Sacred Time (7 page)

Before we went to bed, my father chopped at the sides of our Christmas tree until it fit into our living room with all of Aunt Floria's stuff. I hated how scrawny our tree looked afterwards. What spoiled it more was that we had to shove her fabrics and sewing supplies around the base of the tree, where we used to lay out the tracks for my Lionel trains.

The next morning, my mother's head was hurting, and she threw up. My father had to lead her by the arm back to the bedroom, where she lay with the door and curtains closed. She used to get a few migraines each year, but now she complained about them daily.

“Maybe you're pregnant,” Aunt Floria suggested.

“No.” My mother pressed one palm against her belly, her eyes afraid. “No,” she said. “It's that smell of camphor that gets me sick.”

“I'll air our clothes in the bathroom.”

“Then the bathroom will have that smell.”

“I'll hang them on the fire escape then.”

But my mother took to her bed, yielding her kitchen to Aunt Floria. Light or sound or food made her migraines worse, and I was glad for her when she could sleep. Glad, too, that she didn't see how I enjoyed baking with Aunt Floria for Christmas: pignolata and taralli and mostaccioli. Three evenings in a row, my father put on his hat and took me along to Hung Min's, where we found some of the men from his backgammon club. While they played, I'd get to order my favorites for all of us: moo goo gai pan and fried rice and egg rolls and chow mein. Usually, my father only played backgammon on Mondays, but now he seemed anxious to be away from the apartment. The other men were far older than he, and they'd let me pour their tea and put lots of sugar into the little cups.

Around my mother he was careful. Quiet. Once, when I came into their room, he was sitting on the edge of the bed. “You want me to help you get rid of that migraine?” he asked her.

She hesitated. Then noticed me. “Anthony,” she said.

My father kissed her throat. “We could send the boy into the kitchen while we…you know…?”

“I couldn't. Not with your sister so close.”

Some afternoons, the twins practiced the banana song on the accordion desperately, and with great tenacity, certain that those long-drawn squeaks would bring their papa back.

“Papa will hear us,” they told me.

“And then he'll find us.”

Since the shoulder straps were too long, they helped each other hold the accordion up and sang, “I'm Chiquita Banana and I'm here to say: I ta-ke the bananas and I run-a away…,” while air squeezed in and out of the bellows, causing dreadful sounds.

“Papa will find us.”

In the meantime, though, the twins kept finding me.

Since Kevin's sister had the croup, I was not allowed in his apartment, and Mrs. Hudak had just bought a television and didn't let me talk while it was on. James had helped her move her furniture so she could see the television from any part of her living room. She used to sit across from me at her table, or she'd watch our street from her window, observing more interesting things than on television while also making our neighborhood safer; but now I could only see her back and that television. Both Mrs. Hudak and I loved lady mud-wrestlers because they fought dirty, but I didn't tell my mother because she didn't allow anything violent on our television.

I didn't visit Mrs. Hudak when James was around, and he'd been there a lot since he'd graduated from high school. For a while he'd worked at Sutter's, selling French confections, then at Mario's on Arthur Avenue. So far James hadn't found a new job. He didn't like me—not since I'd asked him why he got tomato-red when he saw my mother.

The last day of school before Christmas vacation, I ran home to Creston Avenue and locked myself in our bathroom before my cousins could get home. Ralph was hunched beneath the sink pipes, and I lifted him up. With my free hand, I cast shadows of snarling dogs against the wall opposite the lamp,
dogs that snap at my cousins' legs, bite off their heads,
but when I remembered how dogs attacked rabbits, I stopped because I felt sorry for Ralph. Then I felt sorry for myself, because all I had were shadow animals. I wanted real animals. With fur and with eyes. Live animals. “You're not filthy,” I told Ralph and kissed the sleek fur on his face.

“Hurry up and flush, Anthony.” Aunt Floria was knocking on the door.

Nobody told her to hurry up when she took her long showers, singing in Italian as if—so my mother said—someone were stabbing her ever so slowly.

I darted past Aunt Floria and out of our apartment. On the front stoop in our courtyard, Kevin sat playing with his cars. “Here,” he said and handed me his yellow friction car. For himself, he kept the red one, and we lifted our cars, chafed their wheels against the concrete steps, again, faster, and again, till their racing sound became a loud buzz and we let them speed away from us.

Mrs. Hudak banged against her window. “You're making too much noise. Go back to where you belong.”

We scooped up our cars and ran across the street.

“Supposed to check both directions,” she called after us.

“Let's spy on her,” Kevin said.

The stairway in his building was freezing, and the tar bubbles in the roof had hardened and cracked.

“My Uncle Malcolm can fix that.”

Kevin dropped to his belly and elbows. “Duck and cover.”

“Duck and cover.” I was Burt the Turtle, crawling behind Kevin along the flat roof, past metal frames with washlines, past vents. His corduroys were tight on his ass though his mom bought him husky sizes at Fordham Boys Shop. We crawled toward the television antennas at the edge, where kids were not allowed, and took positions for our spying game.

“Uuuughhh…uuuughhh…Mrs. Hudak…” we howled. “We're going to get you, Mrs. Hudak.”

But Mrs. Hudak was hiding from us.

“Uuuughhh…Mrs. Hudak…uuuughhh…”

Kevin had Nik-L-Nips, and we bit off the waxy tops and drank the syrup while we scanned the sky and our street, especially Smelly Alley, where anyone could be hiding. Smelly Alley was down the block from us, a vacant lot with dog poop and broken glass and sumacs and rusty cans and—most of all—poison ivy. “Three leaves with a sheen, worse than mortal sin,” my mother had taught me. “Never touch those clusters of three shiny leaves.” “Sheen” and “sin” didn't quite rhyme but were close enough. Except poison ivy was worse than mortal sin, because mortal sin you could confess to the priest and get absolution; but once you got poison ivy, you had it for life, and you got it every seven years. But one Sunday last summer, after mass, Kevin—on a double-dare—rubbed a handful of those shiny leaves against his neck, and nothing happened to him. All he said was, “I'm immune.” It was a shock to me, a revelation. Here someone had dared touch this curse of the human race, but nothing had happened to him, which meant that if you were immune to something, you couldn't get it. I felt giddy. Free. Because it had to be the same with mortal sin. And if you were immune to mortal sin, you never had to worry about hell. Not even purgatory. But when I touched the poison ivy, splotches of tiny bumps soon formed on my hands and where I'd rubbed sweat off my face. The bumps itched, turned red, and formed hot blisters that oozed foul liquid. Twice a day, my mother would stir half a box of cornstarch into the tub and I'd lie in the lukewarm water, feeling my skin get cooler while I envied Kevin, who had everything: immunity to mortal sin and to poison ivy.

“Mrs. Hudak is mean,” Kevin said.

“Maybe she's a Russian spy.”

“Uuuughhh…uuuughhh…”

“Let's play mass.”

“I want to spy on communists. Uuuughhh…Mrs. Hudak…” Kevin's face was red, even though it was cold outside. Especially his big cheeks. My mother called him “lollipop face” because he looked like one of those red lollipops with a red face pressed into them.

“Let's just practice communion.”

“We need crackers for communion.”

“I don't have any.” I pointed across the street and into our kitchen. “We can spy on my aunt.”

Aunt Floria and the twins were eating minestrone at my table as if they belonged there. One floor below, we saw the top of Mr. Casparini's bald head, the top of his cigar, the top of his belly while he was sorting his stamp collection. On the third floor, Mrs. Rattner—Pineapple Sheila—was singing while rinsing her bowls and baking pans, and her son Nathan was studying so he could be a dentist. Last week, when Kevin and I had played spies, we'd shot rubber bands at Nathan's window and ducked before he could see us; but he'd still waved at us and stood up, stretching himself as if we'd reminded him to take a break. The next day, Nathan Rattner had left a squishy envelope in our mailbox. On the outside, he'd written “Enjoy, Anthony,” and inside he'd stuffed rubber bands of different sizes and colors.

“There she is.” Kevin ducked. “Uuuughhh…uuuughhh…Mrs. Hudak…”

I howled along. “We're going to get you, Mrs. Hudak…uuuughhh…uuuughhh….”

But Mrs. Hudak didn't look up. She walked away from us, pulling her shopping cart.

“She's going to John's Bargain Store,” I announced.

Kevin nodded excitedly. “To meet other communists.”

Two days before Christmas, Riptide Grandma took me to Arthur Avenue—me alone, not the twins—my father's idea to give me time away from them. At the Italian market, Riptide picked a wrinkled black olive from one of the wooden tubs and laughed when I didn't want to taste it. “One day you'll say yes, Antonio,” she said and chewed the olive, slowly, rolling her eyes sideways, just as she always did when she concentrated on tasting. Then she nodded and bought half a pound of those olives, broccoli rabe, tomatoes, and a tall can of olive oil.

At the dirty-feet shop—that's how it smelled—I pinched my nostrils while Riptide bought fresh mozzarella and chose one of the round provolones that swung from the beams above us.

Next we went to the poultry market, where chickens and turkeys watched me from inside their cages. Riptide told the poultry man she needed a turkey big enough for her family. “Everyone's coming over Christmas Day.”

He took a turkey from its cage and hung it from the scale by its feet.

“No. I want a bigger one.”