On Sundays after church, they greeted each other with outstretched arms, sometimes kisses, and patted me on the head as they joked, “Graziano, your little Angelina is growing like a broad bean! She’ll be taller than you by the time she’s in first grade.”
I smiled back at them, but I wasn’t interested in their chatter, their mouths moving somewhere at the end of long legs. Instead, I stared, mesmerized by their hairy knuckles, their pointy, shined-for-Sunday shoes, and the holes in the smoke rings that curled from their lips. When I wasn’t busy staring, I was sticking my tongue in the froth of the caffe latte Babbo had ordered for me. He would look at me fondly; he didn’t care that I wasn’t a boy—I was his first-born and he was proud to have me by his side. This was our Sunday ritual.
Every Sunday morning I sat in front of the mirror of my mother’s vanity and winced as she combed my hair back, pulling it into a tight ponytail on top of my head that spilled over like a fountain. “Don’t fidget, cara,” she would chirp in her Topo Gigio voice as I wriggled in my chair.
“But why can’t you make me look like Jackie O. or Patty Duke?” I pleaded with her. I wanted to be all coiffed and pouffy and North American, like the women on the covers of the fashion magazines in the hair salon. She and my father cut and styled hair for a living. My father did classic cuts and haircuts for dead people in caskets, while my mother was decidedly more experimental—incorporating Styrofoam balls into big hair at every opportunity. They had taken their diplomas together after arriving here in the new country, and had proudly opened Graziano’s Unisex Hair Salon in 1958, two years before I was born.
All the other men in the community worked in the steel plant or drove vans with names like luigi’s roofing and fixing on the sides. They teased my father because he had a woman’s job, although secretly they were jealous that he got to spend his days running his hands through the hair of other men’s wives. And I knew other men’s wives enjoyed his hands because I heard them moaning “Oh, Graziano” while I loitered in the shop after school, flipping through the pictures in film magazines.
“Stop fussing, Angelina,” my mother would say, wrenching my dark hair backward with a brush. “I can’t make you look like them because you’re Italian,” she said, as if that made any sense. But “because you’re Italian” would have to suffice as an explanation for the reason I was “different” for years to come.
After my hair was glued into place and the pink frilly dress pulled down over my long green-bean body, Daddy and I and Nonna left for church. Ma had gone to the early mass, so we left her in the kitchen rolling out dough the length of the table, humming Frank Sinatra songs to herself. In the cathedral, the priest would blather on in Latin, which no one understood, and I would stare up at the fresco of the people burning in hell.
Then the angels would begin to sing—my father among them. Nonna and I always sat together on the same splintery pew where I could have a good view of Babbo singing in the choir. I watched the men’s mouths move, their lips wrapping around sacred hymns, but it was Daddy alone who sung the love songs of angels to me from above. I would mouth the words back to him: “Oh, spiritus sanctus. Oh, Daddy, you are so handsome. Perhaps after dinner you will let me stand on your feet and waltz me around the living room.”
It was right there on the splintery pew one particular Sunday that I determined I would be a famous singer when I grew up. And every Sunday after that I affirmed it through prayer: “Oh, spiritus sanctus. I will be a famous singer one day. Please, God, give food to the poor people, and take care of Nonno in heaven, and let me be a famous singer one day. Not an angel singing from above, but a rock ’n’ roll star right here on earth. I will not be Italian any more. I will be international. I will tell my public that I was born in the middle of the ocean and I will be loved.”
In real life, outside my family, I wasn’t loved. I was smelly. I was olive-oil lipped with pungent garlic emanating from dark skin. I was a girl with a grease-stained bagged lunch of veal scaloppine and grilled eggplant. I was a wop. I didn’t know what that was, but I knew Paolo in my class was one, too, because they called him that. And my parents. And Paolo’s parents. We were all wops, which seemed to mean people who raised pigeons and grew arugula in the backyard, and ate lasagna for dinner instead of Kraft Dinner or Hamburger Helper. I wanted to eat Kraft Dinner and Chef Boyardee and Cheez Whiz on Wonder Bread but my mother wouldn’t let me.
Wop was different.
It didn’t occur to me until much later that wop wasn’t the only difference. Even in the wop world, my family was different: my dad had a woman’s job, and I was the only girl in the mafioso espresso bar on Sundays after church. I watched cigarette butts fall to the floor and pointy toes grind them into the linoleum. Some of the other men brought their teenage sons, all pimply, with erratic facial hair, and gave them cigarettes and said, “Don’t tell your mother,” as the boys coughed their way through smoke they weren’t enjoying but wanted to.
I asked Babbo why I couldn’t have a cigarette, too.
“Because you’re too young,” was his first explanation. “Because you’re a girl,” was his second.
So some things were as they were because I was Italian, and the rest were as they were because I was a girl. And then, of course, I grew up some more and discovered that it was even more complicated. Seems that’s the way of life—just when you think you’ve got it sorted out, there’s yet another layer of complication.
I was happier after sixth grade, when I found myself surrounded by other wop girls in the School of Our Heavenly Father on Pendulum Road. We traded rease-stained brown bags. Stuffed olives for melanzana, biscotti for tiramisù. Competed for who could hike her green kilt up higher, closest to the crotch of her white-cotton-to-her-navel underwear. Sometimes I won, and for that, I would get respect from the other girls and glaring admonition from the sisters. Occasionally, I would get a detention. I told my parents that I had to stay late for basketball practice. I wasn’t exactly on the basketball team, but when I could, I would observe the senior girls’ practice.
I loved to watch long, tall movements across the floor. I loved to watch girls get mad at each other—so much so that I would follow them into the shower room once the mock game was over to tell the captain, Mary Catherine, that she had been absolutely right, that was a foul, but I would lose my words and my nerve as soon as she stripped her uniform off. She kept talking to me through her nakedness, though, telling me it was nice to have a fan club, that boys at mixed schools had cheerleaders, and that being at an all-girls school was a real drag.
I didn’t really think it was such a drag, and I didn’t really mind detention either, because it was presided over by Sister Faith Camilleri, who appeared to be a hard and crusty woman but actually had a soft amaretto interior. Only I could see it, though, taste it on my tongue. The other girls called her Sister Fart the Crustacean and said she was better off taking a vow of chastity than ever attempting anything involving sex. She could be hard as a ruler, but I took to saving her the clementines from my lunch, and slowly she melted—not exactly like butter, more like a candle; a slow drip, spreading her wax in a big puddle before me, talking to me about scripture and asking me why I couldn’t be just a little more virtuous when I clearly had a brain in my body.
I couldn’t say, “But then I couldn’t offer you oranges and sit with you after school pretending to do my homework while I write song lyrics and doodle lewd pictures in my notebook.” I couldn’t say, “Because I like this vice more than virtue. Because I like to have my skirt hiked up to my crotch and feel the wind flirt against my bare thighs, and wear tie-dyed vests over the white shirt my mother has laboriously starched and ironed. Because I’m going to be a famous rock ’n’ roll star.” I wanted to ask her whether she understood that “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” but I knew I couldn’t dare; I knew she thought she was free.
I believed I was, but I didn’t understand why the rest of the world wasn’t. So that’s why I picked abortion as the topic for my presentation in Grade 9 religious ethics class. Our teacher, Sister Phillipa Neary, an acne-faced, nervous novice who’d clearly committed herself to virginity long before she’d ever known about the concept, was not impressed.
I was all for proposing the provocative: Why shouldn’t a woman have a choice? What if she had been raped? A deathly hush overtook the room. I wanted to shout, “Come on, girls! This is a debate!” but no one appeared to be rising to the bait.
I thought I’d liven it up then with some dramatic framing; I was, after all, going to be a famous media personality. It was a beautiful spring day, warm sun pouring through the window—I would just move me and my provocative stance to the sympathetic backdrop and let them forget my words if they refused to understand them. I’d dazzle them with my fabulous stage presence instead.
In front of the window, I gesticulated wildly. “Choice,” I said, inviting them, any of them, to respond. “What does it mean to have a choice? Are we free agents? Do we possess free will? How do we reconcile free will with a Catholic lifestyle?”
Deadly silence greeted me in return. “But what if a woman is raped?!” I shouted, flailing my arms and, suddenly—God alone knows how—smacking the Virgin Mary in the midriff and sending her flying, backward out the open window. Horror struck the room. I turned in shock to watch our holy sister fly out into the gorgeousness of the spring day. Silently, I wished her a good flight. “Good for you, Mary, stuck for centuries in that fixed mask, finally tasting the sweet salt of dangerous wind on your lips.” Oh, but then I heard the crash. Mary’s freedom was short-lived. I’d forgotten that she was only a lady made out of clay, and she smashed into a gazillion pieces, courtesy of me and my solo pro-choice rally.
Oops.
Every day for the next three months ended in detention. Every day I told Sister Faith that it hadn’t been intentional. I mean, I fundamentally believed—and I still do—that we all should be able to make our own choices, and that means without pressure, or having someone else literally push us over the edge. And I meant it. Even the Virgin Mary. I think Sister Faith understood me the first time I said it, but she nevertheless let me natter on and absolve myself in the way that I thought I had to. I blessed her for that. And then \I asked Father-through-the-little-latticed-window for forgiveness for my sinful thoughts about what she looked like in her underwear.
But then the end of the year came, and Sister Big Cheese, the principal of the school, said, “I suggest you find yourself a place in another school for next September.” I suppose this was diplomatic. I mean, she spoke my language, said it in such a way as to imply that I had a choice about where I did Grade 10. But really, I think it’s because my father was doing her—I mean her hair. He did all the sisters—and God knows even a nun is vain enough to want a good coif under her habit.
Whatever the reason, she didn’t tell my parents, and I was grateful for that. I seized the opportunity for freedom, but not without a provocative jab. “I’ve been looking for mixed-sex opportunities,” I said, thanking her. “My parents will be so glad that you’ve suggested this.”
And secretly they were. My father had been worrying about my fascination with women’s basketball and hoping that I’d become an adolescent girl he had reasons to ground. He wanted to yell at me about boys calling at ten o’clock at night and pulling up on the curb in their fathers’ Monte Carlos, and in an all-girls Catholic school, I wasn’t giving him much opportunity. Unfortunately, though, mixed school gave him more reasons for the concerns he didn’t want and fewer reasons for the concerns that he, as patriarch, wanted. The girls here wore what they wanted to—or at least they did so during the day, before changing behind trees back into the conservative clothes they’d left their houses wearing in the morning.
I brought up the topic of the pill not to horrify my parents but to say without saying that I had a crush on Mary Lennox, who was on the pill, and I wanted to be just like her. My father seized upon this and threatened to get out his belt. My mother calmed him down and said, “Angelina, good Catholic girls are not supposed to know what sex is.” Secretly, though, my father was conflicted by the fact that he was pleased that I had some interest in what girls did with boys. I was only interested in prevention, though. Preventing what girls did with boys. Preventing Mary from doing anything with a boy.
I continued going to confession because I did not think girls should have sex with boys. I confessed that I had sinned that week by drinking chocolate milk one night after dinner. Father-through-the-little-latticed-window congratulated me. Told me I was a good girl. Asked me whether I had ever thought of the sisterhood. I told him, proudly, that I’d been thinking of little else for years.