“Hello, hello,” she sang out, at odds with the living room two steps lower than the rest of the first floor, like Aunt Diane had weighed it down until it gave up and sank.
“He’s wild,” Diane said. “It’s dangerous.”
The edge in Aunt Diane’s voice challenged the softness of her body, like Silly Putty wrapped around nails. Gia thought of the boys racing down Cross Bay, burning rubber. Did she mean them?
“What are you talking about?” Agnes forgot to exhale as she settled onto the arm of the couch.
“Did it look directly at you?” Diane’s head pivoted toward Gia, her pointed finger emphasizing each word, and Gia felt stabbed through. “It’ll make you sick.”
Gia froze. She was right. Nonna had always said that if a praying mantis looked directly at you, it would make you sick. Diane had seen that mantis, in her head, same as she’d seen Uncle Lou’s plane fall from the sky, and maybe other things, too, but no one talked about them because they were all spooked after Uncle Lou.
“Right.” Agnes stood, patted Diane’s shoulder while clearing away the most recent bottle, pinching it like a dead bug in a napkin, hiding her disgust with a fake cheery voice. “We’ll come back another day, Diane.”
Lorraine leaned against the doorway, rubbing her forehead.
“You’re welcome to sleep at our house,” Agnes said to Lorraine, and then, quieter, “We should go down to the VA and see if they can write the checks to you instead. She’s getting out of hand.”
“I hear you.” Diane whirled. “There’s nothing wrong with me. The world is falling apart.” Diane made the sign of the cross, gathered her housedress, and settled into a charged silence.
Gia stared at her aunt, who had seen a world war and blacked out the windows when air-raid sirens had rung out, who’d welded metal at the navy yard while the men were away, sparks flying in her face as she’d pieced together machinery. But tonight, in Queens, the world was falling apart. And Gia’s brother had disappeared into it, and her father was out there trying to hold it together.
Lorraine set up a bowl of cool water with a washcloth for her mother, dabbed it over her forehead. She was staying, then, in this hot house with that folded flag on the mantel staring down at them through stars and stripes. It was the saddest family Gia had ever seen: Diane, that flag, and Lorraine. Gia fought the urge to hold her mother’s hand.
“Let’s go,” Agnes whispered.
The parakeets on the wire were in a line, swinging with the breeze. The phone was ringing in their house. Agnes hurried across the street while Gia gathered up the plates and blew out the citronella candle, the praying mantis hiding in the bush.
“Your father’s not coming home tonight. They’re rioting again. Burning everything in Bed-Stuy. Gia, bring the dishes and wash them before it gets too dark. And no sleeping outside. I want you in.”
Whatever summer spell Agnes had been under was over. The door slammed. The rabbits shuffled. Gia locked the hutch and carried the plates inside, wondering why anyone would want to burn anything on a night as hot as this.
That night, a fire glowed in the distance. Smoke hung in the air, and sirens wailed far away, hopefully not where her father was, her bad feelings toward him haunting her now. Heat lightning argued in the sky. “Have you seen Leo?” her mother asked the kitchen receiver, worrying the phone cord into a tangle. No, Aunt Ida must’ve said, because her mother said she hadn’t seen Ray either. Tommy was probably farting around at home like she was, feeling especially left out now that the sun was down and the boys weren’t home. It wasn’t full dark yet, but time went away with electricity.
Her mother hung up, and it was quiet again, full of a stillness that didn’t extend beyond the porch. She wished her father and her brother were home. She felt less safe without them. Agnes dialed another number.
A gunshot sounded in the distance, echoing through the quiet. Gia sprang up, gathered the rabbits from the hutch. They couldn’t stay there. She locked the front door and let the rabbits hop free in her room, tucking herself into the linen closet, something she hadn’t done since she was little. The heat and detergent smell were almost unbearable, but there was just enough room beneath the last shelf for Gia. The chaos outside didn’t fit here. It was just Gia and the dark until sometime in the night, when the power came back on and her brother tiptoed past.
“We got stuck,” he told Agnes over breakfast the next morning, the half moons beneath his eyes dark as the rain clouds gathered outside, low and gray. “The cops set up a roadblock, and we couldn’t get through.”
“From Rockaway?” Agnes repeated. Leo nodded, twirling a sweating glass of milk between his hands. Agnes pressed her lips into a line and cooked an egg, gas burning blue beneath the pan. He didn’t mention selling the bike or Ray speeding down Cross Bay.
“But I found a job,” he said. “Wasn’t that what you wanted me to do?”
Agnes said nothing. The clock on the wall was stuck at nine a.m. She flipped the egg as the edges curled, shut off the burner with a snap, and slid the overcooked egg onto a plate. The toaster popped. Say it, Gia wished. You know he’s lying. But her mother quietly gathered her things for work, sipping the last of her coffee, waiting for Eddie to be her voice, and slipped out of the house as if she had something to apologize for and not Leo.
“What kind of job?” Gia crossed her arms over her chest.
“Working for Ray. He’s got something for you too.” Leo dropped his plate into the sink without washing it. “Go see him.”
The rain started outside. Fast and heavy, finally breaking through the heat. The relief of it ran through her veins. She didn’t understand what Ray could possibly want, but Leo was already upstairs, the shower running. A dove cooed on the windowsill. She would have to ask Ray herself.
Chapter Five
It rained for nearly two days. The thundering of water on concrete changed to water on water. The sewers spewed until it was raining from above and below. Ducks swam past in the street, where the water was deeper than parts of the bay. Gia pressed the pleats in her uniform skirt, willing them to sharpen as her mother wished. Lazy pleats, lazy person. School meant a schedule full of nuns, her mother’s campaign to transform her intensifying. The pink razor had been repositioned in the shower, a bag of makeup left on her bed, the date of the fall dance circled on the calendar, making Gia wish she could wash out like driftwood and turn up somewhere else.
Lorraine waded over in a plaid pantsuit with plastic bags of school supplies. It was daring: a woman in a pantsuit. They divided the supplies up on the table—marble notebooks, number two pencils with perfect points, stacks of loose-leaf paper—and clipped them into last year’s binders. They’d done this for as long as Gia could remember, only there weren’t any crayons anymore, or markers, or stickers. It was more serious-looking stuff now.
“What is there to think about? You should go.”
Part of her wanted to see streamers hanging from the gym ceiling, trellis archways and pop-up walls, a crepe-paper forest of reds, greens, and gold, nuns making popcorn and spinning cotton candy.
“What do you even do at a dance?”
“You eat, dance, take small sips of spiked drinks if you’re lucky, talk . . .”
“Yeah, but . . .” The boy part threw her. Boys were booger-picking schoolyard fighters. With dances, they were something else, but what? Lorraine dragged her pen along a spiral notebook as Gia squirmed.
“You know, Gia, you really are pretty. You just don’t know it. But it’s useful.”
“Useful?” A Swiss Army knife was useful. Pretty didn’t come with tools.
“Yes, useful.” The front door opened, and the conversation shut with it. “You’ll see.” Lorraine doodled her name in a new notebook, giving Gia one quick raised eyebrow, as Agnes breezed in with groceries, opened cupboards, and pulled dinner things from the refrigerator.
“Your father is coming home,” Agnes sang out, unpacking groceries. “The rain finally put the fire
s out in Bed-Stuy, stopped the riots. You believe it started because some landlord sprayed a group of kids sitting on the stoop with a hose? Three days of riots and looting, terrifying, all because some guy didn’t want kids sitting on his stoop.” She shook her head.
Gia and Lorraine raised eyebrows. It was more complicated than that; people were sick of being told what to do. Ten years after Rosa Parks wouldn’t give up her seat on the bus, people still couldn’t sit on a stoop. It was the same for women, trapped under their bell jars, as Sister Gregory called them. She thought about Aunt Diane at the navy yard, welding along with the rest of them, sent home the day the war ended and told to learn typing. Of Lorraine, who’d be a nurse but never a doctor. Of the people who bought things on store shelves, believing they were safe, only for those same products to poison them slowly. It was unfair, and it seemed to Gia that the world was waking up slowly.
“Your brother. He’s home?”
“I think so,” Gia said. He’d eaten a whole box of cereal in front of the TV earlier, lifting dumbbells during commercial breaks, but she didn’t know where he was now. Agnes looked between Gia and the ceiling, where Leo’s bedroom would be. There would be a talk when her father got home.
“Is he sick?” Agnes scrunched her forehead. It was unusual for Leo to be home, grounded or not.
Yes, Gia thought. He has an incurable case of the idiots.
“And what is that you’re wearing?” Agnes’s already-scrunched forehead tightened as she looked at Lorraine. “It’s all connected?”
Gia swallowed the giggles and wiped her face. No way that pantsuit would end up folded at the foot of her bed, which almost made her want one.
“You know, we were just discussing the dance,” Lorraine said, as easily as setting out a beer can for slugs, drowning Gia in bubbles and yeast.
“Oh?” Agnes forgot the groceries. Cabinets gaped as Agnes imagined dressy pictures by the mantel, corsages, warning about curfews while Eddie glowered in his uniform to make a point, watching by the window as Gia climbed into a car in a taffeta dress.
“But she needs to learn how to dance.”
You’re getting the malocchio for this, she promised, raising her index finger and pinkie so only Lorraine could see, but it didn’t matter because Lorraine had a red ribbon under her mattress, same as they all had since they were infants, thanks to Nonna.
Agnes lit up, hurried to the living room, and shoved aside the coffee table, newspapers on the floor, hands flying in every direction like on that game show with the supermarket runners filling the carts before the time ran out. It was completely mortifying.
Lorraine snapped her books shut with a glint in her eye as Agnes pulled records from sleeves. The record player spun quietly, clicking, until Agnes settled an album into place. Crackling to a start, an old, fuddy-duddy Sinatra song from family parties or New Year’s Eve, when everyone wore paper hats before the ball dropped.
“Shall we?” Agnes sang.
“Shoes off,” Lorraine suggested. “It’s easier in socks.”
Lorraine stood next to Agnes, facing Gia like captains picking teams in gym, hopeful until the options dwindled.
“Pretend there’s a box on the floor. Always start with the right. Right foot, top corner,” Lorraine said. “Like Twister. Your left lands lightly, like there’s an ant you don’t want to squash. Just trace the box.”
“A small box,” Agnes suggested. It was less awkward with smaller steps.
“Good,” Lorraine said. “Now, the first two steps are slow, then quick, quick.”
“We’ll get to hands later.” Agnes smiled, which only made Gia aware of the wet spaghetti hanging at her sides. Gia traced the box in silence. Doing this with a boy near her face? The smells alone would be overwhelming: soap, breath, sweat, aftershave. No. A panic welled up in the pit of her stomach as Lorraine prompted her to look up, but there were too many things to look at: the framed picture of Nonna and Pop Pop on their wedding day, not smiling, on the mantel; Leo in his Confirmation suit; Gia at her first Communion, hands in prayer under a lace veil; two tarnished candlesticks. Gia lost the box.
“Pick a focus point,” Agnes suggested. “I always pick a brick on the wall.”
Gia was sweating: on her forehead, under her arms, down her spine. Wasn’t she supposed to be dry, like the magazine-ad women with powdery, fresh skin? The fireplace bricks shifted. Everything was moving too fast.
“OK, now.” Agnes and Lorraine shared the same box, a confusing jumble of hands on shoulders and waists, intertwined in the air. Lorraine was taller, her lines colored in and filled out, leaving an empty space for Agnes. Gia was wispy and unfinished, too, but less so, deflating her further. They skipped around the living room as one unit, leaving a maze of footprints in the rug as Gia’s knees pressed into the coffee table, waiting for the moment it clicked, like algebra, the formulas on the chalkboard finally recognizable.
They didn’t hear the door over the music. Eddie framed the doorway, his uniform hat at his side like a fallen star, shoes in hand because of the high water, smelling like smoke, wavering slightly on his feet from three days without sleep, trying to hide the gash on his face by turning away as Lorraine and Agnes zipped by, a trail of perfume in their wake.
Agnes spun to a stop when she saw him; brushing hair from her face, and hustling over to lower the music, she said, “Gia’s learning to dance.”
Her pride was contagious. It made the house feel more alive, the floral print on the couch ready to throw back its plastic cover and grow into a jungle, covering the living room with vines, but Gia was mortified. Getting caught doing girl things was worse than rowing.
“I see,” he said. The music warmed him, stripping away the things he’d seen over the past three days in layers that almost gathered around his feet. “Shouldn’t the student be dancing?”
“I should get you something to eat.” Agnes hurried to take his hat as Eddie rolled his sleeve past his elbow, where the anchor trailed off. That tattoo was her father through and through: frayed rope and salty metal. “And you should lie down.”
He looked exhausted, but even more, he looked disappointed. It settled in the lines around his mouth and eyes, but he wouldn’t talk about it, same as he didn’t talk about the war or any other day at work. Those things were better left where they belonged.
“One dance.” He held out his hand to Gia, and some of the disappointment fell away, a tired smile hinting at the corner of his mouth. Gia didn’t want to dance, was glad the music had been turned down, but how could she say no?
“A good man asks first. You told her?” He looked at Agnes, then back to Gia. “Any boy who wants to take you to a dance has to ask me first. Understood?”
“No one has to ask you anything, you old grump,” Agnes teased, plopping down on the couch, Lorraine beside her, their hair scattered, faces flushed, eyes shiny.
The attention was dizzying, even if dancing was embarrassing. Her insides were singing like she was running her finger around the rim of one of the fancy crystal glasses they used on holidays.
“A slow song, please?” Gia took her father’s hand. He put his hand on her waist, their toes facing off. It was weird, her father’s stubbled chin, the heat from his hand. She didn’t know where to look exactly, so she looked at their feet. Agnes adjusted the stereo, clicked a new record into place, moved the needle to the right groove.
“Edelweiss,” her father’s favorite. She could pretend she was just brushing her teeth, her father humming down the hall.
On the first step, Gia forgot where her foot was supposed to go.
“Let my foot chase yours,” he said. Gia nodded and looked down. Her father drummed his finger against hers, humming along. This time, Gia was ready. They made the box; he spun her away and back, flipping the room, then again. She was doing it. She was dancing, the surprise of it overshadowing the complicated look on Lorraine’s face as Agnes whispered something into her ear, squeezed her hand. Maybe how Uncle Lou and Aunt Di
ane used to go dancing every Saturday night, even at the Copacabana once. The song ended, and her father gave a little bow. She lifted the hem of an imaginary dress and did her best impression of a curtsy. From the dreamy look on her mother’s face, she must’ve done OK.
“I should start dinner,” Agnes said. “And you should wash up. I’ll get some peroxide.”
Eddie put his arm around Gia, pulled her into a side hug, and kissed the top of her head. Then he was gone, both of them holding on to the moment a little longer in private. It felt like she’d stepped over a barrier, and it hadn’t been as scary with her father. Gia and Lorraine pulled the coffee table into place and smoothed the plastic on the couch but left the record player on, music tinkling, a reminder that something special had happened.
Later at dinner, Eddie took a first bite of food, a second. “What the heck was she wearing?” he asked between bites. “Why’s she dressed like a plaid mechanic?”
“It’s a pantsuit,” Gia argued. “They’re in now.”
And everything went back to normal.
After dinner, Gia pushed the kayak off the front porch and paddled down the street, testing every few strokes to make sure it wouldn’t bottom out. Water lapped at front porches, begging to be let in; a fish swam past where cars should have been. Water world, she thought, smiling to herself.
Ray was on the roof above the front porch, smoking a cigarette. A curtain blew through the open window, begging at his shoulder like a cape. Even with his rolled-up pants and bare feet, he looked like a king surveying his land.
“Where’s your brother?” he called.
“Grounded,” she said. “Dad’s home.” Which meant it was enforceable.
Ray tapped the ashes from his cigarette. “Heard he got good money for the bike.”
Gia nodded. A car passed where the water wasn’t as deep, rocking the kayak beneath her.
“Tell him I got parts for the new one. Tommy’s working on it. How about you? You want to make some money too?”
A Frenzy of Sparks: A Novel Page 6
