Salvatore Scibona - The End

“Are you hungry?” Patrizia yelled toward the doorway.

“No,” he called back.

“Are you playing with my icebox door?” Mrs. Marini asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you like the noise? The clicking noise?”

“Yeah,” he said feebly.

He did that before church, when she made him go, and before returning home when his father had a list of chores waiting for him, and before the penmanship practice to which she used to subject him in the afternoons. It was his way of asking to be left alone.

She faced Patrizia and made a coquettish smile.

“Don’t start, Costanza,” Patrizia hissed. “You be nice.”

“I’m nice,” she whispered, leering. “I’m always nice. I’m so very, very nice. Don’t you think I look nice?”

Come to think of it, her strategy would come off much more smoothly if Ciccio were left at home. Too bad Patrizia insisted on driving. She wanted Lina to herself.

“Let him stay here,” she said.

“He’ll go,” said Patrizia. “He wants to go.”

“We’ll have to smoosh together in the cab, which will be hot and disaccommodating.”

“He likes trains,” Patrizia insisted.

“We’ll smoosh and think of the trouble with the shifter.”

“When he was a baby, he had the toy trains that he pushed on the sofa and the driveway, and he made the train noises. Remember? He had the stripy hat I made him.”

“A passenger car. A sedan.”

“We’ll buy him peanuts that he likes.”

Mrs. Marini and the boy were connected temperamentally. She had a keen sense of justice, as did he. She had the snapping of a clothespin; he had the opening and closing of the icebox door, a waste of gas she would not have indulged for anyone else. The connection antedated his birth and had its source in events and confidences of the kind that her profession had taught her to inter in deep caverns, so far out of day-to-day reach that it required no effort to keep them there.

(The events that had led to Lina becoming pregnant with the boy were such a confidence; however, Lina’s specific reasons for refusing to dispose of him when he was still only a germ were not. It had seemed to both Enzo and Mrs. Marini the only unobjectionable course. If Lina had run away in shame at that time, no explanation would have been expected of her. Instead it was as though she had waited to disappear until no one could have imputed to her any motive other than supreme egoism.

“Aw, Coco,” said the glib ghost that pretended it was her husband, “takes one to know one.”

“How about you give me a whisper of fellow feeling for once?” she exclaimed. “Will you never understand me? Carmelina was my heir. She wrote herself out of my will. On a whim. How absurd.”)

“If you had the sort of car in which it’s appropriate for four people to ride at the same time,” Mrs. Marini said, “I admit I would have no quibble. But you have the truck.”

“I’m going to eat one of these bananas,” Ciccio yelled from the kitchen.

Patrizia lowered her voice further. “I want your best behavior,” she said.

“I have mortadella in the drawer on the right on the bottom,” Mrs. Marini yelled back.

“Save your rotten-egg throwing for at least a month. As a favor to me.”

“I don’t see the bread,” he said.

“A month?” said Mrs. Marini. “A month from now she’ll be hunting seals in Norway.”

The train waddled north out of the soot-smeared green dells above Pittsburgh into the familiar flatland, in the direction of Erie, Pennsylvania, where the woman would transfer to a two-and-a-half-hour westbound into Ohio.

She asked a cadaverous young man who was reading the Book of Mormon across the aisle if he had any cigarettes, but he said he didn’t. She tottered into the next car, scanning the seats for a prematurely wrinkled face. The other passengers glanced at her and looked aside. Finally, an army private gave her a Chesterfield but claimed to have no matches.

Her husband, from whom she was estranged, detested Chesterfields. He would indiscreetly leave a room in which Chesterfields were being smoked. In the dining car, she got a light from a girl behind the counter. The canteen was closed for business. They were only a few miles from Erie. Nobody was in the car but the two of them. The girl was perhaps twenty-five years old and wore a golden yellow turban tied in front with a knot that was like a French crescent pastry. She wheeled a bucket from behind the counter and then pressed with her foot on the lever of one of the castors and locked it in place.

“Missus, don’t you have a handkerchief?” She sighed.

The woman was sitting at a table by the window. She shook her head no.

The girl yanked a handkerchief from her pocket — it was clear the embroidery on the edges had been done by hand — and waved it at her. “Now, that’s fresh from my iron this morning,” she said, “but I guess you’ll keep it.”

The woman said, “Thank you,” and wiped her eyes and nose, preparing to be softly but aggressively pitied and then to be evangelized.

The girl only commenced mopping the floor.

Later, in the station in Erie, the girl came up to her again and asked passingly if she had a while to wait. The woman said she had two hours, yes.

The girl sunk her fists into her coat pockets and blew a long breath through her teeth. The turban had gone a little crooked. They both stared up at the estimated times of arrival and departure, the platform numbers, the destinations. The girl, keeping her eyes on the timetable, cocked her head and asked under her breath, “Missus, don’t you know you got that dress on backwards?”

He opened the icebox. He closed the icebox. He was alone in the old lady’s house. He listened to the noises when he (a) pulled back the handle, releasing the latch; (b) broke the airtight seal that the weather stripping around the door formed; (c) pushed the handle forward again, lowering the latch; (d) tossed the whole apparatus away from him, the latch relatching and the seal resealing simultaneously.

He allowed the mind to unravel. He allowed it to think whatever it wanted. Then he pierced it with the sound of the icebox door. He tried to synchronize the noises with the ticks of the clock. He watched as the mind organized itself around these sounds, click by whomp by click by whomp, until all other thoughts became inaudible.

It wasn’t really working. Usually it was a surefire strategy for quieting the interior clamor, but not today. Now Ciccio had blown so much time working on his head that he had just two hours left.

He picked up Mrs. Marini’s phone and called Ricky.

Shortly thereafter, the two of them were coasting down Chagrin, Ricky steering, Ciccio on the rack behind the seat with his feet out to the sides for balance. It started snowing again — great clumps of snow flopped onto the street.

“You were at the farm this whole time?” Ricky said.

“I told you, ass.”

They dropped the bike in Ciccio’s driveway and went in through the back door.

“Off with the shoes,” Ciccio said.

They took off their shoes.

“Now,” Ciccio said, “you’re going to keep your mouth shut about this, got me?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“I’m serious here,” he said, although Ricky was to be trusted.

“I said okay, fine.”

“The train’s supposed to get in at five forty-seven. Give them till quarter after six to make it back. We have ninety-two minutes to clean this dump up.”

When the conductor called out “Erie Station Tower,” the woman got off the train. She could see them out of the corner of her eye, two old ladies in black scampering toward her like ants, from two o’clock, about fifty feet distant. She looked away to the left. She pretended to search the faces where she knew they weren’t, pretended, for about five seconds, not to hear that one of them was calling her name, and held tight to these last moments of strangerhood.