When we get home, I feel kind of sad. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I haven’t found my destiny. I bet Jordan knows his destiny already. He knows everything.
I have homework, but this is more important. I go downstairs and find Mom.
“Ma?” I ask. I have to say “Ma” about six more times for her to hear me, because she’s busy both cooking dinner and unloading the dishwasher. I start to help her so she’ll notice me.
“Ma,” I try again when she looks at me, and I stop. It’s been a long time since I’ve been this close to her—weeks, I think—and I forgot how nice she smells. Like powder and lemons.
“What, Annie?” she says tiredly.
“Why didn’t I get ballet lessons?” I ask. “I could have been just as good at it as Aurora.”
She looks down at the pot she’s stirring. “You did get ballet lessons,” she says.
I frown. “No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did. I took you to your first ballet class when you were five, like I did with all you kids, and you hated it. I didn’t take you back because it would’ve been a waste of money. Besides, the teacher said all you did was daydream and hum to yourself while you looked in the mirror.” She pushes past me to stack dishes over my head.
It was a long time ago, but I actually think I remember that. It was so boring until it was too hard. Seriously, I was tucking so much I thought any second I’d see the back of my own bum peeking up at me from between my legs. My thighs ached for days afterward.
“If you’re going to help, help,” Mom scolds, motioning for me to move. “Clear off the table.”
I start gathering up piles of … I have no idea what all this is. Mail, sheet music, rosary beads, a dried-out set of toy watercolors, and other “odds and ends” (as Mom calls them) that seem to collect wherever my mother is. I start carrying piles of stuff into the sewing room/study, but there’s no place to put any of it. The desk is buried and so’s the chair, and there’s all kinds of knitting and needlepoint baskets cluttering up the sewing table, so I just start to stack Mom’s junk on the floor.
“What about piano? I could have been like Evie,” I say when I come back in the kitchen. She smiles and rolls her eyes. “What?” I ask.
“You’re tone-deaf, Annie. You couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.”
I didn’t know I was tone-deaf. Maybe that’s why everyone gives me that look when I sing along to U2 or the Police and especially that song “We Belong” by Pat Benatar. (It took me forever to figure out she was saying, “We belong to the light, we belong to the THUNDER.” I used to just say DUM-DA really loud when that part came.) Well, at least now I know why.
“Then what about—”
She cuts me off. “Soccer, like your brother? You don’t know your left from your right. I took you to soccer when you were five. The coach told you to run one way, and you ran the other like your hair was on fire.” She turns away from me like I’m hassling her. “You’re a menace at sports. You can’t even go down a Slip ’N Slide without injuring yourself so badly the whole town asked if we’d been in a car accident.”
Okay, now that’s unfair. The Slip ’N Slide thing was not my fault. Two summers ago Dad told us the Slip ’N Slide was ruining the lawn, so we weren’t to use it anymore, but Fay didn’t want to stop, so she figured if we moved it to the driveway, we wouldn’t hurt the grass. Our driveway is a long, steep hill, and Fay promised it’d be like going down a slide at a water park. At the last second she told me to go down first to test it out, and so I charged at full speed and only realized my mistake when I was out of wet plastic, with no way to stop myself, and about to skid across concrete. I was in a bikini.
“The only thing you might be good at is distance running,” my mom continues, “but only because once you actually start something, which is rare, you’re too stubborn to stop.”
I didn’t know I was stubborn. Why doesn’t anybody tell me these things? “Well, what about—”
She turns to face me. And she’s actually looking in my eyes, so I shut up. If it’s been weeks since I’ve been near her, it’s probably been months since she’s looked me right in the eye. I think the last time I had all of her attention (okay, most of it) was when I had the stomach flu so bad they almost had to take me to the hospital. Star Wars was on TV for the first time, and she hadn’t yet banned us from watching it. Mom let me put my head in her lap while she folded laundry. It was awesome. Well, except for the cramps and the fever and the barfing, but other than that, it was awesome.
Was that second grade? Had to be. Jordan gave me a get-well card he made out of construction paper, and he spelled well with only one L. It was probably the last time Jordan Dolan misspelled anything.
My mom’s still waiting for me to talk, but I’m still thinking how nice it was to put my head in her lap. When you’re the youngest of nine kids, you never see your parents. And they hardly ever really see you, either, even if they’re looking right at you.
“What? What do you want to do, Annie? What are you good at?”
I got nothing. If Fay were in the room, she’d call me a mouth breather because of how my jaw is hanging open. I shut it with a snap.
“I don’t know. But I’m going to find out,” I say.
“If you can pay for it yourself, I’m all for it,” she says. She turns toward the stove. “Now will you get out from underfoot? I have work to do.”
She’s not trying to be mean. I know it seems like she is, but Mom is always spread thin. It’s like nothing she does is what she wants to do, and everything you add to that, even if it’s just talking, could be the last straw for her. It’s not her fault. She didn’t choose me any more than I chose her.
Miri told me. She said Mom held it together before she had Bridget, and then after, she couldn’t stop crying. Then she just gave up on all of us and lost it. If she could have stopped after JP, I think everything would have been okay. Everyone says Mom and Dad should have stopped after having a boy. I know that means I wouldn’t have been born, but that doesn’t bother me. It’s not like I’d know the difference.
Chapter Five
At some point in September, the whole family visits the two tias.
They’re not my aunts, or even my father’s aunts, but they are related to me. I think, anyway. See, it’s tough to tell. Tia Nina and Tia Olga are from the “Old Country,” and they’re like great-aunts or something. I don’t think either of them was my nonna’s sister, but it’s hard to tell sometimes because all the old Italians grew up in the same village in northern Italy. Everyone in that village was from one of two families that intermarried as long as the cousins weren’t too close.
It’s gross, I know. But I guess this village was out in the middle of nowhere and there weren’t any other options, unless you went over a ton of mountains and married an Austrian, and Italians don’t like how Austrians talk, or at least my relatives didn’t.
Okay. So. Everyone had to leave this village after it was pretty much flattened during World War I, and they all promised to look out for each other’s children in case someone died on the boat ride to America, and that’s why it doesn’t matter if they’re really my aunts or not because they swore a blood oath and Italians are just bananas when it comes to oaths. Which is weird considering they always seem to be making them. Makes you wonder how they keep track of them all.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat in Tia Nina’s kitchen and seen her raise her right hand like she’s pledging allegiance and haul herself up next to her ancient wood-burning cast-iron stove and babble something in Italian that my eldest sisters (who learned Italian, but the younger ones didn’t, because Dad got too busy working all the time and was never around to teach us) tell me is her swearing her right hand to God that so-and-so from the old country gave the evil eye to her favorite goat and killed it fifty years ago. And then she’ll open the stove door and spit into the fire.
They’re just … nuts. And my father would do anything for them, so t
hat means the rest of us would, too.
Tia Nina and Tia Olga wear all black dresses because they’re both widows. They have no teeth, and would probably be about six feet tall if you stacked one on top of the other. They don’t speak English, but they don’t have to with us kids, because all we’re allowed to do in Tia Nina’s kitchen is sit quietly and eat pizzelle, which are anise-flavored cookies that are flat and shaped like snowflakes. I like them because they taste like licorice.
The only question that I ever have to answer the two tias is this: Are you being a good girl? My father translates, and I nod my head and say sì.
That’s it. And I get a truckload of pizzelle, because the two tias try to stuff me blind with them anyways because they think I’m skinny. Which they swear (their right hands to God) will keep me from getting a husband. They’re both shaped like meatballs, and that’s why their husbands loved them so much. Or that’s what Miriam told me they said right before they both started cackling like a couple of wicked witches.
I like the two tias. They scare the crap (five Hail Marys) out of me, but they both have really kind eyes somewhere under all those wrinkles. And Tia Nina has green eyes just like Dad and me.
Miriam always comes back from MIT for the visit to the tias, but I don’t know why she does unless it’s to translate for us kids. Miri always seems a little put out around them. She gets snappy, although maybe I’m the only one to really notice, because she works so hard to hide it.
We have something like arranged seating when we all cram ourselves into one of the tias’ kitchens. This year we’re at Tia Nina’s, and Tia Nina is the one with the big black stove that she never seems to be more than a few steps from. I always sit next to Miriam. I used to sit on her lap when I was littler, because she’s the eldest and I’m the youngest. She’s my sister, but more like my mom than Mom ever was. My earliest memory is sitting on Miri’s lap in Tia Nina’s kitchen. I was wearing a white lace dress.
Miri says there’s no way I can remember that because it was my first birthday, which is always a big party because Italians from the Old Country don’t really admit you’re alive until after you’ve survived through your first year, I guess because most of their babies didn’t. But I do remember it. I remember calling Miri “Mama,” and I remember the tias frowning at Mom for it. That’s why the tias still scare me a little. I remember their frowns.
They still frown at my mom a lot. See, Mom’s Irish. And for some reason, if she’d been an Italian girl, she wouldn’t have had so many kids and been such a burden on my dad. No one’s ever said it, not out loud anyways, but I can feel it. I can see it, for crying out loud. Mom never gets closer than two feet to any of her in-laws—not the tias, not Dad’s brother, Uncle Antonio, or his wife, Aunt Constance. They don’t talk, they don’t touch, and they barely like sitting in the same room. Even now Mom’s sitting as far away from the big black stove as you can get. Aurora is sitting next to her, as usual.
Aurora always sits next to Mom and translates for her. Mom always holds Aurora’s hand whenever they sit next to each other. Mom loves Aurora the most, and who can blame her? Aurora is beautiful.
I don’t know why, but the pizzelle aren’t doing it for me this year. I’m nibbling around the edges to be polite, but really, I’m looking at Miri. I’ve missed her a lot since she left. She comes back a ton to see us all, but it’s not the same. I used to sleep in her bed with her when it got really cold, and now it’s just the top bunk and me, although I have stopped falling out of it all the time. Now falling’s just a special-occasion thing.
Miri isn’t even trying to hide how frustrated she is. She keeps looking at Mom and Aurora and then back at the tias. She’s grinding her teeth. She used to do that in her sleep when she was having a nightmare.
“What?” I whisper to her, hiding my totally illegal speaking behind my uneaten pizzelle. Miri grinds her teeth some more. I reach down and squeeze her fingers. She’s bitten right through the side of her thumb till it bled. I do that sometimes. I bite or pick my fingers when I’m anxious.
She shifts in her seat to hide our conversation. “I’m sick of this,” she whispers. Her dark brown eyes are too bright. I think she might cry. “Not one of them helped.”
I take a giant bite of my pizzelle and choke on it, but I swallow like crazy, trying to stuff it down. My eyes water and my voice is all wheezy when I ask, “Helped what?”
“Helped Mom,” Miri says, raising her voice. My dad heard her speak. Kids aren’t allowed to speak unless spoken to around the tias.
I figure I’ve got a mouth full of pizzelle and nothing to lose. The tias think I’m strange anyhow on account of the fact that they always catch me smiling and humming to myself because I’m bored.
I let the cough go and start hacking away, spewing pizzelle all over the place. Miri starts banging on my back and everybody jumps up. Somebody hands me water, which, when you think about it, makes no sense. If you’re choking on something, how would wetting it help?
Boogers are streaming out of my nose, and so many people are thumping on me you’d think I was a dusty rug. Miri finally drags me outside. She’s talking in Italian and shooing everyone else away. They go when she tells them to go because they all know that she’s in charge of me, like always. After a while I’ve settled down.
“You okay?” Miri asks. She’s wiping my drippy face with her sleeve. I nod and she smiles at me. “Thanks for covering for me.”
“No problem,” I wheeze, blinking back a few more choke-tears.
We sit down on the ground and look at the darkening farmland. This isn’t our farm; it’s our relatives’, the Iruzzis’. It’s one town over from ours. They have way more land than we do, but it isn’t prettier. I wait, because I can tell Miri has something to say, but she’s always been slow to talk. Now that I think of it, Miri is like Dad. And Jordan.
She looks up at the sunset sky. “I’m so sorry, Annie,” she says.
As far as I can tell, Miri has never done anything to be sorry about. “For what?” I ask.
“I can’t do it anymore.”
“Do what?”
She looks at me and smiles like she’s going to cry. “Did you know I was your age when you were born?”
It gets dark in a second. We even see the green flash from the ocean side of the Iruzzi farm, that last blip of the sun disappearing. It’s so pretty it makes us watch for just a moment, which is good because I can hardly understand what it would have been like for me to have a baby, like Miri had me. I mean, I know I’m not hers. But I was hers. I guess it is pretty strange. None of my friends got raised by their big sisters. I just never really thought about it before because that’s the way it always was. But it wasn’t normal. And it wasn’t really fair to Miri.
“No one helped,” she says. The dark keeps falling on her as she talks, but I can see her because I know every expression on her face so well I could see her without eyes, probably. “No one helped Mom. No one helped me. I was ten and I had a newborn. I fed you. I bathed you. We slept in the same bed and I was there when you cried. If I hadn’t been there…”
She looks at me for a long time. I can feel the dew seeping into my clothes. I can smell the apples in the orchard. The grass is spiky under my hot hands.
“I can’t do it anymore,” Miri says. I can’t see her tears, but I can feel them. “I’m so sorry. I never should have been your mother. A ten-year-old girl should not be left with a newborn baby.”
She lowers her head like she’s ashamed of herself. Like she did something wrong.
“Why not? You did great.”
I say great, but it sounds kind of silly and small compared to what she did for me. I want to say more. I want to tell her everything I feel about her, but I don’t know what to say and I’m scared that it won’t be enough. I have a terrible feeling right now.
She shakes her head. “I burned you.” I can barely hear her. It’s like her voice has turned inside out. “Mom told me to do the dishes and wash the bab
y, so I filled the sink up with water for the dishes, but I was so tired. You’d been up all night and I was so tired.”
Miri drops her head and cries in that way we do. No sound. But it’s coming up from her feet and running all through her like lightning. The harder she cries, the quieter she gets. Miri’s the master at hiding it, even better than Nora.
She keeps going. “You were screaming and reaching for me and I kept pushing you into the water again and again. I was so mad at you for fighting me. And then my hand touched the water and I felt how hot it was.”
She cries for a long time, her body curling and rolling over her sobs, and she still isn’t making a sound. When Miri cries, it hurts me worse than crying myself.
“I don’t remember any of that. All I remember is that you were awesome to me,” I tell her. I’m scared and I need to make her smile. I have to be able to make her happy, because I owe her for everything. My whole life, actually, and I can already tell something bad is about to happen and I don’t want it to. I just want to make her laugh so hard she forgets this whole thing. I nudge her with my shoulder and smile at her out of the corner of my mouth. “You only dropped me on my head, like, six times.”
I’m trying to joke, but it doesn’t sound funny. I don’t feel very funny right now. She hugs me anyway. And then she sniffs and rubs her eyes, first left, then right, then left again like the tears won’t stop just yet, but they might soon. The moon is rising.
“I don’t blame Mom. It’s all she knew,” she says after a long time. “You weren’t around when Mom’s mom was still alive, but she was even worse.” She looks at me and her eyes are big and scared. “I don’t want to be like them.”
“You could never be,” I tell her. “Look, if anyone would know, it would be me, right? You were an awesome mom.”
“Oh, Annie.” She sighs and smiles. “I’m going to miss you.” She puts her arm around me. “You were a good baby, but I was never your mother and I never got to be a kid.” She pulls away so she can see me in the moonlight.
Snow Lane Page 6
