Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

“How can you possibly be cold?” her mother asked.

“I’m not.”

“Are you sick?”

She looked at her mother, who was practically having a heatstroke in that straining chair. “No,” Francesca said. “I’m fine.”

“Right next door,” her mother repeated, pointing at the men’s dorm with her thumb this time. “Can you believe it? Because I can’t.”

Why she was talking so loud, who knew?

“So why didn’t you want to go to a girls’ school?”

She said this loud enough that Francesca was sure people in the men’s dorm could hear. “This is a good school, Ma, all right?” She extended a hand to help her mother up. “C’mon.”

When they got to Barnard, Francesca knew, all Kathy would hear was “Why did you have to go so far from home?” Anything Francesca did was found wanting for not being enough like what Kathy did and vice versa. Before the homecoming dance, her mother had pulled Francesca aside to extol the virtues of Kathy’s date, whom she later that night dumped. Then Francesca asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance. The next day, her mother started listing all the things wrong with him. He’s changed, Sandra said. Anyone with eyes can see that.

Francesca took another trip by herself. It was only then that she noticed how many doors were festooned with Greek letters. Her mother and Kathy had talked her out of coming up the week before, in time for sorority rush, her mother because she had her heart set on the convenience of making one big hoop-de-doo car trip and Kathy because she said sororities were great for WASPs, sluts, or dumb blondes, but not for any sister of hers, who already had a family and who certainly didn’t need to pretend she was the sister of a bunch of slutty blonde WASPs. Francesca had said that cinched it, she was rushing. But she hadn’t. Only now did it occur to her that the friendships made last week might already mark Francesca as a loser, an outcast: as different.

By the time she got back to her room, her mother had opened her boxes and suitcases and begun putting things away. She’d also produced a small Madonna print and a set of red bull horns, neither of which Francesca would leave up after her mother left. “You don’t need to do that,” Francesca told her.

“Bah,” Sandra said. “It’s no problem.”

“Really,” Francesca said. “I can take care of it.”

Kathy laughed. “Why not just tell her you don’t like her going through your stuff?”

“I don’t like you going through my stuff, Ma.”

“I go through your stuff at home. Stuff? I hope this good school here will teach you not to talk like a dirty beatnik. And anyway, what are you trying to hide from me, eh?”

“Nothing.” Beatnik? “And in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not at home.”

Sandra looked up as if startled by a loud noise.

Then she sat herself down at Francesca’s desk and burst into tears.

“Now you’ve done it,” Kathy said, sitting up.

“You’re not helping any.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Kathy said, and of course she was right: it’s not just yawning and laughter that can be contagious.

The twins teared up, then began to cry, too. They all three huddled together on the bed. It had been a terrible year. Grandpa Vito’s funeral, which had been rough on everyone. Then Uncle Carlo’s bizarre disappearance. Chip, the sweetest one in the family, getting called a name at school, snapping, and breaking the kid’s skull with his thermos. Yet there was only one other time the three of them had ever been like this: united, embracing, sobbing. The girls had been in Mr. Chromos’s math class. The principal came to get them and took them to his office without telling them why. Their mother was in there, her face red and puffy. She said, “It’s your father, there’s been an accident.” They all fell onto the principal’s smelly orange couch and sobbed for who knows how long. Now, sobbing together again, they must have thought of that day, too. Their sobs got louder, their breathing more ragged, their embrace tighter.

Finally they calmed and released their grasp. Sandra took a breath and said, “I only wish-” She couldn’t say the rest of it.

A sharp knock came at the door. Francesca looked up, expecting this to be the true first impression her dorm mother would have of her. Instead it was a couple, he in a powder blue suit and she in a poodle-cut hairdo, both smiling and sporting HELLO, MY NAME IS name tags.

“Excuse us,” said the man, whose name tag read BOB. “Is this Room 322?”

The number was painted in black on the door. His index finger was actually touching it.

“Yes, pardon us,” said the woman. They both had an extremely thick southern accent. Her nametag read BARBARA SUE (“BABS”). She was looking past them to the Madonna and frowning. “If y’all’d like us to come back later-”

“This is her room,” the man said, stepping aside and gently pushing a dark-skinned girl across the threshold. The girl kept her eyes on her Mary Janes.

“I believe we’re interrupting,” the woman said.

“Are we interrupting?” the man asked.

Sandra Corleone blew her nose. Kathy wiped her face on Francesca’s pillow. Francesca used her hand. “No,” she said. “No. Sorry. Come in.”

“Fantastic,” the man said. “I’m Reverend Kimball, this is my wife, Mrs. Kimball, this is our daughter Suzy. With a Z . Not short for Suzanne. Just Suzy. Say hello, Suzy.”

“Hello,” the girl said, and then looked back down at her shoes.

“We’re Baptist.” The man nodded toward the Madonna. “We have Catholics in Foley, though, the next town over. I played golf once with their leader. Father Ron.”

Francesca introduced herself and her family-pronouncing it Cor-lee-own, which even her mother did lately-and braced for a question about her name. It didn’t come.

Suzy looked from one sister to the other, visibly confused.

“Yes, we’re twins,” Kathy said. “That one’s your roommate. I go to another school.”

“Are you identical?” Suzy asked.

“No,” Kathy said.

Suzy looked even more confused.

“She’s kidding,” Francesca said. “Of course we’re identical.”

The man had noticed the bull horns. He touched them. Sure enough, they were real. “Suzy is an Indian,” he said, “like you folks.”

“She’s adopted,” whispered the woman.

“But not a Seminole,” he said, and laughed so loud everyone else in the room jumped.

“I don’t follow you,” Sandra said.

With a whiny sigh, the man stopped laughing. Suzy sat at what would be her desk and stared at its Formica top. Francesca wanted to give her flowers, wine, chocolate, whatever it would take to make her smile.

“ Florida State,” the man said. “They’re the Seminoles.” He pantomimed throwing a football. He laughed again, even louder, and stopped laughing, even more abruptly.

“Naturally they are,” Sandra said. “No, I mean about being an Indian. We’re Italian.”

The man and the woman exchanged a look. “Interesting,” he said. Inner-esting.

“Yes,” said his wife. “That’s different.”

Francesca apologized and said her mom and sister had to go but she’d be back in just a sec to help Suzy with her stuff.

Her mother flinched slightly at stuff, but of course did not correct Francesca in front of the Kimballs.

Francesca and Kathy held hands on the way out to the car. Neither one of them could, or needed to, say a word.

“Want me to drive, Ma?”

Sandra opened her purse, took out a handkerchief and her keys, tossed the keys to Kathy.