She says, repeatedly, “Lasciami, io non ci sto.”
He says, “On my grave!” and then storms out of the house.
The little girl is screaming, clutching her mamma’s legs, wanting to bite the old man’s legs, do something to protect her mamma, so that he won’t be able to hurt her anymore.
The older woman drops the pasta on the floor and covers her eyes. She doesn’t see how the pasta has landed on her shoe, how it winds like a snake.
The scenes disappear but the rumbling words beat at Lavinia like giant wings. She covers her head. She feels wretched. She bends forward toward the tree and barfs in the thick mulch, expelling the gross, curdled stuff, watching it absorb into the rich soil.
“I’m sorry, dear tree.” She sits there under the tree with an acid taste in her mouth. Thinking of the tree standing above her helps her locate her querencia.
Again she hears, “Don’t be afraid. Upstairs.”
She’s confused. She hasn’t been upstairs since Rose died. She looks toward the green fig leaves dancing gently in the breeze. They are large and wide-leafed, a triple leaf. A jay squeals and flies away.
Stuffing the letter into its envelope, she goes inside to her dark bedroom, to her chest of drawers where she keeps the key to upstairs. When she opens the small top drawer, she sees the photo of her and Sal taken in Naples the day he came to take her to America. She’s looking down at a piece of candy, wrapped in colorful shiny paper and twisted at the ends. Raggedy sits on Sal’s knee.
She places the picture back in the drawer, takes the key in her hand, and turns on her heel. “Upstairs,” she says.
She takes the wooden stairs slowly, unlocks the door at the landing, and leaves it open. Old fried food smells breathe out from the kitchen where once they ate as a family, smothering her. Stuffy. How Sal loved fried fish.
She enters the bedroom where Rose died. Mint green curtains match the chenille bedspread. On one wall is an apothecary console with many small compartments, on the other a mahogany dresser. Rose loved this heavy furniture. Sandwiched between them is the bed. In Lavinia’s mind’s eye, she sees Rose on the bed with gray skin and shrunken eyes, dying. It’s as if she has been here all these twelve months, just rotting away with the smells, waiting for Lavinia to visit. Their last supper together would have been ten months ago, the fish fry Sal made before she took to her bed. He hoped it would perk her up. It didn’t.
Lavinia’s stomach heaves. Dry heaves, since nothing is left in it.
She walks closer to the bed, remembering that last day of Rose’s life when her friends Kate and Mari Karen gathered round her bed, singing their song. Lavinia recalls their sweet voices, singing like angels all around her. There was a beatific smile on Aunt Rose’s face.
Now, as Lavinia approaches the bed, she sees Rose. Alarmed, she squints. Rose lifts her head off the pillow, staring at Lavinia, nodding. With a frail finger, she points toward her bureau.
Lavinia feels a combination of fear and awe. I must be going crazy.
The finger is wriggling now, so Lavinia walks toward the mahogany dresser and opens the middle drawer. She steps back, places her hand over her mouth, and sighs.
In a zippered plastic container is a blue-gray stuffed doll with a frayed satin trim.
“Raggedy!” she cries, kneeling before her treasure.
Before she unzips the bag, she looks toward the dead woman, who seems to be smiling now. Lavinia makes a small bow of gratitude to the no-nonsense woman and clutches her doll. She closes the drawer and then finds her way back down the creaky wooden steps to the tree, which seems to be smiling, too.
Nesting in her studio on the wooden floor with Raggedy in her hands, Lavinia puts away intrusive images. She hugs her, smelling almond and lemon scents that she associates with her mother. Stretching her legs and arms, she tends to her breathing, minding her heartbeat, which seems out of time. Held in a mother space, like the one in her dreams, Lavinia has a new regard for Rose. Rose wanted to love Lavinia but didn’t know how; she, a forlorn woman who made her best effort to teach Lavinia about the hard knocks of life. Maybe she was hell-bent on teaching her about adversity, trying to help the lost child make it in the tough new world. Lavinia’s memory has helped her to see her aunt as a woman who had to support gruff Sal in raising his niece. Lavinia holds her Raggedy close to her and lets herself be wrapped in a blanket of forgiveness.
Maybe Rose had never been tended to like a young fig might be.
Something Lavinia cannot name flips inside her. Outside is inside and inside is outside. She can’t tell what, exactly, is different as she inhabits this new awareness of her other mother, Rose, the one who had the tough job of filling in for the toosweet young mother who gave up to the external forces of life as a twenty-one-year-old. Aunt Rose hung in there. She did her best. No matter what.
Lavinia’s phone vibrates, bringing her back to the present moment. It’s a text from George. “When are you coming back to work? Don’t worry about ground cloths. I bought new ones.”
She deletes the message. Not George. She knows she owes him some money for the ground cloths, but it doesn’t sound as though he expects a payback. He just wants her to come back to work.
No, not yet. She’s not ready to see what else might show up on his clay table.
Chapter 12:
KINKY AND LAVINIA
Lavinia freezes when she hears a knock on her studio door.
Because the curtains on the front window are drawn shut, she can’t see who’s there. Maybe it’s George. Her cell phone vibrates. It’s Kinky, so she gets up to answer the door.
“I was on the floor.”
“What were you doing on the floor?” Kinky asks.
“Relishing this,” she says, holding out the doll for Kinky to see.
“Oh my God! Is that Raggedy?”
“It’s her. Feel. Smell. Like my mother.” She shakes her head. “From Rose. She kept it hidden in her drawer all these years.”
“Another secret. Why would she have done that?” Kinky asks. “I thought she liked you.”
“I think she was jealous.”
“She wanted to be your mother,” Kinky says.
“When I first arrived, I thought she liked me. I have memories of her trying to be nice, doing stuff like plaiting ribbons in my braids, but I didn’t like that.”
“So what happened?”
“That’s a hard one. I’m not sure. I can’t remember, and over time we settled into a better rhythm. But she was never very loving toward me.”
“But what was with all the secrets?”
“Their MO!” Lavinia holds up her cell phone to show Kinky George’s text. “He wants me to come back to work.”
“He wants something from you.”
“That’s exactly my fear.”
“Don’t go back, Lavinia. You don’t owe him anything.” Kinky takes a flask out of her jacket pocket, followed by two more packages. “Food from Mama.” She points to the letter. “Is that from Sal?” she asks as she unloads her offerings onto the counter.
Lavinia smiles at her friend. She feels a cloud has lifted today, and now Kinky’s brought her dinner.
“Mama’s been asking for you.”
Lavinia puts her hand over her heart, grateful for this friend and her willingness to share her dear mother.
“Mama’s a curandera.”
“You’re like her. You both make me feel better,” Lavinia says.
“Today she told me about a woman from her village who lost her husband and began to steal shoes from the closets of the other women in her village.”
“Why?”
“Well, she believed that if you stand in someone else’s shoes, your loss will be reversed. She thought if she did it, he would return.”
“What?”
“Go figure.”
“Why do you think she told you that story today?”
“Because I was complaining about my shoes.”
“Then give me your sho
es.”
Kinky looks at her and laughs. “It doesn’t matter. Sometimes nonsense is better than fact.”
“Where is Mercedes from?” Lavinia asks.
“You know she came here from Spain through Mexico,” Kinky says with a perplexed look.
“Alone?”
“No, with the sad, deep cante, and the alegría,” Kinky says. “The cante was my father, who taught her the low songs—and the happy sounds, too.” Kinky’s voice halts. “Papa died in an accident when I was eight years old.” She bites her lower lip.
Shock runs through Lavinia, startling and jolting her body. Of course she knew Kinky’s father was not in the picture, but how could she not know this information? How could she not have asked about it? She’s been so focused on her own pain, she’s never seen or asked. She sees more clearly now than ever before how Kinky has always soothed her. How has Lavinia never asked her about her father? She’s been obsessed, needing her own mothering. She feels selfish. She doesn’t want this part to be true.
Kinky is looking at her.
“I’m sorry, for you and Mercedes.” Lavinia takes her friend in her arms and listens to her soft whimper. When she settles, Lavinia says, “You never said anything. How could that be?”
“You know, Lavinia”—Kinky pauses as if hesitant to continue, but she does—“didn’t you lose your mother in an accident?”
“Yes, we have that horror in common, Kinky, but you . . .” Lavinia stops. “You seem so much more well adjusted than me.”
“But I have my mother. I am not an orphan.”
Lavinia feels the bolt. One hand crosses her heart.
“I’m sorry, Lavinia, I didn’t mean to say something to hurt you.”
The two friends look at each other. It’s as if they have passed through a deep chasm together. Kinky reaches over to grab her friend’s hands. Their four hands wind in a garland with their two dark hearts at its center.
Kinky begins plating the carnitas and tortillas on a large platter sitting out on the counter.
“Sal thinks I finished State,” Lavinia says, watching Kinky prepare their food.
“He doesn’t know you left?”
“Apparently not. He sent me a check for five hundred dollars.”
“That’s not even enough to cover your book expenses.”
“I know,” Lavinia says, her face dropping.
“You can still finish,” Kinky encourages her.
“I’m not interested. Sal pictures me teaching elementary school to kids on Bryant Street.”
“I do, too.”
Lavinia ignores her friend’s comment. “He told me he visited the house where I was born. He remembered me cooking there with Mamma as a four-year-old.” Lavinia gets up and goes inside to her bureau and returns with the photo. Kinky puts down her fork, wipes her hands on her oversized sweatshirt, and carefully takes the small black-and-white photo with its fluted edges. She stares at it for a long time.
“Look at you with your T-strap shoes.” She looks down at Lavinia’s shoes. “You still love T-straps.”
Lavinia shrugs. “I’m still a baby.”
Kinky laughs. “Sal’s pretty dapper with those creased pants and leather shoes.”
“He prided himself on the way he looked. His hair was always slicked with some kind of grease, and then he’d wear a hat. He worked at a small accounting firm when I was little, and I always wondered if he took his hat off at work.”
“Look how he only has eyes for you,” Kinky says. She places the photo on the clean side of the outdoor table.
“His friend Giovanni told him something about my mother,” Lavinia says, her voice deep and throaty, thick and edgy. She stops, can’t go on.
Kinky sits quietly and reaches out to touch her hand. The warm night air seems to hold them in some protected space—the fig tree, a shadow guide. The carnitas and tortillas wait.
Lavinia breaks the silence by picking up her small tequila glass and clinking it against Kinky’s. “Buen provecho.” They both take a sip and then eat Mercedes’s carnitas and tortillas, spicy and sweet and salty all at the same time. They eat slowly and in silence, their only soundtrack the evening sounds of crickets left over from the late summer. Or are they newly born?
Street voices rumble. A bus pulls away from the curb. When Lavinia finishes eating, she musters her courage to speak of her mother.
“Giovanni told Uncle Sal that Mom and her family had some misfortune.”
“Sal must know that.” Kinky sits up tall in the metal chair, invigorated.
“He never told me what really happened, what prompted him bringing me to the States. He only said that Mamma went to the angels. It wasn’t until I was ten years old that I realized that being with the angels meant she must’ve died.”
“Then you have no idea how she died.”
“None.”
“You must be curious.”
“Furious.”
“To my mind, Lavinia, that’s the sadness.” Kinky looks at her, her eyebrows drawn together. “Maybe it would have been too much when you were four or five, but they owed you an explanation as you got older.”
Lavinia stares into the dark fig tree, tears glistening in the corners of her eyes. It’s as if Kinky’s proclamation is the first she’s ever heard or understood the degree to which she has been wronged. The pieces are fitting together now in some mysterious way.
Kinky fidgets with her glass, swishing the liquid gold. Lavinia feels that if she listened carefully enough, she could hear the sap seeping from the agave. She could swear the fig is producing its own milky white sap—crying, too.
Chapter 13:
THE CONTRAPTION
Lavinia goes to North Beach every day now, passing the places where she grew up—one above the bakery on Columbus and another on Vallejo. She never sees anyone at home. The Vallejo house sits like a big fortress, shut off to the world.
Stopping in front of the bakery, Lavinia inhales deeply, smelling the sweet aromas of Italian bread baking in the downstairs oven, sweet creams and butters, rum-flavored cream. Although Maria, the baker, is gone, the new memory of Lavinia’s own mother arises in this moment. She remembers her mother’s offering, a latte and a bite of fried dough, in the kitchen of her birth home. She takes a moment to savor this memory before hurrying off to Zack’s house. She carries the sweet smell of dough lingering in her nostrils—her mother’s dough, struffoli, she imagines.
Zack Luce is waiting for her at the door, dressed in his gym clothes. A small duffel bag waits near the door. Lavinia feels welcomed, grateful that someone is at home to greet her, even if he is her client. His smile and zest for life gives her a sunny, citrus feeling inside. He is a contrast to Nina, who barely says hello. Zack waits at the door for her wearing a genuine smile.
“Ss-so, we’re off to a good s-s-start,” he says with a big smile. “I’m glad it worked out with your other clients.”
“Oh, yes, Don and Nina White. Nina didn’t switch times.” Lavinia looks up to see the tall, slim man open his mouth. “You know them?” she asks, surprised by the small world.
“Yes, we once worked together on a neighborhood project.” His Adam’s apple pulses as he speaks about them. She hasn’t noticed that before, nor has she noticed his long, thin hands with their shiny fingernails.
Zack directs her to the living room. The wall-to-wall books give her the feeling she’s ascending into some great library, only interrupted by the singsong s’s of his speech. The ambience of his place and his speech please her. She stands near the divan across from the Boston rocker with a floral print pillow. He rocks it forward with his long hands.
“Please,” he says, “sit and lis-s-s-sten to the eight fifteen chimes of the clocks with me.”
She sits on the couch and he slides into the rocker, resting his hands, wrinkled by time, on the arms of the black wooden chair, studying her, making her feel mildly self-conscious. She shifts her weight as if she’s in a rocker, too. He’s a quiet man, she t
hinks. This thought eases her mind. “I’ve never seen or heard so many clocks,” she says.
“My collection. Elsa loved them as well. Be sure to check out the granddaddy of them all.” He looks over his right shoulder to a large wooden clock with a silver pendulum, its medallion moving back and forth. “We got that in Germany when we lived in Munich.”
“And the book collection?” Lavinia wants to hear a summary of the books, but more, she wants to know about the man who collected the books.
“Mostly mine. Bought over the years. I don’t make many purchases now.”
“And all about time,” she says.
Zack nods. “Most of them, anyway.”
She waits for a long moment, but he adds nothing more. The silence seems to underscore time until, a moment later, they hear the eight fifteen chimes, each clock seeming to speak to the next.
Zack rises and says, as if in a hurry, “Speaking of time, I must get to the gym now. A water baby, you know. I feel most alive suspended.”
“I don’t swim.”
“Too bad. But then, that means you have a lot to look forward to. It’s never too late to learn.” He stands up. “Oh,” he says, as if he’s forgotten something, “the laundry is pretty simple today. The soft creases you ironed in my chinos are just how I like them. I rigged a clothesline in the shower for you. It’s one of my own inventions—like a tape measure, but it has a crystal on the end of the fluorescent blue tape. Crystal is what it’s all about for me. Moving through the water is like moving through the facets of a crystal.”
What Zack said about crystal lingers in Lavinia’s ears. She runs the water into the washer. Faucets splash into the spinning tub and gushing water fills the blue basin, churning a world full of colors with foam at the top. She imagines each splash of water as a facet of a crystal, reflecting color. She watches, mesmerized.
While the clothes soak in the bathroom, she pulls one of Zack’s books off the shelf. The author announces, “This is not a tree. This paper is made from a combination of recycled materials. and you can make good choices.” This idea seems to be the gist of the book.
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