suddenly, holding a pot slightly raised at her side like a weapon. “Have you gone crazy?”
“They didn’t teach you how to work in Italy, ah? I’ll teach you how to work, by God, even if I have to stand behind you every day with a whip!”
But my aunt held her ground.
“If you ever lay another hand on me I’ll break your skull, I swear it.”
“
Dai
, try it! We’ll see if you’ll always have things your own way. Not in this house, by Christ, not if you want to live under my roof!”
“Ah,
grazie!
Do you think I asked to come here, to this goddamned America? To wash your dirty clothes like a servant, to take care of a baby you wish your wife had taken with her to the grave? I had my life there, did you think about that when you called me here? What life do I have now, tell me! What life will you give me?”
For days afterwards they didn’t speak. The house assumed again its familiar gloomy silence – even my aunt seemed unable this time to bring us out of it, had defeated my father but went about the house irritable and brooding as if burdened now by her victory.
She began to grow impatient with the baby, perfunctory, almost clumsy. Perhaps she had always been, had merely hidden this awkwardness beneath her glow of good humour; but nowsuddenly everything she did for the baby seemed flawed somehow. When she made up a feeding, with the powder we used now, her measurements seemed more haphazard than Gelsomina’s had been; when she gave her bottled food she seemed to stop before the baby had had her fill; when she held her she seemed unable to settle her comfortably against her, struggling with her as with some bulky inanimate thing. These signs of deficiency in her disturbed me, made her seem to lack something crucial in her character, some important instinct, like the sows who’d roll over and crush their own newborn.
Then once when I was helping with a change, the old diaper came away stained with a small patch of dried blood.
“The head broke on the pin, it must have pricked her,” my aunt said. But she slipped the pin into the pocket of her apron before I could see it.
I began to watch her more closely after that.
“Look how curious he is,” my aunt said. “As if he’d never seen a baby before.”
But she seemed to understand now that some contest was going on between us. As if to put me in my place she turned the baby over to me one evening for a feeding, mockingly, indulgent; but I could tell she was quietly impressed then with my small, careful efficiency.
“You learned all that just by watching me?”
“Gelsomina taught me.”
“Not bad,” she said, but she seemed put out. “She did a good job.”
She began to come out to the fields suddenly, diffident at first, prying carefully among the vines as if not to dirty her hands, but then growing quickly more expert, some new resolve taking shape in her. She left the baby at first in a playpen of bushels atthe end of her row, sending me now and then to check on her; and then gradually more and more of the care of her began to devolve upon me, till finally I was being left alone in the house the entire afternoon to tend to her while my aunt was out in the fields, my father silently acquiescing to this new arrangement as to something he neither approved of nor could oppose. I’d come to call my aunt still for feedings and changes, not certain yet what I was allowed, how far my dominion extended. But as my aunt saw I could manage these things on my own her interest in the baby seemed day by day to diminish.
“
Dai
, you don’t have to come running to me for every little thing, you know how to do it.”
What I never told my aunt was the agony for me of these afternoons alone. There was something so unreasonable in the baby then, the dangerous awkward weight of her, her obliviousness. I was never free of her, her sweaty heat, her spit, her smell, seemed not to exist at all, become merely the thinking extension of her animal need.
“They didn’t teach you how to work in Italy, ah? I’ll teach you how to work, by God, even if I have to stand behind you every day with a whip!”
But my aunt held her ground.
“If you ever lay another hand on me I’ll break your skull, I swear it.”
“
Dai
, try it! We’ll see if you’ll always have things your own way. Not in this house, by Christ, not if you want to live under my roof!”
“Ah,
grazie!
Do you think I asked to come here, to this goddamned America? To wash your dirty clothes like a servant, to take care of a baby you wish your wife had taken with her to the grave? I had my life there, did you think about that when you called me here? What life do I have now, tell me! What life will you give me?”
For days afterwards they didn’t speak. The house assumed again its familiar gloomy silence – even my aunt seemed unable this time to bring us out of it, had defeated my father but went about the house irritable and brooding as if burdened now by her victory.
She began to grow impatient with the baby, perfunctory, almost clumsy. Perhaps she had always been, had merely hidden this awkwardness beneath her glow of good humour; but nowsuddenly everything she did for the baby seemed flawed somehow. When she made up a feeding, with the powder we used now, her measurements seemed more haphazard than Gelsomina’s had been; when she gave her bottled food she seemed to stop before the baby had had her fill; when she held her she seemed unable to settle her comfortably against her, struggling with her as with some bulky inanimate thing. These signs of deficiency in her disturbed me, made her seem to lack something crucial in her character, some important instinct, like the sows who’d roll over and crush their own newborn.
Then once when I was helping with a change, the old diaper came away stained with a small patch of dried blood.
“The head broke on the pin, it must have pricked her,” my aunt said. But she slipped the pin into the pocket of her apron before I could see it.
I began to watch her more closely after that.
“Look how curious he is,” my aunt said. “As if he’d never seen a baby before.”
But she seemed to understand now that some contest was going on between us. As if to put me in my place she turned the baby over to me one evening for a feeding, mockingly, indulgent; but I could tell she was quietly impressed then with my small, careful efficiency.
“You learned all that just by watching me?”
“Gelsomina taught me.”
“Not bad,” she said, but she seemed put out. “She did a good job.”
She began to come out to the fields suddenly, diffident at first, prying carefully among the vines as if not to dirty her hands, but then growing quickly more expert, some new resolve taking shape in her. She left the baby at first in a playpen of bushels atthe end of her row, sending me now and then to check on her; and then gradually more and more of the care of her began to devolve upon me, till finally I was being left alone in the house the entire afternoon to tend to her while my aunt was out in the fields, my father silently acquiescing to this new arrangement as to something he neither approved of nor could oppose. I’d come to call my aunt still for feedings and changes, not certain yet what I was allowed, how far my dominion extended. But as my aunt saw I could manage these things on my own her interest in the baby seemed day by day to diminish.
“
Dai
, you don’t have to come running to me for every little thing, you know how to do it.”
What I never told my aunt was the agony for me of these afternoons alone. There was something so unreasonable in the baby then, the dangerous awkward weight of her, her obliviousness. I was never free of her, her sweaty heat, her spit, her smell, seemed not to exist at all, become merely the thinking extension of her animal need.
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