Death 8 Cerebral Hemorrhage （Dementia） #3
That place in the back of her head pulses with that low-grade heat.
She grasps Tommy’s hand and stands like he says.
They are whooping and clapping, all these tall dark-haired children towering over her, with their white-blond children looking up with their wide light-colored eyes from where they’re playing on the floor.
How funny that her own children’s children have nothing left in them of her, just one generation removed.
But the whooping has turned into the tarantella, and the clapping has broken into a rhythm. DUH-duh DUH-duh DUHN . . .
Stella waves her arms. She won’t do the whole dance today. She smiles.
What a woman! It’s the tallest one shouting—Freddy. What a woman you’ve got yourself, Dad! And they change tune, her sons bellowing in Calabrese, which not all of them speak very well. Uai uai uai chi mugliera mi capitai!
There is Carmelo, crying of course. He kisses Stella very gently on her cheekbone, just below the bandage. What a woman I married, he says.
SOME THINGS GET BETTER, some things don’t.
SHE STANDS, SHE WALKS, SHE DANCES.
Her language comes back to her. Not always the right language.
She crochets—fast. She can make anything—spreads, hats, scarves. They don’t always look very nice. She combines colors like Christmas Blend with Valentine Pink.
The grandchildren watch TV with her while she crochets.
She loves them. None of them are old enough to remember what she was like before.
The Maglieri grandchildren will grow up thinking it is standard to have an unintelligible crocheting grandmother engaged in a blood feud with her sister, and who might at any time stop strangers in the street and hand them Mardi Gras beads or miniature sticks of deodorant she hides in her red purse.
The Maglieri youth will be so conditioned by the Accident that even as adults, when they are old enough to be used to the world, they will marvel at their friends’ alternate grandmother experiences.
AT MASS, STELLA TRIES TO PRAY, but all the words are gone. She tries to think of God and the Virgin, but she can’t concentrate.
She doesn’t speak of her mother. Maybe Assunta was one of the parts they cut out of her mind with their surgical knives.
SHE DOESN’T DRINK ANYMORE, EITHER. The doctors say not to let her, but it doesn’t matter, because she doesn’t want to drink anymore, or maybe she does, but she doesn’t correctly identify what wanting to drink feels like.
CAN AUNTIE TINA COME OVER for Christmas dinner, at least? Stella’s children beg her.
They don’t understand. They don’t understand the danger.
“She’s jealous,” Stella tells them, over and over. She killed my baby, she wants to say, she almost killed me seven times because of the evil in her heart. But when she tries to explain why, she can’t find the words.
SHE CAN’T REMEMBER THE MAL’OICCH’ unfascination spell, because she never believed in it enough to learn it back then and now she believes and it’s too late.
Instead she makes the sign to ward off the invidia when she sees her sister, a fist with index finger and pinky sticking out, two horns to pierce the Evil Eye.
“Stop that, Ma,” her children say. “That’s rude.”
These children, who have never had to fight for their lives, who have never struggled for anything, are worried about rudeness.
THEY START HAVING TWO DIFFERENT Mother’s Day parties, one pink and white cake at 3 Alder Street for Stella, then a second at 5 Alder Street for Tina.
They have pasta at the first party, coffee at the second.
Tina makes the pasta for the first party, which she isn’t allowed to attend.
Stella pretends she doesn’t know about the pasta’s provenance.
Stella has eleven grandchildren now. Tina has none.
MARIO AND CAROLINA PERRI COME to visit from Las Vegas, where they moved when Mario retired. They can only visit one of the Fortuna sisters at a time, because of the rules.
She’s still angry, five years later? Carolina asks. She was Stella’s maid of honor forty-five years ago.
You can’t take her seriously, Tommy tells her. She’s not right in her head.
She always was very stubborn, Carolina says, reaching over to pat Stella’s knee.
Stella smiles and pinches Carolina’s arm so hard, Carolina shrieks and pulls away.
STELLA’S SON TOMMY TAKES HER to the seven thirty mass every day.
He walks her to the altar to take Communion, and she lets the priest put the wafer in her mouth.
She doesn’t remember what it felt like when she used to believe it became the body of Christ on her tongue.
She has not felt absolved of her sins for many years.
SHE CROCHETS FAST TO DISTRACT HERSELF from the memories that they didn’t cut away, and buried memories that are lying there like potatoes now. Baby Bob, the hotel in Montreal, Nino.
She makes so many blankets, she can’t give them all away. Tommy leaves them in the Goodwill bin.
You gonna make me go broke, Ma, he says. Buying all this yarn. But he takes her to Jo-Ann Fabrics three times a week for more.
When crocheting fails to distract her, she repeats her stories. She can no longer emote, so to her audience they are only words. Maybe to her they are also only words; maybe the doctors cut away her pain and left only her obsession. We’ll never know.
“My husband raped me on my honeymoon,” Stella says to a young man and woman eating breakfast together at Franklin Diner. They smile at her. She doesn’t realize she spoke in Calabrese.
“Shhh, Mommy, that’s not true,” her son Freddy says as he guides her away. “You don’t go around saying things like that to people.”
IN AUGUST 1996 THE MAGLIERIS throw Auntie Tina and Uncle Rocco a surprise fiftieth-anniversary party.
They rent out DiMarco’s banquet hall on Franklin Avenue and lure Tina by telling her it’s a baby shower for Franceschina Carapellucci’s granddaughter Angie.
The family will joke for years about how Tina brought six trays of angel wing cookies to her own surprise party.
Sweet little Mikey Perri brings an extra suit jacket for Rocco, who arrives thinking he’s only dropping off Tina.
Tina and Rocco are so stunned, they both cry.
Almost eight years have passed since Stella and Tina have been in the same room.
Carmelo and his children trick Stella into attending by pretending the party is for her.
They guide her up to the high table, where, half a century after the event, the entire bridal party has been reassembled for a photo (except, of course, Fiorella Mulino, who died so young, benadic’).
Carmelo sits between Stella and Tina, gesticulating jovially to block his crazy wife’s line of sight.
Stella realizes the truth, but she lets them all think she’s been duped. She doesn’t want to miss the party. She dances to “Pepino Suricillo” and the Chicken Dance. She claps her hands and waves her arms and chews her chicken parmigiano with the new dentures Tommy got her.
She is careful not to turn her head in her sister’s direction so she can’t see her or her pervert husband, Rocco. Fifty years have passed, but she can only remember his selfish lies and his wandering eye. Happy Anniversary to them.
“They will rot together in hell,” she tells her son Richie when he brings her a Diet Coke.
“Sh, Ma,” Richie says. “Be nice for one day, will you?”
THEY HAVE A FIFTIETH-ANNIVERSARY PARTY for Stella and Carmelo the next year, but it’s much smaller, just dinner at a restaurant.
STELLA GETS VERY ANGRY IN THE SPRINGTIME, when she becomes stuck in the memory of baby Bob kicking in her belly that gray spring of 1948 when the world was crushing her and he was her only ally.
She channels her anger into physical activity.
When Carmelo is out helping at his son Guy’s restaurant, Stella finds a pair of hefty garden shears and uses them to fell Carmelo’s grape trellises, the gooseberry bushes, and the young peach tree.
God only knows how she hacked through that trunk, her children will say. Who knew Mommy was that strong.
Why would she do such a terrible thing? they ask each other, and reply, She’s not right in the head. What can you do.
LATER, STELLA CUTS DOWN CARMELO’S two beautiful fifteen-foot fig trees. No one’s ever seen figs like that before or since, purtroppo.
IN THE FALL STELLA GETS ANGRY again when the crisp weather reminds her of Montreal, and she carries the feeling of cold marble against the pit of her stomach.
She burns all the photos in the kitchen sink.
Carmelo comes home from the bar to a house reeking of carbonized plastic.
Smears of black and gray smoke have ruined the apple-patterned kitchen wallpaper, which Carmelo will have replaced.
STELLA’S SON TOMMY SITS IN FRONT OF HER, a folding chair drawn up to her armchair, his knees touching her knees. He moves his mouth like he’s talking. Stella can’t tell if she’s going deaf or if he’s teasing her.
STELLA’S OLDEST GRANDDAUGHTER GRADUATES from high school.
She will go to one of the best universities in the country.
Stella won’t recognize its name, and no one will ever successfully explain the big-city job the granddaughter eventually gets.
But Stella will proudly attend all her graduation parties, and happily pose for pictures wearing the granddaughter’s flat tasseled cap.
Her other grandchildren will become mechanics, hairdressers, nurses, bankers, auditors, graphic designers, restaurateurs.
One will become the principal of an elementary school.
One will own a country club, another a funeral home, another a car wash.
One will go to Hollywood and act in movies produced by J.
J. Abrams, Jodie Foster, and the Coen brothers.
Stella won’t recognize those names, either, but she’ll enjoy watching her granddaughter’s face, thirty feet tall, on the screen at the movie theater.