She requires fortitude and self-preservation.
November in Alderwood, our south Etobicoke neighbourhood overwhelmed with charcoal grey. The cinderblock-coloured sky matched the cement sidewalks. The horizon disappeared, and we floated against a backdrop of drab and dreary, a spatial distortion that made it difficult to distinguish up from down.
My parents, in the suburban language of the 1980s, hated each other’s guts. Late into the night, they bickered, and I begged them both to stop.
“Can’t you hear your own daughter asking you to be quiet?”
“Tell me who you were with today. Was it that whore Giuseppina? What motive would you have for chasing another woman? With me waiting at home, making your dinner, you chase the tail of a fat old bitch.”
“You’re insane. I work hard to put food on the table and keep the roof over the head of crazy woman. And this is the thanks I get. Not even the chance to rest my head in my own home.
“You want gratitude? I’ll show you and your slut gratitude. You start with me and I’ll finish you. Understand me? I’ll finish you. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be a widow before I ever come close to getting divorced.”
“There’s no talking reason to you. You’re impossible.”
My mother’s temper would propel her out of bed at night. She vented by slamming all the cupboards and doors, breaking through the plaster to release the people she heard living in the walls.
In the mornings, my father would inspect the damage and grumble to himself. “This is no life for a human being. This is no life.”
The first time she broke all the mirrors in the upstairs bathroom, we had no warning. A screech jolted me out of bed. My heart lurched with panic. The wall on the other side of my bed shook as my mother repeatedly slammed the metre-long, mirrored medicine cabinet until the glass shattered and sprinkled the floor with jagged pieces.
“Ma che fai? Che ti pozzone chiede—” Dad waved me back to bed. “Leave her. Don’t go near her right now.”
In silhouette, I couldn’t make out her distorted features, but I knew them well enough to picture: a contorted mouth, flared nostrils and flinty eyes. I pulled the blankets over my head and prayed she wouldn’t kill us while we slept.
He replaced the mirrors dozens of times—if the seven years of bad luck was true, it would take lifetimes for my mother to pay off the debt incurred to misfortune. Then he gave up and went for the quick fix. I put on makeup using a giant shard adhered to the wall with crazy glue.
I was thirteen, my mother thirty-three, my father forty-four, and we were all miserable. After a Sunday that had yawned and spit out an afternoon of bowling on television, we visited my Aunt Angelina and Uncle Mauro in Mississauga. On the Gardiner Expressway, my father sped along within the speed limit while cars droned past as if they were participating in the Indy 500. My mother muttered under her breath, accusing my father of having multiple affairs.
“But why? Tell me why you did it?” she asked over and over.
My father caught my eye in the rearview mirror, we were both in the habit of ignoring my mother’s words, but trained to listen for a change in pitch, in timber, a signal switch in tone that acted as the warning bell. He let out a tired sigh. “Are you crazy? Or trying to drive me crazy?”
“He’s right. Ma, please, give it a rest.”
My mother half turned in her seat to face me. “Who was talking to you, sporcaccione? Fate i cazzi tuoi. This doesn’t concern you. Zingara.” She gave me her Medusa look, the one that could freeze water in an instant. The look usually left my father so stupefied I believed she could turn all men into stone. Her eyes acted as a sensor alarm for me, but I failed to notice in time.
She leaned sideways then lunged forward, grabbed the steering wheel and yanked hard. Our car swerved into the next lane. I screamed. My father swore as he fought to regain control of the vehicle. We were the road traffic sign in action: a slippery car warning for everyone else on the highway, leaving a trail of wavy lines as my dad scuffled for the steering wheel. Horns blared from angry commuters.
My mother let go and laughed. Not a maniacal shriek of amusement, not the cackle she could let out. She guffawed like a person who’d heard a brilliant joke.
If anyone in the cars whizzing past had looked out a side window, they would have seen me bent over, hands protecting my head, braced for impact.
Years later in yoga class, lying stretched out on a mat after a vigorous class, I realised I’d been holding the same pose for years—whether I went for a walk, sat for a meal or lounged on a couch watching television—my spine curved with fear. Even when I slept, my body curled on one side, hands tucked under my chin, half fetal and half fearful—forever seeking calm and attempting to rest in the crash position.
The following November, another wintry morning during grade nine, my high school debut, I sat on our. top step lacing up my running shoes. The Evans Avenue bus left every half hour.
My mother shouted, “Wait—” she climbed the stairs, wiped her hands on her apron and removed it. She fixated on my notebooks, and frowned. That gorgon gaze again, the red sky at morning stare.
“I’m driving you to school today.”
I balked. “Dad left you the car?”
“I’m going to pick it up now from your father. Then I’m driving you to school.” In the mirror behind the closet door, she primped her hair off her forehead and smoothed down the sides.
“But you’ll make me late before you even get there.”
I studied her face. This day would unfurl into madness.
She swapped her house slippers for pumps and put on her coat. “When I tell you to wait, you wait. You do what I say, and you do everything I say. Understand?”
She slammed the door shut behind her and locked the bolt. Insult to the injury that was surely coming.
I sat still and cursed my lack of courage, frustrated that I couldn’t will myself to get up and leave. Maybe when I came home she’d have forgotten. But more likely she would drive to my high school and search the hallways until she found me. Then she’d drag me out the front entrance by my hair.
In middle school, she had once come up behind me and had attacked me in front of a group of gape-mouthed girls, and the memory was still fresh. She towed me backwards while a boy standing with us yelled, “Hey—you can’t do that.” He turned to the others, “She can’t do that. That’s abuse.”
I held up my hand to stop him from helping, from interfering. “Don’t. It will be worse if I don’t give in.” I usually capitulated. Nothing could tame her Category Five fury—no seeking shelter, waiting for the storm to subside and hoping the house didn’t cave in. As my world expanded, farther from her scope of control, she amped up her frustration.
That damp morning, so foggy and overcast, I wanted to disappear into the heavy mist outside and never return. I wondered where I could go that she wouldn’t find me. Where could I hide? What would happen to my father? I sat and listened to the clock pendulum swaying, the minute hand ticking until it struck eight o’clock. The wind-up whir, the constant clicking noise. I hated that grandfather clock, a wedding gift to my mother from her godparents.
By 8:30 I thought I would do it, I would go. I sat and chewed my fingernails and the fleshy part of my thumb. At 8:45 I heard the car pull up in the driveway. I ran outside.
“Do you even know where to go?”
“State zitte. Get in.”
We stayed silent for the brief ten-minute drive. I fumed and hoped she’d stay on the correct side of the yellow dotted line. She’d learned to drive when I was six: at a bend in the road on Horner Avenue beyond Mimico Correctional Centre, she drove us toward oncoming traffic. I cringed and reached for the dashboard, too small to make contact. She swatted my arms down. I squirmed and turned sideways in my seat to avoid the head-on collision. Shocked drivers blared their horns and skidded out of the way. Cars pulled over to the side of the road, and startled men exited their vehicles to shout at my mother as we whipped past.
She pulled into the high-school parking lot, and I slinked out without saying a word. I signed in late at the front office and slid quietly into history class.
On her way home, she rear-ended a truck stopped at a red light at Kipling and Evans Avenues, less than a kilometre away from the factory where my dad worked.
That night we ate dinner in silence. I sat with my Archie comic in front of my plate, a habit that annoyed both my parents. I pointed out that since they rarely spoke at the table except to argue, I could read instead of being asked to referee the battle. The comics worked as a barrier, a screen that shielded me from observing my mother, who allowed tomato sauce to drip down her chin onto the tablecloth or her plate. She never wiped her face.
Once my father called the spectacle disgusting. For weeks after, my mother stood and ate from a pot over the sink. When she returned to the table, she doubled down on her atrocious manners, stuffing her face until her cheeks bulged like a chipmunk’s, speaking with a full mouth and speckling our food with her wet crumbs. I’d endured having my face cleaned by her spit in a handkerchief, and she wouldn’t touch a napkin until she was finished shovelling food into her mouth.
After another meal of greasy eggplant and burnt ground beef, my father announced that he would go for an espresso. Within minutes of stepping outside, he rushed back.
“Lucie!” He bellowed from the side door. “What the hell happened to the car?”
I put down my reading material. “What happened?”
“What business is it of yours?” To my father, she called, “What? What’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter? The car is smashed. What’s the matter—you think I’m an idiot. Come out here and tell me what happened. Don’t make me come to you or you’ll regret it when I call the police and tell them to take you to jail. Come see what you did.”
I gathered my comics and went to my room.
I heard my father shouting from the garage. He came back inside and asked me to join him at the upstairs dining table. Charged with the role of mediator, marriage counsellor and quasi-wife, I ended up as the sounding board for all my father’s questions and concerns. My mother held zero interest in solving any household problems, balancing a budget or maintaining the vegetable garden. Adult conversations occurred without her input. Guidance duty exhausted me: I felt old and weary, never wise. Exasperated, I trudged down the hall.
Ignoring my father’s agitated state, Mom offered to make us all espressos. She insisted that she had bumped the front fender on re-entering the garage. She referred to the damage—the metal crunched and fanned like an accordion—as a scratch. A scrape that would cost over a thousand dollars at an auto body repair shop.
My father removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know what now. We should be call the police?”
“Yes. We should.”
“Why? It’s a scratch.”
“We have to call them and report there’s been an accident.”
“You’re a snake—”
“Fine. And you’re a terrible driver.”
“You’d call your daughter a snake? You, a beast born to destroy and cause ruin—do you have venom coursing through your veins instead of blood?”
“Papa, don’t—” The last time he had defended me (and then left to hang out at the billiard club), she had punched me in the ribs so hard I sported a bruise the size of a saucer.
My mother left in a huff to evening Mass at St. Ambrose. Perhaps she could petition the patron saint of automobile accidents.
My father shouted after her, “Now you pray? Look at this,” my father jerked his chin at her retreating figure. “The devil wants to attend church. Unbelievable. I don’t know what to do with her. We should call the police and make the report.”
I stood up, walked over to the rotary dial on the wall and called 9-1-1.
The officers arrived within twenty minutes. They had been looking for my mother since morning. She had struck a truck on her route home after dropping me off at school. The driver crossed the intersection and pulled over to the side of the road to wait for my mother, but she drove on past. In the fog, the trucker couldn’t make out the license plate details.
One of the officers, heavy-set with a handlebar moustache, questioned my father about the time of the accident, making it sound as though we had purposely been trying to hide the car.
“Why did it take you so long to call us, Mr. Fantet?”
“It’s Fantetti,” I corrected. A tight constricted sensation clutched my chest. It wasn’t right, my father being treated poorly, being treated like a liar, a suspect. I wanted to tell the officer that he didn’t know who he was dealing with. My deeply religious dad and Mr. moral compass, always the first to lend a hand. He lived and acted according to his preferred philosophy that we were all put here on Earth to help each other. My father was disgusted by cheaters and con artists, by men like his brother-in-law who bilked the government out of every penny he could.
What kind of detective ability did this officer have? Couldn’t he see the man who sat before him? A man who had nothing but praise for his adopted country; a socialist in Canada, a communist in Italy, a citizen passionate about politics who had never missed voting in elections at any level of government. A man who didn’t have to think about doing the right thing because no other option ever occurred to him.
He was the highest-paid butcher at his company and still laboured diligently to bring in the union. He was the shop steward until he took on bigger responsibilities in the company, an amiable man whom people loved. At the factory, they said, “If you can’t get along with Mike, you can’t get along with anybody.” My father got along with everyone except my mother. The officer’s tone suggested my father was a mobster attempting to dupe the local sheriff.
“Yes, yes, you right. You right. I should be call before. I was finding out after I coming home, maybe two hours before now.”
“That’s not an explanation, sir.”
“No, no. You right, you right.”
“How is that not an explanation? He didn’t know. Then he did. When he did, we called you and now you know too.”
“Eufemia,” my father’s forehead furrowed. In Italian he said, “Don’t get upset. Don’t get angry.”
The second officer, the younger one, piped up, “Why didn’t you report this earlier sir?”
“Are you for real? I told you why—you found out right after we did.”
“Chickpea—is okay.” He turned to the officers, “My wife, she makes trouble, but my daughter is difference. She likes to help. She’s a good girl.”
The officers explained they would be filing another report, and offered a mini lecture on the law and how the legal system could penalize hit-and-runs, how fortunate it was that my mother had not hurt or injured anyone.
“Yes, thanks God.” My father nodded. “Thanks God.”
“You should have called us sooner,” the second officer repeated.
“Okay! We get it. We’re late. So now what? Tell us, so now, what?” My jaw clenched and unclenched as I over-enunciated every word. A nerve ending pulsated behind my right ear, and my face warmed with shame. I stared at the officers, dared them to use the “Let me explain this to you simple-like” tone that they had used with my dad. As if he was stupid. As if he wasn’t answering their questions as clearly as he could. As if his accented English was an alien language spoken in another galaxy.
My father unclasped his hands and raised his right inches off the table, palm down. He flapped his fingers slowly, and subtly shook his head. He wanted me to stay calm.
“No. I’m handling this, Dad. So now, what?”
The one with the bulging belly ignored me and spoke to Dad instead. “Where’s your wife, sir?”
“She went to church. She be come home in a little bit. You want wait? I can take some food for you? My daughter can be make the coffee for you?”
“We’ll come back later.” Mr. Paunch took a final look around.
“Up to you. Is okay if you want to stay.”
They left, sauntering out through the side door instead of making a spectacle at the front.
We said nothing to my mother when she came back from church. My father watched the grandfather clock, and I kept checking my wristwatch as it got later and later with no sign of the officers.
They returned at a quarter to midnight, three hours after we’d all gone to bed. I let the officers in while my mother got dressed in a housecoat. She offered her fresh-baked taralli biscuits. My father told her to stop offering nonsense dessert and insisted the officers try his homemade prosciutto. Within minutes, the table was covered with ricotta pie, soppresatta, a platter of Italian cheeses mixed with mortadella and capicollo and a bottle of homemade wine.
The officers put up a good fight but gave in when they realized my parents would not stop offering them food and drink, answering every question with “Please, you eat something, is good for you.”
Every time one of the officers questioned my mother, she burst out laughing. “I no know.” She shook her head coyly, shrugged and giggled. She was on her best behaviour, an act that didn’t seem to convince the officers.
This second visit, they treated my father politely, with respect. Mr. Moustache observed my mother carefully while the other officer—the cute, clean-shaven, blue-eyed one who I could never forgive for coming back so late as to catch me in my pink flannel pyjamas—asked my parents different versions of the same questions. My father answered in a logical, sensible manner. Questions about when my mother arrived at his factory, how long she had been driving, when he first noticed the smashed front fender.
“Mrs. Fantetti, do you understand how serious this is? You can’t leave the scene of an accident, ma’am.” The older officer studied my mother’s expressions, her body language. He rarely looked elsewhere.
My mother was under observation, and for once she chafed at the attention.
“Che ditte?” My mother threw herself into the part of misunderstood immigrant.
“Tu sai che ditte. S’acce che tu capische.” I refused to participate in her charade. She understood everything the police asked her. My mother needed a buffer between psychosis and reality, not a translator.
Her soap opera antics were amateur theatre. “I no know. I no speaking good the English.” In Italian she said, “You can’t trust a man with a moustache.” The final word she pronounced in English. She wanted to watch me scramble into peacemaker mode whenever she offended people or put me in an uncomfortable spot.
A look passed between the officers.
I faked a yawn. It was midnight on a school night. “She’s admiring your moustache.”
My mother scowled at me. Remembering she was in trouble, she brightened at the officers. “You want caffè? I make.” She patted her hair, smoothing a wayward strand.
My father lowered his head, humiliated at hosting this audience of authority figures. “You see what I have to be live with?”
“Shut up, you stupid. I marry bad husband. No understand nothing. I prepare espresso for everybody. Eufemia, take cups, bring from kitchen.”
The older officer pushed back in his chair and stood. “No. No coffee. We have what we need to file the report. Mrs. Fantetti—”
“Lucy. My friend call me Lucy. Now we friendly.”
“Mrs. Fantetti. You’ve had a driver’s license for ten years. You should realize you committed a crime. People go to prison for what you did today.”
I visualized my mother in the black-and-white striped uniform of a cartoon convict: a comforting thought. Perhaps the Almighty had finally heard my appeals for assistance.
“Mr. Fantetti, I suggest that you take your wife to see a doctor—a specialist—probably a psychiatrist. Her behaviour isn’t normal for someone in her situation.”
The younger officer nodded his agreement. Both looked stern.
Less than fifteen minutes in the same room as my mother, and both officers advise she see a psychiatrist. Fifteen minutes. I had been with her for almost fifteen years, and no one had ever made that suggestion before.
In the pause, I examined the lines of my palm. Not wanting to make eye contact with either of my parents, avoiding the police entirely, I pressed my thumbnail hard into a ridge, and grimaced.
“Thanks you. Very much. I’m sorry we meeting this way, but you was helping us very nice.” My dad led the officers to the front door. I followed, watching them descend the veranda stairs. Snow fell in a swirling pattern with enormous snowflakes landing on the officers’ uniforms and caps.
The night bore a bone-chilling cold that lingered. Winter stormed on, bringing a record-breaking day of bitter cold in December and harsh storms that caused thousands of motorists to stall. Some days it seemed the sun would never break through the oppressive cloud carpet again.
Three weeks later, at an office in the Bloor West Village neighbourhood, a psychiatrist diagnosed my mother with paranoid schizophrenia.