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“Ha! I added palazzo to the name because you foreigners will pay twice as much. I just got the building. No money, lots of debt. I wasn’t even allowed to own it alone because I was a woman. I had been seeing Orlando on and off for most of school. He married me and his name was put on the deed. It worked for us. But he was an idiot. When the hotel made any money he spent it, so I told him to go away and let me manage things on my own.”
“He listened to you?”
“He listened to me so he could be with his girlfriends down by the seashore.”
“Sounds like my dad.” I tried to commiserate, to bring back some of the camaraderie we’d shared over dinner.
Giusy snorted. “Sounds like most men. My idiot husband left for longer and longer and then for good. I made sure he left for good.”
There was something ominous in her pause after that sentence and I nearly followed up with a question, but then she began to speak again.
“I thought if he was truly gone the hotel would be mine and mine alone, but everyone always tells me Orlando is the real owner when I try to sell it. I’ve done my best with the hotel. I got smart on the Internet. Taught myself the SEO. It was good for the town too, brought more people here, not that they ever thanked me. I made enough to send my own kids to Sciacca for school.”
“Where are your kids now?”
“Grown. I was pregnant at seventeen. I was a baby.”
“Do you regret it? Getting pregnant so young?” I asked it even though I knew it was also rude and taboo to say you wished your children didn’t exist, that you wished you’d had a different life.
“You can’t regret your children. But yes. Of course I do sometimes. I wouldn’t want to not be their mother. Not exactly. But I do wish I’d been able to do other things instead of mothering them all those years, having to make money to support them, having to give up what I wanted. Do you regret it? Rose told me you have a little girl.”
“I love my daughter.” The question overwhelmed me. Nearly five years into it motherhood remained a mystery to me. There was more I could say. I could tell Giusy how sometimes I wondered whether my restaurant ultimately failed because I took too much time away to be a mom or whether I was always failing at motherhood because I worked too hard on my business. The gnarled shame shifted every day, but the common thread was always my failure at something.
All I knew for sure was that at the end of each day I felt the crushing weight of wishing I’d done better in both of my roles, never mind trying to be a decent wife to Jack.
I could tell her how desperately Jack wanted to grow our family at the same time that I desperately wanted to grow my business. Jack had loved how ambitious I was until it got in the way of our life together. Then, according to him, I was aggressive and selfish when it came to making time for work.
I could tell Giusy about the positive pregnancy test I thought I buried deep enough in the trash can that Jack wouldn’t find it, but he saw it later that week when he was taking out the trash because he always took out the trash and was meticulous about plucking the soda cans out and getting them into the recycling bin. By the time Jack saw the test it was too late, I had started bleeding anyway. It was just a chemical pregnancy, but he was hurt I didn’t tell him right away. I also didn’t tell him when I got back on birth control either, and then he saw that on our insurance statement. That was the real betrayal. We’d talked about how many kids we wanted when we first got married. Jack said five and I said one and we settled on two. After we had Sophie we said we’d roll the dice and I wouldn’t go back on the pill. But then I got nervous. The restaurant was taking off and a new baby would require full-time childcare in addition to the expenses of the child we already had. Jack was working long hours in the DA’s office. Both of us had jobs that looked successful on paper but there was no cash to show for it. A nanny was out of the question and Sophie’s day care that billed itself as a “preschool” cost more than our mortgage. We couldn’t afford another child if both of us kept working. But that was the rational math of it all. What was harder to explain was that I couldn’t afford another child, not yet, maybe not ever. I couldn’t return to the months and months of little to no sleep. As a newborn Sophie had screamed uncontrollably for hours every time she woke at night to feed. Jack had to be in court first thing in the morning. I had to be at the restaurant too, but somehow court was more important, so I had always let him sleep, though I resented him for it. The lack of sleep ate away at my brain. One day after I’d passed Sophie off to my mother, I had tried to quarter a dozen game hens and cleanly sliced off the tip of my index finger instead of the chicken breasts. The top of the digit couldn’t be saved. I was slow and sluggish even as I made my way to the emergency room on my own. The stump still tingled each time I picked up a knife.
Having Sophie had broken my heart and brain open in ways I appreciated with time. I found new things to love about her every single day. But I had to let things settle, keep easing into the terror and newness of motherhood. Another seismic eruption of our life would have ended me. But that didn’t even make sense to me, so how could I say it to Jack, my ever-optimistic husband who doted on everything our daughter did, who took on much less of the mental load and just assumed that all parental love was exponential.
“What do you need to make it work for us to have another baby?” Jack had begged me.
I choked out a laugh and tried to joke like I always did when things got tense. “We need a third parent,” I said. “I want a wife.”
He looked me dead in the eye. “I want a wife too.”
I said, “Fuck you,” and that was that.
I definitely wouldn’t tell Giusy about how it was the final straw for Jack.
A pain seared behind my eyes. Hangover or memory? Both. I rooted around in the picnic basket, finding a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. We sat in silence. I smoked. Giusy ate. Then she smoked. She opened a bottle of white wine despite the fact that it was an hour before noon. I took a cup, hoping the hair of the dog would work better than the egg yolk I’d swallowed an hour earlier.
“Do you see that cave behind us?” Giusy pointed to the jagged opening in the mountain. “That is the cave of the terrible dragon who tried to destroy our village. He feasted on the children of Caltabellessa for centuries and the peasants believed that they could protect their good children if they sacrificed the bad ones. The women would bring their wicked children up here and let the dragon take them in order to keep the others safe. That smooth part of the rock over there. We call that the dragon’s ear. We whisper our secrets into it. Anything you want to tell it?”
I waggled my head no. What would I say? I couldn’t stand the person I’d become? I was a failure? None of that was a secret. But something about the story was familiar.
“Aunt Rosie used to tell me this story. Or some version of it. She heard it from her father. It used to scare the shit out of me.”
“Most of the stories we pass down are terrible ones.” Giusy blew smoke rings into the air. “But this one has a twist that I bet you do not know.”
“In the one I know, Saint Pellegrino slays the dragon and saves the village.”
“That is the version the men love to tell. It’s a silly story. Of course there was never a dragon. The myth was invented by the women of our village as a way to keep this cave, this place, just for themselves. A long time ago women would gather here and talk away from the ears and eyes of men. The story of the dragon kept people away. The story of the sacrifice allowed them to rescue young women and girls from the village who needed to escape from abusive fathers or priests. They said they fed them to the dragon, but really they took them away to another village and kept them safe.”
“Is that pretty well known?” I asked.
“No. Not at all. I learned it from a friend who works at the university in Palermo, who studies the history of women. She discovered it in her research and I love it, how the women helped one another, protected one another, found secret ways to cooperate. I want to help you, Sara.”
