Souvenirs from the Old Country
On my first day at Dr. Marino’s practice, he showed me where the vacuum was. Like Dr. Marino, it was well past its prime and required a few sharp kicks to come alive. The doctor was tall and wide, with drooping earlobes and dangling jowls that reminded me of a basset hound. These were my duties in the mornings: clean the carpets with the geriatric vacuum cleaner and wake the geriatric dentist with a cup of coffee. He was always asleep in the leather chair in his office when I arrived, and I suspected that his wife had kicked him out. It’s what I would have done. I envied his imaginary wife for her empty, blessedly silent home.
The practice had no bathroom of its own, so most days, after I ate lunch, I had to go to the French restaurant across the street. I was ashamed to burst into the little bistro dressed in my white smock and smelling of lint and dentistry. It was always full of smartly dressed couples drinking wine and eating small cubes of cheese. The women there seemed unreal to me, with their little black pumps and their magnificent fur coats draped over the backs of their seats. I wanted to be the kind of woman who wore fur and was able to linger over lunch on a Tuesday afternoon.
Between the vacuum and the bistro, it wasn’t difficult for Della to persuade me of her plan. It had been like this since we were children: no matter how difficult or impossible an idea of hers was or how disastrous the consequences might be, she could present it in a way that made it seem glamorous and laughably doable. When we were both at junior college, she had once convinced me to go to the bar with her while pretending to be Swedish cousins from Stockholm. Neither of us had any idea how people from Stockholm spoke, but her invented accent fell from her lips with such confidence that anyone, even if they were from Stockholm, would have sworn she sounded native.
Like I said, it didn’t take much to convince me. She lured me away from Dr. Marino’s dental practice with the promise of long lunches and the pleasure of her company. It was true that since we had both gotten married and moved out of our little apartment above the laundromat, we had not seen enough of each other, and it had gotten even worse when we both started to have children. But I didn’t tell Della about my other reasons. In my mind, fur coats danced like ballerinas, dipping into pliés and bending exquisitely over the awaiting backs of bistro chairs.
In my mind, owning a store was a different kind of work than being a dental hygienist. There was a European elegance to it, and the idea of being my own boss appealed to me immensely. Della said she would put up the rent money for the property, which she assured me over and over was no problem. Although neither of us spoke French, we decided to call our store L’envie, which we both thought sounded unbearably elegant.
Shopping around for the space felt like stepping into Della’s life. I could almost pretend that her money was mine, and was surprised at how quickly I became desensitized to the sums that the realtor presented us with. We settled on a space that wasn’t too far from Dr. Marino’s office, who I would sometimes see lumbering into work. I was a little shocked to know that he didn’t permanently sleep in the leather chair in his office, which I related to Della, who laughed and swatted my arm.
The store very quickly began to feel like ours. We painted the walls three times, changing our minds from baby blue to forest green to wine red. Whenever something scraped against the wall and chipped the paint, all the colors were revealed in the exposed layers. I wanted to paint over the chips at first, but Della became very protective, stepping in front of them with her arms outstretched like a martyr, calling them, with a pout on her face, “our little rainbows.” I rolled my eyes, but left the chips as they were. In time, they grew on me.
I had always felt that Della was too beautiful to be my friend, and when we reached adulthood, I was proven right. While I married a man fresh from Korea, she married a man fresh from Princeton who gave her thousands of dollars to pursue a hobby that would get her out of the house. When I asked Della why she ever felt the need to venture outside of her husband’s family home, which was nearly palatial in size and smelled of leather and money, she would just smile and shrug.
Della had a talent for business. She was often among a different kind of woman than I was, the wives of her husband’s work associates or Princeton friends. She had proposed to them that they bring in their unwanted clothes, for which she would pay them. They said that they were delighted by her idea to open a store, and told her that they would bring in their clothes for free. These women had been educated at Bryn Mawr and Wellesley, while Della, like me, had been certified to be a dental hygienist at the local junior college. Della told me that behind their delight, she suspected that they were laughing at her. She said that she could never tell when she had said or done something that broke their unspoken rules. I couldn’t understand why anyone might laugh at Della, who had always been the most beautiful and magnetic person I knew.
All the same, we had piles of beautiful clothes on the racks by the time we opened. Wealthy women, Della said, could always be counted on to want to think of themselves as charitable.
It rained at the grand opening, watering down the champagne. It was only our families in attendance, which was always a bit awkward, with Eamon and Frank shaking hands, and Frank making a brief, valiant effort to start a conversation about baseball, to which Eamon responded that he had always been more interested in football, after which the conversation stalled out. Frank shot Della a subtle, innocent look and shrugged as if to say “I tried!”
Della often told me that she suspected Frank was relieved when Eamon rejected these conversational advances. “He’s such a snob, but he’s too well-bred to be honest about it,” she had once complained. I had hummed along in assent, not wanting to accuse Eamon even though he was partially to blame. The only men he socialized with were men who had been in Korea or, more recently, Vietnam, and privately, he called Frank and men like him who had chosen college over war “sissies.”
Our children played together, still too young to be afflicted with such prejudice. James and Eamon Jr. played tag in the learned, exclusionary way of boys their age, ignoring each of my daughter Leanne’s attempts to join their game. Something in my chest tightened as I watched them. They were like this now, but I knew that once the easy camaraderie of childhood passed, they would be like Eamon and Frank: straight-backed as trees and unable to think of anything to talk about. They had different friends, went to different schools, and would grow to be different kinds of men.
For a while, the store was exactly what Della had promised it would be. Instead of vacuuming and enduring the stink of people’s rotting teeth, I was helping women decide which colors complemented their eyes and which silhouettes flattered their bodies, topics about which I pretended to be an expert. In order to maintain our inventory, we would go to estate sales together on the weekends. Della would always approach these sales like a serious, dirty job, donning fraying jean overalls and a red bandana to rifle through the clothes of the old, rich, and dead.
We would briefly close the store almost every day to go out to lunch, which Della told me was how the Europeans did it. A few times, we even went to the bistro across the street from Dr. Marino’s office. I drank the French wine with great satisfaction, even though I thought it tasted like dirt.
But even more wonderful than these lunch outings were the days that we would stay in and lock the doors before sitting on the floor and talking over sandwiches that one of us had brought from home. On these days, with no one around to hear us, we would talk about everything.
I was reminded of how easy it had always been with Della. We’d grown up in the same cul-de-sac, our mothers shooing us out of the house as soon as the sun rose. It was the kind of friendship that began so early in childhood that it was difficult to tell how it had actually come to be: maybe we had braided each other’s hair in a neighbor’s front yard, maybe we had chased each other in a muddy creek bed, maybe we had climbed into Mr. Rossi’s crab apple tree and pretended to be princesses trapped in a tower. It pleased me that our friendship predated memory. There was something wonderfully simple about it all—how we had likely been brought together by some long-forgotten game played on the sun-bleached grass of a neighbor’s front lawn; how she was probably the first person I had ever chosen for myself; how I couldn’t remember being without her.
When the store was empty, she would tell me about the strange, almost foreign customs of her husband’s world. She, like me, had inherited the Catholicism that her mother had carried over from the old country, but her husband Frank was Episcopalian. There had been no conversation when they’d gotten married, she said, only an unspoken sense of expectation.
“It’s not like I mind that much. You know that I’ve never really been one for God anyway,” she said one day as we sorted new inventory, answering my knowing smile with one of her own. She examined a shirt that had come undone at the seam under the arm and put it aside to mend. “But, you know.” She paused and looked down, collecting her thoughts for a moment. “I’ve always liked the way the Catholics pray. I don’t know if what we said ever reached God, or if there’s even a God to reach, but I liked the ritual of it. I didn’t think it was possible, but I miss it.” She laughed as if such a thing was ridiculous, but I understood what she meant. When we’d been at Catholic school, we’d been terrors. We used to make a game of irreverence, sneaking food into morning Mass, not because our mothers weren’t feeding us at home, but because contraband tastes like ambrosia. We would say the Hail Mary around mouthfuls of toast that we had prepared at home and wrapped in paper napkins, nearly choking as we tried to suppress our laughter.
Later, however, I found myself returning to those prayers. For the first three days of his life, my son wouldn’t stop screaming. I had shushed and cooed and pleaded, but the wail continued unbroken. My new role chafed, and the words and sounds that it demanded felt jagged on my tongue, but the old prayers were as familiar as my mother’s face and as well-worn as beach-glass, so I clung to them. Like Della, I had never been one for God, but in those early days of motherhood, I began to understand the power of words that have been rubbed smooth by a thousand recitations, and how people might find God in them.
“Sister Francis would be proud of me,” Della said with a small laugh, remembering our Latin teacher who had been outspokenly prejudiced against Protestants and who had often rapped our knuckles with a ruler when she caught us whispering back and forth when we were supposed to be conjugating verbs. “I know that we always hated them, or acted like we did, but those prayers seemed like poetry to me. Frank always prays over our meals now, and I feel bad for thinking it, but there’s something ugly about how he prays. About how they all pray, really.”
I nodded, but a part of me resented these confessions of hers. That’s what marriage is, I thought, giving pieces of yourself away for someone you think that you love and realizing afterward that you gave up something that you didn’t intend. I had done that too, but I had also had to work terrible jobs for ten years and rear my children without the help of a nanny. Part of me sympathized with the unexpected sting of her compromise, but another part of me thought that I gladly would’ve taken ugly prayers for a beautiful house.
It wasn’t long before the store had regulars. The same women would come multiple times a week, sometimes buying things and sometimes just leaning on the counter to talk. There was Joyce Emerson, who would complain about her delinquent son and had a weakness for blouses with antique lace; there was Diana Kirst, who would come in to worry about her husband’s beautiful young secretary and would often buy silk scarfs if we had them; there was Carol Hemmings, who hated her mother-in-law and couldn’t stop herself from buying shoes; and there was Nancy Hunt, who always had either a pounding headache or an aching back, as well as an inexplicable predilection for feathers. Eventually, when Della and I were taking inventory, I would set aside a scarf that I thought Diana might like, or a blouse that might suit Joyce. Once, Carol came in on a Wednesday afternoon and asked how my daughter’s school play had gone, and I realized that I had shared as much with those women as they had with me.
When a piece would come into the store that I really liked, Della would encourage me to take it home, which I soon began to do so often that the initial guilt vanished. I suspected that Della was covering those losses from her own pocket.
One of the pieces was this glorious mink coat that Della brought in from an estate sale. It was lined inside with pale pink silk, and I thought that it was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen. Della insisted that I take it; I made a show of uncertainty, but took it home that night. My husband Eamon wasn’t home from work yet, and I tried the coat on in front of the mirror in our bedroom.
It was horrible. I was much too short for it and I looked like I had been swallowed up by an animal carcass. Everything about it looked wrong on my body, and I quickly took it off and put it as far back into my closet as it would go. The next day, Della asked me if I liked it; I told her it was my favorite thing that I had ever owned. She was much taller than me and hadn’t retained baby weight in her hips as I had, and I knew that it would have looked incredible on her. I was much too ashamed to tell Della that I hated it, so it stayed, collecting dust, in the back of my closet for the next decade. If Della noticed that I never wore it, she didn’t say anything.
When I arrived for work one day, I found a hollow, blackened shell where the store had been. I remember my mouth falling open as I watched ash, still warm, dance delicately on the breeze. There were still firetrucks out front and firemen indifferently spraying the wreckage with limp yellow hoses, though the flames had already been extinguished. At that moment, I didn’t think about the loss of inventory or profits or the strange oversight that no one had called and we had been left to find things in this state. Eyes stinging, I thought about the little paint rainbows that Della had so fiercely protected, which were now lost forever.
Della arrived a few minutes later and stood at my side. We were both too stunned to weep.
They said that it was an electrical fire, and for days, Della and I were surrounded by people telling us how to move forward, none of them allowing us a moment to grieve. Eamon, who had never been much of a talker, said that it was a good thing, and that I should go back to work for Dr. Marino, who had always let me leave early enough to have dinner on the table at an appropriate time. Frank told both of us that he was sorry we had lost our little place and that we should consider taking up a less flammable activity next time. It was one of our regulars, Nancy Hunt, who suggested we sue our landlord for negligence when I ran into her at the supermarket. Initially, I waved off the idea, but her husband was a lawyer, and she said that he had told her that both Della and I could walk away with tens of thousands of dollars.
I ran it by Della, who looked uncertain, then asked if that was what I wanted. I said that it was, and she said that if I wanted to do it, so did she. About a week after the fire, I visited my mother and told her that we might sue, and that we were thinking about hiring Nancy’s husband. This made her almost hysterical, and she said that only an Italian lawyer would actually try to get us what we were owed, at which I scoffed. It often felt pathetic to me, the way my mother clung to the imagined ties between us and a country that she hadn’t seen in over forty years.
When I was a child, she used to feed me Italian words as we did the dishes side by side, and I had attacked those lessons with enthusiasm. There was nothing more beautiful to me than the mysterious language that my parents would toss to each other across the yard and through the small rooms of our house. While we scrubbed plates and spoons, my mother would take handfuls of iridescent bubbles from the sink and gently blow them into my face until, through my breathless laughter, I could correctly recall that they were called bolle. As I got older, I began to resent her broken English and the way that it marked us as outsiders wherever we went. She never said so, but I could tell that she was disappointed when I put a stop to the lessons.
When I had told her that I’d gotten a job at a dentist’s office, she had lectured me about men and the ways that they might leverage their power over their young female employees, but, just as I knew she would, she had relaxed when I told her Dr. Marino’s name. While I had worked there, I’d once mentioned to her that Dr. Marino had permitted me to leave early in order to attend my daughter’s concert, and that was all she had needed to begin saying that she didn’t know of a finer dentist. I knew that I wasn’t the only one that she was saying these things to, as her friends would sometimes approach me and tell me how lucky I was to work for such a wonderful, considerate man.
She told me that a friend of hers had a son who was a lawyer, and that it would be best for me and Della to be represented by one of our own people. I recounted all of this to Della, laughing as I did, but she said that she wouldn’t mind hiring him if it would give my mother some peace of mind. At this, I smiled tightly at her. Although Della was an adult, she still called my mother Mrs. Provenzano and would sometimes go to visit her without me, which made my mother melt. I often wondered if she wished that Della was her daughter instead of me.
I had scoffed when my mother had suggested it, but I immediately liked Charlie Giamatto. He reminded me of the boys that my brother used to be friends with, and like them, he smelled of cologne and cigarettes. He had an easy way about him and acted nothing like I thought a lawyer should: cracking jokes and chain-smoking all through the meeting, his cigarette hand considerately hanging out of an open window. Like me, he had Sicilian coloring, and while I had always been envious of Della’s fair skin and light hair, I thought that Charlie’s features suited him a great deal.
Charlie, of course, couldn’t take his eyes off of Della for the entirety of our initial meeting, flashing a gleaming smile her way whenever the chance presented itself. Della quickly noticed his attention and smiled back, a faint blush coloring her cheeks. I fought to shove down the ugly sting of jealousy. It had been a while since a man had looked at me like that.
After we left the meeting, she spoke almost as though in a daze, saying, “Don’t you think he looks an awful lot like that boy your brother used to be friends with, Mary? What was his name again?”
“Samuel?” I ventured, turning to her and noting a lingering blush.
“Samuel,” she said, her eyes unfocused and her voice almost dreamy. “He was pretty, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, and he thought you were pretty too, if I remember correctly.” It was an effort to keep the annoyance out of my voice.
She didn’t seem to notice and giggled into her hand. “That’s right, he did. He asked me to go out to the movies with him, but you and I were already doing something that night.”
“We were?” I asked, absently fixing a curl that had fallen out of place. “I don’t remember that.”
She gasped but her indignance soon cracked into a wide smile. “How can you not remember? That was the night that your brother agreed to buy us beer, and we had plans to make ourselves sick in your backyard.”
The memory came rushing back to me, and my annoyance fell away. I grinned and put my face in my hand. “I don’t think we planned on making ourselves sick, but that was definitely the result.” We had set out to prove to my brother that we were adults, but we had ended up vomiting into poor Mr. Rossi’s hydrangeas. The memory was imbued with the kind of heady nostalgia that belongs only to brilliantly stupid adolescent mistakes, and it immediately warmed my entire body.
Della looped her arm through mine and put her head on my shoulder as we walked, which was awkward because of her height. It was a bit like a three-legged race, but neither of us moved to pull away. She said with a giggle, “God, our headaches were so bad that we couldn’t move the next day, remember? Your mom found us lying completely still in your bed and yelled at us that there was no reason to be asleep after seven in the morning, but as soon as you moved, you threw up on the floor.”
I laughed along with her, my eyes beginning to tear. “She was livid. I don’t think I’ve been that drunk since.” I felt her shake her head against my shoulder, and I suddenly felt my love for her so clearly and strongly that I kissed her on the forehead in a way that I usually reserved for my children, and when she pulled herself even closer to my body, I knew that she felt it too.
Before the lawsuit was over, Frank accepted a job in New York City, taking Della with him. That’s what everyone was told, at least. I was certain that there wasn’t a job, and that Frank had instead pulled some strings to make one materialize. The reason they left town had little to do with work, but I was one of the only people who knew that. When they left, the secret belonged to a tight four: me, Frank, Della, and Charlie.
I think I knew what would happen before Della did. We had meetings with Charlie once a month, and during each of those meetings, he would watch Della like he had the first time, like I’d seen boys and men watch her all our lives. She watched him back, like she had watched the men we had used to encounter in bars when we were still at the junior college. After one of these meetings, she kissed me on the cheek and slipped me the keys to her car, which she had parked down the road.
A few days later, I watched as she gripped a steaming mug of coffee tightly between her two hands to keep them from trembling. We had been sitting at my kitchen table in silence for some time before I asked, “Was it worth it?” I tried to keep any bitterness from my tone; I wasn’t entirely successful.
Della lifted her eyes from her mug to look at me. There were purple circles under her eyes that were beginning to look like bruises, and her cheeks were hollow and pale as if she was starved. For once, her beauty wasn’t the first thing I saw when I looked at her; she looked as if something was eating her alive. “I don’t know,” she said plainly. “It was good,” a fragile smile passed briefly over her lips, “but it didn’t change anything. I don’t know why I was stupid enough to believe that it would.”
“Is that why you did it?” I asked.
She shook her head slightly, almost to herself. “No. Not really. When he took me to bed, I wanted to imagine that he was my husband. I wanted to imagine that I really had married a boy like him, a boy like us.” Della’s gaze was intense behind the tears that had begun to collect in her eyes. “I’m so alone, Mary, in that giant house with a man who I don’t understand and who doesn’t understand me.”
Feeling helpless, I reached across the table and clasped one of her hands between mine. “It wasn’t what you wanted it to be,” I stated, “with Charlie.”
She shook her head, exhaling deeply. “It wasn’t.” Her eyes were sorrowful as she looked at me. “I know now that it never could have been.”
Della hadn’t imagined that Frank would uproot their family when she told him, but that’s exactly what he did. He said that in New York, they would be among the right sort of people, and that they had remained too long in stale company.
A month after they moved, the lawsuit came to an end. It hadn’t required our frequent presence in court, but I was relieved that it was over. Charlie personally delivered the check to our house, shaking Eamon’s hand and giving me a grave attempt at a smile before leaving.
In a rare moment of intuition, Eamon left me alone in our room to open it. I felt sick when I saw the figure, and none of the elation I expected when the lawsuit first occurred to me. In my trembling hand, I held more money than I had ever possessed, yet my thoughts were only of Della.
I thought of the way she had looked at me while sitting at my kitchen table that day. I thought of all of the times we had spent together, and what it was now like without her. Her letters and occasional phone calls were no substitute for feeling her shake with laughter against my shoulder or our sandwich lunches on the floor. I thought about what she had always been to me, and what I must have been to her without fully realizing. That is, I think, the great tragedy of living: that we spend our lives able to endlessly examine our memories, turning them over and over in our minds until we understand, usually much too late, what they actually are.
For the first time, I thought I understood what it must have felt like for my mother to see America for the first time, to live underneath the perpetually gray sky of our American manufacturing town. She would often say that the sky in Sicily was impossibly blue. I thought about how it must have felt to watch her American daughter roll her eyes at these confessions, which contained a grief I was only just beginning to understand.
I looked down at the check in my hands and began to absently thumb the perforated edge.
Julia Gartley is a junior English literature major at SUNY Geneseo. Right now, she’s really into peanut butter.