Advice for Italian Boys (6 page)

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fter Jessica, Nicolo successfully avoided even the possibility of romantic humiliation for two full years. He had decided after several weeks’ deliberation that he needed to be wiser, more attuned, more fully on his guard before he could hope to be able to engage with women on anything like equal terms. His mother may have known more than she let on about the humiliations of his graduation dinner and dance, because she didn’t mention Jessica Santacroce again, even in passing. And it wasn’t much longer before the family was overtaken by the need to make wedding plans for Nicolo’s older brother Enzo and his girlfriend Mima. Mima’s family, the Bonfiglios, had six daughters, of which Mima was the third, as well as the third in four years to have disclosed during her last year
of high school that she needed to get married. Enzo, who was twenty, wasn’t given much choice in the matter; as far as Nicolo could tell, no one had even asked Enzo how he felt about a marriage. Instead, immediately after Enzo and Mima had disclosed the situation to their two sets of parents, the mothers had taken over; they hurried the young pair in for an urgent talk with the priests from the families’ churches, and then took turns telephoning around to the local banquet halls to ask about cancellations. Within three days, a small wedding was scheduled and planned for early August, and printed invitations were ready to go out to two hundred guests.

“What are you going to do?” Nicolo overheard Mima’s father, Joe Bonfiglio, say to Nicolo’s father at about ten o’clock in the morning on the day of the quickly organized wedding, his voice an aural shrug of fatalism. Nicolo walked into the kitchen and saw Joe sitting with his back straight as a plank of wood in a chair that had been pulled back from the kitchen table. He had one of Paola’s aprons, which was printed with deep purple poppies on olive-coloured sway-backed stems on a black and yellow background, tied around his wide, red neck, and his head was tipped forward so that his chin was cushioned by a folded band of rosy flesh at the top of his wide chest. He spoke carefully from one side of his mouth, avoiding any unnecessary movement. Massimo was standing behind him in the small space between the table and the refrigerator, scraping errant hairs from Joe’s neckline with an ancient and freshly honed straight razor. Nonna had prepared espresso in a battered wasp-waisted pot, and from time to time one or the other of the two fathers sighed, contemplating his scapegrace son or daughter, and then
brought his cup close to his lips, blew short cooling breaths across the dark surface rimmed with minute white bubbles, and took a small sip. Nonna set the blue-flowered sugar bowl on the table and then turned to slice one of the heavy, crusty loaves of bread that she had made the day before. She placed two of the slices carefully into the toaster, which she did not trust. It had once given her a shock that coursed like a
serpente
up her arm from her fingertips to her shoulder when she used a fork to try to free a piece of bread that had been cut too thin and had curled in the heat and got caught in the wires. Nicolo reached over and pressed the lever down for her, while she rummaged inside the refrigerator for a jar of the blackberry jam she made every August, each jar kept this side of too sweet with a fat paring of lemon peel.

“Kids these days. They got too much time on their hands. They flock around each other like flies and honey. And the way they dress. Boys and girls both. Tattoos. Earrings everywhere, even in their noses and stomachs. Tight jeans. Those little shirts. Legs and arms and boobs and belly all out for everyone to eyeball like the vegetables outside of a grocery store. Nothing left for the imagination. No wonder they get themselves into trouble—who wouldn’t? But, then I think to myself, after all, I mean, we got to remember that they would be married by now already if we were still living back in the old country.” Joe reached out to take a noisy slurp from his cup. “And anyways, you can’t lock them up any more or we’d be up on charges for child abuse.”

“Aspirin,” said Massimo, snipping his scissors for emphasis in the empty air above Joe’s ear. “We should of gotten them to take aspirin. That’s my advice.”

“Aspirin? I don’t get you.” Joe twisted his head around to look at Massimo. “Aspirin’s for headaches, not for getting knocked up.”

“It works.”

“I never heard of that. How many they got to take?”

“They don’t take them. They just hold them.” Massimo finished his coffee in one swallow and held his empty cup out toward Nonna, who hurried over with the espresso pot in her hand. “Between their knees.”

The two men laughed while Joe repeated the punchline, savouring it, wondering how he could work it into the speech he was going to give at the wedding reception. “Between their knees. Yes. That’s good. Between the knees. Couldn’t hurt, eh?”

Nicolo carried his toast, and his coffee which Nonna had diluted for him with milk heated in a small pan at the back of the stove, into the living room. He fell onto the sofa and switched on the TV with the remote. A wedge-shaped formation of women—three with blonde hair and three with dark—were demonstrating aerobic exercises to the rhythm of a thumping, repetitive soundtrack. The women kept broad lipsticked smiles fixed on their faces, and their six sets of eyes gazed into the camera, but none of them seemed to be getting any enjoyment from the workout. The manner in which they bounced and stretched and reached made exercise appear like a necessary evil, something to be concluded in as short a time as possible, perhaps so they could go and relax on the beach, of which a simulacrum could be seen in the distance behind them. Nicolo ran through the channels but ended up at the first program again. The pace of the music had slowed,
the throbbing beat replaced by the breathy tootling of pan pipes against a background of rippling harp chords, and the women were now sitting in formation on pink and blue mats. Their legs were propped opened in wide leotarded Vs, and they reached and strained their torsos in synchronized arcs toward their toes. Nicolo winced at the way they forced their lean bodies and outstretched arms forward. The woman at the front, the only one with her hair cut short, was relentless, with the manner of a drill sergeant. “Four more! Three more!” she barked, and the women behind her complied cheerlessly, their glistening expressions undented, their arms and legs in perfect alignment. The sharp angles of their hard bodies glinted under the lights.

Enzo came into the room, dropped heavily onto the couch next to Nicolo and reached to take a piece of toast from Nicolo’s plate. He stretched his legs out and let his shoulders fall back into the cushions.

“You look like a wreck,” Nicolo said.

Enzo didn’t answer. He chewed Nicolo’s toast and stared at the absurdly smiling women on the screen. He was unshaven and unshowered. His hair lay around his head in tufts and valleys and his expressionless face looked rumpled and colourless.

“Coffee?” he grunted, without taking his eyes off the television screen.

“I’ll check,” said Nicolo, but before he could get up from the sofa, Nonna appeared at the doorway carrying a cup for Enzo, a flowered, gold-edged cup with a saucer, taken from the cabinet of never-used best china in one corner of the dining room.

“
Sposa bagnata, sposa fortunata
,” she announced, holding the coffee out to Enzo ceremoniously. A wet wedding is a fortunate wedding.

Nicolo and Enzo turned their heads and looked out the window behind the couch. The clouds were breaking and scattering and had begun to surge southward like a defeated armada of ragged ships. Patches of blue-white sky were breaking through where the clouds were retreating. Thin streams of pale sunlight breached the gaps as they opened and light shone down onto the wet houses and hedges and cars of their street. Enzo shrugged and accepted the cup. Nonna gave a satisfied smile and headed back toward the kitchen. Soon she returned with a large piece of St. Honoré cake on a plate with a fork balanced beside it, the last remaining from the rehearsal dinner two nights before. She gave the plate and fork to Enzo. The women on the screen finished their toe stretches and switched to sitting cross-legged on their mats, breathing in and out in rhythm and rolling their heads from side to side as instructed by the leader, who held her own head high like a border collie’s and continued to call out commands. Enzo ate his cake, scraping the fork against the plate to get the last crumbs, and drank down his coffee.

“Today’s the day,” Nicolo tried again.

A grudging but unrevealing sound emerged from deep inside Enzo’s chest.

“You’re all right with this?” asked Nicolo. “You’re okay with marrying her—Mima?”

Enzo didn’t reply. Nicolo reached and pressed the button to turn off the TV.

“Hey. Earth to Enzo,” Nicolo said into the silence, without turning his head.

“What do you want me to say?” said Enzo. He shrugged, and his plate and fork and cup bounced and rattled on his stomach.

“I want to know. What’s it like?” Nicolo persisted.

“Well,” said Enzo. “If you want to know the truth, I don’t love her, if that’s what you mean. I don’t hate her, but I don’t love her. She reminds me of Ma a bit, you know? She’s bossy; she knows how to do things; she means well; she’s organized. She told me she couldn’t get pregnant, that she had taken care of things, but she hadn’t done anything at all. It’s hard not to feel like I’ve been made a fool of, you know?”

“Does she love
you?
” Nicolo asked. He wasn’t sure where the question had come from, but, after all, wasn’t love supposed to go with marriage? He turned to look at Enzo. This conversation wasn’t one he had expected or planned for.

“She says she does,” said Enzo, who was staring at his cup. “But she doesn’t, not really. I am the kind of person she wanted for a husband. That’s all. She wanted to get married young, like her mother did, and her sisters. Eat what you kill. That’s the Bonfiglio motto. The girls all figure it worked for their mother and it’ll work for them too. Mima wants to have lots of children. She wants a big house. She wants to cook. She doesn’t want to have to get a job or work. I fit into this picture she has of how things are supposed to be, and I’m going to be the one who supports it. Do you think I really wanted to quit university and sell car phones for a living?”

“Are you going to be okay?” Nicolo asked again. He felt an intense need for the story of his brother to make sense, for
his brother to love Mima, for Mima to love his brother, for their child not to be born because of random grapplings and guile but because he or she was destined to be born, of these two parents, at this time, in this place.

“What would you do if I said no?” Enzo asked. Obstinacy had been one of his traits since early childhood.

Nicolo considered. “I guess I wouldn’t know what to say,” he answered honestly. “I don’t know what choices you have, not now. A baby. It’s a big deal, you know. A big deal.” As he said this, it came to him for the first time that he would be an uncle. To a pink infant with eyes shut tight and its crooked thumb in its mouth. A fat toddler swaying on unready feet. A boy in striped shorts and yellow and black striped socks and scuffed shin pads kicking a soccer ball around a muddy field on a cold Saturday morning, or a girl with long dark curls and tiny gold earrings and a hand reaching up to his. Uncle Nicolo. Zio Nicolo. What wouldn’t he do for this child?

Enzo turned suddenly so that he was looking directly at Nicolo. He spoke in an urgent, appealing tone. “Ma could raise it. Did you ever think of that? Mima wouldn’t have to if she didn’t want to. It might be a girl. It’s probably a girl. All her sisters have girls. Ma always wanted a daughter; you know that. She’s got a name picked out and everything. Pa told me once. It’s not impossible. It could be the right thing. For everyone.”

Enzo gripped his hands into fists as if they might be of use, as if he could use his hands to keep hold of his independence, and his plans to finish a degree, and then, and then—he wasn’t sure, couldn’t be certain, but his mind’s focus
shifted to a semi-transparent manifestation of his aspirations, a vision of his life to come as he had only half-imagined it so far. His goals and desires and acknowledged limitations spun and twisted inside his head and his heart like a cloud before the arrival of a storm, and then they coalesced and were transformed, this vision, the one he had never quite been able to bring into focus, of his autonomous future. It took on a more concrete, but still not quite solid form, of a well-lit tunnel with encouraging markers and road signs, a tunnel that broadened generously at the far end where it was drenched in a warm and hope-inspiring light. He tried to describe it to Nicolo: he wanted…he wanted a job at a local business, light manufacturing or distribution, one that he did well at and that would lead over time to a solid position in middle management and then a business of his own. A successful business. And volunteer work. Membership in, and then an executive position on one of those semisecret clubs run by men much like him who once a year ran an appeal, some sort of “athon,” that raised money for an urgent cause—a wing for the children’s hospital, a cure for one of the more compelling diseases, support for a languishing segment of the highly deserving poor. And, after a few years, maybe a run at and then election to city council, as an alderman or reeve, isn’t that what they were called? A wife, of course, at his side, attractive, but definitely not Mima. A woman not remotely like Mima. His wife would be someone whose family had for generations owned a cottage in Muskoka furnished with battered antiques. Someone with a natural head of straight, mocha-blonde hair, deftly feathered at the tips. Someone with a wardrobe of sweaters made of
that soft wool, merino or cashmere, and navy tailored pants that zipped up at the side and shoes made of the best leather, and smooth golden thighs. The Breck girl’s twin or cousin or next-door neighbour. Enzo poured out all of this, or as much as he could put into words, and then he groaned and with his teeth worried a loose scrap of skin at the edge of his thumbnail.

The need Nicolo felt to be fair to Mima, whom he had known all his life, together with his wish for a more or less logical unfolding of events, swamped his loyalty to Enzo. Nicolo felt as if he, perhaps alone, could picture it, how Enzo’s life would actually be, and the pattern of Enzo’s life began to come together in his mind and gather substance, like a hologram, in the air between the couch and the television. It was a vision that didn’t differ very much, in fact, from Enzo’s, except that Mima was central to it and there was no cottage or parson’s tables or sisters-in-law named Debbie and Becky. Nicolo almost believed that he could, by imagining it, call it into being for his brother—although at eighteen, he had no thought that any of this image might ever apply to himself. What he foresaw for his brother but could not have articulated was an early marriage to a clever and devoted wife, three or four children, hard work, watchful stewardship of a modest but steadily increasing store of resources, the acquisition of a small block of apartments in town that Mima could manage once the children were in school, no more than the usual number of disagreements, and the growth, like the twisting tendrils of vines, of an infinite number of bonds—thick and slender—and unspoken accommodations slowly maturing over months and years, all leading to a fiftieth anniversary
party in a community hall or the ballroom of a suburban hotel, organized by their children and grandchildren, at which Enzo would speak briefly, white-haired, moist-eyed, moved by the genuine warmth and domestic harmony of all that he and Mima had engendered. A well-lived, useful life, better than most.