We headed down Broadway to Cigarette City, where they turned Church down for a pack. Sure enough, there was the old lady, lingering by the glass-cased cigars. I started to believe him. “Really, Church,” I said, “that’s weird.” We ducked into a nail salon, where I looked at the display book. “You want preetty nai-yas?” the Asian woman asked, her teeth rusty looking and bent. “Scatch yo’ boyfren’s back?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
When we came out, the old lady was fiddling with a parking meter. And then she followed us into the arcade, shuffling through the rows of blinking lights and buzzing, grunting, gear-shifting machines, like an extremely lost, blind, deaf, foreign tourist. She carried an enormous black pocketbook with an industrial-size buckle, hung in the crook of her elbow, her fist pointing up. It looked heavy, as if filled with lead to crack over a purse snatcher’s head.
“I’m gonna ask her what she wants,” Church said.
“No, no. Just ask her for directions to Hudson County Park or Avenue C.” I was getting a little nervous.
With me tagging along behind him, he cleared his throat and said, “Excuse me. Do you know how to get to Avenue C from here?”
The old lady turned around and muttered sharply, “No, I’m not from here. I cannot help you.”
I thought I knew her then, her thick Polish accent, the sharp smell of liquor and onions, the tight knot of her face. As she shuffled off, I turned to Church. “That’s my grandmother,” I said, not as sure as I sounded, but wanting to be sure. “My dead grandmother.”
Every evening Dino Pantuliano surfaced for the cocktail hour, always like that first night: Bloody Marys with celery sticks, Cheez Whiz-ed crackers, the swishy jogging pants hiked up, his balls hanging obviously to one side, the bare chest—how it got tan still a mystery. He poured drinks all the way around—Church and I were now allowed one weak drink each—and chatted. A few weeks into our sojourn at his house, however, he’d started to press. His commentary got pointed: He’d ask over and over when my birthday was, then when my mother was last in Bayonne, when she last saw Anthony. My mother answered honestly but didn’t offer anything further. He’d say, “The girl’s got an Italian nose, don’t you think, Ruby? She could be from the old country, picked right off an olive tree.” Church knew not to say a word.
The Friday I thought I saw my dead grandmother alive and well in the arcade was especially tense, the sun too hot, the neighbor’s rap music too loud, Jacko whining to get at his irritated skin. I was distracted, confused by the sight of my grandmother in the arcade. Church was antsy, his knees bouncing. He was convinced that Dino was a mobster on some small scale, which only made him love Dino more. While Dino was trying to pin down my lineage, Church was trying to get Dino to talk about his possibly dirty business dealings.
Church had told me a story of his dad’s friend’s friend who was about to testify against one of the bosses but died before he got the chance, “of a heart attack,” Church had said, “while swimming away from his exploding boat! That’s the way Dino will go one day. Mark my words.”
“But Dino doesn’t even own a boat,” I protested.
Church was firm. “Mark my words.”
Dino was grouchy, bellyaching about Steinbrenner, “He changes managers as often as he does his boxer shorts! He should have stuck to building ships!” He was also pissed off about the players. “Righetti, Mattingly, Winfield—all prima donnas.”
Ruby was really putting the screws to my mother and me. The big euchre party was only a week away, and that afternoon at our lesson I’d played a heart when I’d meant a diamond and she’d lost it, yelling, “You’re weak! You play like my brother, the fag in Redondo Beach; like Mrs. Marcucci, that ninety-five-year-old woman without the teeth. Is this what I’ve taught you?” I hadn’t told my mother that I was being stalked by a little old lady with a menacingly large black pocketbook. There’d been no good time.
We sat there in the blue glow of the bug zapper, frying bugs full tilt. My mother said, “It’s hot.”
Dino said, “It’s muggy, not hot. Hot’s okay. It’s muggy that no one can take. If I had a gun, I’d shoot the sun.”
“Don’t you have a gun?” Church said. He turned to me. “I mean, I’m sure he’s got a gun.”
I shook my head, having already had an overdose of Church’s paranoia that day.
Ruby said, “You’re a bad shot, Dino. You’d put somebody’s eye out.”
My mother said, “I don’t know. Hot or muggy, it’s brutal.”
“Hot or muggy? Hot or muggy?” Dino rolled his eyes. “Look, it’s either one or the other. You can’t have both.”
Jacko whined plaintively, circling our feet for someone to rub his itchy back.
“Dino, just hypothetically,” Church said, “just between you and me, have you ever killed a man?”
“That’s not hypothetical,” I said. “Do you know what hypothetical means?”
“Often, the weatherman says, ‘Tomorrow will be hot and muggy,’ ” my mother said. “I think he says it all the time, ‘hot and muggy tomorrow.’ He probably said it just yesterday.”
“The weatherman on channel three wears a bad piece,” Ruby said. “Rat fur, I tell you.”
Jacko started yipping, sharp, ear-piercing cries.
Church leaned in to Dino. Church whispered, “Nothing out of hate—you know, just business, right between the eyes?”
Dino stood up, burst out, “There are no bastards in this family. A Pantuliano is a Pantuliano. Don’t try to confuse an old man about the weather, about guns and his personal business. The only man I’d shoot is a dirty little sniveling thief.” He stared at Church. The dog was quiet. Ruby scooped him up in her arms. “Blood. Blood is what matters, am I right?”
We all nodded silently. “And she is my blood.” He pointed at me. His voice became a hoarse whisper, like he might cry. “She’s my blood.”
He was looking at my mother, and she was looking at him, unflinchingly, like she was finally relieved to be forced to say it. “Yes.”
“Well, well,” said Ruby, clapping her hands like a little girl, Jacko bobbling in her lap.
I looked at Dino and he reached down, pulling me up, hands on my shoulders. He kissed both my cheeks and said, “Yes, I knew it the first minute I saw her. Anthony Pantuliano can expect a call, the cocky son of a bitch. He’ll have to claim what’s his.” And the old man pulled me into his body, my head pressed to his bony chest. I could smell his cologne, musty and sweet, and beneath it his sweat. His heart was beating so fast I thought he might die right there. I imagined him keeling over, his arm locked around my head, imagined Ruby and my mother and Church standing over us. Well, she’ll have to stay there forever; a Pantuliano is forever bound to a Pantuliano. And I imagined in that quick flash my grandmother, Mrs. Verbitski, knocking the newly dead Dino Pantuliano over the head with her giant handbag. I wondered what she would think, her granddaughter a Pantuliano after all.
12
When my mother talked about the convent, she was totally different, her eyes bright and alert, her mouth open too wide like she was singing. She looked freshly scrubbed, beaming.
“I wanted to be a nun,” she said. “I loved everything about them, their black skirts and sweet faces cupped by the wimple, the way everything had its place under their aprons, in the folds of their skirts, files and tiny scissors and the rosary slung from one unseen hitch to another. If you said, ‘Sister, I need the World Almanac,’ presto, it would appear. They were each a bit off, a minor deformity, a wandering eye, a gimp leg, a humped back. Damaged goods. And I was one of them, sitting along the chapel pew, our dry lips scurrying over prayers like hungry mice. I was damaged goods, too. Knocked up and kicked out. And they loved me, even though they didn’t know I was pregnant; they knew I was one of them.”
She’d heard so many terrible stories from the girls at Mt. Carmel Church who went to the Catholic school about the typically evil nuns, austere, jealous old women with stinging ru
lers. She’d been nervous. But my mother didn’t find any of that to be true. She loved the nuns. They taught her French, and every day at noon, a young muscular local girl who was thinking of becoming a nun would teach swimming lessons while the nuns went to chapel for special nun-only prayer sessions. My mother couldn’t swim. She’d try every day to get her French teacher, Sister Katherine Perpetua, an older nun who’d suffered polio as a child and now leaned on wrist-clasp canes, to let her stay and speak French. “Out, out, la piscine,” my mother would say. “Mais je ne nage pas, Soeur. I sink.”
Sister Katherine Perpetua would reply, “Does the water make you uncomfortable?”
And my mother would say, “Yes. I can’t swim.”
“Maybe the water makes you uncomfortable for a reason. Maybe God is testing you. Maybe one day the water will save you. It will be your calling from God.” Sister Katherine Perpetua was always claiming that a calling from God was just around the next bend, that everything hinged on it and that it was just about to happen to you if you were paying enough attention. And my mother began to pay attention. As Sister Katherine Perpetua hobbled off to chapel, my mother would watch her and pretend that Sister Katherine Perpetua was her own mother and that she was going to the chapel to pray only for her.
She tried not to think of temptation, not only Anthony’s blood-cocked penis but his sweet voice, his shining eye. Nearly everything led her thoughts to him. At the pool she felt self-conscious in her swimsuit, wondering if her stomach was sticking out, if anyone was whispering behind her back. The suit made her feel naked, and feeling naked made her think of Anthony. Sometimes a car would mistakenly pull down the dirt driveway and all of the girls would turn and squint to see if it was someone coming for them. And my mother expected to see Dino’s Pinto, Anthony behind the wheel, his thick black hair on his large head, that he’d finally found her. But the car usually turned around in the parking lot and headed out again. It was never someone for her.
The swim instructor gave up on her quickly. She said in a little lisp that my mother thought might be enough to make her damaged goods if she believed in it enough, “I’ve never known anyone who couldn’t float, who could turn so blue lipped and shivery.” And so she told my mother to lie down on a picnic bench and practice her stroke in the cinder-block shade of the squat pool house. The swim teacher promised her that one day she could just apply all the dry swimming to water. But on the bench she thought of Anthony even more. Her ribs pressed against the wood, feet kicking over the hard edge, she thought of his hard body, knees and hips, his bones, and she practiced breathing deep breaths held tight in her lungs.
She’d glimpse the blue square, shimmering with girls who rippled below the water, their hair shiny as scales. They bobbed to the surface with their firm breasts, climbed ladders, tugged at suits that inched up their narrow rumps. She breathed, Baby, baby, baby, hoping it would come out whole, with a beating heart and all of its fingers and toes, that it would not choke inside of her like her mother said. She wanted it.
One Sunday after my mother had been at the convent about two weeks, Sister Katherine Perpetua invited her for a talk in the convent in a chamber, which was really just a small room. My mother liked the way they were always changing the names of things; the bathroom was a lavatory, a corner a reading nook. Leaning on one cane, she pulled down a pair of blinds to keep out the sun and placed herself neatly on the edge of a wooden chair with a box on her lap. Every once in a while the wind sucked the blinds into the windows tightly, and the room went dark and orangy and airless. She offered my mother a little tray of cookies. My mother took a cookie with a small cherry in the center. It was just the kind of thing she loved about the nuns, how little and meek the cookies were and the cherries in the center—she’d begun to see Jesus in so many small ways—like His sacred heart.
“Your father,” she began, her mismatched teeth seeming to rise from her face as she spoke, “has sent a box of letters from one Anthony Pantuliano. Your father says he doesn’t know if it is a sin that he sends these letters. He doesn’t know if it would be a sin not to. He says he doesn’t understand sin because he is a simple man who owns a fish shop. He wants me to decide whether or not to give you the letters, and I turn to you.” She looked at my mother, deeply into her eyes. “Do you want me to give you these letters?”
My mother was poised on the edge of her chair, her back straight, her brow stitched. She didn’t say anything at first. She wasn’t sure why she was being asked and what exactly was at stake, although she felt it was something very precious.
Sister Katherine Perpetua said, “You know, Dorothy, that when a nun takes her vows, she dresses like a bride, because she is marrying Jesus. Not many girls know that.”
“I didn’t know that,” my mother said. She imagined the entire metaphor, including Sister Katherine Perpetua’s wedding night, with Jesus lifting the white skirt to reveal her pale, twisted legs. The bedroom was like her parents’ with a crucifix on the wall, but this one was trembling as the headboard knocked the wall, Jesus himself in the act and above on the cross taking it all in, head lolled to get a better angle.
“You know, you could still receive a calling.”
My mother thought of Anthony, the backseat of the Pinto, their bodies pressed together, the child swimming inside of her. She thought of my grandmother calling her a whore. Her chin went weak, her eyes flooded. “I don’t think I can.”
The nun’s face turned pink, the tiny veins around her nose stood out as fine as blue pen ink. She said, “You know, I didn’t think much of myself at your age. I thought I was ugly, crippled, stupid. The children threw stones at me on the way to and from school; sometimes I was covered with welts. My mother was dead. My father stayed drunk, too drunk to unbuckle the braces on my back and my legs. Sometimes I would be trapped in the braces for weeks and I smelled sour and got sick. But I wanted someone to save me and I prayed, and someone did.”
They sat quietly for a minute. My mother’s knees felt weak and her hands sweaty. She pictured Sister Katherine Perpetua as a girl her age in a small bedroom, the dark stink of her skin, a curdled powder, her drunk father angry and flustered with the buckles, finally pushing her away.
“Should I give you the box of letters, Dorothy?”
And my mother said, “No, Sister.” She stood up. “No, thank you.”
The tiny child swimming inside of my mother at the Oblate Sisters’ School for Girls was not me. My mother lost the baby, a miscarriage. She doesn’t know how far along she was, maybe eight weeks. It’s hard for me to envision my mother in the bathroom stall at the convent school, the detail of blood slipping from her in warm gushes when she kneels to throw up in the toilet and puddling, dark red, between her knees on the white tile floor. I want to step into her life, to hold her hand, wipe sweat from her brow with a cold washcloth, and yet I know that I’m helpless. My mother wiped up the blood with bunches of toilet paper while her stomach cramped in labor, and she was covered with sweat, her hair soaked. It was night, and a little cool air seeped in from a high, small, open window. She felt lightheaded and weak. And she couldn’t stop feeling that she was the baby, the one being washed away by all of the blood. She didn’t know where she stopped and the baby started, whose blood was whose; and, pulsing through it all, she could hear her mother’s heart beating in her ears, her tiny, ugly heart, throbbing with everything it hadn’t gotten but felt bitterly that it deserved.
She could hear Sister Katherine Perpetua on night patrol, her wrist-clasp canes clinking and tapping down the hallway. The old nun walked into the bathroom and paused at the stall door. My mother turned her head, and under the stall door she could see the nun’s thick-heeled shoes—one heel thicker to even up the length of her legs—her canes’ rubber stoppers, and her black hem.
“Dorothy, are you in need?”
“I think so.”
“Is it your time of the month, dear?”
“Yes, sister.”
“Would you like me
to stay with you and pray?”
By then my mother’s face was wet with tears. She didn’t answer. She rested her head on the toilet seat and stared into the bloody bowl.
She heard the nun pull a chair, scraping against the floor, to the other side of the door. She sat down and laid the canes next to her on the floor. My mother imagined her pulling the rosary from the unseen hitches in her black skirt and then her hands cupped to her mouth, her lips running through the simple recitation of prayers—this time for my mother’s body, her bones, her teeth, her bright lungs and slick valves, each fine hair, perfect gleaming egg, and, without knowing it, for the dead child, the beautiful clot of blood.
My mother told me this part of the story the night after Dino had announced that he would find Anthony Pantuliano, my real father, the night after I’d seen her dead mother in the arcade. My mother was lying on the bed next to mine, and I could see her profile lit by the streetlights lining the street. Tears had rolled out of her eyes into her dark hair.
“And your mother never knew?”
“No,” she said. “No, no, no.”
“I saw a woman just like her today, like her picture on the piano, an old woman with a thick accent,” I said.
“You talked to this woman?”
“Church asked her directions. He thinks she’s following us.”
There was a long pause. “She isn’t dead, Lissy. Your grandmother never died, exactly.”
“What do you mean. ‘exactly’? Is she dead or not?”
“She isn’t dead.” My mother looked away from me toward the window. She didn’t say any more. There was a distant siren, nothing else.
“Do you think it was her? Would she know we’re here in town?”
“She knows,” my mother said. “From one mouth or another.”
I asked her if she thought my grandmother would be the type to follow me. I asked her what she thought the old woman wanted.