SHE NEVER KNEW WHEN he was gonna blow. The cap could have come off at any time.
It could have been the faucet dripping.
It could have been the clock ticking.
It could have been the cat licking.
How long before he would know?
She watched him read the Herald-News.
WANTED: Female Dancers for Coney Island Revue!
She watched him work in the yard tending the animals and sharpening his tools.
She watched him file his pitchfork and grease his long-handled hoe.
She watched him in his garden plot getting the ground ready for his goddamned fucking prizewinning tomatoes.
He doesn’t know.
He still doesn’t know.
She wanted to tell him. Yell it into the house and watch it ricochet around, knock the pictures off the walls, and blow the mice out of their holes.
I know what it means to be a woman! she wanted to scream. I have proof! And it’s growing inside me!
How long before he would know?
He must never know.
For four blissful weeks Bella had breakfast with Francis Anthony Mozzarelli almost every morning. She swore Lulu to secrecy and skipped across the street.
At first, when her monthly didn’t arrive, she thought nothing of it. Then she started vomiting. Every morning. Then every time she ate.
“Please God, please don’t let it be true!” she cried.
She vowed to never see Francis Anthony Mozzarelli again.
She avoided the puzzled boy like the plague.
She ran away from him when she saw him.
“Leave me the fuck alone, Francis Anthony Mozzarelli! Go away!”
But the young man chased and grabbed her. “I love you, Belladonna Marie Donato!”
“I don’t love you!”
“How can that be?”
“I’m in love with somebody else!”
“Who is it? I’ll kill him!”
Bella grabbed the first name that came into her head. “Terelli Lombardi!”
Francis burst out laughing. “That’s ridiculous! Terelli Lombardi doesn’t like girls!”
“Well, he does now!”
When the second month breezed by without so much as a tiny stain on Bella’s bloomers, her flesh froze.
Francis still hunted her down. Like a hound dog, he followed the scent of her tomato gravy. Then, like a phantom, he appeared. Behind a makeup display in S. S. Kresge. Next to a colorful pile of packaged wool in the yarn shop when she shoplifted for Terelli Lombardi. He appeared in the cow fields behind the factory and howled at night.
“Stop following me!” Bella yelled in the middle of Van Houten Avenue. “Stop standing in the goddamned cow fields! Stop with the fucking howling! If you don’t, my papa will shoot your balls off! And if he doesn’t, I will! I hate you, Francis Anthony Mozzarelli. And I never want to see you again!”
The look of heartbreak that ravaged the beautiful boy’s face was almost more than Bella could bear, but she stuck to her guns. She avoided him like the plague. Walked a different way to school every day.
“Why aren’t we taking the bus from Krueger Place?” Lulu complained.
Sitting in remedial math and grammar, Bella found herself staring into space.
“You look different,” Terelli Lombardi said one afternoon while the two of them were shoplifting their way through Rowe~Manse Emporium. “You’re putting on too much weight.”
She had to stop seeing her queer little friend too.
This pained her. But what could she do?
After a while, she stopped going to school. She stopped vomiting, but she couldn’t breathe the way she used to. She couldn’t sleep.
All she could do was eat and eat and eat.
She cooked like a demon.
Griddled trout.
Plum cakes.
Savory soups.
Sweet stews (pork, chicken, veal, beef).
Long links of hard salami sliced and fried. Spicy.
Tons and tons of homemade cavatelli (each little cradle of pasta about the size of the thing growing in her belly).
After she cooked everything in the house pantry, she ate her way through the jars and buckets and barrels and baskets stored in her papa’s basement sanctuary.
Pickled beets and carrots from Manny’s summer garden.
Autumn apples from the neighborhood trees.
Whole heads of garlic until she couldn’t breathe.
Raw onions until she couldn’t see.
“Jesus! You’re gettin’ as fat as one of Papa’s pigs!” Little Luigi screamed.
She took to wearing her red winter coat all day and all night to try and hide what was happening.
She tried like hell to avoid her papa too.
She stayed way out of his way.
“What’s for dinner?”
“Fix me a chop.”
“Sear me a steak.”
“Wash my feet.”
“Where the hell is she?”
Predawn hours found her dodging the long ray of light from his Big Beam beacon lamp. She hopped the factory’s back wall, stepped over the train tracks, slipped past the weasel packs, crept across the empty cow fields, and tip-toed through the moon-blue streets all the way to Krueger Place.
If she told Francis Anthony Mozzarelli she was carrying his baby, what would he say? Would his mamma shoot her out of her coat?
She could hear the old lady’s picture growling.
Too terrified to do anything, she stood shivering at the bus stop for hours, the little cavatelli nestled in her belly.
Two hearts beating.
Both of them calling, begging, praying for Jesus to save them.
She did this every night until, on the first warm day of spring, a knock at the Donatos’ front door sent her flying up to the eaves. She was furious that Francis was seeing where she lived. From the girls’ bedroom window, she watched the young papa of her blooming baby pick a white rose from one of Manny’s prized bushes and take a tender sniff. When he looked up, she snapped the curtains closed.
Did you see that?
I sure did!
She persuaded Luigi to answer the door. It cost her two dirty nickels and an entire homemade ricotta and salami pie.
“Bella told me to tell you she ain’t here,” Luigi said. “She told me to tell you she hates you and she never wants to see you again.”
A single petal from the flower in Francis’s hand spiraled down to the porch floor.
Like a fat ash from Pompeii.
“We’re not allowed to pick those, you know.”
Francis handed Luigi the rose. “Will you tell your sister Francis Anthony Mozzarelli came by? Tell her I have to see her again. Tell her I love her.” Luigi had never seen a grown boy cry. “Tell her if she doesn’t see me again, I’ll die.”
When Luigi slammed the door closed, Francis dropped to his knees. He grabbed the hair on his head and clutched the scalloped neck of his guinea T. “Bella!” he screamed. He ripped the shirt open, exposing his gorgeous Jesus nipples. His broken heart was bleeding. “Belladonna Marie! Please don’t leave me!”
“He really said he loved me?” Bella asked Luigi when he handed her the plucked flower.
Luigi didn’t say anything, but he knew something horrible was happening.
For several weeks he refused to go to school.
Instead, he clung to the tattered hem of his sister’s coat. He tried like hell to climb under it until it was time to go to bed. And even then. He started calling her his Bellamamma again and helped her with the cooking. He cranked open cans, popped open jars, and chopped vegetables. “I can do it! I can do it!” he always said. He even took over washing their papa’s feet for his sister. “Let me,” he said when Manny called for Bella.
“Where the fuck is she?”
“Bella’s busy.”
“Bella’s cooking.”
“Bella’s sick.”
“Bella’s sleeping.”
The first time Luigi washed his papa’s feet, he almost fainted. “Jesus! Your frickin’ toes stink!”
There was a brief tussle.
“Holy cow! You don’t have to clobber me!”
When the truant officer showed up and Luigi was dragged back to school (kicking and screaming), Bella decided the time had come to tell Francis Anthony Mozzarelli she was carrying his baby. She hoped he was still alive.
“Where is he? Is he dead?” Bella asked Mary Mozzarelli when the old woman told Bella he wasn’t home anymore.
“Of course he ain’t dead.”
Bella could smell the old woman’s sour tomato gravy. It wafted out of the house loaded with the skunky scent of rotten jealousy.
“I really need to see him.” Bella’s hand rested over her blooming belly. “It’s an emergency.”
The old woman smiled like a cat with a stomach full of dead rat. “You think you’re the only little whore who rang my bell with a belly full of lies?”
“I’m only tryin’ to do what’s right.”
“Well, you’ve come to the wrong house. Goodbye.”
“Francis!” Bella screamed after the door was slammed in her face. “Francis Anthony Mozzarelli! I’m gonna have your baby!”
The door swung back open, and the old woman raised a glinting pistol. “I’m gonna count to three …”
Bella spun in her galoshes and ran like the wind, the old woman’s laughter chasing her all the way back through the pointy gates of the Robertson Scale factory.
For days she was unable to get out of bed, every muscle dog-tired, every joint unable to bend.
“Please God, don’t let me turn into my mamma,” she begged.
As depressed days stumbled into depressed weeks, her body really started changing.
Her breasts swelled like two blowfish.
Her nipples turned purple and pined for something to feed.
She itched in the oddest of places.
Her shoes no longer fit her feet.
Her brain felt like it was melting.
The cavatelli blooming in her belly started talking.
“It won’t be long now!” the rotten little thing teased.
The skin on her body prickled. It felt pickled. She couldn’t imagine carrying another human being inside her belly.
“I want you to leave,” she whispered. “Please leave.”
Aren’t you falling in love with me?
“No.”
Not even a little?
“Nope. Not even the tiniest bit.”
Will you ever?
“Not if I can fucking help it.”
At night, and especially during the day, she had the strangest dreams. Whales riding enormous swells of salty seas. Giant walls of green, briny broth swelling up to the heavens, reaching to find where God might be.
“Francis Anthony Mozzarelli,” she prayed to the ridiculous painting while kneeling in Saint Anthony’s. “Francis Anthony Mozzarelli!” she cried to his broad shoulders, to the stars dancing around his beautiful head. “There’s a baby growing inside me and it’s yours, Francis Anthony Mozzarelli!”
As sloppy spring crested into early summer and Manny Donato’s garden started sprouting, petal upon petal opened inside of Bella like a monstrous rose blooming. Her belly was mounding into a volcano. She was churning and bubbling. A musky cloud of fertile perfume wafted out from under her coat as she waddled around the neighborhood. Hot lava rocks. Pumice. Ash. Volcanic gasses. Young men started chasing after her.
(But not Francis.)
First one.
Then four.
Then a dozen.
Then more.
She thought about letting one of them do to her what Francis did. Maybe it would relieve some of the pressure. Kill the baby.
She tried to get rid of the little thing herself by douching with diluted Lysol. She drank large doses of Marchman’s castor oil until she hocked like the Italian men that peppered the streets pitching pennies and tossing bocce.
“You’re an oily girl!” Guiseppi Sparza slurred after her down Van Houten Avenue one afternoon. “But let me tell you something!” he sloshed. “The guppy uppy inside you won’t die! No matter what you do, it’ll grow until you explode!”
Bella imagined the little thing blasting out of her like an alien spaceship in one of the Jewel Box Theater’s Saturday-morning serials, like a molten cannonball destroying everything.
“Mamma, I’m gonna have a baby,” she confessed while bathing Lucia one stormy morning.
Thunder rumbled as Bella grabbed her mamma by the wrist and planted the woman’s wet hand on her swollen belly.
Lucia just smiled and stared into oblivion.
“Mamma, say something.”
More rain.
More lightning.
The little thing in Bella’s belly started dancing.
The volcano was preparing to erupt.
And Bella was drowning.
“Mamma, speak to me. Please …”