By the Rivers of Brooklyn (12 page)

R
OSE STANDS IN
M
ARCELLA'S
kitchen, the heat from the stove like a slap in the face. Outside it is August, ninety-five degrees, even small children scurrying for shade or water. In five years Rose has still not adapted to the heat of a Brooklyn summer. Marcella's kitchen is the back porch of hell, she thinks.

Marcella, unmoved by heat or, apparently, any other force of nature, stands at the stove stirring her sauce. She moves back and forth between the stove and the kitchen table, quickly and gracefully for such a big woman, sprinkling handfuls of this and that into the pan, speaking to her food in a soft singsong voice. Rose's legs ache. Shooting pains right up the back. She's been standing all day. Time to quit this job, find something where she's not standing all the time. All day in the factory, and now she's here in Marcella's kitchen, watching this thick Italian peasant woman who is only five years older than herself but seems of another generation, this woman who has finally decided to accept Rose into the family as a necessary evil and has, unfortunately, chosen to show her acceptance by teaching Rose to cook.

“Now, a handful of oregano,” she says, scooping up what looks like grass clippings and scattering them over the chicken breasts simmering in the big castiron pan. Earlier, Rose watched Marcella pound the breasts almost paper-thin and dust them lightly with flour, watched as her plump quick hands sliced through bell peppers and green onions. Marcella is doubtless gratified at Rose's attention; she has not guessed that Rose is watching with what amounts to horrified fascination. Such attention, such passion, such love, even – lavished on something as trivial, as menial, as cooking a dinner.

Did her own mother cherish the act of cooking like this? Rose wonders, dragged unwilling back in memory to the canvas-floored kitchen on Freshwater Road with the Ideal Cookstove that dominated the landscape and set the hours of the women's days. Did Annie? Annie loved to cook, had taken over most of the cooking from Mom when she was about thirteen. Mostly Rose remembers Annie baking, up to her elbows in flour, dipping her fingers in a bowl of water, sprinkling one drop, two, three…but no more, never too much. Rose, when she tried, would dash half a cup of water into the pie crust, ignoring Annie's shrieks, not caring about the tough chewy crust anyway. Annie flushed with pleasure when the family cooed over her flaky crust. Annie has probably never seen a bell pepper, or oregano either, but perhaps she and Marcella would understand each other.

“This is Tony's favourite dinner, this is what I make for him on a special occasion. You can't afford to do chicken like this on an ordinary Sunday. You know on a Sunday, coming home from church, Tony likes macaroni with meatballs and gravy,” Marcella says. She knows Rose doesn't go to church, isn't Catholic. She doesn't know that the first time Rose came for macaroni with meatballs and gravy she was expecting gravy, like at home, a beef gravy or something, and didn't know what to make of the rich red tomato sauce all over the noodles and meatballs. That was a long time ago: Rose has been coming here for meals for nearly three years now. But she knows, and Marcella knows, that she will always be an outsider.

Marcella knows that Rose hates to touch raw meat and loves to eat in restaurants where waiters bring her things on trays. Marcella's words say,
I'll show
you how to look after my brother
, but underneath she is saying,
I know you won't
look after my brother. I know you're not good enough for him.

Rose wants to sit down. She knows it will be one more black mark against her but how long, really, can she stay standing up? After three years of keeping company, three years of nothing better coming along, she has almost decided to marry Tony, but worries the price may be too high. Is Tony worth spending hours and days cooped up in the kitchen on the back porch of hell, listening to Marcella? Worse yet, turning into Marcella? Thoughts of getting older, getting fat, making babies, oppress Rose. When she thinks about being locked into a kitchen like this one, what she imagines is lying in a coffin, the lid nailed down on top of her.

She sways a little: heat, exhaustion, the cramps in her legs. She steps back and lets her legs buckle, settles into a chair. Marcella doesn't notice: she is singing to her food now, singing a song in Italian with a high sweet voice that doesn't match Marcella at all. It's like those songs Tony sings sometimes, when he's drunk or happy or sad, the songs that make Rose wish she really did love him. Another memory stirs and Rose is again back in that other kitchen at home, watching Annie knead bread. Annie sang as she kneaded, clear and strong and a little shrill on the high notes, emphasizing the beat more than the melody and punching the bread down on each beat. “
Would
you be
free
from your
bur
-den of sin? There's
power
in the
blood
,
power
in the
blood!
”

Quickly Rose knows she has to leave; she stands up even before Marcella notices she was sitting down. “I got to go, Marcella, sorry, I'll see you later,” she says, grabbing her purse.

“What…where are you going? Tony's coming over, what am I going to tell him?”

“Tell him…tell him I'll see him later. Thanks for the cooking lesson, Marcella.” Rose is already out the door, flinging the words back as she runs down the steps, teetering on her heels.

Out in the street, ninety-five degrees seems blessedly cool. Rose walks through the streets, hearing the babble of Italian voices, waiting till the sound ebbs and she hears only English again, out on the broad main streets. She looks hungrily at stores, speakeasies, movie theatres.

A movie. That's what she needs. She wants to get far, far away, and only the movies can take her far enough. She is a thousand miles from home, in Brooklyn, New York, where she has always wanted to be. But now she knows that even Brooklyn is not really far enough; it is full of little pockets, little holes you can fall down and find yourself back home, or someplace too much like it.

She can't go to a movie alone. She walks, aimlessly at first, then with some purpose, down to the candy store at Bushwick and Myrtle, just beyond the edges of Tony's neighbourhood. It's a tiny store spilling over with people. In the lot outside a bunch of little kids play with alleys, and there are two sagging benches laden with old men reading newspapers and muttering to each other through clouds of cigar smoke. Inside, in the dim and crowded interior, Rose can see a row of people jammed elbow-to-elbow at the counter getting sodas or egg creams. But in front of the store, the reason she's here, is a knot of fellows who usually hang out there in the evenings after work. This being Saturday, the ones who get a half-holiday are there early, lounging around the steps, carrying on with each other and checking out the girls. One of them, Danny Ricks, who works at the Navy Yards, whistles as Rose comes down the street.

“You better watch yourself,” Rose says, slowing down and smiling at him. “A lady don't take that kind of thing from bums like you.”

“My apologies,” Danny says, taking off his cap and doing a big fancy bow. He's always flirting with her. She's known him for years, back before she was going out with Tony.

“I can't forgive you that easy, you gotta make it up to me,” Rose says.

“How about a soda? Would that make it up?”

“It'd be a start,” says Rose. Danny offers his arm and they go up the steps into the store, where they lean on the counter and both order chocolate sodas. After the brilliant sunlight outside, the inside of the candy store seems like a cave. Rose blinks, trying to accustom her eyes to the gloom.

“So, seen any good pictures lately?” says Danny.

“I hear that new one with Gary Cooper is good,” she says, flashing her brightest smile.

“
Morocco
?” Danny says. “I hear it's great. It's got Marlene Dietrich in it.”

“Morocco? What's that mean?”

“Some place far away in the desert,” Danny says with a wink, even though there's really nothing to wink about.

“I like movies about places far away,” Rose says. “I wonder if it's as good as
The Virginian
. I loved that movie.”

Danny isn't bright but it doesn't take him forever to get the hint. He looks her up and down and smiles again. “Only one way to find out if a picture's any good. Ain't Tony taken you to see it yet?”

“Tony's working tonight,” Rose says, “and I want to go to a show. Haven't I got the worst luck?”

“Maybe your luck's about to change,” says Danny.

Rose falls into the movie like she's plunging headfirst into water – which is a funny thing to think, because the movie is so dry, the desert sands and all. But that's how it feels: the movie rises up, absorbs her. She is there in Morocco, in a place almost as hot as Marcella's kitchen on an August afternoon.

The very first scene of the movie shows a man struggling with a donkey in the middle of a dusty road, and Rose remembers the first time she heard Tony talking about his home back in Italy. Donkey – they had a donkey. To Rose, the donkey is an exotic creature, something from an alien world. Is this the kind of world Tony comes from: hot, dusty, with voices wailing strange music? Thinking of Tony makes her feel guilty, and she's glad when the Foreign Legion marches onto the road, onto the screen, brushing aside the man with the donkey.

And, oh yes, there's Gary Cooper, with that amazing long face and those eyes, those dark eyes. Rose wonders why she's never met a man in real life like Gary Cooper. That's the trouble, that's why she can't fall in love and settle down and get married like an ordinary girl. She's looking for Gary Cooper.

Then she sees the beautiful fair-haired woman on the boat who looks so sad, so bored and tired, like she'll never fall in love again and nothing will ever make her happy. “That's her, the German girl,” Danny says, leaning over. “Marlene Dietrich. Some looker, ain't she?”

Rose tries to shut out Danny's voice, to block out any intrusion from the real world into the movie world. “Yeah, she's pretty,” she whispers back. But
pretty
doesn't begin to describe the woman's face, with her high cheekbones, her perfect mouth, and those sad haunted eyes. When she tears up the card with the rich man's name on it and blows the pieces to the wind, Rose knows exactly how she feels. There's a word for it somewhere but Rose is not good with words: she only knows that even though she has never sung and danced on a stage or made love to a man or been to Morocco or had a millionaire fall in love with her, still, she is fundamentally the same as this woman – already Rose can't remember the actress' name but the character is called Amy, Amy Jolly – and she feels that same weariness with everything, like a glass wall cutting her off from the world where people meet and fall in love and are happy.

The knowledge scares Rose. She admires everything about Amy Jolly: she wonders if she can get her hair done just like that – it's almost the same colour – and would she have the nerve to try that trick of lighting her cigarette from a candle, which looks so sophisticated. When Amy Jolly first appears on the stage, dressed up in a man's suit and a top hat, singing in French in a deep rich voice, Danny leans over and says, “She looks a little like you, Rose, dontcha think?”

“Oh, go on,” says Rose, pleased with the compliment but knowing in a hundred years she could never be that beautiful, that strong, that alluring. Maybe she needs to be more like Amy Jolly – more cool, more set-apart, so that everyone will know her heart's been broken too many times and she won't let it be broken again.

Rose sits transfixed, thinking about the choice Amy Jolly has to make, between the poor man she loves and the rich man who's so kind to her and who she'll never really love. That's always the way in movies though, there's always some rich man ready to sweep a girl off her feet. And always some handsome devil like Gary Cooper, too. Sometimes the girl gets really lucky and the rich man is also the good-looking one, but there's some other problem to keep them apart till the movie's over.

That's the movie Rose wants to star in – the one where Gary Cooper plays the rich guy from Manhattan who wants to take Rose away from all this, give her a more exciting and wonderful life. She should be waiting for that, holding out for that. Rose watches Amy Jolly at her engagement dinner to the rich man, wearing his string of pearls around her neck, and thinks,
Rose, girl, this is who you've got to
be like. You've got to start playing it smart.

By this time in the movie Rose is confused because she doesn't know whether she wants Amy to follow her heart and go with Gary Cooper, or play it safe and stay with the millionaire. Either way, it seems to Rose, she's got a pretty good deal. She feels Danny's arm slip around her and tighten on her shoulders. His fingers slip under the sleeve of her dress to her skin. He will expect something after all this is over, and why shouldn't he? She's made herself available.

Rose has still never been with a man, not really, though she's gone pretty far. When she was a girl back home there was a book they gave all the young people in church to read:
The Story of a Rose
or something like that. A warning to young men, about how a young girl was like a delicate rose and if you started handling it too rough, the petals would fall off and it would wither and die. The book was about sex, though the word was never said. Her brother Jim read it and used to tease her, because of her name being Rose. They laughed about the book, yet all these years she's been carrying it – virginity – around like it really was a precious rose or something. Now she feels like a woman who's looked down and sees that all she has in her hands is a wadded up piece of paper, a woman who says, “What am I hanging on to this for?” and drops it casually in the street.