“Be…careful, girls…”
dance-running up paths the colors of dunes and earth, past donkeys and rocky ledges, trampling thyme and rosemary. Far below them the harbors of Santa Margherita and Rapallo. Gates to olive groves and vineyards, to farms and sheds. And the echoes of pigeons, following girls falling or drowning or dance-running from the smell of fish and mangoes and animals toward the glint of rings that look like one, not two rings
“Don’t touch…”
someone else’s unhappiness and joy next to her skin
“Just checking your oxygen, Kiddo.”
back from Italy, and asking others what they would have done with the rings. Leonora: “I would have kept them.” Her father: “Once you pick up a young bird, you’ve done harm. Because of your scent, the mother won’t feed it any longer.”
“Birds…young birds…rings are not—”
“Right, Kiddo.”
leaving the birds alone on the deserted path in the olive grove. But what’s deserted to you is a significant place to someone else
“Not…disturb…”
“Sorry if I disturbed you, Kiddo.”
“…the pattern.”
“Make a fist. Here we go.”
“Is the priest coming back, Julian?”
Priests and doctors. Spoiled men, all of them, demanding obedience. Not letting her girls touch the rings
“Someone…placed them here…intentionally.”
Rosemary and thyme and your great-grandfather is hiking through Liguria, a young man hiking through an olive grove, sun streaking through the trees, settling on something shiny on the path. Beads of water? A spider’s web? Silver…a ring. No, two rings…smooth, worn. One a wedding band. The other a band of four woven knots, tarnished on the inside. Leaving the rings in the next village he comes to, at the feet of the Madonna statue. A day later he hears of a miracle in the churchyard of Nozarego, how the Madonna restored two lost rings to a young woman just hours after she prayed to that statue, wedding rings of her dead parents, rings she wore on a chain around her neck because her fingers were too large for them. Your great-grandfather returns to Nozarego, knocks at the door of the priest’s house, tells him how he found the rings and left them with the statue. But the priest doesn’t want to hear. Tells your great-grandfather it’s a miracle, and that he is the instrument of that miracle. Warns that it would be a transgression to undo this miracle, that your great-grandfather must let the miracle be. The priest takes him to meet the young woman’s family, and your great-grandfather marries her the following week, believing the real miracle is how the rings led him to her
“Hold still, Kiddo. You can open your fist now.”
Your girls running up the path, hair flying, stone arches and steps and walls. Shoes in a window
“Don’t go…in there. They—”
No reason to scare your twins by telling them the saleswoman would rather cut off their toes than let them leave without buying tight tight shoes
“They expect…you to…buy.”
Buying prune yogurt, two in a package that’s purple with wrinkled prunes. Vitasnella. Con pezzi di prugna
“My recommendation is still to have your wife in the hospital.” Dr. Kiddo.
“It’s not what Floria wants.”
“Your wife would be a lot more comfortable. And so would I.”
“Not…about your…comfort…Dr. Kiddo.”
“Floria and I have discussed this.” Julian. “It’s not what we want. Anthony? Will you help me carry your aunt into the bedroom.”
“I’m here.”
“Lift her legs. Careful. Like that. I’ll take her shoulders.”
Two men to carry one skinny woman. Years of wanting to weigh less, and now you miss that gravity. One more kind of aloneness. Whenever you figure it out, this aloneness, it tricks you, takes you one degree further. And yet the more alone you are, the closer you get to yourself
Julian turns off the light, and it’s night again, his shape next to yours, his sorrow. His cool fingers graze your neck, then your forehead as if you were brittle. What you need is the bulk of his body on yours
anchoring you, searching with you for your girls in the monkey house that opens into the church where the Madonna is forever and before nursing the infant who’s already the man nailed to the nearby cross, then out into the mist of the piazza—“Steam will make it easier…that’s it, good, Floria girl, keep breathing…”—silver mist, and through that mist a girl dance-running toward you without help, no longer limping, but playful, Bianca, dance-running exquisitely, and Belinda right behind her, skipping, both in velvet coats, both restored to you, and once more time is forever and before. Forever and before Bianca falls
forever and before Julian fits himself against your side, cautious not to crush what’s left of you
forever and before rising from the signora’s bed. How much warmer the signora’s body is…Floria does not regret it. For years it felt like something she had to bring forward, talk it and rest it and go from there. Except she didn’t confess. Not with Malcolm. Not with Julian. There’s something loyal about secrets—they’re yours, all yours, holding on to you when nothing else will—and Floria no longer feels that anyone, even a husband, is entitled to them. If anything, she wishes she had more secrets, because the weight of all that was never brought forward has become so precious, so familiar, that to part with it would make her lighter yet
Anthony 2002
Acts of Violence
My mother is taking self-defense classes in the basement of a pawn shop on East 149th, the roughest neighborhood in the South Bronx. Of nine students, my mother is the oldest. The only other woman is half her age and owns a massage parlor near what used to be Alexander’s.
So far, my mother has studied how to free herself from a choking hold; assault someone who comes at her with a pool cue or broken bottle; break her attacker’s nose and elbow. When she visits Joey and me for the weekend in Brooklyn, she brings us fresh mozzarella from Arthur Avenue and wants to practice her maneuvers on the patio, where I’m setting the table.
“Come here, Joey, choke me from behind.”
At eleven, my son is already a head taller than my mother, and when he steps toward her, he moves with a grace I certainly didn’t have at his age. He has Ida’s build, long and narrow.
I catch his elbow. “I don’t think choking your grandmother is a good idea.”
“Then you choke me, Anthony,” she says.
“Let’s eat. I cooked Dad’s minestrone for you.”
“We can eat after you choke me.” White hair swings around my mother’s mottled face, transforms her into a photo negative of the mother I grew up with, the mother with hair all black and skin so white it glowed. When her hair faded, it began along her left eyebrow till all her hair was white, as though, all along, it had been her true color, waiting.
“But pool cues?” I ask her. “Broken bottles? Where does that man expect you to fight? In bars?”
“He used to work as a bouncer.”
“Cool,” Joey says.
“Not cool.”
“Cool,” he repeats, defiance in his eyes—that first flare of hate?—and even as I wonder what I’ve missed noticing, I know he’ll look at me like that again.
“The instructor says—” She drops her voice. Makes it go choppy. “‘Hit hard. Then get out. Courts give criminals more rights than victims. Someone can sue you if you don’t finish him. Don’t leave your calling card. Go home. Read about it in the paper the next morning. Say to yourself: So a mugger got killed…. Hmm…How about that?’”
“‘How about that?’” Joey imitates the accent. “‘So a mugger got killed. Hmm.’”
I envy their excitement, their bond. Nudge my way in. “What is that man’s background?”
“He’s in his forties, about ten years younger than you, Anthony. Came over from Norway when he was a boy. Still has a face like a boy, with those—”
“That is not what I ask
ed.”
“But that’s my answer.”
“What is his educational background?”
“A bit of everything.”
“I bet.”
“He has a black belt and teaches other classes, too.”
“Classes in how to hold up a liquor store? A bank?”
“Karate classes. Judo classes. Kickboxing classes.”
“You could sign up for a women’s self-defense class. I’m sure the YWCA has supportive programs…with other women there.”
“If I get attacked—” My mother raises herself to her full height of five feet and one inch. “—it’s unlikely that my attacker will be a woman. So I may as well train against men. And this instructor knows a lot. He even trains firefighters.”
“Thugs, too, I bet.”
“The week after 9/11 he started two classes that were only for firefighters.”
“You really believe what he’s teaching you can stop terrorists?”
“It’s far more complicated than that, Anthony.”
“You saw what Ground Zero looked like.”
“And I’ll never forget it.” My mother was with us last October, when Ida and I took Joey to Ground Zero and stood on a sidewalk crowded with people from different cultures, all speechless, all grieving across from what had become a mass grave. Many of us cried. No one pushed.
Until, all at once, a young woman with brassy hair and a brassy voice started shoving, yelling. “People, move. Walk. This is a side-W-A-L-K.”
I was stunned. All along I’d been reluctant to come here, to let Joey see this; but he’d told Ida and me that, before he could enjoy any part of Manhattan again, he had to cry at Ground Zero. And that’s what he was doing.
“Get it, people? A side-W-A-L-K.” Cheap leather jacket. Cheap makeup. A voice that could rattle a continent. “Get it?”
“Quiet,” someone said.
“So…walk, people.”
But as she went on like that, I had to smile—for the first time in weeks—because she was the one spark of life and energy here: she was the real New York. We talked about her afterwards, as we walked through Washington Square where jugglers were surrounded by audiences, where couples sunned themselves in the grass. Normal. As always. Life continuing as it was before the attack.
“I need you to practice with me, Anthony,” my mother tells me.
“I don’t want to choke you.”
“Will you at least grab me by the front of my collar?”
Cautiously, I test an edge of her silk collar between my right thumb and forefinger.
“Not like that.” She rolls her eyes to the sky. “Jesus Christ. You’re not buying fabric.”
How can I tell her that we draw toward us what occupies our passion—what we dread or love or want or hate intensely—and that I’m afraid of her drawing violence toward us with those classes of hers. The same way I have drawn violence to my family. As a boy I was pushy—skutchy, she called it—until I became afraid of wanting. If wanting anything as simple as a stencil kit could kill, I resolved, I’d stop wanting altogether. But inside me, the wanting grew, a voracious beast. My life’s work: to keep it caged.
My mother is watching me closely, so closely that I wonder if I’ve thought aloud. “There are things we need to forgive ourselves, if we are to continue breathing,” she says slowly. “Certain things we…did as children, Anthony. Especially if we did them to keep our family intact.”
We?
“But I did not keep us intact,” I remind her.
“You tried.”
“So…what bad things did you do as a child?”
She won’t answer, has no sins to offer me; yet in her eyes I see a legacy of sins no son should have to imagine for his mother.
“I don’t understand.”
“Forgiveness,” she says, “comes in the shape of a red umbrella. Comes in the canter of a horse.”
“I still don’t understand.”
She nods. Sits down. “Can we eat now?”
“But—Of course.” I give her what I’m good at. Food.
She takes a spoonful. “That little bit of ham…just a hint, the way your father made his minestrone. Wonderful. How is Ida?”
“All right.”
“Are you talking?”
“Yes.”
“To each other?”
“Of course we are talking to each other. We have to plan our visits with Joey.”
“Don’t call them visits.” She unrolls her napkin. “Being a father does not mean visiting your child.”
“Don’t you think I’d like to live here with Joey all the time?”
Ida and I take turns staying in this house and in the apartment above our bookstore, so that Joey can live in one familiar place. At work, she and I navigate around each other—pleasant and helpful, from what our customers must observe—she in the bookstore, I in the attached café where, enveloped by scents of garlic and cheese and rosemary, I re-create the meals I loved as a boy. Most of what I know about cooking comes from my father and Aunt Floria: his skill; her passion. “Italian comfort food for solitary readers,” one of the food critics wrote. I like to think of people coming here to be alone, satisfied as they eat and read. Watching them makes me less afraid of being alone. And so I feed them, coax them with my cooking into wanting to return.
I bought into Ida’s business the year before we got married. Before that, I used to help her with the café after roofing all day. That’s how we first met, when she advertised for a part-time cook. It’s hard to be near Ida all day. Nights I’m haunted by the concept of Elsewhere I figured out as a boy—that men did not exist without marriage. I used to dismiss it as a child’s misunderstanding, but away from Ida, Elsewhere—not belonging, not being rooted—is exactly how I feel. It makes me think of Uncle Malcolm, and though I haven’t been to jail, I, too, have moved along that edge of respectability. After I started helping Uncle Malcolm with his roofing business, I didn’t know how to get away from him until he died, and I was released to do the work I loved. When I married Ida, I felt myself opening myself to her as much as I knew how to. And then to Joey. But there are parts of me I can’t show him or Ida. The least I deserve is the loneliness of that.
For myself. But not for them.
Weeks I’m at the house, I often invite my mother, because she softens Ida’s absence, the only other woman who has loved both me and Joey. But there’s been nothing soft about my mother lately.
“The instructor showed us how to drive a fist into a groin,” she tells us. “‘Like holding an ice pick.’”
“Whenever you quote this man, you speak in this phony accent…some low-budget spy movie.”
“‘Like holding an ice pick.’” Joey is trying the accent. “‘Like holding—’”
“That’s just how the instructor sounds,” my mother says in her own voice.
“I don’t want Joey hearing this stuff.”
“You’re too protective of Joey.”
“I never expected I’d have to protect him from you.”
“From me?”
“From your influence.”
“Don’t say that.” She looks shaken.
“Not from you. I’m sorry. From your self-defense stories.”
Behind her are the purple wisteria vines Ida and I trimmed back so radically when we bought this place a decade ago. Vacant for years, the brownstone was crumbling in a yard so overgrown with poison ivy and wisteria and trumpet vines that we kept Joey out of there. The third time Ida left me—six separations and five reunions so far—I bought industrial-rubber gloves and went after the poison ivy with weed spray and clippers, amazed at the satisfaction I felt while yanking out those long vines. My revenge. As a boy, I’d touched poison ivy deliberately to prove that, just like Kevin, I was immune to poison ivy and sin and punishment, but the hot rash of blisters only confirmed that I couldn’t get away unscathed.
Beneath the tangle of vines in back of our house, I found a deep hole covered with rotting b
oards. A root cellar, I figured; but when I got the ladder and climbed down—grateful we’d kept Joey out of the yard—the hole was lined with cinder blocks. An abandoned fallout shelter from the fifties, about eight by eight. Olive-green canisters of water. Two corroded flashlights. A metal crate full of hardened packages. On one of them I could still make out letters: “General Mills.” Survival rations that, if indeed a nuclear bomb had struck, wouldn’t have saved us any more than cowering under our desks in school, chins down, arms pressed against our ears, fingers linked behind our heads in prayer, the way Sister had demonstrated, so we’d bypass purgatory and go directly to heaven. Duck and cover.
Where I tore out the poison ivy and filled in the shelter, lilacs and peonies grow now; roses and trumpet vines. I understand that, given its roots and the nature of our land, some of the poison ivy will reappear; but I’ve learned to identify it during any season—even without its shiny leaves—by the brown centipede hairs on the vines that suckle themselves to trees. I’ve learned what I must do to destroy it.
Our backyard is safe now: I have made it so.
But it’s not that simple with conflict. Here’s the prevailing struggle between Ida and me: she wants to climb into my darkness and understand me, while I fight her with silence to shield her from my darkness. Sometimes I still long to go without speaking for days. But I can’t anymore. Not as a father. For Joey, I’ve learned to pull words from myself.