Death 5 Rape （Marriage） #3
Her sister and her mother were looking at her expectantly.
She knew what they were thinking—What is this?
We don’t do this—because this was what men did, drinking after dinner, like smoking a pipe.
Stella passed a glass to Tina and took one for herself.
“Salut’,” she said. She waited until the other women lifted their glasses, still watching her with misgiving.
“Salut’,” Stella said again, and took as large a swallow as she could.
Almost immediately she felt better, as if the wine were a calming medicine.
“Salut’,” Assunta echoed, and took her own large gulp. With no reason left not to, Tina followed suit.
Late into the night the women drank and played briscola.
The tension eased as the wine opened up their respective angers and affections.
Stella noted the feeling of the drunkenness setting in, reveling in it as the cards became harder to count and their mistakes became increasingly funny.
The dining room had ceased to feel uncomfortably cold; she now appreciated the draft, which rippled sensuously up her arms. So this is why they drink, she thought. This happy softness.
“I don’t care if he wants to go see a puttana,” Assunta said between deals. She hadn’t cried since they started on the wine. “Oh, Madonn’, you think I’m jealous of what some other woman is having done to her?”
Stella would never have been able to say the words sober, but here they were, tumbling out of her mouth: “What’s it like, Mamma? When he does the job to you?”
Assunta waved her hand, dispelling the unpleasant thought.
“Oh, just a big hassle, you know? Part of being a wife. You gotta be there for him when he wants to do it, doesn’t matter how you’re feeling, and then sometimes it makes a baby.
” Assunta was staring at the table, her eyes glazed, but she kept speaking, candidly—Stella tried not to move a muscle, afraid that any disruption would make her mother clam up.
“And even if you think to yourself, we have enough babies, I don’t want to be pregnant again, you can’t say no to your husband. ”
The candle on the table between them flickered. Stella’s heart was racing. Her imagination was damply alive with the alcohol and she couldn’t stop a progression of visions, putting herself in her mother’s place.
Tina was watching her mother with wide eyes. “Does it hurt?” she blurted.
“No, it doesn’t hurt,” Assunta said. “Not all the time. Only when you really don’t want to.
Or sometimes it hurts when he drinks too much, or if it takes a long time.
” Stella’s mother wrinkled her chapped nose.
“The best husbands are the ones who finish the job fast, and whose pistola isn’t so big, so they don’t hurt as much.
” She shrugged, her sheepishness overtaking her alcoholic immunity.
“But you can’t know that before you get married. You just have to take your chances.”
Stella gulped down a glass of wine. She hoped she’d already taken all the chances she was going to have to in her life.
By the time they finished the bottle, they were too drunk to play cards anymore.
It was one in the morning and Antonio still hadn’t come home.
Stella and Tina helped their mother, giggling sleepily, to her bed, then huddled together in their own—the cold had seeped in again through the filmy wine-warmth.
The girls whispered to each other in the dark.
Tina’s breath was sweet and sour and thick; Stella wondered if her own was the same.
Would Antonio beat them when he found out what they’d done?
Why had he left to be with a puttana when his wife was right here?
Should Stella be happy he wasn’t bothering Assunta, or offended he had broken God’s law and chosen another woman over his wife?
How grotesque, to know your husband was also doing grotesque things to another woman.
Did that other woman also have his children for him?
Stella thought about the money Tony must spend to keep a puttana. How much sooner might he have brought his family to America if he had saved that money—if he’d really wanted them there?
The darkness shrank and bulged around her.
Stella was full of the memory of that hot summer night in Ievoli, of Antonio’s naked ass thumping into Assunta’s pushed-up skirts.
She felt the pinch in her groin, the blood rising under her father’s fingernails.
Stella felt sick to her stomach—a mixture of the wine, the memory itself, the indignity her sweet mother had endured because she owed her obedience to a brute.
. . . Stella realized her thighs were throbbing; she was clenching them tightly together.
That was never going to happen to her. Never.
* * *
SPRING brOKE ON 1940. Along the Fortunas’ walk to and from mass, the trees were still naked, but gray, dry bushes burst into yellow flowers, root to tip.
Forsythia—they were everywhere, living wildly roadside or manicured into thick, square hedges that separated the houses.
Stella would learn that forsythia was how you knew winter was over in Connecticut.
The spring air was still colder than Christmas back home, and Stella couldn’t believe the flowers didn’t die.
But they didn’t, and they were followed by more.
Home in Ievoli, Stella thought, the camellias and the daffodils would be blooming. She hoped someone picked a bouquet for Nonna Maria, who loved their smell.
THERE WAS A PROBLEM WITH THE HOUSE Antonio was going to buy on Bedford Street.
Although he’d been promised a terrific deal, there was no way he would ever have the two thousand dollars he needed.
He made no mention of money he’d already saved before bringing his family to Hartford; Stella was certain no such money existed.
He made eighteen dollars a week working his construction job.
The rent on the Front Street tenement was six dollars a week; one dollar went into the church basket at mass.
Five dollars went into the grocery jar on the kitchen counter.
Even if Antonio was putting the remaining six dollars in the bank, which Stella doubted, he would only be able to save three hundred dollars a year.
His wife and children would have to find jobs.
This was how Assunta, Stella, Tina, and Giuseppe found their way to the tobacco farm in the summer of 1940.
Antonio’s friend Vito Aiello had worked there when he’d first arrived in the country, tenting and harvesting large-leaf shade tobacco, the kind they use for fancy cigar wrappers.
In April, Antonio brought Zu Vito over for dinner to explain how it would work.
They’d catch a truck on Farmington Avenue and it would take them to and from the farm, which was outside Hartford in the countryside.
The tobacco season ran from May through August. Anyone could show up for fieldwork; as long as you did a good job your first day, they let you come back again.
Tina cried in bed that night, little hiccupping sobs.
Stella was swimming through her own confusion and dismay, thinking of the oranges she would be harvesting back home.
She let Tina cry for a while, imagining the tears were tapering off, but they never did.
Finally, tamping down her own nasty thoughts, Stella stroked Tina’s long hair and said, “Don’t be upset, little bug.
Come on, stop crying. You’ll wear yourself out. ”
Tina coughed to clear her teary throat. “I thought we were going to live real nice here,” she said.
“We were going to live in a nice house, have nice clothes. But instead he made us give up our own house and come live where we have to share with other people, and he made us give up our own land and come work on someone else’s farm like cafoni. ”
This was all true. Stella stroked her sister’s hair quietly for a few minutes. Don’t waste sadness on the problem, she scolded herself. Sadness is weak. Think of how to fix the problem, instead.
“We’re not cafoni,” Stella said. “It’s the opposite. Anyone can own land here in America. Yes, we’re going to work in a field, but then we’ll have money to buy our own house. All right? Forget Papa. We’re going to work hard and buy a house for Mamma.”
Tina’s blubbering had stopped. Stella guessed what her sister must be thinking—how surprising, the idea that girls like them, Tina and Stella, could buy a house. They had worked for chestnuts and olive oil, but they had never worked for money before.
“You really think we can buy a house?” Tina said eventually.
“We’re going to work really hard,” Stella said. “You know how good we are at working hard, little bug. We can do it.”
“We can do it, Stella,” Tina repeated. “We’ll buy Mamma a house.”
EACH DAY, IN THE TWILIGHT BEFORE DAWN, Assunta, Stella, Tina, and Giuseppe walked down to Farmington Avenue and waited with the other day laborers until the tobacco truck came; then everyone climbed up the metal steps to the flatbed and sat thigh to thigh on the splintering benches, clinging to their neighbors.
The truck carried them out of Hartford on a wide, painted highway, then along narrower streets lined with magnificent houses, one after another, as if everyone here were some kind of minor nobility.
And then on to the shade-leaf tobacco farms, acres of thin cotton tenting stretched between eight-foot-high stakes.
In the summer breeze, the dark green leaves, wide as your hand, beat gently against the cloth cage, dancing shadows you could see from the road.