An Italian Wife (13 page)

“
D
UCE,” FRANCESCA'S GRANDMOTHER BEGAN.

Rat face
. Francesca wrote.
Turd
.

Her grandmother folded her hands, brown-spotted and blue-veined, into her lap and considered. She wore a thin cotton dress, black, and beneath it a white slip, white bloomers, a white camisole. Over it she wore an apron in a gaudy floral pattern. Francesca hated her. She had lost several teeth, and as she spoke air whistled through the spaces.

“I am writing to tell you of my gratitude and the gratitude of the Italians who are here in America, away from the homeland that you will once again make strong . . .” her grandmother dictated.

Josephine only spoke very basic English. Although she had been in America for over thirty years, she still mixed up please and thank you, still looked like she was drowning when she tried to piece together an entire sentence. Even her grandmother's Italian embarrassed Francesca, with its dropped final vowels and bastardized words.

You Fascist pig
, Francesca wrote.
We living under the democracy of the United States of America despise you
. . .

It was warm for April, and Francesca sweated under her wool sweater. She wished she could take it off and run bare-chested through the yard, the way she used to when she was a little girl. Now she was fifteen years old. She had been kissed by four boys; all of them shorter than she was. One of them, Bruno Piazza from down the hill, loved her. She hated him. She hated every boy she had kissed.

Her grandmother's voice droned on, blending with the bees that buzzed around their heads, dictating her letter of loyalty to Il Duce.

Francesca sighed.

“Your devoted servant,” her grandmother said.

May you burn in hell
, Francesca wrote.

“Josephine Rimaldi.” Her grandmother grinned at her, not even caring about her missing teeth, or the long, silver hairs on her chin. She picked up the small sharp knife in her lap and began to cut a pear that had fallen to the ground.

“Do you know you're supposed to wash that?” Francesca told her in English. “The ground is full of germs.”

“Bella,”
her grandmother said, not understanding.
“Grazie.”

“You stupid old woman,” Francesca said in English.

“Eh,” her grandmother said, shrugging.

Francesca folded the letter into thirds and put it into an envelope. On the front she wrote, as she always did:

Benito Mussolini
Italia

On the back, she wrote her grandmother's name and Natick, Rhode Island.

“Go mail it,” her grandmother said. Juice from the pear dribbled out the corner of her mouth.

Relieved, Francesca stood to go. Robert Torre mailed all the letters back to the Old Country. His store was at the bottom of the hill, near the mill, a long enough walk to get some of this nervous energy out of Francesca. On the way to Torre's, she would pass Bruno's house, and Michele's, another boy she sometimes kissed. Maybe she would see one of them and they would walk together to the river first. She would lie beside them and let them kiss her, let their tobacco-tasting tongues explore inside her mouth, and their hands grope at her. Today she would take off her shirt, surprising whichever boy she ran into, and let them touch her breasts. Touch only, not kiss. These were things that the ancient priest, Father Leone, would not understand, these lines girls drew, the way girls felt desire too.

Her uncle came into the yard.

“Hi, Uncle Carmine,” she said, trying not to sound nervous.

“You
puttana
, going to get laid?” he asked, a terrible thing to say to his fifteen-year-old niece, but ever since Anna Zito married someone else he called almost every girl a
puttana
.

Francesca held up the letter. “Going to mail this to Mussolini,” she said, and quickly closed the gate behind her.

FRANCESCA'S SISTER, MARY,
always made a point of finding something beautiful here. If Mary were walking beside her right now, she would say, “Look at the pink blossoms on that cherry tree!” She would stop at the Galluccis' to admire their new shrine to the Virgin Mary, taking the time to open its glass door, to gasp at the lovely face of the Madonna, perhaps even to light a candle at her feet. Mary would know whose cat these drunken-looking kittens zigzagging on the street belonged to and that Old Man Conti's wine was ready to drink. Mary, who was twelve, loved everything about this town. She loved everything as much as Francesca hated it.

“Where would you go if you left?” Mary asked, but only at night when the two of them lay together on the iron bed they shared upstairs. The ceilings slanted so that they could reach up and touch them easily, something Francesca often did, pressing her fingertips against the eggshell-colored paint as if she could break through to the roof and beyond.

“I don't know,” Francesca answered. She was embarrassed that she knew so little of the world that she could not even name a place to run to.

“Providence?” Mary asked.

“No!” Providence was awful, a jumble of carts and peddlers and shouting, without any of the exciting things a city might offer. Francesca had gone there once with her father, to buy cheese.

“Back to the Old Country?” Mary asked. She wouldn't stop until she had an answer, and Francesca had no answer to give her.

“Yes,” Francesca whispered. “I would go to Italy and be Duce's mistress.”

Mary giggled. “Then you'd have to take Nonna with you so she can be his mistress too.”

Later, after Mary would fall asleep, Francesca would press her fingertips to the ceiling, pushing, pushing, unable to move anything even a little.

NO ONE WA
S
OUT TODAY
except Francesca. Poor Bruno, she thought as she approached Torre's store. Tomorrow she might not feel the same way, she might keep her breasts to herself. She saw the men from the neighborhood across the street. They had set up tables on the sidewalk in front of the store. The acrid smell of cigars already reached her, the medicinal smell of their homemade wine sitting in glass jugs on the sidewalk. The men were playing cards, laughing, shouting in Italian. She saw her own father among them, gambling away their money, money they needed for Mary's new glasses and pencils for them to do their homework.

In the distance she heard the whirring of a car engine. Automobiles were no longer strange on the street here even though most people couldn't afford them. Walking, Francesca always had to sidestep horse shit. But the DiGiornos didn't have a car and they still held a certain fascination for her. She paused to watch it pass. A bottle-green Ford.

To her surprise, the car stopped and a man's voice called out, “Excuse me?”

Francesca looked around, but she was the only one on the street except the men a half block away. Swallowing hard, she walked toward the automobile. She was aware of how she must have looked in her dull wool sweater, too heavy for such a warm day, and the thick black boots and unevenly hemmed skirt. Still, she smoothed her hair, trying to flatten the strands that insisted on springing up.

She peered into the car. The driver wasn't a man. He was a boy, not much older than she was. His hair was so blond it seemed almost white in the sunlight and his face looked pink, like a baby's.

“I'm looking for Jerry Piazza. Do you know him?”

Francesca shook her head. The letter to Mussolini grew damp in her sweaty hands.

The boy sighed, exasperated. “Do you speak English?” he asked her.

Insulted, she said, “Yes, I speak English.” She was trembling. She smelled mint, as if it grew in the backseat of that car.

“Sorry,” he said. “You never know. There's so many wops in this part of town.”

She could've said something about how ignorant he was, how he should try to call one of those men across the street wop and see what happened. One of those men was, in fact, Gennaro—Jerry—Piazza.

ON THE FEA
ST
DAY
of the Virgin, the men of the town took the statue from the church and wheeled it through the streets on the giant platform they built new each year. The girls covered the platform with roses, working all morning, their fingers bloodied from thorns. Then they joined the throngs of people in the street, pressing against each other to throw coins at the Virgin as she passed. The old women, dressed in black, walked slowly behind the Virgin, praying, their voices so soft they sounded as if they were humming.

Francesca did not like this part of the feast. It was hot and the men always grabbed at the teenage girls in the crowd. Already her thighs were bruised from their pinches.

She looked at her sister, Mary, beside her, shouting,
“Ave Maria! Ave Maria!”
and throwing her own pennies and nickels at the passing wagon.

Francesca turned and fought her way out of the crowd, away from the parade. After the Virgin and the old ladies there would be a band and some floats and the littlest girls dressed up like miniature madonnas. Today there was also going to be a march for Mussolini, the local men who were Fascists would hold a banner with Il Duce's face on it and march, singing the Fascist anthem. Her grandmother had taught it to her and Mary, and no doubt Mary would want to stay until the very end to sing it. But Francesca had had enough.

She cut through the Contis' yard to the street beyond, which was deserted, and pulled a cigarette out of her pocket. It was half-smoked, discarded by her uncle Carmine earlier. That was how Francesca got all her cigarettes. At least today she was dressed for the warm weather in a pale-yellow short-sleeved dress that her mother had sewn for her. It buttoned down the front and had a wide, sailor-style collar. Really, the dress was for a child, a younger girl, but the fabric was so thin and soft that Francesca was happy to have it. She kicked off her shoes and rolled down her stockings, then leaned against the stone wall that marked the end of the Contis' yard.

With her eyes closed, she tried to think of what people in other places were doing today. In the newspaper she had seen a picture of San Francisco, where there was going to be a World's Fair. She did not know what people who lived in San Francisco did, though her father had once told her about a terrible earthquake there, and Antonio the fish man had once been a fish man there. Fish and earthquakes, Francesca thought, trying to put them together into some sort of life.

Hands covered her eyes and she knew right away it was Bruno. He had probably followed her.

“Guess who?” Bruno said. Most of the people their age did not have the accents of their parents; but Bruno did. His family went back and forth, never satisfied in either place.

“Bruno,” she said flatly.

He released his hands and laughed. “I'm going to kiss you,” he said.

She shrugged. It didn't matter to her if he kissed her or not.

His lips were on hers, hungry, his tongue pushing its way into her mouth. Almost immediately it happened; Francesca seemed to fly out of her body and into the air between this short squat boy and this girl in the yellow dress. The boy's hands, square and thick, were running up and down the girl's body and Francesca felt nothing. Bruno was breathing heavier.

What would he do, she wondered, if she sat up and unbuttoned her dress to her waist and let him touch her breasts?

The band was playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” badly. Too much brass.

Francesca pushed Bruno away from her and began to unbutton her dress. She would've liked covered buttons, but they were too expensive. Instead, her mother had sewn on big, smooth black ones from an old dress of Nonna's. They slipped easily through the buttonholes. This smooth, quick action brought a jolt of electricity to Francesca, the one she had when she wasn't with Bruno, or any boy. It was a hum she wanted to keep going, to have a boy push forward like an accelerator in an automobile. A boy, she thought, could take her somewhere special if only he could keep that feeling going in her.

She unhooked her bra and shrugged it off her shoulders, letting her breasts fall free. Her breasts were large and full, and Bruno, when he beheld them, gasped. The hot, sticky air on her bare skin made her want to be touched even more, and it was Francesca who grabbed Bruno's hands and placed them on her breasts. Almost immediately, she became that observer again, the one watching. How foolish they looked, Francesca thought. The boy's hands as if they were kneading dough for pizza. The girl's new dress in a rumpled heap around her waist.

The Fascists were singing. Soon the parade would be over and the streets would fill with people on their way to the church and the
festa
on its grounds.

Francesca, wanting to finish her cigarette, to get rid of Bruno, let him suck on her breasts briefly. He made loud slurping noises that disturbed her. When she roughly pulled him away, clutching his thick hair, he looked up at her, his mouth wet from his own spit.

“I'm going to marry you,” he said gruffly. “I'm going to marry you and do this to you every night.”

Those words in her ears made her cry uncontrollably as she stumbled home, trying to avoid the crowds of people returning to their houses for the food they would bring to the
festa
. Without a plan, she thought, her breasts sore from Bruno's clumsiness. What hope did she have for anything different from the very life he had predicted? She was ashamed that she was so ignorant that she did not even know where else to go. She did not want to fall into a crevice in the earth and get swallowed up in San Francisco. She did not want to farm land in the Old Country. And she did not want this life.

When she walked into the kitchen at home, she stood in the doorway and looked at the dark wallpaper and badly laid floor, and heard the Italian words buzzing through the room, as if they were not in America. Her grandmother, smiling proudly, held a small sign with Mussolini's face on it attached to a basket. The basket was brimming with gold. Francesca moved closer. She recognized earrings, crosses, thick chains, and on top, Nonna's wedding ring. To be certain, Francesca looked at the woman's left hand. Bare.