The Complex Arms Read online

  “Okay. She’s yours.”

  ADEEN

  What would you have done in my place? I needed a break. I know, I know. I could have put Irene in one of those places, but she is still my flesh and blood, my responsibility. But Mona, so kind and loving, somehow she knew how to control Irene. She was good like that. Why do the bad mothers get the difficult kids? Mona married once and that was enough for her. No children.

  Let me tell you about Mona. She worked for a while as a file clerk for this inflatables company — you know, those businesses that manufacture balloon cartoon characters to advertise products and attract motorists. There’s always an inflatable sitting on some rooftop, like a car dealership, for example, trying to lure customers into their showroom — a dangerous distraction for anyone driving by, in my opinion. Anyhow, Mona was not good at her job; always misfiled everything. But the boss fell in love, married her, and took her home where she lived unhappily ever after. The guy was mucho wealthy. You’re either rich or poor here or on the way to either — no in-between. I can’t blame her for marrying the guy. He set her up with her own beauty salon in the basement of this gorgeous mansion on a hill overlooking the river valley. He even financed her beautician studies. Mona thought she had found her true vocation, if not true love.

  Two years into the marriage, the guy started seeing someone else — standard behaviour here — and they divorced. He wanted a child and Mona couldn’t deliver. Why are men such bastards? Anyhow, Mona was no pushover and demanded a settlement or she would take him to court and expose him for the bastard he was. He gave her enough money to buy a mobile home in the Evergreen Park and she moved her shop there.

  She wasn’t a beauty by any means, but there was something about the way Mona carried herself, strong and confident, that attracted the guys, and her thick black hair was always a draw, a real asset. She hadn’t really been tempted since her divorce, though, and she vowed she’d never marry again.

  I reminded her she came out ahead with an alimony that provided a roof over her head and a business of her own, doing what she always wanted. She was one smart cookie: reliable and a true friend. So when she said she would take Irene off my hands, I wanted to shout hallelujah! Freedom at last, for a while.

  Anyhow, that’s the story there.

  ZITA

  Zita’s mother crammed the corners of her daughter’s suitcase with frozen homemade Italian meatballs in Ziploc bags. It was her way of showing love.

  “I have no room for them,” Zita pleaded, but Marietta persisted and found a way to make everything fit.

  “Dolcezza, you don’t know how to pack. Here, I show you.”

  She rearranged the luggage as though she were rearranging her daughter’s life. Marietta reminded Zita not to forget the Italian sausages. “Do you have everything?”

  “Yes, Mammina, I have everything.”

  There was nothing more to say; nothing more to do.

  Earlier that day, after breakfast, Zita had caught Marietta sitting on the back porch tossing bread crumbs at the pigeons that landed on the neighbour’s garage roof below. She detected anger in the way her mother hurled the pieces of stale bread at the unsuspecting birds.

  Older now, Marietta still resembled a Modigliani portrait: serious brown eyes squinting against the light of day, the sixty-year-old skin barely creased, yet the cheeks a robust red from too many broken capillaries. She had spent too many young years in the Mediterranean sun gathering crops of grapes and misticanza in the fields of Sicily. Her throwing hand was still strong notwithstanding the loose “chicken” skin hanging below her upper arm.

  Zita had phoned for a taxi and now waited in the living room. It was not yet noon and already the sidewalks of Toronto’s Little Italy slithered with humidity. She separated the shabby lace curtains in search of her ride, and pressed her cheek with a fierce intensity against the window screen, leaving a cross-hatched hive of squares against her skin. Her mother’s doorbell was unpredictable, needing repair, but Marietta feared the landlady would increase the rent if she dared complain. So she lived alone with a broken bell, ears always half-cocked for possible footsteps, interruptions to her isolation and loneliness. Derrick had stationed himself on the cement steps below, sentry for any vehicle remotely resembling a yellow cab, easy to spot from afar. His nonna had spoiled him with gifts and money but now he, too, was anxious to return to Edmonton. The air here was suffocating. He could barely breathe from the sweltering heat.

  Zita was not the daughter Marietta wanted her to be and Marietta was not the mother Zita needed her to be. Zita suddenly felt trapped, claustrophobic in this hollow shoebox that was her childhood home. How she wanted Marietta’s praise, acceptance, love. Why was it always so difficult? The rebellious Catholic daughter was a disappointment and must be punished.

  In a moment of anger, her mother had discarded all photos of the family’s existence from the living room’s sideboard. Where once there were displays of her Sicilian parents, Zita in a veil of whiteness clutching an onyx rosary for her First Holy Communion, an assortment of girlhood photos, Derrick’s baby pictures — an hour after birth, first Christmas, first steps, first grade, second, third — there was nothing now. A family in disarray; a family abandoned. That was the year Zita moved with her husband and son to Edmonton.

  “I won’t see you again.” Marietta had never forgiven her.

  “I’ll call you every Sunday, Mammina. I’ll come and visit.”

  Marietta didn’t believe Zita was leaving Toronto until she saw the moving truck; didn’t believe it was for a better life, a job for her husband, a future for her son. She took it personally. Zita tried to assure her that she still loved her, but truth be known, she had fled to psychologically separate herself from her mother’s unpredictable and abusive control, which always pulled her down. Shifting her life to another province allowed Zita to recover her sense of self. As expected, Marietta ignored her daughter’s Sunday calls, but eventually she relented and Zita heard her mother’s voice.

  “You should be here with me and not in Edmonton.”

  Zita had pleaded, “What do you want me to do? Divorce my husband, forget I have a family and come live with you until you die? And then what?”

  Marietta had spat back, “You family. Everyone selfish. No one think of me. I live alone. We no do that in my country.”

  And Zita, her adult child, had broken down again with guilt, a planned manoeuvre on her mother’s part that always worked.

  “You can come here and visit. It’s not far,” Zita suggested.

  “I no like to fly.”

  “What do you want me to do? What do you want me to do?”

  Zita’s anxiety and confusion frightened her mother, causing Marietta to retreat, loosen the reins, but soon she was back to her typical pattern of behaviour. Nothing ever changed.

  “Never mind, never mind, it be all right. Everything be all right,” her mother chirped as Zita, now feeling like a dirty rag, accepted defeat.

  If Marietta had her way, Zita would have been glued to her heart and lingered there until death pulled them apart.

  A year after she left Toronto, Marietta sent Derrick a birthday card and wrote a note to Zita in Italian: As long as I am alive, you are my heart. The disposable daughter had tossed it into the recycling bin wondering if Marietta knew its meaning.

  On this scheduled first visit since the move to Edmonton, Zita had not yet announced her second pregnancy. Her condition was obvious, but either Marietta was in denial or she thought Zita had just put on weight; a daughter’s joy shattered by a mother’s myopic oversight. Here she was sticking out like a hot-air balloon, but no questions were asked. Are you pregnant? Do you feel the baby moving? Let me touch your stomach. Do you feel okay? None of that.

  And yet before Zita married Howard, before Derrick’s birth, her mother was known to compulsively complain to her church friends that she would never be a grandmother.

  “Hello, Mammina.”

  “What’s the
matter?”

  “Well, good news. You can tell your church friends I’m going to have a baby and it’s a boy. We’re calling him Derrick.” Zita was being flippant but only silence at the other end had greeted her. “Are you happy for me?”

  And then,“Shit. What kind name Derrick? Mario better.”

  Zita wept in her husband’s arms. “Why does she always do this to me?”

  “Don’t let her get to you. You know there’s no pleasing her.”

  Years later, seeing Derrick at play with his grandmother, Zita reminded Marietta of her descriptive comment.

  “I never said shit. What you say. Such a liar.”

  “How can you still look God in the face every Sunday, Mammina?”

  “I was worried about you. You were too old to have a baby.”

  And now she was pregnant again and not a peep.

  Where was the taxi? Zita entered the kitchen, opened the fridge for a container of lemonade. She poked her head into the freezer — nothing but Ziploc bags of frozen meatballs and preserved jars of tomato sauce in case World War III was declared. She was overcome with a sudden nausea, stomach cramps. The baby kicked. She and Derrick had anticipated Marietta’s fondness for all things Italian. Every type of meat, fish, or pasta was smothered in her thick aromatic tomato sauce, and after a five-day binge they both pleaded indigestion, craving an unhealthy Canadian hot dog topped with ketchup, mustard, relish, onion, and coleslaw.

  Today was rigatoni day.

  “I don’t want pasta every day, Mom! Gross!” Derrick had said.

  “Be polite and eat, or she’ll feel hurt.”

  “But I can’t eat any more.”

  “Okay, then give me yours and be quiet about it.” And Zita shovelled his rigatoni with the hot tomato sauce onto her plate.

  The day they had arrived, the table was already an overflow of every Italian delicacy under the sun. There was no time to unpack — everything would get cold.

  “Nonna, you make the best meatballs.”

  “You like? You are so big now. You were so little when you left your nonna. You miss? Nonna love you.”

  Guilt. “Don’t do that to him, Mammina.”

  “I do nothing.”

  Derrick nodded, the tomato sauce and butter spilling over his chin. He had won over her heart again.

  “Eat slowly,” Zita scolded, “and chew, don’t slurp.”

  “Let him be. He love his nonna. I can see.”

  Food. In Marietta’s world, food equalled love. It was her equation for life. Her home carried the flavours and smells of Kensington Market, with all its spices and herbs and cheeses. Stacks of Italian sausages and capocollo, ciabatta, cucumbers, dill pickles, tomatoes, grapes, potatoes from her garden, and large tubs of minestrone soup in the basement freezer waited for the next disaster; mountains of meals to consume, erupting volcanoes of love and other emotions.

  “Eat, eat,” she would say. “Everything taste good.” To refuse was to hurt. Zita didn’t want to offend her mother but at some point both she and Derrick had enough.

  The rest of the visit was a mishmash of gossip and complaints.

  “The landlady. You should see!” Marietta gasped and in hushed tones said, “She’s dying. Cancer. Si. She wants to sell the duplex and then where I go? I pay two hundred and fifty dollars. Never mind, I get a room. Nobody cares.” And she pinched the top of her nose with thumb and index finger, shutting her eyes as though she had just been asked to solve the problems of the world and needed a moment.

  “Mammina, we love you. I told you to come live with us in Edmonton.” Zita rested a reassuring arm, only to have Marietta shrug the weight off her shoulder.

  “And I told you what will I do there? I am too old.”

  Her butterfly fingers fluttered about her face waving at imaginary flies. Marietta had lost sense of her bearings and was staring beyond, outside the kitchen window, as though she just spotted an apparition. Her eyes had forgotten Zita’s presence. The small fan on the table, which separated them, was the only noise — a steady breeze blowing airy kisses that disintegrated into the humidity.

  Zita wanted to ask her so many things. First, she wanted to say how much she loved her — out loud — but she was afraid again. Afraid Marietta would turn away, insult her, distract herself with grating cheese or boiling water for the pasta. She couldn’t look at her mother; instead, she picked at half-polished nails.

  “And how’s the choir?” Zita interrupted the strained silence.

  The butterfly fingers again. “Big shots! I don’t go anymore. I’m no good enough for them. They no call.”

  But Zita had heard her many times on the phone, turning down invitations to picnics, to dinners, to church socials.

  “My daughter and grandson here. You know how it is. They only come a week.”

  There is that silence again broken by the steady hum of the fan.

  “You get the news there in Calgary?”

  “Edmonton, Mammina, and, yes, there is civilization out there.”

  “Ah, Calgary, Edmonton, all the same.” She supported her head with knuckles cupped under the chin, Mediterranean eyes piercing like lasers. “You will be back.”

  “No, Mammina.”

  “Si, you wait and see.”

  “No, I’ll come visit again, but I’ll never come back.”

  “And where I go? Who take care of me?” She suddenly propelled herself out of her seat.

  “Mammina, we’ve been through this already.”

  “I have to make the capunata sauce. We have fish tomorrow.” And with a sulky pout she opened the fridge and returned to the sink loaded down with eggplant, celery, and capers.

  “MAMMINA! ”

  It was always the same. Zita scrutinized her mother standing above the deep, antique sink, washing the vegetables, torso dancing rhythmically to the task at hand; breasts swaying; hands flaying. Such attention and pleasure in preparing a meal; Zita thought she should be so lucky.

  “Mmmmmmmm, the saucie be so good. So delicious, si!” Marietta dropped the ingredients into a wide saucepan and continued to sing without missing a beat. “Too bad you not here tomorrow to taste.” Tra-la-la. Guilt trip.

  A shuffle of feet downstairs; the door opened and Derrick yelled, “Mom, the taxi’s here.” Marietta still rooted to the back stairwell watching the pigeons compete for bread crumbs.

  “Mammina, it’s here. We’re leaving,” Zita called out.

  Organized chaos. Marietta helped her daughter with the luggage.

  “Remember to put the meatballs in the freezer as soon as you home.” An awkward moment. She kissed Derrick on his head and said, “Nonna love you.” She slipped him an almond Hershey bar, her eyes distorted with moisture from the tears and sweat. Zita hesitated, not knowing again what to say, do, but Marietta was still her mother after all, so she leaned forward and hugged Marietta, kissed her cheek. “I’ll call you Sunday like always, okay?”

  As quickly as it was done, Marietta pushed her away, erased the kiss with her arm as though it were dirt and ran inside tripping over the last step. Zita stared beyond her mother’s backside, spun around, slid next to Derrick in the back seat of the cab.

  “You okay, Mom?”

  “Did you see that?”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “Why did Nonna push you away?”

  Zita rolled down the window and let the breeze caress her face, dry her eyes. She had forgotten how unbearably hot and muggy a Toronto summer could be.

  In Edmonton, the taxi pulled up in front of the Complex Arms. The driver was removing the luggage from the trunk when Zita heard her name. Adeen was sitting on the bench in front, Irene in a game of skipping rope on the cement walk. Home, Zita breathed. Adeen was waving for her to come over. “Zita! Zita! I have mail for you.”

  “I have something for you, too.” Zita hurried toward Adeen, reciprocating the gesture. Derrick lagged behind, carefully carrying the food tote like a ring bearer at a wedding.

  “I didn’t forget,�
�� and Zita opened her suitcase and removed three Ziploc bags of Marietta’s meatballs.

  “No, you didn’t!” Adeen unzipped the package and removed the foil.

  “It’s the real deal. My mom’s meatballs are the best. Still frozen. See. She uses Italian sausages. No ground beef for her. And some of her baked ciabatta.” Zita handed her a plastic grocery bag.

  “Oh, but your mother meant it for you and your family.”

  “We had plenty. Believe me, Derrick and I have had enough. Plus, she gave us her capunata sauce, so not to worry.” She pointed to the food tote that Derrick still gingerly carried.

  “Oh, my! So tell, tell. How’s Toronto?”

  “Meh. Overrated and underfunded. The Small Apple. Changing, that’s for sure. Lots of different immigrants coming in. Getting expensive. Tearing down old houses and building new ones. Where will the poor go?”

  “I thought there might have been a glimmer of hope that things had perhaps improved.” And then she wanted all the news about the trip. “And so your mother. She was happy to see you and Derrick? Yes?”

  “Don’t know. She barely said goodbye. Day before we left she said she probably wouldn’t see us again, that we won’t come back. And poor Derrick, she smothered him with these ugh wet kisses and gave him chocolate bars. She’s such a hypocrite. Criticized me for marrying an Englishman, and now Derrick is the love of her life.”

  “Was she happy you’re pregnant again? Surely, she must have been.”

  “Didn’t say. She just kept feeding Derrick, and he just kept asking me when we were going back to Edmonton.”

  “You mean you didn’t tell her?”

  “No. Didn’t get a chance. She thought I looked healthy. All that weight.”

  “I’m so sorry, Zita. Never mind. This is where you all belong anyhow.” Adeen patted her stomach.

  “Everything okay here while I was away?”

  Adeen mentioned that she should be on the lookout for their new tenant, and shared the story of Velvet’s birth at a Bobby Vinton concert in the Sault while he sang “Blue Velvet.”

  “Wow! That must be embarrassing for her.”