Cettina had not paused her shucking. Stella was glad her sister hadn’t noticed anything awry; she couldn’t deal with Cettina falling to pieces right now. Keeping her voice calm, Stella said, “I have to go home, Cettina.” Although she wasn’t sure she would make it—what if she dropped dead right on the donkey path, like Nonno Franciscu had?
“What?” Cettina looked up. “You can’t. We have to get these to Don Pepe.”
“I don’t feel well,” Stella said. Actually, with each breath she took she became more certain she was going to die. “Something is wrong. I have to see Mamma.”
“What’s wrong?” Cettina pulled herself up to her feet. “What’s wrong, Stella?” Her voice was climbing in pitch and volume.
Stella wanted to be annoyed with her sister, but the bigger part of her wanted to cry. She had to remind herself that she wasn’t weak. She would die alone on the donkey path before she would cry. She stood up, too, and Cettina saw the blood on her hands and gasped.
“Stella! Stella, there’s blood!” That was all it took, Cettina was sobbing.
Fortified by her sister’s hysterics—the reminder that someone had to be the adult—Stella said, “It’s going to be fine. I just have to go home so Mamma can see if I need a doctor.” She wouldn’t need a doctor, because she would be dead, but it would be no help to tell Cettina that.
“I’m, I’m coming with you,” Cettina said, wiping snot off her face between sobs.
“Don’t be stupid! Finish these and take them to Pepe.”
But Cettina couldn’t do that—she was weeping with panic at the thought of being left behind—and so the morning’s work was abandoned there for some other enterprising harvester to claim. Later Stella would wish they had at least thought to steal some of the shucked fruits, but no, a whole day’s labor wasted.
They ran home down the mountain, which took half an hour. Assunta was sitting on the bed, nursing Luigi, who was three years old and should have been weaned a long time ago. Somewhat guiltily, Assunta pulled her breast back into her dress and stood up, leaving Luigi looking sullen.
“Girls,” she said. “What’s the matter?”
Cettina, out of breath from running and shuddering with tears, needed comfort and threw her arms around her mother. Stella, standing uncertainly in the doorway—would she infect her little brother?—lifted her skirts with her bloody hands, showing her dusty brown and red feet. “I’m bleeding, Mama. It’s coming out of my legs and my stomach. Everything hurts.”
“Oh, Mariastella,” her mother said. What was that tone in her voice, reproach?How could you let this happen to you?As an older woman, Stella would revisit this vivid moment, the memory of her mother’s face, and reread the dismay:How could this have happened to my baby already?But that conclusion required the wisdom of age. In the moment itself, there was nothing to fish her out of her pool of shame as her mother, unconcerned about contagion, guided her to a stool and patted her head, making her feel young and dumb for being afraid.
“You’re going to be fine,” she said, and then those words every girl has to hear at this same barbaric, uncomfortable moment in her life: “It means you’re a woman now.” Stella felt herself flaming red from her collarbone up to her forehead as her mother showed her how to wad a rag and explained how she needed to stick it up into herself. “You have to do that for about a week,” she said. “And remember that no matter what, you must never let any man see the bloody rags. Hide them untilyou can clean them. You should start wearing panties now, so it doesn’t fall out. Can you make some for yourself?”
“I can make some,” Stella said, her mind dull with her humiliation. She had nothing else to do for the afternoon, since they had lost all their chestnuts.
As she sat on the stool, the rag jamming up inside her where nothing had ever been before—a wet, heavy reminder that Stella couldn’t control her own life—her shame began to give way to anger. Her mother had known this was going to happen—she could have given her some kind of warning. There was no reason Stella had had to crouch in the chestnut fields thinking that today would be the day she died. This one thing Stella never quite forgave her mother for.
Cettina got her first period one month after Stella, even though she had only just turned twelve. She couldn’t stand to be separated from her sister in any way; even their womanly cycles matched. What a frustration this was to Stella—aching and indisposed at the same time every month. She knew Cettina wasn’t personally responsible for that, that it wasn’t as though she’d had a choice. But honestly.
***
CETTINA WAS GOOD IN THE KITCHENand helped Assunta in her self-sacrificing way. Stella would watch somewhat jealously as her mother and sister giggled and chopped and stirred. Stella consoled herself with the knowledge that she was more precious to each of them because she was aloof, turning up her nose at kitchen activities. They teased her about being a princess, but they spoiled her, brought dinner to her already cut and laid out on a dish, complained to each other about how lazy she was but cleaned up after her.
Well, that was all fine with Stella. She was no kitchen slave; she had other, more refined talents. She was the best needle crafter in the village. This was how Stella spent the heat of the day, her blind grandmother Maria reclining next to her on the bed incanting old rhyming stories as Stella made perfect things with her hands. The tiny complex patterns came as naturally as counting to ten to her. She made tablecloths, doilies, and dress lace, and she was so clever at it that other Ievoli girls asked for her help as they prepared their own trousseaus. Their mothers paid Stella in chickens, in cheese, in oregano pizzas big enough to cover half Assunta’s kitchen table and which Giuseppe finished all on his own when no one was paying attention. The brat.
“Too bad none of these girls can pay you back by helping with your trousseau,” Assunta lamented. “But no one is as smart as my Stella.” This was an unlucky thing to say, so Assunta immediately performed acruce.
“That’s all right. I won’t need a trousseau anyway, Ma.”
“No trousseau?” Assunta snorted. “What blankets are you going to sleep on after you’re married? Are you going to feed your husband dinner on a table with no tablecloth?”
“I’ll never get married,” Stella said. “Not if I can help it.”
“Madonna have mercy on my daughter.” Assunta clicked her tongue and crossed herself. “Don’t even say those things, Stella. You think it’s a joke now, but you’ll curse yourself someday if you have bad luck.”
Stella let it drop, because there was no point in getting her mother upset. But she had already started to make up her mind about her own future. She wasn’t interested in marrying a man like her awful, braying father, or having her body torn open to bear him a child. The more she thought about it, the less she could imagine being married to any man at all.
AFTER THE MIDDAY MEAL,while Stella stitched with intense focus by the lemon tree window, the whole of Ievoli shut itself up until the first call to mass at five thirty. Houses were silent and dark, the bougainvillea blossoms bobbing genially in the breeze the only sign of movement. The fountain, the village’s source of life, burbled unmolested by laundry-scrubbing housewives. The garden plots were as empty as if they had planted themselves, the shiny faces of the tomatoes and chili peppers glinting red on their righteous stakes. A foreign traveler passing through at the wrong time of day might think the town had been abandoned completely, that it was haunted by the ghosts of perfectionist horticulturalists.
The Fortuna house was among the shabbiest now. The Fortuna girls were at a social disadvantage, with their missing father and no dowry. But by 1935, when Stella was fifteen and Cettina about to turn fourteen, they had established themselves nonetheless as the Ievoli town beauties. They were good-looking to begin with, all clear skin and plump lips. But Stella had made them the most beautiful by making them the best dressed.
With the little bit of extra money she’d made from selling silk and lace pieces, Stella had purchased cloth from the peddler to make herself and Cettina fine new dresses. She experimented with stylish puffed sleeves and narrow, tailored waists. The girls changed into these dresses for mass in the evening, which was a vanity the Lord surely sanctioned because it gave everyone in town a reason to come to church, to gossip about the pretty, vain Fortuna girls.
