Into my cousin’s house over twenty years later, how was I going to talk to them about that? (my last post). As Angelita said, “rape, you, her.” After all that, the sex scandal I was in, my father and I came to Italy. I was about nine, but we disappeared a few years later, so I hadn’t seen them in fifteen years.
My cousins sent Carmine to pick me up, taking off his shoes on the front step, because he understood me when no one else could, which I had all but forgotten. I remembered it when I got there along with the house in the small town of Ottaviano in Naples, Italy, where I was standing in.
Up the enchanted stairwell, I called it, with wide marble steps and a wrought iron staircase with a vintage wooden handle, I had developed a maladaptive pattern after that scandal, so a couple more families came into my life. I was just coming to understand that as my “adopted family narrative” blotted out my parents a touch too successfully. But I didn’t know that yet. Confusing. I had one objective: don’t adopt me. But what the hell did I know?
The same architectural skeleton was there out of the half-moon window with a gate of squiggly diamonds. I didn’t clock that it had been a house for at least ten years. I thought it was an unfinished parking lot. I only had the adopted narrative, squinting…wondering what happened. Not to say that my parents didn’t exist in my mind, but I had pieces that hadn’t really landed yet.
I was nervous…the Neapolitans didn’t play patty cake, and the questions were coming. They invited me to spend the holidays with them, so I came early to not ruin the season or dominate it, as my childhood story could really really have an effect on people that I still didn’t really understand.
“Maria?” Carmine called.
I turned. “Who is?” I didn’t even speak Italian…
An antique door turned coat rack framed the Neapolitan at Hogwarts. Carmine looked like a Harry Potter character, at least as a boy with his owl eyes (his spirit animal) behind round spectacles. I saw a Santa ornament, wait what? A little early no? I came before Christmas. It was like December first.
He asked for my ginormous Mongolian fur coat so he could hang it up. I looked like a big bird, but I think it was chic. But I had no body, just stick legs.
Now, I got nervous about removing my jacket because my friends had freaked me out a little. Even one of them, when they read this draft, got nervous here. You see, to my friends, family wasn’t safe, necessarily. Family was this “very weird” realm in my life. Was my cousin going to fall in love with me? She was scared.
It’s just to say, I was so confused. “Well, thinking about your life…”
I was just starting to. It’s just, writing this right now, I don’t know what to say about that given the sex scandal I was in, what I don’t know now, since writing my story put me through an experience I cannot explain, and given what people say about the past coming back to haunt you. But then, I found comments like this to be a bit strange, as…well, there was only one instance where a family member who wasn’t even a family member, I mean, originally, had romantic feelings for me… Given my life…some of my friends seemed to communicate that everyone was in love with me, but I wasn’t privy to this information, most of the time, so I didn’t really understand it.
Okay, so weird, I threw my coat, I guess I had a nice body, I guess that’s what she was implying, but I had no idea how to judge that, to be frank, as there are different beauty standards. In Italy, I’m not the ideal. I was in a navy polka dot sheath with a large sailor collar that I had taken from a costumer’s bin…
“Maria?” Diodora rang, which startled me, because she rang like I was a kid once. With a superior nasal cavity, she could resonate from here to the point of knocking me sideways. She could ring your name with a very clear tone—you got the message. “La bella Diodora!”
I opened her door, remembering the knob. It was built too close to the threshold… and I walked into her living room the color of sand with linoleum floor that reflected the light — as if she were the shore. Her element is wood, so she had a gaiety to her, she’s dry. Her sister in Sorrento is the sea, humid, different temperament.
A Christmas tree was there… undecorated, but what was it doing there? I turned, nervous.
Running to embrace me with a bag of olives, I gasped. She hadn’t changed in 20 years! She was still in fitted house pants and platform house slippers that clicked when she strutted her stuff with confidence — it made me laugh. She looked the closest to Carmine with dark olive skin and dark features. Short haircut. Cat eye frames with a gold chain. An Invisibles character because she’s tiny and fit. I would also cast her in the Italian Jetsons because of her amazing nasal capacity, which is cartoon-worthy. Just put her in a spaceship hovering above me —”Maria?” In a screenplay, I would put her at the head of a mafia family because she’s eternally in the kitchen, conservative, could be cruel. She would never be able to picture it, which is why it would work. She likes glass menagerie. Holds her hands like turtledoves.
Beside herself, she hugged me. I was shocked to be taken in like that. They were genuinely excited to see me. I tried to tell her she was “eternal,” the light coming through her big window, “you no older,” I took some steps back to communicate “the past, and this tree…” what is it? Why? Here? She didn’t get it because I mispronounced it, “eterne,” I said, instead of “eternal.” Carmine translated, and Giggino slid open the mirrored door in the back.
Holding a plate of struffoli, a mountain of fried balls of dough sticky with honey, topped off with festive sprinklers, it was gift-wrapped. Giggino was a gator, as in an alligator, and a bulldozer with a sincere brow. A urologist.
Boom—two kisses on the cheek, “you want this?” Tactic.
No, “I do want questo adesso.”
“I don’t want this now,” I said, which rhymed in Italian. Not speaking the language didn’t make me shy, like it would most people; this was the opportunity to reach greatness, you see.
“You’re skinny, where have you been?”
As far as I knew, they had never tried to call us, but I had been built to assume blame, so I jumped in. It was crazy, so crazy.
And right there, a problem I had was that I didn’t understand these types of displays. Did he mean that? Did he not really mean that? Meaning, had I disappeared, for real, wouldn’t they have called out of concern? Or, did we just fall out of touch? Was this one of these “things families do?” I had heard that line on TV, which I say because people told me that my story sounded like something you saw on TV, when all families appeared to be something I had seen on TV.
I wasn’t the best at receiving that as my mother, Dr. J, was the biggest liar on earth, so I had a lifetime, as my undercover investigation will show, of not knowing if the performance was real, real in the moment, or what? How was I supposed to take it? I was confused by this exchange. Now, today, it would be water passing, “happy to see you…” but my body, already, became a focal point, upon entry.
“She’s skinny,” he looked at his wife out the back of his head, hilariously just… behind him… it had to be fixed immediately, the doctor, it must be handled now, in his white doctor’s jacket. Now, I had to unsex myself because I was in the dark, here, not knowing what this was. I hated attention being drawn to my body.
“Me,” I said, brightly. “Strong,” I tapped my bicep. I couldn’t show that I was frustrated, annoyed, you couldn’t get under my skin. I was 100% muscle.
“Puro,” I said, reaching for “pure.”
I assured him, refusing to get angry at this exchange, in general.
I had just done a half marathon without training, so I wasn’t looking to gain weight, if you would. I just showed up with my latest family at 5 AM— BOOM, under two hours. “Go.” I wanted to see what shape I was in, as I didn’t track myself. And my ex-brother in that family reminded everyone, “Maria’s been running since she was twelve.” I didn’t like skinny talk, I had worked very hard on my physique, and I have ex-family members. He was in love with me, and then he told me he had been giving people AIDS for ten years, happy to be back. Fun times…
I had to evade — this. Into the kitchen, “wow,” I remembered it.
The window that opened from the wall like a door… with the dainty embroidered curtain of daisies, for Diodora. This window filled me with sensation, the way the light poured into the simple Italian kitchen. People were really my passion, in a sense, characters. I searched for their contrasts, since she’s dry and unemotional, but she’s a flower, wood, so I was gathering information about them as I moved, remembering them, quite simply.
“Do you like curtains or something?” Giggino— fired. But I had triggered him, already.
I was just happy to be back. It had been over twenty years. But my personality could cause me problems… upon entry, and I was assessing Joy, my mother, within me, I suppose, I don’t know, it was a mystery in fact. They called me “Meri,” as in goddamn Merry Christmas.
I didn’t speak Italian, so I was overly communicating, as they would, even, in trying to speak to me in Italian, so I ran over to the window to —
“You’re skinny, I am muscle, no, yes, how was your flight, where have you been? How are you making money? Eat, Maria, eat. AHHHH,” Diodora rang. “What the hell are you doing, goofy guitar playing man?” Carmine never moved his face, also strategic. This guy, his father indicated. “Why is she laughing?”
“TWEET TWEET,” Giggino made two little birds tweet-tweet in sweet little branches with his fat hands, hilarious. He rocked on his heels, snapped back at me, the alligator, with wide beady eyes. He could feel it. Carmine just shifted his eyes.
“Huh? You two tweet tweet,” he said, using a series of sounds to communicate that we speak a language that no one else understands. “Tweet tweet.” He didn’t like it, and he didn’t like feeling left out.
Out the window, Naples is a sport — I loved that about it.
To give a quick replay of what happened next—they told me I wasn’t who I was, formerly, because I didn’t do theater, because I didn’t have curly hair, and then, I remembered that I had forgotten I had curly hair because I wasn’t living at my house anymore when I was four…Giggino sort of treated me as if I were a baby, again, the food, the skinniness, he’s playing dad with me already… I had just gotten there…
BOOM— pasta first, then FISH, first buffalo mozzarella, first, these are just balls in buckets, we do not have special packaging here. They did it for me, because I always had to have one upon arrival—my favorite. Giggino undercut— “does food not have taste in America, how much is your rent.”
BOOM: fire: “DIED, FATHER DIED? Did he die Maria?”
He was assessing me, arms crossed, finding problems in me already, at his “bench,” or the radiator, to keep warm. His sons typically took their seats around him. “Why is everything wow with you…”
At the table, I never started “my story,” since I hate that phrase even now, with my father, which began shifting my focus back towards him when he didn’t really exist in the sex scandal fiasco until I came back here. Of course, they would lead with my father, but I wasn’t anticipating it.
I said, something about crazy, right? About how he died, chewing, though I cannot confirm, exactly, if the food had arrived yet, since a meal is a theater, and an event, so we stretch it out over time…of Alzheimer’s, though you cannot die from Alzheimer’s…
“ALZHEIMER?”
In Italian, it was funny.
“Si,” I said. “When?” Giggino was interrogating me, practically. Arms crossed.
“When I was ten…”
“This was my life,” I said. I made an explosion.
“Explosion Maria?”
Giggino pressed. “Everything exploded.”
“Tutto boom,” I said.
“Tutto boom,” he asked? “Tutto boom?”
It was funny. Imagine if someone said in a thick accent: “Everything boom, everything went boom.”
And now, we were in a cascade, “Tutto boom, Maria?” Diodora said. “Tutto boom…” Giggino looked over at his son. He wasn’t going to say it.
“I’m sorry…” I said…
Giggino squinted, Diodora shifted, Carmine — only his eyes — no one knew this word, knew why I was using it. “Excuse me? Why is she saying that?” Over to Carmine. He did not know, and he didn’t need to use words to communicate that.
I froze. “Piano piane,” Giggino said, “piano piane,” as in the instructions at the beginning of a score of music, how to play it, “softly softly,” he said. But the Neapolitan dialect is practically famous, in that, we don’t do endings —we elbow that shit right off, chomp, it depends. It’s unnecessary. So it’s piano piane.
I laughed, “piano piane,”
Giggino, hands behind his back, light on his heels, corrected me.
“Piano PIANO, Maria, piano piane,” he slipped it in.
Already, they didn’t believe that. I said it upon entry. He got diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when I was ten…though it was Parkinson’s first, I just didn’t feel like going into it because what did it have to do with anything? In the dark.