LOMBARDI, MONA AGNESE

THE WAY THE DAY BEGINS DECIDES THE SHAPE OF EVERYTHING BUT THE WAY IT ENDS DEPENDS ON IF YOU'RE HOME

20 | HOMOSEXUAL | SINGLE | WAITRESS | NEWCOMER | CARA DELEVINGNE

Mona A. Lombardi,

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The only thing you remember of Italy was the soft warmth of golden afternoons on the veranda outside of your Florence apartment. You have a dim impression of sitting on your mother’s lap and playing with the beads on her necklace while she and your father drunk wine and spoke in gentle, rapid Italian about how much better life would be once you moved to America. You grew up in East Harlem, amongst a melting pot of other immigrants all shouting to be heard above one another. Your parents worked in the Italian restaurant of an elderly second cousin, and then took over once she died. You, a stringy little tomboy with knobbly elbows and knees, spent all the afternoons of your childhood weaving in and out between vinyl-clothed tables with trays balanced precariously on your trembling palms. Your childhood was a stream of brown and weathered faces, pinching your cheeks, slipping crumpled dollar bills into the pocket of your apron, speaking to you in flawless Italian and then withdrawing their smiles when they realised you could only respond tentatively. Your parents spoke to you in broken English, and the kids at school spoke in a veritable linguistic rainbow of pidgin English, Portuguese, Spanish, and you could barely remember those golden afternoons on the veranda in Florence. Your father cooked in the restaurant’s kitchen, with a sweaty boy in his late teens who lisped when he talked and once swore at you when you knocked over a stack of plates. Your father was more patient with your clumsy attempts to help, and when you were small, he often lifted you up to peek into pots, to stir utensils, to taste sauces on the tip of your tongue. When you were bigger, he would bark orders at you through clouds of steam from across the cluttered kitchen: Mona, take off the stove. Mona, more salts and seasons. Mona, bring me my wines. Your mother was the mastermind behind the business. She did the books and the finances. She and a small cluster of third cousins, all of them tall and olive skinned and beautifully haughty, worked in the front of house as waitresses and hostesses. You sometimes tailed along after them, comparatively scruffy, your dirty blonde hair making you stick out like a sore thumb and your clumsy Italian giving you away as an impostor.  You wish you had cherished your childhood more. Those hot and sweaty days being mistaken for American in that tiny, cluttered restaurant were golden. When you were ten, your parents divorced. One Wednesday afternoon you came home to the apartment above the restaurant and your mother was flitting gracefully about the bedroom, throwing her clothes into a suitcase. Your father was crying from the chair in the corner. You stood in the doorway and asked “Mama, where are you going?” while the silky scraps of her scarves and sundresses flew through the air and into the case, and your father sobbed, and she said, “I cannot do it. I cannot do it any more time.” She walked out of the door without even looking at you, and that night, you and your father both slept uneasily on the couch, constantly stirring to look at the unlocked front door as though she were just about to walk back through it. A year later and without your mother’s skill to balance the finances, your father filed for bankruptcy and had to close the restaurant. You came home again on another Wednesday afternoon to find another open suitcase. This time it was your own, and it was your father stood in your bedroom, throwing mismatched items of clothing and books you’d long since grown out of into the open bag. He drove you in silence to the train station, clumsily kissed your forehead and tried to put you on a train to the Midwest to live with your mother. When you cried and clung to him and begged him not to send you away, he thumbed away your tears and said, “How can I keep you if I cannot feed you?” He told you to be brave and waved you goodbye. Your mother had moved to Ohio, where she’d married a politician and now lived in a big house with West facing gardens. In the afternoon, you could sit on the second floor veranda and catch the last of the fading sun and your mother said it felt just like home. Just like Italy. You longed much more for the cramped and sweaty kitchens of the family restaurant. You longed for your inept father and his bad English and his clueless attempts to parent you. Your stepfather was much more slick and polished: a blue-eyed, blond-haired white man, a “born and bred All-American” (he told you, smiling his toothy American smile). His name was Richard. Sometimes your mother playfully called him Ricardo, and a crease of a frown would appear on his brow. When you were thirteen and it had been two years since you’d seen your real father, he officially adopted you. He threw you a party and everything, like a baby shower but for a thirteen year old girl. He told you he was the king and your mother the queen and you were the princess, and he stroked your hair and bought you a pretty silver locket to wear around your neck. As the years had gone by, your animosity to him had worn away, and you smiled at him and kissed his cheek and thanked him for being your father. Now that you lived in a big house in Ohio and your new father was a governor, you went to a small private school where everyone was white. Gone were the days of hued skin and a linguistic rainbow, now everyone was white and American and spoke English all the time. When you went to friends’ houses after school, they all had mother’s like the woman your mother had become since she’d married Richard: pretty, polished women who drank spirits in the afternoon. You made friends at your new private school who laughed at your jokes and egged on your wild careless streak. You were the first of any of them to kiss a boy, and a girl, and to sneak vodka from your parents' liquor cabinet. You ran track and joined the swim team and went away to meets and competed with other athletic departments across middle America. You were never as driven as Richard would have liked, and spent more time goofing off than seriously training. You got okay grades. You liked art: you liked drawing, and you were good at it, and you occasionally had your work put on display for school functions. You went to school dances. Once, in your junior year, a boy asked you to go with him to his senior prom. Your friends were very excited, but bemused, you had to explain to him that you couldn’t go with him because you were gay. You had thought he’d known that. You’d thought everyone knew that. After all, you had always known. There was some fall out after that as news spread throughout the school that the Governor’s daughter was a lesbian. You had ‘dyke’ written in permanent marker across your locker. When you stayed late after school to wipe it off, the next day it reappeared scratched into the metal. Whenever you went into the locker room to change for swim practice, the other girls giggled and threw you snide glances and immediately left. The senior who’d asked you to the dance cornered you and tried to force his hand up your skirt, telling you all along that you “just hadn’t met the right guy yet”, and you gave him a black eye. After that, your parents were called in. Richard threw a fit about these ‘vicious rumours’ being spread about you, and informed the school he would sue them for slander if these ‘accusations of lesbianism’ did not stop immediately. He fumed and ranted all the way home, oblivious, while your mother watched you sadly in the rear view mirror. You think she knew. You think she knew what he was too narrow to see. You changed school for your senior year, and when a nice boy asked you to the homecoming dance, you smiled and nodded. You went with him. You danced. You laughed. You snuck gin from his hip flask and then let him fuck you in the backseat of his car. It didn’t change a thing for you, but the whole experience seemed to make Richard happy. When your mother found you crying in the bath tub the next morning and trying to scrub all the traces of his greasy fingertips from your skin, she told you that some boys could be rough. You started to tell her that it wasn’t that, but she pressed her lips into a thin line, shook her head quickly and said, “Don’t say it. Do not say things you can’t take back.” The following year, you began attending a private liberal arts college upstate. You had plans to major in art, or perhaps history of art, or maybe photography. Something visual, something beautiful. In the summer after your freshman year, you went backpacking in Italy with a girl from your sorority. Her name was Missy and you didn’t have to scrub yourself raw after you made love. You took photographs of her lounging on verandas in the golden afternoon sun, and it made you happy. You made dirty sand sculptures up and down the Italian coast. You gave her piggy back rides in the surf and held her hand while you lead her up winding cobbled streets and paths to the heart of huge cathedrals and sprawling market cities. You think you were in love. You spent the flight back from Europe sleeping with your head on her shoulder, and you were so relaxed, so loved up, that when you bade her goodbye at the airport arrivals lounge, you did so with a kiss. You did not know that your mother and Richard would be there waiting for you. You did not know that they would see. That night was bad. Your mother cried. Richard paced and yelled. He accused you of making a fool of him and took back the silver locket you’d dutifully worn around your neck all these years. When he told you he would not pay for you, for someone like you to go to your fancy college if you were just going to sleep with other girls, you told him that was fine. When he told you that he couldn’t believe you would be so selfish as to to jeopardise his political standing with the conservative Christian voters with your unnatural persuasion, you told him goodbye. Your mother followed you upstairs and watched you pack a suitcase, making excuses for him all the while. After all, he would not be so angry if only you hadn’t lied about it. You told her you thought she was missing the point, and you left. Richard cancelled your credit cards before you got a chance to buy a ticket out of Ohio, so you took to the side of the road and began the long and arduous experience of hitch hiking back to New York. It took you five days, three reluctant blowjobs and one attempted theft of your suitcase, but you got there in the end. When your ride let you out in East Harlem and you walked the familiar street to your parents’ old restaurant, you were surprised to find it still there. Not only still there, but open. Bustling. In the low evening light, the flickering of candles shone through the windows, outlining dining silhouettes. You could smell your father’s cooking and it bought tears to your eyes. When you went inside and asked to see the head chef, and he came staggering out to see you, he didn’t recognise you. You had to stand there for a whole minute and a half, smiling mutely at him, while his dark eyes scanned you from head to foot and tried to puzzle you out. When he figured it out, his whole face lit up like an Italian veranda, and you finally felt as though you were home. In the short few months since you returned to New York, everything has changed. You took a job waitressing at your father’s restaurant – the restaurant he managed to save only after Richard paid him to stay away from you. You felt bitter about that to start with, but now you don’t mind so much. It is the exact sneaky, hypocritical thing your stepfather would do – to pay your father off behind your back, and comfort you about how he was never around to your face. You sometimes think about your mother back in Ohio. Or Missy. Or the promising art education you were forced to give up. But never for very long. You are home now, and your adolescence feels like a bad dream. It’s for the best if it stays that way.

PUN | GMT | 22 | LIAM NOLAN KEALEY & DOMINIC CALEB WILDER

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