Stella swallowed. “I wasn’t—”
“He’s a good man, Stella,” Tina interrupted her. “You should stop teasing him. He doesn’t deserve it.”
Tina dropped the rag in the sink and left Stella alone in the kitchen.
***
INFEBRUARY 1947,Tina had been married six months. The first three, the ladies at the Sacred Heart socials joked about Tina’s robust good health and how a little one was probably on the way, but when Tina blushed and waved them off they left her alone, because everyone knows it’s bad luck to talk about a pregnancy before the mother is showing. By the holiday season, though, Tina was fair game. She’d been married long enough, and all the ladies who’d already had to go through it wanted a turn at her, to make sure she had to go through it, too. They’d come up to her after mass and pat her belly, right there in the church, and ask her if there was something cooking.
“We’re trying,” Tina would say, turning her dark pink.
The ladies would cackle and say, “You have to try harder!”
Now that half a year had passed, people asked Tina point-blank what she was waiting for, or if something was wrong. Tina didn’t know how to answer these questions and became flustered and downtrodden. It was upsetting to watch. When she could, Stella would step in and change the subject; usually this meant offering herself as a sacrificial lamb, because most ladies were more disgruntled that Stella wasn’t married than that Tina wasn’t pregnant.
On Ash Wednesday, Tina made a huge dinner for the whole family, hot boiled ricottapolpette,parsley-baked fish, freshlinguineshe had cut before work. But her six-month anniversary had just come and gone and she was so distraught by that milestone that she couldn’t eat her own feast. Six months of being a wife and she hadn’t been able to do the most important thing.
Stella rubbed her sister’s back while Tina cried in the Caramanico bedroom. “What’s wrong with me, Stella?” Tina asked, as if Stella could possibly have the answer.
“You know it can take time,” Stella said. “You’ve heard all the same stories I have. It’s only been six months.”
“Maybe I did something wrong and God doesn’t want me to be a mother.” Speaking these words made Tina start sobbing again.
“Tina. Enough. You’ve never done anything wrong in your life.” Stella scratched gently at Tina’s scalp, which had always soothed her since she was a little girl. “Just give it time, little bug, and pray to Santa Maria. I promise I will pray for you, too.Va bene?”
Stella did not want to see Tina suffering like this. But she also wanted Tina to conceive as quickly as possible for selfish reasons; if there was a grandchild for Tony and Assunta to concentrate on, there would be less pressure on Stella to marry Carmelo.
NO ONE COULD ACCUSETINAof not working that particular chore as thoroughly as she worked any other. She had told Stella more than once that she hoped Rocco’s enthusiasm would eventually wane, but behind their closed bedroom door Tina seemed not to suffer inordinately while paying her marital debt. That very night, only hours after she had cried too hard to eat her ownpolpette,Tina made so much noise, soft cries like a little baby’s, that Stella, tiptoeing to the bathroom, paused in the hallway to listen in disgusted amusement. Rocco’s voice was a low, coarse rumble, his words obscured, but Tina’s were not.
Stella shouldn’t have, but she did: she took a careful, silent step toward the door of her old bedroom and laid her ear against the wood.
“That’s nice,” Stella heard, then Rocco’s low murmur, then “That’s nice” again.
It was not the first time Stella had overheard the Caramanicos in the act—it would have been impossible not to, with Stella’s sleeping just around the corner in the kitchen—but she still found it horrifying and fascinating, almost unbelievable, that her good-girl sister seemed to enjoy having such an awful thing done to her. Breathing shallowly, the door cool against her too-hot ear, Stella tried to guess what the sounds she heard could mean. She felt the familiar knot in her stomach, the ball of nausea that always accompanied her dream, as she imagined what Tina must be letting Rocco do.
Stella was so focused on not betraying herself by making any noise that she failed to notice her father’s approach until his musty, garlicky night breath landed on her neck. “Jealous, eh?”
Stella coughed in surprise, choking on her own spittle as she whirled around, bringing herself eye level with a sweat-matted T of curling lead-gray chest hair.
Tony chuckled. “I always knew you were a little whore. You can barely hide it.” Before Stella’s half-asleep brain even caught up with what was happening, her father reached out and cupped her left breast in his hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you somepistolareal soon.”
FOR THE FIRST TIME,Stella thought of leaving Bedford Street. An unmarried woman leaving her parents’ home—it wasn’t done, but how could she go on living here? Once the idea had crossed her mind, she thought about it constantly. She just had no idea how she could do it, short of marrying Carmelo Maglieri, but that would be taking her body out of the jaws of one wolf and putting it naked into another’s.
Becoming a nun seemed like a terrible idea to Stella—nothing but housework and praying all day, a prisoner locked away from everything that was interesting and delightful in the world. But how else did a woman make it on her own? She had no education and very little English. The problem was larger than Stella’s limitations, though. In the world where the Fortuna girls had been raised, a woman never left her father’s house until she was married. To run away was the same thing as to become a whore. If she did run, she would risk breaking herself away from her world forever. She would be shunned in church. Her friends might not be allowed to see her anymore. Her mother’s heart might break. Stella shoved aside the dread of what Assunta’s reaction would be—Stella couldn’t worry about her mother right now.
Whatever form her escape would eventually take, she did know she would need money. She had some, a small savings she had been siphoning off her factory salary before turning it over to her father. Onemorning in February Stella dawdled getting ready so she could count the money after Rocco had left for work. She had fourteen dollars in change. Only fourteen dollars. She thought of the fifteen dollars she’d spent on Tina’s shower with some chagrin, but then shook that off—that had been one of the happiest days of her sister’s life, and her own. But other than the shower, there were dresses Stella hadn’t needed to splurge on, the money she’d spent on movie tickets and soda fountains with the girls. Her mind was churning, a mush of frenzied strategic planning and self-recrimination.
“You’re going to make us late, Stella,” Tina said as they sat on the Caramanico marital bed and counted out the quarters and dimes.
“I wonder how much rent Papa charges,” Stella said. She was thinking about Miss Catherine Miller, the tenant who rented the third-floor apartment from Tony Fortuna. Miss Miller was a retired schoolteacher and had never been married. Stella wished she could ask the woman how she’d left her father’s house. But Miss Miller was an English-speaking American, for whom the rules were different. And the old lady had never been particularly nice; there was a risk she would repeat anything Stella said back to Tony. Stella knew better than to trust anyone but herself.
“He charges twenty dollars a month,” Tina replied.
Stella eyed her sister, already buttoned up in her winter coat. “What? Why do you know that? He told you?”
“He told Rocco. You know he’s trying to get a tenant to move out so Rocco and I can rent one of the apartments.”
Stella felt a sparkle of relief. The end of her kitchen-sleeping nightmare was in sight. “When?”
