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Dancing for My
   Mother

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Thomas E. Kennedy
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          Winter becomes spring becomes summer and the old man who occasionally gets chased down the street by his wife hitting him with a broom suddenly dies. The family is Italian, thirteen of them. At the old man’s funeral, the priest talks Latin and walks around the coffin shaking a smoking brass bowl and chanting. The old lady weeps throughout the Mass. Now and then she cries out, Mi senti, oh Dio? Mi senti? Which you’re told means can you hear me, oh God? This is followed by breast-beating and loud wails. Finally everyone goes outside and the coffin is loaded into the bed of a pickup truck. Mourners walk behind it to the cemetery. Where it is laid beside a narrow hole in the ground. The priest speaks more Latin. The old woman wails Mi senti, oh Dio! She tears at her clothes and hair. After the coffin is lowered, the old lady throws herself into the grave and has to be hauled out by her sons, all of them weeping, all of them crying Mamma! Mamma!

          So this is death, this is what happens. It’s awful to see big people crying so much. Death is more than sad, it’s terrifying. But when you get back home your mother says the old lady made a spectacle of herself. It was disgusting. And this is the old bitch who chased that poor man down the street hitting him over the head with a broom! Italians are so emotional! They have no dignity, they have no control. They’re phony. You wonder if everyone dies. Will your mother? Will Pappas and Grandpa Mike and Carol Marie? Will you? You can’t die, can you? And yet you nearly did. The dog. Always remember the dog. Born to die too, that dog. But not before he got you good. Scars stopping time, taking you backwards—a prisoner.

          One day your parents move you to Aurora, to a brand new house at 1648 Ironton Street. There is no lawn yet. Across the street is a vacant lot that will soon be full of new houses. Carol Marie and you have your own rooms! Your bed and chest of drawers are made of rustic blond wood, western style. There is a lampshade with scenes like home on the range. The living room furniture includes a pale green love seat and couch sitting at an L angle, a glass-topped corner table connecting them. The love seat jutting like a pier into the living room. You have to walk around it to go into the kitchen. On the table is a tall lamp in the shape of a naked woman. She is jade green. She is curvy. According to your mother she is art. Hanging on the wall behind the couch is a wide rectangular mirror, where Pappas will pose a lot with his shirt off, his muscles bulging, his proud voice saying, What a man! What a man! On the opposite wall is a big picture window facing west. Beneath it is a stuffed chair, an end table, a rhododendron in a pot. Looking out the picture window you can see the snowcapped Rocky Mountains. They look so close it’s as if you could walk there in no time. There are lots of plants flourishing in the living room, hanging from the ceiling and sitting on the little tables. There is also a big Packard Bell radio record player combo. At night everyone gathers around the radio and listens to Amos & Andy, Inner Sanctum, Hopalong Cassidy, Sam Spade, You Bet Your Life.

          This then is another new life: up and coming family of four. The future secure. But unfortunately the move to Aurora, the removal of Grandpa Mike’s influence from your daily lives, brings the old, irritable Pappas back and you start peeing the bed again. He says you do it to spite him. Your parents decide that if you’re going to act like a baby, they are going to treat you like a baby. Your mother buys a bunch of diapers and every night she pins one on you. You look really silly, seven years old, a beanpole with rippling ribs and bony legs wearing a white diaper that will fall off if you don’t clutch it with one hand when you stand up. Diapers do no good, you wet them too. Pappas gets ferocious about it and starts beating you on your wet mornings with a thick belt that has a steel washer embedded in it for attaching a set of keys if you have them. One whack produces a hollow-centered welt that turns red to purple to yellow. The beatings come and go, one day yes, one day no, depending on if you wet the bed and also on his mood. Which is always unpredictable. Extremely so. Early evening in the glow of the cocktail hour, he might sit you on his lap, caress you, give you a kiss and tell you stories about the war, being at Pearl Harbor manning a machinegun, bombs going off, Jap Zeros sinking ships, sailors diving over the sides into flaming water. Never trust a Jap, he says. Those slanty eyes, he says. Those slanty eyes hiding their slanty thoughts. I’m glad we dropped the bomb on those bastards. The goddamn Russians are next.

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