Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  My father made an antipasto plate, offered it to Livvy, who took it and ate so quickly that she was almost finished by the time he sat down with one for himself. My mother came out of the bathroom, tested the emotional waters, tried to determine whether it was safe to jump in.

  “So,” she said brightly, “have we decided when everyone’s going to Westport?”

  Silence. Livvy looked at me.

  “What I think,” I said, “is that Livvy’s the one who should decide, and it’s too soon for her to decide anything. She just got here, for heaven’s sake. She might want to see some of Manhattan before she gets whisked away.”

  Livvy smiled at me.

  Something had changed.

  I made an early dinner. My parents would go to Westport as planned. Livvy and I would join them when we (she) wished, a week from the coming Monday being our deadline, since my summer classes would begin the following day. She kissed them back when they kissed her good-bye, but there was none of the loving urgency I’d seen earlier. She was content to remain with me, amenable to being hugged and kissed, interested in Manhattan.

  I was very happy, quite unconcerned with her reasons.

  We remained in the city that weekend. I took her down to the Village, shopped with her there, explained that it was the only real Italian neighborhood left in Manhattan. The area called Little Italy being just restaurants, cafés, and bakeries. But she was interested in what was American, not what was Italian: the Statue of Liberty; the Staten Island Ferry; the Empire State Building. All of which we visited in those two days. I bought a map of Manhattan, which she clipped over the Klee poster I’d hung in her room and ran to consult when I mentioned a new place. She was mastering place names with the same ease as she’d mastered English grammar, daily improving in both, never forgetting anything she’d learned. The only meal she wanted when we were out was hot dogs and papaya, though she ate anything I served her at home. She hadn’t mentioned her father or his wife, but a couple of times she’d referred to being at Mirella’s.

  The second time, I said, “It must have been difficult for you when your father stopped seeing Mirella.”

  Tears came to her eyes.

  “I wanted to go down there without him. She didn’t want me.”

  “How awful.”

  She searched my face to see if I was taking it as seriously as I seemed to be. When she saw that I meant it, she allowed herself to cry a little, me to hold her.

  “Poor Livvy,” I murmured. (I admit to duplicity here.) “I hope at least your father’s wife is nice.”

  Abruptly, she sat up. The tears were still there, but now her face was contorted with scornful rage.

  “Nice? Queen Annunciata? She does not have to be nice. She is The Queen. She does what she wants. Tells everyone else what to do.”

  I smiled. “Not your father. Nobody—”

  “You think no? She does not have to tell him. He does what she wants before she tells him!”

  Behind my smile, I was in shock. The earth had moved. Angelo had been brought to heel. Was it possible I could have done it and saved myself a lot of anguish?

  “Are we talking about your father?”

  “No. It is not my father. It is another person.”

  “People don’t really become someone else.”

  “He goes to church every Sunday with her.”

  I was impressed. On the other hand, he’d gone to church for a while after our big Ebrea fight.

  “Well,” I said, “it probably won’t last.”

  “To marry her, he had to promise. To go to church, I mean.”

  Careful now, Caroline.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He told me! Everything she makes him do, he promises. He likes this. It makes him laugh.”

  As I gaped at her, she grew more intense.

  “He thinks she is beautiful. He calls her his madonna. She is ugly. The most ugly . . . He thinks, I cannot tell you, everything she does, he—her baby will be the most beautiful baby that is ever born!”

  “Her baby? You mean she’s pregnant already?”

  Livvy nodded. “She is una maiale.” (A pig.)

  “When is the baby due?” For the first time I was seeing a glimmer of hope that Livvy would stay with me past summer’s end. I warned myself not to bring it up before she did.

  She shrugged. “I do not know. In January. January nineteenth, perhaps.”

  I couldn’t be certain who had arrived at this date, but it was almost precisely nine months from the day Angelo and Annunciata had married.

  The city grew extremely hot and humid. I was able to persuade Livvy to go to Westport that Friday by telling her that we’d spend only as much time as we wished with “the others.” We would ask my father to drive us anyplace we wanted to go when we didn’t feel like being with those nameless others. And we could easily walk to the beach by ourselves, as someone with a young child, for instance, could not.

  When, on Friday morning, I said we could ride up in the car with my sister and Larry and Max or, if Livvy preferred, we could take the train, she made a show of being puzzled about why she wouldn’t want to go in the car. But then she suddenly remembered having promised her best friend in Rome that before the end of her first week in New York she would write a letter about Bloomingdale’s. So we spent two or three hours in Bloomingdale’s, Livvy with her backpack, me with my usual airline bag, more ingredients than clothes. Then we had a leisurely late lunch and went directly to Grand Central Station.

  During the ride up I was preoccupied with food matters—what I’d cook over the weekend that we could shop for on the way to the house; what I should make on Saturday night, when friends of Larry and Beatrice who had a daughter Olivia’s age were coming for dinner; what I’d do for my first class on Monday. Occasionally Livvy asked the name of someplace we were passing, but there were no queries about the family or the weekend. If there had been, it might have occurred to me to prepare her for the likelihood that Max would be at the station with my father. Not that anything I said could have altered the hostile course each was on by virtue of the other’s very existence.

  Seeing us, Max broke free from my father and ran to me, holding out his arms for me to pick him up, which I hadn’t done in a couple of years. I laughed, bent over to kiss him, whispered that he was too big for me to carry, now, especially with my suitcase.

  I took his hand, said, “Sweetheart, this is my daughter, Livvy.”

  “You expect me to believe she’s yours?” he asked indignantly. “She’s way too big!”

  Laughing, my father turned to lead us to the car.

  Not laughing, Livvy muttered under her breath, in Italian, “And you’re too little to have such a big mouth.”

  I promised he’d get used to her and simmer down.

  But as the weekend progressed, it became clear that she wasn’t going to get used to him. At the house, there was an instant and nearly total coldness between my very pregnant sister and Livvy, each of whom claimed, as we used to say when we were kids, that the other had started. Livvy acted as though Max didn’t exist. Larry attempted peacemaking and succeeded to the extent that Livvy found him a delightful person, was willing to go to town with him on errands, and so on—as long as Max or Beatrice didn’t happen to be going. Alone with Beatrice, I told her what I’d discovered about Angelo’s new wife having gotten pregnant immediately, and so on.

  The response of my sister Beatrice, the Psychologist, was, “Fine. But that doesn’t mean she can’t be decent to Max. He’s got enough problems with my pregnancy.”

  I nodded, but I was still on uncertain ground with Livvy, afraid that any suggestion about her behavior might put her off me, as well. I didn’t want her to feel that I, like my parents, was unfaithful.

  We ate most of our meals on the lovely screened porch that ran the width of the house’s rear. There were cushioned rattan chairs at one end, while the other held the big, round table where we ate. A window over the kitchen work c
ounter opened on the porch just above where the table was and made it possible to pass dishes back and forth without walking around through the living room.

  On Saturday night I made a brodetto in the style of the Marches, or I should say, in one of the styles, for the region has more and better fish than almost any in Italy and this was a time of year when I could easily find the eight or more varieties a brodetto should contain. In the mood marchigiano, I did the potatoes that were a regional favorite, the spuds sautéed and then baked with a lot of rosemary and garlic. The salad combined store lettuce and cucumber with the arugula and lettuce that were coming up in our garden.

  Livvy and Marsha, the friends’ daughter, quickly became friends, perhaps because as I was passing the big, flat bowl of fish stew through the opening to the table, and the adults were murmuring appreciatively, Marsha whispered audibly to Livvy that hamburgers were her favorite food, Livvy whispered that they were hers, too, and both dissolved into giggles. Marsha spoke very quickly and Livvy couldn’t bear to keep asking her to slow down, but after that, Marsha began to do it on her own.

  Now I was in front of the window on the kitchen side, whipping egg yolks for the zabaglione that was a company treat. Water was heating for decaffeinated espresso. (I’d barely heard of decaf until my return from Italy.) As I rested my arm from its beating work, I heard various jokes about how these kids suffered, having to eat the glorious food I prepared. Larry offered to take them to the ice-cream parlor after dinner if they couldn’t bear zabaglione.

  “More for us,” he said, laughing.

  “I don’t think so,” Livvy said. “My mother will be angry at me.”

  Through the kitchen window, I called, “Good grief, I can’t imagine that I’d get angry, but what would happen if I did?”

  “Oh, well,” Livvy said, turning to look at me, “you know how you used to yell at me.”

  My hands stopped beating the yolks—as though I’d been accused of egg abuse.

  Certainly I’d yelled at her once in a while, always when I was working in the kitchen under intense pressure and she’d gotten in my way. I was about to point out, jokingly, that I’d never given her so much as a light smack on the backside because my hands were always occupied during such moments, when an incident I hadn’t thought of in years flashed through my brain.

  The kitchen of the trattoria. Our last autumn in Florence. Livvy was two. Angelo had bought a basket of truffles. There had already been fights about money with Anthony. As Angelo set the truffles on the work-table, he lectured me on their price, and on the necessity of wasting none and making certain none was stolen by the help. The lecture made me so nervous that I decided, as I wrapped the truffles in the usual damp cloths within the basket, to put exactly three in each packet. Should anyone see the carefully wrapped packets—maybe I’d even make a sign saying there were three in each packet except the started one—surely they’d think twice before stealing any.

  Livvy had been napping in her little room in back of the bar. She awakened to Angelo’s voice, ran into the kitchen and was scooped up in his arms. After a couple of minutes of kisses and Papa’s-girl talk, he set her on the worktable, not far from the truffles. I gave them tartini with prosciutto and olives, their current favorite snack. (Neither had a great taste for sweets then, though Livvy seemed to have developed one recently.) It was a joke among us that Livvy’s fuori tavolo, literally a snack eaten away from the table, was often eaten right on it.

  The phone rang. I was in the middle of sautéing in two different pans the soffritto, the mixture of onion, carrot, and herbs, with garlic in one pan, that serves as a base for many dishes, and which it’s important not to cook for so long that the onions and garlic brown. Angelo left Livvy on the table, telling her not to move until he got back, then went to the phone, which was on the bar wall near the kitchen door. After a moment, he took the phone through the doorway to the bar, doubtless because one of his girlfriends was on the other end. As I moved the first pan to a cold burner, a loud shout from Angelo made my heart leap and my hand drop the pan. I turned to see what was happening.

  Livvy had pulled the truffle basket closer to herself and was opening the cloth containers, in the process spilling most of their contents onto the table and the floor. With Angelo’s shout, she’d burst into tears. Now he rushed to her, scooped her up in his arms, and continued to yell—at me. What did I think I was doing, leaving such things around a child? What kind of an imbecile thought you could leave millions of lira worth of truffles on a table—

  “Why are you yelling at me?” I’d screamed back. “You were the one who left her with them, you were the one who didn’t tell her to stay away while you . . . Livvy, you know you’re not supposed to touch the stuff on the table. You know you—”

  But as I turned my wrath on her to stop myself from screaming about his girlfriends’ calls, he scooped her up and stalked out of the kitchen and the restaurant. I didn’t see either of them again until five minutes before we opened for dinner. Angelo brought her to the little room; she wouldn’t come into the kitchen.

  Now I felt as though I’d been watching a filthy movie I’d starred in—and that everyone on the porch had also seen. By the time I brought out the zabaglione, they were talking about the weather, but I felt too defensive to let it go.

  “Well, here it is,” I said, light as a ten-ton truck on a corrugated (my voice was shaky) road, “no fuss, no muss, no screamings, beatings, nothing.”

  I looked at Livvy. I was fighting tears, but she smiled. Placidly.

  “You are different now, Mother.”

  I (fake) smiled back.

  “I’m not cooking for fifty people at a time now.”

  “Just hearing that number, I can’t imagine. . . .” Marsha’s mother said. “I mean, I can’t cook like you do for two people, but . . .”

  I shut up and let them move on to a discussion of which foods they could cook for how many people at what time of year, which led me further into self-pity. Felt like cooking, indeed. What I felt like had never been an issue in our restaurants. In our lives. My daughter had no sense of what my life had been like. Maybe she didn’t even understand why I’d had to leave. Maybe she had no idea of the extent of her father’s screwing around, or how I’d suffered from it. Maybe she thought he’d just grown attached to a Sicilian woman who was a more appropriate mate for him. Maybe she’d never understood why I left. I wasn’t ready to tell her, even without consideration of the other people present, but for the first time it occurred to me that someday I might.

  Livvy appeared to have forgotten our first bad moment, or, at least, to have thought of it simply as a moment when she reminded me of something I’d forgotten. Nor did I live with it in any way that might have prepared me for what was to come. If I’d lost her to Marsha instead of to my parents, that was because she was a normal teenager and normal teenagers wanted to be with their friends, not their parents. Someday, it might be years from now, I’d make clear to her the pressure I’d been under, see if she couldn’t understand that there was no way to be even-tempered in such a situation. Tell her that placid chefs were few and far between. In the meantime, she was content to be in Westport for the summer because her best friend, Marsha, was in Westport, and introduced her to a couple of kids whose parents had summer homes there and who attended Hunter High School, along with Marsha. They spent more time at Marsha’s house than at ours. Marsha had a younger sister, but hers was a bigger house with fewer people in it, and escape was easier. Marsha wouldn’t correct Livvy’s speech, she loved the way Livvy talked, although she taught her some of the current slang with the eagerness of a kid who isn’t one of the first to know it. And she did immediately correct Livvy’s taste in food. Or, to be more accurate, she nudged Livvy along a path my daughter was already interested in treading: Fish was yucky. Sauces were yucky, except ketchup, the sauce of choice for almost everything. All Italian food except pizza (and an occasional spaghetti with meatballs) was yucky. The foods of choic
e for two meals a day (three, if you were away from home) were hamburgers, hot dogs, and French fries. Marsha’s mother must have told her to behave at our first dinner, but once the two were a team, all bets were off. If I wanted to see Livvy, I’d have to see (and hear) Marsha, and if I wanted them there for dinner, I knew what to cook. Actually, Larry was happy to grill meat for the kids over the weekend, if I was occupied. Hostilities between Beatrice and Livvy never came to a head that first summer because Livvy spent all her time with Marsha. Larry was more than pleased to do what he could to help keep the friendship going. It was Larry who assured me that if my daughter barely talked to me anymore, that was because she was turning into a typical American teenager at a precocious rate. And, indeed, she was losing her Italian accent with remarkable speed. There were moments when I almost wanted it back, when I felt that more than twelve years of my life had disappeared, after all.

  At the end of July, I went into the city for a day to pay my bills and do errands. While I was home, I went to the loft’s one long closet, which had ended up in Livvy’s room when we put in walls. (For now I had the room that was slightly larger and closer to the bathroom.) I’d left for Westport with just some white pants and shirts, thinking I’d be returning to New York before long, and now I wanted to get some of the clothes I’d left behind. As I edged toward the back of the closet, I kicked Livvy’s suitcase. Which did not move.

  I got my dresses and left the room, but the suitcase nagged at my mind because it was cloth, with vinyl sides. Lightweight. Theoretically, Livvy’s clothes had been unpacked and put in the bureau or hung on the left of the closet’s two rods. I’d observed but not thought twice about its being not much clothing, considering the size of her suitcase.

  Cautiously, as though she might walk in at any moment, I returned to the room. The closet was dark. I pulled out the suitcase, set it down, opened the zipper that went around three sides, lifted the flap. It was more than half full of fall and winter clothing—sweaters, skirts, tights, shoes, a pair of boots, a parka.