Fruit (6 page)

Christine said that I was a retard and went back into the house. But later that night, my parents and I drove by the Sears parking lot and sure enough, there was a mini-carnival set up with a Tilt-A-Whirl and Skee-Ball. And as plain as the nose on my face, there was a booth selling pogo dogs. I made my dad pull over and I ran out to buy one. It was the best-tasting pogo dog I ever ate.

Another reason why Daniela wants my job is because she doesn’t get paid for any of her jobs. She waitresses at her dad’s restaurant during the week, and on Saturday nights she works at the Basilico Club, the Italian club in Sarnia. Most people have their wedding receptions at the Basilico Club whether they’re Italian or not. That’s because the only other decent place to have a reception in Sarnia is the Golf Club and three years ago, someone almost got a concussion when a golf ball crashed through the window.

Daniela works as a banquet server. Her boss doesn’t give her any money, but she gets a free meal at the end of the night.

“Sometimes chicken, sometimes roast beef,” she told me. “Depends on how much money the bride’s parents cough up.”

Daniela says that the banquet servers are very competitive.

“It’s fuckin’ hell,” she said. “Every bitch wants to serve the head table.”

Serving the bridal party is the highest honour and only girls who have worked at the Basilico Club for a long time get to do it. It’s like getting a badge of bravery in the Italian military. I guess that’s because if you spill any food on the bride’s dress, you could get sued.

Daniela says that her manager doesn’t let her serve the head table, even though she’s worked at the Basilico Club for three years.

“I haven’t spilled one drop of minestrone since I started working there. But the asshole says I make him nervous so he gives it to Maria Punta and she’s only worked there six months. You know why Maria gets to serve the head table? Her tits are so big, she could rest a fuckin’ platter on them.”

I don’t understand why Daniela would work and not get paid, but then, there are lots of things I don’t understand about Daniela and her family. For example, why do they leave their Christmas lights up all year? And why doesn’t Mrs. Bertoli take an aspirin to cure her headaches?

Anyways, the other day while I was delivering papers, I saw Daniela in her garage. She was bent over, laying out rows of tomatoes on paper to ripen. The Bertolis make their own sauce every year.

“Why do they go through all that trouble when there’s Ragú?” my mother always asks.

Daniela didn’t see me coming up the driveway and when I called her name, she practically jumped ten feet in the air.

“Don’t fuckin’ do that!” she yelled, dropping a tomato.
“What are you, a jerk or something?”

“I wasn’t trying to scare you,” I said. “What’s your problem?”

“Nothing, I just got a lot on my mind, okay?” She picked up the tomato, spit on it, then wiped it off on her apron. “Fuckin’ bruised.”

She turned to look at me and sighed.

“Listen, I didn’t mean to snap at you or anything, okay?” She sat down on an empty milk crate. “I’ve just been under a lot of pressure lately. I’m talking large fuckin’ pressure. The kind that builds and builds until one day, you go psycho and start killing everyone with a bread knife.”

Daniela can be very dramatic when she wants to be and she’s always talking about murdering someone. A few weeks before, she was planning to kill her mom because Mrs. Bertoli had let Gianni go out instead of cleaning the garage. She made Daniela do it.

“She lets that lazy son of a bitch get away with everything,” Daniela had said. “She thinks he shits gold nuggets. One of these days, I’m going to sneak up on the fuckin’ old toad and strangle the life right out of her.”

“Why are you under pressure?” I asked.

“I went and signed up for the Miss Basilico contest,” Daniela sighed. “I’m gonna be in a fuckin’ beauty pageant.”

Every September, the Basilico Club puts on the St. Marco Festival. I asked Daniela once what St. Marco did to get a festival named after him and she told me that he drove the mange-cakes out of Italy. The St. Marco Festival
is like the carnival in the Sears parking lot, only it’s for Italian people. I guess white people could go, but every-one’s afraid of the Sarnia Mafia.

Every year, a young Italian virgin is crowned “Miss Basilico” on the last night of the St. Marco Festival. There are many duties she has to fulfill as a beauty queen. For example, she has to be nice to people all the time and pose for pictures. She also has to dress as an elf at Christmas and hand out candy canes to children at the mall. Most importantly, Miss Basilico has to set an example for Italian girls everywhere and show them that no matter what your dreams are, they can come true if you really believe in yourself.

“I’m looking forward to winning the food basket,” Daniela said, picking a scab off her knee. “Nutella for days.”

She sounded pretty impressed, but I wasn’t. Beauty pageant winners are supposed to win money, not groceries. Besides, I was getting a bad feeling about this beauty contest. What was going through Daniela’s head? She wouldn’t look good in a bathing suit and what kind of beauty queen has armpit stubble? The bottom line was that Daniela wasn’t pretty enough to enter the Miss Basilico contest. I know it wasn’t a very nice thing to think, but it was the truth. And I didn’t want Daniela to find out the hard way.

“Are you sure about this?” I asked her. I could almost hear the audience and judges laughing when she stepped across the stage. “Beauty pageants are kind of sexist, you know.”

“Who the fuck cares? This is my big chance! I’m gonna get that crown on my head if it’s the last fuckin’ thing I do. Then they’re all gonna be sorry when they see my picture on the front cover of the paper.”

Each year, Miss Basilico gets her picture in the
Observer
, which I guess is a pretty big deal for someone who failed grade
6
. I had my picture in the
Observer
when I was nine. My parents and I were at a home show at the Sarnia arena when some guy came up to me and asked me if I’d lie down on this waterbed. I thought he was a pervert at first. But then I noticed his camera and the
Observer
badge on his shirt. He must’ve thought I had star quality. Anyways, the picture came out a few days later and my fly was down. I was so embarrassed. Everyone at school teased me. My mom bought a bunch of papers and sent them to all my relatives, even though I asked her not to.

I knew that I wouldn’t be able to change Daniela’s mind, at least not without telling her the truth, and even though Daniela bugs me sometimes, I just couldn’t do it. So instead, I smiled my best fake smile and said, “If you need any help deciding what to wear, feel free to ask me.”

There are lots of rules a young Italian girl must follow if she wants to enter the Miss Basilico contest. For starters, she must be pure Italian, which means that neither of her parents can be white, because then she’s a half-breed.

She must be between fourteen and eighteen. She must also say a speech in Italian. But the most important thing of all is that the young Italian girl must have a talent.

“That’s where it all comes down,” Daniela said. “That’s when the winner gets separated from the losers.”

We were sitting in Daniela’s garage. The pageant was only a week away and Daniela said she was “sweating buckets,” that’s how nervous she was. I asked her what she planned to do for the talent competition.

“Are you going to serve tables at the pageant?”

I wasn’t trying to be mean, but Daniela got pretty angry.

“What, you think that’s the only thing I’m good at doing?”

“Well, what are you good at? Can you sing?”

Daniela thought for a bit. “No,” she said, shaking her split ends. “I sang ‘Ti Amo’ once at my cousin Angela’s wedding, but everyone booed me. Gimme a break. I was only eight.”

“Can you dance?”

“How the fuck should I know?” Daniela said. “You think anyone ever asks me?”

Daniela said that she
could
play the accordion, though. “Is that a talent?”

“Are you any good at it?” I asked.

“It’s an accordion,” she said. “They all sound the same.”

Daniela said the two songs she knew off by heart were “Ti Amo” and “I Will Survive.”

“Well, maybe you should stay away from ‘Ti Amo,’” I said. “Do the other one. It’s a very powerful song.”

“You think so?” Daniela asked me.

“Yes. It’s about a woman who falls in love with an
alien. One day, he comes back from outer space and she tells him to leave his key on the table, get back on the spaceship, and never come back. It’s very dramatic. People will relate to the message.”

Daniela spat on a tomato and rubbed it on her pant leg.

“Dramatic,” she said. “That’s a good thing, right?”

Every day when I delivered the papers, I’d see Daniela in her garage, standing in the middle of the tomatoes, practising on her accordion. When she hit a wrong note, she would yell “
FUCK
!” and smack the accordion. She was driving my mom nuts.

“When is that pageant again, Peter?” She was pacing in front of the living room window with her hands on her hips.

“Saturday night,” I said.

On Wednesday night, Mr. and Mrs. Bertoli took Daniela to pick up her dress at La Mirage, Sarnia’s fanciest dress store. It’s where all the girls get their prom dresses. Daniela came home with a red poofy dress and a big white tent with hula hoops. She told me it was a “crinoline.”

“My parents paid two hundred bucks,” she said the next day when she unzipped the bag to show me. “Two hundred bucks. That’s real fuckin’ taffeta, too.” Then she whistled through her teeth.

“How are you going to do your hair?” I asked her. I was eyeing her split ends.

“Lots of baby’s breath,” Daniela said. “I saw it in a
magazine. My aunt works in the hair salon over on Huron Street. I’m going to see her and she’ll fuckin’ fix me up and then I’m going to the Merle Norman to get my face painted on.”

I watched Daniela as she zipped up her dress bag and took it back into the house. I just knew I’d have to stop her from going into that pageant and embarrassing herself, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it without hurting her feelings. Maybe I could write the Basilico Club a sinister note with letters cut out from magazines.

“Danger!” it would read. “Death to all beauty queens! Cancel the pageant or else!”

Or what if I could convince the judges that Mr. and Mrs. Bertoli weren’t really Daniela’s parents, that Daniela was born white and had been thrown into a dumpster behind Mr. Bertoli’s restaurant by her white low-class mom and the Bertolis had found her and raised her as the Italian daughter they never had? Then Daniela wouldn’t be allowed to compete because she wouldn’t be a true Italian. She’d be an impostor.

Just then, Mr. and Mrs. Bertoli pulled into the driveway.

“Uh oh,” Mr. Bertoli said to me as he got out of the car. “Ow are you tomorrow, boss?”

At least, that’s what I think he said.

“Isa time for collection?” Mrs. Bertoli asked. One look at the Blue Jays toque on her head told me that no one was going to believe that the Bertolis were anything
but
Daniela’s real parents.

“No, not tonight,” I said. “I just came by because
Daniela wanted to show me her dress.”

“It’sa nice, okay?” Mrs. Bertoli said.

“Yes, it’s a very nice dress.”

“You know, I tell Daniela, I say ‘Why you wanna be Miss Basilico? It’sa too much work. You gotta smile alla time. You gotta wave alla time.’ But Daniela she say, ‘Dis isa someting I gotta do for me. You understand?’”

Mrs. Bertoli sighed.

“I say to Daniela, ‘No I’ma never understand.’”

“Uh oh,” Mr. Bertoli said. “Ow are you tomorrow, boss?”

I smiled and said “Yes.”

The rest of the week, I think I was more nervous about the Miss Basilico pageant than Daniela. I just couldn’t figure out why Daniela was entering the contest in the first place. I kept thinking back to what Mrs. Bertoli had said, about Daniela saying how she had to do it for her. What did she mean by that and did she really think she’d win? Part of me felt guilty, like I was watching her walk into a room full of tigers. Another part of me felt angry at her for wanting to walk in the room in the first place. Daniela couldn’t be
that
stupid, could she?

When Saturday night came, I sat on my front porch to watch Daniela leave for the pageant. She had some problems getting through the front door in her red dress and accordion, so Gianni had to push her from behind while Mrs. Bertoli pulled on her arm.

“Careful!” Daniela yelled. “You’re gonna fuckin’ rip it!”

Her hair was piled up and looked like a big black beehive. She had clumps of white stuff stuck in it, which I guess was the baby’s breath, but looked more like cobwebs to me. Mr. Bertoli had on a tie and a green shirt that was too tight. Mrs. Bertoli was wearing a dress that matched her toque.

Gianni was wearing his Burger King uniform.

“Good luck,” he said and got into his Camaro. “You fuckin’ cow!”

Daniela started yelling back at him, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying because Gianni backed his car out of the driveway, squealed his tires, and roared off down the street.

Then Mr. Bertoli made Daniela stand on the front lawn while he took pictures of her. “Hurry up,” she said. “My back is fuckin’ killing me. This accordion weighs a ton.”

Just before Daniela’s parents squeezed her into the car, she looked across the street and saw me sitting on the porch.

“What do you think?” she yelled and twirled around. “Pretty fuckin’ hot, eh?”

I nodded and gave her the thumbs up.

“I lost two fake fingernails pulling up my pantyhose and I got so much make-up on, I think I’m going to fuckin’ tip over.”

I just hoped Daniela wouldn’t use the f-word in her speech.

Once Daniela’s parents had her stuffed into the back seat, the Bertolis took off for the Basilico Club. A black cloud of smoke followed them all the way down our street.

As I watched their car disappear, I started to wonder. What if Daniela actually won? What if she didn’t swear in her speech? What if she hit all the right notes on her accordion? What if the judges thought she’d make the perfect Christmas elf? What if she really
did
set an example for Italian girls everywhere by showing them that dreams
can
come true if you believe in yourself?