All This Talk of Love (14 page)

Frankie grabs a slice of pepperoni. “You two are masters of passive-aggressive antagonism,”
he says, which causes both his mother and sister to laugh, Maddalena because she doesn’t understand the words, Prima because he’s right.

“We’re not going to fight today,” Prima says.

“Who’s fighting?” says Maddalena. “I’m looking for presents.”

Maddalena’s wearing her new brown leather pencil skirt, which Prima bought for her birthday in September. “You still have the figure,” she had reminded her. “You should enjoy it.” Prima would never have chosen the outfit for herself, but it works on her mother. Frankie’s jeans are too tight and torn at the knee, and his hair’s a goopy mess, and this, too, works, though she’d never let any of her boys out of the house looking like that.

Th
ey stand before a display of $200 orange and lime cashmere sweaters. “You need to wear more color,” Maddalena says to her.

“
Th
ese make me want sherbet.”

“I’m serious,” she says. “Look at you.” Prima’s got on her khaki-and-maroon ensemble, bought over five years ago, the most comfortable outfit in her closet. “You buy ‘in’ clothes for me, but you walk around in a sack. Your friends don’t tell you to dress more—what’s the word?—hip?”

Prima shrugs. “I’m not as hip as you, Ma,” she says. “We’re wasting time here.
Th
ey’re not even on sale.” She guides them away from the display, toward the less pricey shops on the other side of the fountain.

“Whatever happened to those nice girls from college you used to go around with?” Maddalena asks.

“Linda and Audrey? What made you think of them?
Th
ey’re around. I think Audrey lives not far from here, actually.”

“You don’t see her?”

“We have our own families, Ma. We lost touch.”

You should have friends, Maddalena thinks. If you did, you wouldn’t say, at your sons’ birthday party, “It’s a wonder I’m
not
a drunk.” Maddalena wrote about drunks in her letters to Mamma. She asked God about them in church. She thought back to the ones she’d known—an uncle in Santa Cecilia, a Russian lady at the dress factory—and remembered them as angry people, but Prima wasn’t angry. Now, though, as they walk through the crowded mall together, she thinks, No, those people weren’t angry.
Th
ey were lonely.

“I’m getting you one of those cashmere sweaters,” she says to Prima suddenly, interrupting whatever she’s saying to Frankie. “So you better tell me which color you like.”

“You’re still on that, Ma?” Prima says. “
Th
ey’re a rip-off.”

“I want to do something nice for you this year.”

“
Th
ere’s only one thing I want from you.”

“Frankie, what do you think? Which color?”

“I’ll take a medium,” he says. “In cantaloupe.”

Prima shakes her head.
Th
en she can’t help herself, she has to ask: “So, do you have anybody special in your life who’d look good in that sweater?”

Again the trademark Frankie eye roll. “Subtle segue there,” he says. “Please change the subject.” He picks at his fingernail as they walk, and won’t look up at her or his mother. “I think I’d rather hear you fight about Italy.”

“Come on, Frankie,” Maddalena says. “I tell you
my
stories. You never tell me yours.”

“I don’t have any.”

“I don’t believe you,” his mother says.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “You have a boring kid. I’d think you’d want that.”

Th
at’s anger, not playfulness, in Frankie’s voice. Prima’s finely tuned to how quickly, and without warning, a man can cross the line from one to the other, especially when he’s being teased or probed. She’s learned how to push Tom and her boys close to that line, get the information she needs or make the point she needs to make, then retreat at the last second before they blow up.
Th
is approach leaves them thinking they got away with something, and what man doesn’t glory in that?

“Leave him alone, Mother,” Prima says.

“You brought it up.”

“Let me put it this way,” Frankie says. “I’m not lonely.”

Later they sit and rest awhile on the benches by the fountain.
Th
ey’re surrounded by shopping bags. At Prima’s direction, Frankie’s bought a monogrammed pullover for his father, a tie clip for Tom, and various gift cards for her sons, all gifts thoughtful enough to be appreciated but cheap enough for Frankie to afford. Frankie buys nothing for anyone in Boston, though Prima reminds him, gently, that Delaware is tax-free, and if he was going to get something for a certain nameless special person, now would be the time. She even offers to make the purchase herself if he wants to hide it from their mother, but he ignores her. She’s helped Maddalena finish all her shopping, too, except the gift she’ll get for Prima on her own steam, which better not be one of those sweaters or she’ll return it immediately. Again, Prima reminds her mother that for Christmas she wants only her blessing—which includes her cooperation with the Italy trip—but this, too, is ignored.

She finds a handful of pennies in her purse and gives them to an adorable little girl who sits beside her, looking even more bored than Frankie. Her grandfather looks over, smiles, and thanks her.
Th
e girl casts her arm back and pitches each penny as far as her matchstick body can make it fly, delighted by the splash and the ripples it makes on the water. In a year or two, Prima thinks, she’ll be too old to enjoy this. She’ll be too self-conscious. For a moment, Prima sees not the little girl at all but the twins at her age, at five, maybe six.
Th
ey had the chubbiest little hands then, couldn’t keep their balance, could barely outrun the neighbor’s dachshund. Now Matt’s an all-state pitcher, written up in the
News Journal
for his finesse and speed around the bases; now Zach’s the team’s most reliable goalie. What will become of this little girl in ten years, when she reaches Allison Grey’s age? Does her grandfather have any idea how much the world has changed, how dangerous it’s become? Yet another reason Prima should be happy with what God gave her. Sons.
Th
e world was made for sons.

Allison Grey is everywhere. All the girls Prima sees have her shiny, innocent-seeming face. Every boy stops to check her out, consider her, tick his head in recognition and invitation. In the mall today, Prima spotted her listening on a headset at Sam Goody, and again pulling apart a pretzel at Auntie Anne’s, and again in the ladies’ room coughing into a clenched fist. She’s always singing that same song, always stretching her naked limbs. What Prima saw in the basement shocked her, turned her stomach, and yet she can’t stop herself from playing the scene over and over in her mind—the moonlight on Matt’s muscular back and behind, Zach strutting fully erect to the bed, their playful confidence and ease, all three of them.
Th
e next morning, Allison gone, Prima couldn’t look Matt or Zach in the eye, but by the afternoon she watched with pride as they devoured the egg-and-sausage sandwiches she’d fixed them. After they conked out on the couch wearing only their boxers and a T-shirt, she brought down blankets, laid them over their gently breathing bodies, turned down the TV, and kissed them both on the forehead.

And then—it has to be said—as the evening came on and Ryan flew back to Syracuse and the boys woke and she vacuumed and prepared dinner for them to take in the car to Penn State, Prima felt closer than ever to her twins. Closer and, strangely, relieved. She had seen everything. And after everything, what more could they hide?

At Allison Grey, though, Prima’s still mad as hell. Every time she sees her—driving her beat-up Toyota down Concord Pike, pumping gas, in the school newspaper running for student council, bagging her groceries—she wants to grab her by the neck. She should be warned. But the girl is never there quite long enough. She’s always turning the corner. Prima’s gone so far as to look her up in the phone book, but there are too many Greys in Pennsylvania and Delaware, and she has no friends in common with her parents, and to ask Matt or Zach is to risk their not having gotten away with something. Last Saturday, Prima went to Ethan Allen and wandered the showroom for an hour, just in case Allison and her mother wandered in. It’s possible the girl lied about that, too, in some boneheaded attempt to impress her. Who does she think Prima is, anyway? Her future mother-in-law?
Th
e thought of this made Prima angrier than ever. She has a plan for this week, once school’s back in session, to observe her—just observe her—and if the girl can stay still for one minute, maybe Prima will figure out what it is about her that she can’t shake.

“Somebody’s done for the day,” Frankie says. He points his thumb at their mother, now dozing beside him on the bench.

“I’m just resting my eyes,” says Maddalena, without opening them.

“One last stop,” Prima says. “Come on.” She pats her mother on the thigh, gives Frankie a wink. “We can do it.” It’s time to reveal her ulterior motive, even though she herself feels sluggish. For a moment she considers abandoning the surprise, worried that it will ruin an otherwise pleasant afternoon, but the junkie in her will not let her.

She leads them to Macy’s.
Th
ey weave among the fragrance counters, then up the escalator to the home section.

“What did we lose here?” Maddalena says.

Prima finds Arnaud, the flouncy fellow who helped her earlier in the week and promised to be working today from two to eight.

“Miss!” he says. “I’m ready for you!”
Th
en he rushes off.

“What’s this, now?” says Maddalena. She crosses her arms.

“An early Christmas present from the Buckleys to the Grassos,” Prima says.

“Am I included in this present?” asks Frankie.

“Aren’t you a Grasso?” says Prima.

In seconds, Arnaud is back, grandly wheeling two sets of luggage—one two-piece, one five-piece—on a big plastic cart.
Th
e first, Frankie’s, is black, to match every article of clothing he owns; the other, her parents’, is a rich burgundy. Both sets are fashioned from the finest leather.

“Jesus, Prima,” Frankie says. “Your subtlety continues to amaze.”

“Take it back,” Maddalena says to Arnaud, waving him off. “We don’t want it. Get it away.”

Arnaud’s big, toothy smile fades. An old lady behind him stares. He says to Prima, “Miss?”

“OK, Mom,” says Frankie. He puts his hand on her shoulder. “Now you’re being dramatic.”

“I’m sorry,” Prima says calmly to Arnaud. She takes her mother’s arm and pulls her out of the aisle, away from the staring old lady, toward a dimly lit display of china. Frankie follows close behind her. “You’re going to have to explain this to me again,” she says.

“We haven’t explained it enough?” says Frankie.

“Oh, I forgot. You’re a united front.”

“I just understand where she’s coming from, and you can’t seem to.”

“Because where she’s coming from is just plain stupid. We’re doing this
for
her, Frankie, not
to
her. And definitely not
against
her. I tried to tell you that, but you’re the one who can’t seem to understand.”

“It will only make her sad,” Frankie says. “You don’t think she’s sad enough? You want her to be worse than she already is?” His expression is pained, like she’s the enemy holding his loved one hostage. “
Th
ere’s an expression, ‘You can’t go home again.’ It’s from a novel—”

“Do
not
start quoting shit to me, Frankie. I’m not an idiot. I know that expression. I think he was wrong, whoever wrote it. I think you can go home anytime you want. You just have to be a grown-up about it.”

“Her whole family over there is either sick or dead. I can’t imagine what that’s like.”

“We’re her family,” Prima says. “We’re not sick or dead.
Th
at should count for something. For
everything,
actually. Not to mention what Dad wants. You saw how excited he got when I told him.”

“Dad, who basically had to kidnap her to get her to come here? I find it rather ironic that he’s trying so hard to bring her back to the village now.”

“Nobody kidnapped anybody,” Prima says. “You only hear her side of the story. I talk to Dad.”

“And Mom talks to me.”

“
Th
at’s enough,” Maddalena says. “We both talk to you both. Can I say what I feel now?”

“Unless you changed your mind and aren’t going to be so selfish, then I’d prefer not to hear what you feel.”

Maddalena stares at her. “I’m saying, listen to this: Frankie and I had a good idea the other night. We were talking, and we said, Let’s go somewhere else, all of us. California. Canada. Or Paris. If all you want is for us to be together, we can be together in Paris.”

Prima shakes her head. It’s the only response she can muster. She has a specific reason for Italy over Paris or Canada or California or anywhere, and an argument she could make, but not now, not here. She can’t acknowledge the reason to herself, let alone to her mother or Frankie. Her hunch might not even be true. She’s tried to put it out of her mind as a possibility, but nothing stays down for long, and when it comes up, it surprises her, and she starts to cry.