Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

Marlene hitched herself around in the car seat, removed her pistol and its holster, and locked them in the glove compartment. Marlene had a new gun. The old gun had killed two men and it had started giving her the sick shivers when she touched it, so she had sold it and bought this thing, a SITES AW9 “Resolver,” one of the lightest 9mm semiautomatic pistols available, made in Turin, sleekly Italian in design. She prayed daily and sincerely that it would never have to resolve anything, would forever remain a shooting-range virgin. It was a little less than twice as long as a king-sized cigarette and about twice as thick and weighed about the same as an office stapler. This made it much too heavy to carry into her mother’s house.

The front door was, as always, unlocked. Marlene went in and passed directly into the kitchen.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Good, you can help me hang,” said her mother, indicating the wicker basket of wet wash on the kitchen table, as if this visit had been arranged, or as if Marlene had never left home. Mrs. Ciampi, despite the book on Italians, had never been a physically demonstrative parent.

Marlene heaved the basket up on her hip and followed her mother out through the screen door to the tiny backyard. She and Mrs. Ciampi began to hang clothes on plastic lines strung between two T-shaped poles.

“Didn’t we get you a dryer, Ma?”

“I like it better when they hang. They don’t smell right from the dryer.”

Marlene was out of practice, being totally dryer dependent herself, and her mother placed four clothespins to every one of hers. Marlene cast glances at her mother through the flapping linen. Aside from the hair, which had gone pepper and salt, and a thickening middle, she looked more or less as she had looked during Marlene’s youth, or perhaps it was merely imagination. She had the kind of face that holds age well, Marlene thought, handsome rather than beautiful, too bony for that, the features too prominent. The main difference seemed to be the track suit she was wearing instead of the flowered housedresses she had worn every day back then. Mrs. Ciampi had discovered track suits late in life and had adopted them for every occasion that did not involve the Roman Catholic Church. She had a dozen, this one being aqua with a beige stripe. Combined with her mother’s energetic movements, the outfits suggested that she was about to strip and run the five-hundred-meter hurdles.

While they worked, Mrs. Ciampi wormed into, with a skill that the KGB would not have disdained, every cranny of her daughter’s life, having already detected on her secret mother radar the unidentified bogey menacing Marlene’s heart. The twins first, their little doings elaborated, discussed, the peculiar difference between them made light of, on the basis of other family twins, not to worry; Marlene’s own work, deplored sadly, the infant Marlene, her brilliance and hoped-for future recalled, with the familiar anecdotes, the necessary dollop of guilt offered and accepted; the brothers and sisters analyzed, their recent triumphs and travails recounted, nor could one neglect highlights from the lives of Marlene’s twenty-three first cousins, none of whom, it seemed, was required to shoot people in their chosen fields of endeavor.

The wash hung, the two women entered the house. Mrs. Ciampi offered coffee, which Marlene accepted with an internal shudder. It would be instant, with water barely boiled. Marlene’s mother, unlike Marlene, had no interest in cuisine beyond assuring quantity, and had raised six children on canned and frozen, on Kraft dinners and Velveeta and Pepsi, unlike her own mother, who was a maestra assoluta of south Italian cuisine. Marlene thought about generations, about inheritance, about what she was doing here, really, as she sipped the weak and bitter cup.

“And how’s my doll?” asked Mrs. Ciampi, feigning innocence, comprehending perfectly, of course, that the one person they hadn’t discussed was the one most on Marlene’s mind. “What’s with Lucy?”

So it all came out, the rudeness, the disobedience, the sullen contempt. Mrs. Ciampi listened, gently encouraging, withholding comment. Marlene felt some of the misery lift and wondered how women her age who were estranged from their own mothers managed to raise children-who could they talk to? Books? Therapists? Not that Marlene considered Teresa Ciampi any great expert on child rearing: look how Marlene had turned out, after all, but she had the history, she’d been there, when the seeds were planted that-so Marlene believed in her deepest heart-were bearing in Lucy such unlikely fruit.

“Tell me,” Mrs. Ciampi said after her daughter had run down, “does she still go to church?”

“Oh, does she ever! I can’t get her out of there. She makes the Little Flower look like Lenny Bruce.”

Her mother shot her a look dense with meaning. Decoded: you and your wise mouth, I told you a million times, you mock the church, you’re going to get trouble and here it is.

Aloud, she said, “And you? Or you just drop her off?”

“I go, Ma. You know me. I punch the clock even if I don’t work the shift. What, you think it’s a punishment from God Lucy’s giving me grief?”

“No, she’s just taking after her mother.”

“Get out of here! I was a little angel compared to Lucy. I never opened my mouth.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon. I must have been in amnesia eighteen years, I wasn’t really here.”

“When? Give me one time!”

“One time? Oh, let’s see. . you were fourteen, because it was the summer your great-aunt Angela passed away, God rest her soul. I came home from shopping and you were in the kitchen leaned over the ironing board, ironing your hair like you used to do, the hair God gave you wasn’t good enough. You remember that?”

“I remember ironing my hair.”

Mrs. Ciampi raised her eyes. “Oh, thank you, Madonna, I’m not losing my mind. So I come in, I put my bags down, and I say, because it was a weekday, and you were working at Uncle Manny’s, why’re you doing that on a Tuesday, or whatever it was, you got work tomorrow, you’re not going out, and you don’t say anything, like a mule. So I ask you, where’re you going you’re ironing your hair. Still no answer. So I think, this is my house, my kitchen, and this little strega ’s pretending I’m not there? So I yank the cord from the iron out of the wall.”

She paused for effect, nodding, took a sip of coffee, assured herself that she had Marlene’s full and fascinated attention, and resumed.

“You let out a yell like I never heard, and you called me a bad word, I won’t even say what it was, and then you threw the iron at me. At my head.”

“No!”

“Yes. You think I’m making this up? Look over there on the door post, on the left. See that mark? It’s painted two times since then, but you could still see it. That’s the mark. Then you ran out, we didn’t see you until God knows when at night. That was when you were climbing in and out up the drainpipe.”

“Oh, Jesus, you knew about the drainpipe?”

“Don’t swear. Yeah, I know you think my head’s full of lasagna, but I got eyes.”

“And you never said anything. Did you tell Pop about the drainpipe?”

Mrs. Ciampi sniffed disdainfully. “Are you joking? You’d be six feet underground I ever told him the things you pulled. I didn’t tell him about the iron either. He came home and saw the mark, I said I was changing the kitchen bulb and the ladder fell.”

“I can’t believe this,” said Marlene. She felt an odd constriction in her chest, and the room seemed to be growing warmer. “I don’t remember any of that. And you didn’t do anything about it?”

“I prayed, Marlene. I sent up so many novenas. . Father Martini, if you remember him, let him rest in peace, Father Martini said, ‘Teresa, you wore out the roof on the church. That’s why we need a new roof, Teresa Ciampi.’ What else could I do? Whip you like a dog? Lock you up?” She sighed, sipped the cooling coffee. “Anyway, it turned out better than I expected, tell you the honest truth. You stopped with those bums with the motorcycles, you won the scholarship to Sacred Heart. . I’m not saying you’re not still pazza , but it’s your life, darling. But what I’m saying, about Lucy, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Have patience and bring her by more, I’ll talk to her.”