THE LESSON
by
Linda Scotto
Today she will teach us a lesson—Bella. She is always teaching us lessons. The problem with this is either the lesson is something we already know or don’t want to. Today she has entered my bedroom and stands arms akimbo, feet spread shoulder-distance apart, stockings gathered at the ankle. She waits until I look up. Because she is short, and I mean short as in dwarf-like short, I can see, standing behind her with an expression of dread, my mother, chomping on her cuticles. This lesson, I can see, might be a difficult one. I have questions about what is going to go on, but Bella is impatient to begin. She stomps her foot hard, hard enough to shake and vibrate the trinkets on my plywood dresser. I hear all the bric-a-brac that make up my eight-year-old life instantly clatter together.
“Come on,” she bellows, “Today, you’re going to learn what a whore is.”
We walk down the stairs of our six-story apartment building silently. My mother slouches along a half staircase behind us. I turn to look at her several times just to make sure I will not have to take this lesson in by myself. I keep turning every few steps, for fear she will disappear, until my grandmother pokes my arm hard with her finger.
“Watch where you’re walking.”
My grandfather, Augie, is already outside waiting behind the wheel of the car. He is wearing a bright-yellow straw hat with a big florally brim, and he’s drinking a Rheingold. I know that hat. I’ve spent hours in it, dawdling in front of the mirror, vamping it up, doing some of my best Marilyn Monroes until Bella would come in and scream, “Get my goddamn hat off, you hear?”
Hey, how come Augie can wear it? I want to ask but before I can say a word, we are seated inside and his foot presses on the pedal hard. Our heads jerk back in unison. I look over at my mother who seems neither annoyed nor interested.
“Today,” my grandmother repeats, in case from the time we’ve gotten down the stairs, it had slipped our minds, “I’m going to teach you what a whore is.” And she smiles. When she smiles, I see them: her teeth, with all the ugly dark gaps between them. She has told me it’s from bad water in Italy. Even though I’ve never been to Italy, I still dream I will wake up with the teeth. Sometimes the kids on the block make fun of her. Sometimes, before I leave to go outside to play, she stops me and I know what she is going to say. “Don’t tell those goddamn kids out there that I got brown teeth, you hear?”
I want to tell her they already know. But she hears them, she hears them by the window when she calls me for dinner. “Go eat brown teeth’s food.” Sometimes in a rare moment when she giggles, not the forced laughs she has with the mailman or the grocery clerk, but the one that slips out on its own, she covers her mouth quickly and bows her head in shame, as if a real laugh will show more of their ugliness.
Augie is drunk and his driving is not very good anyway. Drivers on the road are giving us the horn. “Fucking watch out, old man,” I hear someone shout from a passing car. I turn to look at my mother, but she’s too busy looking out the window. Sometimes she turns her head around completely as if we’ve passed someone she can’t believe she recognized, but Augie’s foot is heavy on the gas and won’t allow her eyes to linger long.
“Your sister should be here too.” Bella sneers. Even though I have not been directly addressed, I know she’s talking to me because I’m the only one in this car with a sister.
“Turn here, pull up,” my grandmother spits the orders out tersely. Augie obliges wordlessly, planting both right tires on the curb in an effortless park. I look around and immediately recognize the area. It’s Kings Highway, one of the most crowded shopping areas in Brooklyn. Dozens mingle in the street. They pop into and out of the stores, wait for buses, some with dozens of bags in tow on a definite mission, others strolling in a lazy Saturday morning daze. Bella and I step out of the car, but my mother is still looking out the window.
“Get out of the car, Carol.”
“How come Grandpa Augie doesn’t have to know what a whore is?”
“Grandpa Augie has known many whores already.” My grandmother snickers.
Bella positions herself on the corner, my mother and I beside her. We wait for what seems like hours. From where we stand, I watch the sea of heads that seem to float up the avenue. The August sun is merciless and creates a dreamlike, transparent wave over everything. A baseball game blares from Augie’s radio. Once in a while, he sucks down a beer in what looks like one swallow, then throws the empty can directly over his shoulder.
My grandmother checks her Timex every few minutes, then as if on cue, points toward the Dime Savings Bank.
“Should be right about now.”
Then I see her: a small woman, almost as short as Bella, in a white housedress. In one arm she holds a paper of some sort and with the other makes what appears to be an unconscious rubbing motion across her chest. She stops at the curb, then drops her arms to the side and looks up in an attempt to cross the street, and now I can see it’s my godmother. My grandmother takes a step back, she arches her back, juts her belly into the air, then cups her hands in front of her mouth into what seems to be a makeshift bullhorn.
“Whore!” she screams. The word, pronounced by my grandmother as who are, is in perfect Brooklyn speak and emitted loud enough to pierce the soul. Several people stop instantly. They look to us then among themselves, as if to make sure the trollop referred to is not among their own party.
“Hey, everybody, there’s a whore on Kings Highway,” my grandmother continues.
At first I think Julie will not recognize us. But then I follow her eyes, from my grandmother to my mother and then to myself, and I want to die. Immediately, I move close to my mother and lean my body against her, and when I do, I feel her housedress moist with sweat.
“What’s going on?” A man asks my grandmother as he walks by. He looks confused.
“You see that there?” She points across the street. “That is a whore. My daughter is letting her husband fuck a whore right before her very eyes.”
The man turns his head. The shoppers are still stopped. I feel like the world is standing still and everything in it, except for Julie who has figured out what is happening now. She is trying to make her way through the crowd, and I watch her shift direction this way and that. She reminds me for a moment of a tiny pinball, slapped forcefully into the blinding lights of the game, desperately trying to make its way to the hole.
“Whore,” my grandmother bellows in an attempt to get a last one in while Julie is still in earshot.
We stand there for what feels like hours until, finally, we are allowed to sit in the car. As I make my way into the backseat, I hear the empty cans of Rheingold crunch beneath my feet. The car begins to move, and Bella is saying something but I don’t hear her.
My mind is racing. Saturday, like every Saturday before, Julie will be waiting for me. We will meet and she will put me on the carousel and watch me go around and around. I will never catch the gold ring. I will never get a free ride, because I love Julie and I would rather wave to her than do just about anything in the world. And now, the next time I am on that ride and my eyes meet hers, she will know that I know—even though I am not quite sure what it really means—that she’s a whore.
We ride in silence for a while, then Bella turns herself around until she is completely facing my mother. “Maybe…maybe…if you hadn’t let yourself get so fat.” I look at my mother. She has her chin in her hand, and she is staring right into my grandmother’s eyes. I think maybe I should be worried about her, but I know somehow she is in a place where she goes, where things don’t touch you so much.
I understand this place. It’s where the unshaven man in the schoolyard was. The one who would stand outside day after day and let out large wails and say, “Please, for herself, can herself have these, please?” But there was never anything in his outstretched hands. The police came one day and took him from there, and the teacher told the whole class about Vietnam and how he may have seen too many bombs dropping.
I do not know, at eight years old, what kinds of bombs my mother has seen dropped. She does not reveal them in my presence. Sometimes I catch her—the real her, the one that’s a person with a living, beating heart and healthy blood coursing through her veins—revealing a tiny bit of who she really is: a single word, one sentence, or perhaps if she has had a glass of wine, a small story of delight or disappointment before the veil comes down and it becomes dark again behind her eyes.
We turn up our corner and Augie belches. His feet crush more Rheingold cans as we get out of the car and make our way toward the walkway of the apartment. My mother, who has not said one word during the entire trip, doesn’t walk with us. Instead, she turns and walks up the block. I see her light a cigarette when she gets some ways up, pause, take a deep puff, then watch as the smoke disappears into the hot summer air.
Some lessons are never learned.
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