Sacred Time (6 page)

Still—the twins moved into my room.

With their candy lipsticks and dolls.

With their father's accordion and domino game.

With the Superman cape Bianca wouldn't let me use.

With the onyx animals Great-Aunt Camilla had brought them from Africa.

With their real-life rabbit, who was banished to our bathtub.

With cartons full of dresses, always two of each, so they could look alike.

After they messed up my Tinkertoys, they opened the doors on my Advent calendar and ate every piece of chocolate after I'd been so strict with myself, not opening a single door till the day that was written on it.

My parents made me sleep across from my cousins on the cot that Great-Aunt Camilla took on some of her journeys. “Camilla can afford to travel like that because she doesn't have children,” some of my relatives would say. Not having children sounded selfish. As selfish as traveling alone.

Lying on the cot that night, I heard the twins breathing in my bed, filling my room with their breathing, and I thought that, if Great-Aunt Camilla took the twins along—along and away and real soon—it would stop those comments about traveling alone, and on the voyage back she'd still be traveling alone, just as she liked it, because she would have forgotten the twins somewhere far away, in Egypt, say,
in a canoe that floats down the Nile till the Pharaoh's daughter finds the twins and raises them as her own, the way she did with Moses.

Mortified that Kevin would find out that girls were sleeping in my bed, I didn't let him come up, not even when he stood on the street five floors below our kitchen window and hollered, “Can Anthony come out and play?”

Aunt Floria made do with the couch in our living room. That's how she put it: “I'll make do with the couch.” Since she always lived in furnished apartments, she didn't have a bed of her own. “Don't worry about me,” she said, “I don't need much space.” There was no space left anyhow, once her suitcases and slipcovers and that bride-dummy were stacked against the walls of our living room, hiding our boat picture made of nails and threads that formed sails. Even the landing of our fire escape was crowded with boxes and tarps, blocking Santa's entry into our apartment.

“Let's just hope the fire marshal won't come around for inspection,” my mother said.

To be helpful, my aunt got up ahead of my mother to fix breakfast and school lunches, ironed sheets my mother had already ironed, scrubbed the floor behind our ice box, polished the black lid of our white stove, dusted the cookbooks on top of our cupboards. She took a splinter out of my swear-finger before I could bother my mother, and she played checkers with me, especially if I asked while she was writing a letter to Uncle Malcolm Elsewhere.

I'd sit on the counter between our gas stove and the cutting board while my aunt chopped basil for her pesto sauce. Or when she punched the pizza dough and then lifted and stretched it, and twirled it on her fingertips. It wasn't that her food tasted better than my mother's, but that I could feel Aunt Floria's joy inside me as she generously added ingredients instead of measuring them. To be able to cook like that! She kept the cupboards open to get what she needed. Taped to the insides of their doors were theater reviews and schedules. Although my mother didn't see most of these plays, she liked to know about them.

Since I loved the taste of raw spaghetti dough, my aunt would let me take a fistful before she cut it all into strips that she spread on wax paper across the cot and bed in my room to dry. At night, long after we'd eaten the spaghetti, I could still smell dough on my pillow.

Most mornings, she went to mass and helped my mother with the shopping. They didn't have to buy much because my father ordered wholesale—more than he needed for Festa Liguria—so that every evening he could shlep home one or two cartons of groceries. I liked the surprise, because whatever was inside was not what was written on the cartons: Bernice Peaches; Ajax Cleanser; Dole Pineapple; Hoffman Soda. It gave him such pleasure to announce, “Look what I got for you today.” Though he only ate fresh bread, he sometimes brought a loaf of Silvercup, my mother's favorite; and whenever he'd ask me, “What does Buffalo Bob say to look for?” I knew he had the good bread in his carton, Wonder Bread, because on
Howdy Doody,
Buffalo Bob always said to look for the red, yellow, and blue balloons on the wrapper. I liked it even more when he brought Dugan's cupcakes or Drake's Devil Dogs.

Aunt Floria didn't want to come along when we went to the Bronx Terminal Produce Market to pick our Christmas tree. “I'll get some baking done while you're gone.”

“I will take care of the baking when we get back,” my mother said.

“You go and enjoy yourself, Leonora. Hear?”

“And you leave some work for me.”

“I want to be helpful.”

“I wish you wouldn't.”

“I'll have dinner waiting for you. Fried cauliflower and chicken with fennel.”

“I wish you wouldn't.” My mother crossed her arms.

“It's the least I can do to thank you for letting us live here. How about if I make some cannolis for you, Anthony?”

I nodded. Cannolis were like giant pastry cigars. You could stick them between your lips. Suck the ricotta filling from their shells.

“Did you get rid of that squirrel in your storage room?” she asked my father.

“Even if I catch it, I'm not allowed to kill it. Squirrels are protected by the Parks Department.”

“So what are you supposed to do? Feed it through the winter?”

“It's chewing its way into my supplies, making a mess.”

“Squirrels are so pretty when they run up trees,” Bianca said.

“That's fine,” my father said, “but when they come indoors, they're just another type of rat.”

“I can shoot it dead.” I snatched a wooden spoon from our counter, aimed its end toward the floor. “Bang. Bang.”

“We don't use guns, Anthony,” my mother said, “including pretend guns.”

“Give me that spoon, darling,” Aunt Floria said, “and get your boots. Don't forget your earmuffs, girls.”

It was snowing as we drove along rows of loading docks, their overhead doors closed, the produce inside, where it was warm. During the summer, when crates of produce were stacked outside and inside, you could still smell the earth on the vegetables. But today, on the docks, men who sold trees stood around fifty-five-gallon drums filled with red-hot coals; and after my father backed the Studebaker against the loading dock at Jack's, where he called mornings to place his produce orders, we stepped into the smell of pine and chestnuts and fire.

The men at Jack's wore gloves with the fingertips cut off, and they slapped my father's back and got the twins' names mixed up on purpose and gave us a newspaper cone with roasted chestnuts. Occasionally, sparks from the coals flared up, fusing with the shouts that hung above the rows of docks as people dickered, and when they carried away their wreaths or trees, they were pulled forward by the ribbons of their frozen breaths.

At Jack's, the men cut the rope from bundles of Christmas trees and showed us only the best ones, full around the base and tapering to a straight point.

They bellowed with laughter when my mother asked, “For that price, do they come with balls?”

“Bells.” My father hid his grin behind his glove. “My wife means bells.”

“Same thing,” one said.

“That's what I've been telling you, Victor.” My mother stepped close to the coals, let their heat reach up to flicker on her frosty breath. That flicker was the only thing moving while she stood motionless, spellbound by the fire.

None of the men spoke. But they were looking at her like you look at a dinosaur skeleton you long to touch in the Museum of Natural History, but know you're not allowed to, that you'll be punished, banished, if you were to try. Finally, one of the men sighed. “Lucky fellow.”

And then the others remembered how to talk. “Lucky fellow,” they teased my father when they tied the tree on top of our car.

On the drive home, my cousins started fighting with each other, and I felt them in my skin like an itch. I didn't want them on the seat with me, in the car with me. Bianca was accusing Belinda of stealing her onyx giraffe, and Belinda said that I had it.

“You're lying,” I told her.

“I don't even like it,” she said, though she'd been skutching Bianca to trade the giraffe for the bull that was just a chunk of onyx with stubby legs.

“You're lying,” I told Belinda again. I liked the giraffe better, too, because the green streaks in the onyx made it look real fast.

“Anthony is being mean,” Belinda chanted in her I'm-telling voice.

To keep them both away, I stuck out my elbows. Smoke from my parents' cigarettes coiled upward, flattened itself against the ceiling of our car.

“You don't want to give those fellows any ideas,” my father was saying.

“They already got ideas.”

“Well, yes, but—”

“You like my raunchy side.”

“Not in public.”

“Ah, just for you then?”

Belinda yanked at my elbow.

“Stop it.”

“I want my giraffe back,” Bianca whined.

My mother groaned. “Your sister has unpacked her Toastmaster. Her Mixmaster. Her—”

“The girls can hear you.”

I leaned forward. “And her breadbox.”

“Right. That hideous breadbox with those hideous flowers painted all over the front.”

“The girls—”

“Your sister has hung the pope plus the cardinal. Our entire apartment reeks of mothballs.”

“I didn't take your stupid giraffe,” Belinda yelled across me to her sister.

“You give it back to me.”

“I'll let you play with my bull.”

“Floria needs to feel at home with us,” my father said.

“She does. Believe me, she does.”

“I don't want your stupid bull.”

“It's not stupid.”

“Stupid and ugly.”

I kept my elbows out, pretending not to see the twins, although they bounced against my arms. What if someone else took what you'd been saving up? Would you get ten times as much Advent calendar chocolate in heaven? Or none? And how about purgatory? How much Advent calendar chocolate would you get in purgatory if you didn't tell on the kids who'd stolen it from you?

“While I
don't
feel at home,” my mother said. “I can't take a bath without first cleaning after that goddamn rabbit. It's learning to jump from the tub, and I have to keep the door shut to make sure it stays in the bathroom. This morning I found it behind the toilet bowl. Your sister doesn't have a piece of furniture she can call her own, but she can always afford those filthy pets.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“She's here to stay, Victor.”

“It's just for a while.”

“Like six months? Ten years? Whatever sentence Malcolm gets next? And you know what else? You complain about him and his schemes. But you aren't that honest, either.”

“Don't you compare me to him,” my father hissed.

“All this stuff you bring home—not just food, but plates and silverware and napkins and glasses and God-knows-what-else with ‘Festa Liguria' written all over—someone's paying for all that, and it certainly isn't you.”

“I don't know what to say to you when you get like that.”

“Get like what?”

“You don't know shit about running a business, about writing off expenses.”

Their harsh whisper continued while we carried the tree up our five flights of stairs, but when my mother saw that Aunt Floria had dinner ready, she got quiet—so quiet that, at the table, she didn't say “amen” when Aunt Floria finished grace. I wanted the two of them to get up, to start dancing and laughing; but there was no relief—not for them, not for any of us—and though my father praised the fried cauliflower and the chicken with fennel, he had the face he got when he was afraid of upsetting my mother. While I could barely swallow. Not even the sweet ricotta.