Salvatore Scibona - The End

She wrapped an afghan over the shawl. (Abjection; serfdom.) She exercised by pacing from the kitchen to the parlor to the bedroom to the parlor to the pantry, up the stairs, down the stairs, down again into the cellar to shovel more coal into the furnace. Back upstairs. (Her hip! Suffering!) Her face was gray and her fingers were blue. She was determined not to let a certain party see her like this.

She positioned a chair over the register in the kitchen floor. She opened the dictionary on the credenza. She rubber-banded the crossword to the cutting board in her lap. The pen was in hand. The clock said 10:17. She gave herself twenty minutes.

Work fast. Scan for capital letters in the middle of clues, indicating facts, indicating only one possible answer. Capital of Yemen. Dog of Thin Man. Joseph of Gori. No loafing now— Sanaa, Asta, Stalin —or you missed the point.

An enchanted moment came, an erotic flash, at fourteen across: eight letters; second-to-last letter an a; the clue, Baloney.

She was a naked woman reaching into a tree, plucking a plum from the branch.

Claptrap.

She had trouble with thirteen down: ten letters, An image that bleeds through. She had nti in the middle. Last letter, o. What were they talking about? Then pe at the beginning. Was it pentimento? She consulted the dictionary. She had not known it counted as an English word.

On filling in the last letter, with two minutes to spare, she felt the familiar triumph. She had defeated the puzzle writer. But triumph was succeeded immediately by hopelessness. She often felt this when the puzzle was done. The paint repented and gave up the image it was hiding. The crossword faded, and underneath was the day’s agenda. None of this was helping her color.

She needed a plan.

It came to her.

She would stew herself. She left her hat on the hair of one of the plaster heads in the lavatory downstairs. She took a detective novel with her to the bath and sunk into the tub. She refreshed the water every ten minutes, draining a little and refilling, reading the book cover to cover, until she could have peeled her toenails out of their slots. Sweat stung her eyes.

She tossed the book onto the toilet seat and pulled herself to a standing position with the rails Vincenzo had, to her zealous and futile protestations, bolted into the tile. Microscopic machinists had tunneled into the flesh of her leg, filed the ball and socket of her hip to a glassy finish, and painted them with Vaseline. She could’ve run a marathon, but she had more pressing business. Her wristwatch on the toilet seat said it was 3:03. She toweled off the mirror and observed her moist, bald head. Her victory over the cold was absolute. She could’ve fried an egg in her palm, but she had business.

She dried herself. She had to get a move on. Patrizia and Ciccio were due any minute to pick her up and go to the station.

She pinned her wig, an extravagant black pouf, to what was left of her hair. She had the smallest possible moment of regret while putting in her earrings. What with so many years of metal dragging at her earlobes, the holes weren’t piercings anymore, they were dragged-down gashes in the cartilage. Had she known she would live this long, she would’ve waited to pierce her ears until she was fifty. But, then, if she’d waited to pierce her ears, Nico would never have had occasion to buy her all these earrings to begin with.

Very good. Her hair was on straight, her taupe rayon stockings were clipped up, her color was high. The image in the mirror showed its teeth. She saw a spark at the edge of her mind. It was an idea, at first distant and indistinct, and it was shooting toward her like an arrow in a dream. It was a hideous idea, but she was not culpable for having conceived it, because it had attacked her from the outside. She hadn’t thought it up, it had thought itself onto her; however, she could not help but recognize that it was indisputably true. The idea was that she would outlive them all.

Her purse was black. Her dress, of course, was black; all of her dresses were black. The open-toed mules she picked from the closet — she was impervious to cold now, she wanted to look harumscarum and regal at the same time, the queen of Hell — were black. She hadn’t set foot outside of her house in any other color since 1915. She hadn’t set eyes on Lina, her lamb, her little lover Lina, since 1946. She painted her face up strikingly. She sharpened her cheek-bones into scimitars. She didn’t want to look good. She wasn’t vain, merely. She wanted to look terrifying. She practiced the countenance with which she would greet Lina on the platform. Was she more frightening with her arms folded or at her sides? The sneer, she found, was less effective than closing the lips tight and dilating the nostrils. Don’t show the teeth until you are moving in for the kill.

The senses in which Lina was at fault were too many to list, but that didn’t stop her. There was the disappearing with no trace and no word for days and days. There was thereafter the word every couple of years communicating little more than that she was alive and in a lunar Western outpost working in the kitchen of a school, and then, of all places, in Pittsburgh. There was the reasonable if not demonstrable hypothesis that, Enzo and his father having reportedly been dead tired before they left the farm, they may both have fallen asleep, if only for a second, which never would have happened if Lina had been in the car. She never fell asleep in cars. She would have kept Enzo awake or driven them home herself, because she wasn’t proud and careless behind the wheel like he was. There was the little matter of leaving her boy with no mother. There was the husband who said, Thick or thin. There was the mother whom everybody else had already abandoned. There was the man in the other car, who was also killed, and Lina would have talked Enzo awake or driven herself. There was the no reason ever given, to anybody, not in a letter, not in a phone call, for leaving. There was Mrs. Marini’s own theory that there never had been a reason, only a decision, made and executed in a single deft, unmeditated stroke. There was Costanza Marini. There was, What about her? There was, I gave you my heart every day for thirty years. There was, Even when you pass a dead dog on the road, you pay it the courtesy of a backward glance. There was, I drove you from my thoughts, I did not say your name while you were away.

She may have reserved her severest judgment for the sins, committed by someone else, of which she happened to consider herself most guilty, but that wasn’t the point. She wasn’t interested in extenuating circumstances or Christian psychology or petty tolerance. She was interested in driving a stake of fear into Lina’s heart. The Lord would have his opportunity for retribution in due course. Meantime, there was a price to be paid down here, at home.

She was plucking her eyebrows before the bedroom mirror when Patrizia and the boy arrived. Ciccio came in and sat on the bed, expressing curiosity as to what she was doing to her face.

“I don’t come out of the package like this, you know,” she said.

He said, “What do I know about cosmetology?”

“Did you tramp snow on my rugs?”

In the mirror, she saw him lift his stocking feet for her approval.

He said, “Are you sick or something?”

“No,” she responded.

“You look sick. Pardon me saying it.”

Patrizia shuffled into the bedroom, tinkling her keys. Her face was swollen and splotched. Mrs. Marini checked Ciccio’s face in the mirror, but it was a weird and peachy mask of health and goodwill. Then he left the room. Patrizia looked at her sideways as she continued to lay siege to her brows. From the other side of the house she heard Ciccio repeatedly opening and closing the icebox.