“Marie, Jeanne looks just like you!” says Aunt Mae, as she lights a Pall Mall cigarette, takes a seat on a dark wood club chair in our livingroom, nervously taps her foot, places a plastic ashtray on the t.v., and playfully tugs at Maria’s sleeve as she walks past, to say “hello.” Her thin frame is one bundle of energy. I stare at the cigarette carton on the coffee table that exclaims, “Pall Mall’s natural mildness is so good to your taste!”

“Marie, Jeanne is the spittin’ image of you!” says Jean, a long-time friend of Mom’s. She has the nerve to push my long, brown hair out of my face.

“She’s too quiet. She has to come out of her shell!” she says, as though I’m not standing right there.

I feel like a clamshell, tightly closed up from the audacity of their tasteless judgments about me.

“Marie, Jeanne, looks just like you, when you were in high school!” says Aunt Matheline, wistfully wishes of long-ago days.

“Marie, Jeanne looks just like you and you looked just like your mother! Three generations of beautiful, Italian girls!” says Uncle Joe, as though he tells us something new. I cringe as he looks me over from head-to-toe, lingers on my big, brown eyes and eye-catching breasts, as he reminisces over Mom’s stunning bathing beauty looks, then gives Mom a lecherous grin. She flirts back with a smile.

Why can’t Mom see the pain I’m in? Why can’t she think of me?

I shrink, eyes cast downward to my toes, shoulders curve miserably. Down, down, down, into Dear, Sweet, Jesus’ earth I want to go. I hate hearing that I look just like Mom, something I’ve heard over and over again, throughout my childhood, and, now, as a teenager. I’m not like Mom at all, I think, confusing looks with being. I hate any attention thrown my way, and furiously hold my anger at the gall people have to comment about my looks.

Never any in-between, there’s either too much attention, or too little attention. I hate not being told things, too. Other words blow in like a vicious summer thunderstorm, with raindrops that soak through clothes in an instant, cling to skin. I need a towel to roughly, quickly, smoothly, dry off the sticky, yucky rain evaporating on my soft, warm body. Words thrown at me as though I’m not there, or words overheard, or conversations stopped mid-stream as I enter a room, or as I’m shooed out a door.