Sometimes I Dream in Italian

by Rita Ciresi

  Oh, it's you.

  Who were you expecting?

  Before I could begin dusting Mama's chest of drawers, I had to clear it off. Like almost every other surface in the house, the chest was covered with a lace scarf, and on top of that sat about ten of our favorite candidates for Name That Ugly Thing. There was a statue of Mary standing on a globe (the infant Jesus in her arms, her bare foot crushing a serpent's head) and a multicolored mosaic box, some of the tiles missing, in which Mama stored her holy cards and rosaries. There was a night-light, in the shape of Jesus standing with a lamb, that you could plug directly into a socket. An abalone shell sat next to a piece of petrified wood. I picked up the wood. It was cold, heavy, and glazed. My mother's cousin Vincenza had brought it back from the West Coast as a souvenir, along with a wax statue of a bear from Yosemite Park and assorted postcards showing Old Faithful at sunrise, full light, and sunset.

  Once, when I was seven, I stole the petrified wood and brought it to school for a report I gave on the Ice Age. With a thorough butchering of history and geography, I claimed that the wood dated back millions of years to Neanderthal man and that the wood turned to stone when Asia and North America split into two and the glaciers came sliding down both continents. I also claimed it was a souvenir from my summer trip to California, a fact that Sister Saint John of the Cross duly reported to my mother after church the next Sunday. Mama blew her top. “Liar!” she said to me. “Thief. Sneaking behind my back, stealing my things.” That petrified wood was an antique, she said. A real relic, worth a lot of money. I could have cracked it or broken it. I had the nerve. What did I have to say for myself?

  I hung my head. “Nothing,” I said.

  Mama shook her finger at me. She'd teach me the meaning of saying nothing. For the rest of the day I was not allowed to talk to anyone, and Babbo and Lina were forbidden to say anything to me. The radio, T V, and phone were strictly off limits. If I had anything to say, I could just tell it to God. He would always hear my voice. He was always listening.

  The silence that day was excruciating. Lina, bless her, wrote me a few notes, which she passed to me when Mama's back was turned. But other than that, I felt as cut off from the world as someone deaf and dumb. My lips kept moving silently, like the little old ladies in church who hunched over the altar, mumbling the rosary. From that moment on, I resolved to keep everything hidden from Mama. She did not deserve my confidence.

  I used up a quarter of the box of Kleenex dusting the knick-knacks. After I knocked all the dust off the bureaus, the night-stands, and the headboard of the bed, I got out a laundry basket and threw in all of Babbo's clothes that were slung over the chairs. The clothes were rank and stiff with sweat, and I held each piece by my fingertips before I let it drop into the basket. Then I went to strip the bed. I paused before I took off the pillowcases. Underneath the pillow that had been Mama's, I knew I would find her nightgown—neatly folded and tucked away, just as it had been the morning she had the stroke and every morning of her life before that.

  The first time I had come into the room to change the sheets, I found the nightgown beneath the pillow. It shocked me to find something that was so obviously waiting for Mama to come back. I didn't know what to do with it, so when I remade the bed I simply tucked it back under the pillow, deciding to let Babbo deal with it. But Babbo never moved it. Even though I was sure he continued, from force of habit, to sleep on his side of the bed, with his head on his pillow, and his body taking up only half of the mattress, he must have known the nightgown was underneath the pillow. Several times when I changed the sheets I left it peeking out from under the pillow, to give him an opportunity to move it. He still kept it there. I wondered how much of that decision stemmed from hope, and how much from habit.

  I, too, was guilty of habit, of keeping my things in the same old place. Even though I hadn't lived in my parents’ house for years, I still carried the key with me every day. It was attached to a silver key tag that depicted the Vatican. The inscription said La Città Eterna. The key ring sat at the bottom of my purse, along with all the rest of the junk I needlessly toted around: compacts that spilled powder, breath mints that had fallen out of their foil liner, a tube of Vagisil, pens that had run out of ink, my birth certificate laminated in plastic, a St. Christopher holy card that said on the back CATHOLIC: In case of accident, call a priest. Mama had given me the card when I went away to college, acting as if I were embarking on a long journey around the world, instead of a two- and-a-half-hour drive across the Connecticut state line to Poughkeepsie. You never know, she said. You never know what will happen.

  Once a week I tried to clean out my purse, dumping the contents onto my nightstand and vowing to put them somewhere else. But then I left them there for days, until I got sick of looking at them and threw them back in. Mama did have a point. You never knew what you would need or what would happen. Or at least I liked to think so, because my life had become so overwhelmingly predictable.

  For the past five years I had written verses and supervised production of the Catholic greeting-card lines at Special Moments Stationery, Inc. Lina poked fun at my job every chance she got. “Special Moments!” She snorted. “Sounds like a feminine-hygiene product to me.” She lowered her voice into a whisper. “For those days when you really need to feel fresh. When douching just isn't enough…”

  Mama always hushed her. If I had to work, Special Moments was a good place, because I got boxes of greeting-card samples, which I regularly surrendered to her. “Just look at this,” she said to my aunts, fanning out the assortment of cards as if they were a winning hand in pinochle. “Look. Birthdays, weddings, showers, funerals. They even put her in charge of the cards for Catholics.” Mama rearranged the cards in a neat stack. “Do you believe some people pay a buck seventy-five for just one of these things?” She put a rubber band around the middle of the stack and snapped it with satisfaction. “Free,” she said.

  On my birthday, Mama always sent me one of the cards I had given her. She did the same thing on holidays like Thanksgiving and Easter. After her stroke, I missed getting mail from her. For in addition to the cards, every week she sent me a letter. She wrote it on Sunday night, and Babbo, who must have suspected a bomb sat in every corner mailbox, personally delivered it to the post office on his way to work on Monday morning. The letter, written with a nineteen-cent Bic stick on plain white tablet paper, arrived at my apartment every Wednesday. I went to the Feast of Saint Paul dinner. The manicotti was good, but the sausage and peppers—too oily. The Rosary Society is making potholders for the Holy Redeemer bazaar. Father John wants more $ to fix the organ. Last year he wanted more $ to fix up the vestibule. It's always something. I hardly see that sister of yours these days— too busy with her own life, I guess. Babbo's on the couch, sleeping. The mass for Nonno and Nonna is this Thursday. I'll go out to the cemetery after and plant some geraniums. Somebody stole the flowers off Zio Tuilio's mother's grave. What's the world coming to? What a shame. And isn't it something about Gino? So young! You never know when God will call your number.

  When I turned over the envelope, a newspaper clipping usually fluttered to the carpet. Mama sent obituaries with almost every letter. Some of the names I barely recognized—third cousins of my parents, a bank teller who had waited on Mama for twenty-five years, a church usher. Others I knew well—nuns, neighbors, the lay helper from my catechism class. They gave her two columns and a photo—quite the spread, Mama wrote. Or, Look at this, only a couple of paragraphs. He really got gypped.

  Mama seemed to thrive on other peoples’ deaths. The minute she heard the thump of the newspaper hitting the front porch, she went out, fetched it, and turned straight to the obituary page. If she recognized one of the names listed, she immediately called my aunts, arranged a car pool for the wake, ironed her black dress, and planned for an early supper. Then she went down to Frankie's Newsstand and purchased another copy of the newspaper. “Today I knew somebody,” she proudly told Frankie as she handed hi
m her quarter.

  She carefully clipped the obituary from her newspaper and put it in a faded red Macy's gift box whose cracked seams were reinforced with Scotch tape. Just before All Souls Day she went through her yellowed clippings to see who she should remember in her prayers. The clipping from the spare newspaper she sent to me, expecting me to put it in my own box. I refused. The pictures of the dead people—always dated from years before so they looked as if they had passed away in the bloom of youth— creeped me out so much I immediately crumpled the clippings. The newsprint left stains on my hands like the black smudges the priests ground into the foreheads of the faithful on Ash Wednesday.

  After I finished gathering up the laundry, I pried the window open all the way and shook out the scatter rugs. I thought about how Mama and Babbo had visited me only three times total in all the years I lived in New York. Once while they were there, they got into a dispute over the name of Babbo's cousin's mother. Mama insisted she was called Ziata, short for Anunziata. Babbo stuck to his guns. “Her name was Ziela, short for Graziela,” he kept repeating.

  “You're wrong,” Mama said.

  “She was related to me, not you,” said Babbo.

  “So what?” Mama asked. “Does that improve your memory? You got a head like a sieve for names.” She turned to me. “Go get that clipping I sent you,” she said. “That'll prove it.”

  “I'm not sure you sent it to me,” I said.

  “I send you everybody who dies.”

  “But I don't think I have Ziela.”

  “Ziata,” insisted Mama. “Go get your box and I'll find her.”

  “I don't have a box,” I finally admitted.

  Mama's face grew stony. “I send you those clippings special,” she said. “And what do you do? You throw them out.”

  I shrugged and kept quiet. Unlike Lina, I had never stood up to Mama. I had listened to what she said and then done the opposite thing the moment she turned her back. And for the most part, Mama assumed I followed her instructions. For instance, she kept on sending me clippings after she found out I had no box, simply adding more detailed commentary in her letters to convince me of the person's worth. He always gave Babbo a fair deal, she wrote. She was a nice person—I never understood why she didn't get married. This one on the Monsignor is worth saving. Imagine, he knew three different languages!

  As much as I hated the obituaries and the harping on religion and death, I still missed Mama's letters when they stopped coming. On Wednesdays, no matter how many catalogs and bills filled my mailbox, I felt something was missing. I found myself calling Lina more, to find out what was going on in the neighborhood. “How the hell should I know?” she said. “I don't have time to read the newspaper.”

  “What's the word from Babbo?”

  “Since when does he ever talk?”

  “Do you ever see Aunt Marga or Aunt Fiorella?”

  Lina clucked her tongue. “Those dried-up old cunts,” she said.

  Lina hated our aunts. She was still bitter because some of them hadn't sent her a wedding gift when they found out she was pregnant. Feeling only slightly more generous, Mama cashed in six books of S&H green stamps and presented Lina with a two-slot Hamilton Beach toaster.

  Babbo woke up just as heavy thundershowers were lumbering across Alabama and Georgia. “I thought I heard you moving around up there,” he said.

  “So why didn't you call out and say hi?”

  “I figured you'd come down soon enough.” He winced and held his leg as he sat up. “Darn arthritis has got me again.” He squinted at me. “Your face is red as a lobster.”

  “I went to a tanning salon.”

  He glared at me. “That's good money down the drain.”

  I shrugged. “It's a nice day,” I said. “Is it supposed to last?”

  “How should I know?” he said.

  “You're watching the weather news,” I pointed out.

  “You got to wait half an hour before they give the local conditions.”

  The blare of the TV suddenly was too much to take. I went over and snapped off the power.

  “When do you want to go visit Mama?” I asked.

  “Now's fine,” Babbo said. “They're probably done giving her lunch.” He slowly got up. “I got your mother a geranium.”

  “I saw it on the kitchen table.”

  “Did you bring me a card for her?” he asked.

  “It's in here.” I motioned to my purse.

  Babbo frowned when I took out my keys. “You've been driving all morning,” he said.

  “So I'll drive some more,” I said.

  “My car is bigger,” he said.

  “There's only two of us,” I pointed out. “Besides, I'm blocking you in.”

  We went through this tussle every time I visited. I refused to ride with Babbo, because he drove ten miles an hour in a forty-five-mile zone. Babbo hated to be driven by anyone, especially a woman. He was suspicious of my Toyota. When he bumped his head putting the geranium in the backseat, he said, “Why don't you buy American?”

  “Because the Japanese make them better.”

  “They're taking over the country,” he grumbled.

  “Last time you said the blacks were doing that,” I said.

  “Them too, with their civil rights,” Babbo said. “What rights did we have when we came to this country?”

  I held my breath, waiting for the old melancholy tune that both Mama and Babbo liked to bang out, like some rusty percussive music on a tin bucket and washboard. It was raining cats and dogs when the boat got to New York. We stood in line for six hours with nothing to eat or drink! When we finally got to the desk the immigration officers spelled our name wrong! We were too scared to correct them! We weren't proud in those days! We lived twelve people in a three-room apartment above a bakery! We ate day-old bread and were thankful for every crumb we could get! My father worked on the wharves from three A.M. to three P.M. We kids shoveled snow, delivered newspapers, and did whatever we had to do to earn a penny! I braced myself for the torture of hearing this family saga one more time, but Babbo spared me. Still, what did it matter? I had already heard it, and rehearsed it all, in my head.

  I started the car and backed out of the driveway. The minute we were on the road, trouble began. Babbo was a backseat driver. All the way to the convalescent home he pointed out every peril that stood in our path: blind driveways, sharp turns, members of the animal kingdom from dogs to squirrels to birds, drivers who didn't know where they were going. “Watch it,” he called out on the corner. “They come around that curve like a hurricane, one hundred miles an hour. Stoplight ahead.”

  “I see it,” I said.

  “That yellow turns to red in the blink of an eye.”

  “So I'll brake,” I said.

  When he wasn't playing traffic cop, Babbo took on the role of tour guide. He acted as if I had moved halfway across the globe and the neighborhood I had grown up in had been destroyed by a nuclear bomb and rebuilt from scratch. The truth was that everything—from the run-down houses to the shabby storefronts and boarded-up movie theaters—looked exactly the same. “That's a new deli there,” he pointed to a store that was at least five years old. “You can get some good pastries at Luccino's. A couple of crooks held up that jewelry store.”

  “You told me that last time.”

  “Puerto Ricans,” he said. “From Bridgeport. Dope addicts. It's just not safe anymore. Nowhere is. There's a character on every street corner. Pothole ahead. Watch it.”

  By the time we got to Saint Ronan's, my nerves were jangling. The convalescent home, a four-winged complex surrounded by open fields, sat at the bottom of a hill. The parking lot was crowded, and Babbo insisted on getting out and directing me into the last tight space. I hardly had enough room to get out of the car and reach into the backseat to take out my present. On the other side of the car, Babbo struggled to get out the geranium plant. He looked forlorn standing there, the flowers bright red against the gray of his worn-out pol
o shirt. The petals were starting to shatter.

  We crossed the parking lot. The pollen from the neighboring field made me sneeze. The moment we entered the lobby we were hit by the smell of rubbing alcohol and boiled broccoli. The front hall was decked with brightly colored posters like a pediatrician's office. Red crepe-paper ribbons and white fold-out bells hung from the fluorescent lights. On the back wall a cord was strung with multicolored construction-paper letters that spelled out Happy Mother's Day.

  Babbo set the geranium down on a table outside the nurses’ station.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, even though I knew.

  “You're supposed to check in,” he said.

  “Nobody else ever does.”

  Babbo pointed to the sign, heeded by no one but himself, which commanded visitors to register their names in the guest book and obtain passes before entering. He parked himself in front of the window while the receptionist, obviously on a personal call, twisted the phone cord around and around in one hand, smiling and laughing. Finally she took the phone away from her ear, cracked the window open, and asked Babbo in a brusque voice what he wanted.

  I turned away so I didn't have to listen to their inevitable argument. The receptionist told Babbo he could go right on in. Babbo insisted on following the rules. Finally she crammed a piece of paper through the window, asked him to sign it, and dug up two laminated cards. Babbo clutched the passes as if he were a five- year-old boy about to gain admission to an amusement park. He held one out to me.