Saint of the Narrows Street

1.
Risa’s in the kitchen, crying into a gravy-stained dish towel as she heats up the remaining chicken cutlets on the stove in her cast-iron pan. Her hands are clammy. Sweat beads her hairline. Her purple T-shirt has dusky little circles on it from the popping oil.
     Her sister, Giulia, is sitting at the dining room table, holding eight-month-old Fab.
     At twenty-eight, a new mother, Risa feels old and worn out already. Giulia’s four years younger than her, and she still seems so full of life, like the world can break her and she’ll bounce back no problem. She’s lithe, tan, looks chic in the acid-wash jeans and blue Oxford shirt she’s wearing. Fab’s squirming around, playing with the buttons on her shirt, blowing raspberries against her sleeve. Giulia’s come over with her own heartbreak—having split with her latest boyfriend, Richie, moved out of their apartment, and shown up here with a suitcase and nowhere else to go—but she hasn’t noticed yet that it’s Risa who’s in tears. Of all nights.
     Not that there’d be any good nights with Sav still around. He’s out now, thankfully. Probably at that heavy metal club he goes to, L’Amour.
     “He’s getting big,” Giulia says, her focus wholly on cooing Fab. “He’s about the cutest baby I’ve ever seen. I could take a bite out of his little apple cheeks.”
     “It all happens so fast,” Risa says. “I feel like I took him home from the hospital yesterday.”
     “You really don’t have to heat those cutlets up. I’m not that hungry.”
     “You’ve got to eat.”
     “I can’t remember the last time I had a home-cooked meal.”
     “I’m glad you’re here. Fab’s glad.” A break in Risa’s voice. The tears apparent in her words.
     “What is it, sweetie?” Giulia says. She stands, Fab in her arms, and walks over to Risa at the stove, holding Fab to her chest with one arm, while reaching out with her other and touching Risa on the shoulder.
     “You came here because you need help, not to help me,” Risa says.
     “I’m fine. It’s nothing, really. It was just time to move on. What’s happening?”
     Risa uses a dish towel to dry her eyes and attempts to compose herself. “Sit down and eat,” she says. “Please. I’m gonna make you a plate.”
     Giulia nods and takes Fab back to the table.
     Risa met Sav in the summer of 1983 on the beach in Coney Island. Only three years ago, but it feels like another lifetime. She was twenty-five and mostly happy. Sav approached her and her friends Marta, Lily, and Grace on the sand not far from the boardwalk that day. What did she see in him? He was a year younger than her. Wiry. He seemed a little dangerous, the kind of guy her father had warned her about, and she liked that. She thought he looked like Ralph Macchio in The Outsiders, which she’d just seen at the movies—she’d read the book in high school, and Johnny was her favorite then. She liked Sav’s voice, sticky with the syrup of the neighborhood, part concrete and part muscle car. She liked his laugh, the way it flattened everything in front of it. They’d gotten married fast and moved into this walk-in apartment on Saint of the Narrows Street between Bath Avenue and Benson Avenue in a three-family house that Sav’s parents, Frank and Arlene Franzone, still own. The Franzones lived in the house until Sav was in high school, then they bought a new place on Eighty-Second Street and started renting this one out as three separate apartments. Sav’s older brother, Roberto, occupied this unit for a while until he robbed Jimmy Tomasullo’s trophy shop and split town for greener pastures with Jimmy’s wife, Susie. Roberto was a neighborhood legend in his time—smarmy and charming in his way, a guitarist in a few bands that played at L’Amour, prone to breaking rules and laws—and Sav always seems like he’s aching to be his brother.
     Sav had revealed himself as a bad man soon after they were married, but it’d been worse since Fab was born and tonight had been the worst of all. The things he’d say and wouldn’t say to her, the way he wouldn’t meet her eyes, his quiet menace, the way he’d slap her and toss her around—all of it just a boiling prelude to what had happened a short time ago at the very table where Giulia’s now sitting with Fab. Sav’s friend Double Stevie was there and so was Chooch, Sav’s oldest friend from across the street. Sav took out a gun he’d bought on the sly at the Crisscross Cocktail Lounge and was showing it to Double Stevie. Risa told him to get out. He pointed the gun at her and Fab, smiling, and pulled the trigger on an empty chamber. She’d nearly puked up her heart. Her body’s still buzzing. Thank God Fab doesn’t understand what his father’s done.
     At the table now, Risa gets Fab situated in his high chair and then sets Giulia up with a plate of cutlets and some semolina bread. To drink, there’s wine or water and not much else. Giulia opts for wine, a tall glass filled to the brim. Risa says that the wine’s from their former neighbor a few doors down, Mr. Evangelista, who died recently. She says it’s strange to have a bunch of wine bottled by a man who’s dead. Giulia agrees but drinks it down. “It’s good,” she says. “And the cutlets are great. They remind me of Mama’s.”
     Risa thinks of their mother’s kitchen, oil bubbling on the stove, Mama’s hands covered in breadcrumbs and eggs, the apron she always wore. She remembers piping hot cutlets on pink plates. Savoring each bite. She remembers helping Mama. Learning. She has was always been interested in the ways of the kitchen. She kept all their mother’s and grandmothers’ recipes on index cards in a tin. Things were easier when they were kids at that table with their pink plates. She didn’t yet know the sad terrors of the world.
     Giulia reaches out and tweaks Fab’s cheek. He smiles at her, one of those sweet baby smiles. The way he beams with his whole face. His eyes. Such light.
     Risa picks up a napkin from the table. She looks at Giulia and then at Fab and then looks away, at the wall, at the kitchen, at anything other than them. She’s on the verge of tears again. She uses the napkin to blot her eyes. She’s turned to the side, faced away from Fab, as if she doesn’t want him to see her.
     “It’s okay,” Giulia says. “You let it out.” She gets up and comes over to Risa, squatting at her side and placing a hand on her back, palm flat against her spine at first, eventually falling into a rhythm of patting her gently.
     Risa can smell the cutlets all over herself. “I don’t know if I’m ready to talk about it,” she says.
     Giulia looks like she wants to say something, but she hesitates and holds back. “Whenever you want to tell me what that bastard did, I’m here,” she says.
     Risa leans into Giulia, putting her head on her shoulder, sobbing steadily now.
     Giulia pulls her into another hug. Fab’s watching them, smooshing his thumbs against the tray on his high chair, delighted. “We’re gonna take care of each other,” Giulia says. “That’s what we’re gonna do.”

As a girl, Risa had daydreamed about being a nun, about helping the sick and poor, about finding real meaning in life. She imagined herself dabbing the heads of dying patients with a wet washcloth, saying not to worry because God was with them. She imagined everyone calling her Sister Risa, which had a nice ring to it. She imagined keeping all her thoughts about God and the world in a journal, all her doubts and fears, everything beautiful and frightening, and she’d write it all down by candlelight in this simple marble notebook with a freshly sharpened pencil. She could have lived a “meditative life of purpose,” as her favorite nun ever, Sister Antonella from Our Lady of Perpetual Surrender, would have said.
     That dream faded. After high school at Lafayette, where she’d gone instead of Bishop Kearney because her folks couldn’t afford the tuition there, she’d attended Staten Island College, getting mostly Bs and Cs in general studies classes, but decided not to go back for her junior year and to forget about her degree. After dropping out, she worked at Villabate Alba for a few years—her father was friends with the owner. It was tough, especially on Sundays and holidays, early mornings and very long lines, people anxious for their cannoli and sfogliatelle and every other beautiful thing behind the gleaming glass in those display cases. If she’d been smarter sooner, perhaps she could have gone down a different road—nurse, social worker, law clerk—but she’d allowed herself to drift until she met Sav that day on the beach. She’d had boyfriends before him but nothing serious, so she didn’t know the pitfalls and the signs of serious trouble. She liked that he liked her. If she’d never met Sav, she’s not sure where she’d be—maybe still living at home with her folks—but she’d be better off in many ways.
     In the last seven months, since watching the Challenger blow up on television while home alone with Fab, she’s fallen into crying fits daily. Thinking about that poor teacher. Christa McAuliffe. A mother herself. The squiggle of smoke the spaceship made in the Florida sky. Fab was only a few weeks old at the time, but she’d shielded his eyes from the disaster. Maybe they’d happened before, these crying fits, but something about the Challenger really set her off. The impermanence of existence. The realization that nothing’s promised. Thinking about the tragedy’s impact on her makes her feel guilty, but she can’t help it.
     She’s tried so hard to figure out how she and Fab can leave Sav, but every scenario ends badly for them. Alone, tired, with no help. Her father saying it’s her duty to stay with her husband, no matter that she’d chosen the wrong guy. The problem, he’d say, was back when she was doing the choosing and not now when she has no choice. He’s very old-school, her father. Look at how he’s handled Giulia, disowning her when she was seventeen after he walked in on her having sex with her high school boyfriend, Marco LaRocca. One less daughter, no biggie. He’d be angry at Risa for talking to Giulia, let alone knowing she’s given her black sheep sister a place to stay. Risa doesn’t understand her father. His version of God seems to have nothing to do with love and everything to do with shutting the door.
     Risa again looks at Giulia holding Fab. Playing with him. She’s such a sweetheart. It’s brought her comfort to have her sister’s company for this bit of time. It’d be nice if it could be this way all the time. The three of them. Some joy in the room. None of Sav’s poison.