I even told her about this martial-arts class they were running at the Bridgeport Y. I figured, you know, a woman alone.
Nothing. She didn’t want nothing to do with any of them. Okay, I figured. This Gary thing’d take a while longer.
Instead she ends up with Mr. Bacigalupe.
I took Sandro’s advice; I didn’t push it. Let her tell me when she’s ready to tell me. So we sat there like chidrules and it never came up. I even said, “You got something you wanna talk about?” She said, “No.” She was always like that.
I wanna tell her, You get involved with him, I’m wearing black. I’m in mourning. I lost a daughter.
So we’re sitting there in the kitchen and she doesn’t want to talk about him and she doesn’t want to talk about anything else, either. I was telling her about my bursitis, which is awful lately. My shoulder, it absorbs the dampness at night. I feel like a sponge. She’s barely listening.
I told her the house looked good and asked if she was having company. She gave me a look like what was I getting at, and I felt like saying, Hey, forget it, let’s not talk, let’s just sit here, all right?
I asked about Gary, had she heard from him.
I asked about her son.
The dog, we talked about the dog.
Finally, I go, “Joanie, I give up. What do you wanna talk about?”
She goes, “Ma, you’re not helping any, you know?”
This is what she said to me, after I sat there for thirty-five minutes talking about things she could do to help herself. I felt like saying, Okay, maybe they weren’t the best ideas, but I was trying, you know? I was trying.
It hurt, what she said.
They think you don’t have any feelings at all, that you just come and go without them. We were over Lucia’s the other day, she and Todd were outside the whole time. It looked like hell. I asked her if maybe she shouldn’t come inside, and she came back at me so fresh I thought, Forget it, and went right back in the house. In front of her son, too.
Then she gets in these moods and it’s like, Jeez, Ma, we don’t see enough of each other. I just keep my mouth shut; I don’t say a word. Every now and then, though, I tell her, When you want something, you have to work at it.
They don’t wanna know nothing. They gotta learn the hard way, just like we did.
I can’t talk to Sandro about it. The kid’s fine. Gary’s coming back. She’ll work it out. Happy days are here again.
This morning we were sitting there in the breakfast nook, I was going through the mail. The Church was raising money again, like in the old days, for the orphans in the Philippines or Indonesia, the little kids with flies on their noses. And I started getting tears in my eyes. Sandro sitting there, thinking I’m nuts. And here’s the thing: I was crying for myself. I was looking at poor kids who didn’t have a pot to piss in and crying for myself, like seeing their faces was making me panic, making me think that there was nothing I could do to get out of my life.
TODD
In the toilet at Arby’s I tried to figure out what to do. On the metal wall of the stall there was a sign: IT ISN’T POSSIBLE FOR US TO CLEAN AFTER EACH USE. Somebody scratched out enough letters so it said, IT ISN’T POSSIBLE TO CLEAN AFTER U.
My mother says when I was little and a kid had been beating me up on the playground, she found me one night going to bed with a hammer.
I had time to confess and make it right and I didn’t. I had chances. I knew what the right thing was and I did the wrong thing. I had the Sacraments and all this training and I did the wrong thing, and kept doing it.
God’s supposed to forgive you if you’re sorry. I’m sorry.
Also in the toilet in Arby’s I said an Act of Contrition. I got off the toilet to say it.
Someone came into the bathroom and I had to get up. It was an older guy and he gave me a look when I opened the stall door. I don’t know what he thought I was doing in there. My knees were wet from the floor. My eyes were like I had an allergy.
Part of me is glad. Glad that someone knows, glad that something’s finally going to happen.
My dad’ll hear about it in the paper, or maybe from a relative when he calls like a month later.
There was this kid I knew in third grade. He always, always got in trouble. He would only get hit between classes. Sister would take him to the office then, so he wouldn’t miss anything. I remember the way, on the days he was in trouble, he spent the whole period at his desk, sitting up straight, his hands folded, waiting.
JOANIE
My mother and father argue about directions. They have fights over what’s faster, this or that road. Which has more traffic. My mother’ll say, Why you going this way? You coulda gone that way. As a kid, I sat in the back and had to listen. Even then I knew they were arguing about this decision instead of the other ones. How they ended up here, how they got here. Instead of where they ended up in general. I mean with their lives.
My mother’s turning into one of those old people who think the rules are going to hell everywhere, the kind who hang around the pool at condos watching for rule violations. Reporting the kids without towels, the kids who do cannonballs.
But then I’ll see, like this morning, that she left some stuffed shells for us, wrapped in that careful, housewifey way, and my heart’ll go out to her.
I don’t want to hurt her about Bruno. When I was with him, it was like my head was saying no but my mouth was saying okay. Which is about the way the two normally operate.
A month or so after Gary left, Todd and I were sitting on the floor in the living room one night, listening to the radio. We were in a kind of stupor. The TV was broken. It was hot, and Todd kept rubbing his forehead with a wristband he was wearing. It reminded me of the summer he was always drying his sweat with a hand towel he carried around. We were listening to an oldies station. They played Petula Clark’s “Downtown.” Todd hummed along. He sang the last part to himself at the end, and I remember thinking that maybe we’d be all right, maybe we were going to make it.
All these days since the car thing have been the same, like ugly cabins along a swampy lake.
I never tried to be Queen of Heaven, but I did want to be a good woman, a good mother. It turns out I didn’t know how.
I wake up every morning with my heart racing, like every day will be the day that things work out, or at least get resolved.
The sisters used to say, You don’t get exactly what you pray for, you get what God thinks is best. So I used to figure I might as well just wait for that, anyway.
My mother said to me once, just in passing, impatient about something or other, “Well, when were you ever happy?” It stuck with me. I should have said, Easter Mass, when I was little. With my white dress and white gloves. My candy to look forward to, the sun on the lawn in front of the church, the air fresh in my nose, the trees with the birds I didn’t know, talking, calling things like Red key, Red key, or else So Soon, So Soon.
What would she have said? She probably would have said, Oh, you weren’t even happy then. But I was, I think.
I just want it all to stop. This morning, after Todd went out, I sat on the sofa with his peeled-off sweat shirt, like it was the last warm thing of his I’d touch.
BRUNO
The way to get respect is to treat people like dirt. It’s surprising how many people hold this view. I’m told this often. People say this to me; I say no. But I’m no professor. Many times I’m wrong. Often I’m wrong.