Death 6 Exsanguination （Motherhood） #10
“Ma!” Stella barked. The chatter from the living room had grown frighteningly quiet. “Ask her yourself the next time you see her.”
Lying sleeplessly in bed that night, her breasts aching because Guy was already weaning himself, Stella turned the thought over and over.
Would she let Carmelo put his thing in her mouth, if it meant she didn’t have to get pregnant again?
The thought made her want to throw up, and she couldn’t make herself come to the answer yes.
* * *
STELLA CALLED GARDEN MEN to plant a hedge at the front of her property to stop the children from running into the road when they were playing in the backyard.
She enjoyed watching the men in their dirty close-fitting jeans dig holes and bend over pots.
The whole job only took a few hours and boom, there was a lush green curtain separating Stella’s private business from the rest of the world.
Carmelo was furious, claiming he could have installed the hedge himself and saved them a lot of money. Stella pooh-poohed his ire. “When would you have had time?”
Several months later, when she was feeling particularly fed up with Carmelo, Stella called painters and had them paint the house bright pink while he was at work. He would learn better than to make her mad.
LATER, MUCH LATER, after she went crazy, Stella would chop down the hedge herself with a pair of garden clippers. Her grown sons would marvel at the strength the destruction must have required.
THEIR FIRST SUMMER ON ALDER STREET, 1955, Carmelo turned over the spongy dirt in the backyard, pumped out the water, and filled in the soil for a garden.
He got up to weed in the earliest light of dawn before work.
He planted zucchini, tomatoes, and peas.
He planted two gooseberry bushes, unique Balkan varietals that had been smuggled past customs by an Albanian buddy from the electric company.
He planted two grape trellises, one along the garden and one overhanging a picnic table.
Stella looked at the perfect leafy stakes and considered how Carmelo’s garden looked like it could have been transplanted from a mountain terrace in Ievoli. They had come from distant villages, she and Carmelo, but in the United States their backgrounds looked almost the same.
The air here was too moist, and the winter too cold, but on a hot day in June if Stella lay on her back in the tick-infested grass by the garden and looked up through the bean leaves, translucent lime-green in the sun, she could imagine she was home again.
FOR THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS, on afternoons as they worked in their respective gardens, Carmelo would call up the hill to Tina, or she would call down to him—do you have any extra rags so I can tie my beans?
Did Freddy mow your lawn like I told him?
Is your wife’s vacuum cleaner still broken?
Do you want to come have a glass of wine?
THE GOOSEBERRIES AND THE GRAPE TRELLISES would get chopped down, too, and the beautiful fifteen-foot fig tree, after Stella went crazy.
IN AUGUST 1955, LITTLE KNOB-KNEED TOMMY started kindergarten.
School was awful for Tommy. He was tiny and he couldn’t run well or throw a ball—he had never learned that from his father, who didn’t know anything about balls himself.
The worst thing about the whole school situation was that he couldn’t understand a word anyone said to him, because he’d never learned any English in the bosom of his Italian home.
Tommy was a nonconversant runt, and that is a painful way to be forced to join society.
Tommy, as the oldest child of two immigrant parents, had it the worst. When Nino started kindergarten the next year, things were tough but not as tough, because at least he had Tommy.
And then by the time Bernie went to school, two years after that, she was so used to hearing her older brothers speak English at home, and so used to the English-speaking television in their front room, that it was almost no trauma at all.
IN OCTOBER 1955, STELLA GAVE BIRTH TO FEDERICO. Carmela and her husband, Paolo, took the train down from Montreal to stand up as godparents.
Freddy would be the most handsome of Stella’s sons, with his glossy black hair (before it all fell out) and his grandmother’s down-turned chocolate eyes, the unusual Mascaro eye shape that had made Assunta the beauty of Ievoli, and which here in America got Freddy nicknamed “the Jap.” He would inherit his father’s musicality and eventually become the frontman in a local band.
Freddy, the fifth baby, would also be the breaking point for poor Stella’s mind, which could no longer conceive of her children as individuals versus as a mass.
Maybe four would have been all right, but five was just too many, and by the time the oldest were teenagers their name had become TommyNinoGuyFreddy!
Bernie, obviously, was an exception, what with her being a princess instead of a hooligan.
NEXT UP WAS NICOLA, “NICKY,” in August 1956, less than a year after Freddy.
No one was really ready for Nicky. Stella hadn’t even believed she could be pregnant until she was almost six months along; she’d become so inured to morning sickness over the last eight years that she hadn’t managed to distinguish it from a hangover.
Stella and Carmelo didn’t know who to ask to be godparents on such short notice, so Tina and Rocco stood up again.
The Maglieris had to wait to have the baptism until after the Caramanicos got back from their ten-year anniversary trip to Italy, which they had been planning for a lot longer than Stella had been planning on having Nicky.
But at this point Stella and Carmelo were willing to cut a few corners, and they were sure God would understand.
Luckily Assunta now lived across the street. She was still working in the tobacco fields but could stay home on the worst days and help Stella with the two new infants. As much as Stella was annoyed by her father’s proximity, she was grateful for her mother’s.
Nicky, one of only two sons who would inherit Carmelo’s famous blue eyes, would grow up to be the gentlest of the Maglieri boys.
He loved animals, and Stella was always catching him slinking up the stairs with his jacket zipped around a suspiciously squirming bulge.
Stella would have to go chasing him and banging on his door—“Nicky! What do you have in there!”—lest she find another squirrel he’d tried to save from a cat bleeding in his bedding, or another green garden snake coiled up in the bathtub.
Nicky would be too gentle for the world, though, and would retreat into a cave life, spending his adulthood watching television in the bedroom he’d once shared with his brothers, stretching various disability checks to cover a medicating supply of weed and grape soda.
WHEN YOU COME FROM A LARGE ITALIAN FAMILY, not only do you simply have more relatives numerically than many American families do, but you also keep in closer touch with them.
This means a socially obedient Italian American will have more special occasions than their non-Italian friends can conceive of.
Funerals and baptisms, anniversary and graduation parties, babies’ birthdays, but worst of all weddings, weddings, weddings, and the showers and fittings and shoe-dyeings that precede them.
Carmelo was a socially obedient Italian, and for better or for worse, Stella was married to him.
This was why she spent what felt like every Saturday at a wedding.
Carmelo made her go shopping for nice dresses, thinking that would make her feel better, but she hated being trussed up in sequins or silk when her breasts were leaking or her stomach swollen tight against the fabric.
The music and small talk made her tired, as did picking out gifts from registries and smiling for people whose names she couldn’t recall.
She remembered how she used to love the September fhesta in Ievoli, the Italian Society dances during the war, but it was a different person who had been doing the dancing then than the one who was doing the remembering now.
Italians, in case you did not know, invite children to all occasions.
This meant every week or so the hooligans had to be wrestled into their little suit pants, which were just the right material for sliding across newly waxed floors.
The boys were the life of their own party, even if that meant dismantling the bride and groom’s; no one knew whether to laugh at them because they were adorable in their tiny matching suits or to actually call the police.
Nino, who had the practical mind of an engineer, was famous for coordinating drag races with empty serving carts stolen from venue kitchens.
They never smashed a wedding cake, but they did once get a plate of marinara dumped on a bride’s train.
It was around this time, 1958 or 1959, that Stella gave up and just let them do whatever they wanted. “Those are wild kids, Stella,” people would say to her, in their reprimanding but unhelpful Italian style.
“What am I supposed to do?” she’d say back.
“There’s too many of them. I’m outnumbered.
” Let anyone who wanted to look down on her take the matter up with her Catholic husband.
God had given her all these children; there must be a reason He had not given her the ability or desire to keep up with them.