“Be grateful,” Floria whispered.
“For what?”
“Be grateful your daughter is alive.”
“Don’t you threaten me.”
“Grateful. Be grateful.” Floria slipped past the bride’s mother and the bride’s half-finished gown, leaving her door open.
When Malcolm found her, she was sitting on a swing in Slattery Park, clutching a pebble. “Hey.” He sat down next to her, laid one palm against the rigid valley between her shoulders. “What do you have there?”
As she tightened her fingers around the pebble, she felt its shape, its color, imprinting itself forever into her skin.
He bent closer. “Tell me.” His voice kind, urgent.
She let him peel back each finger to open her hand. Listened to herself as she told him how she’d walked from the bride’s mother, how suddenly she’d had the thought how much easier it would be to not be alive. “That’s when I picked up the stone. Because it scared me, the thought. And I held on to the stone and promised myself to live.”
“That’s good.” Malcolm reached for the stone.
But Floria snapped her fingers shut. “You weren’t even there.”
“You know I begged them to let me be at her funeral, to send me with someone from the sheriff’s office. You know they told me decisions like that are never made quickly, that there’s a process to follow.”
“I know…you weren’t there when she died.”
He flinched.
“And that you cannot blame on process and regulations.”
“I only blame myself. If I’d been there that day—”
“No,” she says. “I’ve done the same, wondered…what if I’d been in the kitchen with the girls and Anthony….”
“If I were to promise you that I’ll never be back in jail again—would you believe me?”
“If? You either promise or don’t promise. Don’t ask for my belief just in case.”
“I promise. I promise you I’ll never do anything to end up in jail again. And I won’t ask for your belief till I’ve proven that to you.” He enveloped her fist with his hand. “We’ll take it home with us, your pebble.”
“No.”
“You’ll have it as a reminder.”
“Of misery?”
“Of knowing that you’ll survive this.”
Though she didn’t want to keep the pebble, she didn’t have the energy to stop Malcolm; but when he opened the apartment door, she wouldn’t go inside. “I’m scared of having it in there.”
“It’s just a stone.”
“It’ll remind me how…I felt when I found it.”
“You want me to throw it out?”
“Oh no. That’s…dangerous. Because it means both—the not wanting to live, and the promising myself to stay alive.”
“Then let me take it back where you found it.”
“Not to the playground.”
“Someplace in the park where you don’t go. I’ll figure something out.” Gently, he opened her fist. Took the pebble, egg-shaped, a mottled sand-yellow.
For two hours he was gone, and when she asked him where he’d left it, he said, “I considered several hiding places, but none of them felt right till I found a crevice between some rocks. I pushed your pebble in there for safekeeping. Maybe, someday, you’ll want it back.”
“No.” But already she imagined going there. Felt the danger. The promise. “Would I find it?”
“I’d find it for you,” he assured her.
In the half-light of church, others are kneeling—most of them women—fast lips murmuring, belief a habit, a birthright. Above the side altar, a faded Madonna is nursing Baby Jesus. For a moment Floria feels exhilarated—she hasn’t seen a bare-breasted Madonna before—and she wonders who the artist is. She’s glad it’s not Michelangelo. Her mother has urged her to visit his tomb in Florence, but from what Floria has read about Michelangelo, it would be exhausting to be around him. Too much like her mother: capable and demanding.
All around Floria, women are praying. Have any of them known the kind of sadness that will never just be ordinary sadness again, once you know what waits for you beneath? Sadness is the trapdoor to the void. Not that it will open each time you walk across it. But you’ll be aware of the void. Terrified of the void. Terrified of love. Terrified of anger. Because of that awareness, the border has changed. Though, gradually, you’ll have days when you trust that the ground will hold.
As Floria rests her forehead on her linked fingers, she notices the floor with its ancient stone mosaic: worn shades of gray and terra-cotta. That pale dove-gray…she’ll make slipcovers in that color, sew curtains and pillows in terra-cotta. Instantly she feels shallow. She’s in a church, for Christ’s sakes, surrounded by prayer and tears and holy statues. Still…she can get some fabrics. Ask her mother to crochet a matching afghan. And she already has a vase that would match.
When she leaves the church, shreds of mist hang above the piazza like wings of colossal birds, and coming toward her in that mist is a family, exquisitely dressed, the parents’ hands linked to the child between them, a girl of eight or nine, who’s laughing at the shadow-sky from her velvet collar, bouncing like a marionette, knees knocking and elbows flailing, like children will swing from their parents’ hands. The woman’s fur coat flows around her like a cape, and within that fluidity, that playfulness, the family seems privileged. Mist and the arches of the piazza separate them from the rest of the world, from anyone who has not sampled that degree of happiness.
If I could be certain—
If I could be certain Bianca is with parents like these—no longer mine but taken care of so exquisitely in a world where, for now, I cannot touch her—maybe, then, this is the closest I will know of heaven. Or maybe that’s what heaven is meant to be all along, that glimpse of someone you love being safe forever. But as the family gets closer, Floria is stunned to see that the girl’s marionette dance—suspended like this between both parents—is the only way she can walk. Her crooked limbs twitch as she propels herself forward, mouth open to the sky, not in laughter, but in one unending wail.
In her hotel room, Floria undresses without turning on the light, slips naked between the sheets. She shakes a cigarette from the pack, strikes a match in the dark, throat greedy for that gasp of smoke, and wills herself to believe the parents were bringing the girl to the church at nightfall to be healed.
And that she will be healed.
Must be healed.
But all at once the girl is Bianca—forever suspended; forever falling—and Floria crushes her cigarette, jams one palm against her mouth. Cheated. Cheated out of her first glimpse of the girl: so playful and lucky and protected; cheated out of imagining a lifetime for the girl as she has imagined a lifetime for Bianca in all these years. Measuring her—what she looks like, what matters to her—by the changes in Belinda. Embarrassing herself by clinging to her surviving daughter. A mother who tries too hard, offers too much. But Belinda has learned to dodge that sticky love in school, in college, in marriage. Instead of living at home while taking classes at NYU, Belinda moved into a dorm. And after she married Jonathan, they rented a back three-room apartment in the West Village instead of returning to the Bronx.
What used to be Belinda’s room is Floria’s sewing room, but she keeps fresh sheets on the bed in case Belinda ever wants to stay overnight. But Belinda is perpetually in flight from Floria, planning her escape before she arrives. If Floria struggles against that flight, revs up to offer more, the flight becomes urgent, immediate. Recently, though, Belinda has also been in flight from Jonathan, who is clean in an aggressive manner, brushes his teeth after every meal, takes several showers a day; and from what Floria can tell, Belinda is getting ready for a flight more drastic than anything she has attempted before.
As the signora pours juice for Floria, she opens her lips to smile, and her lovely pout is no longer a pout, but the way her lips have to arrange themselves across her protruding gums and teet
h.
“Grazie.”
Sun slices the red pulp in Floria’s glass—Blood of Christ; Blood of the Lamb—and she wonders what it would be like for someone from another planet to walk into mass. Flesh of Our Savior eaten by priests and sinners. Amen. Barbaric rites. Definitely a Leonora thought. Floria reminds herself to tell her.
From the lobby comes the peck-peck of the signora’s quick heels as she checks on flowers, perhaps, or deliveries. Light peels shadows from the white columns in the courtyard, and angels spill water from their palms. Did the nuns really choose those naked angels? Or did the signora? Leonora’s vote would be for the nuns: “To make up for all those clothes they have to wear. But why didn’t they choose grown naked angels?”
A few days ago the hammering ceased, and after enclosing the scaffolding with green netting, the men went away. Yesterday, the painter arrived with pails and brushes and floated behind the netting as if he were inside the watery glass of the aquarium in Coney Island, where Floria took the twins. While Belinda loved the aquarium, Bianca wailed, “It’s going to break,” pointing at the glass. Right away, Floria picked her up and promised the glass wouldn’t break, but Bianca was inconsolable. “The glass will break…and then the fishies will break…and then—” Floria brought her nose against Bianca’s, eyes against eyes. “Nothing will hurt you. I promise.”
As Floria lights her third cigarette of the morning, she wonders what promises the signora has broken. Quickly, she rolls up two slices of ham, hides them in her napkin, and rushes up the stairs—sixty altogether—to her room, with its massive ceiling beams that support the clay bellies of the roof tiles. She opens her window, feeling mischievous, because the signora would disapprove of feeding the cats, and as she tosses shreds of ham onto the clay tiles, she clicks her tongue—“here…here…here”—and cats pour onto the roof in long, fluid shadows, three, then eight, a graceful swarm in the shape of a fan.
She steps from the polished door of the hotel, leaves the bay behind, and feels the town open around her in its maze, the hushed shade of yet another narrow street, the sudden brightness of yet another piazza. Some of the foundations smell of camphor and damp stone, of cat piss. She doesn’t mind the camphor. Like her mother, she ties mothballs and sprigs of lavender into squares of muslin that she tucks into out-of-season clothing, and she advises her customers to do the same. “That’s how things last,” she tells them.
She likes to turn corners, to come upon the unexpected, to observe faces. Shopkeepers have set out crates with vegetables and fruits. She loves hearing the Italian words. In high school, she and Victor felt embarrassed by their parents’ accents, and it wasn’t till they both had children that they valued the Italian customs, the language. Holding the produce in her hands makes her think of her mother, who is a goddess with food, a priestess with food; whose hands move gently, precisely, while she rhapsodizes about soaking chestnuts in red wine, skinning broccoli, separating cloves of garlic. Who becomes poetic, brilliant.
“It’s where your mother’s soul lives,” her father likes to say.
Victor, who has inherited that gift for food, knew he wanted to have a traveling restaurant, as he called it, when he was still in grammar school and watched two women cater his parents’ tenth anniversary. At seventeen, he began working for a caterer in Throgs Neck, and he had his own catering business before he was thirty.
A scrawny woman is shouting at three boys who’re playing kickball around her vegetable stand. Her ankles are frail, unsteady, and whenever the ball gets too close to her, she shakes her cane at the boys as if she were a conductor trying to prevent her orchestra from escaping. Quickly, Floria positions herself between the woman and the boys, lingers while she buys a handful of dried figs, but when she gets nudged by the cane and the woman yells at her, she walks away, eating her figs as she passes a fish market. She walks beneath washlines strung between windows, sagging with sheets and towels and underwear, all white, except for one red blouse. As a girl, Floria wanted a blouse like that.
A man comes toward her with a tiny dog on a leash. “Rat on a string,” Victor would say. He’s quick to notice rats in parks, in subway tunnels; compares them to squirrels, to tiny dogs; to pigeons: flying rats. He hates the small park near their parents’ house, where people toss bread crumbs to the pigeons despite his warning that feeding pigeons attracts rats. In winter, when the weeds have shrunk to the ground, you can see the rats in the petting zoo. That’s Anthony’s name for the park. Usually he’s so quiet, but if he makes a joke, it’s bizarre. Petting zoo. You just stare at the ground till you see it moving, and if you clap your hands, rats scurry away, and the dead plants shiver long after the rats have passed. It’s almost like dropping a stone into a pond and watching the water ripple outward from that point.
Some of the streets don’t have sidewalks, and she has to share the pavement with cars and motor scooters. When a bus advances, she presses herself flat against a shop window. Inside, on a satin cushion, lies a cameo brooch that resembles her own profile, as if she’d come across a lost ancestor. She hesitates. In Italy—so she has been warned—shopkeepers expect you to buy once you enter. Still, she goes into the shop. Buys the brooch for herself. Pins it on her collar, amazed at her extravagance. Enters other stores, as though buying the brooch had melted all frugality. Buys shampoo that smells of apples. Fresh mimosas wrapped in cellophane. Lotion three times as expensive as what she usually pays. An oval platter in a pattern of terra-cotta and dove-gray.
In the window of a shoe store, she notices elegant black pumps and asks to try them on. Though even the largest size is too tight, the saleswoman tries to force Floria’s right foot into the stiff leather, her flying hands suggesting in some universal language that Floria can cut a few slits into the leather—there and there and there—to make the shoes fit.
“No, grazie.”
But the woman is already undoing the straps of Floria’s other sandal, ready to crush that foot, too.
“No, grazie.” Floria is certain the woman would cut off a toe or two to make those shoes fit. She can see her motioning toward the back of the shop. “Come into our special fitting room.” Positioning her in front of a basin stained with blood where previous customers were fitted.
“No,” Floria says and gets away, her sandals loose, flapping around her. She bends to tighten them, and as she heads downhill, she values the solid connection to the ground her feet give her. To think how it used to bother her that her shoe size is larger than Malcolm’s. No more.
To find her route back to the hotel, she aims for the open sky above the bay, where sounds of pigeons and motors don’t get snagged as in narrow roads but travel upward. From the bay, she can orient herself by walking along the promenade, and through the side street by the farmacia that leads to the hotel, and to the signora with the elusive pout that’s there as long as she doesn’t speak and remembers to laugh with her mouth closed.
From outside the hotel window, the ginger cat stares at Floria while she bathes. Even with cats back home—smaller specimens than these Italian cats—Floria is never quite at ease. Cats, it has seemed to her ever since she was a child, have the potential for danger that flexes beneath their sleek manners, beneath their speed that’s only matched in intensity by their stillness. Whenever Bianca and Belinda begged her for a kitten, she told them cats hunted other pets—especially chicks and parakeets.
As Floria opens her new bottle of lotion, she feels watched. She glances toward the window, where a black cat crouches, as if the ginger cat had been transformed. Its black fur is long and spiked, like the hair of the American students who arrive here with backpacks after hiking the cliff path between the villages of Cinque Terre, who eat their bread and cheese on the church steps or on benches along the boardwalk.
In New York, it’s still too cold for that; but here you can walk along the harbor without a coat.
And sit on ancient stone steps warmed by sun.
Or decide that tomorrow you’ll hike up
to Nozarego.
Floria avoids the auto road, walks uphill on ancient footpaths that weave past the back doors of farmhouses. Built of stone, some of the buildings are set into the hillside. Feeling like an intruder, she follows overgrown paths that lead into steps, steps that lead into paths that haven’t been used lately, though they’ve twisted for centuries through these hills above the sea.
The air is tinged with the smells of salt and earth. She feels limber and strong as she hikes along terraced olive groves and vineyards. From her father she knows that the soil is rocky, hard to work. Without these stone walls it would surely wash down the steep flanks of the hills. From close up, she can see the irregular pattern of the stones set into these walls, but whenever she looks up, she sees the green hillside sectioned off by toothlike borders. Below her: the glint of the sea and the tile roofs of the simple buildings she’s passed. In an olive grove, sun streaks through the trees, settles on something shiny on the path. Beads of water? A spider’s web? No. As Floria bends, scents of rosemary and thyme rise toward her. Silver…a ring. No, two rings…smooth, worn. One a wedding band. The other a band of four woven knots, tarnished on the inside. Someone must have lost them here, someone with small hands, because they’re too tight for Floria’s ring finger.
She wants to return them to their owner, or at least leave them within the village. The priest. The priest will know. To keep from losing the rings, she slips them on the little finger of her left hand and, instantly, is aware of someone else’s unhappiness and joy next to her skin. Still, she keeps them on her finger as she follows the path toward the church. Huge and still, a bell hangs in the opening of the tower. In front of the church is an intricate mosaic of pebbles—white and black and gray and reddish brown—that form a circle with a crown at its center, surrounded by larger circles with diamond shapes, and within those diamonds are small circles. A huge circle of white stone blossoms borders the pattern. Floria has seen mosaics like these outside several churches, each one unique and yet simple. Taken from what the land has yielded, they’ve been laid with skill and patience, and they’re far more exquisite than mosaics assembled of gold and precious stones that impoverished the parishioners.