MY WAY happens. A song about a man who ate up doubt and spit it out.
And then they hit me with doubt, mercilessly, unlike any I had ever experienced in my life. After all that. Now, holding back the hover dam—them. Me. The whole thing.
Vico let a twangy line fly across the table.
Naples is chaos.
These were football players, professional marksmen, shapeshifters. At times, you’re on a field, playing defense, offense, sure. These people can, do, change sides, also. We are the players, the commentators, the crowd, the stadium itself. We’re on our feet, cheering, we’re throwing you out. Rules are suggestions here. WHY ARE YOU LEAVING? Thrown back in.
I was the cousin—the target. Could I dance? Sing, entertain? These are actors, you see, as Naples is called a theater. Field, stage. Tear down the set, charge the field, save the smuggling revolutionary. Revolt. We will. Reason? What other reason do you need?
The pizzas came flying in, cheese in strings across the table. Fourteen people talked to me, insisted that I eat all this pizza, piling onto my plate.
“NO IS BUONO COLD!”
“NO IS!”
“CALZONE?”
Calzone.
“EAT THE PIZZA.”
It was wonderful, celebratory, joyous, a “My Way” reprise.
My plate almost dropped by the weight of this football.
Into the beast, I sliced it open, and a pool of cheese spread across my plate rising in bits of salami.
“What happened?”
Vico threw it on the table, just like that, and kicked the feet out from under me. I could write about the whole dance it took to get here but let’s, punching my fist, get to the meat of the issue. And meat was in the oven, you mothers…On his elbows, Vico sat at the head of the table next to Franco Franzese. Flora was justice. Angela was amused. Does she have what it takes? Commenting on my style.
“Piscine,” I said, or pool in French with a Neapolitan accent.
“Eh brav. Eat, eat, eat.”
I was full already and thrown, packed to the brim. I didn’t know that. How to eat this thing? With a fork and knife or with my bare hands? I picked up the creamy, subtle cheese on a fork, amazed. These people were gifted. I just wanted to enjoy, talk about how wonderful this all was.
“You see she doesn’t eat,” Franco said, and that was not true.
He kicked my internal state up a notch: defense.
He mocked the “laser beams” shooting out of my eyes.
Yes. No. This.
He interjected that, apparently, my father had “Alzheimer.”
Vico’s eyes widened. “Alzheimer?”
Everyone said “Alzheimer,” which was funny.
“What does that mean?” I swallowed. I laughed.
“You see, she’s joking,” and why would I joke about a disease? But I couldn’t say that. I told him, them, and they brought it up. Franco continued with two palms as if I didn’t speak the language all of a sudden: louder, slower, repetitious. I was before the judges.
“You were ten, correct?”
“Ten” flew in from everybody.
“This is what she said,” Franco gave me a palm and tapped the table.
“But you were here at this time…”
“I poof no?!”
Sure, sure, I had not convinced them and you must win the crowd here. They laughed at my “poof” as if I were funny, silly, or using this word seriously—why did people think I actually talked like that? It became a little too real.
I slapped my hand at Carmine. He sat directly in front of me as he always would to facilitate communication between me and the rest of the table since we had our secret language. “TWEET TWEET,” his father made two little birds speaking sweetly, tweet tweeting. Carmine just didn’t give anything away. Sometimes, he gave me a hand and it was a spillover, splash all over the place and he could pick out objects, words, and string them together.
He adjusted his glasses.
My grit, bite, was good to them.
“What is the…” word for WORD.
I saw explosions in his eyes.
Carmine nuzzled his nose at me.
“How do you say…”
They threw out guesses, amusing themselves. The tension over Carmine and his band even reentered the equation, Franco Franzese rooting him on in a state of conflict with a chin.
“POOF.”
They got the CONCEPT.
“Disappear,” Carmine said simply.
I dipped my finger into that word. They mirrored it. Not Carmine.
“And what is this?”
I laughed.
“Type, teep…of grammaria…”
I didn’t want to bastardize Italian.
“The structure of the LANGUAGE.”
He thought.
“Grammatica?”
He snapped and said languidly.
“A verb…”
They disagreed.
I scooped that word up and brought it back with my shoulders.
“She has a quality though doesn’t she?”
“BEFORE THIS.”
I continued with air-quotes, pointing at everything.
“LIKE CALZONE LIKE TABLE LIKE PAPA LIKE LIKE—A VERB IS?”
“Maria?”
Flora rang low.
“How do you say questo…” I SHOT OUT MY HAND.
“Word…”
“WHAT?”
“YES!”
I pointed.
“The word, Carmine! The word! Thank you!”
They looked at one another.
“This is what you want to know? WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE? THANK YOU?”
They rushed for me with “Alzheimer, poof, ten, word, what was this nonsense?”
I signaled largely.
“He didn’t say nothing…”
I went underneath the table trying to mime “secret,” what is hidden. I made “shush shush” sounds with my finger to my lips. They took this strange finger of mine. “Shush shush. Shoosh shoosh.” This was utterly nonsensical, conceptually, to the Neapolitans. What did this even mean? I couldn’t help but laugh; they undercut me.
I clapped at Carmine.
He received my growing state of intensity, impatience, frustration, and positivity. I projected outwards. “What is the WORD for the contrary of one person?” I couldn’t think anymore, snapping, trying so hard to be positive. I will learn!
“AHHH,” Flora adjusted her glasses like Carmine. She understood what I was doing. Maybe she didn’t. Franco said something that made Flora laugh and alerted me.
“The word,” I wagged my finger.
“PER…”
“PER, PER? Meri PER?”
“QUESTO.”
He pulled back.
“No person,” and I tried to mime “around” and flashed “one.”
“No one.”
“YES!”
We applauded Carmine.
I boosted him as “my professor” at his father who received it begrudgingly.
“He said nothing to no one!”
“SECRET!”
“How was he supposed to tell a child? How was…”
“Scouge,” Franco said, not scusa, even suave.
“NO!”
I was the one—eyes wide—living with him.
“No one!”
Franco gave me an expression like I was the one who didn’t want to accept it. I was a child. He couldn’t tell me. Their question as to why we disappeared was disappearing. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t true. It could not be true. Meat was coming.
Rosa, Emma, and Angela casually got up because it was just a story to pick up the plates. I shot up.
“HELP?”
Obnoxious move.
Rosa sweetly said “NOH baby.” Emma didn’t get involved. They threw me back in the ring.
“Secret,” Carmine said, looking off, because he kept getting it.
“It’s THE SAME, is it the SAME? THE SAME.”
They shouted. “And what about it?!”
“NOH, noh, noh…”
They insisted as if they had been there.
“HEY!”
I started swinging wide with English just to slap them down.
“THE DOTTOR!”
“Dottore Meri DOTTORE…”
I threw my hands down.
“I speak Neapolitan” and lost the word for “the fastest possible” so I threw a pinched finger around like mad! Franco gave the assembly a palm. My gestures had a style.
I slapped across my palm into the great beyond. It was done, I put down my glass.
“Brav.”
I shot out “diagnose” which passed. Franco and Vico were doctors. Everyone confirmed “the importance of Latin” in how they said the word.
“HE SAY TO ME when I was twenty years old that he…”
“WHO, Maria, who?”
“DOTTOR!”
I gripped my fist for the past participle. I opened myself up for attack. This was a boxing ring.
“HAS EU,” it was English and French, “Alzheimer when I was ten.”
“Alzheimer?”
They said as if they heard it for the first time.
I couldn’t withhold, lie, if you would, because I had a trembling fear of it, being perceived as one because my parents were such liars so I had to clarify that it was…
“MA PARKINSONS PRIMO…”
Throwing out three fingers, I tried to say “neurologia.”
“When you were twenty or ten?”
“Ten,” and then, I brought a fist back to me in a large curve.
“Told ME when I was TWENTY.”
“Maria, eat, please.”
I laughed. I was joking.
“I don’t SPEAK,” I said, “Italian!”
They reassured me that I did.
Franco gave people “looks.”
How was he supposed to tell a child? About all this?
I was out of my mind. They were trying to help me come to grips with all this.
“THE DOCTOR SAID!”
The word for angry—I had fists.
“The dottor was not happy!”
I pleaded with them.
It was I who was not happy.
They even projected understanding.
I couldn’t believe that they were fighting me on this.
“SPEAK,” Franco threw me onto the table with his forehead.
“SPEAK to your mother?”
I was wild, in-between states of awareness. It could have appeared as a freeze with sheets of paper shuffling in my eyes. No one remarked on my state as abnormal or out of control. Chaos, haha, Angela would later laugh. That’s Naples. Nothing to bat an eye…about. Franco Franzese made circles over his eyes and gave them to me as a questions.
“What are these eyes for?”
Flora was deciding how to call it.
Nodding, looking at them in a heightened state, “he said…CARMINE!”
Everyone huddled in, enjoying charades with Maria and Carmine, throwing in their guesses. Hard to keep the thread. I swam. Carmine nuzzled at me. “NO he said,” I made the universal symbol for talk. “The word,” in his owl eyes, we were going down, spiraling.
“He did not say…to YOU?”
Carmine pulled back. I took the floor.
“Nothing. He said nothing?!”
I wiped my mouth, remembering my father, laughing a little. Of course not.
“What Meri, what? SAY WHAT?”
“What is this play, what are you doing?”
They didn’t know. I had to remind myself.
I floated, my pinched fingers remained. Franco pointed. “Neapolitan.”
“About the MY MOTHER to you? He say,” I opened my hands.
Franco took the lead on this one because my father spoke to him the most…
“Cosa?”
I tossed Carmine “what” instead of “how much.”
“La quantità, Carmine…of the WORDS.”
“Not much,” Franco said. Others joined, obviously.
“Only that she wasn’t never really in your life.”
His sympathy infuriated me.
I made like—why are they asking me this, then?
They got pushy right back.
“How were they supposed to know?”
I laughed. I had to give that to them.
“No, I do not SPEAK…!”
“Aw, how sad, sorry.”
“No…”
They searched for a day, any day, that I spoke to my mother.
“No, no,” and no!” Not this.
“Not even on her name day?”
I had to laugh.
“Her name day?”
“NEVER!”
“But she’s still your mother…”
I laughed. That was richer than the food.
Mai, mai, mai, I said “never” with an increasing satisfattivo. Satisfaction, I think.
I gave them two hands—the number of times that I saw her let alone spoke to her. They didn’t stop. Nodding, I had to understand them, though, wrapped up in convincing them that my truth was the truth, that I wasn’t a liar; that was all in a kind of white-out since the idea that someone could hurt me, even, or affect me was still not possible.
“Christmas, weekend, name days, you called people…”
I threw my hand—I cast it long and sharp.
“Oilloc,” Vico poured me another glass.
“SHE!”
It was hard not to laugh, too; they were so forceful and entertaining. They just didn’t stop. I held the hand, held it, just trying to find the word for “to give.”
I handed anything and everything to Carmine for the VERB.
Carmine took it, simply, not knowing what this was.
“When a person does this…the ACTION. VERB!”
Everyone threw out suggestions, comments, and even complimented my gestural style once again. I did it again, feeling bad. I was too quick. I couldn’t offend them. They were innocent.
I got it.
“She gave me….”
Carmine came in.
“SHE GAVE YOU? GAVE YOU WHAT?”
“To another person!”
Emma took a deep breath.
In short, my mother gave me away, not gave me, to another person when I was four years old.
“So what, people give their babies to people…”
Franco Franzese handed a baby to a person as if it were stupid, even, how common it was.
“Si, si,” Flora seared, this time, with her frown, right through me.
Looking at them, they continued gesturing and scanning as to how “NORMAL, NORMALE” it was. This is not a reason not to call someone, your mother. Si, si. Patch things up.
I got up from the table.
I threw open an invisible cage in a self-mocking step. Isn’t this nice? Eager, bright, can’t get angry, I was intense, electric.
“NORMALE,” I said.
“Si,” they supported of me. They liked my mime, and?
Carmine made little wings without changing his face but there was a question beneath it.
I saw a pigeon coup. He even got the image. His father snapped at him.
I pointed as if it were a game because it was, wasn’t it? It was a spectacle, an entertaining one at that. I had to slide into this dispute in Carmine’s defense about the birdcage.
“What did this have to do with birds?”
“Metaphor!”
I had to laugh. She’s joking! No! Then why? You. YOU!
“TELL THEM MERI!” Angela cried.
I gave the BABY to a woman “over there.”
“BAMBINE.”
“What about the BIRD CAGE MARIA?!”
I was putting her, pushing her, over there. And now, they were playing with me.
“OVER THERE.”
“WHERE MERI?”
Vico kept saying “OBI LAN.”
I felt terrible for taking up this space but it was over.
With a fist to Carmine like we could do this, I fired at him.
“WE!”
He repeated what I blurted, becoming less and less verbal. He adjusted his glasses.
“Confusion,” he could see that. He asked everyone with a palm to back up. He was in charge. It didn’t work, but it did. Franco gestured to Flora—her son. Whatever.
Without inflection, he said “Meri is giving a baby to someone…in confusing circumstances.”
“A foreigner, Meri, or someone,” Carmine’s brows rose to try to lift me up.
“Or someone you did not know?”
Carmine left the space between us open; there was a missing piece of information that everyone tackled to fill. He had a question in his eyes.
I shot four fingers at them, my body surging with electricity.
“FOUR YEARS!”
Yes, that detail.
“FOUR YEARS?”
“FOUR YEARS OLD OR YOU LIVED WITH THIS WOMAN FOR FOUR YEARS?”
I shook two fingers in their faces to be positive. Both.
“YES!”
I clapped. We did it.
That “yes” became bigger, happier, and more serious as they went in an unexpected direction.
“No, no, no, that’s not what happened.”
“No, no,” Flora said with a tone.
“You don’t remember.”
If there was one thing that could have made me blow, it was that. I heard “remember me” in my head when I was four years old, lady, and at four, I had that bite, and I did bite—watch out. I threw punches. My Way. I couldn’t forgive myself for going there in feeling, so I masked that, and they kept going. No, no.
Desperate, “me, there, my life?”
Only one woman could bring down a team of Neapolitans single-handedly. In this case, she would have been happy to. I felt it, I channeled her fire—the mother who stepped into my house in a tennis skirt and legs shaped by the Gods. “HEY!” I kicked my feet like she did.
“Who’s this?! She’s good. The way she kicked her feet.”
“My Brazilian Mama!!!!”
They flew back. Just their faces.
“TELL YOU—OKAY?”
I think I set off Nettuno barking like—what the fuck is going on?
Carmine moved his eyes without his face.
“O—kay,” they bounced off my okay, rhythmically, “o-kay, o—kay.”
I gave them her sassy finger in her Brazilian accent.
“Pay attention.”
I suddenly remembered that phrase.
The table paused.
They were impressed…by how I became this other person in front of their eyes.
Franco especially.
“Si, si,” they all agreed, but why didn’t I do theater anymore?
I flashed guilt.
“She’s good, not bad. Do it again.”
They got that she was real—they felt it.
“DO IT, Meri, DO IT AGAIN.”
I collapsed into a state of laughter. “Pay attention.”
“She’s joking…”
“NO,” I had to pull it together, but gave into the fun of it? Isn’t this where I lost the reality of it, I don’t know. Chewing gum, snapping, smiling really nice at them. A nice fake smile on my face.
I flashed the four jazzy fingers she gave me at the tennis club which they mirrored, amused.
They commented on my play, zooming in on the gestures.
I began on my pinky!
I showed it to them. Held it. They waved their little pinkies at me. I had to have evidence in my case. That was my approach. I had evidence. I wasn’t readily believed so I tended to rely on what “SHE SAID, no me, SHE said to me.”
“SHE SAID—FOUR YEARS!”
“Don’t SAY to ME,” I gave them her sass.
“It’s not true.”
“SI!”
For the love of GOD.
Flying hands, nonsense spurting.
“PER this…I DO NOT SPEAK!”
Franco didn’t want to accept it.
“You don’t put the definite article in front of family members…”
Carmine slipped it in.
“MAYBE,” I blurted in French.
“PAR CONTRE.”
They called my fouls.
“It is more true,” with shoulders, “PER me.”
I took on a tough guy stance as a goddamn joke.
The math added up, at least, to Franco Franzese.
“And then,” I came here for the first time…after these four years.
“Yes.”
I laughed again, just taking that hit. Franco Franzese accepted my statement that he didn’t believe a child, in a sense, putting his chin into it.
“Was this not unbelievable?”
He had no clue why was I laughing.
“Sure,” I even bowed, slightly to the “authority.” The edge: they didn’t even see it, but I was wrought about it. He twinkled his head in it smiling like an alligator. Christmas. I hated the Catholics, always did, to be—with a smile—honest. The Catholic Church, not people.
“She was Brazilian, this woman?”
“She said that,” Flora kept her cool.
“Ahhh,” Angela rested on her hand.
“Anche…”
What was the word…for Jewish?
“The religion of Mary? Carmine…”
I gave them a thumb.
“Hebrew?”
“Si.”
“And Jesus?” Getting testy.
“Anche Jewish, Meri,” they regarded at me as if I were a comedian. I laughed, too.
“My Brazilian Mama, SHE,” I said instead of “her.” I pointed to her husband—a word I didn’t have. I put a ring on my wedding finger. “HER, the person who did this, yes, was Jewish.”
“So, she converted,” Franco urged me to answer the question with a sincere brow.
“Is this what you’re saying?”
I laughed, rinsed, and charged if not electric.
I was coming to my senses.
“My Way Brasiliane,” Vico said as if that’s exactly what this was.
They put it together.
“NOH, NO…”
“Si,” Vico figured. He knew all along. Isn’t that what I was saying?
I laughed again.
“Na na My Way…”
Franco demanded confirmation.
“Was this her? The woman you told to get out of My Way?”
“Sorry…” I said.
Their faces—what word was this?
“SORRY?”
Flora called my foul in sounds.
“Why is she apologizing? Carmine?”
He didn’t know.
“Um,” trying to bring my voice down, they barked. They wouldn’t let me.
“What? Meri? What do you want to say?”
“What is stronger than scusa?”
Meri, Carmine got real without words suddenly near me.
Why do you want to know this?
“Mi dispiace,” Ivana said.
“NOH,” Rosa said. “Baby NOH.”
Franco looked at me as if I were a complete alien.
Angela said “MERI,” so tenderly.
She was happy that I was back even elegantly.
Everyone was.
I was “allegra,” according to Angela—joyful, happy, lively.
I blinked.
Allegra?
“Si, Meri, si,” Franco ushered me to get off this train of thought.
I couldn’t believe these people.
“We wondered where you went…”
Um, right.
“Si, scusa.”
“WHY IS SHE SAYING SCUSA?”
“This is what family is for.”
Right.