ONE PERSON DID TAKESTELLA SERIOUSLY:her enemy, her father. He’d been watching her carefully, waiting for her to slip up. Maybe she had been playing too docile; maybe that had raised his suspicions.
Stella was still a little hungover when she got home from work the next day. Her headache had fermented over the course of eight hours on the assembly line. The air in the Bedford Street house was swampy with late-August heat and heavy with the basil-garlic aroma of Assunta’sraù.Unknotting her head kerchief, Stella followed Tina toward the kitchen, where they usually fixed a snack before dinner.
But Tony was home today, and he was sitting at the kitchen table. From the way Assunta was standing silently by the stove, staring into her pot, Stella knew something was wrong even before she saw what Tony had in front of him: a pile of coins; an array of crumpled dollar bills that had been smoothed flat; a flaccid knitted pink sock.
“Papa,” Tina said.
“Why don’t you leave, Tina,” Tony said. “Go to your husband.”
Bright red face hanging, Tina hurried out of the kitchen. She did not meet Stella’s eye as she passed. In retrospect, it all should have been clear then, but Stella’s mind was still struggling to catch up.
“Tonnon.” Assunta was crying—why hadn’t Stella noticed immediately?
“Quiet, woman.” Tony didn’t look or sound angry. He patted the pile of coins on the table in front of him. “Rocco gave me all this money,” he said to Stella. “He found it in a drawer in his room. He was worried it might be stolen from me, so he turned it over. Do you know where the money came from, Stella?”
Rocco. The pervert, the thief, the betrayer. Stella felt a wash of guilt, guilty blood rising into her cheeks and drumming in her ears. She fought back the guilt with anger. “It’s mine,” she said. “It’s my money.”
“What do you mean, it’s yours?” Tony’s eyebrows were jumping. “You say it’syourmoney but you mean it’smine,right? You’re my daughter, and as long as you live in my house the money you bring in is my money.”
Stella’s mind was hot with stupefaction as she tried to think of a way to calm him down. Assunta was crying into her hands now, her whole face obscured.
“What is the money for, Stella?” Tony said. “What have you been stealing money from your father for? Your father who’s been spending his every penny to give you a beautiful wedding?” His chair shrieked against the linoleum as he stood. “Thirty dollars just for the goddamn flowers, eh?”
Her money, spread out over the table. Irrationally, Stella triedto think of how she could take it back. Later, she couldn’t explain to herself why she hadn’t just bolted—hadn’t recognized the hopelessness and run for her life. In the moment, though—well, it was one of those moments a person doesn’t understand as it happens, only after it’s over.
“Well?” Tony was standing in front of her now, he was gripping her shoulder, his wide uncompromising thumb driving into the soft partable flesh of her arm socket; he was forcing her up against the red-flowered wallpaper. Stella emitted an unintentional sound, a grunting yelp. Tony seized her loose curls in his left hand and bashed her head into the wall, knocking it into Assunta’s shrine to the first Stella. Her vision smearing and then clearing, Stella saw that the wood-framed photo had tumbled to the floor, facedown. “Well,fhijlia mia?What was the money for? Was it to pay me back for your wedding cake?”
“It was to run away.” The words came out of her mouth like a curse; then and later she would never know why she said them. Maybe it was because she was so angry she would have cut off her own head to annoy him. Maybe it was because she had never been a very good liar, or because she knew in her heart that her plans to run away were over forever now, and she lashed out in despair. Or maybe it was the little ghost who made her say it, facedown on the floor, taking this one last chance to get even. “I was going to run away,” Stella said, “and I was never going to come back.”
“Shut up!” Tony roared at Assunta, who was shrieking now, an earsplitting ululation that made Stella’s skin crawl. “You,” her father said to her, “you make your mother cry. Her oldest daughter says she’s going to run away and live like a whore?” His fist full of her hair, he dragged her, hunched over and stumbling like a three-legged dog, out of the kitchen and down the hall toward his bedroom. Stella’s whole body was hot with panic, her skin prickling as she tripped over herself to keep up with him. “You need to be taught a lesson,” Tony was saying. “You’re so damn stubborn you refuse to learn your place in this world. Well, this can’t go on. I can’t give you to your husband like this.”
He threw her onto his bed and locked the bedroom door behind him, an oak safeguard between himself and his wife’s bloody knuckles and clawing fingernails. “Take off your dress,” Tony told Stella. “Your shoes. All your clothes. Take them all off.”
“I—” She stood up, staring at her father, his tousled hair a black halo in the dim afternoon light. Stella was dipping into her nightmare—it was exactly like this. Paralysis settled on her limbs. She swallowed. “What?”
“I said take off all your clothes,” Tony said. “You can obey me and take them all off nicely or I will cut them off you with my knife.”
Her fingers vibrating, her conscious self retreating into the high-up window ledge of her mind, Stella turned away from her father so she faced the wall, toed off her shoes, contorted her arms to undo her own zipper. Her body undulated with shudders. She folded her dress and dropped it onto her shoes.
“All of it,” Tony said. “Everything.”
She unclipped her brassiere and watched it fall to the ground below the wealth of her hanging breasts, her elbows jerking, shivering as if she were freezing to death. Gooseflesh covered her arms, her scars rippling with cold fuzz. She hooked her thumbs into her girdle and, choking on saliva, peeled it down over her hips. Behind her the metallic click of her father’s belt buckle, thezzzziffof the leather strap being pulled out of its loops.
But he didn’t rape her, like the dream version of her father would have. Because whatever other forms Tony Fortuna’s perversions took, he was not a man to throw away his daughter’s only asset, her virginity. He might have stared at her breasts and pinched her fat and given her nightmares about his unquenchable desires, but Tony knew where he drew his own line. A woman’s virginity was for her husband; that was a sacred rule. Tony had learned that rule from his own mother, whose father had not protected hers.
No, he didn’t rape her, he only beat her. He told her to get on the bed, and when she resisted and screamed, he brought down his fiston her cheek, the same gesture as if he were slamming a glass down on the table. Later the molar and incisor he’d loosened with this blow would fall out, creating the third and fourth holes in Stella’s gums. After this impact, which made Stella’s head ring, she didn’t resist anymore, but lay on the bed and took the beating, leather belt and metal buckle against bare ass and thigh and back.
“You’re worse than a donkey,” Tony said to her. She couldn’t see him, but his breathing was heavy, staggered. “I have to break you like a donkey if I’m going to teach you to obey your master.”
Staring at the wall as she absorbed the pain, turning herself over to the ordeal so that it might end faster, she thought of theciucciuthey had left behind in Ievoli and wondered if Tony would have really done the same thing to him.
THAT WAS WHENSTELLAFORTUNA GAVE UP.She gave up resistance. She gave up everything.
STELLA MISSED TWO DAYS OF WORKbecause she couldn’t walk normally or sit in a chair. There was broken flesh all over her thighs and back that seeped blood for days before scabs finally crusted over. She lay on her belly on a blanket spread over her mother’s living room sofa, where she was allowed to sleep now because of the medical emergency. If anyone walked past her through the living room, Stella kept her eyes closed and her face turned to the upholstery.
When Carmelo came over for dinner, Tony entertained him in the kitchen. Stella lay staring at the stitching on the cushions, listening to Carmelo’s booming laugh as the gray darkness within her spread. He brought her a bouquet of sunflowers, which Assunta arranged on the coffee table where Stella could see them, but the Fortunas didn’t allow Carmelo into the living room. What had her family told him? That she wasn’t feeling well? Or had they told him the truth? Soon he would own her broken body. The thought left her coldly empty.
Her mother brought her a bowl ofpastinaand stroked her hair. “Your eye will be all better by the wedding,piccirijl’,” Assunta said. Stella didn’t answer. She had nothing to say to her mother.
