DAHLIA
THIS WAS HOW I DID IT: ONE HOUSE AT A TIME, WITH ZAIDIE ON one side of me, Agnes on the other, and a fool cat bringing up the rear. I carried a paper bag for the times I couldn’t breathe. Slow? My God, the first day it took me over an hour to make it past Josie Pennypacker’s old place. But wobbly as a baby learning to walk, heart thumping like Edmund Hillary scaling Everest, I reclaimed the street I lived on. The city—or you might as well say the world—because aside from my jigsaws, Claxton was it for me—had come into view.
There were days I started out so dizzy I was sure I’d collapse before I made it off the porch. “I got one of my migraines coming on,” I’d say, holding my head. “You want me to drop dead out here like poor Josie? Is that what you girls want?”
But they were merciless, those two. “Just to the corner today. Then you can go to bed the rest of the day if you want.” Zaidie tightened her grip on my arm till I felt a jolt of her determination.
Agnes nodded and held me fast on her side. “Remember what I told you, Ma. Don’t look to the right or left. Just keep swimming. And when you’re afraid?”
“Yeah, yeah, swim faster. Fine for you to say.” But somehow my feet kept moving. The only one who seemed to have any idea how I felt was Flufferbell, who opened her mouth wide as a lion and let out a fierce howl every day when I stepped off the porch.
At home, the girls tried to show me a textbook Mrs. Kelly had found for them at the library: Anxiety and Panic Disorders.
“Anxiety? Panic? For heaven’s sake, I don’t have anything like that,” I said, switching on the TV so they wouldn’t notice the red of my face. “And even if I did, your father’s right. When did those books Mrs. Kelly sent home ever help any of you?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, Agnes and I turned out pretty good,” Zaidie said. “Maybe we got more from you and your books than you know.”
I suppose that was meant as some kind of compliment, but all I heard was the first phrase: in case you haven’t noticed. Truth was I’d been so fixed on the boys, I’d noticed far less than I should have. Trying not to think about that, I made it to the next house, but by then I was shaking so bad a car slowed down to gawk at me.
“Since when is a woman walking down the damn street some kind of spectacle?” I yelled. When I turned to give them a good glare, who was it but Gina Lollobrigida. In full war paint, too.
“Good to see you out and about, Dahlia,” she called.
The strumpet. Even though the girls said she was just trying to be nice, I straightened myself up the best I could and pretended I didn’t hear.
“I told you to let me stay home,” I hollered at the merciless ones. “Now see what you’ve done? Even the likes of Gina Lollobrigida are laughing at me.”
“Keep going,” Zaidie said. Did I say they were merciless?
A minute later, I heard Agnes laughing. “Look, Ma. You got so mad at Gina Lollobrigida you went a whole house further than you were supposed to.”
BY THE TIME I made it around the block, everything, including my own house, looked different.
“How long has it been since your dad painted this porch? It’s a sight,” I told the girls. The next day when Joe Jr. came by to deliver some of Anna’s meatballs, a new idea occurred to me.
“Run to Creeley’s and pick me up some paint for the porch, will you, Joe?” I told him. “A nice forest green. Tell him Louie will pay later. And two brushes, one for me and one for you.”
“Me—Joe O’Connor Jr.? Go to Creeley’s Paint Store?”
“Yes, you. I’ve got a job for you, Junior.”
He backed up—nervous as I was every day when I crossed the maledizione. “Can’t, Mrs. Moscatelli. Gotta work. At my job. Gotta work at the Nothing’s Perfect Market and Deli. Can’t. Gotta . . . At my job. Sweep the floor. Say hello. At the . . . Can’t, Mrs.—”
“I already asked your father,” I lied. “A nice forest green, and two brushes. I suppose we’ll need some of that turpentine, too. What do you think?”
Sensing he was about to repeat his spiel, I pulled out my ace. “Jimmy wants you to do it, Junior. He called from the jail just this morning and told me so.”
He looked at me skeptically. “Jimmy called—from the jail? Jimmy Kovacs?”
At first, I wasn’t sure he was buying it, but then he blinked. “Turpentine and a scraper and some sandpaper, Mrs. Moscatelli. We need sandpaper. And paint. A nice forest green.”
If he hadn’t paid the bill at the paint store, I might have thought Louie was unaware of my project. He didn’t even say a word when he come home and caught Joe and me scraping the porch.
Finally, a couple of days after we finished painting, I was forced to ask what he thought of the job.
He chomped his BLT like he didn’t hear me. I stared harder.
“You wanna know what I think, Dahlia? I think you better send Junior to the store for a ladder and a few gallons of white. Better learn how to climb it, too.”
“Climb a ladder—me? You know I’m scared of heights . . .”
“You’ll have to get over it, then. Cause all you done with that bright green porch is make the rest of the house look like hell.”
He got up and chucked his sandwich into the trash from halfway across the kitchen.
“Moscatelli sinks a three-pointer,” Agnes sang out.
I shot her a look. “Good Lord. Do you think this is some kind of sporting event?”
“Kind of,” Zaidie answered for her.
Louie had already slammed the door to Jimmy’s room by the time I’d recovered enough to follow him to the stairs.
“Maybe I will; just you watch!” I yelled. “And for the record, it’s not bright green. It’s a nice forest . . .” I heard Jimmy’s stereo switch on to drown me out. That music Louie always hated, too.
“The hell with you, then,” I hollered louder.
THE NEXT DAY, still peeved by his suggestion that I get on a ladder and paint the house, I walked past three extra houses before I noticed. Then, realizing what I’d done, I went a little further. “To hell with him,” I repeated to myself with every step.
Back at home, though, my eyes were drawn to the stones Louie had given me when he first came courting.
“Some fellas come with flowers, some bring candy,” I told the girls before they could escape. “That’s what your father brought me.”
“Dad gave you a basket of rocks? When you were dating?” Agnes asked gently, still thinking of the words that had powered my walk.
“Not all at once. One at a time, he brought them. Every day till the basket was filled.” Holy God, was I about to cry?
Though I knew they had things to do, they sat beside me on the couch and took my hands.
“It’s all right,” Agnes said, like I used to tell the kids when they had a bad dream.
But we both knew there were some things that could never be made all right. Not what Mr. Dean did to her in the attic. And not the three days I spent in the woods or anything that followed. The trial. The afternoon I watched my mother typing a letter to inform the Massachusetts General School of Nursing that I would not be a student there in the fall. Remembering, I felt every key in the typewriter pummeling my body. My parents’ faces at the supper table when people stopped coming into Dahlia’s Place. Fearful, dismayed, but most of all angry. It wasn’t long before that rage—mostly Mother’s—settled on me.
You couldn’t have kept quiet about it, could you? What did you accomplish, dragging it all out in the open, taking on the Woods of all people? Just ruined yourself and us, too.
The only peace I had was when they were forced to take jobs out of town. I didn’t tell the girls any of that, though. What was the point? I began with the day the story changed.
“I was home alone that afternoon. It was just a little after three—God knows why I looked at the clock, or why I remember—when Louie Moscatelli came to my front stoop and rung the bell.”
“Did you let him in?” Agnes asked.
“I wouldn’t have gone to the door for anyone back then—least of all Louie. I hardly knew the boy for one thing, and he was considered . . . something of a homely-looking fella at the time.”
“Considered? At the time?” The girls giggled. “People still call him Frankenstein, Ma.”
“After I heard him walk away, I went to the door to make sure he was good and gone. That’s when I found the first stone.”
“How did you know he left it? Or that it was for you?” Zaidie asked. “It might have been an ordinary rock from the garden.”
“I suppose I didn’t. Not at first. But when I picked it up, it was so smooth.”
I paused and passed a rock to each of them. “See? He’d polished them up in his shop. From then on, he showed up every day with another one. In the beginning, he rang the bell like the first day, but once he figured out I wasn’t going to answer, he stopped ringing. I’d hear him coming up the steps, then I’d wait a little while and go out to collect my rock.”
“So why’d you keep them?” Agnes said. “I mean, if you weren’t interested . . .”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” I figured this wasn’t the time to explain my theory of how Louie had come to me as mysteriously and purposefully as they had. I hadn’t asked for it, and I certainly didn’t recognize it when it came. But for some reason, I went to the basement and found a basket for the rocks he left behind.
“And then one day when I heard him on the porch, I looked out the window and found myself staring directly into that homely face—and seeing . . . seeing, well, my whole life, I suppose—though I didn’t know it at the time.”
“And then?” both girls said at once.
“What else could I do?” I laughed a bit for the first time since all the business with Jimmy. “I flung open the door and asked him what he wanted.”
“What on earth I wanted; that’s what you said,” Louie corrected from the foyer, where he had slipped in unheard.
I was about to ask him what he was doing home two hours early, but he went to the kitchen for a shot of water before I had a chance. And after supper, he headed straight to Jimmy’s room like he’d been doing. Something was different, though.
Halfway up the stairs, he stopped and looked at me on my chair. Soon as he caught me looking back, though, he cleared his throat and kept going.
It was long past midnight when I woke up and found him in bed—motionless, but awake. We lay there quiet for a few minutes.
“People been sayin’ they seen you, Dahlia,” he finally said. “Out walkin’ around the neighborhood. Far away as Grainer Street, someone seen you. Is it true?”
“Hmm . . .” I said, wondering if it was Gina Lollobrigida who’d stopped near the Grainer School. Somehow it didn’t seem like so much of a big deal as it used to. “You know what it’s like, Lou?”
He grunted.
“The walk you took that night after Jimmy . . . It wasn’t streets you were walking. It was like you were traveling up and down Jimmy’s whole life, looking for something. Except this is my life I’m walking.”
I paused, but he stayed quiet.
“We made it as far as Papa’s old restaurant this afternoon. Me and my girls.”
Louie grunted again.
“One of these days, you know what I’m gonna do, Lou? I’m gonna walk into that jail and see Jimmy.”
The sky was so black that night nothing in the room was visible, but I saw him just the same—hands folded behind his head. “You know the question you asked me at the door that first day?”
I chuckled to myself. “What you wanted.”
“What on earth I wanted,” he corrected again. “Well, in case I never answered you proper, this was it, Dahlia. The all and the everything of it. This was it.”
And then he reached for me.