Death 6 Exsanguination （Motherhood） #2
Here it was, it was going to happen again.
Stella was outside and away from her body, just like that day in the pigsty when the invisible hand had closed around her own.
She watched from that remove as Carmelo arranged her knees.
Her husband—the man she would spend the rest of her life with—he actually didn’t care how hurt and afraid she was; he would put her to use.
A cold gush of air prickled up her hot, secret skin as he spat into the palm of his hand and reached down to rub himself.
She could feel her heartbeat in her groin as his stomach came to rest for a moment against hers.
Her dread and disgust gathered in her belly, a hard round stone. And then—there—it was inside her again.
Her female skin was tender and she shuddered as he first penetrated her.
The soreness abated quickly, and for a while it was an absurd but otherwise unremarkable rhythmic activity she watched Carmelo engage in: push, and push, and push.
His expression seemed distant as she watched his face above her.
Periodically he cupped her breast through the nightgown, giving it a gentle squeeze.
After a few minutes of this, though, a different soreness took over as his plunging into her passage became drier and more abrasive.
The discomfort increased steadily, and Carmelo seemed to feel it as well, because his thrusting sped up.
Just as it was starting to become so painful Stella was wondering if she could ask him to stop, he made a noise in his throat and froze, his torso bucking backward, exactly as she had seen her father do over her mother.
A few seconds passed, then Carmelo pulled himself away somewhat clumsily, his kneecap coming down on hers so that she gasped in pain and he apologized.
As Carmelo stepped into his briefs, Stella lay still, the draft emitted by the thrown-back cover slowly chilling the wetness that lay on the jelly-soft skin of her thigh.
She would very much have liked to get rid of the wetness, but she was unwilling to touch it.
The thought of feeling it on her fingers made her clench her hands together.
“Didn’t you want to use the bathroom?” Carmelo said.
Stella shook her head, which was a silly thing to do in the dark, but she couldn’t find her voice.
He must have understood because he got back into the bed, pulled the covers halfway up his chest, and said, “Well. Good night.” That was really it for him—all it took.
After only a few loud, deep breaths, he was snoring.
Stella lay in the narrow bed with one hip against the cold plaster wall and one against her husband’s hot thigh.
There was nowhere to put her arms, so she folded her hands on top of her stomach.
And in her exhaustion there was no more miserable thinking or terror or disgust or despair or confusion—somehow there was sleep.
THIS IS WHAT MARRIAGE TURNED OUT TO BE: shared life in a small space. Keeping on, but with a man whose personal habits she was unfamiliar with, instead of with the family from whom she had learned all her own personal habits.
Stella hated Carmelo’s apartment building.
They didn’t have much, so it wasn’t crowded.
Their wedding gifts would stay at Bedford Street until they had a place of their own.
But the shared bathroom was a daily humiliation.
She had to walk down two flights of stairs and stand in line; everyone coming in through the front door could see who was waiting for the bathroom—a better setup for burglary or molestation Stella couldn’t imagine.
The toilet line was all men, and you could always count how many people were planning a number two because they came with a wad of toilet paper.
Stella had spent her childhood shitting in the woods, but this—this was somehow worse.
At least in the woods she had shat alone.
There was the oddness of all-encompassing intimacy with Carmelo, even aside from offering him her body for his use.
There was, for example, the fact that if she needed to do things like tweeze hairs out of her underarm he was going to be there to watch her do it.
Dressing in front of each other was awkward, although Carmelo seemed to take it into stride that his wife would see him do silly-looking things like tug his trousers and briefs down to his knees, then pull them back up for manly adjustments before buckling his belt each morning.
This was married life, Stella realized. Doing private things in front of another person without any comment.
STELLA WAS NOT TRULY SUICIDAL, because she never wanted to die. She had fought death too hard for that. But, as the distinction goes, she often wished she did not have to be alive. Her current existence was a perverse realization of her greatest fear.
This was the period when the thought entered her head: What is the point?
Of course there never is any point, but until you think that thought for the first time it doesn’t matter that there isn’t.
And once Stella had the thought, it was stuck, soaked into her skin and tunneling along her arteries.
Her fast, perfect fingers were dulled by it, her elbows harder to lift and her neck sore.
Her days were gray and slid together. There were no bright spots, no memories she would take with her of this time, her early marriage.
Stella had never had a life goal before, a specific precious thing she badly wanted, the way her father had wanted to be American, or her mother had wanted a house, or Tina wanted a baby.
But now Stella had something else, the pure, irrefutable knowledge that there was nothing she wanted at all.
Not only did she have nothing left to lose, she had nothing left to win, either.
WHEN I THINK OF STELLA’S LIFE during this time, I grieve for her.
But my relationship with her misery is nuanced, because I am a product of it.
As you have surely figured out by now, Stella Fortuna is my grandmother.
And as you’ll see if you stay with Stella even through this grimmest of passages in her story, my life is only one of many she spared by not ending her own.
* * *
TONY HAD BOUGHT THE THREE-FLOOR WALK-UP on Bedford Street with the notion that someday all three floors would be full of his progeny, a palazzo of Fortuna offshoot families.
Now that those satellites were starting to come into being, however, Tony was having trouble getting rid of the tenants he’d rented to.
The family who had lived in the second floor had left peacefully as soon as they’d found somewhere else to go, and the Caramanicos had moved into that apartment just before Stella’s wedding. But the lady on the top floor, Miss Catherine Miller, would not leave.
“It’s my house,” Tony told her, “so if I tell you to leave you have to leave.”
“That’s not how things work here,” Miss Miller said, with the sanctimonious conviction of a retired schoolteacher. “I know my tenant rights. I can have my lawyer come down here and remind you of what they are.”
Both parties enjoyed an enraged battle, and she might never have left if she hadn’t had a stroke just before Christmas and been relocated to a care facility.
In another circumstance Stella would have sympathized with Miss Miller; it came as no surprise to Stella that her father could make someone have a stroke.
But she secretly resented Miss Miller for never sharing the secret of her independence.
It was an irrational feeling of betrayal, because Stella had never gotten up the courage to speak to her except small talk about the milkman.
And Stella was acidly grateful to Miss Miller for her timing with her stroke, because now that she was pregnant and forced to visit it even more often, Carmelo’s shared bathroom was intolerable.
If I died, she had actually thought—had begun to say out loud to Carmelo—if I died right now at least I wouldn’t have to use that toilet again.
“That’s just a stupid thing to say, Stella,” Carmelo would reply, but they moved into the third-floor apartment in the Bedford Street building the very same day that Catherine Miller’s nephew told Tony his aunt wouldn’t be coming back.
Tony gave the nephew fifty dollars in cash for her larger furniture; Assunta and Tina packed her other belongings in boxes and stored them in the garage.
Miss Miller would never come and retrieve them.
STELLA COULD PEE IN PRIVACY NOW, as often as she wanted, but now she had a toilet of her own she had to clean.
She had a claw-foot bathtub now, but she never wanted to bathe.
Her hair was short these days, but she still didn’t feel like washing it.
She was always hungry, but she hated to feed the monster inside of her.
She would eat and she would hate herself afterward, rubbing and scratching the greasy feeling of guilt off her face and neck, leaving red welts on her skin.
She watched as her body went through the first changes of the pregnancy ruination she had dreaded her entire life.
She had been vain, she had thought she was beautiful, and now she was being punished for her vanity as, one by one, the features she had been proudest of were taken away.
Her flat belly thickened; it would never be anything but swollen or vacantly sagging for the rest of her life.
Her once-smooth bronze skin broke out in various rashes.
Her eyes were dull in the mirror, the whites turned reddish-yellow.
The dark under-eye bags would merge seamlessly into the facial sagging of age, so there would never be a moment between pregnancies when her pretty face was restored.
Everything beautiful about Stella Fortuna’s life was over.