Sometimes I Dream in Italian

by Rita Ciresi

  Even though he lived in our home—and paid for it—Babbo, too, seemed like an invader. When the Dixon Park Soda truck rumbled up our driveway, Lina and I used to run to the kitchen and peek out the sheer yellow curtains, then bolt for the living room as he got out of the truck. We pretended to be grossly absorbed in our books or dolls or crayons when Babbo came in. We dreaded the moment he sat down on the couch with the newspaper. He always examined the sports page first. He let out a hefty sigh. Then came the fatal words, uttered to no one in particular: Think I'll rest my tootsies awhile.

  Lina and I looked at each other with dismay. Babbo leaned over and untied his shoelaces, then grasped each heel and pulled his black shoes off one at a time. We stared, fascinated, at Babbo's white socks, gray on the bottom and stained with dark brown spots at the toes where his nails, rarely clipped, had squished too close together and cut the skin. Babbo peeled the top of his sock down over his ankle and gave a sharp yank at the end. We sucked in our breath. His feet—cracked white at the ankles and undersides, calloused at the toes, and blistered on the heels—stunk royally. But he seemed unaware of it. He dropped his socks to the carpet and propped his legs on the orange vinyl hassock in front of the couch. “Aaah,” he said. “That feels better. Yes.”

  I bit my lip. Lina began to hum a loud, ominous-sounding tune, until she reached an unsurpassable crescendo and had to exhale and pull in more air. My face felt as if it were turning blue.

  I looked at her beseechingly. She nodded. Grabbing a fistful of crayons or a doll by the leg or the hair, we bolted the room, pinching our noses so hard our nostrils ached. Upstairs we collapsed on our twin beds, panting and gasping.

  Downstairs we heard Babbo shake open the newspaper. “What's the matter with those girls now?” he sometimes called out to Mama in the kitchen.

  “They're half your kids,” Mama said.

  Babbo sighed. “One of youze half-mine girls,” he called out, “remember to bring down my slippers!”

  Even though we swooned at the overpowering smell of his feet, Lina and I loved Babbo enough to fight over him. We tussled to win the favor of fetching his slippers and squabbled over who would get to wear the thick red and gold band that came on the Rey Corona cigar Babbo smoked in the backyard while we played after dinner. Babbo gave the cigar ring as a consolation prize to whoever lost the game of four squares, Seven-Up, or hopscotch. Since Lina was much more athletic and terrifically competitive, I often got to sport the ring on my finger. Lina used this as rationale for claiming the privilege of getting Babbo's slippers on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

  I had to be content with entering the otherwise forbidden territory of Mama and Babbo's room on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The floorboards creaked as I tiptoed past the dark wooden bed covered with a nubby white spread Mama had pulled tight with hospital-like precision. I peeked under the pillows just to see if Mama and Babbo had anything hidden there. Just Mama's old nightgown, the lace torn at the collar. Then I opened the heavy door to Babbo's closet. Tied on a hook to the right, one of Mama's old stockings held a cluster of waxy white mothballs. The odor made me sneeze. On the rack, white and blue dress shirts hung to the left, black dress trousers and jackets hung to the right, and two somber ties hung over the rack in the middle. Babbo wore those clothes only to Sunday mass and weddings and funerals. On weekdays during the summer he wore thick brown cotton pants and white T-shirts that got soaked with sweat. In winter he wore the same gray V-neck sweater five days a week, which he discarded every night on one of the living-room chairs. When Mama wasn't looking, I liked to pull the pills off the sleeves.

  I lingered as long as I could in front of the closet. Then I pulled the slippers—black leather with fur lining worn almost completely away at the heels—out of the shoe bag that hung on the back of the door. I ran downstairs, plopped the slippers on the floor beside Babbo, and ran back upstairs, where I reported on this nonevent in whispered, conspiratorial tones to Lina.

  “He didn't look at me,” I said. “But he said thank you.”

  “I saw wax in his ears yesterday,” Lina bragged.

  “So what?” I countered. “I saw hairs in his nose.”

  “I saw a piece of hot-dog relish between his teeth,” Lina said. “When he kissed me.”

  Babbo always favored Lina because she was prettier. “Who wants a kiss from him, anyway?” I asked, in a sourpuss voice. “His face feels like an S.O.S. pad—all rough and stubbly.”

  “Some women like that,” Lina said.

  “You're not some women,” I said. “You're half his daughter.”

  Lina curled a lock of hair around her finger. “I've been thinking,” she said. “Maybe he's not our father. You know, like in books, where the kids get switched in the hospital, or they're left on the doorstep in a laundry basket.”

  “Maybe we're orphans,” I said.

  “I bet we have a long-lost father,” said Lina. “Someday we'll be reunited. He'll own diamond mines. He'll have a treasure chest full of gold and silver coins.”

  “He'll come home to us someday,” I said, “with his pockets stuffed with sapphires and emeralds, pearls and rubies.” I sighed. Babbo came home every night with one pocket full of loose change and the other stuffed with a crumpled yellow handkerchief. Yet I couldn't forget that occasionally he gave us some of that change—the pennies and the nickels, if not the coveted quarters. He did other nice, fatherlike things, like telling us we looked pretty in our pastel Easter coats and hats. He carefully peeled two oranges and crafted the rinds into matching sunglasses, which we wore until they rotted. He put a bell on Lina's used green bike; he painted my wooden scooter a glossy red. Sundays he went out early and brought home soft, seeded rolls, hard cookies that snapped between our teeth, and gooey lemon pastries from the bakery. On my birthday he planted an awkward kiss on my right cheek and whispered, “Angelina, my angel,” before he kissed the other cheek and said my name again, as if to confirm I was some winged creature just descended from the heavens.

  “If he isn't our father,” I told Lina, “that means we can marry him.”

  “Let's spy on him,” she said. “To find out who he really is.”

  So a silly, secretive game began, with a record of Babbo's sadly predictable comings and goings.

  He goes to work in the morning, Lina wrote down in her notebook, and comes home around four in the afternoon. He eats dinner. He smokes a Rey Corona cigar. Then he falls asleep on the couch. She bit her pencil. “There's got to be more to his life than that.”

  “Maybe he goes out later, after we're asleep,” I said.

  “Yes,” Lina said. “He probably carouses. Goes out with other men to bars.” She carefully wrote that down in her notebook.

  “Friday nights he goes bowling,” I offered.

  Lina added that to her list. Under the heading of Saturday, she wrote, Tells Mama he's going to the Knights of Columbus, an obvious lie. She leaned back in her chair and surveyed the evidence. “I smell something fishy about Fridays,” she said. “They're definitely suspicious. Keep your eyes open. Remember— first one to find out gets to wear the Rey Corona ring forever.”

  We sneaked about the house. When Babbo went out into the yard, we ran upstairs, knelt on the floor in front of the window, and raised our eyes above the sill. When he went to the bathroom, not bothering to completely close the door, one of us stood outside. Lina claimed she actually saw the arc of his piss once, but all I ever could glimpse was the white toilet tank and the pink plastic shower curtain, frosted with faded silver. When Babbo was on the phone—a rare event—we stood at the top of the stairwell and listened. We didn't have to strain our ears. As if he were speaking on a public phone in a bowling alley (the balls smacking the pins and rumbling down the gutter), Babbo shouted into the receiver in a strange language we could not decipher.

  “What's an exacta?” I whispered to Lina.

  “I think it's a kind of cigar,” Lina whispered back.

  “Then what's a trifecta?”
>
  “Three cigars.”

  “And a perfecta?”

  “A perfect cigar!”

  We giggled.

  When Mama went out for groceries, we plundered Babbo's drawers. Mama's drawers we didn't care about—we knew her all too well, and our imaginations could conjure up only dreary, baggy white underwear, thriftily preserved until the elastic around the waist and legs had totally lost its snap, and heavy, seamed bras with wide straps and three sets of double hooks in the back. There also would be plain, flesh-colored stockings and white garter belts, worn only on Sundays.

  But Babbo's drawers—his T-shirts and socks bleached white by Mama, the polo shirts he wore for bowling, and the green plastic container full of Clubman talcum powder that he sprinkled on the back of his neck before he put on a dress shirt—fascinated us. He had a black leather box into which he emptied his change every night. Lina and I were tempted to steal a coin or two but didn't, somehow convinced that Babbo knew the exact amount of his savings to the penny. We fingered the passbook issued to Babbo from the Greater Hartford Savings Bank and were tempted to take it out of its plastic case to see exactly how rich Babbo was. “How much do you think is in there?” I asked, and Lina told me at least one hundred dollars.

  One hundred dollars! If only I had that kind of money, I thought, I could have a fur coat and high heels, a diamond ring, and a toy poodle. I could have a house shaped like a Swiss chalet, and an oval-shaped swimming pool with a bright blue slide that dropped into the deep end. Lina scoffed at the very idea. “You dunce,” she said. “You need at least a thousand to be as rich as that.”

  Sometimes in the leather box we found tickets with either one number or three numbers printed on them. Other times we found no tickets but only the brown-tinted pictures of Babbo's mother and father standing stiffly in front of a curtained backdrop in a photographer's studio. Nonno wore a white suit and held a dashing wide-brimmed hat in his hands. Nonna had on a black lace dress and shoes that buttoned. Stacked below these were pictures of Lina and me sitting on the lap of the Santa Claus who appeared yearly at Macy's Christmas Wonderland (Lina squirmed in Santa's arms; I cried), posing in our Communion dresses on the front steps of the church, and leaping in our too-tight bathing suits beneath the sprinkler on a hot summer day better spent at the beach.

  But the most fascinating photo was a black-and-white shot of a thin woman in a sharp double-breasted suit and nonchalant little hat. She stood on a boardwalk overlooking the shore, and the wind coming off the water fluttered the veil on her hat over the top half of her face. She had a happy, carefree smile. Who was she? On the bottom white border of the photograph, Babbo's faded handwriting boldly proclaimed: mine.

  “Wow,” Lina said, clutching the photograph tightly in her hand and holding it up close to her eyes, as if she were Nancy Drew inspecting the fatal evidence. “Look at this. Babbo's got a girlfriend.”

  “He does not,” I said, although the picture told me otherwise. “He can't. He's married to Mama.”

  “So what?” Lina said. “Lots of married people do bad things.”

  “Like what?”

  Lina smiled. She didn't take her eyes off the picture. “She's his girlfriend,” she whispered. “She's all his, I bet.”

  “So when does he see her?” I asked.

  “On Fridays. When he's supposed to go bowling.”

  “But he takes his bowling bag,” I said.

  “He's got to do something to throw Mama off track.”

  “So when does he call her?”

  “On his way home from work. From a public phone.”

  “Why doesn't she call here?”

  Lina looked at me as if I were a colossal dope. “Because one of us might answer,” she said.

  I stood perfectly still, listening to the silence of the house and praying that the phone would ring that very instant. I longed to hear her sultry, passionate voice on the other end of the line. I desperately wanted the chance to speak to the kind of woman that Mama, scorn oozing from her voice, would refer to as a brazen bombshell or a shameless hussy.

  “Do you think she's married too?” I asked Lina.

  “She's definitely a working woman,” Lina said. “Maybe she's a hairdresser.”

  “Maybe she sells perfume at Macy's.”

  “Maybe she sells cigars,” Lina said. “Yes—perfectas! Let's look for her next time we go out.”

  “Okay,” I said. And for a while our mutual goal was to find this slutty young heartbreaker. Everywhere we went, we tried to sniff her out. In the backseat of the car, we kept our eyes glued to the windows as we scoured both sides of the street. We looked for her at church, on our way to school, at the beach, and even in the crowds at Palisades Park and Yankee Stadium. “That's her, that's her!” I nudged Lina from time to time.

  “That's who?” Mama turned to ask once. Lina practically toppled me to the floor of the car with a shove. “A movie star,” she told Mama at the same time I said, “Nobody.”

  “Couple of kooks,” Mama muttered. “Living in a dream world. Just remember, crazy girls turn into crazy women.”

  I saw Lina looking at Mama funny after that. She squinted at Mama, as if she were trying to examine her in a blaze of glaring sunlight, or as if she was searching for something she was afraid to find in Mama's face. She must have found it, because she grew sulky—as only Lina could—after that. She didn't want to play with me or talk to me, except to tell me I was childish. She stopped wanting to pilfer Babbo's drawers (“Who cares about his stinky stuff anyway?” she said) and stopped wanting to look for his girlfriend on the street. “Forget it,” she said. “You'll never find her.” She grew ruder than ever to Babbo. She refused to dust off his bowling trophies, and she gave him good-night kisses that barely grazed the surface of his cheek. One day when he came in, stripped off his socks, and calmly said, “One of youze get me my slippers,” Lina's face turned red and she burst out, “Get them yourself!”

  Babbo looked up from the sports page, surprised. Then his face turned cloudy and he clutched the newspaper by one end as if he were considering rolling it up and giving Lina a good hard swat right across her bottom. But Lina wasn't about to give him the chance. She raced upstairs and slammed the door to our room. Babbo was so angry he could hardly speak. “One of these days,” he sputtered, “somebody around here is going to get what they call a rude awakening!” I sat frozen on the living-room floor, not daring to look at him. “Kids these days,” he said. “Kids!” In his day, he said, none of this smart-aleck back talk would have been tolerated. Back then children did what their parents told them to do. “My father's word was law!” he repeated. “Law! And there was none of this horsing around. You got a slap right across the puss if you didn't listen!”

  My heart pounded as Babbo yelled. As soon as I could, I slunk out of the room, ran upstairs, and fetched his slippers. I continued to get them every night, although the job had lost some of its appeal since I didn't have to compete with Lina for the privilege. Although I wanted to wear the Rey Corona ring, I no longer wanted to marry Babbo. But I kept on looking for his girlfriend, and my fantasies about her flamed up whenever I was bored: during math lesson or novena, or on Saturday mornings as I scrubbed the bathroom tile or pushed a dust cloth along the baseboards.

  After a while—whether it was simply to follow Lina's lead or because I had grown tired of playing the game by myself—I stopped looking for Babbo's girl too. But the idea, imagined or otherwise, that Babbo would reach out to grab the woman of his dreams continued to comfort me. Nothing else he did managed to defy the normal order of things or upset the daily routine Lina and I had observed and recorded in our notebook. Up at five o'clock. Into work at six. Lunch: a hot dog and coffee in a Styrofoam cup from a sandwich truck on the shore at eleven-thirty. Home at four. Dinner at five. Asleep by eight. His grand passion was my great relief. For if he didn't have her—the slim lady in the suit and hat—what was the point of his life? Hard work? Sweat? An occasional strike at the b
owling alley? He had all the wrong attitudes about the world, Lina and I felt. The be-all and end-all of life was not blisters on our ankles and cracked skin on our hands. It was not food on the table, clothes on our backs, and a roof above our heads. We would never be satisfied with just getting by. We were going to have more. We would do better. We would never say, like Mama and Babbo, Well, what are you going to do about it? or That's the way it goes. Only losers accepted their father's word as law; only the poor at heart took things the way they were handed to them.

  Light-years later—after we were living in a world far removed from our childhood—Babbo died, and Lina and I went back to clear out the house. The key seemed to scrape louder than ever in the stubborn back-door lock. Once we were inside, I half-expected to find Babbo lying there on the couch. I could not believe he was lying in a coffin; I could not fathom that his body was sunk forever in the ground.

  “This gives me the creeps,” Lina said.

  “Me too,” I said. “Let's get it over with.”

  We both went straight up to his room, as if by sorting through and discarding his things we could drive his presence from the house. Yet once we were upstairs, Lina curled up with a pillow on what I still thought of as Mama and Babbo's bed, even though Mama had died a few years before. Lina stared at the cream-colored ceiling while I opened the drawers, inspected their contents, and stuffed the clothing into paper bags from the A&P. After a while Lina began to cry.