The last time the three of us lived together was after the attack on the World Trade Center, when Ida and I raced to Joey’s school, horrified. We took him home, but even there we no longer felt safe. Not in our house. Not in Brooklyn. Not in the world. After a few days we stopped watching the news on television and listened to NPR instead; yet images of the twin towers crumbling—forever and again—replayed themselves inside our minds when we closed our eyes.
Ida and I didn’t sleep well, and whenever one of us woke up, the other lay already awake. One night I heard her slipping out of bed, her slow bare feet on the wooden floor, the flush of the toilet. Then she burrowed back under the quilt. Shivered. Four in the morning, and the house was cold.
“Maybe we should,” I said, “you know, get a gun?”
“Maybe…But would we shoot it?”
“I would. If terrorists broke into our house, I would.”
“Terrorists need bigger targets than us. Targets that make the news.”
“Buildings…Bridges…Your feet—”
“My feet?”
“They’re like ice.”
“That’s why I need to warm them on you, Antonio.” Ida called me Antonio, the way my grandparents used to. She used to say the Italian version of my name was sexy, but I hadn’t heard that in a long time, not since she’d accused me that I didn’t desire her. And when I’d said I did, she’d insisted she didn’t feel any desire coming from me.
“We’d have to keep the bullets in a separate place,” I said. “Hide them from Joey.”
“You believe it’s going to happen again?”
I hesitated. According to Ida, I was tentative. Timid. “Some day,” she liked to say, “you may finally have to decide something, Antonio.” Now, as I felt her waiting, I told her with a certainty I didn’t feel, that, yes, I would shoot, and that I’d aim for the legs.
“What good would that do?”
“Stop them.”
“Too easy to miss.” Ida used to watch Cagney and Lacey.“Besides, if you get one leg, someone can still come after you. Not to mention the other terrorists.”
I thought about hiding places for bullets. Thought about getting shot. Reached down and rubbed my wife’s feet between my hands.
Ida sighed. Shifted closer. “What are you…doing?”
I traced the delicate bone spurs above the ridge of her left foot. “Warming your feet,” I said and stroked the tender spots between her toes, the rough skin above her heels.
My mother sets a bakery box with Florentines on the counter, and when I kiss her cheek, she leans into my arm. “Let’s just look at him.” She motions toward Joey mowing the lawn, carving his own trails.
He’s wearing his red jacket with the decals of all the teams sewn on it, and the red leather cap that goes with it. When he notices us, he waves. Skips. Walks two steps and skips again.
“What a performer,” my mother says affectionately.
“He has that from you.”
“Early training.” She waves back to him, and a whiff of basement pool rises from her—chlorine and mildew and dingy lockers—a smell I used to find on Ida some days, and I’m right back there in the water, with Riptide Grandma, both of us silly and wild, exuberant, as if we were the same age. She’s floating on her back, showing me how to: “Once you believe you can rest on water, you’ll never be afraid of sinking.” My mother inherited the key to the pool from Riptide, who inherited it from Great-Aunt Camilla, and the building is large enough so that others assume my mother lives there, including the doormen, who appreciate the generous tips she gives them the week before Christmas.
“Every week Joey mows a different pattern,” I tell her. “Figure eights; diamonds; a grid.”
“That means he enjoys it.” She’s delighted to have a grandchild after years of pointing out to me what she called “daughter-in-law material”—in restaurants or in stores or on the street. “This one is intelligent,” she’d say. Or: “Such a kind face…definitely daughter-in-law material.” Or: “Not daughter-in-law material. Greedy eyes.”
Joey glances over his shoulder, walks taller, faster, as he cuts diagonal stripes into the grass. When we step outside, toward the buzz of his mower, he stops the engine.
“I want to learn kickboxing, Grandma.”
“Kickboxing is dangerous,” I tell him.
“Grandma does it.” Green eyes like mine. Frog-green, my cousin Belinda says.
“It’s dangerous for your grandmother, too.”
“Not if you do it properly,” she corrects me. “The instructor uses the best of each form, whatever is most effective.”
“How did you find your instructor, Grandma?”
“The Yellow Pages.”
I groan.
“I called four numbers, and this man was the only one who had a class starting the day I called. He said: ‘Come and watch and try if you like.’”
“What’s the urgency?” I ask.
She expands her lean shoulders, frail wings that won’t get her anywhere, and I want to wrap her into my arms, keep her sheltered. “I used to think you could leave fear behind if you chose to. But lately I’ve been feeling afraid again. Of what’s happening in our country. Almost every day, we’re warned of terrorist attacks, and—”
“But 9/11 did happen,” Joey reminds her.
“Absolutely.” She nods. “And it was terrible. Monstrous. That’s what makes this fear so real—9/11 happened, but it has become increasingly monstrous, because the government is using it to take away our rights…supposedly for the sake of our protection. ‘Huddle closer. Only we can protect you.’”
“You need to be careful,” I say. “Saying these things aloud—”
“Let’s look at it on a smaller scale, then…at a family where one of the parents—the father, say—beats the child…makes the child afraid. Afraid of him and of telling. And all along that father promises: ‘I’m the only one who can protect you.’ He teaches the child to fear. Reminds the child of what happened and can happen again.”
Joey is nodding. “Just as we are reminded of 9/11.”
“Right. It’s not that terrorists attack us every day. But we’re taught to be afraid it will happen again. The government color-codes our fear, tells us how afraid we need to be today. Tomorrow. And we’re promised that the only one who can protect us is the person warning us. And so we draw closer to that leader. Let him govern us with fear.”
“It’s not wise to say these things aloud.”
“True. And that fact, alone, must show you how many rights we’ve already lost. Remember those three firefighters who were suspended the week after 9/11 because they wouldn’t fly the American flag on their engines? A lot of people are still being harassed for not flying the flag. It means you’re not patriotic. Listen, I’ve lived a long time, but this is much worse than the McCarthy years. And it’ll only get worse if we don’t stop it. If we don’t reclaim that absence of fear.”
I glance at Joey. “Not in front of him.”
“Joey can think for himself. With this whole ‘axis of evil’ thing, I’m far more afraid of our government than of terrorists.”
“I don’t want Joey repeating any of this in school.”
“If his teachers are any good, they’ll get the students thinking…discussing nationalism…its impact on other countries, too, throughout history. Aren’t you worried we’ll lose freedom of speech altogether?”
“Not really.”
“Well…I am.”
“Do me a favor,” I tell Joey. “Let’s keep this discussion in this house, all right?”
My mother laughs. “You sound like your father, Anthony. ‘Whatever the Amedeo family talks about in the car, stays in the car. And whatever—’”
“‘—the Amedeo family talks about in the house, stays in the house.’ My father was a man of great wisdom. But really, now…what do those classes of yours have to do with any of this?”
“Learning to defend myself is one thing I can do to prote
ct myself right now.”
“It won’t protect you from terrorists.”
“No.”
“Or from the government.”
“No.”
“Then—”
“It protects me from the fear.”
“That man’s ethics worry me.”
“Absolutely.”
“He’s an opportunist.”
“An opportunist. I’m glad you’re seeing that, Anthony.”
“How can I not? Just consider how he pounced on 9/11 to promote himself.”
“He’s a dictator.”
“Hel-lo…” Joey waves both hands to interrupt us. “Hel-lo…”
“I wouldn’t call him a dictator. But scheduling classes for firefighters and capitalizing on—”
“We’re not talking about the same person, Anthony.”
“Hel-lo…” Joey’s hands are still up. “That’s what I was trying to tell you.”
“No wonder we agreed,” I say.
“Let’s keep going like this. Let’s talk about government and religion on the same mattress. I know we agree on that.”
“Yes. I’d rather have them fighting each other than combining powers.”
“Agreed.”
“Now let’s talk about the instructor’s ethics.”
“Oh…his ethics worry me, too, Anthony.”
“Finally.”
“No. All along. But I’m not going to him for the study of ethics.”
“It’s street fighting.”
“That’s what I plan to learn.”
“Cool,” Joey says.
I give him a warning glance. “Not cool.” I have feared for him since his birth. Even before his birth. That’s why I waited to be a father. Too long. Ida wanted two children at least; but I know that terrible things happen.
That I cause them to happen.
All Ida knows is that my cousin died as a girl.
Early in our marriage, at a family dinner, when Ida asked my mother how Bianca’s death happened, everyone stared at me; and in that brutal moment—that brutal and eternal moment without sound—it came to me that family is the most violent unit, and I felt certain that retribution would come from within my family.
Aunt Floria was the first to glance away. Her daughter’s death is one huge ripple—a tidal wave, rather—that seized all of us and flung us down in strange formations from where we’ve struggled to come back to what once was familiar. It was different for every one of us. There was no clarity, no common focus, only conflicting angles of vision, colliding and aligning in a mosaic, chaotic and orderly, shifting whenever one of us seized upon some measure of guilt to keep us linked to Bianca: for my mother that it happened while I was alone with Bianca in the kitchen; for Aunt Floria that she wasn’t in the kitchen to prevent it; for Belinda that she hid the onyx giraffe.
For me, of course, it’s that last minute by the open window.
Sometimes I dream the story of my family, the dream-story in which Bianca is still alive. Most of it is without texture and color, as if I were watching shadow dancers through a translucent curtain, flat shadows that shrink or loom depending on how close they come to the lights, one suddenly twice as large as the other, the way people will loom inside your mind when they fill your thoughts. When one of the dancers moves in front of the curtain, she’s suddenly her regular size, three-dimensional, and wearing colors: red and yellow and purple. In my dream-story, the only moment that stands out like that—sharply; vibrantly; irrevocably—is when Bianca climbs from the chair to the windowsill. Countless times I have touched that moment just as those dancers touched the gauzy curtain between them, when it looked as though the dancer in front were reaching up toward the hand of the shadow giant behind the curtain, who was reaching down. Countless times I have revised that moment when Bianca stands up on the windowsill, and I usually manage to freeze her the moment before she flies away.
I can. As long as I cease to want anything. As long as I remember this: wanting is a reason for not having. I practice not having many things. If things accumulate, I give them away.
I’m so consumed by the effort of keeping Bianca there, on the windowsill, that sometimes I wish I could let her fall, hear her scream as she plummets to the ground, stand by her grave, and watch her coffin sink into the ground. And live through that.
No one asked me: “How did you trick her into flying?” And because no one did, I could not assault my family with the truth, could not trade confession for atonement. My penance: to keep my family braced with my silence. At first I kept the silence to protect myself. Then to protect my parents. Then Aunt Floria. And now my son, although I suspect that what continues to harm long beyond the act of violence is the silence. No one mentions Bianca when I’m around. Still, I’m sure any conversation that breaks off when I enter a room has to be about her. I believe they want me to forget Bianca ever existed. But I want her to exist. And some days, I manage to persuade myself that she flew off on her own. That I was only teasing her. That we both heard the long-drawn sighs of an accordion. That she said, “There’s Papa.” And that I tried to stop her.
When I offer to pay for cabs to my mother’s class, she refuses and continues to walk from her apartment to Jerome Avenue to catch the Woodlawn IRT to 149th, then walk across to the Hub. And that’s while it’s still light. To think of her coming back after dark by herself makes me sick with worry.
“I like to walk,” she tells me.
“As far as I’m concerned, that class is the most dangerous thing in your life.”
She assures me the students hold vinyl bolsters between them when they team up to rehearse their kicks and punches.
“That’s not what I meant, but even that could injure you. Some of those types must be twice your weight. At your age—”
“The only bad thing so far is a rash on my feet.”
“What if one of those types followed you from that neighborhood?”
“The carpets there…But now I wear socks.”
“You told me your legs were sore.”
“Only the muscles in my calves. It means I’m getting stronger. Now, quit skutching me, Anthony.”
I search the New York Times instead of skimming it. Suddenly there are more reports of blood and violence in the world, stimulating further violence.
Wednesday evening, I call my mother to make sure she’s back from her class. But no one answers. Ten minutes later, I try again. Nothing. By now, Ida will have tucked Joey in for the night. It’s what I miss most when I stay at the apartment, the ritual of saying good night to my son, turning his reading light so we can cast shadow animals against the illuminated wall, asking him, “Are you quite settled?” and hearing him say, “Quite settled, Daddy.”
If only I could keep him at this age, where he’s content to find the shadows of animals in the configurations of his hands. Whenever it’s Ida’s turn to live in the house with Joey, I call frequently, because the apartment feels bleak after the bookstore and café downstairs have closed. I make plans with Joey to ride bikes or go to Yankee Stadium. I get us good seats, though somehow I still like the cheap seats in the top bleachers.
Traces of Ida are everywhere in this apartment. In our house, too, but at least there I’m with Joey and don’t need Ida quite as much.
At nine-forty-five I finally reach my mother. “Tell me something—”
“Hold on, Anthony. I just got in.”
I hear her setting down the phone. A man’s voice in the back. Something clunking. I’m ready to call the police.
A click. “Can you hear me?”
“Is someone bothering you?”
“Yes. You.”
“What was that noise?”
“My shoes. I kicked them off so I can sit on the bed and put up my feet while I’m on the phone with my son, who—”
“I also heard a voice.”
“Now, that is low-budget movie stuff, Anthony.”
“I can hear someone there with you.”
&nbs
p; “Probably just the television.”
“It doesn’t sound like television.”
“Oh…you must have heard James Hudak. He’s replacing some wiring.” She has always felt sorry for James—used to feed him dinner now and then during those months my father stayed with Elaine. After James’ grandmother died, he took over her lease, and he’s lived on the first floor since, never married, working as a waiter a couple of days a week, trading repairs for my mother’s cooking.
“Make sure you lock up after James. I fretted about you all day at the café.”
“You should just cook.”
“I can cook and fret.”
“You’re too good a chef to piss it away with fretting.”
Next I call Ida, try to win her back by getting her to fret with me about my mother. “I can already see my mother crouched by a dumpster, bleeding from a knife wound in her belly. Or in a coffin, her lips painted a vulgar pink that—”
“Pink is not her color,” Ida interrupts.
“I have visions of my mother kicking and punching four hairy bikers who take a broken bottle to her face.”
“After she gets out of the coffin?”
“A different scenario. Altogether. You’re not taking me seriously. All that could happen to her. I have visions of her in a coma that has lasted years, hooked up to machines, her skin the color of salt. I see her, Ida. I hear her. Even in my dreams, I see her. And now she wants me to attack her.”
“Joey told me.”
“Fighting with words isn’t enough for her anymore, she says. Do you think she’s maybe…you know, maybe getting senile?”
“No,” Ida says firmly. “Leonora is very clear and determined.” Ida loves my mother. Admires my mother. Once a month, the two of them swim in the ancient basement pool where Riptide Grandma used to do her one mile every morning after mass.
“She used to talk about plays she wanted to see, about her friends. Now all she talks about is that class. I think she likes the danger.”
“I’m sure she does.”
“Really?”
“Leonora needs a bit of an edge.”
“I’ve offered to help her move to a building that has security. That old neighborhood used to be great, but now it’s claustrophobic. The noise, the dirt—”