by Mara White
Why did I marry her? Fuck if I know. Call it a sense of duty; I wasn’t doing the world any good as a single man. Antonia sought me out like I was something that needed to be chased down and captured. I was eager to settle—the single life didn’t suit me, I’d gotten into a bad habit with call girls and escorts and that shit will cost you. It’s only a matter of time before dirty catches up with you. I was running out of steam, exhausted. When I needed a net, she was right there to catch me. Antonia seemed nice enough. She came from the right family—had good ties back in the mother country. My first wife was a model, Scandinavian—that didn’t sit so well with my relatives. Antonia wanted to have kids and that right there should have been the deal breaker—but I was too stupid to see it. Fuck me. And I married her. Forever.
“Mama, why do you always expect the worse? If I get drunk, I’ll spill the secrets; if I have sex, then I’ll get pregnant; if I go to the homecoming dance, I’ll get arrested. Why can’t I just go out and have some fun for once? Why can’t I get asked out by a boy and we just act like it’s normal?”
My dress was a purple metallic color. I borrowed it from my neighbor Stacey, who’d been in pageants in Tulsa and OKC. It looked all right on me—it fit over my chest, which was half the battle.
Mama had her hair up in curlers, her feet on the coffee table. Her weight was getting out of control and she never left the house. Her breathing got labored just from getting up to go to the bathroom. The last time we went into town she had a panic attack standing in line at the post office. I had to buy the stamps and everyone stared. No one offered to help us. No one even cared. Then I had to leave her in the car while I did the grocery shopping. I was afraid to come back out with five bags of groceries to find her gone back to the house, leaving me stranded in the parking lot.
After that, I did all the shopping and the errands, and I picked up her pills at the pharmacy. If she didn’t take them she somehow managed to become both depressed and volatile. I wondered if Daddy hit her so hard she had brain damage. I wondered if she could take care of herself at all if I just up and left her.
“It’s just a dinner and a dance, Mama. I’ll be back early, even.”
She shook her head and looked back at the television like she couldn’t believe how stupid I was.
“No man wants just dinner and a dance.”
“Well, that’s all he’s getting,” I said, crossing my arms across my chest. “Everyone in town acts like we’re not good enough. Like Daddy hitting you was your doing and Farren and Storm going to jail was our fault too. We’re never good enough for anybody and you expect me to turn down the first guy who is nice to me?”
Mama shook a cigarette out of her soft pack, stuck it in her mouth and spent an extraordinary time lighting it. I could hear the paper sizzle with the long drag she took into her lungs.
“Aimee, here in Sulphur we will never be good enough. You ought to get out before anything bad happens. Before the lies eat you up and swallow you too. You’re a strong girl and could do things with your life.”
She didn’t usually talk to me about anything, let alone my life. She wanted me to have goals and she thought that I was strong. This was all news to me. My eyes filled with tears, but I didn’t want to smudge the purple eyeliner that I’d just rimmed my lids with.
“What about you? Don’t you want me with you?”
“Aimee, this life took my boys and my husband from me already. My advice is for you to run as far away as possible. There’s evil in this town and misery loves company. Don’t get yourself hung up on a stupid man who doesn’t deserve you. Don’t let anything stop you. The world is your oyster and you should go enjoy it. Ain’t nothing for you in Sulphur, ‘cept bad memories now. I want you to get out. I’d leave too if I could.”
I ran to her and hugged her in a spontaneous gesture. I knew that she loved me and that she was often incapable of showing it. She held me tight to her chest. Her skin smelled of Pond’s Cold Cream and menthol cigarettes. I cried when she hugged me because it didn’t happen often.
“Go to your dance and have fun tonight, but don’t give that boy nothing. You are destined for great things, Aimee. Something big—I don’t know what it will be, but you are special and someday you will shine like the sun.”
“I don’t know about that, Mama. I’d be happy with just a boyfriend. Go to school, get a good job. Just a normal life. Start a family. Something small. I want somebody to love me truly, it doesn’t even matter to me who they are.”
I started randomly collecting garbage. There was an ashtray full of stubbed-out cigarettes and half-sucked-on cough drops. I piled dirty plates and cups up against my purple gown.
“Don’t bother with that, Aimee, I’ll get those later,” Mama said, waving away the clutter. She wouldn’t. Either she didn’t see it or was immune to her environment.
Then she looked at me with clarity, her ethereal blue eyes suddenly focusing.
“You look beautiful, Aimee. Just absolutely . . .” Her words broke off and I thought she was going to cry again. I set everything down on the edge of the coffee table and embraced her again. Two hugs in one night. Maybe a record for my lifetime.
“Aimee, don’t ever think what happened here was your fault. You were just a baby and you did nothing wrong. You are innocent, even though I know you don’t see it that way.”
“Mama, to be honest, I’d rather not talk about it.”
I could see Nathan’s headlights as he pulled up the lane. He was on the football team and was taking me to the dance, I was sure, in hopes of an easy lay. I doused myself in perfume from the atomizer in my purse. Cheap department store stuff, but it smelled better than cigarettes, fried onions and stale trailer, which is the scent I was usually wearing.
“You can’t walk around here the rest of your life feeling the weight of something that was out of your control. I have some money saved, Aimee. It’s yours when you want it.”
My jean jacket hung by the door and I suddenly felt unprepared, like I should have a fancy wrap or a jacket that at least didn’t have stains of origins unknown and forgotten. I stuffed my feet into the patent leather flats that were too tight and usually blistered my heel.
“For what?” I shrugged. “I’m fine with what I make at work and I don’t need anything else.”
“You could leave, get out of here. Start a new life. Chase your dreams. Something better than this,” Mama said. Her face looked haunted, desperate even. She didn’t want me to end up like her, stuck in a never-ending repeat of that night and its twisted shadow that hung over us.
“I’m okay with how things are.” I heard Nathan’s car door slam.
“Well, I’m not. Buy a bus ticket to New York with the money in the coffee can.”
“New York? I’ve never even been there. What good could that possibly do me? Get lost in the big city and forget my roots, forget about how hard Granddaddy worked to make this our home.”
I grabbed the jacket and threw it on despite the shame and the insecurity.
“Take the money and go, Aimee. Don’t wait until it’s too late.” Mama was scaring me, the urgency in her voice was unfamiliar and unprecedented.
“Goodnight, Mama. I love you,” I told her and blew her a kiss.
The shadows from the television lights passed over her face. She focused on the floor like it was too much to look at me. Maybe someday I’d crawl my way out of here, buy a one-way bus ticket and make a clean run for it. But I couldn’t imagine never coming back to my roots. Maybe I could change our rotten luck and be the one to pull us up out of poverty. If Mama couldn’t do it then I was the only hope. But I didn’t have a plan or direction of any kind. First things first—I had to leave home and leave my whole past behind.
Danny doesn’t take it well. He throws shit. He screams. He breaks the framed pictures of us and the wine glasses we were drinking from. I thought the wine would buffer his temper, but they became weapons for his tantrum.
I’m sure Wade can hear everyt
hing; hopefully he doesn’t call the police.
“This isn’t what I wanted to come back to. You’ve got to look at it from my perspective and see how fucked up it is. I don’t want to do this anymore. I won’t do this anymore.”
“I promised you I’d leave her and I am working on doing that. Those kinds of things don’t happen overnight.”
“They can if you want them to.” I run my fingers through my hair, separating the curls. Danny will calm down; he’ll see that this could be a good thing.
“I can’t live without you, Sunshine. I already told you that those six months without you were the worst of my life.”
“Maybe you can take a month to really think about where we’re going with this.”
He’ll hate my conditions, which are, one: he can’t know where I’m going, and two: he can’t communicate with me in any way. I bite my lip because I’m scared to even tell him.
“What?” he says giving me the look. He knows there’s more and he doesn’t like it already.
I bend a little.
“You can email me. No phone calls, no Skype, no FaceTime. Absolutely no visits—that’s the most important part of all this.”
He runs his hands through his hair and I can see the internal battle; he’s trying not to lose control. Go ahead and hit me once, Danny, and it’s over between us. He flexes his fingers and I think for a minute that he really is going to hurt me.
“All right, Sunshine. I’ll play your juvenile game. We’ll be back together before the month is up, that’s how much faith I have in us.”
Or how little confidence he has in me. I can’t do any goodbye sex. I can’t let him touch me. It’s like I’m addicted to his body and its unreasonable demands on me.
Danny stands to leave and gathers his jacket and phone.
“I hope that you’re being smart about this and going somewhere safe. Do you need money for your retreat? I can advance your pay.”
“I don’t work for you anymore. Remember, I quit,” I say in a small voice. I sent Danny a resignation letter, hand-written, in an envelope. He glares at me and then looks at me like I’m pathetic. Then his face fills with love and genuine concern and my heart is caught up in his disorienting storm of emotions.
“I’ll be fine. I don’t need any money. You don’t need to worry about me.” Part of me feels like he already knows exactly where I’m going, that he’s playing a part just to try and manipulate me.
When Danny leaves, he steps on Priscilla’s tail and I think that seals it as the end of our relationship.
The year I turned twelve was the summer of the Son of Sam murders and the city-wide blackout that caused riots and looting so extreme my family was ready to jump a boat back to Sicily. I was a scrawny kid, wearing shorts with knee socks pulled all the way up, dreaming about westerns and cowboys and any hero who was slinging a gun. The itch to make something of myself had already invaded my system. I wasn’t a choirboy. I didn’t take after my father.
That year, at the age of twelve, I became fascinated with crime and the underbelly of the city. I was getting up early to grab the paper before my father and would drink coffee watered down with chocolate milk at the kitchen table. My mother would tsk tsk my infatuation with the bad guys, the mafia especially. I’d eat cold cereal and pore over the coverage of the murders, the crime blotter, and rush to read it all before my father made his way downstairs in the morning.
He loved my ma. He’d always greet her with a kiss to the back of her neck and a quick squeeze to the ass. She’d cough to remind him that I was there, that I could see and hear him. But my dad wasn’t loyal and that’s just the way it was. If my ma knew or took offense was one of the great mysteries of my childhood. My dad always said that behind every great man there was a great woman. And behind her was the chick who was willing to suck his dick and swallow. Crass, I guess. Pretty true in practice. But those were the kind of values I had pumped into me from a man who made it through the first grade and came to this country via Ellis Island. That was his favorite joke to contribute when he was in the company of men, never mind that I was there, that I was, inherently, a mama’s boy—that I never, ever felt close to him. Even before I hit puberty, I knew I didn’t want to be like my dad. He was scared of who he was. He gave the name Daniel Montclair at work so he wouldn’t be mistaken for a Mafioso, called a dago or a goombah at the shipyard.
And he didn’t come to this country at a time when we were wanted. Italians were the scum of the earth—bottom of the barrel. “Speak English!” my ma would screech whenever she heard me and my sister conversing in Italian.
But, I can’t complain. It wasn’t that bad. Ma worked at a tailor’s shop and Dad did stuff for the local import grocery and eventually became a longshoreman’s assistant pulling in cargo down at the loading docks.
Me, I shined shoes, swept up hair at Mr. Fiscelli’s Barber Shop on Saturdays. My parents weren’t exactly warm; they were strict, though, and they were intolerant toward anything different. Anything at all. And all’s I ever wanted to be was different.
They were especially wary of the Italians with the bad reputation—or the best, depending on who you were asking. Like the Black Hand, la Mano Nera, which set in deep with the business holdings in Bay Ridge and every other heavily Italian-dominated neighborhood in Brooklyn. Dad did all he could to disassociate from that kind of Italian. Me? I was fascinated. Wanted in from the get-go.
The cars. The women. Holy fuck, the women. Much better than waiting all week to stare at neighborhood girls showing up in stockings and skirts to Holy Mass on Sunday. I could get my kicks standing on the corner watching their girls climb in and out of their cars after they’d dined them at the finest establishments in our own Little Italy.
I drooled for the influence they exuded, how they could shake the foundation of any man who thought he had high standing before they’d come around. They put everyone in their place and wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it. La Mano’s word was the word and there wasn’t no way around it. The wives would try to frown on their presence, but I could tell at twelve years old that even the old biddies in flowered housecoats wanted a piece of them. They were kings and that was it; the be-all, end-all. Italian mobsters. Royalty. Nobility in Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, even in Little Italy.
I wanted it.
The way they dressed, the way they talked, I mimicked it all. My father started to notice and he would skin my hide anytime he got wind of me encroaching on their territory or even checking them out.
I started small. A casual friendship that began in the barber shop. I pushed around a broom on the weekends; the owner was friends with my father.
“Danilo, come,” the guy said and I froze, my blood pumping like mad ’cause one of the dons knew my name.
“The Pigeon,” Piccione they called him. Looking back now it was probably ’cause he was low on the rank. But I didn’t fucking care back then, I was enamored of every part of it, and I would take what they gave me.
“How much you make here sweeping floor?”
“Fifty cents,” I said and tried not to squirm. And that wasn’t squat back in those days. The barber shop paid me well and my father made sure I was aware of it.
“I give you two times as much. All you have to do is come for a drive with me.”
I smiled in spite of myself. A dumb fucking kid wasn’t the impression I wanted to make. I needed to show them I was hard, that I could take the kind of discipline they handed out, that I was made for the life; that I was anything but a coward. From there on out I went forward and never looked back.
Summer of 1979, I was just starting out on the journey and already I was raking in the dough. The heat in the city wouldn’t let up. When I bought my ma real crystal for her birthday, a gift that my dad could never afford, he ripped me straight from the dinner table and the cake and dragged me up the stairs to their bedroom. I swear it was the first time I’d even been in there. Lace curtains and a white bedspread with pompom tassels on the
ends made the room look like nothing good ever happened in there. There was a framed picture of their wedding day on the dresser next to a silver brush and comb set. The room seemed almost sad to me, like a den of mediocrity, where you’d sit and stew in your own shit because you’d never amount to anything. I wasn’t going down like that; I was meant to become something. I would have pussy where and when I wanted it, not some marital funeral parlor.
My father’s hats balanced precariously on both corners of the mirror. This is where his dreams died, I thought as I watched him in the mirror while he furiously undid his belt. His chinos stayed up without it; his undershirt was tucked in precisely.
I remember how his face turned red as he barreled on about the dangers of the mob, how one lock of his slicked-back hair fell down over his brow as he yelled at his only son. He smelled like Brylcreem and soap with a sting of strong body odor that lurked underneath and seemed to suggest that he was on the verge of losing it, a hair’s breadth from explosive anger, escaping insanity by one narrow, measly degree. He knew I was more man than him already and the threat of that made him hate me.
He told me to face the window that looked out over our street. It was open; anyone could hear him and I figured he’d just find out the hard way how much he was embarrassing himself over a simple birthday present.
He wanted my legs spread, palms down of the windowsill. The first bite of the belt buckle almost knocked the wind clear out of me. There was anger in his swing and regret in his face.
“Danilo!” Ma pleaded, as she hovered in the doorway. And I don’t know to this day if she was talking to him or to me. All’s I could hear was the blood rushing in my ears and the whip of the belt as it flew through the air.
I lost count after seventeen. I don’t believe he ever loved me. He wanted truth and purity and I was born with an appetite for the strong stuff, an insatiable craving once I had a little taste of the apple. I remember it surprised me when he didn’t stop at ten. I passed out at some point. My ma had run off because she couldn’t stand to watch it.
