30. Lily
Unlike her sisters who had dreamed of the day when they could have their own rooms, Lily had always taken comfort knowing that someone was sleeping in the bed next to hers. The snoring of another was a lullaby you could never enjoy if you slept alone. Thoughts of her mother, now gone, living another life; of Dolores, simply gone; of Iris, in college; of the last time she had seen James - the tearful, passionate goodbye they’d shared with no acknowledgement of the future and no resolution of the past - they all hung in the silence, swinging menacingly overhead. Lily had to push them aside to find sleep. In the corners of the silence crouched the sights and smells of the chicken coop, the faces of her childhood, the back room at Auntie Rosa’s. Lily’s lifelong quest had been to avoid thinking about those things, to block them out, drown them, obliterate them. The noise and commotion of home had always been the perfect antidote for reflection, but life’s dwindling chatter was stripping Lily of her hiding place.
The proliferation of silence was the least of it. Since Iris had moved away, keeping up with the household chores took more effort and had become joyless. The grocery budget had been cut due to her father’s mounting legal fees, making it increasingly difficult for Lily to bring any change home, let alone pay for eggs and bacon. Anyway, it was too sad to go out to breakfast alone.
With each item selected from the shelves at Star Market, Lily saw the reflection of what her life had become. Lemon scented furniture polish was Saturday afternoon. Frozen chicken pot pies were for Saturday evening, after Mass. Pasta and sauce, Sunday. Laundry soap, day after day after day. As she filled the shopping cart, she scripted her week, and all she saw there was cooking, cleaning, and tampons for one.
As her father and the boys grew more and more dependent on Lily to care for them, the idea of moving away to college had grown distant. Dolores had been the visionary, the planner, the one who truly believed, the one who fed the fantasies that Lily and Iris had conjured as they’d lain in bed at night. Dolores’ act of self-destruction - which Lily’s father and Auntie Rosa continued to refer to as an “accident” - caused Lily’s clarity for the future to become blurred and faded. How would she ever pick up and go on without Dolores? She certainly couldn’t ask her father to help her with her audition; he was consumed with lawyers and bills and rage. What could she expect him to do for her, when he couldn’t even manage to cook his own dinner?
“For crying out loud,” Lily’s father said. “This cube steak is like shoe leather.”
“Sorry, Dad,” said Lily. “That’s how it comes... I don’t know how to make it more tender. I cooked it slow and let it simmer and everything.”
“Jeepers Cripes, I can’t eat this. Pass me the mashed potatoes.”
He scooped a heap of potatoes onto his plate, shoved a forkful into his mouth, and then doused the mound in salt, pepper, and butter, and mixed it all together.
“Damn your mother,” he said, furiously jabbing at the potatoes with his fork.
Sometimes Charles and William came home for dinner, but often they did not. Ricci spent his afternoons sitting motionless in front of the television, tearing himself from his programs just long enough to eat, before retreating to a cable-induced semi-catatonic state that would take him far into the night. The camaraderie and tenderness that Lily had shared with the boys when their mother had first left had gradually ossified under the pressure of their father’s desperation and hate. Where they had once looked to Lily for hugs and comfort, all they wanted now was to stay disengaged. Whether due to their own bitterness, or as a by-product of their father’s effusive wrath for his wife in particular, and for all women in general, their demeanor toward Lily had become marked with disrespect and cruelty.
Bedtimes and curfews were initially relaxed and then abandoned in the turmoil, as the boys - who were now all in high school - learned that their father had neither the emotional capacity to argue with them, nor the courage to risk alienating them by enforcing rules. Their mother had recently moved into a duplex located in the local school district, which meant that any of the children could simply take the bus to her house after school any time they were so inclined - which Lily would do on occasion, partly to spend time with her mother, but mostly to avoid being at the center of the chaos, like the burned out matron in a home for wayward boys.
“You got anything to eat, Mom?” Lily asked.
“I haven’t been to the store,” Lily’s mother replied. “But let’s see what we can come up with.”
After rifling through the pantry, Lily’s mother emerged with a can of cream of broccoli soup, and the remnants of a box of rotini. She shook the contents of the can into a small saucepan. She sniffed the open milk spout once, then paused and looked up at the ceiling - as if trying to remember what fresh milk should smell like - then sniffed it again before adding it to the soup. Lighting the flame under a second saucepan filled with water, she joined Lily at the small dinette set, wedged into the corner of what she called the “eat-in kitchen.”
The house was built into the side of a hill, so the living room was cool and quiet, decorated with variegated green shag carpeting, macramé plant hangers, and a brown bean bag chair in the corner. Every table top and surface was blanketed with newspapers, magazines, flyers from the National Organization for Women, the battered women’s shelter, the League of Women Voters, and weekly programs from the First Unitarian Church. A half-eaten package of oatmeal cookies sat on the coffee table next to a copy of The Feminine Mystique. As Lily looked around, she felt that she was getting a sense of who her mother was for the first time. Lily herself was the only evidence there of Carlo Capotosti, or of her mother’s life on Chestnut Crest.
As the women sat and ate their pasta with creamy broccoli, Lily noticed a calm creeping upon her, like a peace egg that had been gently broken over her head and was running down her face, dripping onto her shoulders. Unlike the silences at home, which were stretched taut between fits of rage, the silence at her mother’s house was open, though tinged with sadness. Being there was like sitting in an empty church alone, observing Jesus on the cross, feeling both safe and sorrowful at the same time.
“I don’t want to go back there, Mom,” Lily blurted.
“Back where?”
“Home,” said Lily. “I don’t want to go back home.” The words themselves were simple, but the ideas that trailed behind them were terrifying.
“You could always come and live here,” the words shot like projectiles from her mother’s mouth. “I have an extra bedroom. I moved back out this way to give you kids that option.”
“Dad would kill me.” Lily’s heart pounded at the thought of confronting him, of telling him she was going to live with the enemy.
“The fact that you would say that is all the more reason why you should, Lily. He’s your father, not your husband, not your jailer. He’s supposed to be taking care of you - not the other way around.”
Lily raised a spoonful of pasta to her lips, but found that what she had already eaten was threatening an encore.
“Money is tight, I won’t lie to you,” continued her mother. “You’ll have to get a job, and we’ll have to share the car. Why don’t you just go on up and take a look at your room, see how it feels to you?”
“I have a room?”
“Someone does,” said her mother. “Might as well be you.”
Lily sat on the floor of the empty bedroom, listening to the gentle hum of the traffic that flowed along Buffalo Road, a road that - if you followed it for a couple hours - would eventually lead you all the way to the University, a straight line to Iris. The room was austere. No curtains, no carpeting, no clothes hanging in the closet, no shelf for fear, no memories, no loneliness, no fantasies about the future, no more comparing life to what it once was, or to what she had hoped it would be some day. She still grieved Dolores and the dreams they had conjured together, but maybe it would be better to find a way to be happy with an ordinary life. Maybe she could start over here. Begin ag
ain.
Lily and her mother stood in the driveway at Chestnut Crest, preparing to confront her father and tell him that Lily would be moving out.
“When dealing with violent men like your father,” Lily’s mother told her, “it’s important to have a plan, and then follow through with conviction. If you hesitate, he will take that for weakness and he will do absolutely anything to coerce you to stay.”
Lily thought her mother may have been over-dramatizing the matter, but even though her mother now stood beside her there in the kitchen - or perhaps because she did - her father’s behavior was as she predicted. The force of his response frightened Lily viscerally, as though his rage and his stare could vaporize her, and she would simply cease to exist the moment she stepped out the door.
Lily’s father marched to the phone and furiously pounded out a series of numbers. “My ex-wife is here, and she is trying to take my daughter away, and we need her,” Lily’s father shouted. He glared at Lily in the pause, before screaming into the receiver, “This is an emergency!”
Lily’s body was shaking, and had been ever since the words, “I’m going to go live with Mom,” were birthed from her throat. The tension inside her had been building ever since she’d made the decision, and the past few days had seemed surreal: secretly collecting and packing her clothes; taking a clandestine trip to the market to make sure the cupboards and freezer were stocked with easy-to-prepare meals; the way she’d squirmed and watched the clock all day; the image of she and her mother trying to get the keys out of their locked car with a coat hanger in the school parking lot that afternoon; the planning, the timing and the details, like two prisoners of war plotting their escape.
Lily’s father slammed the phone down and turned to her. “I should have known that you would abandon us too. You’re just like your mother.”
“Dad - I’m seventeen years old... I can’t handle all of this... I - I-” Lily’s composure headed out the door before she did.
“Go ahead and go,” he snarled. Lily’s father walked toward her, and she took a reactionary step back. He stopped in his tracks and let out a derisive giggle. Lily couldn’t tell if he was dismayed or pleased that her reaction to his approach was to recoil.
“There’s one thing you should know before you go.” He picked up the paper grocery bag stuffed with the remnants of Lily’s belongings. “You know that twenty dollars I paid you each and every week for helping out around here? Well, you weren’t worth it.” Shoving the bag into her arms, he added, “Get out - both of you.”
Lily burst into tears with such force that she was sure she would open her eyes and find her guts lying on the yellowed linoleum.
“Fuck you, Carlo!” Lily’s mother shouted, encircling Lily’s shoulder with a trembling arm.
“I bet you could, with that big dick you have hanging between your legs, you dyke!” Carlo slammed the kitchen door, and the last thing Lily heard as they started down the driveway was the shattering of glass.
I hope he knows where we keep the broom.
“Can you work weekends?” Cory, the assistant manager at Burger King, was just a few years older than Lily, but she imagined that he must be very good at his job to be a boss already. Perhaps she could become assistant manager some day, too. But first she had to get the job.
“Yes, I can work weekends,” Lily replied. Remembering the coaching her mother gave her, she added a smile and made eye contact with Cory. “I’m done with school already, so I can also work during the day.”
“That’s great.” Cory made a note on Lily’s job application. “We have a hard time keeping the register staffed during the day, but it gets pretty hectic at lunch time. Do you think you can handle it?”
“Sir, I’ve spent the last three years cooking and cleaning for a houseful of boys. I can do hectic.”
Cory looked at Lily for a few seconds. She smiled.
“C’mon back to the office and get your uniform. You’re hired.”
Lily was struck with how easily and quickly the job materialized, like it was meant to be. The entire last few weeks had unfolded that way. With a simple graduation ceremony at the end of January, she had gleefully left high school behind. Once settled in her new home, all the pieces had started to fall into place.
“Don’t you have a college audition coming up soon?” her mother asked one evening.
“What do you mean?” Lily asked.
“College - you know, college? That place you go to learn more after high school?”
“Well, I did have an audition appointment, but I don’t know what’s going on with it - Dolores had all that stuff. I didn’t bother keeping up with it.”
“SUNY Purchase, right?” her mother asked.
“Yeah. Why?”
“I’ll give them a call and see what I can find out. I’ll have to get time off of work, if we’re going to drive down there. But you’d better start making some money, because you’ll need to make a contribution toward the expenses - and you’ll need to have some savings for your first year away. I don’t have much to spare, and I think we can safely say we can’t depend on your father to help.”
“Wait - are you saying you’re going to take me?”
“Well, I don’t expect you to drive to New York City by yourself.”
Lily felt torn between the recycled excitement of possibilities and the need to protect herself from the disappointment she feared awaited at the end of this path. Giving up her dreams once was bad enough; the pain was just beginning to become rounder and smoother than it was at first. Now it was less like cutting yourself with a knife and more like hitting your leg on the corner of the coffee table. If she tried again and failed, she would have to go back to the rawness of the fresh wound. Yet as much as she tried to talk herself out of it, Lily knew she ultimately had no choice. To turn away from this opportunity was to give in to fear, to disrespect what Dolores had tried to do for her, and to deny her mother the chance to make up for lost time. Maybe it wasn’t too late after all.
The days passed quickly, crammed with activity. Lily took as many hours as they would give her at Burger King, saving her spare time to rehearse for the audition. She and Dolores had done a lot of what they called “vision shopping,” just to get ideas, but the closest they had come to actually buying anything was when they placed a few dresses on layaway at the mall. Surely they had found their way back to the racks by now. The application fees and the money needed to get to New York City were just about all Lily could manage to save for anyway. She sorted through her closet and selected a pair of black palazzo pants, then rummaged through her mother’s clothes until she found a blue and green paisley print rayon blouse with ruffled cuffs that fit her just right. The only thing missing was a pair of shoes; she would just have to find something on sale at SaveMart.
The old Plymouth Duster made the trip to New York sputtering and coughing. Lily acted as navigator, and they got lost twice on the way, making the trip ten hours long instead of seven.
“Let me see the map,” her mother had said with irritation, as they pulled into a gas station seriously north of Albany.
They laid the map out on the trunk of the car, and Lily traced the route she had instructed her mother to follow. “See, we got off of I-90 here, and then we went left here - ”
“Lily Elizabeth Capotosti! You’re looking at this upside down, for goodness sake!”
With the map in its upright position, they had finally reached New York City, discovering that arriving in Manhattan wasn’t nearly the same thing as finding a particular address among the millions stamped on countless doors of countless buildings. Lily rolled down the car window and stuck her head out into the cool evening air, gazing up in wonder at the buildings that stretched imploringly toward the moon as if they knew it was not just the city and not just the moonlight but the combination of the two that lent magic to nights such as this. She wished Iris could see this, and hoped that one day, she might see something at least as beautiful.
; The first time they passed their hotel, they were in the wrong lane and couldn’t move over in time to make the turn. The second attempt put them in the right lane, but the hotel traffic was backed up into the street and when they stopped to wait for it to clear, the cab driver behind them laid on his horn and shouted, “Move that goddamned piece of shit!”, so they abandoned the line and circled the block again instead. The third time around they finally rumbled into the hotel parking garage, Lily’s mother exhaling in short puffs like air escaping from an over-inflated beach ball - the only sign of stress or worry that she ever exhibited. Their plans of spending the evening exploring were thwarted by sheer exhaustion. They grabbed a burger and fries from the Burger King across the street before collapsing into bed.
Still, she could hardly believe that they were there, just one day and thirty miles away from the dream she and Dolores had designed together. Her heart swelled with gratitude for the time she had spent with Dolores, and for the efforts her mother was making to help her see it through.
Lily woke the next morning to a grinding in her gut and an icy-blue radiance that filled the room. Pushing the sheers open, she found the city buried in snow.
“Oh, shit!” she cried. “We got hit last night!”
“It’s just a little snow,” said her mother.
“Oh shit,” Lily cried again, placing her hand over her belly. “I think I just got my period.” She and her mother rarely discussed such things; too irritated by the snow and the badly timed cramps, Lily forgot to be embarrassed. Even when Lily had gotten her first period, her mother had simply handed her four Kotex pads and a sanitary belt, and then returned to the conversation she was having with John, who had just returned from a semester of college, full of ideas and of himself. Lily had learned most of what she knew from Iris, from her friends, and from Health Education classes at school. She had little concept that most mothers and daughters had open conversations about puberty, sex, and womanhood, but Lily didn’t find her mother’s silence strange. In the Capotosti home, conversations were practical - who used the last of the gas in the car, what’s for dinner, whose turn is it to set the table - there was never any discussion of sex or money or spirituality - unless someone was getting yelled at for having a Playboy magazine, skipping Mass, or getting a hickey.
[Iris and Lily 01.0 - 03.0] The Complete Series Page 47
