The Fine Art of Truth or Dare

by Melissa Jensen

  Technically, Dad owns Marino’s. Nonna knows that; she sold it to him. She just likes to ignore that fact. I don’t think he minds. He’s happiest when the customer is happy. Ricky has no interest whatsoever in running a fifteen-table family restaurant in South Philly. He’s always had big plans, most recently involving Top Chef—for which he auditions every season—and a move to New York. Nonna likes to stand in the kitchen and tell everyone what to do. The system works.

  “Eh, Rinaldo, you need to put more anchovy in that puttanesca! Ancora!” Nonna clanged her ladle against one of the big stainless colanders hanging over the workstation for emphasis, sending it into a wobbly arc.

  “Sure, Ma.” Phone wedged between ear and shoulder, Dad dropped a fistful of fresh fettuccine into a waiting pot, stopped the colander midswing, and plated a slab of codfish. Fred Astaire in a red-stained apron. “Leo!” While Nonna wasn’t looking, he slid the anchovy container a few inches closer to the stove. Consider them added. “Leo!”

  “. . . so I tell her, when I get to New York, Padma Lakshmi’s not gonna be hassling me about my friggin’ Fruit of the Looms . . .”

  “A little service here!” Dad yelled. “No, not you, hon. My son who puts the word wait in waiter. Now, you promise me those eggs are gonna be fresh? Keeps me up at night, thinking about E. coli . . .”

  I thought about slipping silently back out. But that would have defeated the purpose, which was to be seen. Otherwise, someone would come over to the house looking for me, and probably want to chat. I needed to make an appearance, so I could go home to unwillingly and helplessly relive the dismal day over and over in peace. I braced myself and stepped onto the honeycomb floor mat.

  They saw me.

  “Hey, Ell-a!” Uncle Ricky lunged with a spoon. I tasted garlic and strawberry. “Mmm,” I managed.

  “It’s my new sauce. The producers will love it.”

  Maybe. I grabbed a slice of bread from a basket.

  “That’s no good!” Dad scolded. “No, not you, hon. My shrimp of a daughter. Thinks she can make a meal out of bread. Harvard girls eat dinner!” I saw him reach for a pan. Knowing he would be stuffing me soon with something expensive and unappealing, and probably fishy, I headed him off by filling a mug from the zuppa di giorno pot. Then I did the rounds, kissing him, Uncle Ricky, and Nonna, who pinched my cheek, hard, like always, and started my escape. Through the porthole windows between the kitchen and dining room, I could see Sienna bouncing toward us. I wanted to get out before—

  “Get the lead out, youse!” She banged through the doors like a force of nature, masses of curly hair and eyelashes and J.Lo booty squeezed into a tight black skirt. She’s the hostess on Tuesdays and Sundays, and on nights like these, when Uncle Ricky and Aunt Tina are fighting and Tina refuses to come to work. “We’re all turning gray out here!” Someone in the dining room must have said something funny, because there was a ripple of laughter.

  “You’re a pup, Mr. Donato,” Sienna called back over her shoulder, then slipped in for a lipstick-and-VPL check. She gave me a quick once-over and rolled her eyes. “Would it kill you to put on a little mascara? You could be such a hottie if you just tried . . . Okay, okay,” she muttered when Dad, Ricky, and Nonna gave her looks I pretended not to see. “I’m just saying.”

  They all have their own ways of trying to fix me. Dad’s usually involves food. Mom’s is a continuing stream of rhinestone-embellished tops that would cure my Willing invisibility in decisive and unfortunate ways. Sienna goes for vague threats of makeovers.

  “Hey, don’t you go sneaking off on me,” she commanded as I edged toward the back door. “I got pictures of shoes to go with the bridesmaids’ dresses. You just gotta tell me which you like best.”

  Fortunately, when there are options, Sienna circles her preference in pink Sharpie. It makes my participation much simpler.

  Leo came back in with the plate of “off” mozzarella salad. “Look at that. Ass—” Nonna hissed. “Jerk eats most of it, then sends it back. I hate these guys. Yo, Insania, there are people waiting to be seated.”

  “So they’ll wait.” Sienna carried a bowl of minestrone to the office in back. I could see our mother, magenta suit jacket and matching pumps off, frowning at a stack of papers on the desk in front of her. Generally, she’s at work from eight to late, showing houses to people who, for the most part, don’t buy them. Lately, she’s around more, studying the books and trying to convince Dad that shrimp and steak for a hundred and fifty wedding guests is not excessive. I watched as Sienna traded the soup for a shiny catalogue. Whatever she said, probably something about shoes, got her a big smile. They’re most alike, Mom and Sienna, but we’re not exactly a wildly exotic family.

  I’m like the period at the finish of a sentence, the end of the line. We all have the Marino dark hair and eyes, even Mom, who was born a Palladinetti and has aspirations of being a redhead. We’re all short, although Leo swears he’s five ten, and kind of curvy. Even Leo and Dad. We burp when we eat celery, have decent singing voices, and have never had our names on a single plaque. There are a thousand families just like us within twenty blocks.

  “Ella,” Mom called from the office, “did you wear those ratty jeans to school again? No wonder you haven’t got . . . Oh, fine, Sienna. I get it already. Ella? Come in. You gotta look at these shoes. Absolutely to die!”

  I didn’t think I could face pictures of purple diamante pumps just then. Mug in hand, I crept out.

  “Stay, stay!” Dad called. “Salmon. It’s brain food!”

  “Anchovy!” Nonna banged again. I closed the door behind me.

  I stepped from the restaurant’s four-car lot into our backyard, skirting the rock bed and empty koi pond Mom insisted on when Zen was all the rage. Personally, I miss the scrubby lawn and cracked cement patio. It was good for sprinkler jumping in the summer. From the front, the house is pretty much like every other one on the block: narrow, three stories, brick at the bottom and white vinyl siding at the top. Dad nixed Mom’s idea of replacing the porch supports with plaster Greek pillars. But on theme, she stuck a trio of fat, faux-stone planters complete with cavorting nymphs on the front porch. She never remembers to water the stuff she plants, so there’s usually an assortment of browning weeds in front of the thriving rosemary that Nonna snuck in. Inside, it’s beige and cabbage roses, the toile throw pillows that were all the rage three years ago, and the occasional bright blue Madonna statue that, yeah, Nonna snuck in.

  My room was pink, typical ruffly princess pink, until I started at Willing and had my first art class with Ms. Evers. She took one look at the watercolor I did of the rose she’d given us and laughed. In a really good way. Then she gave me a pad of the whitest, thickest paper I’d ever seen, a box of charcoal pencils, and sent me off to roam the halls.

  “Think bold,” she said.

  Now my room is black and white. “Sfortuna!” Nonna mutters whenever she looks through the door. “No good fortune in this room.”

  But she likes my drawings, which replaced the pink floral wallpaper, and she’s partial to black, herself. She hasn’t worn anything else since arriving from Calabria fifty years ago (“Oh, this city. So dirty!”).

  Nonna is obsessed with dirt, American Idol, and bad luck. Since my birthday is March 17, she’s convinced I was born with bad luck hanging over my crib. According to her, the fact that I am barely five one is due completely to Evil Number 17. Mom says the fact that I was due to be born on the twentieth—of April—has a lot more to do with my shrimpyness. Dad says that considering the fact that I only weighed three pounds then and weigh a hundred and three now, I should consider myself a champion grower. Mom also likes to point out that Nonna doesn’t top five feet even in her black church shoes.

  According to Mom, I was a perfectly beautiful little shrimp. According to everyone, Nonna went ballistic whenever someone called me a beautiful baby. “Malocchio, malocchio!” she spat at doctors, nurses, and visiting friends, hurrying to counteract their well-
meant compliment (and, apparently, evil-eye curse), by waving the protective corno—pinkie and pointer up, other fingers folded—over my tiny head. “Like a wrinkled Ozzie Osbourne in a dress,” Mom mutters.

  Mom and Nonna don’t agree on much. Well, they are both completely convinced that they come first with Dad. And they love me with the same combo of high hopes and fierce, if misguided, helpfulness, leaning on me like mismatched bookends. Mom shoves from her side: “Such a diamond in the rough! Everyone can see that. Gorgeous bones. Bright as anything, absolutely endless potential, just needs some work . . .”

  She speaks in Realtor-ese. I don’t think she can help it.

  Nonna shoves from her side: “Bellissima! Bella bella Fiorella. No, no, no purple! Always green, like the spring . . .”

  She spends a lot of time telling me how bella I am. Apparently, it’s okay now that the damage has been done. She puts all of her ninety-odd pounds behind the word, so it always sounds kinda like she’s spitting, cursing the curse of the curse. That’s Nonna.

  I think maybe she believes that if she says it often enough and with enough force, it’ll come true. Or I’ll buy it, like the emperor’s clothes.

  Nonna is okay with faking things. Her favorite handbag is one she bought off the street from a guy who was also selling incense and diet pills. It’s stiff and black, big enough to swallow small people, and she pretends not to notice that the metal plate on the front says FRADA. According to Nonna, if she believes and God doesn’t mind, it’s all good. She has pictures of Jesus, the Pope, and Robert De Niro over her bed.

  I have my sketches, mostly of architecture—like cornices and pediments and bow windows, although I’ve been going through an ornamental door knocker phase lately, so the top layer has a lot of eyes and gaping mouths—covering two walls. Above my desk, I have one bit of Edward. There are plenty of prints of his work, but he did only two self-portraits (one is in the library at Willing), and only one has been reproduced, on a museum poster advertising an exhibition. It’s my very favorite piece, a portrait bust in bronze.

  Here’s the thing. Edward’s self-portrait in the school was like a first date. Through it, he said everything about himself that he would have wanted me to think: that he was handsome, sexy, confident. All true, but that’s only the obvious stuff. Not the whole picture. By the time I found the bronze, I’d already read the bios and the collection of his letters that Edith’s granddaughter published after his death. It was later in our relationship. I knew him.

  The bronze is a completely different Edward, the warts-and-all Edward. He’s older, by about ten years. It’s the same broad forehead and thick hair waving back from it. The same slightly hooded eyes; in the painting, they make me wonder if Edward didn’t go through life looking a little sleepy, and if that didn’t make a lot of women feel wide-awake. But there are shallow lines next to the bronze eyes, and deeper ones bracketing the mouth, which is thinner than the painted one, and really sad.

  Which makes sense when you see that the center of the piece, the most important part, is the jagged, gaping hole in the middle of his chest where his heart would be. It’s called Ravaged Man, dated 1899, which is the year his wife died. Diana. He never got over her. I like the bronze. It’s truthful. In it, he’s truthful.

  “Does all life suck?” I asked him as I slumped into my desk chair. I noticed the white paint I’d used was starting to chip. The pink was creeping back. “Or just ours?”

  “Life sucks,” he agreed. He sounds a little British, even though he . . . well, wasn’t. “Although I think that if I could live for seventeen years after having my heart wrenched from my body, you can survive another nineteen months until graduation.”

  “You’d think, wouldn’t you? I’m not so sure.”

  “Not a good showing with the Frost, certainly.”

  “Don’t even go there,” I warned him. “I can’t even think about that yet.”

  “Fine. How is the weather?”

  “I mean, I knew I would see him in class.” I let my head drop onto the desk with a well-deserved thunk. D’oh. “I see him in every English class. But today, after . . .”

  “After the unfortunate Freddy moment?”

  “Don’t go there. I really don’t want to talk about that.”

  “Fine.” Edward shrugged. He does have shoulders. “Have you read any good books—?”

  “He’s so cute. And, you know, I kinda get the feeling he’s nice, even if he is dating Cruella De Vil . . . And the drawings . . . Sorry,” I offered. “I probably shouldn’t be talking about another guy.”

  “I completely understand.” Edward is very understanding. “Besides, I am ravaged. I have no heart to give you. And the Bainbridge fellow is rather talented. The mermaid was really quite impressive.”

  “Yeah, it was.” There had been two loose pages tucked into Alex’s book. They’d been covered with incredible, unreal figures: slinky animals dressed up like forties movie stars, ghostlike people who looked like they were from Japanese woodblock prints, and an unfinished mermaid, with incredible wild hair and dozens of teardrop-shaped scales, half of them filled with smaller pictures: fish, cameras, airplanes. “I wanted to tell him how great his stuff is, but I completely froze.”

  “No great surprise, that.”

  “Thanks. Why do I bother talking to you?”

  “Because you can, I suppose” was his reply. “I don’t frighten you.”

  “You should. You have a huge hole in your chest.”

  “That’s what you like about me, darling.”

  “Maybe,” I conceded. Edward hadn’t needed words to tell the world how he felt about Diana. “So what do I do about Alex?”

  “Talk to him.”

  “Yes, again, thank you. How do I start?”

  “‘Hello’?”

  “Masterful. And then?”

  Edward sighed. “For heaven’s sake, Ella, you’re a smart girl. Think of something. What was it Evers said? ‘Be bold’? Be bold. Tell Alex his drawings remind you of Suzuki Harunobu, Hieronymus Bosch, and Hilary Knight all in one.”

  “Oh, that would make me sound cool and normal.” My fingers traced the edge of the scar where it peaked under my ear. “It’s hopeless. I’m hopeless.”

  “Absolutely. Give up now.”

  “You’re not helping,” I said. “Why can’t you be doting and supportive and say all the right things?”

  Edward shrugged again. “You prefer the truth. Besides, I’m a metal head. What do you expect?”

  Fair enough, although you’d think imaginary conversations with an object of desire would be a lot nicer.

  5

  THE GAME

  “Okay. Sing first, or Truth or Dare? Sing, right?” Frankie had scanned the crowd at Chloe’s. Apparently, he’d seen something he liked, because he knows his singing—his enthusiastic, reliably flat singing—will bring him to the attention of everyone in the room. He freely acknowledges that Sinatra he is not. “We believe in the importance of dancing well,” he informed me once, speaking for millions of gay men who might or might not agree. “Singing well is not mandatory. It’s all about presence.”

  I almost never sing in public, for all the expected reasons (cowardice, cowardice, cowardice, and cowardice) and because, between Sadie’s good singing and Frankie’s everything but, I would just disappear again. When I’m between Sadie and Frankie is when I’m most visible. Why would I mess with that? For me, Chloe’s is all about the hummus and hanging with my friends. For Frankie, it’s so much more.

  “Truth or Dare,” I said around my first mouthful of spanakopita.

  “Puhleeze,” he muttered. I didn’t know if it was because I usually choose ToD and almost never choose Dare, or because the skinny, goateed guy at the mic was launching into “Oops! . . . I Did It Again.”

  We turned to Sadie to break the tie. “Truth or Dare,” she said, surprising me a little. She usually and understandably sides with Frankie on stuff like this because she’s a peacemaker and he’s m
ore likely to sulk than I am. Then she added, apologetically, “I’m starving. If I don’t eat, I’ll cry.”

  Frankie pouted, but only for a few seconds. When it comes to Sadie and food, he’s a prince. Especially when her diet is not going well, which is almost always. “Greek salad,” he said, sliding the platter in front of her, “takes almost as many calories to digest as it has in it. Really.”

  I nodded my agreement. Sadie smiled (she’s no dummy, but she has a great ability to believe in fairies and magic when it’s important) and scooped a pile of salad onto her plate.

  Chloe’s: Greek restaurant, karaoke bar, and shoe-repair shop, is our favorite hangout for three very good reasons.

  The food is cheap and decent.

  The karaoke options are many.

  No one else from Willing ever goes there.

  We’d managed to snag our favorite table—one away from the stage, such as it is. It’s really just a big sheet of plywood raised up on bunch of cinder blocks, large enough to hold a mic and a singer (or poet, stand-up comedian, or emcee, depending on the night) comfortably. It’s not uncommon for a Motown song to inspire backup singers, but it’s also not uncommon for them to fall off the back, especially if the song is “Stop! In the Name of Love” and the Supreme-alikes are enthusiastic.

  “God, shoot him,” Frankie muttered, stabbing a pita triangle in the direction of the stage. “Shoot me.”

  Sadie, clearly feeling much more cheerful with some sustenance in her, popped him with a gun forefinger. “Truth or Dare.”