Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons by Linda Cardillo Page B

younger than me—begged to join him. The hole created by Claudio's departure did not close. Instead, it widened, tearing apart the life my family had known.
    My oldest sister, Letitia, had married six months before, a marriage arranged by my parents with the jeweler Samuel Rassina, the son of one of Papa's business associates. She was eighteen and already bitter. She seemed to spend most of her time in the church, "praying for babies, instead of staying home making them,"
    her mother-in-law complained.
    I knew, from observing other girls in the vil age, what lay ahead for me. A year or two of meeting stiff and boring boys at gatherings with families like ours, always under the extremely watchful eye of my mother. And then, after the families nodded and whispered, the women sitting on the sofa and hiding their conversations behind painted fans, the men out on the porch with their cigars and their eyes narrowed, estimating the worth of the girl's family or the boy's land—then, the banns of marriage would be announced in both churches. A string of novenas would fol ow, the girl's grandmothers and aunts pitying that no unforeseen obstacles would tumble into the couple's path, like the loose boulders that had slid off the mountain, crushing five of the vil age goats and blocking the road to Pano di Greci for three days. Praying that the wedding would take place before the girl had a chance to disgrace the family with a baby born too soon, like Constanza Berti. She'd come to the doorstep of my cousin Arturo's house and thrown the baby into the arms of Arturo's mother, screaming, "Here, this is yours!" My aunt and uncle had made Arturo marry her and take her and the baby away.
    My mother wanted no Constanza Bertis in our family.
    "You are not peasants! You are the daughters of Felice Fioril o." Her greatest weapon in her defense of our honor was our pride. From the time we were smal , she had Zia Pasqualina scrubbing us and dressing us in starched white dresses while the other children in the vil age ran around barefoot and in tatters. When the money from Claudio began coming, the dresses became finer, and we ordered fabrics from Napoli for the bed linens we were to take to our marriage beds.
    Painstakingly, under the instruction of Zia Pasqualina, I embroidered red silk GFs on the elaborate pil owcases I sewed, festooned with tucks and elegant lace. My fingers cramped from the tiny stitches. My mother held up these beautiful objects to us like Giuseppina's talismans. If we wanted a life fil ed with beauty and elegance, a life where we could rest our heads on an embroidered pil owcase, rather than a life spent washing someone else's pil owcases, then we had to remember that its cost was far more than the silver she'd paid for this linen. How would we be able to put our heads on these pristine objects if we ourselves were soiled?
    My sisters soaked up these lessons without question. They were wil ing to sit for hours with their needles and thread, gossiping about wedding dresses and arguing over the placement of a flower. They looked at the not-married and the married in our family, in our vil age, and had decided which side they wanted to be on. I was not so sure.
    I was haunted by Letitia's heartache. How lonely she seemed! Her husband had no brothers and sisters, and he was often away, leaving Letitia alone with his nagging mother."No wonder she seeks refuge in the church,"
    my mother muttered one day.
    The lonelier and more withdrawn Letitia became, the more I began to share my brothers' growing excitement with each letter from Claudio. I was stil young enough to be granted an occasional excuse from the sewing circle, and then I went off with Aldo and Frankie and Sandro to the hil s and played "America"—the rules defined by whatever wonders Claudio had described in his most recent letter. The more I learned from Claudio, the less willing I was to do as my mother expected.
    I wanted to laugh, I wanted to dance. I did not want