Paullina Simons - Bellagrand

SHE MAKES HER OWN tomato paste. She is dressed in some shimmering gauzy summery thing, and her hair is tied up. The dress has to be loose and sheer because she is about to undertake heavy physical labor. She might perspire. All he does is sit and watch her, his mouth slightly open, his whole soul short of breath. He has watched her make the paste so many times. He never gets tired of it.

She has been simmering tomatoes all morning, boiling them down. She has strained all the pulp, removed their seeds, their skin. She has undressed the tomatoes.

Now she needs his help, and that’s why he’s been sitting at the kitchen table gaping at her.

They drag two plywood boards from the porch down the stairs and to the back. The boards take up nearly the whole overgrown yard. But that’s where the sunshine is. It’s late summer and warm, and it’s the only way to make enough paste to last the winter. The tomatoes she grows are always splendid. In his father’s house he never ate tomatoes the way he eats them now, raw, cooked, boiled, steamed, fried. Any which way he relishes the tomatoes. It’s the fruit from the Sicilian tree of life.

They carry the two pots of stewed tomatoes to the boards. She spreads the thick messy pulp over the boards, tilting them slightly to drain off any remaining liquid. There is much liquid. They set the tomato boards in the sunshine to dry.

Mimoo is cleaning houses, Salvo is sweeping the streets. Harry and Gina make love all afternoon, as the sun moves forty-five degrees in the August sky. They can barely stumble down the stairs to bring her boards back inside. All he wants now is to take a long nap, but it’s almost dinnertime, and she is forcing him to help her. But now, after , he doesn’t want to.

They roll the dried-out paste into large balls. He tries not to make any off-color jokes, but fails. He doesn’t particularly want to make jokes. What he wants is to nap and then make love to her again. Their hands are sticky with gooey sickly sweet paste, red and overripe. They clean their hands as best they can. Sometimes they make love again, with all their clothes on to save time, though it’s so late, and any minute everyone else will come home—Angela, Mimoo, Salvo, Rita for Saturday night dinner. Panting and disheveled, with the hands that just loved one another, they coat the balls of tomato paste with a layer of olive oil, cover them tightly with cheesecloth and pack them into large glass jars. It’s work for a whole Saturday afternoon. She grows enough tomatoes to feed them the whole winter. They never have to worry about sauce for anything they cook. They always have plenty.

Harry associates tomatoes with love. He gets a physical throb in the pit of the place that makes him a man, a flame of fire about two pounds large whenever she opens one of those jars, whenever she feeds him from them, when she asks him what he wants for dinner. What springs to his mind is the heady, acidic sweetness of their sweltering summer afternoons.

IF HARRY EXPRESSED BOTH inwardly and outwardly a certain quarrelsome ambivalence about the regeneration of his future, no one had any doubt how Mimoo felt about it. It was as if all her ailments had left her bones. After Gina told her mother the blessed news, she jumped out of bed, threw on nice clothes and ran through the streets of Lawrence, carrying candles to the church and chocolates to her friends. “Finally she’s having a baby! She’s having a baby!” Mimoo bought flowers, went to the market, made a feast, had a celebration to which she invited what seemed like half of Lawrence. “You didn’t give me a chance to celebrate your pretend wedding. At the very least I can rejoice in the fruit of it.”

Harry leaned into Gina’s neck. “Why does your dear mother insist on calling it pretend? Does she want to see the judge’s papers?”

Gina kissed his nose. “I think she’d prefer to see the priest’s papers.”

He grabbed her around her still slender waist and pulled her out onto the porch. “So she thinks we’re improperly married.” He laughed. “Does that mean you’re a kept woman?” He kissed her. “Why do I find that so enticing?”

True to her roots as a good wife and true woman, Gina returned his open-mouthed kiss and tamped down the other Sicilian part of herself and didn’t say what she was ashamed to be thinking when he was being all flirty with her and kind, which was: of all the things I am, and I am many things, one of the things I’m absolutely not is a kept woman.

“Go to Boston, you two,” Mimoo ordered them, not a day later. “You tell your family, Harry, and you, Gia, go tell your brother.”

Gina agreed. Harry amiably shook his head.

“Salvo will come around, Harry.”

“He won’t, Mimoo.”

“He will.”

“He won’t.”

“God, why are you such a stubborn mule?”

“ He won’t come back and I’m the mule?”

Mimoo pressed her son-in-law: “Salvo is waiting for you to beg his forgiveness. He just needs to hear repentance from you.”

Harry shook his head. “I’ve tried already. It’s no use.”

“How many years ago did you try?”

“Your son has too much pride,” Harry said.

“And you?”

“I’m not your son.”

“Charming, Harry,” whispered Gina, sitting nearby, listening.

Mimoo bristled. “You’re my daughter’s so-called husband.”

“I’m actually her husband.”

“In our country, husbands, even such as you are, are considered family. Not in your country?”

Harry said nothing.

“Like I was saying. Besides, you’re still somebody’s son, aren’t you?”

“Not anymore.”

HALF-HEARTEDLY HARRY SEARCHED THROUGH the job ads in the paper. “What a burden it is,” he exclaimed one night, “to keep needing paid work.”

“Welcome to real life,” Gina said. “Not the pretend one you’ve been living.”

She was right, of course, and he didn’t like to argue with her. He certainly wasn’t going to argue that he did indeed once live what had seemed to him a fake life. To fall in love was one thing. But to choose her was another. He married her because she was the realest thing he had ever found. There was no calibration in his life with her. There was no pretense and no temperance. Every ball was up in the air at once. It was always too hot or too cold; there was too much wine or not enough. His bed was never empty, and that made up for many other missing things—the conjugal union of two kindred spirits, two poles apart when it came to their station in life, but one in the only way it counted. One of body, one of soul.

Still … unmitigated smells and labor, constant labor. There was no time to ever think, make long-term plans, figure things out, barely even read!

“Perhaps you’d like to move to Kalamazoo, Michigan?” Harry asked Gina. “So I could work on Henry Ford’s assembly line.”

“The man will pay you five dollars a day, Harry,” Gina said. “That’s ransom for a prince.”

“Five dollars?”

“A day!”

“Florenz Ziegfeld spends three hundred dollars on stage pillows!” Harry said. “Three hundred dollars each. ”

“Perhaps then you should be the one selling him these magical pillows.”

“There you go, always turning every conversation back to money.”

“I don’t do that.”

“Yes, you do.”

“You mean lack of money?”

“Whatever you want to call it.”

And just like that, another casual spousal back-and-forth turned into intemperance. No calibration ever.