her we had this discussion, and don’t listen to everything your grandfather says.” Celeste licked her finger and patted down one of her spit curls. “I’ll leave you alone so you can try that thing on.”
When she was gone Maggie closed the door again and slipped out of her shorts and shirt. With her back to the mirror she put on the bathing suit, tugging the top into place, exhaling exaggeratedly to find out if it would stay up without effort. Finally she turned toward the mirror. The suit was a perfect fit. The green turned her eyes the color of lime LifeSavers; the ruffles made her look as if she had hips, and the bones in the bodice made her look as if she had a bust. She looked down. If she was careful, no one would be able to tell that there were two inches of open space between the top and her own chest. She held her arms out and twirled in front of the mirror.
Downstairs she heard Damien calling, “Maggie.” She ran to the door and threw her back against it. “Go away, Dame,” she called, and after a minute she could hear the staccato sound of his sneakers running outside. She went back to the mirror and put her hands on her hips.
From below her bedroom window she heard voices, and looking out she saw her mother standing in the grass, her arms crossed on her chest. She seemed very small, and Maggie felt as if she were looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope. She realized that these days she was always seeing her mother from a distance, as if in pictures—framed in a window, frozen in some pose, her face revealed in some essential way. Just yesterday she had come silently into the dining room on bare feet and seen Connie through the door leading to the kitchen, leaning back against the counter, flushed and radiant. Maggie had suddenly thought that her mother looked beautiful, young, more wondrous than Helen Malone. For a moment she had been stunned by her mother’s likeness to someone she could not quite place. And then she had realized that the resemblance was to the picture on her grandfather Mazza’s bureau, in the gold frame next to the clothed statue of the Infant Jesus of Prague, the picture of Concetta Mazza at her high school graduation, with black fabric draped round her bare shoulders and a self-conscious happy look on her face, walking in beauty like the night.
Then Maggie had moved, and her mother had moved, and the moment had been over. That was when she saw the man in the kitchen.
“Here’s the big girl,” he had said, in a false voice. “I’m Mr. Martinelli. I know your grandfather.”
“Which one?” Maggie had said, as she sat down at the table and pushed away the coffee cups.
“The Italian one,” he said in Italian, and Connie turned and said in the same language, “She can’t speak it. You know, they forget. She never hears it.” Maggie understood most of what they were saying, but she just sat with her head down, her hair falling around her face.
“I’m going to teach your mother to drive,” the man said in the same false voice, smiling at Maggie again, his fingers tapping on a key lying near the edge of the kitchen table.
“Why?” Maggie longed to grab hold of his eyebrows and pull, and reddened at the thought.
“Why not?” Connie said, and Maggie shrugged. She knew that she had cast a pall over the kitchen, but she did not care. “Aren’t you finished work?” Maggie said to Mr. Martinelli, suddenly aware that it was quiet out back as Connie began gathering up the dishes.
“I’m leaving,” he said. “But I’ll see you again.”
“I’m going to the beach next week,” said Maggie defiantly, but when she looked up and saw his face she realized he had been talking to her mother.
“Is he the one you went to the dance with?” Maggie said after he had gone out the back door, and Connie turned and asked “Who told you about that?”
“Celeste.”
“Aunt Celeste. No, it was his brother. Joe was too old. Four years older than me.”
“He’s really old,” said Maggie.
Her mother made a sound like a snort and continued to wash the cups. Joseph shrieked from the playpen on the patio and Maggie went outside to see him. “JoJo, JoJo,” she crooned, and the baby grabbed her long hair and stuck it into