CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Woman He Used to Be Expected to Marry
Sunday dinner at Linden Avenue was not optional. It hadn’t been optional for anyone who wanted to stay in Elena’s good graces since before I was born, and in seven years I had missed exactly two, once for the pneumonia and once for my own father’s surgery.
That Sunday the long table had two extra leaves in it and two extra places, for Alessandra and Mia.
I noticed they’d been set without anyone asking me whether I wanted to rearrange my usual seating, which I usually did, because Elena’s instinct for seating was to put everyone she liked near her and everyone she didn’t near the kitchen door.
I’d spent the afternoon in Elena’s kitchen with Paolo’s sister, Zia Lucia, who was eighty-one and made the Sunday gravy every week, and who had decided years ago, for reasons of her own, that I was the only one of the in-laws worth teaching.
We’d worked side by side for three hours without talking much.
She’d shown me, for the fourth or fifth time, how she browned the braciole, and slapped my hand when I tried to rush it.
“Patience,” she said. “The meat decides when it’s ready. Not you.”
“You say that every week, Zia.”
“Every week you rush it.”
I came to the table with sauce on my sleeve and my hair coming down, happy, in the plain uncomplicated way I was almost never happy at these dinners.
Paolo was at the head. Elena was at the foot.
Dante sat at his father’s right, as always, and I sat at Dante’s right, and across from us were Sal and Teresa, and Luca, and Carmela with her husband Rocco, and Nico, and Gina, pale, pushing food around her plate.
Alessandra was two seats down on Dante’s left.
Mia had been put between two of Carmela’s grandchildren at the children’s end of the table, where she was being taught, by a nine-year-old with enormous authority, how to make a spoon hang off her nose.
Before we sat down, Teresa found me in the front hall and kissed my cheek and pressed a small wrapped box into my hand. Inside was a pressed white peony under glass, from Sal’s lunch.
“I kept one,” she said. “So you’d know I noticed.”
Nico arrived late with his girlfriend, Brianna, who was vegan on weekdays and not on weekends.
It was Sunday, so she had two helpings of braciole and told me, earnestly, that she’d heard I was the one who’d told Zia Lucia she was vegan on Wednesdays so there’d be a vegetable dish at the Wednesday lunch.
I said that was me. She said nobody in her own family had ever remembered anything like that about her.
Nico looked puzzled, as if he’d never wondered where the vegetable dish came from.
It went well for a long time.
Paolo told the fishing story, the one about the bluefish off Montauk and his brother falling out of the boat.
Everyone had heard it thirty times. Everyone laughed in the same places, because that was what the story was for.
Sal told a new one about his birthday lunch and the bartender from his club and the splash of amaretto, and he pointed his fork at me across the table and said, “And this one, she found him. Nobody else would’ve thought of it. ”
Teresa smiled at me. I felt my face warm.
“She finds everything,” Dante said, fondly, and put his hand on the back of my chair.
Then Carmela leaned across the table toward Gina and said, “You’re not drinking your wine, cara. Are you sick?”
Gina went white. Her eyes went to me.
“I told her not to,” I said easily. “She’s driving me to the Getty exhibit in the city tomorrow at seven, and she’s terrible in the mornings. I made her promise.”
“You’re going to the city?” Carmela asked Gina, surprised.
“Vivienne asked me,” Gina said faintly.
“Well, that’s nice. You should get out more.” Carmela went back to her braciole. Gina looked at me across the table with something close to worship. Teresa, who missed nothing, looked at me with something else, and then looked at Gina, and then very deliberately looked at her own plate.
I would have to find an exhibit in the city tomorrow at seven. There was always an exhibit.
The talk moved on. Sal and Paolo argued about the Yankees.
Luca told a story about a judge who’d fallen asleep during his closing argument and woken up and ruled in his favor.
I told the story of Dante and the toaster, the pneumonia toast, which I’d never told at a family dinner before.
I’d told it to Luca once. He’d asked me to tell it now, and I did it properly, with Dante’s grim face and the smoke and the phrase it has settings, and the whole table laughed, even Elena, and Dante put his hand over his eyes and said, “It did have settings,” and for a few minutes I was entirely inside the room.
I was part of it, the way I’d been part of it for years, at the center of a story, the family laughing with me.
It was right after that that Elena began.
“Speaking of disasters,” she said, from the foot of the table, pleasantly. “Do you remember the raft?”
Nobody answered for a second.
“The summer at the lake house. You were fourteen, the pair of you.” She looked at Dante, then at Alessandra. “Inseparable. You built that raft out of oil drums and your father’s good lumber and you painted a name on it.”
“Ma,” Dante said, but he was smiling.
“What was it called? Alessandra, you remember.”
Alessandra looked down at her plate. “The Invincible,” she said quietly.
“The Invincible!” Sal slapped the table. “I remember this. It sank in about four minutes.”
“Three,” said Paolo.
“And Dante went down with it,” Elena said. “Swam under trying to save the lumber, because his father was going to kill him, and came up with weeds in his hair. And Alessandra pulled him out by the collar.”
The table laughed. It was a funny story. I laughed too, because it was, and because I didn’t want to be the one person at the table who didn’t. Dante laughed. He laughed properly, the startled real laugh I heard so rarely, his head going back.
“She did,” he said. “She pulled me out by the collar. I’d forgotten that.”
“You were inseparable that whole summer,” Elena said, warmer now, and the warmth was the part that should have warned me. “Your father used to say we’d need a bigger dining table once you two were married, because you’d never once willingly sit apart.”
The laughter thinned. A few people kept smiling because they didn’t know what else to do with their faces. Rocco suddenly became interested in the bread.
“Fate had other plans,” Sal said, too loudly, raising his glass in a clumsy mock toast.
“Fate,” Elena said lightly. “Or business.” She let that sit for exactly one second. “It’s always seemed a shame to me. They’d have made something extraordinary together. You could see it even then.”
Alessandra’s face had gone a deep, painful red. She didn’t look up. Her hand had stopped halfway to her glass.
I sat very still with my fork in my hand and a small smile on my face that I’d had seven years of practice holding.
Two minutes earlier I’d been at the center of the table, telling the toaster story, with everyone laughing.
Now I was sitting beside my husband listening to his family remember a future they’d wanted for him that didn’t have me in it, and nobody had moved my chair at all.
“I still have photographs from that summer,” Elena went on. “In the cedar chest. The two of you on the dock. I should dig them out. Alessandra, you’d like copies, wouldn’t you?”
“Ma,” Luca said from down the table, quietly, a warning.
“What? I’m reminiscing. There’s no harm in remembering happy things.”
Dante looked at me.
It was the first time he’d looked at me since the raft.
He had stopped laughing. I watched the room arrive on his face the way the kitchen had on Wednesday night, all at once: Alessandra red and silent, his brother’s warning, his wife beside him with that small fixed smile.
I watched him understand what the story had been doing while he was laughing at it.
“Enough, Ma,” he said.
He said it mildly. Almost gently. There was still the ghost of the laugh in his voice.
Elena smiled and said, “Of course, caro,” and turned to Teresa to ask about her roses, and the table went back to eating as though nothing had happened.
It was too mild. I knew exactly what he sounded like when he meant something.
I’d heard him end a partnership with a man he’d known for twenty years in four words and a look.
I’d heard him tell Nico that if he ever again brought a certain friend to a family event, he’d be barred from every family event for a year, and say it so quietly Nico had gone pale.
Enough, Ma, in that voice, was a man telling his mother she’d told the story one time too many.
A man telling her she’d hurt his wife would have sounded entirely different.
Alessandra left the table ten minutes later to check on Mia and didn’t come back until dessert. When she did, she sat down beside Teresa instead of beside Dante, and she didn’t look at me, and I knew it was out of shame and not unkindness, and it didn’t help.
Zia Lucia, as I was helping her clear, put one bony hand on my wrist in the kitchen doorway.
“The meat decides when it’s ready,” she said. “People too. That one,” and she jerked her chin toward the dining room, toward Elena, “she’ll never be ready. Don’t wait for her.”
Gina found me in the pantry a few minutes later, while I was putting away the extra bread. She closed the door behind her.
“The Getty,” she whispered. “Is there even a Getty exhibit in the city tomorrow?”
“I’ll find one.”
She laughed, then covered her mouth, then threw her arms around my neck. “Thank you. Thank you. My mother would have made me take a pregnancy test at the table.”
“Have you decided anything?”
“I told Sam,” she said. “He cried. In a good way. I think.” She let go and wiped her eyes. “I’m going to tell my parents. Not yet. Soon. Will you still sit with me?”
“I said I would.”
“I know. I just like hearing you say it.” She hugged me again and slipped out, and I stood in Elena’s pantry among the jars of Zia Lucia’s preserved peppers and thought that there were at least a few people in this family who knew exactly who I was.
* * *
We drove home in silence. It was only fifteen minutes from Linden Avenue, and for most of it neither of us said anything, and I looked out the window at the dark lawns going past.
At the light on Boston Post Road, Dante reached across the console and took my hand. He squeezed it three times.
I didn’t squeeze back.
I didn’t decide not to. My hand just didn’t do it. It lay in his, and he felt it lie there, and after a moment he let go and put both hands back on the wheel, and neither of us said anything about it for the rest of the drive.
That night, undressing for bed, I said it as carefully as I knew how.
“Your mother’s story was pointed.”
He was unbuttoning his shirt. He didn’t look at me. “She’s nostalgic. She tells old stories to everyone.”
“She tells old stories about you and Alessandra’s wedding that never happened? With photographs? To everyone?”
He stopped with his hands on the last button. “No,” he said, after a moment. “Not to everyone.”
“You laughed.”
“It was funny. The raft sank in three minutes.” He turned around. “I didn’t hear the rest of it until I looked at you. I’m sorry. I should have heard it sooner.”
“You should have said more than enough.”
“I know. She can be a lot.”
“She’s been a lot for seven years, Dante. You said that at Christmas, when she gave me the beginner’s Italian cookbook in front of your entire family. You said you’d talk to her.”
He had the grace to look uncomfortable. “I meant to.”
“You didn’t.”
“I’ll talk to her,” he said. “This week. I promise.”
“Will you actually? Or is this going to be like Christmas?”
He looked at me, and I saw a flicker of something that might have been defensiveness and might have been surprise that I’d kept count.
“I’ll talk to her, Vivienne.”
He meant it when he said it. He always meant it when he said it. He came to bed and put his hand on my back the way he did every night, and fell asleep within minutes, and I lay there thinking about Zia Lucia’s hand on my wrist.
He didn’t talk to her that week, or the week after.
I didn’t think he knew how. Nobody in his life had ever needed him to defend them against his own mother, and he’d never had to learn.
And I began to understand, lying awake, that defending me against her was something that didn’t exist in him yet.
He couldn’t simply decide to do it. It would have to be built from nothing.
* * *