I looked in the fridge to see what my options were. Another egg sandwich or PB&J. And of course there were the deli packages, paper-wrapped.
But I found a few small zucchini in the same crisper. Mom only bought vegetables that were out of season. Her urge to enjoy them lasted until she was faced with the problem of how to cook them.
The zucchini made me want to sit down to Dad’s cooking. I went through the contents of the kitchen shelves and found a box of linguini. Uh-huh, I said to myself as I chose a small can of chopped tomatoes, another of mushrooms. Back to the fridge. A rather soft onion. Cream, for Mr. B’s coffee, but I wouldn’t use it all. Good enough.
I’d make a variation on a pasta-and-sour-cream dish Dad used to make the night before he had a busy day of auditions. Whoever got in first put it into the oven to reheat. But I could make the sauce while the pot boiled and have a hot meal in half an hour.
Once I’d collected the main ingredients, I turned on the radio, unbuttoned a couple of shirt buttons, and flipped up my collar. Vincenzo was cooking tonight.
I was giving the spaghetti a toss when someone knocked at the kitchen door. Snatching at a sauced stick of zucchini, I popped it into my mouth as I answered the door. Patsy was standing outside, shivering in a soft dark sweater with a wide neck that left one shoulder to fend for itself in the cold.
“Hi. I thought since we’re neighbors …,” she said, and shivered. “Can I come in?”
“Sure.” God. Maybe she’d guessed. Guessed but wasn’t sure.
Her eyes slid past me to the spaghetti dish. And then, as if she might bolt, she added, “Didn’t your parents go out?”
“They did,” I said, licking my fingers free of the sauce. She’d been watching? I stepped back so she could come in. Might as well learn the worst.
“I have a kind of favor to ask and I hope you won’t be offended.” All at once she sounded less sure of herself than the Patsy I knew, and she looked decidedly uncomfortable. “See, I need some Italian first names. Men’s names, and your stepdad is Italian.”
This visit wasn’t about me. At least it wasn’t about making an accusation. I hoped it was okay to be talking to her like this—my T-shirt was being put to the test.
“Italian first names?” she repeated, like maybe I hadn’t been paying attention.
I decided not to catch on too quick. “What are they?”
She said, “I don’t know.”
I turned obtuse up to maximum. “I gathered you don’t know, but if you don’t give him the list, how can he translate?”
“I don’t need a translation. I want him to give me a list. Just go through the alphabet and give me a few names for each letter. Do you think he would do that?”
I said, “I guess so,” but what I wanted to say, the way she said it to me, she must be counting on a lot of calls. “You know”—I walked over to the fridge—“the Italian alphabet doesn’t have as many letters as we do.”
“What do you mean?”
“The H is silent, so it’s …” I reached into the fridge for a bottle of wine. Taboo, but I was showing off. Patsy didn’t comment, but her eyes were wide open when I looked at her over my shoulder. “Um, Henry becomes Enrico.” I rolled the r and put the swing in the “rico.”
“Really.”
I hesitated to offer further illumination. After all, how much should I know? And I thought Vinnie ought to be a little less, well, verbal than Vincenzo. But willing to talk, because who wouldn’t be?
“How do you know that?” I saw a flash of hunger in her eyes.
“I asked when I heard it. I’m curious.”
“So,” she said. “J?”
I shook my head. “An Italian name would start with a G.” I’d hit a pedantic note, and it was just right. Italian-name nerd.
“Are any other letters missing?” she asked.
“K, W, X, and Y.”
“W? I never noticed.”
“Elmer Fudd probably didn’t have an Italian heritage.” I grinned. “You know, ‘wascally wabbit’?”
She laughed. We were having a nice little conversation here. Which was what I wanted, after all. But now I was afraid she’d somehow leap to asking what names start with V, the way people in the same room sometimes come up with the same thought. I knew this was crazy, but I started to want her to leave.
“Thanks.” She turned on her brilliant response-to-applause smile, the kind of smile she used for peons who only wanted to pick up her books when she dropped them. I didn’t like feeling like a peon. I winked in a friendly way, hoping to set us back on even ground. But her smile faltered, then flattened to a phony paste-on as she let herself out. “Bye, Vinnie.”
I took a deep breath, letting the tension go.
I tried to sort through the ups and downs of this episode. I hadn’t offered her much of myself at all. Except for a moment there that I could be proud of, I was doing a bit, like Dad sometimes pulls out of the air. It could have been a limp, a stutter, anything. This was a superior, holier-than-thou attitude that outdid Patsy’s own natural self-love.
In fact, I didn’t know why I wanted to do that. I had finally made contact, real face-to-face contact with her, and did I try to put in a good word for myself?
No.
I crossed the kitchen in two steps and yanked the door open. She was just standing in the driveway, arms crossed against the cold. Her house was dark except for the front light. “Hey,” I called. “You hungry?”
She turned and came back fast, saying, “Cold and hungry. Are you feeding strays?”
I didn’t have a comeback. I just grinned and shut the door behind her.
“You cooked this?” She sidled up to the table and looked at it from a funny angle, sort of down her nose. She was nervous—I got that—but she was hungry, too.
“Sautéed matchsticks of zucchini and linguini blanketed in a creamy tomato sauce,” I said in a rough impersonation of Julia Child.
“What’s creamy tomato sauce?”
“Southern Italian specialty.”
“Your dad taught you?”
“Just so we’re clear, Mr. B is not my dad.” She watched as I poured two inches of wine into glasses.
“Mr. B, then. Who taught you how to cook an Italian dish?” Patsy asked a tad too casually.
“You think they’re keeping it a national secret? We all like good food. Plates in the cabinet behind you. So what do you need these names for?”
“Oh, it’s a long story,” she said, setting the plates on the table. “Too long. Boring.”
I started loading on the spaghetti. I let her lack of explanation hang between us. Her face grew rosy.
I sat. And I let her off the hook. “You going to eat or you going to let it get cold?”
Dinner was easy. We started to talk about the class we shared.
And we decided to watch a movie after we did the dishes. Love Story was on TV. For a minute I let myself bask in the warmth of life’s little gifts—a good movie and I’m alone with Patsy.
I spent some time wondering whether it would be construed as a pass if I just let my arm fall along the back of the sofa. I wondered if she’d freak out after last night’s date with Biff. I doubted it; she wasn’t sitting all that close anyway. But she didn’t know that’s the way I sit most of the time. It really is.
We’d just about gotten to the really sad part when Patsy complained about her foot. Loudly.
“What is it?”
“Asleep. It’s gone to sleep,” she moaned, lifting it off the floor. The movement seemed to be painful.
“Shake it. Rub it.”
“No,” she yelled. “Don’t touch it.”
Too late. I pulled off her sneaker, which was the first shock, feeling her shoe so small in my hand. It should have prepared me for the warmth of her foot. But it didn’t. It didn’t. I understood in a flash all that I was meant to know the night of the junior dance. I told myself that was a silly notion. I gave her foot a hard rub, trying to dispel the sense of falling backward, of falling under a spell.
“Ow, ow, ow,” Patsy was yelling.
“You have to get the blood to circulate. Let’s get it moving,” I said unsympathetically, and gave it another vigorous rub.
“Ow, stop. It’ll get better on its own.”
I slid into the space beside her as she turned to put her foot on the floor. I had just a glimpse of the surprise on her face as I used my knee to adjust her position to suit mine and settled back into the film. Or appeared to.
What I was doing, while my heart was beating a mile a minute, was thinking about how easy it had been to get an arm behind her, to be practically wrapped around her although we weren’t actually touching anywhere now, and, after all the agony, how comfortable it was to be sitting that way. No sweaty palms, no awkward glances to check whether it was okay.
Vinnie Gold could be suave.
I couldn’t help thinking how un-Patsy she had become for a moment there and how unexpected it was. I had been fooled by her once, believing she was as sure of herself as she looked. I knew now how carefully she presented herself to the world, and I knew that she was more afraid than Vincenzo had ever been.
I reached to switch the movie off, but she put a hand on my arm to stop me. “Let’s read the names. Maybe some are Italian.”
So I waited through the credits, she did the reading. “Is this for a book report?” I asked as the screen went to commercial. “Or maybe you’re a movie snob.”
She poked me with an elbow and made me grin. Latent violence. But I didn’t say anything. I was keeping my thumb on old Vincenzo.
“Can I see your house?” she asked then. “I mean, can I look around?”
“Sure.” Full of surprises, that Patsy. But what could I say? She strolled around the living room, touching the pottery and reading the book titles. “I’ll dig up something for dessert” was what I came up with while she was riffling through Mr. B’s collection of tapes.
I forgot about her for two or three minutes, searching for my mother’s private stash of brownies. Just before I found them, I’d convinced myself that Mom had left this habit behind with the apartment. But she’d simply found the ironing closet made a good hiding place.
“I’m going upstairs, okay?” Patsy called.
“Go ahead, I can eat all this by myself,” I said, believing she’d come into the kitchen.
I dished up some ice cream and put a brownie in each bowl. I tried to play it cool and dropped into place on the sofa, but I was up again like it was spring-loaded. Who was I kidding? Had I left that T-shirt next to the phone on my bedside table?