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When I got home that night, Achille was out somewhere and my parents had already gone to bed. Dishes were piled up in the kitchen sink, and on the table was a basket full of the clothes I had ironed that morning before school. They looked as if they had been angrily crumpled up and slung back in at random.
Next to the basket was a note in my mother’s firm, slanting hand:
Stella,
Wash dishes
Scrub floor
Clean stove
Iron clothesproperly
I sat down at the table and put my face in my hands. My head was throbbing, and don Anselmo’s words were going around and around in my mind.I should hate for you to feel abandoned.
That was exactly how I felt. Abandoned by my parents, on whom I was helplessly, frustratingly dependent. Abandoned by Achille – abandoned by don Anselmo – abandoned by everyone.
I knew then that I would not stay in Romituzzo when the war was over. Nothing was worth it: not school, not the promise of teaching, not even the safety of a roof over my head. I would find a place where I was wanted, and I would go.
*
When Achille came downstairs the next morning, he found me at the ironing board. ‘Morning, little sister,’ he said. ‘Hard at work, eh? I don’t suppose you’ve got a clean shirt for me? I’m not sure this one can last another day.’
‘I ironed all your shirts yesterday,’ I said. I had not slept in the few hours allowed to me but had lain there seething, rehearsing over and over every slight my parents had dealt out to me in the last months. And then I’d got up, in the dark, and had scrubbed the floor and washed the dishes and cleaned and polished the stove, and all the time I had kept seething. ‘I even put them all on the end of your bed. But obviously Mamma got to them before you did, so now I have to iron them all again.’
Achille frowned. ‘What do you mean, you have to iron them all again?’
‘I mean what I said. My work wasn’t good enough yesterday, by Mamma’s standards, so today I have to iron all the clothes all over again. Your shirts included, sorry. And then no doubt Mamma will find a streak on the floor or a smudge on the stove, and then I’ll have to do that all over again, too. It never ends.’ I pushed my damp hair back off my forehead and kept on ironing the creases out of my school underskirt, pressing the heavy iron down into the fabric and letting it sit there just a fraction too long so that the smell of singed cotton filled the air. Achille was watching me.
‘Oh, sit down,’ I said. ‘I’ll make your breakfast in a minute.’
But Achille didn’t move. I set the iron down on its end and looked at him, and he stared back at me with baffled innocence.
‘Does she really do that?’ he asked. ‘Mamma. Does she make you redo all your chores?’
‘Enough of them.’
‘It doesn’t seem fair,’ he said. ‘You already do lots around the house. And you’ve got school.’
‘I know.’
‘And your work.’
‘I know!’ I snapped, and Achille flinched. Of course, I had never shouted at him before. ‘But this is how it is,’ I said, forcing myself to speak gently now, trying to mollify him even as another part of me wanted to scream and shake him for being so obtuse. ‘You know Papà’s still angry at me about my courier work. And you know Mamma doesn’t love me.’
‘Stella, don’t say that. Of course she—’
‘She doesn’t love me. Not even the smallest fraction of how she loves you. She’s always treated me differently. You know, because you’ve stood up for me so many times. You know, so stop pretending.’
Achille hung his head. For a little while we just stood there in silence with the ironing board between us. My words seemed to linger in the air like fog: those cold, true things I had said and now couldn’t take back.
‘It isn’t right,’ he said at last. ‘It isn’t fair. I’ll talk to her about it – to both of them.’
My anger was ebbing now, leaving tiredness and resignation behind. I wished I had never said anything to Achille. I wished I didn’t have to deal with his bewilderment now, when my own was so painful. ‘No, don’t,’ I said. ‘It won’t help.’
‘But I have to. Someone’s got to stand up to them.’
‘I did. I stood up to Papà. He didn’t even want to let me go to school.’
