What I Learned from My Mistake (and What Must Be Done to Avoid Future Temptation)

By R__ H_____

Dear State of Ohio,

On June 2nd, 2005, I made a mistake that impacted not just myself, but every individual in the crowded Yellow Springs graduation through which I ran naked, decorated with the vulgar slogans of the class my prank represented. Yes, it created humor, even nearly chaos—the din of the crowd echoed shock, incredulity, and astonishment. In every furrowed brow, in every glare of disgust, I felt the burning of disappointment singe my naked, painted back. I ran past women, small children, the elderly and vulnerable, all of whom were left dumbfounded by the sight of my genitalia. For this, I have begun to feel ashamed. For this, I hope my district-ordered punishment will begin to make amends to the community I so crudely, lewdly affronted.

Looking back, I cannot believe I could allow myself to be so easily suckered into this mistake. In fact, I view myself as a man of strength, of fortitude, of pride; and it seems unlike me to act in such a foolish, reckless manner—all on the whim of others. In the month that has passed, I learned many things from this incident: The most important is a lesson in appropriateness. I know, as a teenager, that jokes of obscenity may be appropriate in a setting of laughing, immature, unsophisticated boys of my own age and mentality. But in a somber, public ceremony, like the one I chose to desecrate, nothing offensive should ever be included or encouraged. I was wrong to allow a group of rabble-rousers to influence my actions in such a negative manner.

Another important thing I have learned is that there are consequences for my actions. In my immaturity, like many similar teenagers, I grow up feeling reckless, invincible, and even omnipotent. It’s the surging of adrenaline I live for; it’s danger and excitement that drive my friends and me to behave thoughtlessly. What encourages this, unfortunately, is the lack of consequences laid on most of us. This can be quite detrimental, as proved by my mistake: When others are affected, there is no joking around, and the mistakes become quite serious. It is the temptation to behave this way—to create fun out of the expense of others—that must be overcome in order to be an upstanding, mature citizen as one bridges the gap between childhood and adulthood.

Temptation, I have learned, comes from myriad factors; in my case, the enticement of peer pressure and approval was the decisive outlook that convinced me to take on streaking at this year’s graduation. In church, I have always learned about original sin, the temptation of Adam; I have also been taught to avoid this in the name of God. It is something, obviously, that I continue to improve within myself. Since the incident, I learned to greet each temptation with a self-imposed analysis: I mentally compare and contrast the choices involved, and choose whether or not to allow myself to take the risk. A weighing of pros and cons is also necessary.

I have paid my price, and I know what I must do in order to become a better man. To the community I offended, a letter of apology was written; to myself, I worked through hours of community service and spent hours of introspection in the writing of this letter. I feel I did what I needed in order to prevent this mistake from destroying my future.

]]> http://fleish.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/apology/feed/ 0 Cooper Fleishman http://fleish.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/franklin-and-chambers/ http://fleish.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/franklin-and-chambers/#comments Sun, 11 Jan 2009 06:35:22 +0000 Cooper Fleishman http://fleish.wordpress.com/?p=57 ]]>

Men wearing orange safety vests crowded Marvin Campos’s funeral service. Surrogate fathers, brothers, sons: the old ones kept composure, the young tried.

Steel dust was as thick in the air as the July humidity. The men scraped dust residue, gunpowder-colored, from deep crevices in toughened palms; they whisked it in the air out of habit. When the men sneezed, they sent clouds like exhaust fumes to float in the light from the church window, each dust particle suddenly visible and distinct. Muscles of air lifted clusters of dust, which settled on a shoulder, on a discarded coat, onto hair. Steel stuck to sweat. Grey glaze on a forehead. Chunks of it dropped into the throat from the nasal cavity. The men blew black snot into tissues.

The men who didn’t shave their heads wore their hair in dreadlocks. They had tattoos on wrists and necks. Hands like weathered black rocks under the white cuffs of sleeves. Dead nails, dirt-caked, splintering like chipped wood. Mounds of calluses.

At the end of every subway platform there is a short ladder leading to a surface next to the track. Here the men dropped their bags, strapped on helmets, tightened belts, pulled on gloves and safety goggles, got out flashlights. When it was too dark to see one’s own shoe, the men pointed their lights at each other and waited until all were ready. In the summer the heat in the Hole stayed constant, around 110 degrees. In the humidity their goggles needed to be defogged every five minutes, so they carried rags, which by the end of the shift became streaked with grease and dust sludge. Nostrils caught so much steel dust that by 3 a.m. their noses were clogged; breathing through the mouth, they gagged on the taste of piss, garbage, exhaust fumes from the trains. In the humidity it was soupy in the throat. An emetic, like ipecac.

The young trackworkers tripped over everything: rats, cigarette packs, beer cans, coffee cups, rails, discarded clothes from the homeless; the experienced among them avoided hazards by walking with a goose step, bouncing on their toes over obstacles. In this dance they sometimes got within inches of the third rail, a thin strip of steel, low to the ground, revealed by reflective tape, carrying 750 volts of electricity. Men bragged that they had done trackwork so long they could cross a live track with eyes closed.

“We called him Marvelous because that’s what he was. We were like family, we knew each other’s wives and kids—we been with him since he joined the gang in 1981. Even before he joined he was an artist. He was great—Marvin was so great that after every graveyard shift, he slept for an hour, and then took the subway to Long Island City to take drawing classes. Marvin could’ve taught the damn drawing classes, he took so many of them. He drew while his kids were in school and then came home in time to see them, make them dinner, maybe sleep another hour before he came back to work. Never a complaint out of his mouth.”

No one could remember a year on the track without death. The men called themselves the Graveyard Gang because of their late-night shift, 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., and the frequency of deaths at nighttime in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. “When it’s your time to go, it’s time to go,” they said. “How do you make God laugh? Make a plan.” It wasn’t the darkness of night that posed danger: it was dark at all times. But the human element, they knew, is far less dependable when the body struggles to stay alert.

Harold Dozier, under the East Village, installing flags to warn motormen of trackworkers in the area, hit by the B train as the conductor sipped coffee. Joy Antony, testing a warning light under 96^th Street, killed by a 3 train when the operator failed to shut off the track. Sleepy negligence often caused electrocution by the third rail. Civilians, too: drunks fell over while pissing in between cars, “jumpers” stepped into headlights, teenagers surfed on top of trains. The homeless living underground dropped like flies from typhoid. The trackworkers found them all, dragged them to the nearest station, called the coroner.

Marvin Campos drew them.

“Marvin rode from Washington Heights to lower Manhattan and back every night. On the subway he drew everybody he could see. A lot of them were trackworkers, street cleaners, maids, nurses, city maintenance, headed to Harlem, the Heights, the Bronx . . . he loved the ones with dirt under their fingernails. He wrote stories about them too. Did you know that? Anyone he saw. Not a single story was true. One time—this was before he was married—he’s on the 1 train, writing a romance about himself and a female cop who was sitting right next to him. She looks over, sees what he’s writing, and shoots him with a Taser. Now if you ever asked Marvin, he’d deny it, say, ‘No, no, it was nothing, she just hit me with her club, you know? A love tap.’ Don’t believe him. He was jittery the rest of the day. I bet there was smoke coming out of his ears from the electricity. He looked like the Bride of Frankenstein—Marvin got shocked. The best part? She got off the train around Midtown, and Marvin kept writing. Only his handwriting looked like shit.

“He did tell his wife. Told her on their first date, even. Ain’t that right? Second date? All right. He tells Sheryl and her response—get this—is, ‘You better write somethin’ raunchy about me, Marvin.’ Anyway I hope she keeps those hidden. I don’t ever wanna read those.”

He kept a sketchbook in a canvas bag filled with tools for trackwork. Gloves with rubber insulation. Backup helmet lights. Gadgets: frequency converters, circuits, fuses, surge arresters, switches, vacuum interrupters, reclosers, cables, circuit breakers, capacitors. A laminated photograph of his wife. Replacement insoles for boots. And, in a separate pocket, a Strathmore Drawing Pad, Heavyweight, dog-eared from years of use, its cover reinforced with electrical tape. Stuffed inside it were death notices collected from newspapers, computer printouts, scraps of paper with penciled notes: faces, names, families. Reconstructed identities.

Campos would use a whole page to draw a hand. He would start with fingernails, knuckles, tendons, calluses, then draw the outlines around them, focusing more on details than structure. Thus proportions were exaggerated, at times grotesque, as if a magnifying glass were hovering invisible over the page. A grapefruit-sized callus on a palm, the fingers around it smaller, like a cow udder, or an inflated rubber glove. On the next page, an arm, its tattoos. On the page after, a face: Campos emphasized scars, missing teeth, crow’s feet, wrinkled foreheads, white spots in a black beard. When he used color he would emphasize only the pink of a cut across the arm, spots of brown dirt under a fingernail, or purple blisters. He hated paints—he couldn’t bring them anywhere. He brought crayons, colored pencils, glittery gel pens, things he stole from his son Marcus when Marcus got too big to draw. He tore Post-It notes. For the trackworkers’ safety vests, a vivid orange-yellow: highlighters.

“Where we worked, we called it the Hole. Gloomier than a jail cell, less light than the bottom of the ocean. We go in there looking like flashlight fish—some ugly sons-of-bitches with jowls, scales, and gigantic glowing lights on our foreheads—and when we come out, we’re even worse. Streaked with slime, blacker than ink. Smelling like a Porta-John. Smelling like the trash that comes out of a Washington Heights fish market in the morning. And the sound of a train when you’re leaning against the rail to avoid it, when your nose is three inches away from the lip of the door: try this, try putting your head in a kettle and then whacking the thing with a shovel. It’s the place you go when you die if you were worse than bad—if you were one of those America’s-Most-Wanted guys, or if you protest soldiers’ funerals, or if you’re some kind of psychopath, sadist, I don’t know. Anyway . . . that’s where we work. At the end of the 1 train, all the way down at the South Ferry exit, there should be a big red guy drinking blood out of skulls.

“But Marvin, Marvin was proud to zip his safety vest. Five days a week, he went home at 7 in the morning honored to feel the fatigue of a night’s work, to be the force that keeps New York City in motion. The place was art to him. He found beauty in the bloated rats lying in yellow puddles. Lost cats and dogs, covered in steel dust, eating cigarette packs. Homeless folks with toes like barnacles. I asked him once if he ever considered another job, and he said, ‘Mike, I wouldn’t know what else to draw.’ ”

Campos got just two lines in the Times obituary. Track worker, 51, Wash. Heights, hit by train. Body found Sunday between Franklin and Chambers. Though his wife had sent in a paragraph, they edited it out due to space constraints.

The service was over. The trackworkers ate dinner at Grey’s Papaya on 72^nd Street and Broadway, adjacent to the 1, 2, and 3 trains. The men had showered but they still found grime on their Styrofoam cups. The smell of sauerkraut and body odor carried over from the kitchen. It was drizzling and the men sat on torn barstools, eating hot dogs, drinking pineapple juice, looking out the window at the intersection.

“Sunday. Going back to work tonight.”

The reminder was pointless but jarring nonetheless: when the shift began at 11 p.m., they would open a grate on the corner of Franklin and 7^th Avenue in lower Manhattan. Drop down a ladder to the 1, 2, and 3 lines. Hear the blaring of horns, the din of trains, and imagine Marvin Campos stuck to the end of the 1, carried all the way to Chambers like a fly on a windshield.

“I found a dreadlock.”

“What?”

“On the track. Friday.”

“Marvin’s.”

“Yeah, his. It had a bead on it.”

“You keep it?”

“I put it in a baggie. Put it on my dresser.” The men nodded. There was silence for a minute. They undid their collars. Loosened their ties.

“Mike.”

“Yeah.”

“Your eulogy—it was good. Better than good. Did Marvin right.”

“I got another one up my sleeve. Much better.”

“When do we hear it?”

“Not hear it. You’ll see it.”

At ten the men got on the 1 train at 157^th and Broadway, threw their orange vests over their shoulders, held their helmets in their laps, and sat in silence during the forty-five-minute ride to Franklin Street. When they arrived, and the train braked to a halt, they glimpsed a large white patch on the side of the tunnel, only visible by the headlights of the train. They gawked at the image through the window. It was a drawing of Marvin, done in chalk—a horrible depiction, disproportioned, unattractive. A transformer sticking out of the wall was made to look like a wart on his nose. Dreadlocks like snakes flying from his head. Teeth like on a comb.

“He looks like Medusa, Mike.”

Mike burst out laughing. “Yeah. Man, I can’t draw for shit.”

They exited the train, walked toward the Hole.

My grandmother died in the shavings and crumbs of the newspaper clippings we stripped from her wall, long before her family checked her into Mercy Hospital, long before her mouth hung open in a room white as salt. When we moved her outside the city, when we settled her in a modern wood home with no stairs and an electric oven, in a neighborhood of the near-dead, she’d already given up the ghost. It was after her house finally sold, on that night in June: we peeled the skin from her kitchen, pulled the teeth from her living room.

Memory’s not like rewinding a tape—it’s a feeling like gas rising from the stomach to the throat, a feeling like standing up after a dinner of gnocchi and three glasses of red wine and wincing as blood and drunkenness flood the head.

Memories of Italian women. My mother and her sisters, their cousins, friends. In gaudy floral dresses, red lipstick, baseball caps with baseball logos, baggy sweatshirts with football logos. Cat-cartoon bandages on their legs from shaving, although chunky black hairs will frequently sprout from their cheeks like stray pen lines, crusted pink with foundation. Moles, rouge, wet kisses, pants with high waists, breath smelling of garlic, gray hair jutting out like straw, breasts like half-deflated balloons.

_____

It is midsummer when we come back to Pittsburgh. I am thirteen: quiet, gawky, with a bad haircut, and a fading black eye from a little league baseball game. My father left two summers ago; I live in New York with my mother. Though we live just a day’s drive from Pittsburgh, we haven’t visited since my parents split. My parents’ families have been friends since the forties: there has been a shatterproof closeness between them, strong ties my mother has no interest in unraveling by coming back and bringing with her the baggage of divorce, that elephant in the room. When my grandma Lucia had a stroke—a minor one, at the end of a long string of medical problems (a broken leg, osteomalacia)—my mom knew she couldn’t avoid her old home any longer. She orchestrated the sale of her mother’s three-story house, and bought her a tiny ranch home outside the city. Lucia’s daughters are all driving in to help her move.

We leave our apartment at four a.m. with the urgency of a fire drill: “Let’s go,” my mother says. “If we keep dawdling I might convince myself not to.”

By late afternoon we make it to Pittsburgh, entering the city through a tunnel that on the inside looks like a grainy black-and-white film—they’re lit to look pallid, steely, monochromatic; drivers emerge minutes later to a wash of color. The sight of the city is disconcerting: there are no bright lights or neon signs, only yellow and green bridges that lurch imposingly over the Ohio River to sweep cars over drab brick buildings with faded signs, post-war pop typography. I convince myself that the tunnels are wormholes in time, and when we finally enter Pittsburgh it’s 1945. I hold my breath all the way through. I want to enter with a gasp of relief instead of trepidation.

________

My mother’s sisters, Marie (for Rosemarie) and Ange (for Angelina, named after Archangel, a great-grandmother), greet us on the porch looking out over Richmond Street. The house is a prewar three-story in Regent Square, a neighborhood that hasn’t changed since its inhabitants arrived there in the forties. Houses are tall and thin; they line the hills in the neighborhood; they are accessible by two flights of stairs. The streets that cut between them are set low, like rivers in a valley. The streets are still made of red brick and cobblestone, and the back alleys behind the houses are turning decrepit and overgrown. Now my grandma opens the door and walks out; ignoring her daughters’ protests, she takes the stairs down to us. Before she might stumble, I run to greet her. A shiny green nightgown, matching nail polish. The smell of hair spray. When we hug, my chin rests on her hair. She takes my face in hands that feel like leather and cranes her neck up to kiss me.

She cycles through a few names—my father’s, then my grandfather’s—before she gets to mine. “Walt—Aar—Nicky, madonn’, you’re so tall! Thank God, we could use a man around here to get this house nice and good.”

The sign in my grandma’s yard says sold.

“It just really looks like shit in here,” she says. At one point she would’ve been hushed—“Stop swearing, Ma, Nicky’s just a kid”—but my mom is up the street, unloading bags, and no one bothers.

_____

Marie, the youngest of my aunts, is the most beautiful. Even in her forties her family’s wide rear end still has not taken hold of her, like it had, years ago, with my mother, then Ange: it was a bagel around her body, a lifesaver straining her sweatpants. In the afternoon, I sit with Marie, mesmerized by her—she’s beautiful, she’s beautiful, I keep thinking. Angular face, restrained makeup, hair black as tar, no graying (does she dye it?) and breasts with elasticity left in them, stretching a sports bra taut—she is carbonating my hormones—am I in love with her, with my mother’s sister? No, that’s atrocious. But I am thirteen, not yet attractive enough to date, never looked at by girls whose new bodies have bolstered their popularity. Women with femininity—I have never seen women like this outside of magazines, the Internet—I have never been a man around them, only controlled by them.

But we sit closely on the couch in the living room covered in afghans and loose objects taken from the connecting hallway. Marie and I are on break, while the rest of the family is fussing over piles of junk elsewhere—we hear yelling coming from the kitchen and the basement—and they too bring in piles. Picture frames, beach towels from the closet, goggles whose elastic band has turned to crust.

A new pile: photo albums now. We open one and share it between us. We pore over the seventies, sixties, fifties, watching lines draw themselves on faces, watching guts expand like bread dough. My grandfather—whom I’ve never met, who died four years before I was born, who has been in war, seen death—wears a white tank top and smokes a cigar out on the porch’s swinging chair, the same chair I can see now through the window. Faded, washed-out tattoos cover skinny arms. His shaven face has a birdlike sternness embellished by heavy jowls, a puckered beaklike mouth, bushy black eyebrows. Cigar smoke clouds the image.

I ask, “Did Grandpa smoke his whole life?”

“Till his late sixties,” Marie says. “He quit—he had to—for the kidney dialysis. And even then he cheated. He didn’t care. He was resigned to death—I think he felt death made a mistake when it passed over him in the war. He got covered in tattoos because he never expected to live past 24. He was the only one left out of his whole family, four brothers—none of them came back.”

It is an important moment and I say nothing. Marie takes a deep breath as (I imagine) she, maybe for the first time in years, remembers her father viscerally, smells cigarette smoke, cigar smoke, hears her father—This is a Romeo y Julieta, he says, mangling the accent. This is a Macanudo, from the Dominican Republic—and Marie breathes in deeply, puffs her chest (I look away), breathes out, looks at me again, smiles. I smile too, because I know, I think, what she was just thinking. And she says, “Nicky, you really have it bad—this house is filled with old women—you’re the only guy here!”

I say yeah. And I laugh: I imagine my own pale, skinny arms sticking out of a tank top, sporting nothing but peach fuzz on my upper lip, rocking myself on the porch, having a coughing fit while I try to smoke one of those fat brown things. A guy.

I turn the page of the album. “Were these Grandpa’s brothers?”

“These were cousins, distant cousins . . . here’s your grandpa Angelo at Mineo’s Pizza, in Squirrel Hill . . . these guys worked with me and Sue, your mom, at the movie theater on Braddock . . . these guys, they were Jewish, one of them owned the theater, and one of his cousins was your other grandpa, Aaron, on your dad’s side. Aaron and Angelo served together in the Army. They were all family friends. That’s how your mom met your—oh, that guy, see? he was a Levine, like you . . .”

And here I learn the males in my family, these men I had no memories of. Here are the bald heads and combovers, the womanizers (“They loved telling stories of their conquests,” Marie says. “Such pigs. They felt they always had to prove something . . .”), the domestic abusers and the alcoholics, the war heroes who survived, the war heroes who didn’t, the trousers held up by suspenders, the fat legs, the gimp legs, the amputated legs. The drinking buddies, the coworkers, the cigar connoisseurs, the fellow immigrants: Italians, Jews, Greeks, Irish, Germans, Russians, Lithuanians. The men who stuck together out of war-torn families. All missing brothers. Here’s Grandpa Angelo again, in Lucia’s mother’s bakery, holding his mouth over a loaf of braided bread the size of a pumpkin, laughing, with two men behind him—

“Oh!” Marie says. “That was a challah—you know, the Jewish bread, it’s sweet—and your grandpa Angelo who says he’s smoked every cigar in the world, eaten every cannoli and biscotti and bread in the world, he’s never tried challah before. So your grandpa Aaron meets with Carlo, Angelo’s brother. And Carlo goes, tells the bakery, he says, You gotta cook up the biggest fuckin’—sorry, Nicky—the biggest challah Angelo’s ever seen. They do. Angelo comes in the bakery, and they say, ‘Angelo, we made this just for you!’—and look, here he is, about to take a bite, and he can’t keep a straight face.”

“When was this?”

“Nineteen fifty . . . What does the back say? 1955.”

“Before you were born,” I say.

“Yeah, eight years before. But, I swear to God, you hear this story so many times, it sticks with you . . .”

We turn a page and find a picture of my father. Neither of us says a thing. Marie looks at me, starts to talk, stops herself. Finally she says, “Do you miss your father, Nicky? You must miss your father. We all liked him, you know. Even after—” She stops, it seems, in fear that she’s said too much.

“I don’t know,” I admit. “I do, of course I do, but I can’t say it. She was so hurt, my mom, she still is . . . and it’s not something we talk about. Ever. I don’t really know what happened, why he left. His story.”

“Yeah,” she says. A pause. “I see.” Marie is awkward now, reticent, reluctant to continue. “Do you . . . do you want to know?”

“Yeah. Sure, yeah.”

“One time your dad Walt goes on a trip to Chicago,” she begins, with the confidence of someone who has told this before, “to pitch his book to a publisher, and your dad likes it so much over there that he calls your mom and says, ‘Listen, I’m gonna stay another week.’ He needed the space, you know, he needed to breathe easy for a while. And so, Nicky, your mom calls and says, ‘Walt, I know you got some girl up there.’ And your dad says, ‘No, I don’t, Sue, you’re crazy’ ”—

“Did he?” I ask.

“Well, we don’t know. But let’s say he didn’t. So he was mad that she doesn’t trust him, and she was mad because he won’t come home . . . so it turns into this stalemate—he keeps staying longer, just to prove he can, and he sends home pictures of himself in Millennium Park, you know, in front of famous stores and all that, with a cutout of your mother in there to show he ain’t cheating. And your mom just goes nuts, she thinks he’s mocking her—‘How dare he,’ she says, ‘how dare he’—and she finally tells him that he can stay in the city as long as he wants, but when he comes home she might not be there.”

Two summers ago there were fights in the kitchen over dinner, fights I heard through the furnace vent that connected our bedrooms. The summer I was eleven my father came home from a business trip in Chicago, and he and my mother fought one last time. A week later he kissed me goodbye and was gone.

“But what if he did? What if he was cheating?” I say.

“Then he’s an asshole! Sorry, Nicky, a jerk—or, as your father would say, a real schmuck—but I don’t think—I really don’t—”

“Maybe that’s why he stayed, though. He found someone better than Mom.”

“You could remember him as a jerk. But you don’t have to. It’s up to you.”

“Look,” I say, pointing to the album. “Look, isn’t that the breadmaker? When it was new?”

Now the breadmaker’s back in its yellowed box, on the floor, in a pile of packing foam. There’s a breadmaker-sized circle on the yellow kitchen counter that’s lighter than the rest of the surface. A rim of crust and yeast . . .

In my childhood Grandma reads my fortune in bread dough by holding her hands on top of mine and letting me knead the dough with her. She says, “I can feel something, I can feel it in the bubbles—”

“It’s sticky!”

“You need more flour, Nicky? How ‘bout now? Squeeze with me, Nicky, you squeeze that dough and feel that pop when the air comes out. It’s like a big balloon, Nicky. How many bubbles?”

“Got five pops.”

“Five pops means you’re gonna wed the girl of your dreams, Nicky,” she says. “You’re gonna get straight As. You’re gonna be the star of a big TV show—”

“Like Ninja Turtles?”

“Like General Hospital. You ever watch that one?”

There are few facts we know about her childhood. Raised by Sicilian immigrants south of Squirrel Hill, Lucia Pinzino was a baker’s daughter, the last of eleven children. Some facts were not facts. She claimed to have been born on the bakery’s floor in a heap of flour and yeast. Her mother Maria cut the umbilical cord with a bread knife, then heated the crimping press that sealed the ravioli and—

“That’s disgusting!” I shout. “And Grandma, my mom says she doesn’t believe that for a second.”

“Your mom,” says Lucia, “she don’t know nothing, you know, she don’t remember back that far—everyone who know me then is dead. But I know, I know it’s true. It was probably in all the newspapers. Nicky, I coulda been born on the moon, descended from a-a-aliens, raised by Dra-a-a-cula—”

“No, Grandma, no!”

“—And nobody would know it,” she continues. “I turn into a wolf at the full moon. Awooo! I could be a boogeyman . . .”

“I believe you!”

_____

I’m sharing wedding soup with my mom and three aunts in my grandma’s living room. Lucia’s in bed, across the hall. There’s a cluster of balloons, lukewarm casseroles covered by tinfoil, dollar-store cards that say “May the Lord Protect You,” and a steel Party Bucket with “Cold Beer” printed on the side. Instead of beer, though, it’s filled with yarn spools. There’s yarn everywhere in the room: spilling out of the bucket, under the bed with sterile white sheets, around her dresser, stuck in the box of hair curlers. When Lucia wakes up, she crochets. The afghans are beginning to pile up.

My mother hates them. “I just want her to get better,” she says, “so we can get rid of these goddamn blankets.”

“Sue,” Ange says, “they’re afghans. Not blankets. And come on, you don’t think Ma can hear you talking about her? Is she sleeping, or what?”

She ignores her. “Yesterday, I told Ma, I says, I’m about to drop half of ’em off at the Goodwill if you can’t think of no one to give ’em to. Besides, all these goddamn colors are driving me crazy. Looks like Pee-Wee’s playhouse in here. I need more Romano cheese. Ange—Marie—one of you, fork it over. My soup ain’t salty.”

My mom pulls a pink and green afghan off the couch, throws it across the room. There’s an orange and blue afghan under it. They’re folded over the couch seats, draped over the armrests. There’s a white, red, and green afghan hung on the wall like an enormous Italian flag. An afghan on the floor is now a rug.

“Maybe we can teach her to do scarves,” says Ange.

“I can’t even walk in here. It’s like a room full of cats. I wanna kick ’em all.”

A puking sound from across the hall. There’s a pause as three women look at each other. No one gets up. Then they look at me: I get up.

“Maybe,” my mom says, “she can knit something to mop that up.”

Grandma is getting worse. Not just her hip, but her brains—my mom says it like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein—“her bra-a-a-ins.” Memory rises into her consciousness now like bubbles floating to the surface of a lake. There’s a story the three sisters keep telling: Once, while whisking cake batter, Lucia hears the creak of the third stair leading to her bedroom. Although she had replaced the same loud step twenty years before, now, in the kitchen across the house, she hears it clearly, remembering her daughters’ tiny feet scurrying down for breakfast.

“Madonn’,” Mom says, “I remember when she called me: ‘Susan, my god, I could’ve sworn you were five years old just then, running downstairs for breakfast—I heard that damn step, I heard it!’ And I says, ‘Ma, you’re crazy, there’s no one even living there, you got no pets . . .’ ” (I love the way she slips into the vernacular when at home, in the comfort of her family. I says, I says, I says.)

Grandma had broken her hip walking down the stairs. She doesn’t remember much, but she woke up in the Mercy Hospital of Pittsburgh thinking it was 1972, yelling for her dead husband, telling the doctor to find a babysitter for her daughters.

“I bet she thought it was the ’70s all day,” my mom says. “Did she mention anything about a cake to you? Because to me, later, she told me, she says, ‘Susan, I remember the raspberry-chocolate cake I baked for your confirmation. I smelled it the day I fell. I don’t remember falling, I remember smelling that damn cake. It smelled so good! Do you remember, with the icing in the shape of a big cross, and the fruit baked right in—d’you remember, Susan?’ ”

“Yeah,” Ange says, “she did, she did mention something. In the hospital, she was yelling for Dad to get the cake out of the oven . . . and she needed a ride to the church.”

“She smelled the cake when she was walking down the stairs. So she turns, thinking she’s late, sees the clock, then hobbles down the stairs with her osteoporosis—”

“Osteomalacia.”

“Right, and she tries to jump the bottom stair and run out the door. She misses it by a long shot. Falls right on her ass.”

For years, they’ll listen to my mother tell that same story of that fall down the stairs. She recites it over and over, revisiting and revising it at each dinner—never the same story twice, and each time more meticulous, audacious. It’s family mythology now. They alter lyrics from oldies and make them about her.

When the first couple stairs

Hit your big derriere

That’s amore

When you dance down the street

Watch the stairs at your feet!

That’s amore . . .

Lucia, going downstairs to get her paper, hearing a voice singing “Here Comes the Bride”—“It was my wedding, not the confirmation, she thought she was missing,” my mom says. “Can you believe that? What I’d give to see that old bat try to sprint out the door like she did . . .”

Or Lucia, suddenly tasting the apple-and-peach tart she had baked for Susan’s high school graduation. On her way down the stairs, she turns to see if she’d forgotten to wipe the table. She misses a step.

Or Lucia, startled by the sight of Angelo, her dead husband—“He’s at the bottom of the stairs, you know, sipping his coffee, asking Ma where the screwdriver is. You know how she’d always move his toolbox to wipe the shelves in the basement? He needs it to put together something or other for the confirmation—what is it?”

Years later, these are the stories Lucia’s daughters will tell their grown children—each telling a different version of the truth, each embellishing it lovingly. And Lucia’s grandchildren, great-grandchildren, we’ll all tell each other versions of versions our mothers invented. We’ll share the fall down the stairs. We’ll share the grandfather we’ve never met, the man we only know from stories. We’ll share the milkshakes at three a.m.; we’ll even hum that tune with her. We won’t get the song right.

Another day, in the afternoon, Lucia sits in a lawn chair in her back yard, her legs and neck propped up with pillows so her bones don’t ache. As soon as the sun comes out, my aunts help put her swimsuit on and plop sunscreen on her nose.

“Mar—Ange—what the hell? I look like a clown. I ain’t wearin’ no bikini bathing suit.”

“Come on, Ma, we picked that out for you, remember? At the Target?”

“You got the soft bones disease, the osteo—what? What is it? From not gettin’ no D vitamins? D’you remember, Ma?”

“I got the osteoporosis.”

“No, Ma, you don’t,” Ange says. “You have osteomalacia.”

“Oh, hard bones, soft bones, crickets, whatever. I can’t believe I fit in this thing. Mar—An—Sue, you remember that song, Sue? ‘She wore an . . .’ ”

“I know. Come on, Ma. You gotta get some sun.”

“ ‘. . . itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow polka-dot bikini . . .’ ”

Aunt Marie yells from the house: “Where’re Mom’s sunglasses?”

“They’re in the beach bag, the one with the Coppertone girl on it.”

“ ‘That she wore for the first time today . . .’ ”

“Come on, Ma, I’ll get you your damn yarn too. When you’re outside you can knit and sing all you want. You can make your neighbors close their windows. They won’t bring you any more casseroles.”

“Sue, this thing’s riding up my ass!”

Years later, I’ll be sitting in a lawn chair in my own back yard, in a swim suit that barely holds in my fat stomach, and I’ll start singing, way off key, waving my beer in the air, a smile plastered on my face.

She was afraid to come out of the water

She was as nervous as she could be . . .

_____

A week later there are clean circles where fine china once sat in a dusty cabinet. An armchair without pillows, a window without drapes. The fabric sits in a box, and seems awkward and ugly when disconnected from its furniture—it’s like finding a loose hair in a meal, or detached skin from a finger: unsightly when removed from the body.

The tablecloth, folded, is placed on top of dishtowels on the easy chair in the living room. Lucia had crocheted it herself: white with green trimming, doilies hanging from the perimeter. The candles and the Lazy Susan lean against the wall by the door. The bare table isn’t a table. It’s a foreign wooden structure, out of place in our dining room. I ask what we’ll eat on tonight.

“I gotta pack this stuff up,” Mom says. “We can get Chinese.” She grabs a chisel and starts hacking at the newspaper clippings that cover the kitchen.

The clippings had been there, it seemed, since the war ended. We count decades of issues of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The clippings cover so much of the wall we have to use a chisel to hack through it. There are some we save—Grandma will protest and point at one recipe in particular, or hobble in her green satin dress across the room to save an old cartoon, and of course we save the photographs—but most are slashed. The wall is the color of cane sugar and, as more of the wall is revealed, Grandma’s complaints and movements decrease until she’s standing here like a mint-green obelisk, a streak of color in a room stripped of adornment. She stands silent but as we clear the wall her eyes follow our movements, pleading with the clippings, with the hands that took them.

Later when the clippings are gone Lucia stares at the bare walls. She reaches her hand out and as she touches the tape residue and the staples in the wallpaper she can see each clipping in its old position, like individual patches in a quilt, tiles in a mosaic. Here is her mother Maria’s baked eggplant with Romano cheese, the rosemary foccacia with fresh mozzarella, the artichoke antipasto, the blueberry cannoli filling. Here are Angelo with his brother-in-law Carlo in their uniforms and dog tags, here are her grandchildren in Santa hats surrounding a pie with a crosshatched topcrust, here is the family bakery on Squirrel Hill. Lucia moves her hands over forty-five years of history, still palpable over the blank wall, even though she can’t see it.

After dinner my grandmother and I take out the photo album again. My mother, Marie, and Ange take a break from cleaning and join us—we squeeze together on the couch to make room for Ange, who takes up a whole cushion. Now there are five of us, three generations of us, there on the couch: a grandmother, three daughters, a grandson. And leafing through the albums becomes an agonizing process because there is a story for every picture on the page. Grandma builds up momentum so quickly—rattling off names, leaping over decades to add a postscript to her anecdote, gesturing wildly with her hands as she speaks—that as we dig through decades it seems she is channeling the energy she had in 1945:

“Grandma, are you all right? That nap must have really—”

“Oh, yeah, yeah! Oh, madonn’, look at that one—Nicky, did I ever tell you . . .”

And we leap around family history until we circle back to the challah bread. Here Grandma alters the story I already heard, bringing out details only she remembers, embellishing the oddities, the Yiddish—and now I think the more times I hear this it will only become more fantastic. How Carlo pulled the loaf out of the oven and almost dropped it, how the loaf barely fit in the oven to begin with, it was so large, and how Aaron kept brushing it, asking, Is there schmutz on the challah? Schmutz on the challah?

And then, eventually, we rediscover Angelo on the porch, smoking the cigar, the tank top, the skinny arms. “In kidney dialysis Dad still snuck cigars,” my mother says. “After he told his doctor that he quit—That’s it, no more, I’m done—he made several hiding places in the house.”

“Oh you’re kidding,” Grandma says. “Sue, you’re kidding.”

“You didn’t know?”

“Oh, that liar, that sonofabitch, that stronzo—”

“He kept it from you?”

“I knew, you know, I knew—a wife always knows—but I thought he quit before dialysis, I didn’t know he kept it up, my Angelo . . .”

“We used to watch him in the mornings before work,” Marie says. “I was still in high school then. Sue was commuting to Pitt. I remember some of the places he hid those boxes—here, come . . .”

We tiptoe down the hallway, over to the bathroom, where the thin wooden board in the back of the cabinet is loose. Marie presses her hands to it and shoves it sideways—the whole mirror lurches—and behind it there is a small space in the plaster, blanketed in cobwebs, where brown flakes and crumbs are still nestled in the corner.

“Here,” Marie says. “And here”—she runs to the guest bedroom, where she lifts up the credenza (the drawers are gone now) and finds grimy masking tape half-stuck to the underside—“see? He stuck them here, I know, I remember.”

“That stronz’,” Grandma repeats, “I didn’t know that one!”

“And here,” Marie says, pointing to the corner. “I remember—he’d roll back the carpet here, take one out gingerly, smell it, pocket it. He’d smoke on his way to work—this had to’ve been the early stage of treatment, when he was getting his blood drained once every two days, before he was hospitalized and there was no way he could’ve . . . you know.”

Ange adds, “Didn’t you ever smell his car, Ma? That smell never left. We go find it, whoever bought it, if it’s in the junkyard, crushed in a heap, buried under years of dirt, that smell will still be there.”

_____

At the end of the day the house looks like it has been devoured and spat out again, like a cartoon cat eats a fish and spits out its pristine skeleton. In the living room the pictures lie in a stack on the floor, the afghans have been removed from the furniture and boxed up, the TV is unplugged, and there is no color here. Packing peanuts litter the floor. Static fills the space. The clock doesn’t tick.

Lucia is crocheting in the easy chair and I sit with her and listen as she talks again about Angelo her husband my grandfather may he rest in peace the good man that he was—“Did you know he drove tanks in the war, Nicky, did you know that?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“Yeah.”

Today her hearing is poorer than usual, but her mouth works with the high-pitched exhilaration of a record played at the wrong RPM.

“You know he didn’t kill nobody,” she says. “Angelo was an angel. He drove tanks and they shot at other tanks but no one in the tanks died. Sometimes he drove trucks and they brought food to the soldiers. Then he come home and he marries me. And he’s covered in tattoos because he thought he was gonna die, you know, so he get all them tattoos, so they try to cover them up for the wedding photos, but see Angelo don’t care, all he cares about is his beautiful new moglie—”

My mom interrupts her from the kitchen, where she’s scrubbing the tape residue from the walls, tearing out staples with pliers, sweeping clippings into trash bags. She shouts: “Ma, are you telling the wedding story?”

Lucia doesn’t hear her. She continues: “And, Nicky, at the wedding reception, the band’s playin’—they’re playing Sinatra, they’re playing the Dean Martin and Tony Bennett, all those Italians—and Carlo my brother is on the trumpet playing with them, we’re all singin’, Nicky, all us Italians, the war’s over and we’re singing. At the party Angelo come over and he sit on my lap and says, he says, ‘When can we get out of here?’ and I tell him, I says, ‘Angelo, il mio marito, you waited four years for me—you can wait one more night.’ ”

“For Christ’s sake,” my mom says from the kitchen. “You had to go and tell him that one.”

“Susan, come on,” Ange says. “Look at Nick. He’s the man of the house now.”

And Mom smiles this time. She comes in the living room, and squats down and lifts her mother from the easy chair where yarn covers her lap, where her yellow-and-blue-colored afghan, long forgotten, lies in a pile at her feet. Lucia looks at her daughter and speaks to her as she steps into her, clutching her hand so tight that Lucia’s green veins bulge through skin as thin and white as rice paper.

“That song, Angelo, that song.”

“Angelo’s not here, Ma. I’ll sing it to you. What is it? ‘Someday, when I’m awfully low / When the world is cold / I will feel a glow . . .’ ”

Now they’re moving—no, they’re dancing slowly. Occasionally Lucia puts a bare foot up on her daughter’s shoe for support, like a small girl shuffling, learning a step for the first time, clinging to her father or mother.

“ ‘Just thinking of you . . .’ ”

Her mint-green gown sways as the women move awkwardly in time to the song in their heads. With the color drained from the room the dancers look like a scene from a black-and-white romance, and the shuffling of feet sounds like film being fed through a projector.

“Come on, Ma,” my mother says. “Can’t you hear it?”

“ ‘And the way you look tonight,’ ” Lucia finishes.

“Yeah, baby!” she says. “Come on, move with me. Be careful—don’t trip over those packing peanuts. Here, I’m getting tired—oof, you’re hurting my toes—dance with Nicky. Come on, Ma, here, dance with your grandson.”

The man of the house now.

Mom passes my grandma off to me, and I take her clumsily, just as awkward in my new body, which has grown hairy and green bean-like, as Lucia is in her old—her stiff bones and sagging muscles—and so I sway her from one foot to another. Suddenly I grow brave and I spin her: I step back, hold her hand up, and prod her waist to twirl; she rotates slowly, painfully, doing the full turn in twice the time, shuffling her bare feet to shift her inflexible, fragile body. And soon she’s moving like a much younger woman around the bare room—I am leading as we waltz our way over to each corner, tracing the walls with our fingertips as we glide around the perimeter, charting the region, knowing exactly where the pictures were hung, absorbing the room into memory as we prepare to leave it. A house that began when the war ended, a house that ended now with Lucia. And as my mother and grandmother sing this old standard, there is so much memory in this room that I can feel it, smell it, taste it, almost tangible, like a bite into fresh bread, like being greeted by the smell of tomato and garlic as you step in the door at dinnertime.