YEAR tinsel tiaras that he was especially proud of and couldn’t wait to make everyone wear at Dad’s party.

  That was when she realized funny and crazy were two shades of the same color, like burgundy and red, and so she stopped talking about her family altogether.

  “Your uncle G invited me to your dad’s party,” Milo said.

  “Believe me, you don’t want to come. There’s going to be too many people, which means a lot of yelling. Plus, they’ll make you work filling champagne glasses or mixing the antipasto salad or worse.”

  “Worse like what? Removing bodies in the dead of night?”

  “Ha.”

  “I’d like to come. Uncle G invited Grams, too.”

  If Lucy could have fallen over and died, she would have. Dead meant she wouldn’t have to suffer any more embarrassment at the hands of her family. Plus, h
ow much was too much for Milo?

  The Pink Kitchen Deli activities were one thing, the Family Gathering activities were something else entirely. The Belly Button Aunts would bring their pouches of herbs, and Great-Aunt Lilliana would announce her premonitions, and then there was the way her family ate polenta and how many courses there were so that if you stuffed yourself with too much ravioli or sugo meat, you wouldn’t have enough room for the pork butt and roasted peppers and then the Belly Button Aunts might think you were sick and insist on lighting a candle to the saints for your health. Then there was always the pinochle and the fistfights.

  Nonnina’s urn would have its own chair next to Papo.

  “Suit yourself, I guess.” Lucy felt her face tense up the way it had while Dad had been gone.

  After an hour of deliveries—all commenced while chasing an escaped dog, holding a crying baby while Mrs. Frank looked for change and drinking endless glasses of lemonade—Lucy decided they’d earned their lunch and the two dollars in tips they’d been given. Lucy was hot, damp from sweat and hungry as she led the way down Madden Avenue and stopped in front of the Calvary Catholic Cemetery, her sunhat flopping.

  “You stay here. I’ll just drop off the flowers, and I’ll be out in five minutes,” Lucy said, trying to be sensitive to the fact that Milo might not want to be reminded that people, in fact, die.

  Instead, Milo grabbed his rucksack and marched toward the cemetery gates like he was facing down death itself. Lucy followed with the bouquet Great-Aunt Lilliana had given her.

  Big Nona’s headstone was carved with China roses, the kind Big Papo had grown because they meant grace and lasting beauty. Big Papo’s was right beside hers. They’d died within two months of each other, their hearts so intertwined, Great-Aunt Lilliana had said, they couldn’t live one without the other. There were a few more Rossi family headstones that stood side by side in the shade of two sycamores. Milo sat on the grass right between them, elbows on knees, chin in his hands.

  “It’s nice here,” he said. “The grass looks like carpet.”

  Lucy nodded, taking her sunhat off and running a hand across her sweaty forehead. “Mr. Jefferson keeps things tidy. I’ve seen him on his hands and knees, even, trimming around the headstones. He’s obsessed with grass. Don’t get him started, or he’ll talk forever.”

  “You’ve got to have pride in what you do. No matter what you do. That’s what my dad says.”

  “That’s a fact,” Lucy said.

  Lucy handed him his meatball sandwich and offered him a bottle of RC Cola. Just then, a brilliant blue dragonfly touched down on the cap of the bottle.

  “They’re everywhere,” Lucy said.

  “Only in the summer. And only in certain climates. Dragonflies like it here,” Milo said. The dragonfly hovered and then sped away. “She’s a beautiful specimen. Did you know that Sikorsky, which designs helicopters, used a dragonfly wing as a model?”

  “I did not know that.”

  “They used two thousand different drawings on an IBM computer and came up with the perfect wing.”

  “How do you know it’s a she?”

  Milo took out his sketchbook and flipped through, stopping on a page with several detailed pencil drawings of dragonflies. He pointed to the rounded edges at the bottom of one set of wings, and the S-curved edges at the bottom of another set. “The rounded ones are female.”

  A breeze lifted the edges of Milo’s book, and Lucy glimpsed shimmering colors, just like the wings of the dragonflies. “Can I look?”

  He handed it to her, and she flipped the pages slowly. Notes and pencil sketches of different parts of the dragonfly. Wings and abdomens, eyes and tails. Toward the back were watercolors, different species that looked like they’d been plucked from a dream, with soft edges and colors. They sparkled and shined with iridescence, just like the real live things.

  “How did you do that?” Lucy said.

  Milo chewed a bite of sandwich. “I use mica chips. I crush them with a rock and add it to the paint.”

  “Mica is almost a three on the Moh’s scale of mineral hardness,” Lucy said.

  If Milo found that a strange observation, he didn’t say so.

  “Sometimes I cheat and buy eye shadow. Wish I had a camera for the looks on people’s faces at the drugstore. Sometimes they’ll say, ‘What a nice kid, buying eye shadow for your mom.’ And I’ll say, ‘Nope, it’s for me,’ and let them think what they want.”

  He laughed and stuck Lucy’s floppy hat on his own head, which then made her laugh. She touched the thick paper and read their names. Seaside Dragonlet, Gray Petaltail, Vivid Dancer.

  Golden-winged Skimmer.

  She looked carefully at the red dragonfly, the way its wings were darkest near the body and became lighter and lighter until the farthest tips of the wings were invisible, like the flames of a fire. Beyond the invisible tips of the wings were the lightest of swerving lines meant to look like heat, maybe. At least that was how it looked to Lucy.

  “Where did you see it? The golden-winged skimmer?”

  Milo pressed his lips together. “Just before I left Fayetteville. Cross Creek feeds into the Cape Fear River, and there’s this perfect place for dragonflies. So I’d just take a folding chair out there sometimes and sketch for hours. I’d send Dad my sketches in letters. Sometimes he’d send back his own. But he’s a terrible drawer, so they were mostly meant to be funny.”

  Milo reached in his back pocket and took out a tightly folded square of paper, unfolded it and handed it to Lucy.

  Lucy smiled. It was a cartoon sketch of a dragonfly with pointy wings and googly eyes. There was a line drawn to each part and labeled by name: googly eyes, beer belly, bbq ribs, spindly legs.

  The line that pointed to the wing said Grandpa Bud.

  Milo looked over her shoulder. “Grams says the wings of a dragonfly carry the souls of the departed. Grandpa Bud was my grandpa and we’d tease her about it sometimes, that Grandpa Bud was probably having the time of his life flying around with the dragonflies. She’s pretty superstitious.”

  Lucy snorted. “No wonder she likes my family.”

  They sat together, quiet for a little while. Listening to the water burble in the fountain, and watching the zigging and zagging dragonflies, Lucy was overcome with a sense of homeostasis.

  Later, as they gathered their trash and packed up to leave, Milo said, “You’re lucky.”

  “Lucky?”

  “To have such a big family. I just have Grams. Mom’s an only child, and Dad grew up in a boys’ home in Iowa. Grams has a brother in Florida, Uncle Sticks, but that’s it.”

  “I think you’re the lucky one,” Lucy said. “When I’m around my family, I always feel like I’m waiting for something to explode. Champagne bottles. Ravioli. Tempers.”

  “I can see that,” Milo said. “But I still think you’re the lucky one.”

  Just then, the brilliant blue dragonfly caught in her peripheral vision. It hovered above Noona Peterson’s headstone, just to the left of Big Papo’s. Lucy read the inscription as she had so many times before:

  When we try to pick out anything by itself,

  we find it hitched

  to everything else in the universe.

  —John Muir

  Those words always put a picture in Lucy’s mind: a night sky with shimmering threads connecting stars into constellations. She thought again about her family. How they all seemed connected by invisible string. All but her. She wanted desperately to feel those connections, to know she belonged. But didn’t know how to get there.

  She was lucky, she supposed, just like Milo said. Her family might be a circus, but they were her circus. And even if she didn’t quite feel connected, she wasn’t sure what she’d do without them.

  14

  the american legion

  Lucy and Milo rode their bikes
from the Calvary Catholic Cemetery to the American Legion Auxiliary post. She turned her face up to the sun and took in the warmth. She really did love San Jose, every bit as much as she’d loved Chicago, even though she’d never admit it. Because where Chicago was an orderly series of blocks and buildings and street names, the L running through it all connecting the dots, San Jose was the opposite. There was no rhyme or reason that Lucy had been able to figure out. In some places, there were blocks of storefronts like the Pink Kitchen Deli and Dan’s Electronics, Pop’s Cleaners and Little B’s Market. But then there were blocks of strawberry and sweet-corn fields where vendors sold their fruit and vegetables right on the newly poured sidewalks, two different freeways just around the corner. There were apartment complexes and cookie-cutter houses, and just up McKee Road was the Alum Rock Park wilderness where, at the turn of the century, there had been a health spa and mineral bath with a dance hall, an aviary and a zoo.

  San Jose was a circus. Just like her family.

  “Is this right?” Milo said. “It looks like someone’s house.”

  Which was true. The American Legion building was just a long brown ranch-style house with a brick chimney up the side.

  Lucy double-checked the address Mac had given her. “That’s what it says.”

  Milo shrugged and led the way.

  As soon as they hit the porch, they knew they’d found the right place. Just outside the door was a plaque that read:

  In the spirit of Service, Not Self, the mission of the American Legion Auxiliary is to support The American Legion and to honor the sacrifice of those who serve by enhancing the lives of our veterans, military and their families, both at home and abroad.

  Milo knocked on the door, but no one answered. Lucy could hear murmuring voices on the other side, so she shrugged at Milo and opened the door for herself. The smell hit her first: beer and cigarettes.

  Inside to the left, where the living room should have been, was a wide-open space and a bar. There were two poles attached to the wall, one flying an American flag, the other a deep blue with the American Legion symbol in the middle.