Peace is a work of justice.

Forgiveness is a work of justice.

I will continue the work of justice in my own mind and tag onto the traditional definition of justice in the legal sense of view, of the United States legal system.  I will expand this system for my own sake.  There are back door entrances to all things in life.  I must find my own way, even if it’s only to share my story, spread the word, spread the word of how we must be kind to each other.

The blood comes pouring out.  It doesn’t flow the way I expect blood to flow, in a slow, steady way.  It flows in a gushing-rushing water way, as though I turn on an outdoor faucet and the stream flows as one, strong and straight, into a gray-metal watering can for a garden.  The red blood is furious, and races out of my mouth, into a drawer from Mom’s bedroom dresser.  I hold the drawer, hunch over it, as my blood fills it.  Then, the blood stops pouring out of my mouth.  Suddenly, I’m over a sink and tip the blood out of the drawer.  I watch it go down the drain.  Now, the drawer holds Mom’s things; costume jewelry in white cardboard boxes, the lids emblazoned with the department store Lord & Taylor red rose, a pink plastic hairbrush, a floral scarf, neatly folded, as though never worn, and a stand with dainty glass-stone rings.  All things particularly placed, and, God forbid, never, ever touched by my hands.  I cringe in horror as a white, plastic measuring cup tumbles out of the drawer and goes down the drain.  I can’t catch it and fear the repercussion of Mom’s rage, fully knowing it will come.  I tremble, hold the drawer tight, wonder how to save the cup and clean the bloody mess.  In the twinkling of an eye, all of the things turn white.  The white shines brightly.  Then, I feel like I’ve never felt before, tip the drawer over, furiously shake it, and let everything tumble down the drain and disappear.  I choke and use all of my God-given strength to pull something tight out of my mouth.  It’s white, cordlike, a clothesline rope.  It’s knotted.  It turns into a white handkerchief tied in knots.  I feel better as it breaks off and leaves a thin strand of cord behind.  This terror’s almost over, yet there’s no glory in this fight.

Sometimes, during the stifling silence of night, after my parents’ cold-blooded, furious fight, the quietness around me screams.  I wake from this reoccurring nightmare of the clothesline rope with tears on my pillow.  Distorted, then surprised, with wet eyes, I figure out that I was crying in my sleep.  I try to make sense of things that I just can’t figure out.  I decide that the red, gushing blood is Mom, the white handkerchief is Daddy, and the bright whiteness is dear, sweet, Jesus.  I wonder if I have to wait until Mom’s death, when she’s an old lady, a long time from now, for the cord to fragment completely, and I will be let go.

After a night like this, I have to get up and get ready for kindergarten, just like any other school day.  Mom notices my tears as I sit at the kitchen table and stare at the box-size drawing of a cat called Tony the Tiger, on a frosted flakes cereal box.  My baby sister sits in a high chair next to me, clink-clanks a spoon on the chair’s tray.

“Tears wash away your troubles,” said Mom.  She turns her back and scoops pastina and egg into baby Maria’s mouth.

Mom means that I have to get over my problem right this instant, and help her make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for school lunches to put into brown bags of crinkly paper rolled tight.  One bag has my name, Jeanne, blue-penned in Mom’s scribble-scrabble on it.  She’s in a nitpicky rush, as usual, and the littlest thing could piss her off, so I take out slices of bread from a red, blue, and yellow polka-dot Wonder bread bag and get moving.  I figure out that Mom doesn’t care about my troubles.  God only knows she’s fighting back her own tears over last night’s fight, when she grabbed me to use as a shield, positioned me between her and Daddy.  Her frightened grip choked me as my hands clenched her arms that held me.  I hugged, then pushed her arms away, to catch my breath.

I suffer in silence and figure out that I’m walking on a fine line with Mom.  I have to be careful on this tight rope between fights and stay on high alert.  It’s hard to know what she’ll do next.  She could go off the deep end over a little thing, like our cat, if he gets in her way.  Mom hates cats.

As soon as I get home from school, I run to the back yard to pet the cat.  He sits and stares at hurrying ants on an ant hill that looks like a spilt dollop of brown coffee grounds.  Then he licks a paw with his tongue to sponge dingy matted fur.  I love him any which way, even if he is a tangle-mess.  My three sisters join me in the yard to play with dolls that ride up-and-down on a seesaw.  I stop still for a sec’ and watch Mom as she snaps wooden clothespins onto wet sheets sinking on the white, clothesline rope that Daddy hooked up last week with his tough Navy tricks.  He strung the clothesline as I handed him pulleys, clamps, and links, so Mom could push the rope away as she hung clothes.  The clothesline runs from the back porch of our two-family house to a green, metal pole in a corner of the yard.

Daddy, who quit high school to join the United States Navy in 1945, showed me how to make a square knot with two pieces of rope as he made the clothesline.  He gave me a military book to study pictures of sailors’ knots.  Knots, knots, knots.  A simple toss is required to unravel a loosely coiled rope entirely.  Sailors are taught to coil rope tangle-free, as a tangle can be a matter of life or death.

“Hold an end of the rope in the palm of your hand, then coil it around an upturned

elbow and back to the hand,” said Daddy.  He shows me how to coil the leftover clothesline rope in the stone basement of our 1887 house, then puts a hammer and nails away in a toolbox.

Our house is on Jefferson Street, in Stamford, a city in the middle of wealthy towns on Long Island Sound, in Connecticut.  My Polish grandparents, Daddy’s parents, bought our house in 1926.  That was a year before my parents, Joseph and Marie, were even born.  My grandmother, Walerya, a widow, lives in the second floor apartment.  We call her Babcia, meaning grandmother in Polish.  My family of six lives in the humble first floor apartment.  Many of the homes on the street are similar, with three generations, a patchwork under one roof, the oldest generation made up of immigrants from Poland, Italy, and Ireland.  Our house is the last of the two-family homes on the street.  Then, there’s a low apartment building, followed by the city’s train yard.  Around the corner, on Canal Street, are industrial manufacturers that include the remnant of a maker of locks and keys where Daddy was valued as a journeyman in the trade of diemaker in 1962.  This manufacturer gave Stamford its nickname, The Lock City.

Years before my grandparents married, my blue-eyed grandfather, Józef, won the expense of immigration by the draw of a straw between brothers.  They only had enough money for one to go to America and leave behind their father, step-mother, a mix of twenty brothers, sisters, and half-siblings on their 4,000-acre farm.  In 1907, Józef arrived at Ellis Island in

New York and went to work in the Pennsylvania coal mines.  Years later, he joined his two brothers in Connecticut, where they made their new home.  We call him Dziadzio, meaning grandfather in Polish.  Babcia emigrated from Poland in 1909 and married Dziadzio in 1913, at the Holy Name of Jesus Roman Catholic Church in Stamford.  Dziadzio worked at the

Stamford Rubber Supply Company, became a naturalized citizen in 1942, and changed his last name by decree of the court.  The thing that fascinates me about Dziadzio, because I don’t know how it came about, is that his left arm was amputated four inches below the elbow.

In 1962, when I was three years old, Dziadzio died and his funereal wake was held in Babcia’s livingroom, where Mom made my older sister, Donna, and I kneel in front of the coffin and say a prayer.  I miss Dziadzio for his jacket pocket that was always filled with Life Saver candy, at the ready, to place as rings on my fingers.  I licked the lemon, lime, orange, cherry, and pineapple flavors of the candy.  Then, when I couldn’t take it any longer, bit and crunched the rings away.

“Slow down, Jeanne, or else you’re gonna’ choke,” said Mom as she pulled my fingers away from my mouth.

My parents married in 1955 at St. John’s Roman Catholic Church in the neighboring town of Darien, where Mom grew up.  Not long afterwards, they moved into our apartment, on the first floor of Dziadzio and Babcia’s two-family house.

I know our house from top to bottom, from Daddy’s makeshift office in the attic, with its slanted ceiling from the sharp-peaked roof, to Babcia’s apartment where my sisters and I play under the dark, mahogany diningroom table, resting on a Persian rug that glimmers, as maroon color mingles with gray swirls of a floral pattern with pinpoints of stark white that penetrates the dark eyes of onlookers, to our apartment, where my family lives in four rooms, with a bathroom that has a footed tub, and a water closet in the front hall.  I know the entire place, from front-to-back.  I know the yard, from where the sparrows chirp their first spring songs in the purple

Rose of Sharon bush in the front, and fly over the house to rest on the clothesline attached to the green, metal pole in the back yard.

Back in the basement, I learn the ropes from Daddy.

“You’re such a Smartie.”  He watches me figure out his moves in a know-it-all way.

I smile shyly at the mention of the nickname that he gave me.

He winds a rope around his arm in precise, measured loops, ties it off, and puts the neat cord on a shelf.  A tall, muscular man, he has hair of reddish-brown curls, and blue-green eyes, that are at times, washed dull with alcohol.  Sweat at the brow and sides of his face roll past shaven, short sideburns, and down his thick neck.  The spicy smell of Old Spice after-shave and the smooth smoke of Pall Mall cigarettes mingle with the rolled up sleeves of his white shirt.  I follow him as he takes charge of an orderly cross-hatch of nails in baby food jars and clam rakes that he uses to harvest clams by hand at local beaches.  I keep busy with Daddy in the basement.  He sets a metal oil can on a low shelf.  The can waits for me, it urges my hand, and runs amber oil down wheel spokes when Mom orders me to grease a tricycle, or a door hinge that fights back for being slammed too much.

When I move up to first grade, I stray from a high alert stance once in a while and whine about Mom to Daddy for one reason or another, as I follow him around the basement.

“Obey your Mother, Jeanne,” said Daddy.

He doesn’t put up with any complaints about Mom.  Then, he gently kisses the top of my hand that he holds in his hand.  I feel his love for me.

“Don’t ever kiss a man’s hand, Jeanne,” said Daddy.

I try to figure out what he means.  I think it has something to do with being under someone’s thumb and obeying unquestioningly.  I think it has to do with being independent.

Right now, Mom’s the ruler of me and my sisters.  Like many traditional Italian mothers, she gets respect, sometimes forced by her hand.  She even rules us from the back porch, as she hangs laundry on the clothesline, just as she’s doing at this moment, with the wet sheets.

In its corner in the back yard, the clothesline pole, edged by bushes, is imprisoned by

a metal chain-link fence that separates us from neighbors.  The fence, like the 38th  Parallel between North and South Korea, is a dividing border between enemies that have much in common.  An army-green board railing tops the tall fence, which runs around most of the yard.  The rest of the yard has a hedge that separates us from the Irish Bohannan family.  There’s an opening in the hedge, with thick branches and leaves crushed aside, a way for us to enter their yard.  Mr. Bohannan, a Navy veteran like Daddy, tells Mom that he has barbershop skills, and since she doesn’t have money to spend on haircuts, lets him cut my hair.  I sit on a stepstool in his yard, he puts a bowl on my head, and scissors around the rim.  Clips of my brown locks cut to the grass.  We also frequent the Bohannan’s bar and grill, down on Myrtle Avenue, where we eat pizza, our quarters click-clack, roll into a jukebox to let love-me-do lyrics escape, as Daddy drinks whiskey at the bar.

On the side of the yard with the dividing fence, the neighbors’ back porch is parallel to ours and has a similar clothesline set-up.  At the same time as Mom, a black woman hangs out her laundry there.  Mom won’t let us play with the woman’s daughters that I’ve seen through the fence many times.  She surrenders a grim smile to the woman, turns back to lift sheets to the line and works the rope that travels a wheel to flurry sheets out over me.  With my head in the clouds, the white clothesline rope turns into an imaginary, strong, cord that ties me to Mom, goes right through her, snakes its way to the attic and knots Daddy to me.  I know that he sits at a drafting table, invents a mechanical pipe coupling with radially expansible gripping means, writes in technical block letters, and wipes his brow with a white handkerchief.  Because of the rope that turns into a knotted cord, I have to go where my parents go.

Mom halts the laundry.  She jolts out with a loud voice over the yard.

“Barb, let Maria have a chance to play with that doll!  I swear to Christ, I have to have eyes on the back of my head to watch you girls.  Jeanne, mind your sisters.  Get your head out of the clouds.  I’m counting on you.  Give me a break.  My stomach’s in knots as it is,” said Mom.  She furiously pushes a dangling bobby-pin into jet-black hair pincurled under her kerchiefed head.

Mom’s fickle way is the right way, the only way.

“Yes, Mom.”

I turn my back, roll eyes heavenward, and drag my feet towards my sisters.  I drop a bag of ball and jacks into a red wagon, kick a spinning top toy that hums its rainbow colors across the grass, and pick a dandelion weed.  I study its sunburst of yellow in my hand and rip out the petals from the flower head.  Barb reaches to pinch Maria’s hand as she grabs the doll tighter.  Before I step between my sisters to grant a chance with the doll, I wonder why we can’t play with the black girls.  Is it because of the cat?

The cat, without worry, finds ways to cross the dividing fence that separates our house, the last of the Irish, Italian, and Polish families on the street, from the Negroes’ low apartment building.  Sometimes I see the cat in their yard, where boys play kickball and girls jump rope.  Their laughter filters through the fence.  These kids don’t go to Saint Mary’s parochial school, like my older sister and me.  We go to Saint Mary’s because there are more Italian kids in this school than other ethnicities.

We don’t go to Holy Name of Jesus, where many grandchildren of Polish immigrants go, and where Daddy went to school and was an altar boy, because Mom doesn’t get along with too many Polish people.  Mom never goes to Holy Name.  I don’t know why she feels this way because I like Holy Name just as much as St. Mary’s.  Nothing seems impossible when I see dear, sweet, Jesus on the cross at Daddy’s church.  He takes my sisters and me there when he wants to light a candle for Babcia because she’s sick in bed, or when he’s stuck, like an unoiled wheel, and mulls over his altar boy days.

God of joy fills my heart at Holy Name.  Daddy lights a red candle with a long stick match, makes the sign of the cross and bows his head in silent prayer.  I make the sign of the cross, too, then take in the shimmers of foiled gold, glaze of marble, and the vaulted, heavenly painted ceiling, where I wish I could float with the sweet angels.  One time, as we left the church, I saw pink tissue paper hearts that littered the church steps, sidewalk, and gutter of the street.

“Daddy, what are these for?” I said, grabbing a handful and stuffing the pink hearts into my jacket pocket.

“You know how people throw rice at a bride and groom as they leave the church?  Well, at a wedding this morning, someone used these hearts instead of rice,” said Daddy.

“I’m going to do that when I get married,” I said, as we walked home from Holy Name.

The Polish immigrants of Holy Name are too strange for Mom, and too much, too much, too much.  Also, Mom doesn’t like it when Babcia speaks in the Polish language to Daddy in front of her because she doesn’t understand what they’re saying.  She doesn’t like Polish food, which she refuses to eat, and because of that, my sisters and I don’t eat it, either.  Just the stinky smell of Babcia’s golabki, cabbage leaves stuffed with spiced minced meat and rice, and golonka, stewed pig knuckle, makes Mom sick to her stomach.

Mom raises us Italian-style, because that’s the best way.  She says that a lot more white kids are going to Catholic schools since desegregation is taking place in the public schools.  No such thing when Mom was a kid in Darien.  Back then, it was a “sundown town,” which used unwritten rules to prevent black people from staying overnight.  Darien is an exclusionary town where it’s all about the money, materialistic gossip, and highfalutin parties held in houses much too big for anyone, even a family of six.

“Money talks and shit walks,” said Mom.  At times, she wonders what it’s like to be rich.

No luxuries, just simple pleasures, found their way into Mom’s Italian family of Grandpa, Nanny, five sisters, and one brother.  At seven years old, Mary, (my Nanny), her three brothers and her parents, Gennaro and Madeline, emigrated from Italy to America in 1900, settling in the neighborhood of Noroton Heights in Darien.  They were one of the first Italian families to move into the Heights.  Later, Gennaro would send money to his brother Antonio in Italy, so he could move to Darien, too.  Francis, my Grandpa, emigrated from Italy in 1910, and soon after, married Nanny.

“The Heights, where I grew up, was a place where it seemed as though all Italians were related by blood or marriage.  All of us kids went to Baker School and then the high school together.  My brother, Pippi, was a local football star.  My Pop and Ma raised us right.  The Italians stuck together.  Those were the good, old days,” said Mom.  She went to public schools in Darien and doesn’t want us to go to Stamford’s public schools because of the racial mix.

“God only knows what will happen.  It’s Catholic school for my four girls,” said Mom.

Daddy and Mom raise us to be good Catholics.  At school, I learn to pray to Mary,

Our Lady Of Sorrows, my true Mother, and I feel sorry for her, knowing that she watched her son, dear, sweet, Jesus, die on the cross.  From this pain, a sword pierced her soul.  My stomach’s in knots, as this pain and suffering kinda’ makes me feel sick.  It’s the same feeling I get when looking at the painting of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus with the burning, bloodied heart that hangs in Babcia’s apartment upstairs.  Babcia says it shows the compassion of Christ’s heart towards humanity and its long suffering, whatever the hell that means.  I just don’t know anything about that and wish she had a painting of sweet baby Jesus held by Mother Mary instead.  Jesus’s flaming heart, topped by a cross and pierced by thorns, and his head, stabbed by a crown of thorns, bleeds, as he smiles with divine love in the livingroom.

One day, after my first grade homework of studying the Hail Mary prayer and asking

my true Mother to pray for us sinners, Donna, who’s in the third grade, and I quick-hurry-rush out of green-plaid school uniforms and blue-snapped ties.  She tells me that learning boring religious garbage means that I can get the First Communion Sacrament and the Holy Eucharist next year, in the second grade.  Uniforms on hangers, shoes in the closet, we go to the kitchen to get Mom’s orders.

“Go out and stay outside you two.  Be good.  Stay in the yard.  Don’t slam the door!

Dear Mary, Mother of God, help me,” said Mom.  She chops garlic to add to sautéing onions in a frying pan for tomato gravy and meatballs, tonight’s supper.

Mom warns us not to wake our younger sisters in sweet dreams naptime, and asks

Mother Mary, The Undoer of Knots, who never refuses to come to the aid of a child in need, for help, as she struggles with a never-ending task list of four daughters.  Soon, for survival, she adds more to her plate to put food on the table as she works at a manufacturer’s night shift at Machlett’s x-ray tube assembly line.

On these fearful nights, she prays before going to work.

“Dear Mother of God, I beg you, send guardian angels to watch over my girls tonight,” said Mom.  She whispers a prayer over my head and covers Maria sleeping next to me in our twin bed, with another blanket.

“Do you have to go, Mom?”  My eyes are closed, yet I’m still awake, worried that she’s leaving me, scared to say so.  The kitchen light shines into the blue-painted bedroom so I can see her in the sleepy darkness.  She’s dressed to go, in brown slacks and a flowery blouse, red lipstick smooth on lips, a small frill of a blossom.  Over her work clothes, she wears an apron with pockets that hold little girls’ things: brown barrettes bought at Woolworth’s Five & Ten, safety pins used to clip a loose, uniform skirt hem in a pinch, a white handkerchief with pink edging and a purple violet embroidered in a corner, used to dry eyes and wipe lipstick kisses from little cheeks, and a yellow lollipop that waits to be unwrapped by a girl’s hand.  A

Hail Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners’ gold medallion necklace shimmers against her tan-browned neck.

“You’re still awake?  Shh…you’ll wake your sisters.  Go to sleep,” said Mom.

“Do you have to go, Mom?  Where’s Daddy?”  I can’t sleep until I get answers.

“I have to work to put food on the table.  We don’t have any money.  Your father can’t hold down a job because of his fucking drinking.  I hope to hell he doesn’t come to my work, like he did last week.  He barged into the manager’s office and called my name over the intercom.  I’m embarrassed by that drunk chooch.  I’m gonna’ have to quit my job.”  Mom talks to herself more than to me and calls Daddy a jackass in Italian.  I don’t feel any better by her answer.

“Go to sleep.  Daddy’s not home.  Don’t worry.  Someday, we’ll be rich, Jeanne,” said Mom.  She goes across the bedroom to where my other sisters share a twin bed, picks up a soft toy dog from the floor, and places it in the crook of sleeping Barb’s arm.

“Sweet dreams, Jeanne.  Buona notte,” said Mom.  She touches sleeping Donna’s cheek, goes out of the room and closes the door.  Her goodnight in Italian is not a comfort.

I tumble into teary sleep, wonder why Daddy’s not home again, why he can’t make money, why he drinks, can’t hold down a job, and why Mom leaves us alone.  I worry about what’s going to happen next and if I’ll be able to sleep through the night, or wake to my parents in a fucking, scary fight.  Or see a guardian angel, sent by Mother Mary, to undo a nightmare’s choking, white, corded knot.

▬

Underneath the worry, Mom keeps busy.  She sets two big pots on the stovetop, one for the gravy and one for spaghetti.  She gives Donna and me a last look as we head outside to the yard.  She places her pointer finger against her lips as a silent warning.

We obey Mom, don’t slam the door and go outside to play.  I’m as quiet as a mouse.  As we go down the back porch steps, I glance over the fence to our black neighbors’ house.  There’s a cat family in a box on the neighbors’ back porch.

“Look, Donna, a mother cat with kittens!”

I wheedle her to climb over the fence, with Keds-covered feet, that fit foot-by-foot

into octagon-shaped wire, to steal a kitten.  I’d do it myself, except I’m smaller than her.  She gives in to me, because, Daddy says, no matter how many troubles storm upon her, Donna is

Happy-Go-Lucky, his nickname for her.

She sneaks onto the neighbors’ porch, grabs a gray kitten, hands him over the fence, and climbs back.  In my hands falls a fluff of fur.  A prayer to God hopefully guarantees that Mom will let us keep the kitten that we name Twinkles after the nursery rhyme that we know so well about a star that’s like a diamond in the sky.

After a fierce begging fight on my persevering part, Mom scolds us about the sin of stealing and the friggin’ Eighth Commandment.  She reminds us of the two thieves that were crucified with Jesus and gives me an extra stern frown.

“I don’t want to talk to that mulignane,” said Mom.  She refers to a black person as a mulignane, which, in Italian, means eggplant, a vegetable with black skin.  She calls us rotten kids, and with dread, half-heartedly, agrees to cross the border fence and speaks to the woman next door as she hovers over the cat box.

We get to keep Twinkles.

“Don’t bring that filthy thing in my spotless house or I’ll get rid of it.  That thing will just bring bugs inside,” said Mom.

“Come on.”  I start a fighting round.

“Don’t answer back.  Fanabla!” said Mom.  Fanabla means go to hell in Italian, which she adds for extra measure.

I worry and try to say everything right before opening my mouth.  I figure out that to please Mom, it’s best not to say another word and just obey her, yet this doesn’t work every time.  In my throat, I’m furious, yet fear Mom’s slaps.  I’m pissed at God since I can’t use the mouth that He gave me.  I doubt that He gave me a mouth just to glorify Him.

For now, Donna and I bring Twinkles to Babcia, who feeds the kitten and makes him a blanket bed behind our deceased grandfather, Dziadzio’s, rocking chair on the upstairs back porch.

The gray-striped tomcat becomes my best friend.  Behind the rocking chair, I crouch and stroke Twinkles’ face as he sleeps, cup my hand along his cheekbone and flatten peaked ears as I pet his lovable head.  When he wakes, his gray eyes stick to mine, he listens with a twitchy ear, his soft friendship assuages my girly joy-talk-tears.  Even if I can’t bring him inside ’cause Mom doesn’t like him, he’s my travelling star in bewildering days.  Mom doesn’t know that I thank God for Twinkles as I kneel at bedtime, hands folded in prayer.

“Thank God for family in your prayers.  God is good,” said Mom.

Every day, I run home from school, or jump out of the car when Mom picks me up from school, call for Twinkles, and head straight to the green, metal pole in the corner of the yard. Mom yells at me to change out of my school uniform.

“You’ll get your god-damn uniform dirty and make more work for me.  I’m gonna’ go far, far away and never come back,” said Mom.  The work that she does to clean our apartment, with spic-and-span floors, bleach-scrubbed sinks, and ivory-snow-white laundry, is enough to drive her away and put fear in me.

Most times, I find Twinkles at the pole, his favorite spot, and follow him in a circle, a cat’s paws and a girl’s patent leather shoes dusty on the dirt path.  His tail follows the curve of the pole, wraps round and round, as I trail him.  He doesn’t mind when I rub his head and arched back, to the tip of his tail that I gently tug.  My hand rides against the metal-cool pole as my feet scuffle the gray dirt, my head lost in a gray cloud.

Twinkles doesn’t mind when I hold him like a baby and nestle his head under my chin.  He purrs wildly, kneads gentle claws at my shoulder as I pat his back and love him to death.  He stands it for a bit when I mother him with the mothering that I don’t get and cozy-cover him with a blanket in a doll carriage.  I let him paw at a jump rope as my sisters and me wing it around and take a chance to sneak him into the house on tippy-toe feet, only to be yelled at by Mom.

“Jeanne, don’t you dare bring that cat inside,” said Mom.  As mean as ever, she shoos him to the yard, porch, or basement.

“Shit, all that cat’s good for is catchin’ mice,” said Mom.  She frowns as he lunges at a sparrow, catches and eats a fly, squish-squashes blades of grass as he rolls around on his back.

Other times when I call him, he meows out of a hiding place, from behind a metal garbage can, under the porch, or shoots down the back porch stairs.  One time, I call, call, call, until I can’t call no more, and that’s the end of Twinkles.

For a long time, after school, I circle the pole at his spot and my dark tears drop to the dirt.

“Stop crying about that cat, for Christ’s sake,” said Mom.

I want to put my head up, ask what’s wrong with feeling sad, yet I can’t speak ’cause the cord is tight in my mouth and grips my smartie-slammed-stomach.

Later, in bed in the dark night, I stir from the squeaky squeal of the clothesline rope as it rubs against the wheel that pulleys it back and forth in the breezy Long Island Sound air.  Passing car lights throw shadows of the venetian blinds on the bedroom wall.  Trains weep, judder into the train yard that runs behind the street.  Tomorrow, I’ll see empty beer cans in the neighbors’ front yard, tossed by the father of the girls that I can’t play with, as he drinks on their porch at night.  I’ll  feel sorrow over my parents’ denigrating, death-defying fights, with their ethnic slurs of wop and polack, swear words used every which way, and knife-splitting yells that make me push my little sisters into the bedroom closet, slide the door shut, crouch in the darkness, and stick my fingers in my ears.

“The wind is lonely tonight.”  I sigh and slide the soft, satin edging of a turquoise blanket along my cheek.

Twinkles is out there, under the star-filled sky.

Months pass.  Routine sets in.  My First Communion in the second grade comes and goes, with no frills.  A couple of years ago, Donna’s holy-day-main-event was quite different.

At the time, Donna dons an angel white dress, Babcia wears a silk, flowery dress and a hat with a tuft of netting and posy of silky lily-of-the-valley flowers, and Daddy takes black and white photos from an instant camera.  Images miraculously appear.  There’s one of Donna and me, by the front gate.  Donna, with a white tulle and lace puff about her, and me, with a bowl haircut and one knee sock up, one down.  Mom charges back-and-forth between all, to pull down bunched skirts, fix barrettes on my sisters’ side-parted, brown hair, wet a thumb on tongue to flatten a curl, wipe a sleepy out of Maria’s brown eyes, and clasp pearl rosette earrings to her own ears.  There’s a cake that Mom baked on the kitchen table, waiting for a party.  It puddles the plate, the white frosting swiped, a trace of a girl’s sugary finger.

On the day that I receive the body of Christ for the very first time, I wear Donna’s

hand-me-down angel dress, hold Daddy’s hand as we walk to church, leave Mom and sisters

at home, as Donna has a cold, Barb’s gonna’ catch it, and Maria’s in the playpen, squeaking a pink, rubber dog.  After getting the Holy Eucharist, I kneel in a church pew, where the nuns revere stillness, and pray to Jesus to bless my family, hope that our good God loves me, and ask Him how the hell to be without sin.  Mary, Mother of God, serenely smiles at my meek and humble heart from the rays-of-gold-medallion that hangs from the ceiling above my head.  The Blessed Mother, the symbol of forgiveness of people, tells me to forgive.  I close my eyes, clasp my hands, hopelessly chant to myself, I forgive Daddy, I forgive Mom, and I forgive the nun who hit my hands with a ruler for having my head in the clouds.  I forgive, I forgive, I forgive.

At home and school, its back to our routine, except Twinkles is gone and Mom doesn’t miss his dirty, tangle-mess.  We still can’t play with the girls next door even though our cat isn’t around to remind Mom of how she had to talk to the neighbor.  We obey her rules, and, most of all, try not to cut up like rotten kids.  I climb a maple tree in our front yard, hang legs over a branch, stick my nose in the powder puffs of Babcia’s pink perfume roses, ache to caress the roses in an arm-wrapped hug, press them close to my body, and yet can’t because of my grandmother’s threats of not to touch, never mind their piercing thorns.  On one side of the yard, I crunch pebbles underfoot, chase Barb, who Daddy nicknames Hot Shot because she struts her stuff, creak open the black mailbox stickered with our Polish name on a label written in Mom’s scribble-scrabble, draw hop-scotch boxes with white chalk on the walk, teach sisters how to jump from box-to-box, and warn them not to step on the sidewalk’s cracks or else they’ll break Mom’s back.

In the old, blue-finned Chevy car, Mom drives to Saint Mary’s to pick up Donna, Barb, and me after school, where I’m in the third grade now.  Maria, who Daddy nicknames Mona Lisa because she’s a little princess, follows me with her eyes as I get in the car.  In the backseat, she mothers a doll as she feeds it a bottle and rocks it in her arms.  I pat her hand to say hello.

Mom and Maria spent the morning at Nanny’s house, which is what we simply call Mom’s parents’ house, where, for Italians, the extended family gives connection to life.  Children stay close to aging parents.  Mom’s unmarried sister, my Aunt LaLa, lives with Nanny and Grandpa.  So does her unmarried brother, my Uncle Pippi, a war veteran.  The four of them make a united front and hold family boundaries together.  Mom says, like many Italians, they keep family secrets to get along.  Like many Italians, Mom believes that family is the tonic for troubles.

“Yoo-hoo!  Hello, Pip!” calls Mom to her brother, as she and Maria enter the kitchen at the back door.

The washing machine hums in Nanny’s kitchen.  Grandpa sits at the window

that overlooks the driveway and reads Italian newspapers for reports of back home.  Uncle Pippi heads to the livingroom to start a warm fire in the fireplace and watch football on t.v.  He waits for Aunt LaLa to bring him his lunch on a tray.

“Hello, Marie.  Hello, Maria!  I’ll make some coffee,” said Aunt LaLa.  She wisks coffee cups and the sugar and creamer out of a cabinet, piles a plate with homemade crispy, sugary, bow-tie cookies, and places it in front of Maria at the kitchen table.

“Only two cookies, Maria.  Don’t be a gavone,” said Mom, as she takes some cookies off of the plate and calls her a gluttonous eater in Italian.

“Don’t be so fussy, Mary.  Mangia, Maria!” said Aunt LaLa.  She advises, uses Mom’s birth name, Mary, and gives my sister an Italian order to eat.

Nanny’s house is the safe spot for Mom and us four girls.  Mom chitchats with

Aunt LaLa, Nanny, and any other sister, niece, aunt, or cousin who might just drop in.  My sisters and I enter this safe spot with its gardens, yard, zinnia bed where flowers aren’t forbidden to touch or even cut, Great-Uncle Mike’s maple tree, and an empty back lot of an overgrown field.  When we visit, which seems like every other day, my sisters and me cross the lazy streets to go to Great-Aunt Lizzie’s house, Aunt Matheline’s house, and the woods around the corner, too.  We loop dandelions, green rings of flattened stems and crushed yellow heads, into necklaces and crowns.  We are the royal family of Nanny’s yard and we rule the place.

I know each footstep, where the ground slopes down and where it rises.  This place on earth, on the 41st parallel, is where my great-grandfather Gennaro gave this land to his daughter, Mary, and her husband, Francis, my grandparents.  Grandpa, in turn, deeded their house to

Uncle Pippi in 1964, the year that I’m in kindergarten.  Later, a plot across Maple Street, with the largest garden, is held by his daughters.  The house sits on a hill and the front yard rolls down to a sidewalk near the street.  The hill is just the thing for rolling on, where my sisters and I lie on the ground at the top, roll our bodies down towards the sidewalk, where the slope naturally makes us stop.  Our bodies are like rolling pins, they reel back-and-forth at frustrations and the talk of divorce, as dirt and grass wash over us and fallen leaves tangle our hair.  Laughter rolls out of my mouth as I become Nanny’s rolling pin, guided by her hands, dough pushed and pulled until a paper-thin pasta sheet lies still on the kitchen table, sprinkled with flour and wishes of god-like food to come.  Nanny’s house holds kind promises at a time when just plain sorrow fills me up.

Nanny’s house is safe, except for the one time that Daddy came in flying drunk, on his own mission.  He stumbled on foot all the way from home, as the winter-soft snow fell around him, with an intense purpose to take back his family.

“The girls haven’t finished eating yet, Joe,” said Mom.  Daddy sways in Nanny’s diningroom, where we sit.  He insists that we go home with him.

I feel a knot in my stomach and glue my eyes to the table.

Daddy goes on.

“We’re fighting a war,” said Donna.

“What did you say?”  Daddy looks at my sister.  I count Donna as nuts to open her mouth, yet, at the same time, I wish like hell that I could speak up and use the mouth that our good God gave me.

“Nothing.”  Donna looks at Mom.

“Let’s go home, girls.”  Mom gives in.

“Joe’s not right for you, Marie,” said Grandpa.  He mutters that Daddy’s a gidrul, which, in Italian, means a stupid person.

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Before we go straight home from St. Mary’s, Mom parks the Chevy, orders us to behave, and leaves us to wait in the car in a grocery store’s parking lot.  She runs into Grade A Market to buy a loaf of Italian bread and parmesan cheese.  Then, we’re on our way home.

“You’ll never guess who showed up at home today,” said Mom.

Twinkles.

“I never cared for that thing.  It’s as dirty as ever.  I skeefo that cat,” said Mom.  She uses Italian-American slang to show her disgust.

The four of us girls go nuts.

To our hundred questions about Twinkles, she coolly caves in, tells us that she put him in the trunk of the car months ago and drove to Holly Pond, miles away.  She got rid of him, dumped him off at the side of the road.

“How did he figure out the way home, when he was so far, far away?  Hell, I never heard of a cat doing such a thing,” said Mom.

For a ’sec, I wonder if Mom will dump me off at the side of the road someday.  Then,

I don’t hear another word that she says.  As soon as the car pulls up along the sidewalk in front of the house, I’m out.

I don’t care about Mom’s knots and rules, don’t care about Mother Mary’s suffering, don’t even care about my uniform.  Don’t care about nothin’ except my cat.

▬

Twinkles’ dark travels haven’t helped him.  He sleeps more than ever before, he lost weight and can’t gain it back.  He’s been home from Holly Pond for about two years now.

Twinkles is home.  However, it’s not back to the usual routine for us.

In my parents’ last cold-blooded, furious fight, Mom wielded a butcher knife weapon and ended their marriage.  She divorces the man she loved, loses the home that she painstakingly made for fifteen years, and is a single parent now.  The promise in Catholicism, where divorce is forbidden and marriage is forever, is broken.  Gone is the image of a family that she desperately wishes for, just like the one her Pop and Ma have.  My sisters and I join the ranks of the 8,400 children of divorce in Connecticut’s population of three million people.

We move out of our house and across Stamford, to a one-family house that’s broken up into three, disorderly apartments.  A young, hippie couple lives upstairs and a bachelor lives in an apartment next to ours on the first floor.  I miss our house on Jefferson Street.

“Look forward.  Don’t look back, Jeanne.  You have your entire life in front of you.  Reach for the stars.  God is good,” said Mom.

Words to raise spirits are just a farce, as rage is Mom’s way to keep four daughters in order as she brings us up on her own, shamed and scared, with only a 1946 Darien High School diploma behind her in 1970.

In her bedroom dresser, Mom saves a drawing that Daddy made for her years ago.

With colored pencils, he drew portraits of his daughters and taped a black and white photo above each.  He added nicknames and item numbers to each girl in technical block hand-lettering.  We’re all required in his recipe as he wrote, “Mix four items together and bake well:  Wow!  Happy Anniversary.  Love, Joe.”  Compass arrows with a question mark indicate what item number might be next in their life together.

Daddy can’t keep his compass fixed in the right direction, no matter what he tries to do.  Now, he has a bed in the attic at Babcia’s house, and, for the hundredth time, Mom told him to drop dead.  With a divorce decree of intolerable cruelty, I have to go where Mom goes.  Sometimes, she brings my sisters and me to visit Daddy at Babcia’s house, and I look for Twinkles then.  He can’t go where I go and I have to leave him with Daddy.  At one visit, I find Twinkles lying on the floor behind Dziadzio’s rocking chair.

He’s dead.

Daddy tells me to stay on the upstairs back porch after I run and cry to him and Mom.  At the railing, I watch him bring the cat to the yard.  His tough, Navy tattooed arm, in a simple toss, drops Twinkles into a metal garbage can.  He tightly closes the lid.

“Don’t you get it?  It’s only a cat,” said Mom.  She teaches me the ropes about life.

Mom means that I have to get over my cry-baby problem right this instant.  I imagine that we have a funeral for Twinkles and that Daddy buries him at the base of the clothesline pole.  My sisters and I say a prayer about how we will all be changed, just like Twinkles, in the twinkling of an eye, when we meet dear, sweet, Jesus one day.  I imagine that we wish him starry luck, as he travels to God.  I imagine that my sorrowful eyes look upon Mom, as she watches the funeral from the back porch.

I try to make sense of things that I just can’t figure out.  Later, I learn about a theory that says cats have a homing instinct due to sensitivity to the geo-magnetic field of the earth.  This lets a cat keep a compass fix on his home region, in spite of the distance and direction traveled.  Another theory is that the stars guide him home.  I’m proud of Twinkles for figuring things out.

Sometimes, when I stray from a high alert stance, I ask Mom why Daddy can’t stop drinking.

“How the hell do I know?  I can’t figure him out.  You’d think that bastard would’ve stopped when neighbors heard our fights and called the cops.  He crucified me,” said Mom.

I wish I never asked, because, during the stifling silence of night, a painful image runs in my head of Daddy hammering nails into Mom’s hands in a crucifixion, with a crown of thorns and a red, bloodied heart.  Like our Lady Of Sorrows, my true Mother, a sword pierces my soul from the pain.  A choking, corded knot is in my mouth.  In this nightmare, I wait for the white to shine brightly.

The story above was published in March, 2017 in a book, “Reflections:  Stories From Local Writers,” sponsored by The Ferguson Library, Stamford, Connecticut.

Jean Bankowski DeVito is a writer currently working on a memoir about childhood struggles with her parents’ divorce in 1970, to adulthood and a fight in a contest of an uncle’s will, where she represents her elderly mother in the justice system.  She decides that one person’s life is not more deserving of enrichment, by money or love, than any other.  The importance of reporting suspected cases is revealed in this trinity of child abuse, domestic violence, and elder financial abuse.