An Italian Wife (21 page)

Ever since then, she's caught them smoking it in the car, in the basement, even in Terry's room with a blue bath towel—one of the good ones—rolled under the door. It is all that they do, and it makes Aida alternately sad and angry. For her bridal shower, she bought her sister a book called
Wok Cookery
, believing that maybe if she found something new, something she liked, she wouldn't have to get high all the time. “Wow,” Terry had said in her thick stoned voice when she opened it, “Chicken with Cashews.”

The phone rings and Aida runs to answer it.

She hears static and then, “Auntie Anna? Auntie Anna?”

“This is Aida,” Aida says.

“Little Aida? It's Cousin Cammie.”

Aida puts a finger in one ear to hear better. She imagines this voice cutting through the hot desert air, traveling across mountains and rivers and cities to her ear.

“Cammie!” Aida says it like a sigh.

“Listen, doll,” Cammie says, “I'm on my way. I think I'll be able to make it in time for the wedding. If I drive straight through.”

“What?” Aida says. “You're
driving
?” Why wouldn't someone in show business fly from Las Vegas?

“I've got my little red convertible, my cooler filled with ice-cold Fresca. It's heavenly,” Cammie tells her.

“Okay,” Aida says.

“I'm scared of flying anyway. Did you hear about that Eastern Airlines plane that crashed in some lake near New Orleans?”

“Uh-huh,” Aida says, though she has not heard of any such thing.

“No thank you,” Cammie says.

There is a strange sound, then the phone goes dead briefly.

“Out of change, babe,” Cammie says before it goes dead again.

Suddenly Aida has something to look forward to. Maybe she can go back to Las Vegas with Cammie. Maybe she can be her assistant. Aida smiles, hugging herself. Her mother is yelling to her: “Aida, get your skinny ass in here and help.” But Aida doesn't move. Instead, she stands alone with her good news.

AIDA WONDERS IF
Cammie knows Jeannie, Dean Martin's beautiful blond wife. Last night he said, “Jeannie, baby, don't wait up,” and Aida got goose bumps. She imagines Jeannie in a sleek modern house with white furniture and a big stone fireplace and, outside, a piano-shaped swimming pool. Some movie star has a pool like that, she just can't remember who. If she were Jeannie, she would wait up. She would spray on Jean Naté and wear a little babydoll pajama set like the one Terry got at her bridal shower. Her goose bumps rise up again, all along her arms.

ON HER BEDROO
M
DOOR,
wrapped in plastic, hangs her ugly yellow chiana junior bridesmaid's dress. Terry thinks it is sophisticated, but to Aida it looks like a cheap prom dress. Her sister's dress is also chiana—white, even though she isn't a virgin. Aida stares at the dress, hating it.

Downstairs: noise. They are getting ready for the rehearsal at the church, and then the dinner here afterward. Eddie's entire family is coming. They don't peel their eggplants. They put a crust on their Easter
pastera
. They don't do anything right.

“Aida!” her mother yells.

Aida sighs and gets off the bed. Her body weighs three tons. The rehearsal dinner dress sticks to her in the early summer heat. It is black and covered with bright-yellow sunflowers, like a tablecloth. It seems the role of a junior bridesmaid is to be humiliated so that the bride shines. In Las Vegas she will wear bikinis and cover-ups in lime green and hot pink. She will smell of baby oil and iodine, like the older girls at the beach. This idea makes Aida smile as she goes down the stairs, past all of her father's ugly souvenirs.

The souvenirs are all they have left of him. When she was six, there was a blizzard and school got canceled. Her father went out to shovel the snow and died of a heart attack, just like that. Boom! No warning. To Aida, he is just Old Spice and Vitalis, a scratchy wool sailor's uniform, a pile of worthless figurines and clocks and colorful money from faraway places. Sirens still make her feel like she can't breathe. Snow days still make her sad.

“The Queen of Sheba,” her mother says. “Finally.”

Terry's rehearsal dress is short and yellow with a matching bolero jacket. She looks like a jaundiced matador.

“You're all wrinkled,” Aunt Connie says, disgusted.

Aida shrugs. Her great-grandmother, Mama Jo, pulls her aside and whispers harshly in her ear. “If those people bring any food into this house, don't eat it. You hear me?”

“All right,” Aida promises.

Mama Jo pinches her arm. “Don't eat it,” she says again.

People are gathering their matching purses—yellow, blue, red. They primp their hair and twirl their lipstick from their cylinders, the poppy and crimson and coral emerging.

“Let Aida wear some,” Aunt Gloria says.

“No!” her grandmother, Mama G, says. “She's a little girl. She'll look like a
puttana
!”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Aunt Gloria says, coming at Aida with her hot-pink lipstick wielded like a sword.

Aida steps back. No one wears this thick matte lipstick anymore. Girls her age wear plum-flavored lip gloss or Yardley Good Night Slicker all pale pink, almost white. “That's okay,” she says.

But Aunt Gloria grabs her shoulders and holds her in place, then smears lipstick across her bottom lip. It's oily and tastes like crayons.

“Do this,” Aunt Gloria tells her, and presses her own hot-pink lips together.

Aida does the same, miserable.

“Look at you,” Aunt Gloria says, grinning, her breath sour with cigarettes and Mama Jo's homemade wine. “Your whole face opens right up.”

“Hey,” Aida says. “Any word from Cammie?”

“She called from Chicago,” Aunt Gloria says. “Who knows? She might just make it. You know she could have flown to Paris, France, with Howard Hughes but she said no, I got to go to my cousin Teresa's wedding.”

Aida frowns. “But she's afraid to fly, right?”

Already, Aunt Gloria has grown bored with her. She blinks her heavily mascaraed eyes and yells, “Terry! You need a little lipstick, honey.”

From somewhere in the distance, Aida hears a bell ring, muffled amid the shouting. She listens until she hears it again. Someone is at the door. Cammie, she thinks. She wants to open it, to see Cammie first. Maybe she can talk to her right away about leaving with her. Maybe they can make a plan.

Aida opens the front door and gasps. Standing right there, inches from her, is the boy in the white VW Bug. His nose is sunburned and he looks hot in his heavy blue jeans and army-green pocket T-shirt.

Immediately, Aida covers her mouth with its hot pink lips. She is meeting the second love of her life wearing an ugly dress covered with too-bright sunflowers and hot-pink old-lady lipstick. She considers closing the door and running upstairs. But it's too late. The boy is talking. At least, his lips are moving but Aida seems to have gone deaf. She can't hear anything except a buzzing in her ears.

The boy points to his car, which is parked on the sidewalk in front of their house, almost exactly in the spot where her father dropped dead.

Her hearing slowly returns. From behind her comes the sound of her mother yelling, “Is someone at the door?”

The boy is frowning at her. “Your phone? Okay?”

Somehow Aida makes sense of this. The car is broken down. He needs to call somebody.

Stupidly, she nods. She wants to tell him that she is not like the people he is about to meet. That she never wears ugly dresses with bright sunflowers or pink lipstick.
I am not who you think
, she screams in her head. But all she does is step aside and let the boy in. As he passes her, she catches a whiff of something familiar, but she cannot name it.

“Close the door!” her mother yells. “You're letting the bugs in.”

Aida lets the screen door slam shut behind her. She sits on the front steps, trying not to cry.

“Get up!” Mama Jo yells through the window. “You'll get piles sitting on the cement like that.”

“I don't care,” Aida mumbles. She feels the weight of loss heavy on her chest. The boy will never love her. He will think her foolish and ugly and unlovable. His car sits neglected in front of her. Aida imagines all the snow that fell that day her father died. When her mother found him, she screamed so loud that Aida ran to the upstairs window to see what was wrong. Far beneath her, her father lay in the snow, his rubber boots black against it and her mother kneeling beside him in her pale-pink rubber curlers and green chenille bathrobe. They looked small from where Aida stood, like dolls.

Slowly, Aida gets up and walks over to the boy's car. She opens the door and gets in the passenger's side. The car smells like sweat and something else. She inhales. Marijuana. The whole world is stoned, Aida thinks, that weight pressing on her even harder.

Crickets sing in the evening air. Soon, people start filing out of the house, a flurry of bright colors under the streetlight. The boy gets in the car and looks at her.

“Uh,” he says. “I've got to wait here for the guy with the jumper cables.”

Aida nods.

“Your mother said it's okay,” he adds.

Her name pierces the still air: “Aida!” her mother yells. “Aida!”

The boy leans across her and goose bumps rise on her arms and legs and neck. He opens the door and without a word, speechless, dumb, Aida climbs out and follows the sound of her mother's voice.

SHE LIVED THROUGH
IT.
The rehearsal at the church, walking down the aisle on the arm of Eddie's stringy-haired brother Billy, again and again; the dinner afterward with Eddie's family not eating her family's food and her family not eating theirs; the wedding itself, the church so hot Mama Jo had to be taken out for air; Phyllis Cardi singing “Sunrise, Sunset” slowly and off-key; her sister stumbling when she climbed the three steps to the altar; the suffocating smells of flowers and wax and perfume; the boring priest; the boring ceremony; the flurry of joy when Eddie and Terry emerged from the church and everyone threw rice at them and snapped photographs. She lived through it all in her yellow chiana gown and dyed-to-match sandals.

Somehow, by the time they get to Club 400 for the reception, Aida feels let down, as if she had expected more, or at least expected something. Whiskey sours flow from a fountain and platters of greasy hors d'oeuvres swirl around her. The banquet hall, with its heavy maroon drapes and chairs is funereal, Aida thinks. The pale-yellow tablecloths and napkins against the dark maroon make her seasick and she steps outside.

In the parking lot a woman gets out of a red convertible and teeters toward Aida on turquoise high heels.

Aida steps into the sunlight and squints. “Cammie?” she says.

Her cousin's hair is so big and platinum blond that Aida can only think of Jayne Mansfield. When Cammie left she had wavy brown hair. Now she is a person under a big bubble of blond hair.

“Cammie?” Aida says again, softer this time.

The face under the hair might be Cammie's, but the breasts beneath the head are not. These are like bubbles too, big and round, about to burst from her low-cut turquoise dress. Aida has never seen breasts like these. Not in person, anyway. After the breasts, past the wiggling hips, are legs—miles of them. Tanned and endless legs.

Men are stopping. Men are fanning themselves with wedding invitations or handkerchiefs. Men cannot do anything but stare at Cammie.

“Doll,” she says when she finally reaches Aida, “I need a drink.”

Up close, there is still not much left of Cammie. The nose is smaller. The face is tanned. The pouty lips are wet and red.

“There's a whiskey-sour fountain inside,” Aida manages to say.

Cammie throws her head back and laughs. “Maybe I'll jump in it later,” she says, “but for now I need a real drink.”

Aida follows her cousin inside. Busboys clutch their bins of dirty dishes to watch Cammie sashay by. Aida is embarrassed and proud to be walking behind such a creature. She supposes everyone in Las Vegas is this unbelievable. They must all be tall and tanned and busty. If she goes there with Cammie, perhaps she will return reborn into something like this. The idea thrills her. The idea terrifies her.

In the dark lounge, Cammie leans across the bar and orders a scotch and soda. The bartender openly stares at her breasts, which lay on top of the bar like an offering.

“Doll,” Cammie says to Aida, “you want a Fresca or something?”

“A Shirley Temple?” Aida says, her voice small and soft.

“And a Shirley Temple,” Cammie says to the bartender. “Extra cherries.”

A slow smile crosses his face and a flush of red rises from his cheeks to the scalp beneath his thinning hair.

“You bet,” he says.

When he places the drinks on the bar, he says, “These are on the house.”

Cammie stands up tall, her hair and breasts making a bubbly silhouette. “Why! Really! Thank you so much.” She glances at the little black name tag above his shirt pocket. “Fred,” she adds.

She opens her gold purse and takes out a prescription bottle of pills, downing a few with her drink.

“Are you sick?” Aida says.

“Oh, no. These help me stay awake. After that long drive.”

Cammie takes Aida's hand and wiggles her way out of the lounge. Even without turning around, Aida knows the bartender is watching. His eyes are like lasers, shooting into them.

“What a creep, huh?” Cammie says.

Aida is surprised. “But he gave us free drinks.”

Cammie cups her breasts in her hands. They fill them and overflow until Aida is certain they are going to pop out.

“I paid a thousand bucks for these babies and I haven't paid for anything else since.”

A waiter passing by stumbles at the sight of Cammie. She puts her empty drink on his tray and says in her breathless voice, “A scotch and soda. Tell Fred it's for Cammie.”