silence when we drove home that night had nothing foreboding about it, for an instant the group of us seeming held together in the car’s dark, tight warmth by our own strange loyalty, an odd silent family joined in its awkwardness and injury.
This time my father did not back down. When the ground thawed in April a bulldozer arrived to level a stretch of fieldalongside our greenhouses, then a few days later a truck delivered a load of metal trusses and rafters and posts. There seemed no adequate response my uncle could make to the mute fact of this hill of metal that lay glinting in our side field. But one day, taking with them a few suitcases and a wooden trunk, all they’d brought with them from Italy, my uncle and his family simply moved out of the house – as suddenly as that, as if my uncle had reached the decision only hours before. When we came home from school to find my aunt packing the trunk, I imagined they were returning to Italy; but it turned out they moved only next door, into a small clapboard house connected to a broken-down greenhouse and a few acres of land that my father had usually rented for his tomatoes.
Oddly, their departure left no sense of relief in our house, only a strange lethargy, a torpor thick as sleep. The new trusses and posts remained lying where they’d been heaped as if my father had lost interest in them; Tsi’Alfredo came by and warned him to build while he had the time and the weather was good, but the spring planting began and still the trusses and posts lay untouched.
Then Rocco came by one day to borrow our tractor and planter.
“We’ll see if he thinks he can make it on his own,” my father said.
But when Tsi’Umberto himself came by a few days later it was with the air of bland self-satisfaction he’d put on whenever my father had yielded to him in some argument, an air that seemed to deny there’d been any argument at all.
“That old Ukrainian there, I don’t know what he cooked in that house, the whole place smells like cabbage.”
He began to come by often then, to borrow tools, to use our equipment; we had to go looking for things, my father grumbling, making threats, but then saying nothing to my uncle. When we finally got around to starting work on the new greenhouse he came by to help raise the trusses, affable and expansive, almost claiming a share in my father’s accomplishment now that he had nothing to do with it; and my father put up with this as he did everything else, seeming somehow to have gained less by his victory than Tsi’Umberto by his defeat.
It appeared only a matter of time by then before we’d be back more or less where we’d begun, a single family, bound by some twisted allegiance that infected us like an illness, that made sure there could be no new arguments among us, no new solutions. Aunt Teresa would stand at the kitchen window sometimes now with her face so emptied it hurt me to look at her, etched there against the light as at some threshold she wouldn’t cross, that she would turn from finally to wipe the table, rearrange a chair. And yet in all that had happened she was what we’d protected somehow, found a way to hold within our element as if around us we felt the pressure of a world that wouldn’t let us spill into it, that held us in the way the dykes at the Point kept the lake from seeking its level in the spring.
VII
With my uncle’s family gone our household seemed stripped down again to its essence, all of us suddenly dangerously visible, lacking the spectacle of Tsi’Umberto’s arguments to distract us from the awkwardness of one another’s presence. We retreated to our separate rooms, the one wealth my uncle’s departure had left us with, the rest of the house become just a passageway we moved through uneasily, with no sense of ownership or comfort. The living room took on an air of abandonment, the bed removed so that only the threadbare armchair and couch remained; in the day no one bothered so much as
This time my father did not back down. When the ground thawed in April a bulldozer arrived to level a stretch of fieldalongside our greenhouses, then a few days later a truck delivered a load of metal trusses and rafters and posts. There seemed no adequate response my uncle could make to the mute fact of this hill of metal that lay glinting in our side field. But one day, taking with them a few suitcases and a wooden trunk, all they’d brought with them from Italy, my uncle and his family simply moved out of the house – as suddenly as that, as if my uncle had reached the decision only hours before. When we came home from school to find my aunt packing the trunk, I imagined they were returning to Italy; but it turned out they moved only next door, into a small clapboard house connected to a broken-down greenhouse and a few acres of land that my father had usually rented for his tomatoes.
Oddly, their departure left no sense of relief in our house, only a strange lethargy, a torpor thick as sleep. The new trusses and posts remained lying where they’d been heaped as if my father had lost interest in them; Tsi’Alfredo came by and warned him to build while he had the time and the weather was good, but the spring planting began and still the trusses and posts lay untouched.
Then Rocco came by one day to borrow our tractor and planter.
“We’ll see if he thinks he can make it on his own,” my father said.
But when Tsi’Umberto himself came by a few days later it was with the air of bland self-satisfaction he’d put on whenever my father had yielded to him in some argument, an air that seemed to deny there’d been any argument at all.
“That old Ukrainian there, I don’t know what he cooked in that house, the whole place smells like cabbage.”
He began to come by often then, to borrow tools, to use our equipment; we had to go looking for things, my father grumbling, making threats, but then saying nothing to my uncle. When we finally got around to starting work on the new greenhouse he came by to help raise the trusses, affable and expansive, almost claiming a share in my father’s accomplishment now that he had nothing to do with it; and my father put up with this as he did everything else, seeming somehow to have gained less by his victory than Tsi’Umberto by his defeat.
It appeared only a matter of time by then before we’d be back more or less where we’d begun, a single family, bound by some twisted allegiance that infected us like an illness, that made sure there could be no new arguments among us, no new solutions. Aunt Teresa would stand at the kitchen window sometimes now with her face so emptied it hurt me to look at her, etched there against the light as at some threshold she wouldn’t cross, that she would turn from finally to wipe the table, rearrange a chair. And yet in all that had happened she was what we’d protected somehow, found a way to hold within our element as if around us we felt the pressure of a world that wouldn’t let us spill into it, that held us in the way the dykes at the Point kept the lake from seeking its level in the spring.
VII
With my uncle’s family gone our household seemed stripped down again to its essence, all of us suddenly dangerously visible, lacking the spectacle of Tsi’Umberto’s arguments to distract us from the awkwardness of one another’s presence. We retreated to our separate rooms, the one wealth my uncle’s departure had left us with, the rest of the house become just a passageway we moved through uneasily, with no sense of ownership or comfort. The living room took on an air of abandonment, the bed removed so that only the threadbare armchair and couch remained; in the day no one bothered so much as
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