“Rocky, give me a break. I’m an old lady with a big dog.”
“So get a poodle. You belong in serious wheels, Marlene.” He looked her boldly up and down. “Meanwhile, you’re still the hottest thing in the borough.”
“Thank you. You probably clean up pretty good yourself. How’s Terry?”
After that they spent a pleasant fifteen minutes catching up on the old gang, many of whom had stayed close to home.
“So, what’re you, visiting the folks?” Rocky asked when that had run its course.
“Yeah, I’ll fall by after, but really, I needed to talk with Chester.”
Rocky’s face took on a pained expression. “Ah, shit, Marlene. .”
“No trouble this time, honest to God, Rocky, I just want to talk to him.”
“He quit on me, Marlene. I ain’t seen him in a week.”
“Horseshit, Rocky.” She gave him that look, the one they had both learned from the nuns. He sagged, sighed, said, “Not with the dog, Marlene.”
“No dog, and there wouldn’t have been one last time, if he hadn’t tried to bash my head in with a body hammer.”
Rocky was still frowning and shaking his head when Marlene leaned into him, grabbed the collar of his coverall at an unsoiled spot, and said, “And I also came by to see a real good old friend,” with which she planted a semi-sisterly kiss full on his mouth.
He gasped. He rolled his eyes to heaven and flapped his hand, as if it were on fire. “Oh, marone!” he said, and then, “Marlene, you’re gonna burn in Hell, you know that.”
“Yeah, but they’ll have to catch me first. Where is he?”
Rocky punched a thumb over his shoulder. “Back in bay three. Be nice, now.”
Marlene stood in the doorway of the cinder-block room and watched Chester Durrell fill a dent. He was a small, narrow, dark man of mixed Latin and Irish ancestry, with long black hair tucked under a reversed ball cap. His sleeves were rolled back, showing muscular forearms, the dun skin elaborately illustrated with blue, red, and green tattooing. His long fingers worked a pad of wet sandpaper back and forth on a gray patch of Bondo on the neatly masked rear fender of a new black Lincoln. Marlene knew that Chester had a city-wide rep as a body guy, and that in a couple of hours you would need an electron microscope to know that the bright black surface had ever been marred.
Marlene loved to watch a competent craftsman mold the physical world. As a girl she had begged her father to be allowed along on weekend plumbing jobs, where if the old man was feeling good, she would get a shot at turning a pipe cutter. Chester rubbed his patch to perfection, tossed his sandpaper into the water bowl, stretched, scratched, and reached behind him for a spray can of primer, at which point he saw Marlene.
He’s looking for the dog, thought Marlene as she observed the tension in Chester’s body and the jerking of his head. His pleasantly goofy face showed a near ludicrous apprehension, like the kind you see the doomed bit-part actors wearing just before the jaws snap shut in the early scenes of a monster movie.
“He’s in the car, Chester,” Marlene called out. “I just want to talk. Why don’t you put your first coat down and we’ll chat while it dries?”
After an uncertain pause he did that, in a dozen smooth strokes, the solvent smell filling the room despite the roaring fans.
He put the can down and leaned against the draped fender of the big car. “She sent you, right?”
“No, actually, I came on my own. You probably figured out Brenda’s at the shelter again. Chester, I thought we talked about your hand problem. I thought that was all over.”
“Hey, it wasn’t like that, I swear to Christ, Marlene. You want to hear how it went down? Okay. We get invited to this party, right? Up in Inwood, man, my cousin Clarisse’s. I say, Brenda, let’s go, we’ll have some laughs, but she says, no, she don’t like Clarisse. Okay, so I say, I’ll drop by myself, fuck it, she invited me and all, and she says, okay, go. Fine. So I go. A couple hours, I’m there, feeling good, I had a couple, few drinks, what happens? Bam! In walks Brenda, dressed up and all, so I go over to talk with her and so forth, why she changed her mind, and I see she’s coked to the ears. So, fine, right away I knew there’s gonna be trouble, and sure enough, pretty soon she’s mixing it up with Clarisse, Brenda made some remark. You know like she does?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“So Clarisse and her start scuffling, and we all break it up, and I pull Brenda into the bedroom, and I try to talk to her, you know, but now she’s like yelling shit, all kinds of personal stuff. I mean really yelling so’s everybody could hear it. So I like lost it and I popped her a couple, not hard, and she runs out, crying. So I had a few more and I take the subway home.”
“That’s it?”
“No, later back at our place, she comes in, maybe three in the morning, stoned. She takes her fuckin’ panties, which I actually bought her, out of her bag in front of me and tosses them on the floor. In front of me, you understand? And. . fuck, man, I don’t want to get into what she was saying, but it was real bad, mean stuff, and like I must’ve blacked out because the next thing I knew, there’s blood all over the bed, and I’m standing there in my shorts and she’s gone.”
“You busted her face up pretty good, Chester.”
He hung his head and then lifted it abruptly and stared at her. The beginning of panic showed in his eyes. “Are you gonna get me arrested again?”
“No. Look, let me explain something. You know what I do, right?”
“Yeah. You beat up on guys who pound their old ladies.”
“Not exactly. Chester, there’s bad guys out there. Sick guys. Guys who get their rocks giving women grief, guys who don’t feel like men unless they got a woman who’s a slave. There’s guys who just pick a woman off the street, or in a store or a bank, they see her and they stalk her, and they make her life hell. I can stop that kind of guy sometimes.”
“With one through the skull is what I hear.”
“If necessary,” Marlene said coldly, “but my point is, you’re not a bad guy. You’re a good guy. You’re just in a bad relationship. I’m telling you now that if you stay with Brenda Nero, one day you’re going to wake up next to her corpse. No, wait, I know what you’re going to say. She’s great a lot of the time and you love her, and you’re right, she is great. She’s sexy, pretty, she’s classy, she’s smart-but she’s also crazy, Chester. Disaster happens around her. You got to break it up. I mean now. You understand what I’m saying?”
She wanted to shake him as he stood there by his fender, rolling his eyes and shaking his head, like an unusually stupid horse shying from a proffered halter. I’m no good at this, she thought. He’s right, one through the head is where my true talent lies. But eventually she got him to promise more or less that he’d ditch the woman, and she left him, thinking that she would have to do the same thing with Brenda, too, with even less chance of success. Marlene had met more than one woman whose life was a disorganized sprint toward an early grave, and most often they got some poor schmuck to help them into it. Tragedy, whereas Marlene did best at melodrama, with a clear villain in the black suit and the tender maiden in white pining for rescue. Depressing, and she had wanted to be cheery for Mom, or so she thought, and naturally, there was no question of coming to the old neighborhood and neglecting a family visit. The NSA would be happy if it could track Chinese missile tests as accurately as Marlene’s family recorded the trajectories of their absent children.
The elder Ciampis dwelt in a pre-war two-story bungalow, built of dark brick, the sort of sturdy, simple house that working-stiff vets could buy in the late 1940s when the nation was still poor enough to afford it. In the front, two small patches of immaculate clipped lawn greenly gleamed behind low privet growing through a chain-link fence. To the left the lawn patch was decorated with the usual Virgin w/blue mirror ball and birdbath, and on the right there was the fig tree, stunted and twisted but still alive, still throwing out green shoots. These items demonstrated, as th
ey did in all the old boroughs of the city, that second-generation Italian-Americans lived here.
Marlene hitched herself around in the car seat, removed her pistol and its holster, and locked them in the glove compartment. Marlene had a new gun. The old gun had killed two men and it had started giving her the sick shivers when she touched it, so she had sold it and bought this thing, a SITES AW9 “Resolver,” one of the lightest 9mm semiautomatic pistols available, made in Turin, sleekly Italian in design. She prayed daily and sincerely that it would never have to resolve anything, would forever remain a shooting-range virgin. It was a little less than twice as long as a king-sized cigarette and about twice as thick and weighed about the same as an office stapler. This made it much too heavy to carry into her mother’s house.
The front door was, as always, unlocked. Marlene went in and passed directly into the kitchen.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Good, you can help me hang,” said her mother, indicating the wicker basket of wet wash on the kitchen table, as if this visit had been arranged, or as if Marlene had never left home. Mrs. Ciampi, despite the book on Italians, had never been a physically demonstrative parent.
Marlene heaved the basket up on her hip and followed her mother out through the screen door to the tiny backyard. She and Mrs. Ciampi began to hang clothes on plastic lines strung between two T-shaped poles.
“Didn’t we get you a dryer, Ma?”
“I like it better when they hang. They don’t smell right from the dryer.”
Marlene was out of practice, being totally dryer dependent herself, and her mother placed four clothespins to every one of hers. Marlene cast glances at her mother through the flapping linen. Aside from the hair, which had gone pepper and salt, and a thickening middle, she looked more or less as she had looked during Marlene’s youth, or perhaps it was merely imagination. She had the kind of face that holds age well, Marlene thought, handsome rather than beautiful, too bony for that, the features too prominent. The main difference seemed to be the track suit she was wearing instead of the flowered housedresses she had worn every day back then. Mrs. Ciampi had discovered track suits late in life and had adopted them for every occasion that did not involve the Roman Catholic Church. She had a dozen, this one being aqua with a beige stripe. Combined with her mother’s energetic movements, the outfits suggested that she was about to strip and run the five-hundred-meter hurdles.
While they worked, Mrs. Ciampi wormed into, with a skill that the KGB would not have disdained, every cranny of her daughter’s life, having already detected on her secret mother radar the unidentified bogey menacing Marlene’s heart. The twins first, their little doings elaborated, discussed, the peculiar difference between them made light of, on the basis of other family twins, not to worry; Marlene’s own work, deplored sadly, the infant Marlene, her brilliance and hoped-for future recalled, with the familiar anecdotes, the necessary dollop of guilt offered and accepted; the brothers and sisters analyzed, their recent triumphs and travails recounted, nor could one neglect highlights from the lives of Marlene’s twenty-three first cousins, none of whom, it seemed, was required to shoot people in their chosen fields of endeavor.
The wash hung, the two women entered the house. Mrs. Ciampi offered coffee, which Marlene accepted with an internal shudder. It would be instant, with water barely boiled. Marlene’s mother, unlike Marlene, had no interest in cuisine beyond assuring quantity, and had raised six children on canned and frozen, on Kraft dinners and Velveeta and Pepsi, unlike her own mother, who was a maestra assoluta of south Italian cuisine. Marlene thought about generations, about inheritance, about what she was doing here, really, as she sipped the weak and bitter cup.
“And how’s my doll?” asked Mrs. Ciampi, feigning innocence, comprehending perfectly, of course, that the one person they hadn’t discussed was the one most on Marlene’s mind. “What’s with Lucy?”
So it all came out, the rudeness, the disobedience, the sullen contempt. Mrs. Ciampi listened, gently encouraging, withholding comment. Marlene felt some of the misery lift and wondered how women her age who were estranged from their own mothers managed to raise children-who could they talk to? Books? Therapists? Not that Marlene considered Teresa Ciampi any great expert on child rearing: look how Marlene had turned out, after all, but she had the history, she’d been there, when the seeds were planted that-so Marlene believed in her deepest heart-were bearing in Lucy such unlikely fruit.
“Tell me,” Mrs. Ciampi said after her daughter had run down, “does she still go to church?”
“Oh, does she ever! I can’t get her out of there. She makes the Little Flower look like Lenny Bruce.”
Her mother shot her a look dense with meaning. Decoded: you and your wise mouth, I told you a million times, you mock the church, you’re going to get trouble and here it is.
Aloud, she said, “And you? Or you just drop her off?”
“I go, Ma. You know me. I punch the clock even if I don’t work the shift. What, you think it’s a punishment from God Lucy’s giving me grief?”
“No, she’s just taking after her mother.”
“Get out of here! I was a little angel compared to Lucy. I never opened my mouth.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon. I must have been in amnesia eighteen years, I wasn’t really here.”
“When? Give me one time!”
“One time? Oh, let’s see. . you were fourteen, because it was the summer your great-aunt Angela passed away, God rest her soul. I came home from shopping and you were in the kitchen leaned over the ironing board, ironing your hair like you used to do, the hair God gave you wasn’t good enough. You remember that?”
“I remember ironing my hair.”
Mrs. Ciampi raised her eyes. “Oh, thank you, Madonna, I’m not losing my mind. So I come in, I put my bags down, and I say, because it was a weekday, and you were working at Uncle Manny’s, why’re you doing that on a Tuesday, or whatever it was, you got work tomorrow, you’re not going out, and you don’t say anything, like a mule. So I ask you, where’re you going you’re ironing your hair. Still no answer. So I think, this is my house, my kitchen, and this little strega’s pretending I’m not there? So I yank the cord from the iron out of the wall.”
She paused for effect, nodding, took a sip of coffee, assured herself that she had Marlene’s full and fascinated attention, and resumed.
“You let out a yell like I never heard, and you called me a bad word, I won’t even say what it was, and then you threw the iron at me. At my head.”
“No!”
“Yes. You think I’m making this up? Look over there on the door post, on the left. See that mark? It’s painted two times since then, but you could still see it. That’s the mark. Then you ran out, we didn’t see you until God knows when at night. That was when you were climbing in and out up the drainpipe.”
“Oh, Jesus, you knew about the drainpipe?”
“Don’t swear. Yeah, I know you think my head’s full of lasagna, but I got eyes.”
“And you never said anything. Did you tell Pop about the drainpipe?”
Mrs. Ciampi sniffed disdainfully. “Are you joking? You’d be six feet underground I ever told him the things you pulled. I didn’t tell him about the iron either. He came home and saw the mark, I said I was changing the kitchen bulb and the ladder fell.”
“I can’t believe this,” said Marlene. She felt an odd constriction in her chest, and the room seemed to be growing warmer. “I don’t remember any of that. And you didn’t do anything about it?”
“I prayed, Marlene. I sent up so many novenas. . Father Martini, if you remember him, let him rest in peace, Father Martini said, ‘Teresa, you wore out the roof on the church. That’s why we need a new roof, Teresa Ciampi.’ What else could I do? Whip you like a dog? Lock you up?” She sighed, sipped the cooling coffee. “Anyway, it turned out better than I expected, tell you the honest truth. You stopped with those bums with the motorcycles, you won the scholarship to Sacred Heart. . I’m not s
aying you’re not still pazza, but it’s your life, darling. But what I’m saying, about Lucy, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Have patience and bring her by more, I’ll talk to her.”
Marlene nodded, hardly hearing. “I’m stunned, Ma. Now you’re going to tell me you were out of your skull when you were Lucy’s age, too.” Silence at this. “Well, were you?”
“That’s none of your business,” said Mrs. Ciampi, and looked away.
The object of this discussion, having calmed her fury just enough so that she was no longer shaking, dressed in her usual jeans, sneakers, and embroidered vest over a T-shirt, this one imprinted with a color rendition of a can of Chung-King Chicken Chow Mein, and fled the loft. On an ordinary summer vacation day she would have headed, of course, for the Asia Mall to hang out and help out, but this was, naturally, impossible, her mother having ruined her life forever. She had her musette bag stocked with her favorite books, her journal, pens, a compact dictionary or two, and something less than $200 in crumpled bills, her stash.
She walked in a northerly direction, up Crosby, over to Broadway on Spring, up Broadway, through the heart of cast-iron Soho. She almost headed for Old St. Patrick’s, where she might dump some part of her burden of pain, but decided against doing so until the wrath had left her heart. Father Dugan was a smart fellow, and he would snatch the secret from her in no time, as one could not lie to a priest, and she did not want to give it up just yet. She began playing with the idea of going to Washington Square Park and making a start as a junkie prostitute street person. Pro: it would focus the entire energy and attention of the family on Lucy, where it truly belonged, and would make her mother utterly miserable, which she deserved. Con: hideous pain and early death. Still, she had to do something. .
At Prince Street she became aware that someone was following her. In an instant the stupid adolescent maundering left her mind by the nearest exit. Her true self popped up out of the mire, looked around, and took charge.
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