Worn Masks Read online

  Worn Masks

  by

  Phyllis Carito

  © 2016 Phyllis Carito

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any means,

  electronic or mechanical, without permission in

  writing from the publisher.

  978-1-943837-48-9 paperback

  978-1-943837-49-6 epub

  978-1-945805-27-1 mobi

  Cover Design

  by

  GusGus Press

  a division of

  Bedazzled Ink Publishing Company

  Fairfield, California

  http://www.bedazzledink.com

  Set in the late twentieth century, Mary Grace, an independent and solitary woman in her late forties, is drawn back into her mother’s life and death, and a journey that impacts her life as an estranged daughter. Although, surrounded by her family, as a child Mary Grace had always felt isolated. Her Italian parents, in their new American life and home had language barriers and emotional rigidity that left Mary Grace confused about who they and she really were. The story of her family begins to unravel with the unfolding of her mother’s life and the events that lead Mary Grace to walk in her own family’s footsteps to uncover the path her family has hidden for so long.

  for Regina, mia cara sorella

  Acknowledgments

  This work has come to fruition with support of teachers and friends who guided me through the writing process. With special thanks to writing teachers Joanna Clapps Herman and Liz Eslami; and my dedicated readers and dear friends Marcia Sullivan and Patricia Fecher; and grazie mille to Dawn-Marie Vittoria Blasl, and Carl Denti.

  Preface

  Our familia Italiana was centered on food, the cooking, the aromas, the hours of the sorelli preparing the meal, and then the gathering. From noon to evening, from soup to nuts, around the table we sat, multiple generations, where I watched the dynamics of the family. Much of what I know about family came from these times. As a child I learned you didn’t ask questions, but if you were quiet enough, you could listen.

  The story of Mary Grace is a story of all the Italians who I have known, women who cooked and cleaned for their families; who were good wives; who lived with their losses and their sorrows, and no matter what happened stayed true to family. Mary Grace does the unspeakable, she questions. As her story unfolds so do the passions and heartaches of the family.

  Part I

  The Phone Call

  Chapter 1

  HOW COULD MARY Grace ignore the call without breaking her promise to her father? “You always take care of family,” her father said many times, and there was the way he grasped her hand in the hospital. “She’s your mother.”

  She had somehow hoped not to ever have to return to 2224 St. James Place but how else could she respond to Aunt Maggie’s call?

  Back then Mary Grace had tried to talk to her dad about what was happening to him the last time he insisted that she promise to take care of her mother. He held her hand tight and said, “It is all I want of you. Make sure she is okay.”

  “Dad, don’t worry. I will.” Mary Grace had actually said the words, not ready to believe that hospital stay would be his last. She figured there were ways to do this. She could hire people to clean her mother’s apartment, or go to the store. She would figure it out.

  Why was this call from Aunt Maggie different?

  Aunt Maggie, her father’s sister, had always been an alarmist, more reactive than the rest of the Maschere family, but she had never before sounded so worried about her sister-in-law, Teresa Giordano Maschere. Mary Grace and Aunt Maggie had a similar distain for Mary Grace’s mother. Aunt Maggie had always been Mary Grace’s comfort, knowing just when to call upstairs and invite Mary Grace down to her own apartment, and get Mary Grace out of the fray between her parents.

  This had been a Maschere household for over sixty years since Papa Maschere purchased the house for his wife, Momma Rosa, Mary Grace’s grandmother, and their three children. They had converted the house from a one-family to a two-family when Luigi got married to the mysterious, dark-haired Teresa, a wispy girl from the north of Italy, and unlike the full-bodied, sun-soaked Maschere brothers who had come from the south along the Amalfi coast.

  After Momma Rosa died it was a relief for Papa Maschere, what with the wayward ways of Uncle Paul, and Aunt Maggie never marrying, to know his middle son, Luigi, would be in the house when he was gone. Luigi would watch over the house and over Maggie.

  For Luigi, the idea was always that he would move out of this house, out of the converted three bedrooms into some place of their own for him, his wife Teresa, and their sweet-faced bambina, Mary Grace. Early on he saw how unhappy Teresa was, how she always remarked, “It is like a midget’s house, this tight space of kitchen, living room, and bedroom, in a stuffy upstairs, and to top it off, I have to go down the hall to use the bathroom. How is this a home?”

  He wanted to move, he talked about it, usually after a few drinks. But they never moved. There was always some reason to stay, Luigi’s job, Teresa’s health, leaving Aunt Maggie alone after Uncle Paul died. So, they wound up staying in the too small, too tight space.

  Could it be that Aunt Maggie was getting irrational and overreacting? Mary Grace replayed the voice mail a few times, and something about Aunt Maggie’s voice made her feel uneasy. “Mary Grace it’s not good, not good, oh, you must come.” Aunt Maggie’s jittery high pitch was shaky and desperate.

  “She no answer me, she don’t tell me to go back downstairs. She’s not right. I had to call for an ambulance,” is how Aunt Maggie described finding her mother slumped across the couch and unresponsive, when Mary Grace called her aunt back.

  Mary Grace let out a sigh. Could she look at this situation differently, separate from the past? All that occurred long ago, the inability for her and her mother to ever see eye to eye, the cryptic conversations that Mary Grace knew existed, but never what they contained, weren’t they all in the past now?

  Mary Grace had always lived at the edges of family interactions, always lingering in doorways watching, listening, sandwiched between Aunt Maggie living downstairs, and Uncle Paul living upstairs above her in the attic. Both her aunt and her uncle fascinated Mary Grace, but she learned early not to share that with her mother. Even a simple comment that Aunt Maggie had given her a piece of coffee cake would end up with her mother’s stinging words, “You think she bakes it herself? It is from the store. Stupido.”

  Her father, on the other hand, encouraged her to go downstairs to be with Aunt Maggie, but told her very clearly that it was better to leave Uncle Paul alone. “Bambina, Uncle Paul he no likes too much noise. He no like people all around when he is home, so when you see he leaves the porch and goes up the stairs, he wants to be by himself. He no wants to see your bird puzzle.” But, that wasn’t so. Uncle Paul liked to talk to her. When they met alone on the porch he would tell her stories about a beautiful place in the boot called Italy where the trees spiraled up to the sky, and the chiesa had a tower so tall it rose above the trees.

  Besides, in a small house of five people, it was difficult to not cross paths. For Uncle Paul to get to his space, he had to pass through the porch, where Aunt Maggie often was sitting, and then go past her apartment, up the steps to Mary Grace’s family’s apartment, and then down the hall and through the bathroom to get to the attic steps. If Mary Grace was sitting in the hall doing a puzzle and someone was in the bathroom he waited there in the hall, and he smiled, made faces at her, and mimed the birds flying. Still, it was obvious, even to a child, that there were more than physical walls and stairs between all of them, and some things she didn’t know how to ask her parents.

  Could Mary Grace go back now?

  B
ack then, when arriving home from grade school each day Mary Grace wanted to stay with Aunt Maggie on the screened-in porch. Aunt Maggie, not wanting any trouble, would coax her. “Go say hello to your Momma.”

  When she did as her aunt told her, her mother was either in the living room staring at the black box of the television, or in the bedroom with all the blinds closed tight. “Momma, I’m home.”

  “Go downstairs. Go outside. Just leave me be.” Teresa wouldn’t turn her head to see her daughter.

  Mary Grace took a deep breath and reasoned that this many years out, she could handle a brief visit back to the family house, the house she had hoped to avoid forever after she left at sixteen years of age. What she never conceived was how the visit would begin to unravel the whole of their lives, beginning with her childhood bed—the couch.

  The Couch

  Chapter 2

  MARY GRACE HAD felt sickened by the thought of interacting with her mother. She ran conversations through her mind as she drove and reminded herself again that she had promised her dad. When she arrived she went first to the house, and Aunt Maggie’s downstairs’ apartment, and maybe to put off the inevitable a little longer decided to call the hospital. She spoke with someone in the emergency room. “Your mother is a victim of a heat stroke that has put her into a coma, and the next twenty-four hours will tell us . . .”

  Is this the end? Mary Grace’s knees were shaking, but in her head she was angry, and her heart was ice cold.

  When Mary Grace went to the hospital an hour later, the interaction in the hospital was surreal—her mother lying on an air conditioning mat and hooked up to a respirator, her mother who she had not seen for so many years, left Mary Grace feeling oddly suspended, not emotional at all, and asking herself, “Who is this woman?”

  Did she even recognize this person lying there? Why should she? She didn’t know how to interact with this nonresponsive stranger. The ICU nurse, whose name was chalked onto a board across from her mother, Nurse Belinda, encouraged her to talk to her mother. “She may hear you.” But, Mary Grace had nothing to say to her mother. Instead she told Nurse Belinda she was going to have to leave. Nurse Belinda rattled on about how difficult it was to see someone you love so ill, but Mary Grace just interrupted her. “Will you just have someone call me?” Nurse Belinda assured her the hospital would call her with any change at all in her mother’s condition.

  Mary Grace went back to the house where she had grown up. Faithfully, there was Aunt Maggie on the porch. “Anything?”

  “No change, they will let us know. You should get some sleep, Aunt Maggie. I guess I’ll go upstairs.” Mary Grace hesitated, her legs were heavy and she felt uncertain that she could move them. It was harder walking up the stairs to her childhood apartment than it had been walking into the ICU room.

  Mary Grace stared at the empty couch, covered with a gaudy slipcover, one she had never seen. Mary Grace didn’t remember the colors of the other flowery pattern slipcovers her mother had made every few years to replace worn ones. She did remember the folding metal and the creaking springs. She did remember sheets pinched in the metal, with blackened grease-stained eyeholes cut open in them.

  She opened the windows and stared at the stained couch in disbelief. Aunt Maggie and the neighbor had found her mother lying across the couch. She could see where her mother’s body had indented the cushions, foam from her mouth stained one end and there were body excrements toward the third cushion, landing on both the middle cushion and the mostly spared, but most worn last cushion. Mary Grace placed the cushions into a black plastic bag and carried it downstairs and outside to the garbage can.

  They said they’d know in twenty-four hours, so she’d have to stay. Mary Grace had established herself as a solid editor, had worked steadily for over fifteen years for the same publishing house, so taking time off or working without going into the office were not a problem for her. It was a solitary job and she liked it that way. She was tired and not going to drive the hour to be called and have to turn around, come back, and finish this. Maybe she was afraid that if she left she would not be able to make herself come back.

  Mary Grace had been eight years old when she was finally allowed to turn the couch into a bed each night by herself without anyone’s help. The evening ritual began when her dad, Luigi, checked the mousetraps, one placed at the entrance to the living room, discreetly against the wall on the kitchen side; and another one tucked behind the back of the couch. He removed the carcasses to the garbage downstairs, and re-baited the traps with rind pieces of provolone, and he promised Mary Grace that mice could not climb up the back of the couch.

  But, Mary Grace was clear now that she could not sleep on this couch again, and would have to just lie down on her father’s side of her mother’s bed.

  Mary Grace went into the bedroom and heard her mother warning her and her father, “Maria Graziella, Luigi, you never sit on the bed!” Her mother’s bed, always made with care each morning after a brief airing, all linens pulled back, after her mother’s morning bathroom ritual, while the coffee was brewing, she made the bed, topping it with a bedspread for each season. Once the task was completed the perfectly smooth bedspread was not to be disturbed by Mary Grace or her father sitting on it.

  Back at the house the next few evenings after sitting in the hospital all day, Mary Grace tried to get some work done but she couldn’t concentrate on the manuscript and she couldn’t stop thinking about the stupid couch. It was the center of life, even more than the kitchen. It was her secret bed.

  Even before she was allowed to open it, when it had been her dad who opened the couch each evening, Mary Grace always wanted to be like the Castro convertible girl on the television and open it herself. The Castro girl was as small as Mary Grace and could open the couch. Still, Mom said it was Dad’s job, and she warned him: “Don’t let it swing down and smash against the floor. That old maid will be screaming about noise up here.”

  Her mother was always characterizing Aunt Maggie. All of which seemed to relate to her not having children. “That one, she’s peculiar, never took care of a child.” “She’s so touchy, got to watch every word you say to her, guess that’s what’s happens when you don’t have the sacrifice of children.”

  After a week, the hospital still could not confirm what would happen next to her mother. Her mother could remain in the coma or her heart could just give out. Mary Grace called her job and extended her sick time. They were gracious, “Do what you have to, Gracie.” They had no reason to question her. She was a valued employee who never missed a deadline. She came on time, stayed until the work was complete or took it home to make sure it was finished. Her editing was thoughtfully and accurately done, pleasing both the writer and the publisher. If you had asked anyone at the job about her life outside of work they would say, “Family? I think she has an aunt.”

  Mary Grace returned each night from the hospital and looked at the old couch. She sat in the middle on the worn springs of the folded bed. Eating on the couch had always been forbidden. “Clean out those crumbs,” her mother said on Saturday mornings. The crumbs were along the horizontal folds of the bed from snacks that she and her father had snuck onto the couch when her mom was out, seeping down into the bed; or from the mice that after all had gotten in and left them there.

  The memories flooding back, Mary Grace decided that the couch had to go.

  Opening that Castro convertible bed each night for eight years, Mary Grace had tried to make it her own. The nightly ritual was for Mary Grace to gather her pajamas from the bureau behind the accordion door of her parents’ bedroom, brush her teeth and hair, and then her parents vacated the couch so it could be transformed into her bed.

  The process began with getting her pillow and blanket from the coat closet before jamming the gold vinyl chair against the door, balancing the three couch cushions on the seat, and lastly sliding the round two-tier occasional table in next to the chair. Both had to be exactly at the right spot or the couch
would not clear them on its descent. The completion of the ritual, her mother’s guiding the couch into place, “Let it down slow, don’t let it swing down and smash against the floor.”

  Mary Grace would fix the couch with the pillows and blankets, making the couch into a bed early so her mom could watch television with her feet up, while Mary Grace curled on her side facing away from the blue television light and tried to sleep.

  Going to sleep each night and getting up each morning were all wound around her mother’s rules. “Is it too much to ask, for a place to sit in my own living room?” Teresa questioned in the mornings, on the way from the bedroom to make coffee in the kitchen, and waking Mary Grace as she passed through the living room. Poking her finger into Mary Grace’s shoulder blade, “Get up and make this bed.”

  There was no lounging in bed for Mary Grace, especially on Saturday. Although she knew other children could sleep in, her mother insisted on waking her, calling over and over, “Maria Graziella, get up.”

  Mary Grace wanted to scream each time: “Gracie.” She hated her familiar and holy name of Mary and the added Grace was a bad prayer to her ears.

  It had been a night similar to this hot and sticky one, when Mary Grace had not thought of the change of couch to bed, but changing her life. Mary Grace felt her blouse clinging to her, the sweat running down her back, barely breathing, afraid she would be sick there in front of her parents sitting on the couch, her mother in an old housedress and her father stripped down to his boxer shorts, and Mary Grace blurting out, “I’m leaving. I’m moving out. I’m not coming home, not coming here again.” The heat was being blown around her legs from the small floor fan. As always, the windows were only open a crack, keeping out the air and keeping in their voices so the neighbors couldn’t hear. “I’m moving out to live with M., a guy, you don’t know him.” She hadn’t even used his name. Her mother would never meet him.