Cast Me Gently (3 page)

CHAPTER 3

“Teresa, will you hurry
up?”

“Coming,” Teresa called as she came down the stairs, tucking her blouse into her slacks.

“You are not wearing pants to church,” Sylvia said, glaring at her daughter.

Teresa clenched her jaw as she searched through the coats and jackets on the hall tree in the foyer. Finding the jacket she sought, she said, “Yes, Ma, I am. It’s nineteen-eighty, not nineteen-fifty. Get used to it. I’m not wearing a hankie on my head.” She glanced at the lace already bobby-pinned in place on her mother’s hair. “And I’m not wearing a dress. If you don’t want to be seen with me in pants, fine. I won’t go at all.”

“Stop already,” said Lou. “We’re gonna be late if we don’t get going. Y’uns can argue about this in the car.”

Sylvia continued to grumble under her breath as Lou locked the door and they all got into his maroon Cadillac Sedan Deville. Teresa, from long practice, ignored the grumbling.
It’s not going to work
. She longed to say it but kept her mouth shut.

Lou drove three blocks and stopped in front of a two-story brick house that had been Sylvia’s home growing up. He gave a loud honk of the horn.

“Don’t blare the horn like that,” Sylvia said.

Teresa opened her door. “I’ll go.” She walked up the porch steps just as the front door opened.

“Hey, Nita,” Teresa said with a smile. “Everyone coming today?”

“Not Elisa,” said her aunt. “She has a headache.”

Two other women came out and locked the door behind them.

“Here, Ana Maria,” Teresa said, offering an arm. “Let me help you.”

“You’re a good girl,” said Ana Maria, grunting a little as her arthritic knees creakily lowered her down the steps.

The three aunts, all with their lace in place on their heads, their features clearly marking them as Sylvia’s sisters, crammed themselves into the back seat while Teresa slid into the front seat next to her mother.

As they neared St. Rafael, Sylvia turned to Teresa. “Did you get to confession yesterday?”

Teresa looked at her mother. “Ma, I worked until closing yesterday. I didn’t get home until after eight. When was I supposed to go to confession?”

“Then you don’t take Holy Communion today,” Sylvia said. “It’s a sin.”

Let it go,
said a voice in Teresa’s head, but “Oh, well, we wouldn’t want sinners to go to Communion now, would we?” Teresa heard herself say.

“What did you expect?” Aunt Anita said, laughing at her sister as Sylvia fumed. “My goddaughter has a brain and she knows how to use it.”

“She has a mouth and she knows how to use that, too,” Sylvia replied testily.

All Teresa’s life, it had irritated her mother when Anita came to Teresa’s defense. Teresa turned and looked out the window with a small smile on her face.

Lou took two parking places in the church lot. “What?” he said when he saw Teresa staring at his blatant straddling of the line. “I just had it washed and waxed. I don’t want any idiot dinging my doors.”

Teresa shook her head. “So much for Christian charity,” she muttered as she turned toward the church, helping Aunt Ana Maria up the steps.

Several people waved as the Benedettos and the Martelli sisters settled in their pew, third from the front on the right, the same pew they sat in every week.

“Where’s Gianni?” Anita whispered as people shifted and coughed, waiting for Mass to begin.

“He went out last night,” Sylvia whispered back. “He’ll go to a later Mass.”

Teresa coughed to cover her laugh.
Like hell he will,
but she didn’t say that, either. Her mother would never hear anything against Gianni. Sylvia blindly chose to believe that Gianni was waiting until he married his girlfriend, Angelina, before having sex, but Teresa knew better. If Gianni was out last night, he was screwing some girl in the back seat of his car. If Lou knew, and he probably did, he would chalk Gianni’s behavior up to “just being a man.” She sat there, her anger rising at the inequity of all the things Gianni was allowed to get away with. The organ sounded its opening note and everyone stood.

“They’ve been like that since he was little!” Teresa complained an hour later. “They think he’s an angel.”

“Of course that’s what your mother wants to think! And your father? Who knows? Like father like son? I don’t even want to think about it.”

Teresa sat at the table of her oldest friend, Bernie D’Armelio. She knew she was in for a talking to when she got home after stealing away from church while her parents and the aunts went to Communion. She was sure some variation of “it’s a sin” would be awaiting her, but she didn’t care.

“We’ve known each other since we were two,” Bernie said. She took a deep drag from her cigarette and exhaled. “You always complain about how the boys get to do any goddamned thing they want and the girls have to behave. It’s never going to change. We’re fucking Italians, for Christ’s sake. It’s just the way it is.” She tapped the ash off the end of her cigarette.

“I know, but it still makes me angry,” Teresa said, reaching for another doughnut and dunking it in her coffee. “And poor Angelina. She thinks Gianni is waiting for their wedding night.”

Bernie choked on her coffee. “Him? Those goddamned pants he wears are so tight, you can see him get a hard-on every time he looks at a girl. And she’s stupid enough to think he’s waiting?”

Teresa screwed her eyes shut. “Bernie, don’t. Jesus. You just about made me sick.”

Bernie laughed. “And you. Still a virgin. If you would ever let a penis get near you—”

“I don’t want a penis near me, with or without a man attached to it,” Teresa said flatly. “I’ve never met a man who wasn’t a prick. Why would I want that?”

Bernie shrugged and took another drag from her cigarette. “You’ve got a point there. You know what Tom did last night? He cancelled on me. Said he had to be home with his wife. Goddamned bastard.”

Teresa looked at her friend and saw tears shining in her eyes. “Why do you—?”

“Don’t,” Bernie cut her off. “I know it’s stupid. I know I should stop. But I love him. Have you ever loved anyone so much you would have done anything—
anything
—to be with them? Even when you know it’s wrong? God, just to feel him touching me, kissing me. No one has ever made me feel like that.”

“You sound like a drug addict,” Teresa said, secretly glad that she had never felt anything so…
destructive,
she decided was the right word. Not that she would ever say that to Bernie. No matter what, their friendship had always lasted,
and it always will,
Teresa thought now as Bernie ground out her cigarette.

Bernie sniffed and reached for another cigarette. “You want to stay for dinner? You know my mom would love to see you.”

Teresa sighed. “I can’t. I’m in enough trouble as it is. We’re having the aunts over for dinner today. I gotta get home and help or there’ll be hell to pay.”

“When are you going to move out and get a place of your own?” Bernie asked.

Teresa laughed. “Who are you to be asking that? You still live here with your mom.”

“Yeah,” said Bernie. “But I don’t work with my folks. And my mother doesn’t care where I go or when I come home. Your situation is just weird. Too close.”

“Well,” Teresa said with a sigh. “I don’t even know if I could afford to move out. I haven’t had a raise in ten years. How do you ask your father for a raise? Then he’d ask why I need more money.”

“You are fucked,” said Bernie.

“Bernice Jean, stop with the language.”

“Sorry. I forget. But you could get a job somewhere else. Some other pharmacy.”

Teresa’s eyes got big. “Oh, that would go over well. ‘We paid for your education. We poured our blood, sweat and tears into this business. Why? To give you and your brothers something for when we’re gone.’ Yeah. I can just hear it now.”

Bernie took another pull from her cigarette and tapped the ashes into the overflowing ashtray in front of her. “Well, Robbie got away.”

“Way away,” said Teresa. “So far away my parents won’t even speak to him.”

“That’s because of the divorce,” said Bernie.

“Yeah, but things were already strained even before the divorce,” Teresa said. “I thought my dad was going to have a stroke when he dropped out of pharmacy school.”

“But he’s doing great in real estate,” said Bernie. “Probably making more money than your dad.”

“Maybe,” Teresa said. “But that doesn’t matter to Pop. All that matters to him is that his oldest son didn’t follow in his footsteps.”

“Maybe his daughter shouldn’t, either,” Bernie said, grinding out her cigarette and reaching for another.

“How’s my goddaughter doing? We didn’t get a chance to talk in the car.”

The house was noisy, filled as it was most Sundays with talk and laughter and the wonderful aroma of food. Some weekends, everyone gathered at the aunts’ house, where the four unmarried sisters still lived in their parents’ home, but today the aunts were here along with Lou’s sister, Betty, and her husband, Dom Senior.

Teresa caught the not-so-subtle scold. She turned and smiled. “I’m good, Nita. How are you?” She turned back to the loaves of bread that she was preparing with melted butter and garlic.

“Oh, my feet hurt, my legs hurt, my back hurts,” said Anita, sitting down at the kitchen table. The chair creaked ominously under her weight. “I’m just waiting for God to take me.”

Teresa opened the oven and put the baking sheet with the bread inside. “Well, that’s not going to be for a long time.” She went to the sink to wash the brush and cup she’d been using for the butter. “How’s Ana Maria doing since her heart attack? She seems weak.”

“She’s not so good,” Anita said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “She’s not so sure it was a heart attack. She thinks maybe it’s cancer and those good-for-nothing doctors are too lazy to do more tests. She feels so tired all the time.”

“Well, you do feel tired after a heart attack,” Teresa said. “Even a mild one, like hers. Part of the heart is damaged and it doesn’t pump blood as efficiently anymore.”

“See? You know more than those doctors,” Anita declared. “You should have gone to medical school. Then we’d have a doctor we can trust.”

Teresa laughed. “You wouldn’t listen to me as a doctor any more than you listen to me now.” She dried her hands on a towel and turned to face her aunt. “How about you? Are you keeping an eye on your blood sugar? Watching what you eat?”

Anita waved her hand again, shooing away like an annoying fly a discussion she didn’t want to have.

“See what I mean? Aunt Nita,” said Teresa, taking a seat at the table. “Diabetes is serious stuff. You have to take care of yourself. I want you around as long as Nonna was.”

Anita snorted. “Heaven forbid! I don’t know if I could stand being here until I’m ninety-six.” She looked shrewdly at Teresa. “And what about you? Haven’t you met any young men? No one you’re interested in? You’re thirty-four now. You’re not getting any younger.”

Teresa was saved having to answer by the sudden and noisy entrance of her mother with Aunt Betty and two more aunts, Luisa and Elisa, whose headache was better now that there was food in the offing. Together, they were clustered around Teresa’s sister Francesca, five months pregnant with her third child. The older women were fussing about Francesca’s sudden craving for calamari and arguing whether that meant she was having a boy or a girl. Sylvia and the aunts took over in the kitchen, making Francesca sit at the table with Anita.

“Where’s Chris?” Teresa asked.

“He got called in to the hospital this morning. I keep telling him he should have been a dermatologist, not an anesthesiologist,” Francesca said with a wave of her hand that reminded Teresa of Anita.

Teresa quickly stepped back out of the way as Elisa brought a bowl of pepperoncini to the table. “If the baby kicks when you eat something hot, it’s a boy,” she said, pushing the bowl at Francesca.

“If it kicks when she eats something hot,” argued Betty, “it means she’s getting indigestion.”

Is that going to be me?
Teresa sometimes worried, watching her aunts mill around, all overweight, all with mounting health problems, all dependent on one another.
Except I’d be alone,
she realized. Francesca and Chris had a house close to the hospital so he could get there quickly when he was on call. No way Robbie or Gianni would stay here with her once Sylvia and Lou were gone. No, the only future she could see for herself was one with her staying on here, looking after her parents until they passed and then… what? She couldn’t see any further, but no matter what she saw, it didn’t look like this, loud and happy.