An Italian Wife (17 page)

“So,” her mother says evenly, “you follow a man to some fancy job and buy some fancy house and pretend you're American, and you actually turn into an American?”

“Ma, I am American,” Connie says. She can feel Davy's eyes on her. “Italian-American,” she adds.

Her mother takes hold of the rubbery white octopus and splays it on the table, slicing it with quick knife strokes.

The slap of the octopus against the enamel cuts through the silence.

“You know Vincent lost that job, Ma,” Connie says quietly.

“Daddy is unemployed,” Davy says with pride.

Connie's mother hesitates, the knife in midair.

“I thought he got a job with—”

“That didn't work out either,” Connie says.

“And this is the time you decide to get pregnant?” her mother says. “Is that what they taught you at that fancy secretarial school I paid for? I used to have to borrow from the other kids' lunch money for your bus fare to Providence.”

“I didn't decide,” Connie mumbles.

She wants to tell her mother that this is why she has not come home. Her own disappointment with her life is big enough for all of them. She wants to tell her how sometimes, when she watches Vincent feed his fat bullfrog face, she prays that he will choke. How when she finds him asleep on the sofa late in the afternoon, she watches to see if he is still breathing, and is always angry when his chest rises and falls in perfect rhythm.

“Mommy works for Dr. DiMarco,” Davy says through his fingers.

Her mother's head snaps to attention.

“You work? I'm glad your grandmother is spending Christmas with Sister Chiara this year. What would she think?”

“In the doctor's office,” Connie says, trying to sound casual. “A few days a week while Davy's at school.”

“Vincent stays home, and
you
work?”

Connie's glance flits to Davy, and then back to her mother. But her mother doesn't take the hint.

“What kind of wife . . . what kind of mother . . . works?” her mother says.

“Dr. DiMarco looks like Montgomery Clift,” Davy says.

She frowns, but doesn't look away. Connie can feel her cheeks turn red.

Connie picks up the bowl of smelts that still need to be fried and takes them over to the stove, where a pot of hot oil waits. Through the window, she can see her husband drinking homemade wine with Angie's husband, Pat, and Gloria's husband, Rocky. The men have cigars clenched in their fingers and Vincent is holding court, talking and gesturing, happy to have an audience. She wonders what he is bragging about. His woody? Her pregnancy? The car they can't afford payments on?

She drops a handful of smelts into the bubbling oil. It splatters, burning her hands and arms.

“Montgomery Clift is a famous actor,” Davy is saying. “Mommy's favorite actor, right, Mommy?”

The smelts sizzle. Connie fights back nausea as their acrid smell fills her nostrils.

Behind her, her mother slaps the octopus down hard, slicing it into small pieces.

“Mama G,” Davy says, oblivious to the tension that fills the kitchen, “why are there seven fishes?”

“For the Holy Blessed Sacraments,” his grandmother tells him. “Your mother should remember that.”

THREE MORNINGS
A
WEEK,
after Connie drops Davy off at kindergarten, she drives across town to Dr. DiMarco's office. He has given her what he calls
Mother's hours
, working just while Davy is in school. She wears a white uniform that shows off her small waist, unbuttoned just enough so that if Dr. DiMarco wanted to, he could glimpse the white lace of her bra, the swell of her breasts. Connie hopes he is sneaking looks at them, at her. He is movie-star handsome, with thick, dark hair and a high forehead, thick black eyebrows above piercing black eyes.

The diplomas that hang behind her in the office are from Williams College and Yale Medical School. Fancy schools. Connie imagines Williams College, which she knows absolutely nothing about, as a beautiful place with brick ivy-covered buildings and smart, handsome men debating great ideas on brick-lined paths. She imagines pink dogwoods in bloom, and bright azalea bushes, and a clock tower that chimes on the hour. Davy will go there, Connie has decided. Davy will go to Williams College just like Dr. DiMarco.

Sometimes, Connie spends the ride from Davy's school to Dr. DiMarco's office planning how she will seduce him. Maybe she will call him into one of the examining rooms on the pretense of something in a patient's file and when he enters she will slowly unbutton the buttons on her uniform and take his hands and place them on her breasts. Or perhaps she should offer to cover for Bea, who works on Tuesday nights when the office stays open till eight. After all the patients were gone, Connie and Dr. DiMarco would be left alone in the office. It would be dark out, and just the two of them would be there with the hum of the fluorescent lights and the smell of ammonia and cough syrup.

So far, Connie has not executed any of her plans. Dr. DiMarco's wife, Becky, Doris Day–blond and cute, calls several times a day just to say,
Love ya
. Every time Connie has to take one of Becky's calls, her chest fills with such jealousy that she can't breathe. How did Becky get so lucky? How did Becky get born into a family with a dentist father and a mother who bred golden retrievers? How did she get to go to Mount Holyoke, an all-girls college that is maybe even more beautiful than Williams? Connie hates Becky, hates her turned-up nose and tanned cheeks and the tennis skirt she seems to have on every time she stops by the office.

One day Connie went so far as to call Dr. DiMarco into an examining room under false pretenses. She held a manila file in her hands. She'd unbuttoned her buttons one lower than usual.

Dr. DiMarco did not seem to notice the extra button.

Connie glanced down at the file to see who it belonged to.

“The Pattersons,” she said. “They're ninety days late with their bill.”

He frowned. “Gee, that doesn't sound like Peggy, does it?”

Connie shook her head. Her throat had gone dry from being so close to Dr. DiMarco and she couldn't speak.

“Let me think. She brought Billy in for tonsillitis—”

“Whooping cough,” Connie managed.

Dr. DiMarco nodded. “And Peggy had—”

“Gallstones. Or you thought she might have gallstones but the X-ray showed her gallbladder was clear,” Connie said. She had so much to give him, so much information, so much of herself. Surely he must see that?

Dr. DiMarco smiled at her. “What would I do without you, Connie?” he said.

“Fall apart,” she said, shifting so that he could definitely see the white lace of her bra, surprising herself with her boldness.

This was flirting, wasn't it? Connie thought. No one had ever really flirted with her before. But this must be it, the smiles, the joking, the double entendres.

“I'm sure it was just an oversight,” Dr. DiMarco said. “Thanks, Connie, for being so efficient.”

Then he was gone. Just like that.

Connie felt her heart tumbling around beneath her ribs. She waited until she heard his deep voice greeting Pamela Sylvestri and her three kids, waited until she heard the door of that examining room close. Then she went and locked the door of the room she was in.

Alone in the room, with the colorful posters of the digestive system and respiratory system on the wall, Connie unbuttoned her uniform the rest of the way. She kicked off the white rubber-soled shoes and rolled down her girdle. Then she climbed up on the examining table, spread her legs, and closed her eyes, her own hands running up the warm length of her body, lightly pinching her nipples, imagining that it was Dr. DiMarco touching her, imagining him reaching his hands between her legs like she was doing to herself now, imagining he was whispering to her,
What would I do without you, Connie?

This was her shame. She was a sinner. Three days a week, in Dr. DiMarco's office, she found herself doing this. In the bathroom. In an examining room. Once even in her car in the parking lot. Touching herself like this, so often, so desperately, was a sin. And wanting it to be Dr. DiMarco broke the tenth commandment:
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house; nor his wife, nor anything that is thy neighbor's.
Worse, she would break the seventh commandment readily:
Thou shalt not commit adultery.

When she got home on the nights she worked, as she made pork chops with mashed potatoes and peas with pearl onions and Davy practiced writing his letters, his careful
a
's over and over on the yellow papers with the wide blue dotted lines, and Vincent came up behind her whispering,
Little V wants a date
, Connie thought about those stolen moments, that tug, that yearning that took over her body. She thought about Dr. DiMarco and how life with him would be, how different everything would be.

DINNER BEGINS
without Vincent. No one can find him.

Vincent arrives just as Mama G starts to serve the spaghetti with anchovies. He sits down without apologizing and fills his plate high with smelts and eel and octopus and fried shrimp and
baccala
, then holds it aloft for Mama G to add the spaghetti with anchovies.

“Now I see how you keep your girlish figure,” Pat says. His own belly is big enough to hang over his belt, and to quiver when he talks or takes a breath.

Vincent laughs and raises his jelly glass of wine. “
Salute
, my brother-in-law. To our girlish figures.”

Mama G has left some spaghetti plain for the kids, but Cammie refuses it.

“I'll take it with the anchovies, Mama G,” she says proudly.

Mama G beams, pinching the girl's cheeks.
“Figlia mia,
”
she says, and kisses the top of Cammie's ringleted head.

It seems they will never stop eating, Connie thinks, even though she touches almost nothing. The platters keep getting emptied and refilled. Vincent and Pat drink too much wine and grow sloppy and silly. The metallic taste of vomit fills Connie's mouth. When they get home, she will have Dr. DiMarco do a pregnancy test. No, she decides as quickly as she thinks this. She will go to Dr. Caprio. Somehow, the thought of Dr. DiMarco knowing she is pregnant embarrasses her.

Connie glances up at the clock.

“
Amahl and the Night Visitors,
” she says, getting to her feet.

Standing so fast makes her dizzy and she clutches the edge of the table, the plastic her mother has placed over the polyester tablecloth decorated with fake-looking poinsettias beneath it crinkling.

Angie stares into a small gold hand mirror, applying fresh dark-magenta lipstick. “Amahl?” she repeats.

“The opera,” Connie says. “It's going to be on television in a few minutes.”

“Yeah,” Pat says, “that's just what I want to do. Watch a friggin' opera.”

“I've got your opera right here swinging,” Rocky says.

Unexpectedly, tears fill Connie's eyes. She wants to go home. Now. Back to her small white Cape in Connecticut and her dreams of Dr. DiMarco falling in love with her. She wants to take Davy away from these people, who do not even seem to notice how special he is. But when she looks at her husband, it is clear he is too drunk to drive in the dark all the way to Connecticut.

The opera is just beginning when Connie sits in her mother's worn easy chair, the powder-blue upholstery fraying at the seams. She runs her hands over it, as if she can fix it.

Anna comes in too, but she is not interested in
Amahl and the Night Visitors
. She just needs to put her swollen feet up on the little footstool.

“He wants five kids,” she says, almost boastful. “I am going to be pregnant for the next ten years.”

The little boy, Amahl, is trying to convince his mother that there are three kings at their door. The mother keeps asking,
“What shall I do with this boy? What shall I do?”

“Mother, Mother, Mother, come with me
,” the boy sings in the sweetest voice Connie has ever heard.
“I want to be sure you see what I see . . .”

The boy's name is Chet Allen, and watching him Connie realizes that Davy could be on television just like Chet Allen. She thinks of him in his kindergarten play back in October, how he came onstage in a floppy chef's hat and white apron, holding a tray of baked goods and singing, “
Have you seen the muffin man?”
He had sung louder and more clearly than any of the other children.

Connie leans forward.

“I was a shepherd
,” Amahl is singing, his voice pure and high. “
I had a warm goat who gave me warm, sweet milk . . .”

Others have come into the living room. The air is filling with the smells of perfume and cigars and sweat and wine. But Connie can only stare at Chet Allen.

“Cammie's going to do a little performance,” Gloria says. “A little song and dance.”

Davy climbs on Connie's lap and she holds him tight.

“See that boy on TV?” she whispers to Davy. “You can do that. You can be that boy.”

Davy has his thumb in his mouth, sucking quietly.

“Watch the boy,” she says.

Vincent sits on the arm of the easy chair, holding a grease-stained bag.

“For you,” he says, offering it to Connie.

“What is it?”

He smiles crookedly and takes a white Chinese-food container from the bag.

“Pork fried rice,” he says. “From Ming Garden.”

“But when—”

“I went and got it before dinner. I figured all that fish might upset your stomach.”

He is holding the container out to her, but Connie doesn't take it. On the television, Amahl's mother is agreeing to let him go with the three kings.

Mama G puts on the too-bright overhead light.

“Come on in, Cammie,” she calls into the kitchen.