Death 6 Exsanguination （Motherhood） #3
Worse than any of this physical humiliation was the fact that it did not make her husband stop desiring her body.
He took her almost every night. Stella turned her face to the wall so she wouldn’t have to watch him.
There was no more damage Carmelo could do to her—the child had already quickened in her womb—and yet for some reason that knowledge didn’t make her loathe and fear copulation any less.
Staring at the wall, she fought off the smeared layers of associations—the nightmare, her father’s leather belt on her naked breasts, the marble sink in the Montreal hotel.
When she closed her eyes she remembered the wisdom of her mother—the best husbands were the ones who got the job done fast. Sometimes Carmelo was fast. Sometimes he was not.
She couldn’t fight off her nightmare, so she learned to escape into it.
The rapist was coming toward her with his big rough hands, and she would climb into the window frame, where she’d be safe from him.
As Carmelo’s penis bumped and scraped against her insides, she tried to build herself a vision of what was out that window, over the metal fence and beyond the shantytown.
She pictured Ievoli, the glowing yellow-green of the citrus leaves in the April sun, the silver-blue of the September olive groves, the sunbaked July rows of bulging tomato stakes marching like soldiers along the terraced mountain.
Her world was a gray ache and she couldn’t live inside it.
They made her go down to Sunday dinner at Tony and Assunta’s, but she was ashamed to be seen by her family, knowing they looked at her and thought, How nice and quiet she is now, and Someone gave her what she deserved.
She could hear their thoughts ringing around the dinner table in the undercurrent of their solicitous questions about her health.
Joey was the only honest one, cackling about her fertility every time he saw her.
Joey was honest, but he was still the worst.
Carmelo gave her money and told her to go buy dresses, but she didn’t want to go outside.
Her body hurt and disgusted her, and what was the point of buying a dress that wouldn’t fit next week?
He told her to use the money on whatever she wanted, whatever would make her happy, but nothing would make her happy.
At night, when she could find no respite in sleep between her trips to the bathroom, Stella sometimes closed her eyes and pictured the face of the first Stella, the wretched little ghost who had haunted her for a quarter of a century.
“Are you jealous of me still?” she’d whisper into the dark.
“Are you jealous of this?” Because jealousy was two-sided, and the second Stella did not feel lucky to be the living Stella anymore.
On Saturdays when there was no work to go to, Stella would play sick while Tina went to the wedding showers for their Italian Society friends. When she got home she would come up to Stella’s dark room and try to cheer her up with smuggled cookies.
“Tina,” Stella asked her sister one day, “do you believe there’s really a God?”
“Stella! Of course there’s a God. What are you saying?” Tina whispered, as if that would stop her omnipotent deity from overhearing.
“But why do you think so?” Stella asked. “Just because the priest says so? How do you know for sure, Tina?”
“Of course I know,” Tina said.
“But how?”
Stella didn’t expect an answer. Tina only had answers other people had given her, the answers other people had assured her it was correct to believe, and then she knew them beyond a shadow of a doubt.
But Tina had an answer this time, after a moment’s hesitation. “I know there’s a God, because if there isn’t, what’s the point of all of the bad things? There would be no point, so there must be a God.”
After Tina left, Stella turned over this thought, so close an echo of her own. If her sister’s answer had been any more sanguine, it would have been no help to Stella at all. But as it was, it was just enough to get her through.
HER MOTHER HAD TOLD HER IT WOULD HAPPEN—that when it was her own child, she would understand, that there would be nothing she would love more. She had told her mother she was different. She had been wrong.
The connection happened on Ash Wednesday, 1948.
Stella was sitting in the evening mass, hunger stirring in her bulging belly, and then the stirring wasn’t hunger anymore, it was something else—something in addition to the hunger, a little sloshing wave of life.
There was a baby inside her, asserting itself, and the baby was hungry, too.
It seemed that, with this show of solidarity, the baby was telling her, I’m your ally.
It was not the most rational thought of her life—she recognized that even as she had it—but she was sitting on a hard church pew after a long day of factory work and she was tired and hungry and no one else cared. Well, the baby cared.
After that, she felt the baby every day.
Now that she’d understood the proverbial spark of life inside of her, she couldn’t forget it.
Even when the baby wasn’t moving, she knew it was there and thought about it.
Stella could barely bring herself to talk to Carmelo, but she could talk to the baby, for many hours.
She had never been able to sing very well, but now whatever songs she thought of came out just fine.
Her voice bounced pleasantly off the apartment walls, and the echo she heard sounded happy.
Carmelo was stupid with joy at becoming a father.
He rubbed his wife’s belly and bragged about how big his son was getting to anyone who would listen.
Let him brag. Stella had stopped caring about Carmelo.
She still hated him, but the heat was gone.
Her body was tired from the pregnancy and she needed to focus her energy.
Stella wondered about God’s tricks in this matter of the baby.
This had been the thing she had wanted least in her life, and God had changed her heart to make her want it more than anything.
At least, that was her mother’s explanation for Stella’s attachment.
Stella thought it was more like an infection in her mind; her thoughts were not her own anymore, no more than her body was hers.
She remembered—vividly—that only months ago she had not wanted to live; now not only had that shadow fled her psyche but she was also desperately devoted to making something else live, as well.
Her richness and her darkness had been filed down to one fist-size glowing globe she carried in her womb.
TINA SMILED. TINA THREW HER A BABY SHOWER. Tina loved Stella and stroked her stomach. But Tina had an honest face and couldn’t hide her envy even when she smiled.
Stella knew it was confusing to Tina—it was confusing to Stella, too.
Tina had spent her whole life training to be a mother, wanted that life so much.
Stella had not wanted it at all, had walked a dark road to motherhood, lived through days when she would rather have died.
And here she was, swollen and beatific, the change accomplished within moments of the consummation of her marriage, while Tina tried and tried and nothing came.
The doctor had run tests but hadn’t found anything wrong with her.
Behind Tina’s back—and sometimes not—the women would ask Stella whether it was Tina’s fault or Rocco’s.
It was usually the woman’s, everyone knew.
Stella was tongue-tied by the question, although it was not an uncommon one.
How could people be so stupid and cruel?
Did they not see how much they hurt Tina?
Did they want to hurt her, on some level?
Make her pay for not making the sacrifices they had?
When Tina’s face betrayed her—sad, confused envy—Stella would squeeze her sister’s hand.
“You are going to be the best aunt,” she told her.
Tina smiled harder, and Stella added, “It’s too bad.
My children are going to love you more than me.
They’ll say, oh, Mommy can’t cook anything, we want to go to Auntie Tina’s house instead. ”
Tina laughed and looked down at her skirt. “Well, Carmelo can cook for them.”
“He better be planning on it,” Stella said, snappishly to make Tina laugh again.
Stella loved Tina because those thoughts weren’t her fault, and also because there was no room in Stella’s heart now for any coldness or resentment.
Assunta saw Tina’s envy, too. She made the unfascination on Stella’s forehead at least once a day. She came up to the third-floor apartment to hang mint in the windows.
“First baby,” she would say. “The most vulnerable time.”
CARMELO WANTED STELLA TO QUIT HER JOB at Silex as soon as she knew she was expecting, but she loved to work. She managed to defer until May, by which time she was so large that the factory work had become unpleasant.
On Stella’s last day, Tina brought a small portable party: a stacked-high plate of starchy S-shaped cookies and a tray of cold ravioli.
The ladies of the assembly line picked the raviolis up out of the pan with their fingers, taking tiny bites and catching the sauce in their paper napkins.
Everyone giggled like crazy. Stella had put together thousands of coffeepots with these women, but most of them she would never see again.
STELLA WENT INTO LABOR on the morning of July 24.
Down in her mother’s kitchen, she walked in circles while they waited for the expected things to happen: the cramps accelerating, becoming more painful.
Stella was cranky with hunger; Assunta wouldn’t let her eat anything, on doctor’s orders.
It was an infuriating, endless day of bouts of intense pain and miserable summer heat, wet-hot with Connecticut humidity.
She had just stepped into Assunta’s bathtub to splash cool water on herself when her water broke, so at least she didn’t make a mess.