Assunta touched the white bonecornettohanging against Stella’s chest. “You need this now.”
Stella stood motionless at the counter for a long time after her mother went to bed. She needed a lot more than protection against the Evil Eye right now. She needed a plan.
PLAY ALONG.
Stella remembered the folk adage that the best way to cover up a love affair was to get married to someone else—a girl suffered a lot less public scrutiny once her virginity was out of the way. Stella wasadopting a similar strategy, although to opposite end: she was going to save her virginity by getting engaged. Instead of continuing to treat Carmelo as her enemy, she would enlist him as an ally—albeit without his knowledge—in her plot to escape Tony. The months leading up to the wedding, Stella had learned from Tina’s experience, would be packed with frivolous expenses, which would offer her a cover for grafting money from her Silex salary into her secret stash. Meanwhile she would have to work out the logistics. She would have to prepare herself for the possibility that she might be disowned, kept away from her mother forever.
In any case, the first step in the resistance was entering into the engagement.
On Monday after work, Stella took great pains to look her best for Carmelo’s visit, locking herself in the bathroom one last time. She changed into her watermelon dress, even though it was a little too early in the spring for the airy linen, and affixed Fiorella’s butterfly brooch to its bosom. She didn’t have time to wash her hair before dinner, but she fluffed it with a comb and pinned it prettily above her ears. It had been long enough between cuttings that the resulting curls bobbed against her cheekbones, which she rouged.
She was reapplying her lipstick when she heard Carmelo arrive, then Tina’s nervous knock on the bathroom door. “He’s here. Stella?” She must have been wondering if tonight would be another showdown.
“Just a minute.” Stella took her time laying down one last coat. She felt quietly in control. It was the most peaceful, the happiest she had felt in months, since Rocco moved in—no, since before Louie got shot.
When she stepped out of the bathroom, the Fortunas were already noisily gathered around the spread Assunta and Tina had made: oven-fried chicken cutlets, hot artichoke hearts, still in the pan they’d been braised in, a two-pound bowl ofpasta aglio e olio,and a dandelion saladfrom the backyard. Stella affected an air of chastised melancholy as she offered Carmelo her hand in greeting. She didn’t want her father getting suspicious.
Carmelo didn’t wait long, only until everyone but Assunta was seated. Although there was barely space for him between the table and the dining room wall, Carmelo pushed back his chair and took a knee at Stella’s feet. “Stella Fortuna, I want to ask you a question,” he said. He pulled a jeweler’s box out of his jacket pocket, opened it, and set it on the table between them. Inside was a gold ring with three diamonds. Stella stared at it, distracted against her own will by the sparkle of the center diamond, which she couldn’t help but notice was bigger than the single diamond Rocco had bought for Tina.
Carmelo, who was still kneeling, took Stella’s hand, which she observed more than she felt. “Stella Fortuna,” he repeated her name, and then again, “Stella Fortuna, I would be honored if you would be my wife. Will you marry me?”
He spoke to her in Italian, but the words were the American ones, a gallant appeal for her favor. As if this were her choice. As if this arrangement were any less of a business transaction than Rocco’s bartering over lightbulbs with Tony.
“Yes,” Stella said quickly, and was glad it was the only thing she was required to say. In this actual moment of the proposal, her calm vanished and unease prickled in her stomach. She wasn’t a natural liar, even if she was good at putting on a show.
“Are you sure you want to marry me, Stella?” Carmelo’s blue eyes were steady and searching, and she struggled to meet his gaze. The ring in the open box sat on the dining room table between them. “For a long time you didn’t want to. Are you sure you’ve changed your mind?”
The unease that was simmering in her gut heated up to a boil. He was asking her point-blank what she wanted. Was it the right thing to lie to him, to use him?
But no, she reminded herself—he didn’t really want to know. He had never taken her seriously before. Why would he now?
“Yes, I’m sure.” She was shocked at the sound of her own voice, firm, neutral. There was no other way to win the war against her father; if Tony didn’t kill her, as he’d threatened, he would at the very least find some other man. “Before, I didn’t want to get married at all,” she said. “Now I’ve decided I would never marry anybody else.”
***
IT WAS A SIX-MONTH ENGAGEMENT,not too short, not too long. Carmelo’s ring was just a little too tight on her finger and left a red mark when she slid it off to wash her hands. “You have to stop doing that, Stella,” Za Pina warned her. “You’re going to lose it. You gotta get used to wearing it all the time.”
All the people who had nagged and pressured her for the last four years were suddenly kind and caring. They threw her parties and bought her gifts. They were genuinely happy for her, now that she was falling into line.
Carmelo came over for dinner three or four nights a week and everyone was very joyful now. He kissed her on each cheek now when he came and when he left, and she accepted his kisses. She made no trouble. She waited.
In the hot summer evenings of 1947 Stella sat at the kitchen table with a glass of wine, waiting for her cot, as Assunta scrubbed the stove and ran a lemon wedge over the counters to keep away the ants. When the rest of the house was asleep, they sat together and drank under the single naked bulb that hung over the linoleum. In the old days, Tina would have joined them, but now Tina was closed behind the door of her room with her husband. Nevertheless, this was the time of day Stella was happiest, sitting with her mother. On these sleepy summer nights, Stella could almost imagine they were home in Ievoli, in a world with no men to serve and service, just her and her mother, who loved her—that if she stepped out the back door into the warm evening air she would see not the picket fence that separated the Fortunas’ garden from the neighbors’ but instead via Fontana rolling down the mountainside into the breeze-bobbing valley of silver-green olive trees.
Stella loved her mother so much. Her chest ached with the idea that these evenings were the last they would spend together like this. Stella had forty-two dollars in her secret sock and six more weeks until the Fortunas thought she’d be walking down the aisle. She hadn’t figuredout where she could possibly go, but she was going to have to make her move soon. Make her move or be trapped forever.
“I’m so afraid, Mamma,” she said. They had finished the entire jug that night. Stella’s heart thumped, swelling painfully under the weight of what she wanted to say to her mother. “I’m not like you,” she managed. It was the closest she could get to what she meant. “I can’t be a mother.”
“Of course you can, little star.” Assunta wrapped her soothing hand around Stella’s wrist. “Any woman can be a mother. It’s natural. There’s no reason to be afraid.”
Stella fought back the grotesque image of a child swelling inside her. “It’s not natural for me. I don’t love babies the way other women do. I don’t even like them.”
“It is different when it’s your own, Stella. You’ll see. You love it more than anything. Everything will change for you.”
“What if I’m not like other women, Mamma?” Stella’s breath ran out before she could finish the question.
“You are,” Assunta said. “All women are the same.”
When her mother went to bed, Stella lay looking at the extinguished lightbulb, whose fiber seemed to give off a residual glow in the black and gray kitchen. Even her mother, the person she loved most in the world, didn’t understand that Stella meant what she said. Even her mother didn’t take her seriously.
