An Italian Wife (23 page)

Roger takes the dummy down from the shelf and stares at his creepy face. His cheeks are round, like he's hiding food in them, and his nose is like Bob Hope's. Roger can't remember the name Davy gave the dummy, so he renames it Mike Nesmith after his favorite Monkee. He wishes he had a knit cap like the real Mike Nesmith wears for his Mike Nesmith. Maybe his Mama Jo will knit one for him. Even though Mama Jo smells like onions frying and maybe vaguely fishy, he loves her more than anything. Roger likes to sit on her lap and pinch the wrinkly skin on the top of her hand together, then watch how it stays that way for a long time before slowly settling back into place. Mama Jo is ancient.

Roger sticks his hand in Mike Nesmith's back and makes his arms and legs flop around. He swivels the head and opens and closes the mouth.

“Roger?” his mother calls wearily. “What are you doing?”

“Entertaining myself,” he answers.

“You're not in Davy's room, are you?”

“No,” he says, lifting Mike Nesmith's right leg and crossing it over his left one.

ROGER TRIES IT.
He tries to talk without moving his lips.

“I hope Davy gets killed in Vietnam,” he says, pushing the words through his closed mouth.

“Don't say things like that,” Roger says in his regular voice. He gives Mike Nesmith a hard shake. “Don't ever say that again.”

Mike Nesmith stares back at him with his heavy-lidded eyes.

ONE OF THE
THINGS
that his mother always reminds him of is that even though his ancestors are Italian, he is American. “We all are,” she says. “You and me and Daddy and Davy and Debbie. We're American.” Even when he had to do a report in school last year called “My Heritage,” his mother wanted him to write about living in Connecticut and the big Fourth of July party she threw every year.

“But I want to write about Mama Jo,” Roger said. He stared down at the yellow paper with blue lines, his pencil poised over it. “I want to write about being Italian.”

His mother had looked at him with a hard, even gaze. “But we're American, sweetie,” she'd said. “Doesn't Davy play football and baseball? Don't I make the yummiest pies?”

“Yes,” he said, wondering what pie and football had to do with anything.

He wanted his mother to praise him, like she praised Davy. So he wrote about living in Connecticut and the Fourth of July party and all the things she told him made them American. For his last line, Roger wrote:
I am American through and through and proud.
His mother smiled when she read it and told him it was the best paper he'd ever handed in. But the day they read their papers out loud, it was Gilda DiCaprio who had the best paper, and Gilda wrote about her Italian grandmother and helping her make meatballs. Gilda's last line was:
Even though I live in America, I will always be Italian in my heart.
The teacher actually got teary-eyed when Gilda read that, and the whole class applauded. Except Roger. He stared at his own stupid paper and tried very hard not to rip it up.

THE DAY THE
TWO SOLDIERS
in their neat, crisp uniforms ring the doorbell with the news, Roger is home from school sick with tonsillitis.
Golf balls
, Dr. DiMarco said when he came to the house the night before, swinging his black bag.
Tonsils as big as golf balls.
Roger's mother made the doctor coffee and waited outside the bedroom door holding a cup of it for him while he examined Roger's throat. She put on perfume, too, which made Roger's throat hurt even more.

After Dr. DiMarco gave him a shot of penicillin, he patted Roger's head and told him to sleep. Then he went and sat with his mother in the kitchen, the sound of their voices rising and falling lulling Roger to sleep. In the morning, he tried to get his mother to play Crazy Eights with him, but she said she wasn't in the mood.

That is why Roger is on the couch under one of the afghans Mama Jo crocheted watching
Jeopardy!
when the doorbell rings. Art Fleming is one of his heroes. Roger believes Art Fleming knows all of the answers that the contestants say in the form of a question. He believes that Art Fleming is maybe the smartest man in the world.

The category is “Fairy-tale Heroes.”

“In this fairy tale,” Art Fleming says, “she restores Ariel's voice.”

“Roger,” his mother calls from somewhere in the house. “Are you too sick to get the door?”

Roger wants Paul Marx from Phoenix, Arizona, to win, mostly because he has two
x
's in his biographical information but also because he is an amateur ventriloquist. During the interview portion of the program, Art Fleming asked Paul Marx to talk without moving his lips, and Paul Marx said:
What is the art of ventriloquism, Art?
His lips really didn't move, unlike Davy's.

Paul Marx doesn't buzz in fast enough and the three-day winner answers correctly.

The doorbell rings again.

“Roger?” his mother says. “Tell whoever it is that I'm busy.”

She is vacuuming. She vacuums all the time, rolling the baby-blue Electrolux around the house with a vengeance.

“I'll take ‘Fairytale Heroes' for three hundred,” the three-day winner is saying.

Roger sighs and gets up from the couch. He has on his old fuzzy footy pajamas, red ones with cowboys and Indians on them. They don't really fit anymore; there is a hole in the feet part and his big toes poke out. He will always remember that he was wearing those pajamas that day, and that as soon as the men left he went into Davy's bedroom, took them off, and cut them into pieces with the scissors in the desk drawer.

Just as he opens the door, he hears the vacuum turning on.

Surprised to see Army men there, he thinks maybe the Russians have attacked Connecticut and the Army is here to evacuate them.

“Should I pack my stuff?” Roger asks them. He tries to think what he should take and what he should leave behind. Mike Nesmith he will take. Underwear. Socks. His toothbrush.

“Is your mother or father at home?” one of them says, looking straight ahead at a spot somewhere above Roger's head.

Both men are tall and lean and clean-shaven. Their hats sit low on their foreheads and their jackets have all sorts of medals and stripes and patches, not unlike Davy's Boy Scout uniform.

“Um,” Roger says, “my mother's busy.” His father is never home anymore. He is on the road, selling copy machines.

“Please get your mother, son,” the same man says.

Roger hesitates. She is going to be mad at him for sure. When she says she doesn't feel like talking or seeing people, she means it. Ever since Davy left for Vietnam, his mother avoided everybody. Iris from next door, who always brought tomatoes or zinnias or whatever was in her garden—
Just tell her to leave it on the table
, she'd instruct Roger; the milkman, who showed up whistling every Saturday morning with two bottles of regular milk, one bottle of chocolate milk, and a small bottle of cream—
Just give him the order for next week, Roger
; the paperboy, Bobby Anderson, who came around suppertime on Tuesday nights to collect payment—
Roger, get the money out of my purse and make sure to give him an extra dollar.
She didn't want to be bothered and Roger's job was to make sure she wasn't.

“I can't,” he tells the Army men. “She's super-busy.”

The same one kneels down so that he is eye to eye with Roger. “The United States of America requires your mother to come here, son.” His breath smells like the Black Jack gum that Mama Jo chews.

Roger swallows hard. “Like the president?”

“Right,” the man says.

Slowly, Roger follows the sound of the vacuum. At school they did a drill.
Let's say the Russians have dropped the atom bomb
, his teacher Miss Sullivan would say.
What are you going to do? Duck and cover!
the class shouted, and they all hid under their desks. Is that why the Army men are here?

“Mom?” he says.

She is pushing the vacuum across the mauve wall-to-wall carpeting on her bedroom floor.

She doesn't turn around. She doesn't turn off the vacuum.

“I think the Russians,” Roger says, and then he begins to cry. “I think they dropped the atom bomb in Connecticut.”

“Uh-huh,” she says.

He watches how hard she pushes the hose, like she is at battle with dust bunnies.

“I think we have to evacuate.” Crying makes his throat hurt more, but he can't help it.

“And why do you think this?”

Her back is bent over the Electrolux. She has on orange pants and a flowered top that doesn't quite match. It must be laundry day.

“Because the Army is here and President Johnson said so.”

Without turning off the vacuum, his mother slowly swivels around to face him. There is a look on her face that he's never seen on anyone before.

“Tell them I'm busy,” she says.

Roger shakes his head. “They said—”

His mother opens her mouth and screams, “Tell them I'm busy!”

The way she sounds scares him and he runs out of the room, all the way back to the door where the two men still wait, standing at attention, staring at something Roger can not see. From behind him, he hears his mother wailing. For an instant, one of the Army men's jaw tightens and he swallows in a way that makes his Adam's apple bob up and down, like someone trying not to cry.

EVERY SUMMER MAMA
JO
goes to Vermont to visit Auntie Chiara, the nun. Her nun name is Sister Sebastian. Roger believes that she doesn't have any hair—just a high, smooth forehead that ends in her stiff, white wimple. The wimple is topped by a long black veil that makes a sound like someone saying
shush
when she moves. This summer, Mama Jo is taking Roger to Vermont with her so that his mother can recover. She is mourning Davy and as far as Roger can tell, mourning is a full-time job. Ever since the Army men came to tell them that Davy was MIA and presumed dead, Roger has not been able to look his mother in the eye. He had wished his brother dead, and now he was.

His father packs the medium-sized piece of American Tourister luggage for him, keeping up a cheerful banter the whole while.

“Covered bridges, Roger,” his father says. “And little candy shaped like maple leaves. And good cheese. Boy, are you in for a treat.”

When his father sold Royal typewriters, Vermont was part of his territory. He knows these things.

“What are the bridges covered with?” Roger asks him.

His father frowns. “Wood,” he says.

“Oh,” Roger says, disappointed.

“THAT THING NO
T
COMING,”
Mama Jo says, pointing to Mike Nesmith. Then she says something in Italian.

“She thinks he's sacrilegious,” Mama G says.

Mama G is driving them to Vermont. They will sleep in motels with beds that shake if you put a coin in them. There will be swimming pools too, and real maple syrup for their pancakes.
Aunt Jemima
, Roger's father told him,
she's nothing but a fake.

Everyone stands around Mama G's dark-green Valiant, waiting for Roger's mother to come out and say good-bye. But Roger knows she won't. She isn't speaking to Mama Jo. Right after the Army men came, Mama Jo arrived.
I know what it's like to lose a child, figl
ia mia
, she'd said, wrapping her arms around his mother. But his mother pulled away.
How dare you?
she'd said.
You have no idea. None.
Then his mother slapped Mama Jo across the face and went back into her bedroom. All the aunts screamed and yelled, but Mama Jo just said,
Let her go. I understand.
For days afterward his mother would blurt,
How could she say such a thing?

When it becomes clear that Roger's mother isn't coming out, Roger and Mama Jo climb into the backseat and Mama G takes her place behind the wheel and they back out of the driveway. The car smells like Christmas trees from the tree-shaped air freshener that hangs off the rearview mirror. The front seats have strange beaded covers over them, adding to Roger's feeling that he has entered an exotic magical world. He doesn't even wave good-bye or look at his father standing there. He is so filled with relief that he is leaving that all he can do is pinch the skin on Mama Jo's hand and watch it stay there a moment before settling back down.

EVEN THOUGH MAM
A
JO
can't speak very good English, somehow Roger understands her. He knows when she is tired or hungry or when something strikes her as funny. It has always been this way. Most of the family ignores her, or treats her like she is a nuisance, when all she does really is cook for them and crochet afghans that everyone thinks are hideous. Except Roger. He loves them, loves the clashing colors and wavy pattern. Mama Jo gives him coffee with lots of milk and sugar in a chipped bowl.
He's too young for coffee!
his mother scolds her, but Mama Jo pretends she doesn't hear her.

Sometimes Roger wishes he could crawl inside Mama Jo's head and see the world through her eyes. Once he told his mother this and she looked at him horrified. His mother doesn't like most of the things Mama Jo cooks, like veal and peas or polenta with kale. But Roger does. On the rare visits they make from Connecticut to Rhode Island, to see Mama Jo and the rest of the family, he eats so much that he has to take an Alka-Seltzer before bed.
Too much oil
, his mother says, grimacing in disgust. Mama Jo gives him a tiny glass of apricot brandy for his stomachache. During the night, she comes in to check him. He can smell Black Jack gum and Milk of Magnesia on her breath as she leans over to touch his forehead. Her hands are not soft like his mother's, They're calloused and rough and smell like garlic. Mama Jo whispers something in Italian, and even though Roger doesn't know what it means, he understands that she is telling him she loves him.