Death 5 Rape （Marriage） #25
STELLA MISSED TWO DAYS OF WORK because 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 of pastina and 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.
She had even less to say to her sister. Tina came in and sat on the chair next to Stella’s sofa. “I’m so sorry, Stella,” she said. “I didn’t know Rocco was going to tell Papa about the money. I couldn’t lie to him when he asked me. He’s my husband. I had to tell him the truth.”
Stella heard her mother’s voice in her head, Cettina’s just little. She’s not smart like you. Concettina muscarella, my little bug.
“I couldn’t lie to him when he asked me,” Tina said again.
When Stella didn’t respond, Tina gave up and left Stella alone in her misery. Tina gave up awful fast these days.
IN SOME SECRET PART of her suffering heart, had Tina wished this on her sister? Had Tina, with her controlling husband and unresponsive womb, desired to see her pretty, smart, charismatic sister thwarted?
This thought pricked at Stella’s mind as she lay facedown on the couch. But she couldn’t live with it, and she suppressed it—so successfully that it would not surface again for forty years.
SINCE TINA WAS ALREADY MARRIED, Stella’s maid of honor was Carolina Nicotera.
I can’t tell you who the other bridesmaids were, because all the photos of the Maglieri wedding have been destroyed, and those details have been lost. If the photos had survived, though, Stella would have been smiling in none of them.
She never smiled in a photo for the rest of her long life, because she now had four missing teeth to hide.
Stella’s dress was made of white silk—a more expensive dress than Tina’s stiff, formal linen had been.
Tony bought Stella a floor-length lace veil, just like Tina’s.
What a waste, that she couldn’t just wear Tina’s.
Of all things to throw away twenty-five dollars on—half the money she would have needed to run away.
Stella did not remember having her hair done, taking photos, or even saying her vows.
She was numb, almost blind, with fear so potent it became an enfolding blanket, a protective layer between her mind and the world.
To the wedding guests, she appeared calm, beatific with her close-lipped half smile.
The one part of the ceremony she did remember was their first kiss.
Carmelo cupped her face in one white-gloved hand and leaned in cautiously, kissing her gently on her closed lips.
Stella was shocked by the sensation of the kiss—its softness and electricity.
She had never felt a man’s lips on hers before and the impact was unexpected.
Her body recoiled in a shudder of fear, and she gripped Carmelo’s hand to regain herself.
He was smiling into her face; he was so happy.
The reception was at the State Armory, which had just opened its Officers’ Club, rentable as a special-occasions venue.
Stella sat on the gold bridal chair on the head table dais.
She sat and watched the dancing, and Carmelo sat beside her in solidarity.
Seeing these happy people dance, this party ostensibly for her, Stella felt nothing but a sense of remove.
She had no control over anything here. The feeling reminded her of one of her earliest memories, her child-hand clamped indelibly around a piece of bread as the pigs circled.
She was about to be trampled, and there was nothing she could do, because someone else had seized her hand.
THE HALL WAS RENTED THROUGH MIDNIGHT, but Stella left the party at nine forty-five.
In the room cordoned off for the bridal party, Stella changed into her blue traveling suit, a large-buttoned jacket and trim-fitting skirt with matching pillbox hat, which Assunta had bought her at Sage-Allen.
They were headed to Montreal for their honeymoon, where October could be cold.
Her winter coat was folded on top of her waiting suitcase.
Her mother and sister, who helped her take off her wedding dress, cooed over the suit, smoothing the fine blue fabric over her shoulders and breasts with their sturdy, affectionate hands.
She was glad there was no mirror in the room, because she didn’t want to look herself in the eye.
Her name was Stella Maglieri now, and her perfect blue-suited body was a package for a man to unwrap, to consume and interrupt and dismantle.
Assunta took Stella’s arm; Tina took Stella’s suitcase and coat.
Stella was escorted down the hallway, which seemed so dark, the music of the band so far away.
Outside, Carmelo and Tony waited by Rocco’s idling Buick.
Assunta and Tina, both crying, kissed Stella good-bye.
Carmelo opened the sedan’s back door for Stella, then walked around the car to get in on the other side.
He was nervous, too. He kept his hands carefully in his lap so there was the whole middle seat of space between them.
Tony sat in the front passenger seat and Rocco drove them away.
Her father was there to make sure she got on that train, by use of his bodily force if necessary.
Stella had drunk nothing at all during the reception, lest alcohol make her even more vulnerable.
Even wrapped in her numbing blanket of remove she couldn’t think of anything but the threat of sexual intercourse.
Her entire body was tense with anxiety, pulled into a hard curl like a snail disappearing into its shell.
The Maglieris’ first night together as man and wife would be spent on a combination of trains.
They would take the Boston her choices were to carry on with her husband or go home to her father—not that she had any choices, or even a penny to her name.
She had nothing at all except her traveling suit, two new holes in her mouth, and a cold invisible hand clamped around her own.
* * *
THEY ARRIVED IN MONTREAL at two in the afternoon on Sunday, worse for the wear. Carmelo’s twin sister, Carmela, and her husband, Paolo, met them at the station. Stella’s new sister-in-law was tall, maybe five six, trim but sturdy. The family resemblance around the nose and eyes was strong.
Carmela presented them with a basket of food she had prepared for them: ham sandwiches, apples, a jar of homemade wine.
Paolo drove them to their hotel, a stately building that reminded Stella of the manors on Prospect Avenue in West Hartford, minutely attended to and fragrant with wealth.
The cut glass of the front door glittered in the drooping October sun as a white-uniformed bellhop held it open for them.
Stella had never spent a night in a hotel before, with the exception of those awful nights in Napoli.
A “hotel” in her imagination was shadowy and insidious, a place where men took a woman to do the job, where a girl’s father or brothers couldn’t walk in—a place where everyone knew what you were up to, a place full of complicit, smirking strangers.
But this hotel was all marble counters and waxed floors, glowing with luxury—everything was finer than anything Stella had ever seen or touched.
Carmela used her French to help the Maglieris check in.
The hotel stay, five nights, was Carmela and Paolo’s gift to the newlyweds, and their apology for not attending the wedding.
“Why don’t you take some time to relax and freshen up?
” Carmela said. “We’ll come back at five o’clock and take you out for dinner. ”