Unlike other children within their age group, the Mangiarmi kids imposed very few dietary restrictions upon their parents, loving nearly 100% of the food set before them and baked confections offered up at the end of each meal with one exception – the dreaded green pea, the nemesis of both Toni and Marcella. Their parents had heard horror stories of other children’s fussiness and were so elated not to have to worry about managing numerous meal aberrations that they simply eliminated the pea content from their rigatoni ala vodka, replacing it instead with mushrooms that had been lightly sautéed in olive oil in addition to layering onto the bottom of each plate, thinly sliced prosciutto. They would serve the girls some other protein-laden legume substitute to supplement their growing little bodies, usually lentils, sometimes beans.
After moving to Staten Island, the parents of their neighborhood friends would beg to have the girls over for dinner so that their own children might learn by example how to appreciate a wider variety of foods, but Toni and Marcella had already grown accustomed to the superb culinary skills of their parents and grandparents, so demurred more often than not whenever invited, opting instead to invite their friends over to their house to enjoy a far more palatable repast. Ten or more at an overcrowded dinner table every night, with Monday being an exception for reasons no one could quite pinpoint, was not uncommon.
Massimo Sr. was inordinately proud of his daughters as they were intelligent, beautiful - in his subjective eyes, and solid enough to stand firm against any potential threat. He taught them at a young age how to fight, where and how to locate a man’s weak spots and how to breathe slowly and thoughtfully if attacked, to ensure that a clear head would prevail. They would watch B-rate horror movies together during which their father would call attention to the dumb-bunnies who ended up as zombie food simply because they panicked, lost their footing, fell, and didn’t have the presence of mind to get the fuck back up and run or find some weapon and kill their pursuer.
“Don’t ever just lay there and accept death; make sure at the very least that you die with your sword stuck into your opponent’s heart”, their father would say as if that provided a clear enough illustration of everything he’d been trying to teach them.
Marcella just thought he was silly and rough; Toni, not yet having mastered verbal dexterity, didn’t have a clue about how to comprehend the aggregate of sounds coming out of her father’s mouth. His gesticulations were rather animated and he provided plenty of demonstrations so the point became quite firmly embedded in her developing mind – complex verbal comprehension skills were not imperative. It didn’t occur to either of them until they had moved out of the family house that his lessons had become deeply entrenched in their impressionable thought processes, Toni perceiving every man as a potential threat – one opportunity removed from being full-blown rapists, whereas Marcella chose a man so much older than her as to render his ability to physically intimidate, insignificant.
Regardless, those lessons shook loose any residual, dangerously held naïveté and provided them with a valuable, protective shield – one they wouldn’t otherwise have had. At times Massimo Sr. would jump out from around a corner, scaring Marcella nearly to death while Toni, not yet having amassed an intelligible vocabulary, would run screaming for the safety of her mother’s arms. He would then sit them down to explain that if he had been a real attacker, they most likely would be dead.
After the umpteenth time of being subjected to such drills, during the summer before Marcella turned six, they’d both had enough. Marcella took Toni by the hand and off they went to confront their father, their large, tearing eyes pleading for forgiveness of their ineptitude, lips quivering with an even mixture of shame and anger from having failed and displeased him, all gave Massimo pause as from that moment forward, he finally realized that they were just little girls, his little girls, the most precious daughters any man could ask for, and although he needed desperately to impress upon them the severity of his admonition to learn how to defend themselves, his heart nearly twisted into a wilted heap as he helplessly watched their defeated reaction.
On that day he held them both, as tightly as he could without breaking ribs, for several minutes after they’d stopped crying, begging their forgiveness for being so harsh but then explaining that he meant only to teach them a valuable lesson – that it was his obligation as their father to protect his children even when he wasn’t with them and he simply couldn’t bear the thought of them getting hurt; he couldn’t possibly guard them 24/7 so some of the burden had to fall back on them.
“There are very bad people out there that won’t think twice about stealing such beautiful little girls. I can’t be with you every minute of every day so I need for you girls to toughen-up and learn how to protect yourselves. In this home you’ll always be safe but out there, who knows what can happen! There are disgratziati bastardi everywhere.” He wiped away his own tears and kissed each daughter, alternately on the cheeks and forehead, squeezed them again, which forced the air in Marcella’s and Toni’s lungs to draw forth from their mouths in a large puff, which made them giggle like, well, little girls. He ruffled their hair and said they’d speak more on that topic another day but until they leaned how to fight, they were never to be outside of the property’s gates without an adult escort. They nodded in the affirmative in synchronous time, held hands and skipped away to their bedroom to play with their dolls.
That was how it would be with them well into their teens, as they felt the most comfortable in the house, around family and becoming, perhaps inadvisably, each other’s best friend. Their mid-teen years brought about a host of emotional growing pains that resembled an unfettered ugliness that was almost expected when adolescents realize they are woefully ill-equipped to navigate a life outside of the safe, comfortable environment created by their well-meaning but overly protective, just short of fear-mongering parents.
What was originally borne of a need to protect, collateral damage be dammed, became the bane of Toni and Marcella’s burgeoning womanhood, both of whom made decisions that, if they’d have had an opportunity to independently learn from bad decision making earlier on, could have saved them both a tremendous amount of humiliation and heartache.
Neither daughter felt comfortable taking out her frustrations on their father as they knew he meant well and loved them fiercely, so instead drew apart from each other, going so far as to stop speaking for the entire first year that Marcella was away at college. She being four years Toni’s senior provided her with life experiences that illuminated her understanding of the family’s dynamic, the distance she enjoyed from living apart from them several months out of the year being the key factor in opening her mind to absorbing those revelations. Her introspective discoveries were the crucial facts she imparted to Toni during her first summer vacation after freshman year. From that point forward, the sisters would always understand each other with a depth of unconditional compassion reserved for those who’ve resolved themselves to choose love over sibling animosity or foisting guilty blame upon the other that had no rational basis for its existence.
They’d both had enough of a glimpse into others’ households to understand just how lucky they were, that their parents weren’t abusive druggies whose children ranked lower than vermin on their priority scale or were so self-absorbed that the family unit existed merely as a backdrop against which their embattled souls could seek expression, one negative sentiment after another. Once they were finally able to grasp the harsh reality of life outside of the family, they became humbled by the love they had received and vowed to remain friends no matter how angry they became over minor annoyances.
Soon after that heart-wrenching incident, Massimo enrolled Toni and Marcella in a self-defense class geared for prepubescent kids, at the local Tae-Kwon-Do martial arts studio about two miles from their house. It was Antonia’s belief that perhaps they’d be better off learning the fine art of fighting from someone outside of the family.
Massimo was firml
y admonished by their instructor not to further engage his daughters in any sparring matches yet he never failed to ask them to demonstrate what they had learned; his two-cents worth of suggestions about form, balance and stance adjustments were provided without fail. His intention was to introduce to them a mixture of street fighting to complement their fluid kicking and punching movements, hoping to provide maximum benefit to their studies. That they had learned how to fall without getting hurt was the lesson he found to have the most real world applicability. He still wanted them to know how to effortlessly locate physical vulnerabilities and to take out a man’s knee so that he couldn’t pursue.
Massimo’s old-world take on parenting included an insistence on employing an unrestricted, absolute intrusion into the methods by which he could and would raise his children but times were changing and he knew, intrinsically, even without his wife’s tsk-tsk’ing at him from across the room, that he had to back off somewhat or he’d scare his children senseless while smothering their self-sufficiency. Massimo came away from that experience with his daughters a better man, a different parent, and his wife, bearing witness to a depth of compassion and love that she hadn’t previously bore witness to, on that evening, gave him the most extraordinary sexual pleasure he’d ever received – the conception of Massimo Jr. being the result.
Being raised in a family where love, albeit sometimes expressed in an overly protective and culturally oppressive manner, was the dominant theme provided both with an unrealistic expectation of how other people would/did behave coupled with a dangerously underdeveloped suspicion about others’ motivations. The festering concomitant negativity that others tended to blatantly foist upon an unsuspecting populace after having tamped-back to a passive-aggressively, spitefully disastrous extent, too many years of engaging in unsuccessful self-preservation methodologies in a desperate attempt to shield oneself from being relentlessly bludgeoned by those whose offer of love should have been absolute and unconditional, never ceased to confound Toni. Marcella had a natural, more mature, sophisticated perspective on humanity’s failings, perhaps resultant from being the oldest child but also was effortlessly more astute regarding the human condition than was Toni, with a sharper eye and less of an inclination to trust first and suffer the consequences later.
Years later, after his daughters were adults and had moved out, when only his wife could hear him, he would cry mightily with the weight of the burden that perhaps he was somehow culpable for Toni’s decision to remove men from her love life; at times the self recrimination he felt was almost too much for him to bear. His guilt drove his decision to accept Monica and now Katherine into his home for a meet-and-greet, as if they were ordinary suitors, the latter of whom, as Toni had matter-of-factly apprised him, would be the woman with whom she intended to spend the rest of her life – a commitment she’d never before even hinted at, even if the law did not extend itself to formally acknowledging their union.
“I guess there could be worse things than having a daughter who’s a lesbian, right Antonia? She could be on drugs or a loose woman, right? She’s a smart kid, she loves her family, has a good job, makes good money and has a level head so we weren’t such terrible parents, were we?” He paused ever so briefly then in pleading tone added, “So what did we do wrong?” On that evening, Massimo’s tears streamed down his inconsolable face as he prayed for absolution for mistakes he might have made as he cursed the utter impossibility of raising perfect children, all the while crying into his wife’s accommodating shoulder.
Although not inclined toward that conclusion herself, Antonia found it perfectly reasonable that one woman could choose another as her life-mate – love is love, she mused. Her objection to Toni’s romantic interests was restricted to her selection of Monica, as she thought there could be no future with a woman who was saddled with such obvious emotional deficiencies and that her daughter could have - indeed should have, had better sense than to choose such an unsuitable partner.
Antonia made the sign of the cross on the day that Toni called to tell her it was over for good with Monica; she extended her net of compassion as she requested that Toni give her all of the gory details. She was grateful to have been on the phone with Toni rather than in person as she did not want her daughter to see her smiling and clutching onto the fabric of her dress with utter relief during the entire conversation. She felt her daughter’s pain but knew that time would give her the distance required to soften the loss and allow her to move on, hopefully also to regain the lightness of spirit that had been robbed from her over the past several years, as she lived vicariously through someone else’s misery.
Although Massimo truly didn’t understand and only partially accepted Toni’s lifestyle choice, and would much rather have been meeting her prospective husband, sitting by his wife’s side while they planned her wedding, agreeing to babysit future grandchildren, he loved her fiercely and despite the admonishments from a few unapologetically judgmental, prejudiced and wholly ignorant friends and neighbors, couldn’t bear the thought of losing any of his children for any reason so would have loved Toni even if she had come home one day with a needle protruding from the crook of her elbow, claiming an amorous attachment to self-immolative, nihilistic and anarchistic societal destruction. Anyone who believed he was wrong and was also stupid enough to tell him as much, going so far as to scold him, begging him to reconsider his open-mindedness for the sake of Toni’s mortal soul, he told to go fuck themselves, flatly refusing to continue their association.
Toni’s Head Explodes
Kat found the individual neighborhoods’ names and distinctly foreign nature of all things outer-borough to reside squarely on the side of preposterous, but regardless had agreed to be a good sport and make the arduous journey by plane, train and automobile to meet Toni’s family on their landfill laden turf rather than, as she had originally suggested and would have preferred, to maintain the home field advantage and have la famiglia over to their place for dinner.
“Everyone wants to meet you, Kat – there’ll be like, ten people for dinner. That’s just too fucking many of us to fit comfortably in our apartment. You’d regret it; you’ll just have to trust me that you would.”
Just one month prior, Toni had agreed to formally meet Kat’s folks, but this time not merely as her friend, no euphemism intended, but as her life-partner. Kat’s parents had already made their dismissal of Toni’s relevance fairly obvious, even to her unfortunate lower class intellect, as Kat’s mother had the temerity to say about her not two-feet from Toni’s aural field. Toni lost her appetite and hadn’t slept a wink the night before they were to make their debut appearance as life-mates at the Upper East Side Classic Eight in which Kat was raised and her parents still lived. Toni was painfully aware of the class distinction, and hoped that her low self esteem wouldn’t kick in, making her overly cocky and impossibly arrogant or worse yet, painfully shy and reticent to form a cogent thought. Kat tried in vain to ease Toni’s tension, making several failed attempts at sexual congress, only to finally be met with a rather curt “Stop It!” to which Kat’s hurt recoiling went entirely unnoticed.
“And what, exactly, do you do for a living, Toni? Something computer-related, is it?
“Well, it must save you from the embarrassment of having to interact with people, especially useful, I would assume, if you’re not terribly adept at it.
“‘Toni’ - is that a nickname or were your parents hoping for a boy and just didn’t bother coming up with a more feminine alternative?” said with a smile, always a smile, the inquisition being unwrapped, slowly, painfully by Kat’s mother. She was the cat to Toni’s mouse.
Seemingly oblivious to the slight, Toni decided to answer the question as if her life depended on getting the answer right.
“I was named after my mother and her mother before her – Antonia is our full name. It’s the tradition in my family to name the second daughter after the mother; I don’t know why that is ‘cause it’s not necessarily an It
alian thing or a regional thing or anything like that. It’s just a Mangiarmi thing – well, a DiLeo thing actually, ‘cause that’s my mother’s maiden name.
“She’s not a Toni though, because she takes pride in the family’s naming tradition and thought that using an abbreviation would be kind of like a show of disrespect or something and anyway, she likes the flow of An~to~ni~a but she never forced me to do the same thing so like when I was a little kid and started asking my friends and family to call me Toni, she was okay with it and even started calling me that herself, unless of course she was angry with me and then it would be more like ‘Antonia Carmella Filomena Mangiarmi, vieni qui - subito!’ and when she would request my presence like that, I knew there’d be trouble so you know, I’d go and hide under the bed, my sister’s not mine to try and confuse her, you know? But I have these allergies to dust so I would always sneeze and give myself away and in would walk mom, steam pluming out of her flared nostrils as she pulled me out by my ankles...” Toni stopped speaking mid-ramble when she felt the crushing weight of a heel digging in to the joint between the phalanges of her big toe. The pain was immediate and intense, causing a tear to start welling. She worried for a moment that her toe might be broken.
By that point, Kat had nearly suffered a fatal aneurism and knew of no more effective way to stop Toni from irretrievably digging herself into a deep pile of stupid. She feared something like that would happen as she’d had the unfortunate experience of having bore witness to it on other, similar occasions; this time was quite different in that no humor was to be gleaned from the situation. Kat had been emotionally removed from those other circumstances so had used each such opportunity to study Toni’s behavior from a fairly detached perspective.
Love Finds Its Pocket Page 6
