Sunday afternoon, hours before the play begins, Chola leaves church at the end of the Mass. She has received communion and now walks with her teacher, Sister Ramona, to the Dominican Sisters' convent which is to the left of the old grey-stone church built in 1886. In the role of the parish school principal she will dress in a set of garments, a costume that looks very similar to the holy habit worn by Dominican Sisters for hundreds of years.

Chola will be dressed by Sister Ramona and Sister Anthony in the common room in the convent. I wait for her in the school auditorium for over an hour before the play, eyes fixed, heart beating with great expectation. When Chola enters the auditorium she wears a black cotton tunic, the holy habit, that covers her body and falls to her ankles. A round shaped stiff white collar, a gimp, surrounds her neck and shoulders. It is heavily starched and extends outward and away from her body. A belt made of woven black wool tightens the habit around her waist. Wooden rosary beads, large and small, hang from her belt to help her count her prayers. A large silver cross hangs from a black cord around Chola 's waist. Jesus hangs from the cross. His head is down so I know he is dead.

Chola 's arms are fully covered. I can see both long and three-quarter sleeves, the one flaring out over the other. Chola neatly folds the longer sleeves up from her wrist. I curiously touch the sleeve as she folds it back noticing its smooth texture, but Chola taps my hand, like Sister Jean often does, and says, "You can't touch." That's when I notice a wedding ring on her finger: did she get married in the convent? I panic. Then I remember that Sister Jean also wears a wedding ring, and so does Sister Ramona, Sister Anthony and all the Sisters at Our Lady of Good Counsel. When I once asked Sister Jean who she was married to, she said she was the bride of Jesus. I start to think. When Jesus came back from the dead, did he marry all these Sisters? I asked my dad how many wives a man could have. He said only one and if you have more than one wife you can go to jail. Now I’m worried. I can't let Chola marry Jesus and raise her children as a single parent. I want to solve this mystery just like Trixie Belden in the Black Jacket Mystery.

Chola's dress is mysterious, just like Sister Jean's, my 5th grade teacher. I search for clues and ask Chola about her habit, and she tells me she can't talk about how Sister Ramona and Sister Anthony dressed her or what clothing she wears underneath. What happened to Chola has never happened before -- to be dressed as a Sister and told not to tell anyone how she was dressed or what she is wearing underneath. This is her secret. When Chola walks on to the stage I peek for a glimpse of her underskirts. Her holy habit is a sign she will live her life for Jesus. She will take a vow of poverty and share everything that she has. I wonder if, last week, when Chola gave me half of her package of Twinkies, she had already been practicing her vow. Later that same day Chola gave me a set of three baseball cards from her bubble gum package. One card was a big surprise: "Campy" Roy Campanella, the catcher on my favorite baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. I hope that maybe next week she will give me the baseball cards packaged in her favorite potato chips.

I briefly imagine I would be happy for Chola 's vow of poverty if she joined the community of Dominicans. Maybe then she will have good luck. God will give her, and she will give me, the Mickey Mantle and Pee Wee Reese baseball cards that I've been searching for in every nickel package of Bubble Gum. I imagine the sun-filled day of her consecration. Chola gives me a special part in the ceremony that sets her apart to serve God. She asks me to recite the Lord's Prayer, a prayer I know by heart. I imagine the Dominican Sisters will serve my favorite foods from the school cafeteria for the celebration lunch: macaroni and cheese, slices of pepperoni pizza, and hamburgers with ketchup and sliced pickles.

Standing beside Chola after the play is over, I see her white coif, a headpiece that covers her neck and chin. A thin black veil is pinned over the coif and I remember how Sister Jean, sometimes at Mass, wore the veil down to cover her face. I don't like that I can’t see her soft brown hair beneath her cap. I am afraid that her face hurts, crunched in a moon circle, skin puffing out along the pressed edges of her starched coif. Chola doesn't want me to hug her now; she doesn't laugh when I try to be silly. I'm worried. If she is consecrated a Dominican Sister, she will change her name. She will no longer be Chola, and the tomato sauce stained apron that she now wears when she helps our Mom make delicious lasagna, cooked with sausage, ground beef and three types of cheese, will be replaced by a stiff white apron to protect the front and back of her habit when she works in the convent.

I walk out of the church and down the street. I know I am not allowed to cross Broadway alone. My Mom tells me all the time that she doesn’t want me to get hit by the Pesto Cheese Company truck, just like the one that hit Aunt Mary and broke both of her legs last year. But I’m sad and mad and feel like crossing the avenue on purpose. So I do. When I get home to my house on Madison Street, I go to Grandma’s apartment, turn on the television and watch Hector the Bulldog protect Tweety from Sylvester for the hundredth time.

Flo Gelo was born in Brooklyn, where she lived until her early teens. She's published numerous articles in professional literature about illness, death and dying. This story is one in a series about her life on Madison Street.

When we were growing up, she knew everything about me. In our grandmother’s Brooklyn three family house Bets and I lived downstairs with our parents and grandmother, and my mother’s two sisters and their families were in the smaller upstairs apartments. The family was close, if not always peaceful, and the house was always filled with drama, feuding sisters, loud card playing uncles and arguing cousins passing through. There were no secrets in those close quarters. Everyone knew everybody’s business and if someone upstairs farted, someone downstairs said, “Excuse me!”

When Bets started junior high we even had to share a room. Our parents divided their bigger bedroom in half for us and moved into the smaller one. Bets was more like another mother than a sister then. She caught me doing things my real mother, my grandmother and my aunts didn’t. When I was six, Bets caught me in the hall closet under the stairway comparing body parts with Susie Solomon, the girl from up the block. She sent Susie home and me to my half of our bedroom, but she never told our mother. When I was eleven Bets married John, her childhood sweetheart from across the street, and they moved into an apartment just three blocks away. Shortly after that my parents promptly tore down the partition, moved me out and moved themselves back into their old room.

Over the years the time gap between us narrowed as I started catching up with Bets. There were some who said I overtook her somewhere around fifty. I started jokingly to introduce myself as Bets’s older brother, and there were people didn’t get the joke.

“I think we left the city just in time,” my sister says.

I look through the gritty windshield at the cars that are already crawling in the building rush. By four o’clock they will be at a stand still and the expressway will be locked up tight. “Remember when ‘rush hour’ used to be a couple of actual hours and not the whole day? This HOV lane is the only way to fly, Bets. I think I just may invest in one of those Safety Man dummies and keep him in the car. That way I can live the rest of my life in the HOV lane even when I’m alone.”

About six months ago Betty let her hair go gray and cut it short out of necessity. It looks good on her. “I like your hair that way,” I tell her. “It’s natural and soft. And I love the waves. I hope you aren’t going to color it again.”

“I really haven’t decided.”

In the transition Bets has become a kinder, gentler version of our mother, an unnatural blonde until well into her 90s. She was a woman whose social calendar until she died at 96 consisted of regular beauty parlor appointments and doctor visits.

“Live long enough,” she said, verbalizing my thoughts, “and eventually we become our parents.”

In that respect in the past few years we both have become our mother, taking our turn doing the medical thing. The proof was that we were returning from our different doctors in different offices in different hospitals in Manhattan. Usually we didn’t overlap. She had her appointments and I had mine. But this time we did, so I was able to drop her off and pick her up for the return trip home.

Mine was the third follow up appointment, nine months out from a July surgery at the robotic hands of Dr. Ash, which left me prostateless on Long Island. It also left me with damp underwear, a definite improvement, I suppose, over the adult diapers and feminine sanitary pads I had worn for months, and a small price to pay not to die of cancer!

“These aren’t for me,” I assured the check out girl in Rite-Aid. But she was more interested in the cell phone conversation that was going on in her ear, and she just rang up the sale.

Another post-operative advantage was that without a prostate I no longer peed in stuttering fits and starts. “Now I pee like a race horse,” I announced proudly at my first follow up meeting with Dr. Ash. “Of course, sometimes I start before I am in the gate and continue until the race is over.”

Dr. Ash laughed politely at my comment. When I met him I discovered he was not a robot, and Ash was the shortened form of his unpronounceable first name. After my cancer diagnosis, while I was deciding on a course of action and researching doctors, before I had actually met him, I thought his last name, filled with a bunch of vowels, might be Italian. But one look at Dr. Ash removed all thoughts that our grandparents knew one another in Sicily. Dr. Ash was dark as a nut, a little man who looked like he would be more at home driving a cab in New York City than operating a Da Vinci robotic machine. He had the mandatory mustache that would put him on the “No Fly” list, or at least insure that he’d get to know Homeland Security intimately whenever he flew the friendly skies over the U.S.A. He also had little hands, an asset, I imagine, piloting the Da Vinci into the sides of a cancer-filled prostates.

At my second follow up appointment Dr. Ash asked, “And how is the other thing?” referring to the other minor side effect of prostate surgery, erections, or more specifically, the lack of them.

“Well,” I said, “the little soldier isn’t standing at attention yet, but he is leaning against the wall.” Of course I could have told him that the he had been hugging the wall for years.

“You are a funny man,” he said. “Are you using the pills?”

“Oh, the blue pills. Yes.”

“And do they help?”

“A little,” I said. “But only if I duct tape them onto two tongue depressors on each side of my penis.”
“Ah,” Dr. Ash nodded his head, “then next time instead of seeing me, we make your appointment with Adam, my assistant. That way you can explore other alternatives to duct tape and tongue depressors.”

“It’s amazing how far we have come, Bets.” She is quiet and I think she is napping with her eyes open. “So there I was,” I say, “with my pants and underwear around my ankles and young Adam holding my frightened little wee wee in one blue-gloved hand.”

She laughs. I wonder if she is thinking of that day she caught me and Susie in the closet as I described in detail the trauma of seeing the hypodermic needle drawing closer to Little Joe. “And just before impact he actually said, ‘You’re going to feel a little prick.’ The little prick! And then he told me he would go out for about ten minutes while I tried to stimulate myself. Right there in the office! ‘What,’ I called after him, ‘no mood lighting? No Barry White?’”

“And?” Bets asks.

“So, in about ten minutes I felt the earth move. Well, maybe not the earth, and it wasn’t like the big one that hit Japan, but there was a stirring in my lower regions. Not anything to hang my hat on, but a definite improvement. When Adam came back I had to show him and rate it on a zero to ten scale. I told him I gave it a five because I liked the words, but it was hard to dance to. Since he’s about eleven he never heard of ‘American Bandstand.’ He didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. And thought Dick Clark was that old guy with a stroke who tries to count down the New Year every year.” I pause for the dramatic effect. “And how did you spend your day, Bets?”

But I knew. Not to be out done, my sister pre-trumped my puny prostate cancer by a little more than a year when she was diagnosed with cancer in her liver. Cholangioma. How bad could it be? It sounded musical, like a Caribbean dance with those shakey things or that instrument you scrape with a stick, or like an exotic drink made with tequila, Triple Sec and coconut cream. “I’ll take two cholangiomas, one frozen and one on the rocks.”

Actually it was a “little spot,” according to the surgeon at Columbia Presbyterian who removed it with about half of Bets’s liver more than a year ago. He then pronounced her “cancer free,” which she was, for about six months, until her liver grew back. It is an interesting fact that the liver is the only human internal organ that does grow back. And with it, her damned Spot, that very persistent cholangeoma, reappeared. Because of its location so close to the hepatic vein another surgery was out of the question, so Bets found an oncologist who put her through a year of intense chemo alternating with radiation. Five days a week for months the family took turns driving Bets into the city for daily radiation and weekly blasts of chemo. And even after a CAT scan showed Spot was dead, the doctor ordered a second round of chemo stronger than the first, to be sure he just wasn’t playing dead.

“Oh, the usual. Two bags of poison, one bag of flush with nausea and vomiting to follow.” She hasn’t lost her sense of humor.

“Who’d a thought, Bets? How far we’ve come since that day you caught me and Susie Solomon in the closet. Do you remember that?”

She laughs into her hand. “Yes, I do. You were so cute holding your little winky in one hand and a flashlight in the other shining it on Susie Solomon. Well, now you’re out of the closet and telling everybody who’ll listen about your winky.” She laughs again remembering. “The surprised look on your face. And that cute little winky.”
I can feel me face getting red from my sister’s good memory. “Sweet Susie Solomon. Hers was the first vagina I ever saw and that started me down the road to Perdition. I wonder what happened to her.”

Bets is lost in her own memories. “If you think you came a long way, imagine how far I’ve come since my junior high school days.”

As far as I knew Bets had only two men in her life. She married John who lived across the street when he came back from Korea. He was her childhood sweetheart.

That wasn’t so unusual where we grew up. The young people in the neighborhood didn’t travel very far for romance and they tended to date and marry one another. There were many couples on the Brooklyn block, many marriages, some that even lasted. Cousin Maryanne married Pat from across the street, cousin Joann married Tommy from 56th Street, John’s sister Chickie married Frank who lived in the same two family house, Nancy married Donald, John’s brother, and I married Jenny, my first wife, the girl next door. Then after John, Bets met Nels, the quiet Norwegian, at the Arthur Murray Studios the night she went there with people from her bereavement group. Nels, a widower, had just dropped in on a whim. He became the second great love of my sister’s life until his death from an unsuccessful battle with cancer. Both of Bets’s men were gone, but not the way my two wives were gone. Hers died; mine left me for dead after two costly divorces. And in my book that made her the winner.

“We sure have come a long way,” Bets says again. “I remember when I thought masturbation was the worst sin in the world.”

I snort and grab the steering wheel. “I didn’t think my old sister even knew that word. Do you really want to go there, Bets?”

“You’d be surprised what your ‘old sister knows. And besides, I just listened to you go on and on about your penis the whole ride. Now it’s your turn to listen.”
We both laugh.

There we were, bruised and battered, still alive in the HOV lane of the LIE, both of us much too old even to be thinking about erection injections or masturbating. But we were thinking about it, and we were talking about it too. The best thing about Bets and me is that we could talk about anything.

That is what I am thinking, what I say is, “Bets, remember that time that you cleaned out my toy closet and threw everything away?”

“I sure do. You were so mad at me.”

“Well, Bets,” I turn to look at her wrapped in her blanket, “I just want you to know that I finally forgive you for throwing out all my Brooklyn Dodger baseball cards.”

Brooklyn born and raised, Joseph E. Scalia taught English and Creative Writing to reluctant junior and senior high school kids on Long Island for 33 years. He started his "real life" as a writer in 1997. He began writing as a child in elementary school, what he calls "terrible rhyming poems" on bathroom walls. Over the years he made the move to paper and has written and published five books, including a young adult novel, FREAKs, Pearl, a novel inspired by his years of teaching Steinbeck, No Strings Attached, an eclectic collection of his short stories, Brooklyn Family Scenes, a collection of family inspired stories and poems, and Scalia vs. The Universe Or: My Life And Hard Times, a collection of humor.Presently he 1s looking for a publisher for his collected poems, Poetry In Alphabetical Order. In addition to writing he also paints watercolors.

© 2011 Joseph E. Scalia

Every morning we have to leave the apartment — later on good days, early on rough ones. A time out before 8 a.m. and we’re out the door in the next fifteen minutes. Outside I can strap them in and keep them quiet and entertained — maybe even asleep. We all seem to drift off out there, Norah and Colin and I, lost in our own heads, watching the world go by. That morning we were out early and the sidewalks were crowded with city-bound commuters headed for the subway. Washed and ironed, they knew where they were headed, whereas that morning I was willing to take my babes anywhere the wind blew us.

“Doing, Mommy? Doing?” This is Norah’s favorite question these days.

“Walking,” I say, from high above her little upturned head. She wants to look at me, but the sun catches her eyes. She keeps turning away, squinting and frustrated. Then, a second attempt: “Doing?”

“I’m walking…and thinking.”

“Mommy’s thinking!” She squeals and kicks her feet in delight in the tiny space reserved for her beneath the baby’s car seat. Colin’s whole body reacts to her. He turns his head, stops sucking the pacifier, and tosses his arms up into the air. We have one of those conversation-starters: a high-tech two-seat stroller where the older kid gets the bottom seat (she could reach out her hand and drag it along the ground if she wanted to) and the baby’s car seat snaps in on the level above, facing the pusher — that’s me.

I thought, that morning, that we should leave the neighborhood. I’d already been scratched, pooped on, and yelled at, and so the idea of just taking off appealed to me. What if, instead of taking the same old right turn out the door, I took a left?

We walked away from 37th Avenue and ventured up toward Broadway as though it had never been done before. Norah continued to ask me what we were doing, apparently confused by all of the new things she could see from her spot down below: row houses, for-sale signs, a gay-pride flag, the Virgin Mary casting her welcoming gaze upon a lit red candle in the front yard. She sucked her thumb, furrowed her brow, and begged me to take her to the library. I had promised I would before we left the apartment, but really just to get her into our contraption of a stroller. There is such a small space for her down there that she has to be totally willing to get in it, which usually means I promise her cookies, “moo-cow” milk, cheerios, the park, the library — whatever it takes to keep the peace, which has been more and more difficult since Colin was born just three months ago.

Yes, the library. I found myself saying it even though I didn’t mean it. Each step was taking us farther away from the library, and I had no intention of letting her out of the stroller until I could release her back into the safety of our living room with the drooping eyelids and slurred speech of a worn-out two year old. At that point my own body would be at its breaking point and ready to flop onto the bed as well.

When we reached Broadway we were officially in the pulsing heart of Elmhurst, rushing forward in a throbbing crowd of pedestrians. There is very little English on this thoroughfare of Queens. This is a first-stop kind of place. It’s been crossed out and rewritten and we were used to seeing it through the dust-covered windows of our little Honda Fit.

“Mommy, this?” Norah points to a storefront, wanting to know what it is.

“It’s a…a phone store.”

“Mommy, this?”

“And this is a hardware store.”

“Oh mommy, look! This!”

And there, standing back from the street in the full, startling shade of oaks and sycamores, was the Elmhurst Library.

I turned us off the crowded sidewalk and found the side ramp so that we could roll in. Yay! Norah sang and clapped her hands. We were used to this kind of place, as the Elmhurst library wasn’t all that different from our Jackson Heights library, but there was something to the lighting in these rooms — it seemed to reveal more books, more silence, and perhaps more reading going on. Quickly, I rushed us toward the Cat in the Hat entrance of the children’s section before we could disturb anyone. I breathed a full sigh of relief when I found it empty, but for a few busy librarians; Norah could pull out books, climb on mini-chairs, and read out loud (“Oh, a kitty-cat! Oh, a cow!”).

We glided down the aisles, past the teen section, the pre-teen section, the early-reader section, and got settled at a small table in the back of the room next to a revolving bookshelf of bruised toddler books. Norah was beside herself with happiness as she wiggled over to the shelf and began removing the books from their proper places, exclaiming with each one, “Oh, mommy, this!”

I pretended to be as happy as she was about all of the books, while removing Colin from his comfy seat, shoving a cloth diaper under his chin, and pulling up my shirt. Colin’s mouth opened hungrily and he clung to me, looking like an old man trying to suck the air out of a balloon.

Once settled, I lifted my head and found myself in the spotlight of two dark eyes. He was a skinny, pale, teenage boy and looked as though he’d previously been quite comfortable in his spot on the floor behind the last stack of children’s books. In his hand was an open cell phone and he was held captive by it, leashed up by the ear.

Instantly, I knew he had a secret. At 11:15 AM, he should have been in school. This made him a truant, an escapee, a runaway who needed to be turned in for his own good.

I’ll walk over, whisper sternly in his ear, and send him running, I thought.

But that was the teacher in me, hidden beneath what I was at that moment — a scantily clad, partially exposed, post-partum woman with a toddler on the loose. Colin was dribbling and my shirt would be wet in spots when I stood up. A thin coat of polish was chipping off my toenails and my hair was unwashed. Norah had left the toddler section and was now taking all of the books off of the teen shelves and tossing them on the floor. Someone might think to turn me in as well.

Colin was beginning to drift off, cozy and all full up in my arms, but each time I tried to pull away he’d start to suck harder. Norah was now chasing a little boy who’d come in with his grandmother. The two of them were starting to swipe at each other over books beyond their levels of comprehension. The teenager had wandered off to a more distant corner, and began talking on his phone. He sounded like a good, responsible kid, telling a school aide that he was too sick to go in, or that he had some kind of doctor’s appointment. I imagined him afraid to go to school, to be harassed, to be lonely. The librarian called out, loud enough for all of us in the room to hear, that phone use was not allowed in the library. The kid ignored her and finished up his polite conversation. He insisted on his invisibility.

“No, no, no! Mine!” Norah was getting louder, gearing up for something. “Miiiiiiiiine!” She had a book tucked under one arm, her unhappy face on (pursed lips, chin tucked in, fierce eyebrows), and she’d begun beating her own chest — a threat to the little boy that if he got any closer she’d start beating on his chest.

“Norah! Be nice to the boy,” I called out. “Nice to the boy!”

I pulled my shirt down and dropped Colin into the stroller, rudely and without a burp. I had to turn away for a minute to make sure I was decent, and then I lunged for Norah, who had managed to intimidate both the little boy and his grandmother, neither of whom seemed to speak English. I asked Norah to say she was sorry. Nothing. I told her, I begged her, and then I gave up and said it myself.

“I’m so sorry about this! She’s going through a hard time right now, that’s all. I mean, we all are. She has a new little brother, see?”

The old lady just smiled at me demurely as she pulled the little boy behind her.

“Sorry. Sorry. Norah, say you’re sorry.”

“Mine!”

I went to pick her up, and she slapped me in the face and let out a scream that brought all reading to an abrupt halt — heads popped up over books and newspapers. “No! NO!” she began, and continued in a chant that ended in the loudest shriek this library has certainly ever heard. In an instant, she was slapping my face with two hands, curling her fingers to scratch when she could. I spun her around and grabbed her from behind, one arm around her chest and the other around her knees. She found new ways to squirm, new ways to hit. She aimed for my face even though I was behind her now.

“No mommy!” she cried. “I like daddy! I like daddy!”

She collapsed into sobs and turned into me, now for comfort, sucking her thumb, like the baby she still was. With her head tucked under my neck, her long legs hanging down the length of my body, I carried her in my left arm and pushed the stroller with my right. Okay, here we go, I whispered to her. Let’s just get to the door, let’s just get outside. She ignored me, but I knew she was listening.

As we left that children’s room, the librarian nodded to me, Norah, Colin, the contraption-of-a-stroller, the unwashed hair, the chipped nail polish, the tear-stained eyes, and the milk-stained shirt, as if to say, “You are strong.”

I let Norah slide down to her feet and held her hand as we walked down the ramp and back to the sidewalk, at which point she requested to be let back into the stroller. She climbed in easily and curled up on one side, with one hand at her mouth and the other between her knees. I pushed the stroller to the corner and, while waiting for the little walking man on the streetlight to appear, gathered up the loose wisps of her baby hair into a new tail.

Deirdre Faughey is a teacher and writer who lives in Jackson Heights with her family.

“Porto Fino Pizzeria, may I help you?” the voice said.

“May I speak to Fatmir please,” I asked trying hard to keep my voice steady, not knowing that at work they called him by his American name — Johnny.

“This is Fatmir,” he said, as his voice began to break-up. He knew it was me.

Oh boy! I thought to myself, this isn’t going to be easy.

I began by asking the mandatory: “How are you? How’s it going? How’s your health? How’s work? Do you get tired?” I hated these canned questions, but went through the ritual like a good girl.

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?” I asked, after all it wasn’t just him I was marrying.

“Four.”

“What are their names?” I inquired with a pen and paper in hand.

“Why do you want to know their names?” he replied in a smug voice.

My stomach began to turn.

“Because we are going to be married — right?” I replied with a tinge of disgust in my voice, almost daring him to say otherwise. I didn’t care anymore about saying the wrong thing or sounding the wrong way.

This was the reason why parents didn’t let their kids talk, or see their fiancés. If someone made a mistake and the engagement was called off it would be a disgrace to the family. It wouldn’t be so bad for the man, but it would make it a little harder for the girl to find another good husband, especially if she was the one to cause trouble. No one wanted a challenging wife, or God forbid someone else’s leftovers. We wanted our women to be pure in so many ways.

I was sure my tone of voice gave Fatmir a hint that I was a bit hard-headed or pak e egër, a little wild, as my mother would call me. If I didn’t like something I let people know. My family knew this about me but such information never left our house so as to protect my chances of getting a good husband. Even now that I was engaged, it still wasn’t something to be shared — but I didn’t care. I hid nothing. I couldn’t play the submissive role right now. I hoped he was disgusted by my attitude. I hoped he would call it off. That was about as daring as I allowed myself to be. After all I was only a little wild.

“Oh…” he responded meekly, and proceeded to tell me their names.

It was too late. I half-heartedly listened, and wrote nothing down. Fuck him, I thought, Fuck him! He just made marrying him harder. I tactfully ended the phone call and began to cry. What was I to do? I knew God had chosen my husband, but it was up to us to find him — had we found the wrong man? Heartbroken I went into my bedroom and sat on my bed, not wanting Sokol to walk in and find me crying. With only the light that came in from the dining room I wrote my first letter to the only one I knew could help.

Dear God,
Please do something so that I do not have to marry this man. I know You have written who I will marry on my forehead the day I was born, but this could not be him. As you know I cannot do anything to call it off without ruining my family name. I know that You are powerful and can do anything, so from the bottom of my heart I ask you to bring this engagement to an end. You know what a good person I am, and so you must know I deserve someone better. I really want to love the man I will marry, and I cannot love him. But I cannot hurt my family either. So please, please, please God, do something. But if you do nothing I will accept my fate.
Love,
Hane

Tears dripped onto my note and I patted it dry so the letters wouldn’t smudge. I knew he read it as I was writing, but I didn’t want the letter to look messy. It was an important letter — I had even used my best penmanship. I felt Him there listening, and it comforted me. I was hopeful. Truly hopeful. I was not afraid of God — I loved him — and knew he loved me. I had stopped believing in him two years ago, when he let Xharije die tragically, but eventually I reasoned that he must have had a reason for letting it happen as it did. Was he going to let this happen also? The thought disturbed me. He would make this right, I convinced myself. I wondered how he would do it. Would he kill Fatmir? Would he make him call it off? How would he make him call it off? However he would choose to do it would be okay by me — as long as I didn’t have to do it. I put my fate in God’s hands, where it belonged, and I waited.

Day’s turned into weeks; weeks into months, and eventually it became April 2nd or 3rd. I don’t remember the exact date; I just know it was the first weekend in April of 1982 when I got married to Fatmir. God must have picked him after all.

The first time I met him was at his uncle’s pizzeria in Manhattan, on 8th Avenue and 14th Street. Fatmir had started working there when he came from Macedonia at the age of thirteen. Being the oldest boy he was made responsible for his family’s survival and came to America to work — this seemed to be all he did — all he knew. My brother Asllan and his wife Behare accompanied me to the pizzeria. This was only fitting since it was at their wedding a few months ago that Fatmir’s uncles had seen me and decided I would make a good wife — especially since I had my papers. Behare’s father was Shkus i parë, the Head Matchmaker, who came to ask for my hand in marriage on the behalf of Fatmir and his family. It was a Thursday, the day appropriate for these things, and I was in school.

“They came to ask for you today,” my mother told me when I got home, and proceeded to tell me what the Shkus said about him. He was a hard worker, didn’t do drugs or drink alcohol, and wasn’t a womanizer. My mother commented that he didn’t look “wild,” which I took to mean he wouldn’t hit me. Thank God for him I thought to myself. I also found out from Behare that his uncles, whom Fatmir lived with, treated their wives really well; so there was a good chance I would be too. One wife even drove a car, and both went shopping for clothes by themselves frequently. I really wanted to like him. “Here’s his picture,” Mom said as she handed it to me.

There he was standing by himself at some wedding hall, dressed in a dark suit and white shirt, with thick dark brown hair combed to the side, and beautiful eyes — he wasn’t smiling so I couldn’t tell if he had nice teeth. That was one thing to look out for in photos. It was obvious he had this picture taken just for this reason.

“His name is Fatmir,” Mom said.

Fatmir…I liked the name, it meant good-luck, and he was very good-looking. There was some potential here — all I needed was to feel an attraction, so arrangements were made for me to meet him face-to-face — with chaperones of course.

I was wearing an expensive stylish off-white dress with three small hand painted flowers that playfully fell over each shoulder. The dress was an appropriate “girls” dress which covered my legs mid-calf. I had recently worn it to a wedding. It wasn’t something I would normally wear to a pizzeria — but this was a special occasion.

Fatmir was expecting us. He looked like his picture, except with acne. He didn’t smile, but I could make out that he had nice teeth. He was nervous, shy, and hardly spoke. He didn’t even look at me when I shook his hand ‘Hello,’ and he even blushed.

Asllan, trying to make the “visit” seem casual, ordered a large pie for take-out. The fact that we drove in all the way from Bensonhurst Brooklyn was conveniently overlooked. Fatmir made us a fresh pie and spoke to Asllan between serving customers, other customers, looking at me on the rare occasion when I said something. Joining in on the conversation was hard since I was supposed to be the submissive female, and was a little shy myself. Fifteen minutes later, with fresh pie in hand, Asllan, Behare and I were ready to leave.

I hadn’t felt anything and was hopeful that something would happen when he shook my hand ‘Good-bye.’ Maybe he would look at me in a special way? Maybe he would say something nice? Maybe my heart would skip a beat for no apparent reason?

None of it happened.

We got to the car and I noticed that he had forgotten to give us napkins.

Being the cool brother, Asllan said, “You go and ask for the napkins.”

At first I was hesitant, and then I thought maybe it would be different if I saw him one-on-one, and bravely headed back in.

“You forgot to give us napkins,” I said with a smile.

“Oh,” he replied and grabbed a big handful of them, and turning a light shade of red, he handed them to me.

“Are you trying to say we’re slobs?” I asked playfully, hoping he’d be funny, sweet…something.

“No. No,” he replied, now even redder.

My heart sank. I smiled, told him I was only kidding, turned around, and left.

So when the Shkus came on his behalf for the answer to their proposal my answer was also “No.” Actually I said, “I don’t know. I don’t feel anything for him.” This I had to repeat to everyone who inquired if I wanted to marry him — my sisters, sisters-in-law, and brothers. The biggest surprise was when my oldest brother Nezir asked me. I remember it like it was yesterday. I did not think he cared about me and my future. He had his wife, who he chose, his children, and he lived in Staten Island — far away from us. Only the girls were supposed to leave the house when they married. He visited every weekend but he felt more like a guest than family. He had the attitude of being above all the Albanian bullshit, as he called it. He wanted to make sure I picked my own husband, and wasn’t pushed into it. His genuine concern for me made me feel like his sister for a minute.

“I don’t know,” was the acceptable way of saying “No.” I knew everybody wanted me to like him, but I didn’t feel anything extraordinary — the way I expected love to be like. I wanted to love the man I would marry — in this way I was Americanized.

We weren’t your typical Albanian family — I was allowed to make the final decision on whom I’d marry. There were twenty-six suitors in all, but the majority of them weren’t approved by my brother Sokol or my Mom and didn’t pass the first round. Only three made it to the second round of meeting me — and Fatmir was one of them, and I think my mother’s favorite. She wasn’t happy to hear that I didn’t like him.

The Shkus decided not to take ‘No’ for an answer and came again the following week, and the week after, and the week after that — or so that’s how it felt. It was two months later and they would still call to let us know they were coming for “a coffee,” but we knew what they meant. This persistence was unusual and everyone who heard about it was impressed that Fatmir had wanted me bad enough to swallow his pride and continued his pursuit. I knew I was a great catch, and although I was a little flattered, I just wished they would leave me alone. And besides, I didn’t think Fatmir had that type of conviction — although I saw he liked me, I believed it was his uncles’ doing. Or had my mother left the door open for them by somehow giving them hope? She used the excuse, “They keep coming for you so why don’t you give him one more chance.” So I did. How could I say no to her.

This time I went to the pizzeria with my sister Qamile, who excused herself minutes after we arrived with “I have to do some shopping.” It was funny to me that everybody knew what was going on yet went along with it. Why not just say, “I am going to leave you two alone to talk for a while?” I hated lies, even if they were supposed to help one save face. Inside I just shook my head in disbelief.

I sat at a counter on a stool near the ovens, again wearing a dress which was how I silently acknowledged that I knew my place. In school I was a tomboy, but he wasn’t marrying me for who I was. He gave me a slice, directed the Mexican to make pies, and we tried talking while he served customers. I spoke to him in Albanian because I didn’t want to make him feel inferior to me, and I wanted to show off that I can speak the language even though I came here when I was seven. I was not Americanized and was a proper girl.

“How long have you been in America?” I asked in Albanian.

“Five years.”

“Do you like it here?”

“Yes.”

Then silence. Jesus! Couldn’t he answer me in full sentences! Couldn’t he take the initiative and ask me a question. Couldn’t he take charge?! After all he was the man. In a final attempt to break the ice, I asked with a smile, “What were the first curse words you learned in English?”

“What?” He did a double take.

Feeling a little awkward about having asked such an inappropriate question I decided to act as though it was no big deal.

“Une e kum mësu ‘motherfucker,’” I learned ‘motherfucker,’ I said.

“Edhe une,” me too, he responded with a smile. I could tell he liked my gutsiness, but I didn’t care for his lack of it.

Damn it. He didn’t even laugh. This was not going to cut it. I needed more of a man. I should have been the one wearing the pants. An hour later, when my sister “finished her shopping,” we headed home, and I was no closer to liking him than before. Although I wanted to want to marry him, I did not feel anything.

“So, what will we tell them when they come tomorrow,” my Mom asked that Friday night before the Shkus came for the answer again.

My heart dropped as I looked at her and then up at the ceiling. It was dark and we had just gone to bed. I slept in the pull-out twin bed next to hers. There was nowhere to run. I knew she wanted me to say ‘Yes,’ and I didn’t want to disappoint her.

“Se di,” I don’t know, I responded as my heart beat loudly in my chest. I knew she knew what that meant. She always understood what I wanted to say even when I didn’t say anything.

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

It was obvious — she didn’t want to accept ‘No’ for an answer. Fatmir seemed like the perfect catch. But I couldn’t say “Yes” when my heart said “No.” So I lay there in silence not knowing what to do.

“You know…Sokol told me you were becoming an old lady in his house,” she said coldly.

He was right — I had turned nineteen. That was pretty old.

The words took me by surprise and my heart sank. The light that came in from the windows was not bright enough to expose the tears that began to run down my face. For this I was thankful. Sokol had been like a father to me since I was eleven, when Dad died. I couldn’t believe he felt like this. But I didn’t dare ask her if he really said it. That would be like calling her a liar — which no one dared to do — half out of respect, half out of fear. Such an insinuation could mean she wouldn’t talk to me for months. And besides, the thought of her lying about something as hurtful as this was not conceivable — I had to accept it as truth. I lay there like a doe with a deep heart wound, silent and still on the outside, painfully dying on the inside.

“So… what should we tell them when they come tomorrow?” she asked, trying to make it seem like it was really up to me, and that the boulder she just dropped on me was only a feather. But she must have known the weight of it — she had to.

What could I say? I no longer had a home. I wasn’t wanted. There was NO choice. I did my best to collect myself. I could not let her know I was crying. I didn’t want her to think I was being a baby and felt sorry for myself. She hated that.

“Do whatever you want,” I responded and turned away. Silently letting the tears drip off my nose and cheeks onto the hand that cupped my face. With the other hand I wiped my nose carefully so Mom wouldn’t notice.

The tears dripped me into sleep.

The next morning the Shkus, according to tradition, were supposed to be there before noon so I left before ten — anxious to get out of the house. I didn’t want to be there for it. I was so hurt I avoided seeing Sokol. It took me twenty years to tell him how hurt I was about what he told Mom. Confused, he replied, “I never said that.” We looked at each other and shook our heads in disbelief — Mom had always known how to get just what she wanted.

The fifteen minute walk to Qamile’s house took forever. The usual excitement of window shopping past the 86th Street stores wasn’t there. When I got to her apartment she didn’t mention that she knew fjala, the word, was being given today. She was sensitive to my feeling and knew how I felt.

“You’re engaged,” Qamile said to me an hour later, after getting the phone call from my Mom.

I looked at her and gave a fake smile while fighting back the tears.

“Don’t worry. You will learn to love him,” she said.

I hoped so. I really hoped so.

Who was I to question what had worked for hundreds of years? I really wanted to love the man I’d marry. I guess I’d have to get over that. It made more sense to entrust your elders to do the picking, I reasoned with myself. “Look at the Americans, their marriages almost always end in divorce, and they pick their husbands, they start out loving each other,” I heard many women say in defense of our ways. They were right. Albanians hardly ever got divorced — maybe they knew what they were doing? Regardless, I was relieved this whole marriage thing was over. I was tired of wondering whom I’d marry. Whom God had chosen.

We were always happy to see each other and bask in that unique flavor that belongs to the O’Connell clan: we share a way of looking at the world that seems almost biological. When the entire family is gathered, the party goes on for hours. My brother Chris, the now-debonair lawyer, reverts to the Bronx idiom, and then imitates with hilarious precision the peculiar mix of self-pity and lyricism that is Irish as he voices the familiar peasant’s lament, “Ah, it’s a terrible thing what the British have done, a terrible thing….”

Today, it would be just us three. When I arrived, my father told me, “The chow is in the oven already.” He gave me the bear hug that always made me nervous as a child and then, later, as a young woman. He said, “Ah, Mary girl, you look great, you look great.” Then he waved his big farmer’s hand in the direction of the living room and said, “I cleaned the joint up. Have a seat, have a seat. Big Pat should be here soon.” Big Pat was so-called because my sister’s name was Pat also, ‘Patricia,’ and because Patrick, determinedly turning fat into muscle with weight-lifting, had grown quite strong.

Soon after I arrived, Big Pat rang the bell. When he came in, carrying a six-pack, my father called from the kitchen, “Pat, good man, good man.” Pat said, “I brought beer, Dad.” And my father answered, “Right you are, right you are. You’re a good man, Pat.”

We all sat together in the dimly-lit living room, Pat and I on the ancient green couch that had ceased to be comfortable sometime in the ’70s. It emitted a cloud of dust as we sat, first with me, and then with my brother, more dust. My father sat on the green vinyl recliner that had a huge hole in the seat. When my husband had started to make money, we offered to buy my father new furniture. But “No,” he said. “Be dead in a couple of years. Never get the use of it.”

It was his ability to look so squarely into the face of reality that made me admire and respect him. He never feared death. He feared only living an ungraceful life. I always remember the story of my grandfather’s death that my father had told me when I was young: “Death’s nothin’ much, Mary girl. It’s part of the natural process. Well, for Chris’sake, you can’t avoid it: animals die, plants die, trees die. Your grandfather, may he rest in peace, worked in the field till the last day of his life. He came in in the afternoon, complained of a stomachache, and lay down. Little by little, the feeling stopped. First, in his feet, then, in his legs, then after awhile, he just went to sleep. He wasn’t afraid. Had the whole family around him: he was 89.”

That story entered my life and became a part of me: it’s the reason why I, without any question, know that I am strong, and that I will be able to conclude my life with dignity.

We sat in the living room, and my father was as happy as if we were in a palace. He always was the most incredible storyteller. But that day, strangely, his timing was off and the punch lines were not as uproariously funny as they usually were. He began the one about the two Irish housewives commenting on the new man in the neighborhood. They were talking in front of their children, and so spoke in code. One said to the other, “And what does the new gentleman look like?” Her friend answered, “Oh, he’s a fine-lookin’ man, six foot six.” After a moment’s hesitation, she added, meaningfully, “And built accardingly.” He got lost in the middle somewhere, and was embarrassed. “I used to be able to drink all night when I was your age. Now I have one beer and I get a headache: makes the doctor happy. He says I have high blood pressure and shouldn’t go near it at all. Ah, well.”

He got up to check the fresh ham in the oven and announced it was ready. Then, uncharacteristically, he called Pat and me in to do the rest of the preparation, because he suddenly felt tired. Then he left the kitchen, and asked us to call him out of the bedroom where he would be lying down when everything was prepared.

So Pat went to the oven to take the ham out and when he opened the oven door to look in, fell into a fit of laughter, motioning me to come over. My father had neglected to remove the saran wrap from the ham and had cooked the meat with its price tag intact. On the table were a few empty beer cans. “The old man must’ve been high when he put it in,” Pat said.

When we got hold of ourselves, we decided what to do: take the chance that we might get sick eating it rather than hurt our father’s feelings or spoil his day. Somehow we both knew without even mentioning it that my father would not get sick: his stomach was made of cast-iron and we had seen him eat every possible combination of food and alcohol through the years. In fact, at his age, he was stronger, healthier, and more good-looking than Pat and I put together.

During dinner, my father had another beer. He got up to get something from the kitchen and swayed a bit and landed in a heap with the small end-table shattered beneath his weight on the floor. We jumped up, horrified, thinking immediately of the broken hips and joints that old people suffer at the slightest fall. To our profound surprise and relief, he started laughing and sat there quite comfortably, announcing, “Ah well, the old gray mare just ain’t what she used to be.” Then he looked up at us and said to Pat, “And what did you say your name was, young man? Is that your wife with you? You’re a handsome couple. What’s the name of this fine establishment anyway?”

He was not pretending. We realized that he thought he was in a bar somewhere and he had just met us.

We got him up from the floor and sat him on the couch. For the few moments that that took, he was in another place, mentally, and we were with him. Then, ever so gently, Pat said, “Don’t you know me, Dad? It’s Big Pat and this is Mary.”

He came out of it and for a second sat startled. He did not quite seem to realize what had happened, just that he had been out of control somehow. Then we just continued the day as if nothing had happened, undisturbed and free at heart.

It was afterwards that I realized how extraordinary the whole thing had been. For a second we had glimpsed what might very well be our father’s and our own futures: what was supposed to be the most horrifying and daunting experience: witnessing your parent’s mortality. And it had been funny, even pleasant, like some wonderful trip into another lifetime when we were not family, or like a game of make-believe. There was no morbidity about it at all. And on reflection I knew that that was a testament to the strength and joyousness of my father’s life. Although his circumstances had often been tragic, he was never so. He never gave in to self-pity or despair.

Other people speak of the horror of watching a creative mind slowly fade away. But my father’s life was so triumphant, so fulfilled, that in his case it was more like a brilliant sun setting, slowly sinking in majesty and returning to its source. He had raised seven children, virtually on his own, on a window-washer’s salary. He had struggled and established his family in a country where they could fight for their future and make their life what they would. He left through his example a legacy for future generations to draw continual sustenance from.

My father lived most of his later years on Havilland Avenue in the Bronx. I used to take the #6 train to Parkchester to visit him. I used to ask him, “Dad, don’t you miss Ireland? Don’t you want to go back there?” “Why??” he would ask. “Well…don’t you miss the beauty, the nature, the trees?” “Trees? There’s plenty of that in New Jersey!”

The old man was no saint, certainly. There’s a line from The General’s Daughter that always puts me in mind of how I feel about him. When asked about his feelings for his ‘old man’ the protagonist, a real smart-ass, quips, “My old man? He was a gambler, a womanizer, and a drunk. I worshipped him.”

My father no saint, but he was a force of nature: Patrick O’Connell. His life was big, like him. It reverberates through time and space, like every life, an incredible cosmic event.

New York City shimmers in the heat.

Everyone we know is on vacation.

“Where’s Daddy?” Anna whimpers. She’s two. “I want Daddy.”

“I do, too, but he’s at work, Annie.” I try to edit the anger out of my voice.

“He’s very busy. He’s getting ready for a trial. Do you know what a trial is?”

“I know, I know,” Alex says. Mr. Big is five. “He has a jury listen. They decide who’s right or wrong.”

His trial, my tribulation, alone with the kids every weekend. And it’s a heat-wave, brown-outs, our one a/c in the final stages of emphysema.

“Let’s go to the park, kids.”

We push through air sticky as oatmeal to their favorite playground. Empty. No kids, no sprinkler, dried-up fountain, swings too hot to touch. Slide? Scorching. Even the sky is hot.

“It’s hot, Mama, I want to go home.”

“So do I, Annie.”

We head home through more oatmeal.

Back home, we eat Froze Fruits and I don’t care where they drip.

“Want to watch . . . ” No.

“Go to the Museum of . . .?” No.

I clench jaw and fists.

I lie down on our old rug, which feels like crisp, hot toast.

I try to locate some gumption, and try not to morph into Mommy Witch. I hear the M 5 bus groan around the corner of West End and 72nd Street — and sit bolt upright.

“Okay, guys, we’re going on an adventure. Go pee and put some small toys in your backpacks while I get you some snacks.”

I fill my own backpack with a combination of healthy and sugared snacks. Today I am not beyond a bit of bribery. “Oh, and each take a sweater.” They both look at me as if I have turned into a large beetle. “Come on, get going,” I smile, suddenly full of hope.

“Where are we going, Mama?” Anna asks.

“It’s a surprise. I think you’ll love it. You’ll see in a few minutes. Go — go get ready, lickety-split.”

Outside, the sidewalks radiate heat and my knees buckle, but the M5, headed downtown, soon kneels for us, and it is ahh, chilly. It will be a very long, very cool ride from 72nd Street all the way down to Washington Square. With people around, or at least the driver, we’ll be on our best behavior and my transformation into the Wicked Witch of the West Side will be averted.

There are hardly any other passengers, as most sane people have fled the city. An elderly lady smiles and clucks at me. It may mean, “What lovely children; keep them quiet or else.” Or, “I know exactly how you feel, trapped with those little b _______ in all this heat.” I hope it means, “What an imaginative and jolly mother you are for thinking of this bus ride when you are at your wits’ end.” Or, if an analyst, “Brilliant to take a bus ride instead of killing or maiming your children physically or psychologically.” I smile back, feeling righteous.

Alex and Anna pull on their sweaters and kneel to look out the windows on both sides of me, the better to snack and sip. Like droopy celery in ice water, we crisp up in the chilly air; our curiosity is alive again, focused on the city outside our windows.

“Look, Mommy!” says Anna, “Look at that tea cup with the smoke coming out –- it’s all shining.” Miraculous: a neon sign with steam rising out of a cappuccino. I see it as if for the first time.

The kids get busy pointing out all that grabs their attention – funny dogs, funny people who look like their dogs, shiny red cars, huge construction sites with back hoes and earth movers, all those toys they play with in the sandbox, but now large and alive. I’m as thrilled as they are.

“Z-A-B- Zay-bars.” Alex is triumphant when he can read a word. “B – A – Bagg-els – Bagels.” Annie and I applaud, and I remember the first time I read a sign from a trolley car window, how reading the signs helped me feel I owned the world, little bit by little bit, and wonder how he feels.

“Look,” Annie says, “strollers, and mommies – “

“And guys dribbling soccer balls –“

And – And – And –

The occasional passengers let the kids press the yellow rubber bar to indicate “Stop Requested.” What power. They grin all over themselves.

“Bye.”

”Bye.”

And so it goes, all the way down to Washington Square. All I have to do is provide juice and snacks; their curiosity saves me from becoming my mother. I even show the kids my favorite building on 57th Street that swoops down from the sky like a giant sliding board.

By the time we get to 34th Street, Annie cozies down to nap, and Alex takes out his Matchbox cars, creating his own private highway up and down the empty blue seats. He imagines races and crashes, narrating his own world, replete with sound effects.

I look down at the sweet curve of Anna’s cheek; the sweep of her eyelashes; her full, rosy lips softly parted in sleep; her hands, only now giving up their starfish shape as her fingers elongate and become quite graceful.

Just before Washington Square, we get off. The heat smashes right into us, so we slip into an icy coffee shop. The kids slurp up big bowls of ice cream, with rice pudding for me. The sidewalks are still broiling, so we cross the street and catch another chilly M5 heading back uptown. Both children fall asleep with their heads on my lap, giving me the entire chilly bus ride home to dive back into Middlemarch, which I’ve been trying to read for almost a year.

“What?” I generally responded from the other room.

For the record, I am, in fact, a great listener. But she was right, toward the “end of times,” I didn’t listen to her. But that was mostly because whatever she said whenever I was around to listen was a complaint. “You didn’t…” “You never…” “You bastard!” Although that last one was more of an observation than a complaint.

Again for the record, not only am I a good listener, when I put my mind to it, but I am a great observer as well. It is a skill I have finely honed as a result of my many years, according to my ex, of never “actually doing anything, but watching other people doing things from the sidelines.” For example, around March I tend to notice that the days are getting longer, even if there is still snow on the ground. And in the second week of August I notice that all the teaching money I had put aside during the school year to pay the bills in the summer is just about gone.

But besides all that, she was never really interested in what I had to say anyway, especially if my opinion didn’t agree with her opinion, which it hardly ever did. After all, I was a man and she was a feminist of sorts, when it suited her. I voted straight party line and she voted only for women on the ballot no matter what the party affiliation, and so we effectively cancelled each other out in local and national elections since 1976. In other aspects of our lives together, I wanted a tool shed and she wanted the house repainted and a dormer. I wanted a Porsche 9-11 and she wanted children.

So, I gradually lost all interest and stopped paying attention all together, and she managed very well without much input from me. It was a system that seemed to work and had taken us up to the point about two years away from our divorce, the summer I learned that Bernardo, the Fresh Air Fund kid from the Bronx, was coming to stay with us in August. Of course I didn’t learn about it directly from her, but by accident, as a result of overhearing the breakfast conversation of my two kids.

“What?” I asked when I heard them talking about all the things they were planning to do when Bernardo arrived.

“Mommy said Bernardo is coming to stay with us for two weeks,” my daughter said.

“And he’s going to sleep in my room,” my son said.

“What?” I demanded when my wife came back into the kitchen.

“The woman from the Fresh Air Fund is coming today for a look at the place, before they make their final decision. It is just a formality.”

“But–”

The kids stopped eating to listen to the exchange.

“Don’t you think we should have discussed it before you decided to bring some ‘West Side Story’ inner city gang member into the house?”

“Don’t be silly. Bernardo is only six years old. And besides, I knew you wouldn’t agree, so I made the decision.”

“But… You… We…” I stammered, my head spinning as I searched for valid points to contradict her argument. “August is crunch time,” I managed feebly, “and we can’t afford another mouth to feed in August.”

“You can always get a little part-time job if we need more money. I saw a ‘Help Wanted’ sign in the hardware store in town. So mow the lawn, clean up the mess around the swing set and vacuum the pool before the Fresh Air Fund lady comes.”

Crisis over, the kids went back to eating their Froot Loops.

When the woman arrived my wife couldn’t have been more charming. She laid out the redwood table with a red plaid tablecloth and all those picnic dishes she had bought from the Land’s End catalog and plied her with home made lemonade and fresh baked cookies while I refused to say a word the whole time she was there. Instead, I kept my earplugs in as I steered the lawn mower closer and closer to the patio in my attempt to pelt the two of them with grass clippings and small pebbles. But we passed the inspection. Not only was Bernardo’s two-week visit with “nuclear suburban host family” approved and scheduled for the first day of August, but I would have to take the mini van up to the South Bronx to pick him up and hope that I was wearing the right gang colors when I did.

In the days following the visit from the Fresh Air Fund lady, the house was filled with deafening silence. Or if there was any verbal exchange of information from my wife’s side of the house, I didn’t hear it. I elected to give her the silent treatment while I began to plan my strategies, both to prevent the inevitable invasion of my privacy, and to deal with it when it arrived.

I opted for the sensitive approach, assuming that my wife’s failure to communicate and consider my feelings was because she failed to understand my need for privacy, the whole “a man’s home is his castle” school of thought and simply needed to be reminded that since I paid all the bills, I had a vote on who ate at my table and slept under my roof. It was an assumption that was doomed to failure, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt and in an attempt to educate her, I began dropping hints where she could pick them up. I used my computer to find some suitable clip art logo of a cop holding a stop sign and composed a letter addressed to me that I left folded carelessly in the middle of the kitchen table. I knew she could not miss seeing it, and from her past performances, I knew after seeing it out there in the open she would be unable to resist reading it. Although the name at the bottom was bogus and signature belonged to one of the secretaries at the school where I worked, the address and telephone number were legitimate, just in case my wife had any ideas about verifying the authenticity of the communication. The letter said:

The Fortune Society of America

53 West 23rd Street

New York NY 10010

212.691.7554

(The only difference between a criminal and an ex-con is a short sentence.)

May 25, 1990

Dear Sir:

Thank you for your recent letter regarding “Cons Across the Continent,” the rehabilitation work of the Fortune Society of America. Your request to have a recently released ex-convict spend an extended period of time at your home this summer with you and your family has been processed. I am happy to inform you that a suitable candidate has been selected, and he is eager to meet all of the Scalias.

His name is Otis La Rue Washington, but the name he prefers is “Love Master,” a nickname he picked up during his years at Attica. Otis is 36 years old, and has spent about a third of his life behind bars at the Newburg Reformatory for Boys where he served one to three years for third degree sexual abuse, Altoona Prison for Men where he served three years of the five to seven years sentence for aggravated sexual battery. Mr. Washington was released after he volunteered for AIDS research. His most recently time in prison was spent at Attica, where he served five of the seven to ten years sentence for rape.

Although he is a convicted multiple rapist, you will be happy to know, that he has never employed any weapons, other than his hands, to subdue his victims. The New York State Parole Board has determined that he is currently in “remission” and would pose little or no threat to your wife and/or children. At present Mr. Washington is in the “final stages of rehabilitation,” awaiting release from a halfway house at an undisclosed location.

A representative of the Fortune Society of America will shortly be contacting you to set up an appointment to inspect your premises in order to determine the suitability of conditions in your home for Mr. Washington. This is simply a formality and I can assure you that there will be no problem placing Mr. Washington with you by early July.

We appreciate your time and interest in the “Cons Across the Continent” program, and we look forward to working with you.

Sincerely,

Laurie Dunkleson, Placement Director

“Cons Across the Continent”

Fortune Society of America

Although I could tell by its position and fold that the letter had been read, my wife never mentioned it when we passed one another like two battleships in the night. Neither of us said much of anything for the rest of the week, and then on Saturday afternoon a second folded letter appeared on the kitchen table.

The Fortune Society of America

53 West 23rd Street

New York NY 10010

212.691.7554

(The only difference between a criminal and an ex-con is a short sentence.)

June 1, 1990

Dear Sir:

I am sorry to inform you that the plans to place Mr. Otis La Rue Washington in your home through the “Cons Across the Continent” program have met with a minor snag.

While on a work release furlough in the upstate New York area, Mr. Washington violated one of the conditions of his release when he wandered into one of the many topless bars along Route 9W. Once inside the “Kitty-Titty Bar,” Mr. Washington ran amok among the two female dancers and three or four male patrons who were frequenting the establishment at 11 am on a Sunday morning. The exact number of victims is still under investigation by the local authorities. Meanwhile, Mr. Washington has been taken into custody and charged with two counts of first-degree rape stemming from his attack on the women, and four counts of aggravated sodomy involving the male patrons.

I have been in personal, direct contact with Mr. Washington and he has assured me that his attorney will be able to plea-bargain the charges and get them reduced to one count of jaywalking and one count of littering. He said in the telephone conversation that he should be out on the streets in a matter of days, but he will have to make an appearance in court sometime in early July to answer the jaywalking and littering charges. This will likely push back the date of his arrival for the extended home visitation by several days. Mr. Washington said he is sorry for any inconvenience and that he can’t wait to get at you and your family.

Sincerely,

Laurie Dunkleson, Placement Director

“Cons Across the Continent”

Fortune Society of America

I thought I detected a slight grin on my wife’s face when I saw her later that afternoon, but it might have simply been a flare of gas from the previous night’s Chinese food. She never acknowledged either of the letters.

And on August 1st the four of us navigated the minivan up to the South Bronx to pick up Bernardo. Of course my wife was right. He was only six, too young to be in any gang and ignorant of all those gang signs I had taken such pains to learn and flash the moment we arrived in the apartment.

His mother, who was holding on to two other children, Bernardo’s younger brother and sister, looked more worried about this Fresh Air Fund business than I did.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Gomez,” I reassured, calling back to her as we led her first-born son out of the apartment and down the stairs to the street, “we’ll take good care of him.”

The visit went without a hitch. The kids got along as well as could be expected, with a few minor incidents. The weather held up for us to use the pool almost every day. And there was more than enough money to feed everybody those first two weeks of August. Bernardo was charming and polite, and I found that I liked him better than my own two kids. I liked him so much, in fact, that I invited him back for the following summer. And I would have had him back for a third time, but that was the summer my wife and I got divorced instead.

The truth is that I don’t know how my brother became a music publisher or what sort of music he publishes. I only know that one day he called me up and said that he was no longer a music publisher and that he wanted to know if he could stay in my apartment until he straightened some things out. Sure, I said. Stay as long as you like. I owed him some blood, even if I couldn’t say why.

When I said he could stay in my apartment, I meant that he could stay on my couch. I have a small apartment that is made up of two rooms. There’s a smallish bedroom and then another slightly larger room that is both the living room and the kitchen. Each of these rooms has its own window. I got a little nervous, because my brother had never been inside my apartment. He might think it was too small or he might be surprised to find out that I had thought up some rules of conduct that were probably ridiculous; we are both adults and don’t need puerile regulations. Toilet seat, down!

Even so, it probably wasn’t the worst idea in the world to lay down some basic laws. We hadn’t shared space in thirty years and I know that in the interim I had developed some habits or routines that I would like to keep. I didn’t like to use an alarm clock. I didn’t go to work until four in the afternoon. I didn’t like to make a project out of getting out of bed. I liked to make a cup of tea and sit in the living room watching the television like a deaf man. Unless there was a tragedy, I liked to just sit there in silence while I drank the tea. I understood that with Dean sleeping on the couch I’d probably have to give up that particular part of the routine, and I expected that Dean might have to compromise as well. He might, for instance, want to listen to opera. Being in the music business, he might consider listening to music an important part of his agenda, but my building had a strict policy against playing music between the hours of ten at night and nine the following morning. I felt that I could explain this in a simple and effective way, but more than likely it wouldn’t come up at all and if it did I was sure Dean would be the first to say that all buildings had rules like that. It was just for keeping the peace when you lived in such tight surroundings.

I didn’t really expect Dean to be around that much. Even though he said he wasn’t a music publisher any longer, that stuff stays in your blood. He’d probably be spending quite a bit of time over by the sixteen hundred block of Broadway. I don’t know what I expected him to do otherwise. He wasn’t the bus driver.

My mother was excited that Dean was going to stay with me. When I called you could hear the anticipation. She said that Dean would be a good influence on me, but she never said how. Dean took her to the opening night of “Cats” and introduced her to all of the actors and pit musicians. He bought her a cast album and had it autographed. She kept a picture of Dean and herself at this event on top of her piano. If Dean were going to move in with me until whatever things Dean needed to straighten out got straightened out, then it would follow that my life would benefit in some positive way.

I’d been a little bit surprised to hear from Dean. I mostly heard about him from our mother or sometimes from a mutual friend who’d run into Dean eating steak Tartar at Sardi’s. He said Dean had a raw egg cracked over the steak. This friend said that Dean seemed to be very busy and was probably on a business lunch, but that he’d been kind enough to invite the friend to sit down and shoot the shit for a while. I’d always thought of Dean as verbally unarmed.

I thought with Dean around that maybe I could get back on track with my writing. I used to write plays, messy off-off-Broadway things that weren’t very good. I got my characters into a hole and then I’d be unable to get them out of it. I was terrible with dialogue and didn’t understand the simplest of rules: that I wasn’t writing for myself but for the audience.

I may have hated the audience. Most of the time the audiences liked a cheerier ending. I did hate the audience. I don’t know if Dean was even aware that I used to write, and now it had been so long since I had bothered that I felt sick thinking about it again. I got that feeling I used to get when I had an idea for a new play and the idea would make me scratch. It would start out all right, I suppose, and then within half an act it would deteriorate thanks to some bleak situation only I found enthralling. Then I’d spend four months trying to salvage it, fully aware of its inadequacies. The one time I had something produced—in a warehouse with no toilet facilities—the experience had made my bowels so nervous that I didn’t write again for over a year.

I got the impression that Dean had really stuck to what he was doing. That’s how my mother told it, anyway, but I can’t say that I recall any of the songs Dean’s company published. Some of them must have been on the radio or on someone’s living room turntable. I’m not even sure where Dean lived or why he asked to stay with me instead of staying at his summer house in Massachusetts. I’d only seen pictures of it, but it looked like a damn decent arrangement. It sat on some rolling acreage and had a barn and a small apple orchard. The pictures I’d seen had been taken in the fall and the place looked like a postcard. If you looked over a nearby hill, you could see where winter was coming in. That’s the kind of place I’d go if I needed to straighten things out.

Thursday afternoon, someone buzzed from downstairs. I live in a walk-up, up three flights, turn left, down a hallway and that’s me at the end, overlooking the street. I buzzed the guy up; what can you do? He didn’t speak any English and had a hell of a time hefting some metal clothes racks up those stairs, let me tell you. He had to go up and down three times to bring those racks in, and when he finished I felt like I should give him a tip, but instead I offered him a cold beer, which he accepted.

Those racks were the damndest things. I’d never seen anything like them, but I imagined them to be kind of thing you’d find backstage at a theatre with costumes hanging on them, or being rolled across Seventh Avenue in the garment district. They took up most of the living room and eventually I rolled one into the entryway so I could watch television.

I sat on the couch and something on one of the racks that was still in living room caught my eye. At first I thought it might be a skirt, a red velvet skirt, or maybe a tablecloth, but when I took the thing off its hanger it turned out to be a cape, something for the opera or a matador, take your pick. I couldn’t imagine where someone would wear this kind of thing, but I put it on anyway and took the trash down to the garbage chute. There were people in that building who wouldn’t bat an eyelash at that kind of attire. There was a guy on the first floor who moused around in pink ballet slippers that he tied around the ankle. The superintendent had a bulldog that he let eat sandwiches out of his mouth. It was a pretty average building in that respect. To every dog its bone.

Dean showed up later that night with a paper shopping bag clutched to his belly. So, he said to me. What’s going on with you? So it was going to be casual. Just like that. Not much, I said, and I took the bag from him, expecting that it might contain some booze or assorted imported salamis Dean couldn’t do without, but instead it held some neatly folded underwear, toilet paper, and a magazine. He said he had already eaten.

Okay, I said. Okay then. I’ll just go into the bedroom for a minute and let you get comfortable. That isn’t normally what I’d be doing at that time of day. Normally I’d be out taking a walk or frying up some eggs.

After a while I could hear him going into the bathroom, so I stepped back out into the living room and saw that he had arranged his underwear on top of a stereo speaker and had put his watch on the windowsill. He’d folded up his paper bag into a small square and had placed it in the trashcan. I could see a dark stain troubling one of the sofa cushions where Dean had just been lying down. The room smelled of iron ore.

“Are you going anywhere tonight?” he asked when he came out of the bathroom. “Going out?”

“Not really,” I said. “I mean, I sometimes go for a walk and maybe grab a six-pack at the corner store, but I don’t really go anywhere, if that’s what you meant. Why?”

“No reason,” he answered. I asked if maybe he needed me to pick something up for him, like a razor or some Scotch tape, but he said he was fine.

“It’s the longest day of the year today,” I said, only because it was topical.

“Look, my stomach is killing me. I think I’ll just lie down and watch the television, if that’s all right with you. I need a vacation.” He was too tall to fit the length of the sofa and had to put his ankles up on the arm. I went back into the bedroom and shut the door. I should have moved the television into the bedroom before he showed up.

It was probably rough going from one neighborhood to another. They all had their stinks and rhythms, and sometimes it wasn’t easy to move from one to another without feeling as if you’d moved to another country. Same thing occurred when you changed a building, which is why I’d been in this one for so long. I imagined that Dean lived somewhere uptown near the park. I thought he might be used to more air and light. He’d definitely be used to more space. It was bound to be different here, no matter where he’d come from, so I took out a piece of paper and made him a little map that showed the coffee shop, the drugstore, and the corner market. If he wanted Chinese, I knew where to get that too.

It felt a little ugly to me. To think that he just showed up like he’d lived here all along, like a roommate. I made a further note that we were out of celery.

Our parents liked to take long trips by car. We spent fourteen, sixteen hours a day driving. We’d sleep in the car and end up in Texas. The heat could kill you. The trip was only fun for the first couple of hours, but then you’d get itchy for a Coke or an ice cream or a piss and you’d start to rustle around in the back with the hot sun splintering the side of your face. My mother said that Dean and I should play a game—any game—make something up. At first we did what everyone else did and tried to spot license plates from different states. When you’d get to a big state like Texas the game would get too predictable. Not like Rhode Island, the state everyone sped through without stopping. In Rhode Island you could at least get five states’ worth of plates, maybe more. But we both liked the idea of game, so we made up something where we’d have to say all of the lower forty-eight states without taking a breath, or at least see who could last the longest. We’d do this in reverse order also, from Wyoming on back. There were lots of other ways to make this game interesting. You could, for instance, say the state names backwards or in pig Latin.

That’s what I was doing, saying the state names in pig Latin and listening to Dean snore on the sofa. When I got to New Mexico I got up and peeked out the door, and I kept doing that all night, every hour or so, because I couldn’t remember how to go to sleep.

Early in the morning, I went past the sofa over to the drain board that stands in for a kitchen and I made a pimiento cheese sandwich on white bread. I wrapped it in Saran wrap and wrote this on an index card: Sorry if it’s soggy. I left both the sandwich and the card on the arm of the sofa that wasn’t propping up Dean’s feet.

By ten, there was a wound where Dean had been lying. This wound was like the body of Christ. It made an impression on the sofa and I believed in it, I sat on it.

There was a knock on the door, a Mr. Williams from the second floor. Mr. Williams said Mr. Williams as if he were the police. He had a coffee cup in his hand, but it was empty. His breath smelled of the black grounds from the bottom of the pot. His tongue was coated in short-pile mustard carpeting.

Is it you who has had the company? he wanted to know.

No, I said. I haven’t had any parties in five years.

I told them it was probably you. I don’t know what it is about you, I can’t put my finger on it, but I know it was you. He had the eyes of a Gaboon viper. I had the hangover of an A-bomb.

Sorry, I said, and shut the door in his face. I was just getting into the bathtub when the buzzer went off again.

We need to have a little talk, this second caller said. About the nature of the crime and the disposition of the body.

The other one standing there, the third caller, said condition of the body. You mean condition. How it was found and in what state and any other relative particulars, like dog hairs or faux Aztec bracelets they sell to tourists on the beach.

I meant disposition, the second replied. Disposal of the body.

It, this third person said, it was found with a hole in its belly. It was gutted like a fish. And we need to talk to you about it; at the very least we need you to formally identify it. We have it at the morgue, but we can’t say where.

Technically speaking, this knife I have is a butter knife. It is good for spreading margarine and pimiento cheese.

I think, the third person continued, standing in what passed for a kitchen, we have some trouble here. Please keep away from the technician who will be collecting the pimiento cheese evidence. He didn’t really say that. He didn’t say pimiento cheese. The technician had recently been promoted to entry-level evidence collector. There would be a salary of between $14.17 and $17.89 per hour, depending on random variables and knowledge of other languages including Spanish, Korean, or Cantonese. You couldn’t just say that you could speak or write in one of those languages. You had to take a test.

There are no laws here, not really, only small requests about toilet seats and arias. There are, however, incontrovertible facts, and he, Dean, my brother, had bled my couch deep red and then had managed to get down the stairs and into a taxi anyway, guts hanging outside his belly like an unbuckled belt or umbilical cord.

This is what I meant about having a play with a cheerless topic. You can only hit a wall and break your face. You can’t take a U-turn at the very end of it. If you could, then Dean was just pissed off after his latest divorce and angry over some lost publishing rights. We’d have shared some potato chips and bored the shit out of each other by talking about the crass commercialization of the Broadway musical. Dean would have cussed out the investors and used strong language to do so. Eventually we’d have wandered down to the bar on the corner to watch the secretaries drive with their high beams on, blinding anyone who dared to look them in the eye. If Dean had stayed around another couple of weeks, we could have gone away for the fourth of July and eaten ice cream on the boardwalk.