All Alone in the Universe (12 page)

fourteen

 

 

F
RAN HAD
C
HRISTAAAS
E
VE AGAIN THIS YEAR.
L
AST YEAR SHE
skipped it because it is such a ton of work. So we were all thrilled when she turned from her spaghetti sauce one day and said, “I‧m thinking I‧ll have Christmas Eve, Helen. Can you come?”

My mother wrapped both hands around her coffee cup and studied an invisible calendar in space.

“Well,” she said, “we‧re not going anywhere, but my mother will be here.”

“Your mother will come, too, of course,” said Fran. “You can bring a ham. And cookies. I‧ll need your oven.”

“And card tables,” said my mom. “You‧ll probably want both of ours.”

“Do you still have those folding chairs from your church?” asked Fran.

Chrisanne and Tesey and I passed smiles across our soup; once they got this far, there was no turning back. A notepad and pen materialized in my mother‧s hands, and she and Fran started going over all the details.

There were a lot of details. A lot of them had to do with fish. Italian Christmas Eve dinner is
about
fish. Unlimited fish. Soft, fat potato doughnuts stuffed with anchovies, called cullurelli. Baccalà, which is dried cod that has to be soaked in water for a week, and the water changed every day. And calamari. This is like lasagna, and Fran made me taste it the first time and say how good it was before she told me that the noodles were pieces of squid. More squid and more baccalà get tossed with spaghetti. And there is fresh cod, and smelts.

 

Then, because some people don‧t like fish, there is regular lasagna and spaghetti, ham and a stuffed turkey. Salad, vegetables, garlic bread, little crystal dishes with olives and pickles. Mountains of fruit and nuts. Everyone brings some dish prepared with patience and great care. We all clatter down into Fran and Danny‧s basement and sit at tables connected by overlapping tablecloths into a long, uneven line, squeezed in between the storage area on one side and the freezer, washer, and dryer on the other skie, and we eat.

The food has a magical effect of making us feel we must be the most fortunate human beings living on the earth, because what it really is, is love, disguised as food. It holds all the love we didn‧t find words for this year. Or maybe food is just a better way to express it.

Anyway, the words are busy doing other things. Fran is telling everybody what and how mach lo eat (more, of everything). Her brothers are having big arguments about which turnpike exit has a Sunoco station or which moment of which day of which year the helicopter landed in the field behind Grandma Spina‧s backyard.

Here‧s how many conversations each person is having:

 

Weddings, hairdos, illnesses, new babies, new storm doors, new cars, car trouble, bad weather, bad luck, good luck, work school, vacations, movies, TV.

Danny makes sure each glass is full of wine or pop.

After dinner, little glasses of Galliano are poured for the adults from a tall, skinny bottle. It‧s a sticky yellow drink that tastes like licorice. This year Chrisanne got her own glass. Tesey got one, too. I got a sip, which was all I wanted, really. It‧s interesting but I‧d rather eat the cookies. You wouldn‧t think I‧d have room, but I did, at least for nibbling. Biscotti, jumbrelli, ingenetti, and thumbprints. (Guess which kind we brought, being only honorary Italians.)

Candlelight full stomachs, and sips of Galliano warmed and melted the tangle of noisy talk down into one conversation that stretched from end to end. It thickened into the middle as people moved into seats left empty by Tesey, Chrisanne, and the cousins, who drifted upstairs to play cards and wash dishes. I was going to go, too, but Fran was telling about the plastic tomatoes my dad tied to her tomato plants and about how she changed the labels on our cans while we were on vacation, and I wanted to hear her tell it.

“Can you believe it?” she said. “I‧m such a wimp. After Helen came over with the second can, I couldn‧t stand it anymore, and I gave her the list I actually kept a list, that‧s how compulsive I am, of what was really in each can.”

“She handed me this list,” said my mother, laughing, with tears spilling from the corners of her eyes. “And I just looked at it. I thought. How does she know what‧s in my cans? It took me five minutes, even after she explained to me how she cut the labels off the cans with a razor blade and glued them on different cans-”

“You didn‧t think I could think of something like that, did you, Helen?”

“I couldn‧t believe anybody would think of something like that.”

“I
had
to tell her. She was ready to take the cans back to the A and P. I was afraid Joe down there would have a stroke; it would overload his brain, trying to figure out what happened. And then it would be my fault!”

“Hey, Fran,” said Aunt Angie. “Speaking of strokes. Did you know that Vincent Peretti is in the hospital? I was at the desk when they brought him in. He had a stroke. A mild one, though. He‧s doing good. You should stop in and see him.”

“No kidding,” Fran said. “When did that happen?”

“Thursday night,” said Aunt Angie. “Uncle Vincent. I was married to Tony five years before I realized he wasn‧t his real uncle.”

Uncle Tony laughed. “You were married to me five years before I realized he wasn‧t my real uncle.”

Grandma Spina smiled. “That‧s because he practically grew up in our house, with our family. His dad was no good. A bum. Always drinking. Vincent was afraid of him.” She shook her head. “I never understood how such a kind boy come from such a mean father. Well, his mother was a nice woman, poor thing. I guess that‧s how.”

My dad and Mrs. Tovelli blew puffs of smoke from their cigarettes and tapped them into an ashtray at just the same time, in twin movements. Mr. Tovelli‧s cigar added smoke to the cloud that formed there, then thinned to a haze. Grandpa Gliamocco spoke to Grandma Gliamocco in Italian, and she spoke back to him. He translated.

“Tilda say, ‘Joe Peretti wasn‧t mean when he wasn‧t drinking. The trouble was, he was always drinking.” He looked around the table. “What do you do with someone like that?”

In the quiet of Fran and Danny‧s basement, there was only the muffled blur of laughter and shouting from upstairs. Here below there were a few murmurs of bafflement. No one seemed to know. Who could even think about it after all that good food?

“I was like that.” It was Mr. Tovelli.

Fran said, “Oh, Frank, you were never like that.”

“Sure I was,” said Mr. Tovelli. “When I got back from the war. For about six months. If it wasn‧t for the guy I was working for, I‧d be dead. He dragged me out of the bar one day and said to me, ‘Frank, I‧m watching you kill yourself. And not only am I watching you, my money is buying the weapon. I don‧t spend my money like that.’ He took me to his house. He said, ‘You‧re living here for a while.’ Every day after work I went home with him. His wife fed me. I played with his kids. I slept on their couch. For three months. Then I met Joanie, and things started to make a little more sense, it got easier. I can never forget what he did for me, though.”

It got quiet again then, the kind of quiet where people are wondering What do we say now?

Finally, Uncle Tony said, “What made you drink like that, Frank?”

Mr. Tovelli shrugged his bulky shoulders. “Oh, you know. It was the war. The war was not glamorous for me, where I was. It was not exciting. It was pretty lousy, where I was. I couldn‧t get it out of my head; it made me a little crazy, I guess.”

“That wasn‧t Joe Peretti‧s problem,” said Grandma Spina.

“Maybe not,” said Mr. Tovelli. “Maybe nobody ever asked him. Did anybody ever ask him? That‧s all I‧m saying.”

My dad spoke. “My mother nearly always had someone sleeping on our couch. Half the time we didn‧t even look to see who it was.”

“Really, Ed?” said Fran. “Like what kind of people?”

“Oh, I don‧t know…. I do remember one girl, Lila something. She got in trouble, and her mother kicked her out of the house. She was with us for a long time. She had her baby in our living room, and I think the baby was walking before she moved out.”

Aunt Mary said, “People don‧t do that anymore, do they? People don‧t look out for each other the way they used to.”

“Sure, they do. We just don‧t sleep in each other‧s houses anymore.” Fran laughed. “We have these dumb little houses.” She paused. “It does seem different, though, doesn‧t it?”

“It‧s no different,” said Mr. Tovelli. “It just seems different because when we were kids, everything our parents did, we thought that was the normal thing to do. Now we have to think about it. Just like they did. You think my boss didn‧t think twice before bringing a drunk home to live with his family, with his children? You think that was an everyday event for him?”

Aunt Mary said, “He knew you were a good person, Frank.”

“He didn‧t know that,” said Mr. Tovelli. “Nobody knows that.”

“Now that‧s something I don‧t think I could do,” said my mother.

“But you washed Bobby‧s clothes and made him lunch,” I said.

Everyone turned and looked at me. They had forgotten I was still there.

“Whose clothes did you wash, Helen?” asked Aunt Angie.

“What are you doing here?” Fran said. “You‧re supposed to be upstairs washing dishes. Here. Take these glasses up, and ask Tesey if the coffee‧s ready.”

I clinked up the metal treads of the basement stairs. As I reached the landing, I could hear my mother saying, “I just feel for the kids. It‧s not their fault” I carried the glasses to the sink; then I went back and sat quietly on the landing to listen some more.

After a while it was time to go home and to bed.

Chrisanne fell asleep right away, but I lay awake, looking up at the landscape on the ceiling. It was just the shadow of the curtains made by light from the electric Christmas candles on the windowsill, but it always looks to me like hills and trees next to a river at sunset golden and brown like an old painting. Peaceful.

 

I thought about Mr. Tovelli‧s story and the other stories. What was the difference between Mr. Tovelli and Mr. Prbyczka, between Lila something and Marie? Okay, so maybe Mr. Prbyczka was a jerk But maybe he wasn‧t. It seemed to me that the difference was that someone had cared about Mr. Tovelli, about Lila. Like the hero in a fairy tale who says to the monster, “I can see your true heart!” and then the monster turns back into some good person who was just under a spell.