Romantic Violence Read online

  Outsiders may have considered Blue Island to be a lower-middle-class town, but it had everything my mother could want. Family, friends, sustenance growing in the backyard. Fresh eggs and milk delivered right to her front door every Saturday morning. Early Italian settlers had even built the St. Donatus parish, named after San Donato, their patron saint back home in Ripacandida. And every year, the congregation threw a huge festival in honor of the saint, a feast that matched the one in Italy for devotion, wine, song, and celebration.

  My grandmother couldn’t understand why her daughter would want to move out of Blue Island to hoity-toity Oak Forest. “Forest?” she’d mock in her fractured English. It was nothing but fancy split-level houses and manicured lawns. Trees wouldn’t dare congregate on all that tidiness, even if there was room left over after all those two-car garages were built. Why would families need two cars to begin with? And why did they want all their houses to be made of wood and aluminum siding and look the same? The whole notion didn’t make sense to her. In Nonna’s eyes, my mother would be paying more for substantially less. Besides, where would they get the money? It wasn’t like Anna and Enzo were going to be able to afford it on the money they made from giving perms to old ladies.

  My mother consoled Nonna with the promise that she would bring me back to Blue Island every day. “Now that the baby is a few months old, I’m going back to work doing hair with Enzo and you will care for him while we’re away. Not a day will go by that we won’t see you, and Christian will know you as well as he knows us.”

  I was barely a couple of months old when a routine that lasted for the first five years of my life began. Every morning my mother strapped me into a car seat, raced over to Blue Island, dropped me into Nonna’s waiting arms, and hurried off to work at the modest hair salon she and my father had opened after I was born. Half a day later, either she or my father, or both of them, would come back to swoop me up, eat dinner with my grandparents, put me back into my car seat, and rush back to Oak Forest. As an infant, I was usually asleep by the time we reached the house, and I imagine it must have been confusing for me to wake up in one place and spend the rest of the day in another, only to wake up again in the place I had begun the previous day with no memory of how I got back there.

  I never considered who played what role in my life and whether or not the various adults in it were going about things the right way. Nonna provided the nurturing and guidance a mother normally would, and it never struck me as odd that she was actually my grandmother. And just as Nonna played the role of mother while my parents were busy working, the fatherly responsibilities fell to my grandfather, Nonno. I spent hours at his side, watching him saw wood and pound nails. A master carpenter, he showed me how to hold a nail just right. I trusted him so completely it never once occurred to me that the hammer he swung could hit my finger instead of the nail I held in place for him.

  My grandparents practically raised me, and it was the sturdy, three-story brown brick building they owned in Blue Island, not my parents’ cookie-cutter tract house in Oak Forest, that I considered home.

  But, despite having grandparents who gladly took me in and kept their watchful gaze over me, as a young child I longed for my mom and dad while they were away at work. I wanted to be with them, unsure of why they were always absent. I became the good kid, working hard to give them every reason to want me around. I picked up my Matchbox cars without being asked. I kept my clothes off the floor to keep my room tidy. I didn’t leave my soccer ball where my mother or father could trip over it. And I made sure to say “thank you” and “please” and tried to eat everything on my plate.

  Still, it wasn’t enough. I simply couldn’t compete with their steadfast pursuit of the American Dream. They had their growing business to tend to, and they were satisfied I was well cared for by people they trusted while they were away. But as full as my life was, as much as my grandparents and I loved each other, I yearned to be more a part of my parents’ lives.

  When the time came, convinced I was naturally brilliant, my mother made sure to find a school equal to the fine mind she was certain I possessed. Early on, she decided I would become a doctor—both wealthy and respected—and searched diligently for proof she had judged correctly.

  But my future as a doctor was not the only factor that made her resolute in her desire to ensure I was well educated. Her own schooling experience had been less than stellar. She had come to America with her family in 1966, during what would have been her high school years, not knowing a word of English. Blue Island’s public high school, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been a disaster for her. Totally indifferent to the traumas a foreign student might face, the school had no classes, tutors, translators, or resources to help a non-English speaker—or her family—assimilate.

  Anna, a simple sixteen-year-old girl from a tiny hamlet in Italy who could neither read, write, nor speak English, was on her own.

  Instead of helping her adapt, the other students called her names, threw snowballs at her at the bus stop, made fun of her hand-me-down clothes, and mimicked her parents and their backward ways.

  My mother lasted less than a year in high school before she dropped out and never went back.

  She vowed to herself that her child would grow up knowing all about fitting in and belonging. People would respect him, even look up to him. They would all recognize his studies would lead him to his rightful profession as a doctor.

  Of course, it all depended on where he got his education, so he would go to a nice private school, not one of those public schools where kids acted like animals.

  St. Damian Elementary School and its attached namesake church spanned the length of a football field. The long, low, blond brick building that encompassed the parish was huge in my five-year-old mind. Inside, the heavy wooden doors to each of the classrooms were closed, making the narrow, desolate hallways dim and dreary. The heels of my mother’s Italian shoes click-clacked like my grandfather’s tack hammer as we found our way to the principal’s office. The chairs the ancient head nun offered us seemed unnaturally tall and my feet dangled high above the floor. My mother perched on the edge of her chair, her leather purse clutched tightly in her hands. Her hair was stylishly swept to one side, her makeup appropriately minimal for meeting nuns.

  The principal, Sister Lucinia, smiled at me, leaning over her formidable metal desk. “I hear you’ll be starting school this year, young man,” she said peering down at me through large round spectacles that magnified her eyeballs like giant glass marbles.

  “Yes, Sister,” I replied, looking her in the eye like my mother had taught me.

  “And is this the school you’d like to go to?”

  “Yes, Sister,” my mother answered for me.

  Sister Lucinia continued to ask questions and we continued to say “Yes, Sister,” for what seemed to me an hour or more, but which was probably less than ten minutes at most.

  Finally, the principal turned to my mother. “We are happy to have your son join us, my dear,” she said with a wide wrinkled grin. “He is clearly a bright child. He will be president someday.”

  I waited for my mother to correct her, to tell her no, I would be a doctor, but instead she clutched her purse so tightly that even the hair dye that had permanently stained her fingertips turned white. “The president? Of America?”

  “Yes,” the old nun said, winking at me. “The president.”

  After we left the nun’s office, my mother stopped midway across the parking lot and pointed back at the building. “Look at it, Christian. Your first school. In your own neighborhood. In a nice place with nice children from nice parents who have money and doctors in their families. And one day they will be able to say the president of the United States of America went to school right here at St. Damian in Oak Forest. Imagine that.”

  Off to the far side of the parking lot, I spied a baseball game in progress. “Mamma, can I play baseball when I go here? On a real team? With uniforms?”

/>   “You will be able to do whatever you want. They know who you will be when you grow up. You can do anything.”

  I liked the sound of that. A ray of hope broke through the despair that had filled me since finding out I would not be going to school in Blue Island—the place I considered my real home.

  But my mother had lied. Inside a week of stepping into the long dark halls of St. Damian, I knew the kids there weren’t anywhere near the same as the ones in Blue Island.

  They didn’t eat spaghetti with clams for dinner. They ate noodles and fish sticks. They drank Pepsi with their meals, not homemade wine like families in Blue Island did. They lived in single-family homes, one family per house. When you grew up, you went to college and got a degree in accounting and then moved away and got married and had your own house and kids and noodles and fish sticks. The priest at the church said mass in English, not Italian. And they had no idea the annual St. Donatus festival was the highlight of the summer.

  I learned pretty quickly to keep to myself, that school meant boring books and too much praying and itchy uniforms and stupid rules about tucking in your shirt. And like all the other kids who were unfortunate enough to be judged as “different,” I was picked on by Jake Reilly—who I understood was the kid loudly calling all the shots, the moment I stepped into the first grade. But I kept my thoughts to myself, rationalizing that this school didn’t matter. These kids didn’t count. Blue Island and anyone connected with my life there were the real world and nobody in this school was any part of that. School was nothing more than a place I had to endure until my mother or father took a break from work to pick me up and drive me to Blue Island where I belonged.

  Throughout the early years of grade school, my life followed a predictable, well-traveled path. During the week I attended classes at St. Damian and spent evenings and weekends with my maternal grandparents in Blue Island, usually drawing or playing detective by myself in their enormous, dusty coat closet that offered me the perfect space to create a fantasy world of my own.

  Through a small rectangular window built inside the large closet, I admired the Blue Island neighborhood kids as they careened by on bikes with magnificent steel handlebars and long, glittery banana seats. I’d watch them ride without using their hands as they made their way to friends’ houses, drop their bikes carelessly on the sidewalk, hop up the stoop two steps at a time, and bang on the door to summon their pals. Within heartbeats, the screen door would fly open, the friend would appear, they would jump on bikes together and off they’d go, disappearing down an alley, slowly swallowed by the horizon.

  Ultimately, I suspected, they’d pedal to the St. Donatus church parking lot which even I, a refugee from a faraway land, knew held the life force of every kid who called the East Side of Blue Island home—the unofficial playground, softball diamond, Wiffle ball stadium, and rendezvous spot for every youngster around.

  Sometimes I’d practice making friends with the other kids on the block while I sat alone in the closet drawing Snoopy and the other Peanuts characters in my sketchpad. Nestled beneath the moth-riddled parkas and coats of seasons past, I’d imagine myself knocking on someone’s door, or that my grandmother would send me to a neighbor’s house for some sugar, and one of the kids would answer my knock and invite me in to play. While I sat pensive and alone in the closet, I’d find myself unexpectedly pausing, Crayola marker held midair while I pictured someone dropping their bike by the back door and asking Nonna if I was around and if I could come out and play.

  But I knew it wouldn’t happen. The kids in Blue Island had each other. They went to school together, probably copied each other’s homework, maybe even passed love notes in class to girls with names like Gina and Maria, who dotted the “i’s” in their names with little hearts and smiley faces. Sleepovers, goofing around, and eating over at each other’s houses filled their every moment. Why would they spend time with me, someone who didn’t even live or go to school in Blue Island? Someone who was different than them?

  They were all such good friends, a tight-knit group of pals. Wild, even, throwing tomatoes and snowballs at passing cars, hopping fences. Laughing. Having fun together.

  I’d been entertaining myself, sitting solitary in that closet for years, but now I desperately wanted to be a part of something. And I wasn’t. It was me alone, dangling between two totally dissimilar worlds ten miles apart. I knew I was an outsider—at school in suburban Oak Forest because I was culturally different and spent all my free time in Blue Island with my grandparents, and in urban Blue Island because I didn’t live there or go to school with the rest of the Italian kids in the neighborhood. Even with adults constantly hovering over me, I felt so alone.

  All that changed when I was ten years old and received something as ordinary and innocent as a shiny little red bike for Christmas.

  As we did every Christmas, my parents and I went to Blue Island to celebrate with family and to await Santa Claus, although I stopped believing in him the moment I noticed him wearing my dad’s gold pinky ring and Italian loafers. My mother and father didn’t quite understand the whole American Santa-came-down-the-chimney routine, but they did know American kids got presents from him, so they made sure we had a decorated tree and that there were plenty of gifts for their wonderful son who everybody adored.

  We opened presents on Christmas Eve after eating a traditional Italian holiday dinner. Loads of pasta, of course, and various seafood dishes including a salted codfish called baccalà. Wine that had fermented in the basement and was stored in any glass bottle my grandmother had saved—recycled wine jugs, old glass pop bottles, spent whiskey handles—flowed like water from a hose.

  After dinner, we’d all head into the family room, sit on the plastic-covered sofas, and open gifts.

  On this particular Christmas Eve, the adults talked far too long, wine and espresso making them more chatty than usual, which in an Italian family where tongues are never still and opinions rarely held back, was really saying something. I vividly recall thinking dinner would literally never end, but finally my mother leaned close and said in her teasing tone, “What do you have to say for yourself, Christian?”

  I stared glumly at my plate. Would all the talking never end?

  My mother tousled my hair, becoming aware, as all the adults suddenly were, that I had only one thing on my mind—opening presents. “Shall we see if Santa Claus brought you something this year?” she asked. “Have you been a good boy? I bet Santa brought you something very, very special.”

  The suspense was too great for good behavior. I pushed my chair back and jumped down to the floor, shouting greedily, “I want to see!”

  Their laughter and the sound of chairs scraping against the ceramic tiles filled the stuffy kitchen as I dashed to the archway that led into the living room. They were hot on my heels as I crossed the threshold and snapped on the lights.

  And there it was.

  A beautiful, shiny, red bicycle with the biggest bow I’d ever seen. Ignoring all the other gifts, I sprinted to it and yanked off the bow.

  There had to be a Santa Claus after all. My parents would never have thought to buy me anything so perfect. So cool. So amazing.

  I hugged it, kissed it, and jumped onto the seat, my feet reaching for the pedals.

  “No, Christian, no!” my grandmother cried. “Not in the house! Bicycles are not for inside! You’ll ruin the carpet. You’ll scratch the tiles.”

  I jumped back off the bike and, holding the handlebars tightly in both hands, plowed through the stacks of gifts to the back door.

  “Stop!” Nonna called after me. “It’s freezing out there. It’s too dark. You’ll fall and hurt yourself. Or you’ll catch a cold and die!” She crossed herself and added, “God forgive me.”

  Ignoring her pleas, I wrenched open the door and made my escape. I darted down the steps, holding tight to my new prized possession, and at the foot of the stairs, I scrambled onto the seat and wobbled down the sidewalk that
ran along the house. Strings of sparkling Christmas lights on bushes and fences lit my path like a runway as I made my debut ride on the coolest bike on the planet. If it was cold, I didn’t notice. If Nonna and my parents called out warnings or prayed to God for my safety, I didn’t hear. Only one thing mattered.

  Freedom. I was no longer a helpless little boy in the perpetual care of old people, a child transported from one place to another without a word to say about it. Oh no, I was all grown up. I had my own wheels. I had come to life! I could join the other kids in the neighborhood now. Ride with them, tearing down alleys, up side streets, on my way to visit even more friends. But first, I had to make some.

  When that summer following fifth grade came, following the cheers and the crack of the bat, I rode my new bike across several Blue Island blocks and discovered Schrei Field. I watched Little League baseball games from behind the left field fence. I knew who was a threat at the plate, which pitcher had a wicked fastball, who cried when his team lost. If I’d snuck change out of Nonna’s purse, I bought a hot dog and a cold pop.

  I studied the parents at the games—mothers talking to each other in the stands, warning their babies not to climb too high on the bleachers, fathers grumbling under their beer breath at the ump, telling their kids to shake off a bad call. I’d get an empty feeling in my stomach, wishing I was part of the team, wondering what it’d be like to hit a home run, to make a great catch, to high-five the other guys, to crow, “Hey, batter, batter…swing batter.” To have my parents there watching me play, cheering my name, being proud of me, was unimaginable, but still, I let the image rise and fall in my mind.