Sacred Time (35 page)

I'm afraid of what'll happen to me if Ida finds someone else to love. I don't think I can do this again with another person. People don't stay with me for long. Except for Joey. But, then, he doesn't really have a choice. The longest I was in a relationship before Ida was seven months. The kind of love I wish for is the love my grandfather and Riptide had between them. I see them
drifting in the ocean, waiting for their chance to swim out of the current, together, outlasting its path. Floating in Riptide's embrace, his hands on her body, embracing her the way she would have never let a stranger hold her, my grandfather thinks of drowning and of making love to her. And he chooses her over drowning.

“At least you can't accuse me of pulling away from you,” I tell her.

“You still misinterpret everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“That you expect agendas behind the most ordinary conversations.”

“My mother's conversations about killing and maiming are not ordinary.”

“Sleep, Antonio. Your mother is stubborn. Strong.” And she's gone, my wife, leaving beyond the leaving she has already done.

“I wish I could kick my legs higher,” my mother says, “and keep my fists up at the same time.” She starts with the instructor-voice: “‘Because the natural reaction is to drop them when you kick. All a matter of TSC.'”

“I'm afraid to ask what that stands for.”

“Timing. Surprise—as in the element of surprise. And calm—keeping calm. ‘The three major elements of effective self-defense. TSC can save your life. It did for one of the students.'” Her instructor voice is choppy. Tough. “‘A rapist broke into this student's house. Threatened her. So she pretended to go along. Till he got his pants off. Then she grabbed him. By the balls.'”

Joey giggles.

“‘He tried to beat on her. But she held on. Till he howled for mercy. Then she dragged him to the door. She kicked him out. He ran down the street. And she got her baseball bat. Chased after him, yelling: I'm not through with you yet.'”

“Now he wants you chasing rapists?” I'm furious. Helpless.

“That's not what he's telling us to do.”

“I'd love to chase that instructor with a baseball bat or worse. For giving you a false sense of security.”

“There's nothing false about it,” my mother says. “And I never want to walk without that knowledge again.”

Every morning, she practices by herself in her bedroom. I imagine her in front of the mirror—
still graceful, though of a slower grace. She is powerful: she observes it in her stance as she kicks and rotates and punches and stretches. But her floors are still bare and not ready to absorb a fall, as they will during the winter, when she has her rugs down.

She still has the maple bedroom set and the family photos the way she used to arrange them above the dresser, including the one of my father lifting me high and the one of herself as a bride. Now, this is what's weird: her left elbow leans on a marble pillar that is just the height of her elbow. If I didn't remember this very photo of her with my father, I might believe she had posed like this, alone, on her wedding day. But when I was a boy, she and my father stood in this photo together, their arms linked, and I want to stop time there, when everyone I loved lived close by; when I believed my parents would be together forever, and that the entire world was made up of apartment buildings with tar beaches and fire escapes and washlines and neighbors propping their lawn chairs on the sidewalk and kids playing kick-the-can and hopscotch.

When the wedding photo vanished, it revealed a pale rectangle of wallpaper, a nothing-time before a nothing-now. It happened the day of my father's engagement party, and I was there, a witness to his uneasiness, toes hurting in my new shoes. The next morning, when I woke up, Aunt Floria was sleeping on a chair in our kitchen, smelling of licorice, her hair spread around her, while my mother was alone in the big bed, also smelling of licorice. The wedding photo was not on the wall.

When it finally reappeared to cover the nothing-now, my father was no longer in it; but since no one mentioned that change, it felt dangerous to ask, because then my father might vanish from my baby picture, too. I had nightmares of bobbing toward the ceiling fan like a getaway balloon about to be sliced by the blades, unable to return to the ground without my father's arms to pull me back.

That photo still puzzles me. Sometimes, I swear, the curtain behind the marble pillar is moving as if just stirred by a magician who has snatched my father behind that fabric; and I'm oddly reassured to think of him there—not in heaven or purgatory; most certainly not hell—but with this magician, leading a different kind of afterlife from what the priest promised at my father's funeral, waiting eagerly behind that curtain for my mother: still in his tuxedo; still with his sweepstakes smile; still the age he was when he vanished from the photo, younger than I am now, half the age my mother has reached; and still close enough if she were ever to call him back. Waiting. The way I wait for Ida.

I used to hope my mother would replace the photo with one printed from the original negative, and perhaps she planned to, eventually, once she no longer distrusted my father. I doubt that keeping him out was an act of omission, or that she no longer noticed the picture, the way she became used to the pattern of ferns on our wallpaper. I rather believe she deliberately made
him
live with his absence, just as she had lived with his absence, a reminder of what could happen to both of them again.

That day before she let my father come back to us, he asked me to help him clean the Studebaker. I said yes, but I didn't look at him. Just worked with him. Under the driver's seat, I found a quarter, a nickel, and a dried beet.

“Can I ask you something?” my father asked.

I shrugged.

My father brushed dirt from the floor mats, and one dried lettuce leaf dropped to the pavement, thin, like lizard skin. “Can I come home to you and your mother, Anthony?”

I raised the beet to my nose. It smelled of dry earth. “Okay,” I said. “Yes.”

“She's quite a fighter, your mother.”

What I recall most about my father's return was his adoration of my mother, spoiled by caution. It's how I am with Ida whenever she returns to me. Except that she doesn't stay long, while my parents stayed together after their one rift, tugging at their marriage to re-shape it into how they remembered it. Through the wall of my bedroom I'd hear him at night, talking to her more than he ever had before.
Mia cara,
he called her. It took my parents years to figure out that their marriage had become something else—stronger; more tender—and just when they settled into this new marriage of theirs and dared to cherish it for what it had become, my father had a stroke.

While he was recovering, he cooked. No longer for Festa Liguria, but for family. “Even now Victor brings food,” my relatives used to say.

My mother was not all that interested in food, but after my father had his second stroke and only survived for another nine days, she was the one who started cooking, bringing food around.

Though she doesn't like noisy music—she used to claim my grandfather's operas makes her elbows hurt from pushing against the armrests while she tried to get away—she now plays rapid and thumping music whenever she goes out, so that intruders will think someone young and strong and male is in there. Instead, it's become a signal to her neighbors that she isn't home.

I have started to call my mother Monday and Wednesday evenings at nine-forty-five.

“Don't spy on me, Anthony.”

“I can't sleep until I'm sure you're safe.”

“I cannot help you with that.”

“Usually you're glad to hear from me.”

“Not when you're spying on me.”

“I am not spying on you. Ever since you've started those classes, you're no longer the person I know.”

The following week, I dial her number at nine-forty-five and hang up the instant she answers, though it must be quite obvious that I'm the one calling. And for the first time it does feel like spying.

That Saturday, Joey and I take the subway to visit her. When we climb up the stairs at Fordham Road, a rat hunkers on the sidewalk. A few people point at it. Walk in a wide arc past it. Except for one man with a shopping bag who strides toward the rat, grinning. The rat doesn't move. It's disoriented. Weak. Two women scream, and Joey covers his eyes; but I don't look away soon enough.

“Did he step on it from the side or from the top?” Joey asks when I pull him away.

“The Bronx was not like that when I was a child,” I tell him as we pass a building with cracked windows, repaired with duct tape and cardboard. “After being downtown and arriving on the Concourse, you could breathe fresh air. With all the trees, it was like being in the country. It also was elegant, with the Art Deco buildings and shops. On weekends, women would wear mink stoles on the Concourse.”

“You're trying to distract me from the rat, Daddy.”

“That, too. But I also notice the changes in the neighborhood more whenever I'm with you, because you have nothing to compare this to.”

“Yes I do. Your stories. The shiny doors of the Paradise. Playing mass on Kevin's roof. Your Uncle Malcolm opening the fire hydrant in August—”

“He used to aim the spray toward us with the lid of a trash can and let Belinda and me dash through the cold water.”

“The ice-cream truck that came to your street…”

“Yelling up to my mother for money for a Bungalow Bar.” As I listen to myself, I feel I'm reclaiming some of that magic with words.

“Tell me about the Kitchen Sink.”

We pass the Indian-spice store that used to be the Fordham Boys Shop. Sometimes we shop here for cardamom and dried ginger. Coriander and fennel seeds. Across the street is the bodega where we buy ripe plantains. Joey loves to fry them till they're black. The last time we were at St. Simon Stock, the mass schedule outside the door was in Spanish. Most of the Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrant families are gone from our neighborhood—some to the suburbs or Manhattan; most, like Kevin, to Co-op City—and they've been replaced by immigrants more recent than my grandfather, who used to tell us how he struggled to get by when he arrived here. Except what these new immigrants have come to is not as promising as it was for him in the postwar years, when these buildings were new. Now they're in disrepair, with outdated plumbing, and steel bars outside many windows. Hardship has become more visible.