Sometimes I Dream in Italian

by Rita Ciresi

  I leaned forward and brought my mouth close to my mother's dumb, still ear. Mama, I started to whisper, my mouth is a volcano. My crotch is on fire. I remember everything. You slapped my face so hard when I got my first period you almost gave me a black eye! The time you fitted me for my first bra, you pulled the tape measure so tight you practically strangled me! This is how I've turned out, Mama: I hate my job. I feel like some crazed bird cooped up all day in the office. But when I get home, I'm lonely. I shop too much. I overeat. I take a Sominex and go to sleep with the TV on. I screw guys I can't even stand! In the morning I look in the mirror and can't believe how old and ugly I'm getting.

  It was all right there, on the tip of my tongue, and I could have shot it all out like a spitball through a straw. But not a word got said. Because Mama blinked. But she did not open her eyes right away—she closed them, as if to shut herself off from me, and from her mouth came a wild bark, a harsh, garbled sound that seemed to come out of the bottom of her soul. It sounded like the desperate noise of an animal pinned down on a veterinarian's table, the rough growl of an evil spirit or incubus, the crazy cry a man might grind out of you in bed. I could not have imitated it if I tried. But because my mouth was open and I had been set to speak, it made me wonder if it had come from deep down inside of me.

  The noise frightened me so badly I instinctively turned to my father. “Babbissimo,” I whispered, just as I had called him when I was a child and jumped into his arms at the first sound of thunder. Daddy, dear big Daddy, protect me. But Babbo's eyes remained closed. The only indications that he even was alive were the long breaths that whistled out of his mouth and the short bubbly breaths he took back in.

  I looked back at Mama. Her face, once again, was as blank as a clock without hands. Then the fan snapped on, breaking the silence. As the air from the ceiling vent began to ruffle Mama's hair, a close, cloying odor filled the room. I stood up—looking one last time at Mama and Babbo—before I fled the room.

  As I walked down the hall to the nurses’ station, I tried not to look through the doors at the other patients. But it was like being in a locker room: No matter how hard you tried to avert your eyes, you still caught glimpses of embarrassing parts of other people's bodies. Instead of pendulous breasts, flabby butts, and stippled thighs, I saw feet stiffly positioned on wheelchair rests; brittle, shaking hands; twisted faces; and pink scalps shining through thin gray hair.

  At the nurses’ station I rapped on the window, and a woman with frosted blond hair and thick pink lipstick opened the glass.

  “My mother just soiled herself,” I said.

  She took down Mama's name and room number and closed the window. I turned away and slowly walked back to Mama's room. I stood in the hallway, just outside the door. After a few minutes, a Filipino nurse—small and sympathetic, dressed in a pressed white uniform that made her look like a tiny angel—came down the hall. “You need some help with your mother?” she asked.

  “God,” I told her, “you can say that again.”

  ONE CHILLY, RAIN-SPECKLED night in March, I responded to a personal ad. I'd like to blame a bag of Cheetos for this rash act. But I have only my lonesome self to censure. After a dreary week of scrawling sentimental greeting-card jingles, I smuggled my Cheetos (beneath my coat) into the entry of the three-story home where I lived. No use letting the neighbors know I was turning into a junk-food pig. While I checked my mailbox (empty), I heard moaning—female—melt from beneath my landlord's door. I paused on the landing and wondered, for a moment, if that lamentation did not come from some vast and lonely cave within myself.

  Two breathless flights of stairs later, I discovered my bathroom ceiling was still leaking and my heat was on the fritz again. Since I didn't dare return downstairs and chew out the landlord, I shivered, then huddled beneath a smelly, mustard-colored wool blanket on my fold-out couch. My muscled lout of a landlord gave me goose bumps in more ways than one. To avoid indulging in my latest lame fantasy (he came upstairs to fiddle with my thermostat and ending up fiddling with…), I ripped open the bag of Cheetos and hunkered down with the want ads.

  I vowed to limit myself to one salty Chee to for every APT FOR RENT ad I read. Fortunately, the rental market in Poughkeepsie was booming. Chee-to Number 106 had just passed my chapped lips when I idly turned from all the apartments I could not afford to the men I felt I could no longer live without.

  MEN SEEKING WOMEN

  I kept eating. And reading. Why? Because my sister had a house and a husband and I did not. Because I was pushing thirty and no closer than a baby to understanding the answer to this question: What did men really want?

  One thing and one thing only, my mother had warned me— and Love Connection's long cattle call for Free Spirits, Uninhibited Ladies, and Sensual Sun Goddesses seemed to prove her right. Although serious lip service was given to candlelit dinners, long motorcycle rides, and walks on Poughkeepsie's nonexistent beach, the subtext was loud and clear. Friendship first, claimed these European Gentlemen and Bad Boy Poets. None of these big spenders bothered to shell out the additional fifty cents per word to add the obvious: fucking second.

  The only ad that emphasized brains over bodacious bodies came from a college teacher who claimed to enjoy architecture and literature (you know who Rilke is—and like to read him. In 750 words or less, tell me why). As I considered responding, I sucked the Chee-to between my lips so dry it resembled the ghostly white bratwurst-on-a-stick sold at church carnivals. Surely somewhere in the Hudson Valley sat some reasonably un-ugly guy who could outshine this dreary word-counting pedant. Maybe I didn't have the nerve to tell my landlord to jack up the heat instead of the rent, but couldn't I at least say what I wanted in the romance department?

  I licked the orange powder off my fingers and took up a Paper Mate pen.

  LIGHT MY FIRE!(Or at least help me get up the gumption

  to tell my landlord to fix the furnace.) My name is Angel, yet (according to my mother) I'm any

  thing but.

  Boys always 1) looked at my sister; 2) looked at me; 3) then

  quickly looked back.

  I spent the night of my senior prom watching Escape from

  the Planet of the Apes.

  In college I slept with three of what we laughably called

  Vassar men. One actually wore a black beret.

  While doing it!

  After college I took the first job offered, chirping insipid

  verse for a gagulous greeting-card company.

  My biggest professional challenges: staying awake and

  pretending that intercubicle flatulence doesn't exist.

  Last year I was seduced and abandoned (with bacterial

  vaginitis) by a Special Moments traveling salesman.

  One round of killer antibiotics later, I still suspect I

  smell like a day-old prawn on melted ice.

  Sometimes I wonder how I've evolved from the girl who

  deemed Waiting for Godot the most meaningful piece

  of literature in the Western world to the woman who

  goes to the mall and tortures herself by looking at the

  diamond engagement rings.

  (Just for the record, I prefer platinum over gold, and emerald cut over marquise. Also oral sex over penetration.)

  But enough about me! You are:

  Non-beret wearing. Gainfully employed.

  Do not suffer from irritable bowel syndrome.

  29–33.

  Own interesting real estate.

  Fond of Italian food.

  Willing to go down on me.

  Blond.

  Possess parents who herd reindeer in the Arctic Circle.

  I put down my Paper Mate. Counted my words. Even with the first twenty words free, this tall order would set me back $114.50. But I had just spent my last $1.83—in the form of eight quarters, one desperately recovered from the floor of my ‘81 Toy-ota—on this bag of Cheetos that was making my heart as well as my stomach feel si
ck.

  I spent the rest of the evening writing the college teacher a five-paragraph essay complete with truthful introduction (Warmth is something lacking in my life…), three main points (I liked Sonnets to Orpheus, Frank Lloyd Wright, and… and… salty food!), and lame, apologetic conclusion (I've never done this before, so please forgive….). Since I was on word 749, I left off the object of forgive and signed my name as Angelina.

  After I ran out in the rain and dropped the thin white envelope in the mailbox, I wanted to thrust my arm down the chute and retrieve every one of the 750 words. What if he liked to read aloud poetry—that didn't rhyme? What if he turned out to be the Vassar philosophy instructor who'd given me a mercy C-minus and scrawled on my final paper, See me for problems with cause and effect?

  Dr. Symbolic Logic had a near-illegible hand. The letter I received was written in precise blue cursive script that could only come from the nib of a fountain pen, and was signed Dirk. Dirk Diederhoff! Instant fifty points off—until I remembered I was christened Angel, a name ordinarily associated with midget Hispanic jockeys. Still. This Dirk taught German and liked to visit historic houses. As I carefully memorized his suggestion to meet at a local coffeehouse, I wondered how I would last through even an espresso with such a man—me who didn't have the foggiest how to pronounce Rainer, who barely knew Le Corbusier from Palladio, whose knowledge of German culture was gleaned from watching Hogan's Heroes and listening to Wayne Newton sing a song I thought was called “Donkey Shame.”

  On the other hand, Dirk had not requested a photograph. My heart pounding as if I'd already swilled sixteen cups of espresso, I grabbed the phone, dialed his number, and at his severe hello I stopped myself just in time from introducing myself as Angelina Diederhoff.

  “It's Angel,” I said. Shit. “The one you wrote to.” Retard: He'd probably written back to twenty! “I'm free all day this Saturday.” Loser! “Around three?”

  “Three then,” he said. “At Java.”

  “Wait,” I said. “How will I know it's you?”

  “I'll stand just outside the door.”

  “What if it's raining?”

  There came a chilly silence. “I own an umbrella.”

  March was long, cold, and rainy. Dirk Diederhoff did indeed stand under a black umbrella, which he solicitously held over me as he shook my still-gloved hand. Although I had pictured him like Friedrich the smooth-faced boy soprano in The Sound of Music or the impoverished, rough-bearded Professor Bhaer from Little Women, Dirk resembled neither. Pale, honey-blond, gold-bespectacled, he could have been the cover model for a Junior Year Abroad program—posed for contrast between a petite, solemn Japanese girl and a too-tall smiling Nigerian. I had to press my thighs together for fear he'd hear my crotch singing a joyous version of “Deutschland über alles.”

  Dirk collapsed his umbrella and we went inside. At the counter, he unzipped his dark green tundra jacket and reached into the back pocket of his gray cords. “This is on me.”

  I wanted hot chocolate with whipped cream and the biggest slice of cheesecake in the case. “Just a plain cup of coffee,” I told the purple-haired girl behind the counter.

  “House Blend,” she corrected me, in such a superior tone that I wanted to yank all six silver rings from her snotty snoot.

  Dirk (I found out later) did not approve of her Ferdinand-the-Bull look either. He got a cup of the Kenyan and we retired to a window table splattered with sugar. As if preparing a line of cocaine, Dirk folded an ecologically-correct napkin (soft as sandpaper) into precise quarters and pushed the sugar in a straight file to the edge of the table.

  Before the coffee had cooled enough to sip, Dirk gave me the opening lines on his curriculum vitae—undergrad at University of Minnesota, master's and Ph.D. from Michigan—then backtracked and told me: born on a wheat farm fifty miles from St. Cloud. Two brothers, both farmers, both married with kids.

  Dirk was on a one-year—renewable—appointment at Vassar. Where, he added, he was very disappointed in the caliber of the student body.

  “I went to Vassar,” I said.

  His pale cheeks turned pink.

  “Do you know anyone in the philosophy department?” I asked, and when he shook his head, I said, “I always did my homework.”

  “Don't get me wrong,” he said. “Some of the students are bright. The rest are resentful if I correct their spelling. And wear—like that girl behind the counter—earrings in inappropriate places.”

  Apparently tongue studs did nothing to help these students’ already poor pronunciation. After Dirk told me he gave out a lot of Fs, I sat up even straighter. I could see why the bowels of his students would loosen when he strode into the classroom and set down his briefcase. He seemed impatient to hear the wrong answer when he asked, “What languages do you have?”

  The sip I took of my House Blend burned my lips. “English. A smattering of Italian. And French.”

  “How many years of French?”

  “I started in seventh grade.”

  “And you were inspired by?”

  “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.”

  “Really.”

  “That was a joke,” I said, even though it wasn't. “The real reason was because I'd heard about this novel, Madame Bovary.”

  “Overrated, don't you think?”

  I nodded. Vigorously. After I had outgrown Heidi and Little Women, I had pulled Flaubert from the public-library shelf, expecting to find one dashing man after another mounting the insatiable Madame (who lay splay-legged on a fainting couch, moaning something vaguely reflexive like, M'amuse me, oh m'amuse me!). Instead, the book opened with some stupid schoolboys squabbling about a hat.

  “Madame was disappointing in English,” I said, and as an alternative to incomprehensible, I told Dirk, “and… well, just plain dense in French.”

  My initial meeting with Dirk proceeded much like my interview with Vassar's admissions officer. Thankfully, Mama—her black box purse grimly clutched between her gnarled hands—was not squatting in the waiting room, ready to greet Dirk with this sole question: “Quanto is this going to cost me?” When prompted by Dirk, I described my favorite authors, my strongest and weakest subjects, and my short- and long-term goals. After half an hour of nimbly fielding his questions, I looked down and saw that I had squeezed my empty coffee cup so hard it had collapsed.

  “I guess I'm not getting a refill,” I said. When he didn't laugh, I asked, “Tell me—why did you write that ad?”

  Now it was his turn to sit up even straighter. “Why did you respond?”

  “Ever since my mother died, I feel lonely a lot,” I said. “I mean, it's hard to meet others in my line of work.”

  He nodded. “It was puzzling at first. But now I've accepted I'll never meet anyone at Vassar.”

  “Aren't there other young professors?”

  “Either they're married or—” He paused, and I thought he was searching for some more mature way to describe those female profs that we callow undergraduates had portrayed as hailing from the Isle of Lesbos or belonging to the Family Van Dyke. “Or they're tenured.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “I'm not on a tenure-track line.”

  Since I could never remember whether it took a long or a short A, I avoided caste like the word itself had leprosy. “What does that make you, then,” I asked Dirk, “an Untouchable?”

  “Persona non grata,” Dirk said. “That means—”

  “I work in a cubicle,” I said. “No need to translate.”

  I could tell Dirk wasn't used to being interrupted. He started to take another sip of his coffee. But his Kenyan was kaput.

  Dirk then launched into what seemed a carefully planned pitch explaining why he had advertised in the personals. He did not do bars or work out in a gym. Although plenty of other faculty did not share his scruples, he thought it reprehensible to prey upon his students. He sought an intellectual equal. I nodded, thinking, Good thing I didn't ask him
what interested him most about architecture: the floor or the ceiling.

  “You haven't told me much about your family,” he said.

  I thought about Mama frozen in her wheelchair and now even colder beneath the ground. I remembered Babbo sweating out the summer in front of a nonoscillating fan, nursing a warm can of Old Milwaukee as he watched reruns of McHale's Navy. Then I thought of Lina—currently house-hunting and quarreling with Phil about whether or not they really needed two Jacuzzis.

  “Do you have a pen?” I asked.

  Dirk pulled a fountain pen from his shirt pocket. I uncapped it and reached for one of the brown napkins. “Since you enjoy architecture,” I said, “here's a blueprint of my parents’ house.”

  I drew for Dirk the cramped kitchen where Mama had stirred her sauce on Sundays, the living room stuffed with dusty knick-knacks where Lina and I had spent winter afternoons fashioning dollhouses from shoe boxes, the dining room where Babbo presided over Easter and Christmas meals, and the sloped ceilings under which we all slept. “When there was a lot of snow,” I said, “the eaves creaked and it felt like the roof would collapse at any minute.”

  Dirk examined my crooked drawing. “I'll show you the meaning of snow.” He unfolded one of the napkins all the way, took the pen, and drew me his parents’ farm—the house, the outbuildings, and all the fields—in scale, with each square inch representing fifty acres. “Imagine all this in a blizzard,” he said.

  The thought of so much land—never mind so much white stuff—was staggering. My eyes must have widened, because Dirk said, “Of course, I'm the third son.”

  “Like in Grimm's fairy tales?”

  “Exactly. I've chosen not to farm, so none of this will be mine. Except”—he pointed to the northwest corner of the napkin— “twenty acres here, mortgage-free, where the wind blows the hardest.” He took another glance at my drawing and pointed to the front porch, where I had sketched the curlicued-metal screen door marked L for Lupo. “What can you tell me about the family inside?”