Then it clicked. The world was swallowed.
THE WAKE WAS AN AWFUL THING.Assunta had been loved too much by too many people who were too surprised by her loss. Even the hooligans were subdued in their scuffed-elbowed jackets and mediocrely knotted ties. Little Artie, the wicked imp, cried through all four hours of hand-shaking and registry-signing, just as his late grandmother would have—tears rolling silently down his round cheeks and blotting the silk of his tie.
Stella did not go to her mother’s wake. She was not fit for a receiving line. She barely was able to go to the funeral. She had not shed a tear in forty-five years. She had not shed a tear when her own baby died. Now it was beyond her control—Stella who could control the world with her will could not even control herself. She sobbed like a hysterical child, her chest heaving until her ribs were sore, her throatso raw she tasted blood. She cried so hard, she wondered through her delirium if she was haunted by Assunta’s ghost already—Assunta the emoter, whose weeping could wash away even the worst things. This was the worst thing, and Assunta wasn’t here to wash it away.
Stella shuttered the venetian blinds in her bedroom and drew the blankets up over her head. She didn’t eat or drink any water or go to the toilet—there was nothing to pass because she was so dehydrated. The bedroom became dank with the smell of her unsloughed skin and tears and unwashed hair.
In her darkness, she remembered how Assunta had collapsed when Louie and Queenie left—how she had torn out her hair and vomited and smeared her feces in animal desperation. Stella had been disturbed by her mother’s behavior, had thought that manifestation of grief barbaric—inhuman. Now she understood. She wished she could shit out her own grief, pull it out by its roots. But she couldn’t—she wasn’t Assunta. All her life Stella had thought she was so strong, but now she learned that it was Assunta who had been the strong one—Assunta who had been truly in control of herself. Stella, meanwhile, had no means to excise her own demons.
The wound was unhealable. Stella could never say good-bye. There was no chance for redemption. There was only “never again,” the beginning to so many sentences now. Never again would she see her mother’s mischievous smile, hear her girlish laugh. Never again would she sit with Assunta on the back porch and tell stories. Never again would she taste her mother’sraù.Never again would she feel her mother’s cool hand on her forehead as she chanted the unfascination, or her warm hand on her shoulder blade to steady her when she was rattled by the rush of the world around her.
BERNADETTE HAD NEVER SEEN HER MOTHER LIKE THIS.No one had.
She tried to get Stella to drink some water or soup. Bernadette wascrying herself; she had loved her grandmother. Stella realized, with the dissociation afforded by her grief, that she was not being a good mother right now. She didn’t care.
“Mommy,” Bernadette sobbed. “You’re scaring me.”
The world is a scary place, Stella thought. She stared out the window at the street, on the other side of which was the house her mother no longer lived in. The world is a scary place, and you’re all alone in it, and you might as well learn that now.
NOWSTELLA DRANK WHENEVER SHE WANTED.
SHE HAD LOSTBOB—that had been a terrible thing. She hadn’t known if she would live through that. And then she had lost Assunta. She hadn’t known there was a place so dark as the one she tumbled into after she had lost her mother.
Of course, she didn’t know yet in the summer of 1970 that there would be another layer of darkness coming. In half a year’s time she would lose her Nino somewhere in the jungles of far-off Vietnam. She didn’t know now that she had already seen him for the last time, before he shipped out this past spring when his draft number was called.
SOASSUNTA WAS GONE;Tony was a cranky goat-slaughtering diabetic. Stella was descending willfully into alcoholism. Alder Street was overrun with Joey and Mickey’s shabby girl progeny, and with Carmelo’s obnoxious teenage sons with their motorbikes and thunk-engine used cars.
Stella still went to church with Carmelo on Sundays to receive Communion, but she didn’t pray anymore. Praying made her feel as foolish as getting caught talking to herself in the grocery store.
ATGARDENER’S,BERNIE’S HANDS SHOOKwith nervous energy as she counted out customers’ change. She had become fixated on the fateof the dog. If Penny was dead, there was nothing Bernie would be able to do about it, but she needed to know one way or another. She needed to go home and to challenge her grandfather—she was convinced now that he knew what had happened.
When she couldn’t bear it even one more minute, she made one of the produce boys cover her register so she could seek out the manager, who was back in the deli. “I have to go home, Mr. Fastiggi. I don’t feel well.” As long as there was some truth to it, and there was, she could look him in the eye when she said it.
He looked her up and down. “You look okay to me.”
“I’m sick to my stomach,” Bernie said. Again, not a lie—her stomach did feel funny with the nerves.
The manager sighed. The two deli boys exchanged looks; they thought the girls always got off easy. But so what? “Can you make it until twelve thirty? Then Janice can cover for you when she gets in.”
Bernie’s watch said twelve fifteen. Fifteen minutes wouldn’t make any difference in whether the dog was alive or dead, would it? “All right,” she said. Then, remembering to seem a little desperate, she added, “I’ll try.”
THE CLOCK ON THE MANTELabove the television chimed twelve thirty and Stella lurched awake. She had fallen asleep sitting up on the couch, but it couldn’t have been for long, because her head buzzed softly, still happy with the morning wine. Her crocheting had fallen to the floor and the needle had come out. She picked it up and thought about what she would eat for lunch.
As she rose, her gaze fixed on the empty driveway of 4 Alder. Mickey must have gone out; Stella wondered whether she’d taken the little girls. Sometimes Mickey left them with their grandfather for hours as if she genuinely thought he was babysitting. Tony wouldn’t even remember to give them anything to eat; he could hardly feed himself.
Stella didn’t like going over there but decided she was going to be agood aunt today. She could make the girls sandwiches while she made one for herself. She didn’t have anything else to do.
Sliding through the last of her morning drunk, Stella looked both ways perhaps overzealously before crossing the street. The grassy lawns, electric green from the week’s rare summer rain, shimmered for her in the midday heat. There was no breeze, but at least outside the sun dried away her layers of sweat.
Stella let herself in the back door without knocking. There was no one in the kitchen. She followed the sound of the television to the living room, but no one was there, either. Apparently Mickey had taken all the girls with her this time. Having crossed through the whole house, Stella opened the front door to let herself out that way, but happened to see little Pammy sitting on the floor of the hallway, her bare legs crossed Indian-style, making an old Chatty Cathy doll walk up and down the floorboards in front of her. Had Mickey left her here by herself?
“Allo, Pam,” Stella said.
Pam looked at her silently. None of Joey’s girls were big talkers, Stella figured because their mother didn’t give them a chance to say anything.
“You hungry, Pammy?” she said in English. “You want me to make yousanguicci?”
Pam shook her head.
