Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

The house had been built into the slope of a hillside, so that from out front the first floor seemed like a second floor. I looked up. Janet’s mother stood in the picture window there, a vision of what her daughter would have been with thirty more years and one different gene: plump, pretty, happy, shining a little beam of good feeling down on people she had never seen.

Patricia dropped the bag of chestnuts. They spilled out and rolled off lopsidedly in five directions, and by the time we collected them and made our way to the front door, Janet’s mother was standing there. She greeted the twins by getting down on one knee. “But who, who are these two perfect creatures at my front door?”

They said their names at the same time. By then, Amelia had a hand on each shoulder. “I can tell you apart already. Patricia has a pink dress on, and Alicia’s dress is pink!”

The girls squealed, showed her their offerings, made an attempt at the curtsies Gerard had been ridiculously trying to teach them. Squeezed into the six-foot-square entranceway, we made our introductions. Gerard kissed Amelia’s hand and spoke a rehearsed phrase in Italian, even though I’d told him three times that Janet’s mother did not speak the language of languages and had never spoken it. Amelia took my mother’s hands in both of hers, said something about having heard so many good things about her, and about her son.

My mother said, “Yes, Ellory’s chief of surgery now.”

Amelia had been briefed on the situation. “Oh, how wonderful,” she said. “You must be very proud.”

“I am.”

When it was my turn, she thanked me for the cheesecakes then reached up on her tiptoes, kissed me on the mouth, and gave me the kind of hard squeeze that surprises you and makes you smile. Above us, I could smell the turkey cooking, and I said what you usually say, that it was nice to meet her, and nice of her to invite us, that I’d heard wonderful things about her, too. And then I said, “Your daughter is a precious gemstone in my life.”

This was not the kind of thing I was known for saying. And it was spoken, naturally, into one of those moments when everyone else has gone quiet-just a little pocket of accidental silence, so that the precious gemstone part went up the stairwell and thumped around in the small house like a pigeon with a broken wing. Gerard was halfway up the stairs by then. He stopped and looked back at me, lifted his eyebrows and held them up there in one of his comic faces. Janet’s mother started to cry, and wiped at her eyes with her fingers, smearing a little bit of makeup. The silence stretched out. I rushed to think of something else I could say, but from the top of the stairway Janet called down, “Pay no attention, Ma. He says dumb things when he’s nervous, that’s all.”

Amelia couldn’t quite get everything back together, though. We were standing looking at each other, a background song playing “Precious Gemstone.” The tears kept squirting out. “Go up, go up,” she said at last, taking hold of my elbow and turning me, and when I started up the carpeted stairs she ducked outside for a breath.

Janet had met everyone and was leaning against the top of the railing, looking gaunt and breathing very badly. “Nice going, Romeo,” she said hoarsely before I kissed her.

In three minutes, Amelia was back in the kitchen, dry-eyed. We heard the hinges on the oven door, and she was prodding the turkey with a long fork. Janet made a fuss over the girls the way her mother had, getting down on one knee and holding her hands behind her back, then bringing the hands out one by one and giving each girl a certain kind of doll Gerard had told her they liked: soft, long-legged creatures with their hair in dread-locks, the fashion of the season. She set them up with The Sound of Music on the bedroom VCR, then came back and poured wine for my mother and me and a glass of orange juice for Gerard. I was looking at her and pretending not to, a new trick of mine, and I did not like what I was pretending not to see.

Gerard told Amelia he enjoyed watching people cook-which was true-so we all ended up standing at the kitchen door in a knot, taking turns setting our glasses down and carrying out dishes of sweet potatoes and lasagna. There were good smells everywhere, plates and forks and butter knives shining on a gold embroidered white tablecloth, Tony Bennett on the stereo. I kept sneaking looks at Janet. Just before Gerard volunteered to start carving the turkey, she disappeared into one of the bedrooms and I heard the sound of the oxygen machine, food for the starving rest of her, its dull bubbling hum already standing next to some-thing else in my mind.

In the room where the girls were watching their movie, I heard the Mother Superior singing “Climb Every Mountain.” Gerard went in to fetch them. My mother was fingering a photo of Janet’s dad, naturally, of all the pictures on the side table. Amelia called us in to eat. I had little lines, little hot currents running in my legs and hands, the universe sparking bad messages through me. I went into the bedroom to call Janet to the table, and she was sucking in a last few breaths. Before she knew I was there, I saw what I had seen before, a strange thing to see: she was holding the oxygen tube in place under her nose and pricking her finger for a blood-sugar level at the same time, and it was as if she were somehow outside her body, tending to it as if it were a machine, an appliance, without being annoyed or affectionate, as casual and unperturbed as if she were cleaning crumbs out of a toaster oven. People had jumped off bridges because they couldn’t deal with this, and stepped outside to cry on a holiday because they couldn’t deal with this, and lay awake on a couch in a room filled with paint fumes, trying to deal with this. She was cleaning crumbs.

She saw me, checked her number, set the tube back in its clip and the blood-sugar meter back in its neat leatherette holder, and turned the tank dial to Off.

I said, “I came to ask if this would be a good time for a quick roll in the so-called hay.”

IT LOOKED TO ME, when we first sat down, as though Janet’s mother had cooked for the seven people at the table, and also for another seventeen or twenty people who were standing patiently in the leaf-strewn driveway and who would be allowed in for a second seating once we had eaten ourselves into unconsciousness. In my family we had always made a good meal of the bird itself surrounded by various species of root crop under gravy, and something green for good measure. But to describe the Amelia Rossi table you’d have to add lasagna, cheese balls, meatballs, and hot sausage in tomato sauce, grilled green peppers stuffed with spiced bread crumbs, mushroom caps stuffed with the same bread crumbs, broiled mashed pumpkin with about a stick of butter melting on it, baked beans, white beans, green beans. The middle of the table was covered with dishes, the counters were covered with dishes. If we’d all sat there eating until there were two shopping days left until Christmas, we’d still have had three or four different kinds of pie, cake, ice cream, and the deli desserts to work on.

Janet had warned me: “It’s a ritual offering to the god of excess. Don’t have any breakfast and go light on dinner the night before. Tell Gerard, too.”

Mrs. Rossi managed to give the clear impression that she would be permanently offended if we left so much as two cheese balls on a plate, uneaten. This was conveyed via pleasant little remarks-“Oh, no, a big man like you? Who works so hard? That’s all you want?”-followed by insistent spoonfuls of meat-balls, mashed potato, pumpkin, white beans. I don’t even like white beans and I ate a cup and a half or so.

We teased the girls, made a big fuss over them, then left them alone to torment each other and try to eat. The conversation tripped and puttered for a while, settling eventually, for no particular reason, on the Big Dig, a gigantic construction project that was sucking money out of the state budget and would do so for years to come.