The waitress came around to take our dinner order. My mother ordered the prime rib for my father. He cherished all kinds of meat except chicken. He liked his steaks bloody and once I saw him scoop some raw meat loaf filling into his mouth from a big glass bowl in the refrigerator.
I waited to hear my mother’s order, a pollo alla Valdostana, which I’d tried once and didn’t like. Then I ordered the surf and turf off the regular adult menu. Evelyn looked at my mother.
—Kid has expensive taste.
Joseph Sr. was looking at my mother like she was a prime rib. I have always wondered why men don’t do a better job of turning off their eyes.
My father came back to the table. The color was gone from his face. I’d never seen him without a smile or an expression of anger at my failure to listen to my mother. I had never seen anything in between. There was a mist of sweat on his forehead.
—Mimi, my mother said, what is it?
My father shook his head.
—I have to go, he said.
My mother stood and went to him. I heard him, I heard what he said. As usual, everybody underestimated how tuned in I was.
—My mother was raped, he said.
—What!
My mother, with her accent, had a way of saying that word. It sounded like waht! It had an exclamation mark even when she didn’t mean for one.
I saw that Joseph Sr. heard him, too. My parents often spoke Italian to each other, specifically when they didn’t want someone else to hear them, and I did wonder why my father hadn’t communicated the news in Italian. Perhaps the word in Italian, stupro, sickened him too much. The Italian word was more carnal, more visual. Rape, by contrast, sounded like something you might eventually lock away in an aluminum drawer.
I listened as they spoke for another minute. The details were filmy. I merged them with my own experience of my grandparents’ house to create the scene. My grandparents lived in a part of East Orange that used to be a nice neighborhood but now had weeds growing in the cracks of the street. In the middle of the afternoon my grandmother let a man into the house, a man she thought was a technician of some sort, and he raped her on the floral couch where their Doberman regularly pissed. He left with her wallet, her wedding ring, and her gold crucifix. My grandmother was seventy-two years old at the time. She wasn’t slim and she wore gaudy makeup on her fleshy face. Peach lipstick that settled into the wrinkles of her lips, powdery blue eyeshadow on the withered lids of her eyes. Their whole house smelled like urine. The rapist struck her once, hard, on the face. The Doberman and the German shepherd were outside, in the fenced yard. I wondered about the cats. They had five cats in that house. She had a bruise under one eye. She’d cleaned herself up before the police came. She’d inquired with the police as to whether there was a way they could keep it from her husband. My grandfather was a cold, small, stern, racist man. In retrospect I believe he was evil. He called Black men coloreds in polite company and worse in his own home. My grandmother’s legs were big; her calves were like columns. She wore nude pantyhose, even in the summer, which made the skin on her legs look the color of uncooked chicken breasts, an unsettling pinkish white.
My father would be driving the two hours to New Jersey alone. He told my mother he would be back by morning. He came toward the table, kissed me on the forehead. He left his American Express on the table; my mother didn’t carry any cards of her own. He didn’t say goodbye to Joseph Sr. and Evelyn. I’d never seen him care less for other people.
After he left, Joseph Sr. asked my mother what had happened. Evelyn leaned forward like her type does, lovers of gossip.
My mother sketched the story quietly, saying the word rape even quieter, trying to make sense of it herself.
Joseph Sr. let out something like a laugh. A disbelieving guffaw.
—Who in the hell would want to rape an old bag!
Evelyn smiled despite herself and said, Hush, Joe!
My mother somewhat nodded, sharing the energy of the table’s disbelief. I felt she should have taken me home, walked away from these monsters. But she didn’t. She took out another cigarette. She gazed at the fireplace. Joseph Sr. lit her cigarette. Joseph Jr. selected from his rucksack a different palm-size game.
The waitress brought the big charcoal tray of our food. There was some talk about my father’s prime rib, and my mother told Joe and Evelyn they could have it wrapped and take it back to their house. Evelyn wondered if they should send it back to the kitchen; it was too rare for her taste. I looked up at the big bull over the mantel, his horns and teeth that, until recently, had the power to make me wet my pants. I stared at him and wished he were as real as I used to think he was. I prayed for him to animate suddenly and rip the rest of his body through the wall and gore Joseph Sr., make a rhubarb pie out of his wide dentist chest.
—Eat your food, my mother said to me. That was all she said to me for the rest of the meal.
I still remember the cheap hash marks on my slab of filet mignon and the lobster tail beside it. I knocked over the metal dish of clarified butter, but nobody saw, and I knew I couldn’t ask for another.
14
ALL THE NEXT DAY I hoped that Alice would come. I stared at the fridge where I’d lined up the Tecates. I felt like a teenage girl with a crush.
When the bell jingled, I almost dropped a cup I was washing. But it wasn’t her. It was River with Kurt the dog at his side. Meeting Alice had muted my desire for him.
—Whoa, he said. You work here?
—It appears so.
—What happened to Natalia?
—She went into politics.
He smiled and looked at me like I was crazy. Jack had been better at understanding sarcasm. But River was better-looking.
—Is it okay that Kurt’s in here?
—Of course. How’s he doing?
—Terrific. Aren’t you, boy?
The dog sat and lowered his scruffy chin. He was at once regal and a little silly but, above all, loyal and smart. I felt that if I had been the one to rescue that animal, he’d be peeing in the cracks of my uneven planks and whining by the door.
—What can I get you boys?
—An iced genmaicha for me. Maybe a bowl of water for Kurt?
—Sure.
I filled one of the expensive soup bowls with water. My mother thought it was disgusting to use human bowls for dogs. After taking showers, my parents dried the stall with the towels they had used on themselves. The steel drain was always sparkling.
—I’m taking Kurt for his first dunk in the ocean.
—How do you know it’s his first?
—Oh. I don’t.
I felt bad so I walked around the counter and knelt to the dog’s eye level. I wore a frilly light green apron. I gazed in the dog’s eyes and then stood up quickly before the animal rejected me by looking away.
—It will be his first time, I said.
River laughed. One time I wrote to Jack, Last night was the best it’s ever been (for me, with you). Of course, I bookended it with several jokes. I addressed him as Fisheye. He wrote back, Hey handsome! He replied to my jokes with jokes, he told me about an interview he’d had with some start-up firm and asked for my advice. He included some song lyrics and ignored what I wrote about our sex.
I made River’s tea and handed it over to him. I took his money, a few crinkled dollar bills, and gave him change. He didn’t put any of the change into the tip jar. Each time Dean came in, he slipped all of his singles into it. Both actions—the tipping and the not tipping—made me feel like I had lesions.