The Milk of Human Kindness

by Lori L. Lake

  She was rambling, she knew it, and Ellen knew it, too. Anything to avoid thinking about what lay ahead.

  “Kate, it’s okay, I was just curious.” Ellen put her hand on her lover’s arm—gently, tentatively—and quietly searched her face. Kate knew that look: wondering what she was feeling, ready to shoulder any burden Kate asked of her, hoping she would use these last few minutes to talk about it. Letting Kate know that she was there for her, as she had been for the last ten years.

  But Ellen wouldn’t ask, wouldn’t pry—she knew Kate wouldn’t talk about it in any meaningful way until she was ready, and that might not be until she called later that night. Or the next day. It might not be until Kate returned from Baltimore. Over the years, Ellen had become very adept at reading the lexicon of Kate. And vice versa.

  Kate zipped the bag, turned, and kissed her. “I’ll call you from the hospital,” she whispered.

  IT WASN’T UNTIL the train was half an hour south of the Newark stop that Kate pulled out the tray seat in front of her to set up her laptop. She fired it up, accessed the summary judgment brief she’d been drafting, and stared at the screen, trying to get her head back into the argument.

  “Plaintiff’s construction of this terminology strains the bounds of credulity, because…” That’s where she’d left off. She’d been searching for the perfect phrase to capture the outrageousness of her adversary’s position when her secretary had buzzed her that her sister Janice was on the line. Her flurry of emotions had been swift: first annoyance at the interruption, then surprise that her sister even knew her office number, and finally dread. Whatever it was, she was certain she didn’t want to hear it.

  “Mom’s in the hospital. It doesn’t look good.”

  Her heart skipped into overdrive, but she took a deep breath and forced her voice to remain calm.

  “What happened?”

  “She fell. It looks like a broken hip. But there may be some brain damage, too. She isn’t making any sense.”

  Does she ever? Kate bit off the remark before voicing it, oddly aware of some tiny sliver of family allegiance—or maybe just human empathy—making itself known after all this time. She glared back at the screen in front of her. “Well, what do the doctors say?” Let’s get the facts before charging off on a wild stampede to Baltimore.

  “That you should get down here. Now.”

  She waited a few beats, debating whether to ask one last question, the one she hated herself for even considering. But eventually she did, just barely, in a half-whisper she regretted immediately.

  “Has she asked for me?”

  Janice gave her usual sigh—the audible, disgusted one that came out as something between a yawn and a moan. “Just get down here.”

  THE SCREEN CONTINUED to stare at Kate, patiently awaiting the bolt of inspiration from her that would finish the sentence. And she continued to stare right back at it. She usually had no problem working on the train. People tended to keep their voices low, and the gentle rhythm of the tracks usually lulled her into a peaceful state of utter concentration. But not today.

  She lifted her eyes from the accusatory blinking cursor and stared outside at the trees and embankments whipping past at a dizzying speed. The objects in the distance were discernable; they didn’t appear to move as quickly, and her eyes could therefore focus on them for a few seconds. But the landscape closer to the train tracks appeared and was gone in a fraction of a second, things buzzing by so swiftly that her brain barely had time to register they were there at all, much less identify them. The trees and telephone poles in the middle distance were the most fascinating. If she tried to take in the scene as a whole, everything whizzed past in a kaleidoscope of blurred images; but if she focused on a single object, she could just barely make it out before it disappeared. By sheer force of will, her gaze on that telephone pole, or that shrub, seemed to suspend them for a moment, making them stand out in a field of whorling, blinding motion.

  Although she knew the trees weren’t moving—she was the one traveling 100 miles per hour—it didn’t appear that way from the comfort of her seat. No wonder the Renaissance thinkers had such a hard time with the notion of a sun-centered solar system. From a stationary point, it really did appear that you were standing still and the rest of the universe was moving past you. It’s all a matter of perspective, and although Copernicus and Galileo had it right, old beliefs die hard. It would take another few centuries for technology to catch up and prove what they had intuited by simply opening their minds.

  While her eyes played their focus game, her mind soon drifted into a game of its own, reviewing a myriad of flashcard images zipping through her consciousness before they could quite register.

  A smack across the face, hard enough to leave her cheek stinging for long moments afterward as she sat blinking, uncomprehending, at her mother’s clenched jaw and cold glare. She was five years old, and they were living in the three room rental on Trinity Street, in the heart of Baltimore’s Little Italy. She hadn’t meant to knock over her glass of milk; she was just reaching for a piece of Sara Lee crumb cake, and her elbow hit the glass before she realized it.

  An invitation for the familiar litany that punctuated so many of her childhood days: “All right, clumsy, you just get a towel and wipe that up! You think we can afford to throw good milk on the floor? You think you father’s out there working every day so you can throw his good money down the drain? And no crumb cake for you. Not until you learn some respect!”

  It was fear, of course. She’d figured that out long ago – her mother’s constant fear that the money wouldn’t stretch far enough, they wouldn’t make the rent that month, they’d be out on the street and humiliated in front of the whole neighborhood. As poor as they were, her mother had been even poorer as a child. Kate never had to eat ketchup sandwiches for dinner, as her mother had (or so she claimed). Even though, from time to time, her father gambled on the ponies riding at Pimlico and joked about the day when his ship would come in, there was always food in the refrigerator and electricity turning on the lights. Still, her mother lived in unremitting dread that it would all be taken away. And she did her best to teach that fear to her daughters every day of their lives.

  Kate hadn’t known her mother’s mother. She knew only that her grandmother, with the heavenly name of Celestina Bertucci, had raised her children alone and had died when Kate’s mother was only fourteen. Kate’s uncle Dominick had taken over and supported himself and his sister Maria until Maria’s marriage two years later to Jamey Howard, the quiet hardworking Irishman who became Kate’s father.

  If her mother were anyone else, Kate might have felt some compassion for her. Functionally illiterate, having dropped out of school at fourteen; always an outsider in their small Italian neighborhood, having been raised a Protestant and worse, marrying Irish. “Shanty Irish,” her mother would hurl at her father during their weekly knock-down, all-out arguments. But he’d just smile at her, the curl of his lip saying what he dare not: that she was no better, a dirt poor WOP, and probably a bastard to boot. Still, for all their fighting, they were a united front when it came to Kate and Janice. When Maria Bertucci married red-headed Jamey, she took control of his life, just as she would take control of her daughters’ lives when they came along a few years later. It always seemed to Kate that he’d handed over the reins with too little resistance. Then again, Maria Bertucci Howard was a force not easily resisted.

  “Get your head out of that book and find something to do,” her mother railed at her one day when she was in the fourth grade. She had something to do, of course. She was reading Little Women, and her teacher had even commended her when she’d selected the book during Library period that day. But her mother wouldn’t care about that. “You know they’re calling you a bookworm and a smarty pants, don’t you?” she said with an all-knowing wag of her head.

  “They” could only refer to the women in the neighborhood who swapped gossip every day at the pork store on the corner or in the
evenings when they all sat guard on the sidewalks in front of their respective houses, perched on lawn chairs beside the white marble stoops of which they were all so proud. Forever trying to fit in with the gaggle of big-haired madonnas, her similarly-coiffed mother would chime in on a discussion about tomato sauce (which everyone called “gravy”), or the quality of the prosciutto this week, but her comments often went ignored. After all, the hallmark of a good cook is in the enthusiasm of the eater, and with an Irish husband, she was seen to be cooking for a dull and uneducated palate.

  “Why don’t you go show your new bike to Frankie Perillo?” her mother continued. “He got a new bike for his birthday last week. You could ride around together.”

  The last thing Kate wanted to do was ride around the neighborhood with that moron. Francesco Perillo thought he was God’s gift to creation, just like his father and everyone else in that family. They lived in the gaudiest house on the block, and owned the whole thing, from the ugly mermaid fountain taking up the entire patch of front lawn, down to the Baroque portico festooned with hundreds of curlicues and angels. You’d think his father was the Pope instead of the owner of a hardware store five blocks over. Still, they were the richest family around, and the prospect of getting invited to one of the Perillos’ backyard barbeques or wedding showers (with so many cousins, there were always a lot of showers for something in that house) was an incessant theme in Kate’s home.

  “I don’t wanna play with Frankie Perillo. He’s stupid and a bully,” Kate said.

  “You watch your mouth,” her mother hissed, glancing quickly at the open front window to make sure no one was within earshot.

  “I’m supposed to read this for school.” That was technically a lie. But since she wasn’t Catholic, she didn’t worry about having to confess it later.

  “Keep it up, girl,” her mother sneered. “See where it gets you. No one wants to marry a smarty-pants. It’s no good for a girl to be too smart.”

  Yeah, look where all your brains landed you, Kate wanted to say. But by the ripe old age of ten, she had already learned where the line was and knew better than to cross it.

  “You could do a lot worse than Frankie Perillo.”

  Kate rolled her eyes and groaned. “Ma! Please!”

  “What’d I say?”

  The thing was, Kate didn’t really care if her brains were a turn-off to boys. All of her girlfriends giggled about how cute Johnny Nunzio looked in his altar boy get-up, but she was much more interested in how sweet Angie Balducci’s voice sounded when she sang “You’re a Grand Ol’ Flag” after the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. They’d sat together ever since first grade because their names were so close alphabetically, and they’d become best friends. But Angie lived too far away to visit after school—on the whole other side of Italy, a good 20 blocks away—so her friendship with Angie was basically useless to her mother.

  And Angie liked her brains. She always asked Kate her opinion about everything, and when she’d say Kate was the smartest person she knew, Kate struggled to hide the smile she felt ready to beam across her face.

  They used to talk on the phone every night. “It’s about homework,” Kate would say in answer to her mother’s scornful look. But Kate’s mother had put an end to the nightly phone calls last month. The phone company changed the billing plan, and now they had to pay for every call, so Kate’s mother had laid down the law: no phone calls except in an absolute emergency (and probably not even then). Kate actually got hold of the notice from the phone company and, after reading it carefully, tried to explain to her mother that incoming calls were free, so if Angie called Kate, it would be Angie’s phone number that would get charged. But her mother, who could barely read herself, suspected Kate was trying to pull a fast one and stuck to her initial edict. The distinctions between incoming versus outgoing calls were clearly too subtle for Maria Howard, who knew only that her husband had announced they’d be charged for “every call.” Kate suspected that pressing the point would simply earn her another smack—not for being fresh, but for implicitly using her intelligence and education to show up her mother.

  THE TRAIN PULLING into Wilmington roused her from her reverie. She knew from long experience that it was another forty-five minutes to Baltimore. Since there was no car rental outlet at the train station, she figured she’d grab a cab to the hospital and deal with renting a car later. She’d definitely need a car, if for no other reason than her certainty that, at some point, she’d have to make a quick getaway, and she refused to be dependent on someone else to drive her.

  It had always been that way in the Howard home. Explosions erupted out of nowhere, like summer heat-lightning materializing on an otherwise humid but benignly cloudless day, and while her father usually retreated into a can of Natty Boh or Carling Black Label, her sister and mother would end up raising the roof with escalating insults that eventually were glossed over but would never be forgotten. Kate had no reason to think that anything had changed in the three years since she’d last been there. If anything, everyone in her family appeared to get worse with age, their subtle personality quirks blossoming into more neuroses with each passing year. Her father’s love of a good brew, her mother’s hair-trigger hysteria over anything outside her control or understanding, Janice’s growing resemblance to their mother. And Kate’s aloofness from them all.

  “The Shadow” her father had started calling her when she was about fifteen. She’d float in and out of the house without a sound, every nerve in her body poised for the assault, silently praying for them to not notice her. It never really worked. Her mother was an omnipresent force, a multi-faceted spyglass peering into every corner of their lives. Nothing was too small to escape her notice (and therefore her criticism), and a cigarette ash on Kate’s white sweater was cause for just as great a tirade as cutting school to go to the movies. No matter how silently she crept down the hall in the middle of the night, as soon as she reached the kitchen to sneak that piece of cake, her mother’s inner motion-sensor was triggered, and her sharp voice would cut through the dark quiet: “That’s right, keep stuffing your face. You’re gonna be as big as Aunt Concetta.”

  Ironically, for all her mother’s harping at “Kate-the-child” to stop spending so much time indoors, she was no happier when “Kate-the-teenager” granted her wish by spending every possible minute outside the house. No, she knew Kate was smoking pot and popping pills— although she never actually saw it, Kate was extremely careful about that—so that by her teens, the chant of Kate’s early childhood was played in reverse: “Why can’t you stay inside for once?” her mother would call out to her as she slipped through the front door. “Where are you going?”

  “Out,” Kate would call back. She still couldn’t bring herself to ignore that voice altogether.

  “When will you be back?”

  “Later.”

  Kate avoided her house for a lot of reasons. She didn’t want her mother to see her when she was high—which was practically all the time—and she didn’t want to answer a lot of questions about where she’d been and who she’d been with. The drugs were the least of it. Although her father sometimes roused himself to accuse her of meeting up with a boyfriend down by the playground, the truth was far worse: she had a girlfriend.

  It had started at a slumber party two years earlier. Kate, then thirteen, was invited to a birthday sleepover at Gina Martino’s house. Since the Martinos were a family deeply embedded in the community—they owned the pork store and had cousins on nearly every block—Kate’s mother was more than happy to give her permission. “You just make sure you thank the Martinos real polite, and don’t eat like a gavonne. Be friendly to Gina’s brother, too. You never know.”

  “Ma!”

  “I’m just saying.”

  Gina had invited Luisa Andolino, a new girl in the neighborhood who had just started school with them. “They just came over,” Gina explained, meaning that they had just arrived from Italy (the real one). “They’re my moth
er’s cousins.” Thus the Martino clan grew, but since everyone liked the Martinos, they all accepted the Andolinos right away. Especially Luisa.

  It didn’t hurt that Luisa was devastatingly beautiful—or so she seemed to Kate. Long dark hair streaming down her back, with a flowery old-fashioned hairband keeping it all out of her face and showing off her intense blue-black eyes, which were framed by dark, perfectly shaped brows. Her nose was just right—not too long, but not an inconsequential little pug like the one Kate had inherited from her father. To Kate, Luisa Andolino was simply a perfect Madonna out of the Italian Renaissance. Belissima.

  Kate hadn’t gotten a chance to be nice to Freddie Martino that night. She hadn’t seen him, which was just as well because he certainly would have spread it all over school if he’d witnessed the girls’ kissing game. Luisa had been the one to come up with the idea, suggesting that they “practice” on each other and insisting that all the girls “over there” (in her little town just outside Naples) routinely played this game in order to ready themselves for the day when they’d be kissing a boy. “Is no big deal, si?” she’d said with a shy smile.

  For the rest of her life, Kate knew, she just knew, that nothing would ever come close to the heavenly softness of Luisa’s lips, the musky, earthy smell of her face, the heart-stopping moment when Luisa turned to her and pressed her mouth against Kate’s. The girls’ game that night went on for only an hour or so, but Kate and Luisa continued their game privately for another four years—until Kate’s mother found the love notes Luisa had written.

  The memory of that nightmarish afternoon never failed to slam into Kate’s chest with the force of a tidal wave, as if she were seventeen all over again. Luisa had telephoned her at the Five ‘n’ Dime, where Kate had an after-school job at the checkout counter. Kate could barely make out what Luisa was trying to say, with all that crying interspersed with Italian, which always seemed to come out more when Luisa was upset. But understanding finally began to dawn on her—and with it, abject fear.