Death 7 Choking （Change of Life） #3
In her darkness, she remembered how Assunta had collapsed when Louie and Queenie left—how she had torn out her hair and vomited and smeared her feces in animal desperation.
Stella had been disturbed by her mother’s behavior, had thought that manifestation of grief barbaric—inhuman.
Now she understood. She wished she could shit out her own grief, pull it out by its roots.
But she couldn’t—she wasn’t Assunta. All her life Stella had thought she was so strong, but now she learned that it was Assunta who had been the strong one—Assunta who had been truly in control of herself.
Stella, meanwhile, had no means to excise her own demons.
The wound was unhealable. Stella could never say good-bye.
There was no chance for redemption. There was only “never again,” the beginning to so many sentences now.
Never again would she see her mother’s mischievous smile, hear her girlish laugh.
Never again would she sit with Assunta on the back porch and tell stories.
Never again would she taste her mother’s raù.
Never again would she feel her mother’s cool hand on her forehead as she chanted the unfascination, or her warm hand on her shoulder blade to steady her when she was rattled by the rush of the world around her.
BERNADETTE HAD NEVER SEEN HER MOTHER LIKE THIS. No one had.
She tried to get Stella to drink some water or soup. Bernadette was crying herself; she had loved her grandmother. Stella realized, with the dissociation afforded by her grief, that she was not being a good mother right now. She didn’t care.
“Mommy,” Bernadette sobbed. “You’re scaring me.”
The world is a scary place, Stella thought. She stared out the window at the street, on the other side of which was the house her mother no longer lived in. The world is a scary place, and you’re all alone in it, and you might as well learn that now.
NOW STELLA DRANK WHENEVER SHE WANTED.
SHE HAD LOST BOB—that had been a terrible thing. She hadn’t known if she would live through that. And then she had lost Assunta. She hadn’t known there was a place so dark as the one she tumbled into after she had lost her mother.
Of course, she didn’t know yet in the summer of 1970 that there would be another layer of darkness coming.
In half a year’s time she would lose her Nino somewhere in the jungles of far-off Vietnam.
She didn’t know now that she had already seen him for the last time, before he shipped out this past spring when his draft number was called.
SO ASSUNTA WAS GONE; Tony was a cranky goat-slaughtering diabetic. Stella was descending willfully into alcoholism. Alder Street was overrun with Joey and Mickey’s shabby girl progeny, and with Carmelo’s obnoxious teenage sons with their motorbikes and thunk-engine used cars.
Stella still went to church with Carmelo on Sundays to receive Communion, but she didn’t pray anymore. Praying made her feel as foolish as getting caught talking to herself in the grocery store.
AT GARDENER’S, BERNIE’S HANDS SHOOK with nervous energy as she counted out customers’ change.
She had become fixated on the fate of the dog.
If Penny was dead, there was nothing Bernie would be able to do about it, but she needed to know one way or another.
She needed to go home and to challenge her grandfather—she was convinced now that he knew what had happened.
When she couldn’t bear it even one more minute, she made one of the produce boys cover her register so she could seek out the manager, who was back in the deli.
“I have to go home, Mr. Fastiggi. I don’t feel well.
” As long as there was some truth to it, and there was, she could look him in the eye when she said it.
He looked her up and down. “You look okay to me.”
“I’m sick to my stomach,” Bernie said. Again, not a lie—her stomach did feel funny with the nerves.
The manager sighed. The two deli boys exchanged looks; they thought the girls always got off easy. But so what? “Can you make it until twelve thirty? Then Janice can cover for you when she gets in.”
Bernie’s watch said twelve fifteen. Fifteen minutes wouldn’t make any difference in whether the dog was alive or dead, would it? “All right,” she said. Then, remembering to seem a little desperate, she added, “I’ll try.”
THE CLOCK ON THE MANTEL above the television chimed twelve thirty and Stella lurched awake.
She had fallen asleep sitting up on the couch, but it couldn’t have been for long, because her head buzzed softly, still happy with the morning wine.
Her crocheting had fallen to the floor and the needle had come out.
She picked it up and thought about what she would eat for lunch.
As she rose, her gaze fixed on the empty driveway of 4 Alder.
Mickey must have gone out; Stella wondered whether she’d taken the little girls.
Sometimes Mickey left them with their grandfather for hours as if she genuinely thought he was babysitting.
Tony wouldn’t even remember to give them anything to eat; he could hardly feed himself.
Stella didn’t like going over there but decided she was going to be a good aunt today. She could make the girls sandwiches while she made one for herself. She didn’t have anything else to do.
Sliding through the last of her morning drunk, Stella looked both ways perhaps overzealously before crossing the street.
The grassy lawns, electric green from the week’s rare summer rain, shimmered for her in the midday heat.
There was no breeze, but at least outside the sun dried away her layers of sweat.
Stella let herself in the back door without knocking.
There was no one in the kitchen. She followed the sound of the television to the living room, but no one was there, either.
Apparently Mickey had taken all the girls with her this time.
Having crossed through the whole house, Stella opened the front door to let herself out that way, but happened to see little Pammy sitting on the floor of the hallway, her bare legs crossed Indian-style, making an old Chatty Cathy doll walk up and down the floorboards in front of her. Had Mickey left her here by herself?
“Allo, Pam,” Stella said.
Pam looked at her silently. None of Joey’s girls were big talkers, Stella figured because their mother didn’t give them a chance to say anything.
“You hungry, Pammy?” she said in English. “You want me to make you sanguicci?”
Pam shook her head.
Stella tried not to be annoyed. “You want to say, ‘No, thank you, Auntie Stella’?”
“No, thank you, Auntie Stella,” Pam repeated obediently.
“All right,” said Stella, but that was when her mother-instinct kicked in, through the soft fuzzy pulsing of the wine.
Something was funny here. Pammy was only six—why had her mother left her alone?
Why was she sitting in the hallway? What a strange place for her to play with her doll. “Pammy, you here by yourself?”
“No,” her niece answered. “There’s Barbie and Grandpa, but they’re playing.”
“Where are they?” Stella asked. She hadn’t seen anyone in the backyard.
Pammy used the doll’s arm to point silently to the closed door behind her. Tony’s bedroom.
Stella felt her heart speed up before her mind did.
“What are they playing with the door closed?” she was asking Pam out loud, even as she was already thinking, That can’t be why she’s not wearing any pants.
How had she not registered that it was strange for Pam to be sitting on the bare floor in only her underwear?
“They’re playing the game,” Pam said. “I have to wait for my turn.”
He wouldn’t, Stella thought, but she knew he would—the pieces snuggled together in her mind, like a plug fitting into a socket. She had always known he would.
She bent down and swooped Pam up in her arms, sitting the little girl on her left hip in the clamp of her elbow.
She tried the doorknob, which was of course locked.
Her skin roiled with the memory of her recurring nightmare, her father running his large hard hands over her body.
Without thinking through whether it was the right thing to do, whether she might hurt the little girl, Stella threw herself against the door.
She was lucky because the frame was made of cheap pine, and it splintered and gave.
Pammy made a grunting noise in her ear and gripped Stella’s neck.
Stella heaved herself a second time, and the door flew open.
The curtains were drawn. Before Stella could think through whether she wanted to see what was happening in this dank bedroom she swatted the light switch.
She already knew, she already knew, there was no surprise.
Her eight-year-old niece Barbie crouched on the bed, her face bent over her grandfather’s crotch and her tiny bare bum pointing toward the door so that Stella had a clear view of where her father was putting his fingers.
“No!” Stella shrieked. Her voice sounded inhuman to her, like the dying shrill of a pig being drained.
It came again, the shriek: “No!” Hooking her naked little niece around the waist with her elbow, Stella snatched Barbie off the bed as Tony sheepishly pushed himself to a sitting position, pulling the blanket over his groin.
“You.” Stella’s chest heaved with fury. “Monster.”
“Stella,” he was saying, waving his hand, waving it away. “It’s no big deal. I didn’t ruin them.”
“Monster!” She was fighting her way through a blur of emotions and impulses, to scream, to be sick, to tear him with her fingernails, but the little girls were there in her arms and the wine-blood beating against her temples made her slow and confused.
Her own hatred and disgust for her father, the crusted dome encasing Stella’s life, built up layer by layer over fifty years of encounters and nightmares and grief, descended on her.