My mother needed something to do. Fritz was in school full time and I had started preschool—only a few hours in the morning, but it still left her with too much time on her hands. She didn’t like being at loose ends.
My grandparents were on the board of Booth Memorial Hospital, which was run by the Salvation Army, and my grandmother donated money to the hospital’s Women’s Auxiliary. The hospital was only a fifteen-minute drive from Jamaica, so, already familiar with the organization through fundraisers and luncheons she’d attended, Mom joined the Women’s Auxiliary and began volunteering several hours a week in the afternoons.
Mrs. Lombardi, a widow in the neighborhood, had started to babysit some of the neighborhood kids as a way to supplement her income. Her husband had died recently, leaving her with debt and five children, two of whom were still under eighteen. The Lombardis lived a couple of blocks away from us on a dead-end street in a converted two-family house right next to an overgrown section of the park. A few days a week, after picking me up from preschool, my mother dropped me off there. Sometimes there were a couple of other kids around my age, but usually it was just me and Mrs. Lombardi until her teenagers Antonio and Teresa got home from high school. I rarely saw the two oldest daughters, even though Angela, an already divorced bookkeeper, lived in the attic, and Maria, a junior at Queens College, lived in the basement. Luca was a firefighter who had graduated from high school a year earlier. He still lived at home when he wasn’t at the fire station and, despite his job, was still a big kid struggling to grow a mustache.
The Lombardi house always smelled of oregano and garlic. When it was just Mrs. Lombardi and me, I stayed with her in the gloomy kitchen, which had been painted a greyish green, where on rainy days it felt like we were underwater. She lifted me onto the center island and I perched there and chatted with her while she cooked.
The best days were when she made meatballs. Once she added the ground beef, bread crumbs, grated parmesan, eggs, parsley, garlic, and pepper to a dented stainless-steel prep bowl, she rose onto her toes and drove both hands into the bowl as if propulsion were an essential ingredient to get the mixing started. I watched mesmerized as the meat slid through her fingers and the eggs melded with everything else until they seemed to disappear. What most amazed me was watching her roll the resulting mixture into perfect spheres with the practiced hands of an artisan.
When she turned to the stove and placed the olive oil to heat in an enormous and battered old skillet, I skimmed the remnants of raw ingredients from the side of the bowl with my finger and licked it clean.
When the oil in the pan began to ripple, Mrs. Lombardi helped me jump down from the island. I stood next to her as she placed each meatball delicately in the skillet and watched as the oil sizzled and jumped. When they were done cooking, she placed them on paper towels she’d laid on the counter, and as soon as they’d cooled down, she let me have one.
I preferred to be alone with her, there in the kitchen where she taught me about the different kinds of pastas or showed me, step by step, how to make Italian bread from scratch. Mrs. Lombardi seemed sad sometimes, but I was comfortable with sadness and knew when to let the quiet settle between us.
Sometimes she watched other kids in the neighborhood. Annie Bea and Barb were there more than anyone else. If it rained, we stayed in the small front room just off the foyer where Mrs. Lombardi kept stacks of board games, like Don’t Break the Ice, Candyland, and the extra game of Trouble that Mrs. Kohner had given us for the second Christmas in a row. Otherwise, we were outside playing freeze tag or Mother, may I in the driveway.
On days when I was the only one left by the time school let out, Antonio, Teresa, and Luca, if he was home, let me tag along with them to Goose Pond Park, our nickname for Captain Tilly Park. If I had my fishing rod with me (the one my father had bought for me at the Woolworth’s a couple of blocks from the movie theater), they grabbed a couple of slices of Wonder Bread that I could use for bait.
I wasn’t allowed in the park after sunset, even with them, so if my mother worked late at Booth Memorial, I stayed with the big kids, dressed in their army jackets with POW/MIA patches and tie-dye shirts, in the Lombardis’ backyard. While they smoked and set off cherry bombs and bottle rockets in the early evenings, the Beatles, Steppenwolf, and Sly and the Family Stone played on the transistor radio Luca let us use when he had a shift at the firehouse.
I was there so often in the afternoons after preschool let out that their house began to feel like a second home, and Mrs. Lombardi and the kids, especially Teresa and Antonio and Luca, like family.
Antonio, the handsome one, the one who was popular and outgoing, the one I loved not as much as Luca and Teresa but almost as much, started bringing me to the small sunny room just off the front hallway. This was where my friends and I played board games. This was where I tried to pound out songs like “Volga Boatman” on the old upright piano.
I don’t remember how many times Antonio took me to that room, but I know why he stopped. One afternoon, as the lace curtains blew gently in the late spring breeze, we stood there half-naked. When Antonio reached out to me, because I was too scared to touch him, his mother opened the door.
It seemed as though nothing moved, and nobody breathed. Then she leapt across the room and pulled us apart. “You!” she screamed. To him or to me, I didn’t know. She planted her palm against her teenaged son’s chest and he stumbled backward over his lowered jeans. Then she grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the door.
As usual, I got the signals crossed, because when we reached the threshold, Mrs. Lombardi smacked me across my bare ass, pushed me into the foyer, and slammed the door.
I pulled up my pants but had no idea what to do or where to go. Mrs. Lombardi and Antonio stayed in the room for a long time. I let myself out the front door and sat on the steps until, as the darkness gathered, my mother came to get me.
Mrs. Lombardi never said anything to my parents or anyone else, as far as I know, about what had happened. I assumed I’d done something wrong, so I was relieved I didn’t get in trouble.
I continued to go to that house practically every weekday for the next three or four years. But I was never alone with Antonio again.