The Patron Saint of Ugly (11 page)

Grandpa again pulled out his handkerchief to swab his neck. That simple gesture made my hands ball into fists. Yes, it was insufferable in that kitchen with the oven pulsing and pots simmering, but the grand production of Grandpa wiping sweat felt like a dig at my father.

Mom pulled the tinfoil from the plattered T-bones. “Take a look at these.” She held them toward Grandpa as if they were manna from heaven, or a stack of nudie pictures.

Grandpa’s eyes widened and he held his index finger up to one to measure. “That’s a two-inch-thick steak.”

“Spettacolare,”
Nonna said.

Dad wore a prideful expression I rarely saw, and then Uncle Dom opened his fat cannoli-hole. “Where’d you steal those, little brother? They fall off a truck? You certainly couldn’t afford them on your paycheck.” Uncle Dom would know.

Grandpa’s eyes narrowed. “You no steal this-a meat, right?”

“Of course not.” Dad’s face was as red as the T-bones. What I didn’t know at the time was that my father had bartered his labor for those steaks. He worked every night for a week at O’Grady’s Grocery putting in a new floor. I often wondered why Dad didn’t just tell Grandpa the truth.

Mom rushed to her husband’s defense with a lie. “We used the birthday money my mother sent me.”

Uncle Dom jabbed, “So the woman of the house puts the meat on the table.”

I wanted to punch him.

“No!” Mom’s apologetic eyes bounced over to Dad.

Dad grabbed the platter of steaks and went outside.

Uncle Dom followed. “Don’t burn them! Your wife works hard to bring home the bacon.”

“Shut up,” Betty said, and I was glad.

The men congregated out back and Mom and Betty set the table. I sat on my stool watching Nonna peel an orange in one continuous spiraling ribbon, our E note drifting from her lips. Grandpa barked from outside, “Stop-a that damn humming!”

Half an hour later the fam-i-ly was called to the table, all except Dad, still at the grill with his tongs. Ray-Ray, born with some freaky internal alarm clock, returned from his expedition looking rumpled. Uncle Dom didn’t notice the grass stains on his stepson’s dress shirt, the dirt smudges on his cheek. He noticed his hands, though. “Go clean out under those nails. They’re disgusting.”

By the time Ray-Ray reappeared, the table was crammed with salad plates, dinner plates, bowls of cottage cheese, water glasses. Butter and salt and pepper and a basket of rolls. There was one empty spot at the center of the table, the most sacred space, where the meat would sit when Dad brought it in.

Uncle Dom aimed his head toward the window. “You’re not overcooking them, are you?”

“No,” Dad yelled back. “I just don’t want them to be too rare.”

“There’s no such-a thing,” Grandpa said. “You getta more iron when they are still bloody inside.”

Bloody inside? The image made my stomach lurch. On the rare occasions when we had some cheap cut of steak or hamburger in patties instead of crumbled in a tomato-macaroni calamity, Dad would cook my meat to well done. The blacker the better. Any pink would send it back to the frying pan before Mom cut it into bite-size pieces for me. Mix that with the bloody clump of Jesus stewing in my belly and you’ll understand my alarm.

Dad emerged bearing his weighty offering as if he were going through the Stations of the Cross, his first stop in front of Grandpa, who eyed the meat with great approval. Dad’s second stop was Nonna, who pronounced,
“Magnifico.”

When the dish was centered, Grandpa leaned in to claim the choicest one. Dom helped himself next, then plunked one on Betty’s plate and one on Ray-Ray’s. Then it was a mad scramble as hands reached for rolls and potatoes and butter. The steak pile was dwindling and I couldn’t tell which was the well-done one; I kept looking at Dad, wanting to ask:
Which one’s mine?
Someone tossed a baked potato on my plate, a spoonful of green beans, then a whole steak landed on my split-top roll. I had been gifted not only an entire steak, but a sharp knife as well; it lay atop my folded napkin. I had to kneel on my stool for better leverage, and when I stuck the knife in, blood seeped from the wound. “It’s bleeding!”

“It’s
perfetto
.” Grandpa eyed the breathing cow on my plate. “It’ll make you strong like me, see?” He speared a hunk of rare steak and rammed it into his mouth. I didn’t appreciate at the time what a gift this was, Grandpa trying to placate me.

Still, watching him chew that bleeding bolus made me want to puke. Nearly. What I really wanted was my own well-done steak. “Where’s mine?”

Mom jumped up and started to lift my plate. “I’ll just throw it on the grill a few minutes.”

“No!” Grandpa said, the magnanimous moment over. “You don’t make a fuss for this child.” He looked at me. “You eat what’s on-a you plate.”

“But Dad always cooks one special for me.”

Grandpa glowered at Dad. “You coddle this child?”

“No!” Dad said, and that was the truth in everything except how I liked my meat.

And then I saw it, my nearly burnt offering on Nonna’s plate, half eaten already. “That’s mine! There’s my steak!”

Everyone looked at Nonna chewing the food that should have been in my mouth. Nonna looked at me in horror as if she’d robbed the globe piggy bank in the back of my closet.

She lifted her plate and I reached out my hand, but Grandpa slapped it. “Don’t you dare.” He pointed at my plate. “You no take-a the food from your elder’s mouth! Eat!”

Mom tried to intervene. “It won’t take but a minute—”

Grandpa slammed his hand on the table, rattling all those glasses. “I said eat! Angelo, this is your house and you are her father. You make this child eat.”

Dad looked at his father, and then at Uncle Dom, who wore a look not of sympathy but of contempt. Dad’s eyes slowly found their way to me. “Just a couple bites.”

I looked at Mom, now leaning against the sink, arms crossed over her stomach. She looked disgusted too. And outnumbered. Nicky began listing Neanderthal weaponry.

I don’t know where the inspiration came from, desperation perhaps, but I pressed one hand over the relic beneath my bodice and the other over the mooing steak, closed my eyes, and recited my Sancta Maria prayer in my head so that Mary would elbow God to cook the steak to at least medium.

Ray-Ray said, “What the hell is she doing?”

I heard Uncle Dom smack the back of Ray-Ray’s head. “Don’t cuss!”

When I opened my eyes and lifted my hand, the steak was still a bloody mess, as was my hand. In desperation I prayed for Jesus to save me, for God to send a hurricane to end this horror, because I figured God owed me twice over: He hadn’t removed my birthmarks and He had made me be born into this fam-i-ly. God did not save me, so I looked at Dad, hoping that whatever paternal drive had kicked in the day Eleanor Sweeney had doused me at the water fountain would again power up. But Dad stared at his lap, and I knew there would be no intervention.

Cannolis.

As I cut into that bloody steak, I tried to visualize cannolis.
Crunchy tubes stuffed with ricotta
. After this torture I would eat five in a row. I sawed at that steak for an interminable length of time until I finally held a hunk to my lips. I closed my eyes and rammed it in fast,
tiny chunks of pistachio that would stick in my teeth
, but all I could taste, feel, smell was blood. That copper-penny, rusty-nail, corrugated-toolshed smell of blood mixing with the Body and Blood of Christ still undigested in my belly. Jesus’s finger or toe prodding my spleen. It was a sacrilege beyond endurance. I spat the hunk out and it plunked on top of the saltshaker, knocking it over.

“Dio mio.”
Nonna grabbed the shaker, spilled several grains in her hand to toss over her shoulder.

“I can’t do it,” I said, real tears springing to my eyes.

Grandpa picked up his knife and fork to resume eating, and I thought,
That’s it?

That wasn’t it.

He took a forkful of potato and jammed it in his mouth. When he spoke I could see the starchy goo clinging to his teeth, his tongue. “Angelo. You spank this child and send her to her room. That’ll teach her to obey.”

“What?” Mom and I both said.

“You heard-a me. She need a good spank.”

Nonna leaned back in her chair, shoulders slumped, as if she knew how this would end.

Dad knew how it had to end too. He stood up and actually came toward me.

“Angelo,” my mother said in a voice that sounded like rushing wind as Dad shrunk another inch right then and there. “Don’t you dare spank her!”

Uncle Dom sealed my fate. “Not only does your wife bring home the bacon, but she calls the shots.”

That was that. Dad swooped over and scooped me up, but not in the tender way Mr. Giordano had held Donata. He sat on my stool and draped me belly-down over his lap, and the heart-shaped box in my chest tipped over too, spilling out the few warm memories of Dad to rattle around in my rib cage. Dad lifted my dress and layers of itchy petticoat, exposing my little-girl underwear and the Cannibal Isles mauling my backside.

I don’t even recall the spanking, how hard or how many. I just remember the shame, my secret geography revealed to Grandpa, Uncle Dom, and Ray-Ray, who snorted the entire time.

I darted down the hall to my room when it was over, slammed the door behind me, and yanked that stupid dress over my head, along with the veil, which was tainted by proxy. I wadded up the unholy vestments and shoved them as far under my bed as I could, tangling them up with dust bunnies, stale sandwich crusts, dirty balled-up socks, unspoken
I love you
s, and my shrinking faith—not in God (yet), but in miracle-worker me.

TAPE SEVEN

Electricity

Son-ama-beetch! I just tried to sneak out to the grocery store, but now reporters from the
Sweetwater Herald
are camped outside along with the pilgrims. I’m glaring at them from the carcass room surrounded by stuffed bison and elk heads. An entire bear hovering in the corner. A musket hanging over the mantel, which I would love to aim at the press, because someone (a meddlesome priest from Baaston, perhaps?) spilled the baked beans about the Vatican’s interest.

(Miss Ferrari! Just a sentence or two for the eleven o’clock news!)

They’re using bullhorns now?

(Garnet Ferrari! Is it true you can cure shingles?)

(And conjunctivitis?)

(She can-a! I see it with-a my own eyes!)

(Nonna! What are you doing down there? Don’t talk to them! On second thought
, talk
to them! She’s the real healer, people. It’s not me!)

(It’s a-no true!
She
is the descendant of Santa Garnet del Vulcano. My granddaughter. Mine! Just look at-a her face!)

This is ridiculous. All I want is my Ding Dongs, and now—

(Pop! Pop! Pop!)

—shit! The light bulbs in the lamps just blew, all of them. I have to fumble around in the dark. Ow! Fucking humidor.
CAN YOU STILL HEAR ME? I’M JUST . . . LOOKING IN THE CLOSET . . . FOR THE BOX OF BULBS I KEEP IN EVERY ROOM. JUST HAVE TO—OW! FUCKING HUMIDOR
! Okay. Hang on a sec. There. Much better. I am so tired of burned-out light bulbs. I go through two dozen bulbs a month. I know, I know, impossible for you, maybe, but not for me.

Padre, I guess now’s the time to tell you something, but please don’t take it as a mark of sainthood. Though it’s admittedly weird, it’s not under my control, and it certainly hasn’t healed anyone. It’s yet more evidence that somewhere a
jettatura
is zapping a Garnet voodoo doll with jumper cables.

My initial run-in with electricity began after that First Communion when I stuffed under the bed not only my veil but all the miracle-worker lore that went with it. I couldn’t heal Pippa Fabrini; I couldn’t cure myself; I couldn’t even heat up a stinking piece of steak. Whenever Nonna or Dee Dee or some other hopeful child tried to resurrect the legend, I’d plug my fingers in my ears and run away screaming. I lodged my supposed powers deep behind my pancreas and hoped that everyone would just forget about that made-up chapter of my life. Still, I couldn’t deny that there had been healings, and that’s when I realized that Nonna had been beside me for every successful cure. The next time I saw her, she was shelling peas on her front-porch swing.

I sat beside her and whispered, “Are you the real healer?” It felt blasphemous to challenge the fable she had concocted just for me.

“No!” Nonna’s body quivered so violently that several peas spilled from the bowl, rolled across the slanted porch, and bounced down the front steps. “Why you say such a thing!
You
are the healer. No deny this-a gift or bad things-a will come!” She crossed herself three times and I caught movement next door: Celeste Xaviero crossing herself at her kitchen window too.

I knew better than to confront Nonna again, so from then on I watched from a distance whenever she hugged an ailing Saint Brigid girl or smooched some hill boy’s scraped elbow or squeezed a napkin around her nicked finger. She didn’t heal those kids or herself, but I knew she somehow fit into the miracle puzzle, a mystery I haven’t solved but that I’m hoping you will.

I continued to wear my Saint Garnet necklace, however, because I couldn’t shake the Old Religion belief that bad things would happen if I wasn’t protected, especially since someone continued to fiddle with my geography while I slept, atolls emerging, coastlines retracting. Plus I still loved the idea of Jesus lulling Himself to sleep every night with tufts of my hair clenched in His hands.

When I was eight I sat on a stool in the kitchen archway clutching that necklace. I was watching Dad prepare to paint the living room, dragging furniture to the center of the carpet to drape with a paint-splattered canvas.

Though I was sitting right there, another splattered mass, Dad hollered, “Nicky!”

My brother was in his room memorizing
Webster’s
letter-
Q
entries. Later I would rifle through his notebooks to see what sentences he had crafted to practice vocabulary.
Garnet is a quidnunc who better stop snooping or she’ll suffer quid pro quo while she is quiescent
. My brother liked polysyllabic words, but I think he was also searching for the term to describe what was secretly happening to him that made him cower behind chairs and prattle factoids.