All This Talk of Love

by Christopher Castellani

  “You’re not so old, you know,” Maddalena says to him. “You can do better than that.”

  “You want me to wear a tuxedo?” he says.

  “What’s going on?” Frankie asks.

  “Your father’s looking like a homeless,” she says. “I tell him every day: it matters what you wear, all the time, even when you sleep. You never know who’s going to see you.”

  Antonio picks up the extension. “Do you hear this nonsense?” he says. “Can you tell me why it matters what I wear in my own bed?”

  This gets Frankie laughing again. Is there any better sound in the world than your son laughing? Especially when he’s 355 miles away, to hear it, to hear anything that brings him joy, is like food to the starving.

  “I’m gonna let you go,” Frankie says to them both. “As much as I’d like to referee this important debate, I have three more hours of reading to do.”

  “That’s fine,” says Maddalena. “We had a nice talk.”

  “We did.”

  “All our talks are nice.”

  “They are,” he says. “Even when they’re not.” Then he says it again. “You sound really good, Ma.”

  “Good night, Son!” says his father. He hangs up.

  “Take care of yourself, Frankie,” Maddalena continues. “Don’t go walking too far.”

  “I won’t. I mean I will. You, too. Good-bye. I love you.”

  “I love you, too. Bye. Bye.”

  “Bye, love you, bye. Bye.”

  “Bye, bye, I love you. Bye.”

  Maddalena waits until the last possible second, when she’s sure he’s gone, to push the Talk/End button, then brings the cordless back to her bedroom. She picks up Antonio’s pants and shirt and dress socks from the floor, looks at them in the light, turns them twice around, smells them, puts the shirt and socks in the hamper, and hangs the pants back in the closet. She pulls his jeans and a white button-down off their hangers, takes a thin black sweater from the drawer, and sets them on his end of the dresser for tomorrow.

  She closes the hall lights and switches on the lamp in the foyer. She straightens the silk flower arrangement on the lowboy and checks the locks on the front door. In the den, Antonio waits for her in his chair, feet up, arms crossed, half-asleep already. She takes an afghan from the credenza and lays it over his legs. She kisses him on the lips, rests her palm a moment on his warm, stubbly cheek—no wrinkles, for a man almost eighty, amazing—and returns to the sofa. The TV is still frozen on the face of the conniving woman, her blond curls and thick lips and eyes blue as her slinky silk dress. She’ll get away with everything. That’s how the world works now. Women have too much power and no shame. She presses Play and brings her back to life.

  “Who’s this one again?” Antonio asks.

  “Gesù mio,” says Maddalena. “She’s the star!”

  “She’s a good-looking woman.”

  “She’s very bad. You don’t remember what she’s trying to pull? With her baby?”

  “She looks like you,” says Antonio.

  “You’re going senile.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  She takes a deep breath, like Dr. Ferretti tells her to do. But most of the time a deep breath just makes her dizzy, like this afternoon, like yesterday morning. Her head gets heavy as stone.

  After a while, in the middle of the show, she says, “It keeps happening.” Her eyes are fixed on the TV. “Yesterday I was standing at the sink with the water running and a dirty dish in my hand, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it.”

  “That’s nothing,” he says. “That’s called getting old.”

  She can’t see him. His easy chair is behind her, and they are both facing the same direction.

  “You’re fine,” he says. “We’re both fine. The pills will help. Just listen to the doctor.”

  “But it keeps happening.”

  “The pills haven’t kicked in yet. It takes a few months.”

  “Is that what Ferretti said?”

  “I forget people’s names all the time,” Antonio interrupts.

  He’s lying, but how can she argue? “When I was sixty, I thought I was so old. I was a teenager.”

  “The only place you were a teenager,” he says, “was Santa Cecilia.” He sits up in his chair. She can feel him leaning toward her. If she turns around, she will see his elbows on his knees, his face begging. She doesn’t turn around. “Come back with me there. Stop all this nonsense arguing. Make your daughter happy and me happy.”

  “Antonio.”

  “You know what? Forget about me. Forget about Prima. I have a good feeling,” he says. “This trip—it will help you. To remember things better. To see your brother and sister, it will spark something. It can’t hurt.”

  Can he see her shaking? She covers herself with her nightgown. He must hear the fear in her voice. Her kids say she can’t hide anything. Frankie tells her that she’d have made a terrible actress, that she should have tried to be a dancer instead. Frankie! How will he live without her? What will he become? One night soon he will call and she won’t know who he is, and he’ll have no one to talk to, no one to settle his mind. He’ll never sleep. How can she abandon him?

  “Please,” Antonio is saying. “Listen to me, for once.” He is out of his seat now, makes his way over to the coffee table, where he sits on the edge, faces her, his back to the soap opera that keeps playing, on and on, without them. “From the first day you came to this country, you wanted to go home. That’s all I heard for ten years: ‘Take me home, take me home.’ Now I’m telling you: Don’t waste this chance.”

  Last week, Maddalena was sitting at the desk in her workroom when a man walked by. In her hands was fabric. The fabric had a pattern of daisies. She didn’t know who it was for, or how it had come to her, or what to do with it. The man, the flash in the doorway, looked like a man she’d met a long time ago, when she was a girl—the postman, maybe, or an uncle who came to visit from Rome. She wasn’t sure. Daisies grew wild in the yard behind her family’s store. She used to pick a handful and arrange them in a vase for her mother to find, as a surprise. She sat at her worktable for a while, twisting the fabric in her hands, and the next time the man passed she recognized him (her husband, Antonio Grasso) and the reason for the fabric (Arlene’s bedroom windows, Arlene her friend from the dance studio) and where she got it (Jo-Ann Fabrics, in the University Plaza Shopping Center) and what to do with it (sew, sew, always sew). Then she climbed the stairs, walked outside, took deep breaths, and lifted her palms to God, and the houses and sky and trees slid away from her, and the ground out from under her legs, and if she hadn’t grabbed onto the iron railing of her porch, she’d have fallen flat.

  “I don’t want to fight anymore,” she says.

  “Good,” says Antonio.

  “Tell Prima whatever you want.”

  “I’ll tell her you’re going. We’re going. We’re all going. Easter is beautiful. Remember the hats?”

  “Fine.”

  “You’re sure? You’ll see it my way, for once?”

  “It will make Prima happy.”

  “And me.”

  “And you.”

  “Yes. And that’s a good thing. To make your daughter happy and your husband happy and your brother Claudio and your sister—” He kisses her forehead. His hand is warm on her wrinkled cheek. “And you, too. You’ll be happy, too, tesoro. This is for you. I promise. I’ll make sure.”

  Part 2 Spring 2000

  7 All of Us Are Leaving

  IT’S NOT STALKING if you do it for your kids. This is what Prima tells herself as she idles in the parking lot of Padua Academy, sunglasses on, hair pulled back, waiting for Allison Grey. She’s Zach’s official girlfriend now, the one who’s luring him down from Penn State for her high school prom next month. He deserves to know what she’s up to while they’re apart.

  It’s a warm March afternoon, the first of the season. The streets and cars are spit-shiny after the morning ra
in. Prima arranges herself in the driver’s seat in such a way to give her the best view while she soaks up the precious sunlight. Recently in McCall’s she read about a new disease called SAD, a mood disorder that can develop if you don’t spend enough time in the light. More women than men suffer from it, some so bad that doctors prescribe lying under lamps for hours at a time. It got Prima worrying that Syracuse was the wrong choice of college for Ryan. Frankie, too, up in snowy Boston. She can’t read anything nowadays without connecting it in some upsetting way to someone she loves.

  It’s muggy in the car under the direct sun, but the windows are tinted and she can’t put them down. She struggles to remove the fur jacket Tom bought her six years ago—can it really be six?—for her fortieth birthday.

  At Christmas, Frankie told her, “You can’t wear that thing in Boston, you know, if you ever visit me.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “They’ll scream at you. ‘Killer! KILLER!’ ”

  “She didn’t club those little chinchillas to death,” Tom said. “If I didn’t buy it, some other lady’d have it on.”

  “By wearing it, though, Prima implicitly endorses the process.”

  “I guess I won’t see Boston in the winter, then,” she said. “Imagine owning a coat like this and not wearing it.”

  It broke Prima’s heart when Frankie got so excited about a family trip to Boston. Only her parents have visited him there, and just the once, to move him in. Frankie drove them up in the old Toyota he bought from Tom, and they flew back the next day. He’s not a parent. He doesn’t know there are some things a mother can’t bear to see: the run-down apartment where her son will have to clean his own toilet, the city he chooses over you, his life spinning away from yours. Prima has visited Ryan at Syracuse and the twins at Penn State once only, to get them settled. She stayed three hours. It took a lot of effort not to look closely at anything. She didn’t want to remember the details—the cinder-block walls, the stinky ginkgo tree outside the dorm room window, the pretty girls in pink jackets bouncing along the paths. She bought no souvenirs from the campus bookstores. She prefers the blue-and-gold high school sweatshirts and pom-pommed hats, which remind her of fuller days.

  At two thirty the double doors open and the Padua girls spill into the parking lot. Most are Italians from the surrounding neighborhood, dark-haired teens in matching plaid skirts, white button-down blouses, and chunky black shoes. The blonds and redheads stand out. The first few times Prima checked up on Allison, back in December, the weather was frigid and the girls wore hats and scarves that covered their faces, so she couldn’t find her. Then Prima got smart, staked out the Grey house in the early morning, saw the camel peacoat and Burberry-patterned scarf and hat she left for school in, and later that afternoon spotted her right away.

  Today, Allison’s hair is in a ponytail. As she struts out, she gabs nonstop with a girl on her right, waves to one of the teachers, then giggles into the girl’s ear. Last week, she walked out with a different girl, got into her car, sped off to a house in Fairfax, and didn’t emerge before Prima had to get home and fix dinner for Tom. Today, Allison leans against this other girl’s Jeep while she fishes for something in the trunk, chattering the whole time even though the girl’s not paying any attention. Prima wishes she could hear what she’s going on and on about and report back to Zach that Allison’s got her eyes on a different boy. It’s obvious to Prima that she can’t be trusted, but what’s not so obvious is how Prima will prove it.

  The girl closes the trunk and hands Allison a tin of something. Allison opens up the tin, looks around, picks out a small tablet, and pops it in her mouth. She laughs. The other girl laughs. She hands back the tin, and the girl stuffs it guiltily in her sweater pocket. They stand there, waiting, Prima guesses, for another girl to meet them and join them for whatever trouble they’ll get into. So far, Prima’s followed Allison and her various friends to the mall, to Bert’s Music, to Fairfax, and to Brandywine Creek State Park, and while she hasn’t caught them red-handed in anything major yet, she’s certainly never caught them volunteering at a senior center or planting trees. She’s noted that each of them drives over the speed limit, the Fairfax girl smokes cigarettes, and now today there’s this suspicious little tablet Miss Allison Grey won’t put in her mouth unless she looks around first.

  Between her car and Allison is a large maple tree that, when the wind comes, obstructs her view. The branches were bare in January, but now they’re sprouting leaves and making surveillance more of a challenge. Leaning over on the passenger’s side doesn’t help. What is she hoping to discover? She doesn’t know. She knows only that the girl is bad news. A corrupter. She can’t say this to Zach without him asking how she could possibly think that. She needs evidence. For three months she’s been looking. I happened to be at the mall, and what did I see but Allison Grey stoned out of her mind . . . what did I see but Allison Grey stealing a pair of earrings . . . what did I see but Allison Grey kissing a Puerto Rican boy . . .

  Someone pounds on the window. Prima jumps out of her seat, hits her head on the sunroof. When she looks over, she finds Patrick. Patrick! He’s pulling on the handle, but the door’s locked.

  “Mom?” He peers into the car, his hand shading his eyes.

  “Fuck!” Prima says. She tosses her glasses on the passenger seat and opens the door for her son. “You scared me!” she says. “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here? I noticed the Beamer and I was like, That looks like Mom’s car. Then I checked the license plate.”

  He’s all smiles and happy to run into her, but she’s so flustered she can’t find a way to turn the keys in the ignition. “Shouldn’t you be at practice?” she says.

  “I am at practice. We jog over here sometimes, then jog back.” He’s wearing his baseball jersey, but with shorts instead of the uniform pants, and now she does see a group of boys running sprints on the grass next to the main building. Prima’s always worried that Allison Grey might catch her here; she’s never once thought of Patrick, even though his school’s five minutes down the road.

  She starts the car. “I was just about to leave,” she says. “You scared the heck out of me!”

  He looks over at his team, then back at her. “I still don’t get why you’re sitting in the parking lot.”

  “Oh,” she says. She musters a big, goofy smile. “I’m not ‘sitting in the parking lot.’ Barbara asked if I could pick up some tax form from the school office and drop it by for one of your father’s clients.” Barbara is Tom’s secretary, and every once in a while, when things get busy at the firm, Prima will spend a few hours in the office and run this sort of errand. The excuse doesn’t sound too far fetched, especially because Tom’s working double-time to get his clients’ taxes done before the trip. She picks up a manila folder from the passenger seat and shows him. Inside the folder is all the documentation for the Italy trip, but it could very well include a tax form for Barbara, as far as Patrick needs to know.

  “Oh, OK,” Patrick says.

  Prima looks over at where Allison Grey was standing, but she and the girl and the car and the tin of little tablets are gone. Fuck, she thinks, and Patrick must see the word on her face.

  “You sure you’re OK, Mom?” he asks.

  “Of course, sweetheart. Why wouldn’t I be?” She leans over and kisses him on the cheek, but when she pulls away, his eyes, those starry blue eyes that keep her awake at night, are narrowed at her. “What is it?”

  “Dad told me not to say anything,” Patrick says. “But to be honest, I’m kind of worried about you. You seem really stressed out. More than usual.”

  “Oh, Patrick,” she says. “The last thing in the world I need is to worry about you worrying about me.”

  “That’s what I mean. You say stuff like that.” He looks down. “And you forget things you never used to forget. Like, last week. You were supposed to come get me after practice, but you never showed up. The Gooch had to drive me hom
e.”

  “What?” Prima says. “When? What day?”

  “Last Tuesday,” Patrick says.

  Last Tuesday, her father had called in the middle of the day to say, “Come to the house soon as you can.”

  Some guy from the team yells out, “Buckley!”

  “Oh God,” Prima says. “I’m sorry. Your nonna wasn’t feeling well last Tuesday, and Nonno was busy at the restaurant, so I had to run out and get her something. Why didn’t you say anything that night?”

  Patrick shrugs. “Because you were all stressed out then, too.” He looks out toward the street, away from his teammates. “And then I think, when I leave for school, after we get back from Italy and you don’t have enough stuff to do, are you going to be OK all alone, just you and Dad?”

  “BUCKLEY!” the guy calls again. “Let’s go!”

  Again Patrick ignores him. “I can catch up,” he says to his mother.

  This, too, is Prima’s fault. She’s joked too many times how badly she wishes Patrick were graduating from kindergarten instead of high school. It breaks the rule she set for herself as a mother long ago, then forgot: Never give your kids a guilt trip for something they can’t control. Like growing up. Like becoming men. “You should be with your team,” she says. “Don’t worry for one second about me, do you hear? I’m going to be just fine. The Italy trip’s a big deal, and your nonna’s been having a hard time with it. And yes, I’ll be very sad when you leave for school, but I’ve been through this before, right? With your brothers? I can do it again. And you’re coming back every break, so I won’t even have time to miss you.”

  He’s listening. Then he says, “I don’t want you to be lonely.”

  Prima looks over his shoulder to make sure the team’s gone, then pulls him close. She holds him there for as long as he lets her, which is a long time, longer than he’s allowed her in years. She wants to ease his mind, to protect him from every sadness and worry and mistake. “You’re too much of a Grasso,” she says, and he half smiles, rubs his forehead, embarrassed that he’s caused this scene, that he’s opened his heart, that his mother’s sitting in a car alone in the middle of the day with her hair up. And then, as suddenly as he appeared, he breaks free of her, without so much as good-bye, runs across the parking lot, turns the corner, and is gone.