But the justice of the peace didn’t even ask that question, and when Franklin said clearly, “I do,” all I could think was how, when Jonathan said, “I do,” Franklin was still in the seminary, praying in the chapel at dawn, studying the history of belief.
After we ate the food Uncle Victor had catered as his gift to us, after we danced to the accordion band, after Anthony went outside, after we cut the wedding cake, Papa asked us to help him think of yet another new company name.
“It should include ‘Roof’ or ‘Roofing’ in the name. Something people will remember.”
“CRTDL,” Aunt Leonora said without hesitation.
“CRTDL…” He looked intrigued.
“That’s right.” She tapped one crimson fingernail against the white tablecloth as if typing out the letters for Papa.
After his fifth roofing business, Wholesale Roofing, had collapsed, he’d briefly owned a gas station, the only gas station I’d ever seen that had a dry cleaning store with a flashing sign: “Your favorite jacket cleaned for free with fill-up. Minimum 7 gallons.” Then came another combination business: a cavernous bicycle shop that transformed itself into a movie theater at night. Eventually, Papa returned to roofing: it was what he’d learned, what he enjoyed. And since he had Anthony—who’d graduated from cooking school but didn’t work as a chef—to handle his office and occasional employees, Papa got to work on the roofs. When Anthony suggested the Yellow Pages, Papa picked names at the beginning of the alphabet, so that potential customers would find him right away—A-Okay Roofing; Affordable Roofing—except both times the name had already changed before the new Yellow Pages were published.
“CRTL…” Papa built a rectangle with his fingers and peered through them as though they framed those letters. Then he shifted them until they framed Mama, who was all in peach, one of the few times I’d seen her wear anything but black. She’d dyed the white gown she’d bought last year, when she married Mr. Thompson—Call me Julian, please—and she’d designed a peach colored lace vest to float over it. Her hair was still shorter than it used to be from her wedding haircut on Madison Avenue, the cost of ten Bronx haircuts.
“What do you think of CRTDL?” Papa asked her.
“Depends on what it means.”
Papa nodded energetically.
Ever since their divorce, he and Mama had shown more ease and pleasure with each other than during marriage. Since he was the one who’d been left, I sometimes felt angry at Mama; and even though he had started dating, that too felt like her fault.
With Mr. Thompson I’d felt awkward the day I met him, because he was so eager to leave Hartford, to relocate his furniture shop to the Bronx so he could be near Mama. For me, it was all too sudden. I felt awkward with him the day he married Mama, and I felt it again on my wedding day, that awkwardness, even though Mama and I both were twice-married now. But the way they were sitting there—she all in peach, one shoulder against his as if she couldn’t wait to get into bed with this man who’d decided that she wasn’t allowed to smoke. I’d argued with him about it, but he said it was so she would live longer. He didn’t want to hear that women in my family lived to be old and smoked all they wanted.
I felt Mama looking at me, and when she winked, I thought of the two of us sneaking cigarettes on her fire escape or hunched across her stove, taking quick puffs while the fan sucked up the smoke, chewing cough drops to disguise our breath. As conspirators, Mama and I did well; but our natural stance was flight and chase. I still fled from her sorrow, because I didn’t want it to ignite mine. I couldn’t be her substitute for Bianca; and yet I was the only one who looked like Bianca. In the mirror, however, it was just me—minus Bianca. The me that confirms her absence. My likeness rotting beneath the ground. How long does it take? Is there anything left of us? Rib or skull or femur? The heart will already be gone. Perhaps the heart is always the first to go. With Jonathan it certainly was. And the body just has to follow it. As a small girl I was hefty—Bianca and I both were: hefty and tall—and yet I ended up skinny, as though my twin’s death had taken the flesh from me.
Once in a while I hated her.
Because she was dead.
Because they were in love with her absence.
And yet, to taste Mama’s excess love, I sometimes let her turn me into Bianca, greedily became Bianca for her, and fed on love not intended for me though I’d never be enough for her, though she couldn’t look at me without sorrow. How I fought for that love of hers, tried to make it match the intense and confusing love I felt for her. And how I kept losing, because a dead daughter was more powerful than a daughter still alive. Once, I think, Mama understood what it was like for me, because she cried and hugged me tightly and said, “I don’t ever want to do this to you, make you be both daughters to me.” And I stepped out of her arms and said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“CRTDL…” Papa was saying slowly. “It’s catchy, Leonora. But what does it stand for?”
“Cheap Roofs That Don’t Last.” Aunt Leonora did not blink.
Just then, Anthony came back in. He hesitated by the door, as if about to leave again.
Franklin’s parents glanced at each other, startled, then set their features into identical expressions of tolerance.
“You got that from one of your crossword puzzles?” Papa asked Aunt Leonora.
“I made it up.”
“An original. Of course.”
My grandfather started coughing, and Anthony was holding himself tight, wary, as he often did. With him it was either that silence or outrageous banter, when he’d talk on that sharp edge of ribbing as if he wanted us to slap him down.
“We have a few more pieces of wedding cake,” Uncle Victor announced. “Unless anyone would like more stuffed veal breast or—”
“Yes,” Franklin said. “Veal for me, please. I’d also like some more of your spaghetti.”
We all stared at my bridegroom as he cut his spaghetti into two-inch sections, and when my grandfather was the first to glance away, I vowed to myself that I’d teach Franklin to twirl spaghetti around his fork in the curve of his spoon.
“Another toast,” my grandfather suggested in his gentle voice. “Sit down, Anthony. Join me in a toast to our lovely bride and to her—”
“I bet you have other original suggestions,” Papa prompted Aunt Leonora.
“Well, if you prefer a shorter name…”
“Something shorter, then.” As usual, he was punctuating each word with his hands. But only his hands moved. The rest of his body looked stiff. He used to deliver words with his entire body, but ever since the Quality crooks had broken his hands, Papa had seemed without full speech. Playing his accordion had been part of his language, but he’d never played again.
“You could drop the D and just go with CRTL,” Aunt Leonora said.
“Cheap Roofs That Last?” He grinned at her like a schoolboy, eager to be praised for the right answer.
But she corrected him. “Leak.”
At least four of the relatives were silently mouthing the words, “Cheap Roofs That Leak,” and that instant I knew we all felt some joy at Papa’s dilemma. Along with guilt for feeling that joy. None of us came to Papa’s help. Not even I. Because Aunt Leonora had a right to her fury.
Fury at Papa for exploiting her son.
Fury at her son for letting himself be exploited.
I’d never really understood why Anthony would choose work that put him on roofs; but as he sat at my U-shaped banquet table, spookily quiet, observing his mother—each of her words a weapon in her fight to reclaim him—I wondered if he found some odd redemption by trading Papa his labor for my sister’s life. Even if Papa was hatching some strange revenge, Anthony had become an accomplice to being used.
Suddenly I was tired of his silence, his miserable silence. I used to think it was a game, daring himself to make it through a family dinner without speaking. One afternoon at Jones Beach last summer, when I offered him my suntan lotion and he sh
ook his head, I decided to find out how that kind of silence felt. I continued to look at him quietly, fully knowing that, unlike Papa, who took what he could, Anthony had trouble accepting even compliments or a second cup of coffee or my suntan lotion. He’d rather burn. Suffer some more.
I continued to wait. Quietly. But I lasted barely two minutes. “You’d rather burn?” I finally yelled at him.
He looked pained.
“What do you want, Anthony? Suffer some more?”
Still, he wouldn’t speak.
“Hold still. Goddamn you.” I jumped up from my towel, opened the bottle, smeared lotion on his back; and when he flinched I said, “Just hold still.”
Anthony wasn’t there the morning my twin was put into the earth with her favorite toys and sweets in her coffin, with Nik-L-Nips and Bazooka bubble gum and paper candies and Chuckles, with her Tiny Tears doll, who could cry real tears, but not with the Superman cape that had failed her so.
I tucked Papa’s domino game into my sister’s coffin, because he wasn’t allowed to be at her funeral. On the phone from jail, he’d cried, and I’d promised to find something that was his and send it with Bianca.
Afterwards, at my grandparents’ house, where we were staying for a while, Anthony’s father whispered to Great-Aunt Camilla that Anthony had stopped speaking the day Bianca died. The sight of food made me queasy, but the grown-ups piled linguine and beans and a slice from Riptide’s Christmas turkey on my plate. I carried the plate upstairs, and as I hid it under my grandparents’ bed, the sudden roar of an airplane taking off startled me; when I glanced up, the Jesus with the summer tan and the curious eyes was spying on me from the painting above the dresser.
Quickly, I picked up the plate and took it outside, where the air was as gray as the siding. Its ridges looked like the ridges in cardboard, but when I pressed one fingernail against them, it didn’t leave a mark. I opened the lid of the milkman’s box and set my plate inside. Against the drab sky, my grandparents’ wrought-iron banister looked like an ink drawing. So did the empty wrought-iron flower boxes that were bolted to the walls below the first-floor windows, from where I heard voices, laughter even. How could anyone laugh today?
All at once I had to pee. But if I went back inside, they’d only fix me another plate. I searched for something tall to squat behind. But what if another airplane came by, lower? I decided to pee standing, like a boy. Halfway down the alley, next to my grandparents’ side of the attached house, I slipped my fingers beneath my black skirt and bunched myself up so that my pee had to squirt out front. Still, I got my hands wet. What astonished me was how warm the pee was, something you don’t find out when it just runs down some toilet bowl.
I didn’t get to see Anthony the next day or the day after.
For twenty-three days I didn’t get to see Anthony.
Not on New Year’s Eve, which we didn’t celebrate.
Not when school started in January.
His parents didn’t send him, kept him at home, as if his heartache were bigger than mine. I felt cheated because I had to go to school though it was my sister who’d died.
From what I was told, his parents were taking Anthony to doctors because he still did not speak—not one word—and when one of the doctors suggested it would be best for Anthony to be somewhere else for a couple of weeks, his father and our grandfather took him to Canada.
“Why they’d think of a hunting trip, I don’t understand,” Riptide said. “Or why they’d figure a trip with men only will do the boy good. It’s crazy.”
“Perhaps we’re all a bit crazed right now,” my mother said.
Though I was a year older than Anthony, I wasn’t allowed to come along to Canada. It bothered me that I missed him more than my sister.
During those twenty-three days, we moved to furnished rooms on Ryer Avenue, and I was transferred from St. Margaret Mary’s to St. Simon Stock. In each place I’d lived so far, the furniture had been different, and I thought of it as the landlord’s furniture, because all landlords merged into one person, who had the power to keep our deposit if we scratched or stained furniture more than it already was. “Careful with the landlord’s furniture,” Mama would remind me, because it was crucial to get a refund of our deposit, which would become the deposit for the next apartment. And there always was a next apartment. Sometimes we moved secretly, in the middle of the night, because the rent was overdue. The only pieces of furniture that moved with us were Mama’s sewing machine; her dummy that followed us like an extra child; and the television that Uncle Victor had given us.
I loved the television bishop, Bishop Sheen, who’d walk toward me as if about to step from the screen, hands folded, to inspect each new apartment. Then he’d open his hands and remind me, “Believe the incredible, and you can do the impossible,” and I’d look around and suddenly notice all Mama was already doing to improve the apartment, washing walls, rubbing tables and chairs with lemon oil, concealing even the nastiest upholstery beneath clean slipcovers—striped cotton for summer, green velvet for winter—that had ties and folds to adjust to any size sofa and chairs and made each apartment instantly familiar.
Most of her fabrics she bought on sale at Pring’s, where the bolts were stacked so high that I couldn’t see beyond them. Since new fabrics made my eyes burn, Mama would wash them, and if that was not possible, at least air them before she started cutting and sewing. Miss Pring—Emily-from-the-fabric-store, Mama called her—looked so pleased when Mama showed her new sketches or thanked her for special fabrics she’d saved for Mama in the back room. Emily-from-the-fabric-store talked with Mama about who was getting divorced, about how people liked Mama’s wedding gowns. Emily-from-the-fabric-store said Mama had exquisite hands and showed me what she meant by taking Mama’s hands into hers till Mama pulled away. In each new neighborhood Mama found new friends quickly, and I liked those women better than Emily-from-the-fabric-store, whose breath clung to the fabrics, bothering my eyes.
Fabrics that Mama could afford on her own were never as expensive as those she worked on for her customers, whose scraps she kept to make something for me. Sleeveless blouses took the least fabric. That’s why I had several expensive-looking blouses that Mama didn’t let me wear when customers came back. Though I couldn’t recall which customer had brought which fabric, Mama always knew, because she believed anything that ran through your hands settled in your memory. “It gives me a lift seeing you in good clothes,” she’d say.
Great-Aunt Camilla had good clothes, elegant clothes; and I craved that elegance, craved not being poor. “Camilla is fortunate,” the relatives would say, “to have a friend to share apartment expenses with. That’s why she can afford to live on the Upper East Side.” Did any of them understand about the love between her and Mrs. Feinstein? It probably didn’t occur to them. They’d tell her to bring Mrs. Feinstein to family dinners, but she seldom did. “Mrs. Feinstein is visiting her own family,” she’d say. They’d tease each other about visiting Camilla, because Mrs. Feinstein had antiquing kits and antiqued everything in sight with streaks and golden flakes. “Watch it,” they’d say, “you’ll come home looking antique.”
Knowing that soon, once Anthony was back from Canada, I’d have him all to myself, was not the only good thing that happened when I no longer had a sister. I also had my own room. And my parents appreciated me more than before. I also liked the building on Ryer Avenue better than our last one, because its bricks glittered when the sun hit them, and because I no longer had to be scared of taking the trash down to the cans in the cellar but could throw it down the chute to the incinerator. The super would set the ashes on the curb for the garbage truck. Some nights you could see smoke rising from my chimney, and once a flaming piece of paper floated on the smoke and burned for an instant like a wishing star.
Whenever Mama’s sadness came, I kept my leftover family together, running to the store for groceries, winding the alarm clock, boiling water for hot dogs and spaghetti. Those were the two thing
s I knew how to make, and I’d mix them, slice the hot dogs and stir them into the spaghetti while it boiled. Margarine kept it from getting sticky, but we didn’t always have margarine.
One afternoon, early in January, I found Mama crying on her bed, facedown, skirt up to her garters. I rubbed one hand between her shoulders. “I’m here,” I said, “I’m here.”
When Papa came home, he tried to turn Mama around.
“Don’t,” she whimpered.
But he pulled at her till she stood in the circle of his arms, swaying.
“Floria,” he whispered. “Hey, girl—”
She coughed. “I can’t.”
“Take my breath.” Papa blew into his palm, cupped it lightly across her mouth. “Pretend it’s yours.”
“I—I—”
“Swallow it. Pretend it’s yours.”
“Do it, Mama. Swallow,” I cried. Already my family had changed from four to three, and though we’d been three before, whenever Papa had been Elsewhere, we’d always become four again. Only now we wouldn’t. Because it was Bianca being away, not Papa, which meant that if he went Elsewhere again, there’d just be two of us for a while, Mama and I, and if Mama choked from coughing and died and got buried, I’d be all alone. “Swallow,” I yelled at her. “Swallow Papa’s breath. I said: now.”
“I’m sorry.” Mama’s face was slippery, her mouth open.
“Belinda,” Papa said, “turn on the shower. Hot. And keep the door closed.”
I ran into the bathroom, scooped my rabbit from the bathtub, settled him in his cardboard box next to the toilet, and waited for the water to get hot. Odd, to see water running from the shower without anyone standing underneath it. Puffs of steam like white flowers. Aunt Leonora said white flowers were not as strong as flowers with color. I liked Aunt Leonora even though Riptide Grandma had told me that Aunt Leonora was pretty selfish; but all I could see was that Aunt Leonora was pretty, and if pretty was the same as selfish, I wanted to be pretty selfish, too. The white steam flowers were spreading their blossoms around the lamp, hiding cracks in the ceiling, curling edges of wallpaper. There’d been white flowers around Bianca’s coffin. At least she was not a pagan baby.