Twolips by Gerry Coleman

“A dream fulfilled is a dream lost.” 
                                                                          —Mickey Lafferty

The year Rosemarie Zuccarrelli moved away from Ninety Second Street to live with her maternal relatives in the Midwest, we were thirteen.

She quickly metastasized into likenesses and lies, was diluted by adaptations and revisions I fabricated to fill forward the missing frames. I did what most teenaged boys did: I played sports, pushed my luck with inaccessible girls, snuck beers, and cheated on tests. I wrote poems. Spare poems I did not share, poems touching upon alienation and nothingness, the depths of the surrounding black and unyielding ocean, and the silence of God in the world.

I idolized her.

It was my habit to stop by Zuccarelli’s Market after school, or if a date didn’t work out, to see Rosemarie’s father Tony, who always had something to arrange at the market. He would shrug or grumble in Italian if I asked about her. As far back as elementary school, I would see Tony in the neighborhood or the market. We would talk about practical matters like the weather, locations to display fruit angled in boxes, or how girls were. He’d give me a pickle for the walk home and unlikely vegetables to bring to my family: zucca, radicchio, and cavolo nero.

Ever since his wife and family left, Tony took book on the side to keep life moving in front of him. He was not happy alone. Cars pulled up at all hours. Add foot traffic and kids on bikes doing the “bookie run” for the old man and the market hopped.

He was not alone even when he was alone. Birds followed him. When he couldn’t see them, he could hear them squawking and fluttering. Blackbirds of all types: starlings, grackles, crows, but sparrows and wrens went along if caught in the flow. Birds would follow us tree to tree if we walked home together. I lived two doors away. He said it had to do with a family curse.

“I have nothing to do with birds I can’t eat,” he said.

But the birds were entertaining and were, if not happy themselves, hyperbolic, frolicsome, and nipping each other through the foliage. He was content, I could tell, to be around them, the way he bent into the racket.

When summer evenings settled in, Tony and I would sit on produce boxes watching mosquitos float like willful dandelion seeds over discarded vegetable bins—moved by “fermentation currents,” according to Tony. It was then Tony lit the cigar he had slobbered on since noon. Sizzling smoke rose blue-white to float through the neighborhood.

The day after four Kent State students were shot dead by The National Guard, a woman from the old country came to live with Tony, Teresa Maria. She came with a nervous breakdown and Coco, a lapdog. The details of the transaction were unclear, but for months, the sun rose and set cloudless over Zuccarelli’s Market. Tony’s letter “A” speculations were soon replaced by nuggets shared from heart-searing romance novels with promises of mortal sin.

Tony introduced marigolds, geraniums, and other common flowers to the market in red and green foil covered plastic pots. He made little effort to sell them. He would say, “Signora Magnani, I put in your bag a little fern for your windowsill or stoop.” Some plants he named. He’d say, “Ciao, Luigi!” to a marigold or say to a multi-flower arrangement, “Mr. and Mrs. Christoforo, how’s the family?” He added tulips for Easter he spelled “t-w-o-l-i-p-s” and carnations for Mother’s Day—red if your mamma was with you on earth. White if not. He gave the white ones away, if someone tried to buy one. He said flowers had souls we could smell. All summer, fans blew the souls of flowers through the market, and we walked home under blackbirds. We had things to discuss—how love was and the circle of life. It didn’t last.

Teresa was a lovely woman but quickly sank into dipsomania. Like Rosie’s mother Angelina, she neither cooked nor cleaned. Tony did everything after work, including pick up the empty wine bottles. He had his fill in a few months and spent more time at the market than usual, which was a lot.

Months became years, Teresa dug-in, and I graduated—Summa Cum Mediocre. I had things on my mind.

 It was ten o’clock one Friday night after another wasted day looking for a job exempt from the draft. I was on my way home from Mulcahy’s after a couple with the guys and stopped by the market to check on Tony.

Within a few blocks, there was a commotion of grinding walkie-talky static and lights of police cars along the avenue coming from Zuccarelli’s Market. I ran. Cops prevented gawkers from getting front row seats of the dead and dying. I thought I saw Tony half under a canvas bag. I darted around barriers and cops to find Jimmy The Smirk, a drunk we knew from around, ripped apart by bullets. Flowers in red and green pots were scattered everywhere. A cop turned me by my neck into the floor where my top eye caught Tony being wheeled off on a stretcher. He saw me the way a drowning man sees the sun. I was pulled up by someone who knew me from Little League.

“Go home Mickey,” he said, and got me to the street. I sat on the curb watching corpses removed in body bags and forensic guys collect shell casings and embedded bullets in fruit and vegetable crates into morning. They paid no attention to the marigold and geranium souls with people’s names, yellow and brown, nor the “twolips” and red and white carnations honoring mothers littering the floor.

Tony never made it in life to the hospital. NYC papers ran stories with archival photos of guys coming out of courthouses with faces covered. The next day when the police left, flowers were taken home by local people stepping over yellow crime-scene tape. I spun to face an unmistakable sound. Cloaked in Linden trees across Third Avenue, black crows and iridescent grackles gnawed at their feet.

xxx

Tortorello’s Funeral Parlor overflowed with Tony’s extended family. Market customers and compulsive gamblers also came to glom their respects onto the deceased. Several overweight pashas in black suits and pinky rings sat in guarded corners, surrounded by semi-wise guys whose necks circled in their collars waiting to be acknowledged by or inspect this or that person of interest.

Tony was compelled to smile by undertaker’s sutures and wires; his colorized, matte peach lips reflecting favorably in the gloaming of his coffin. “His beloved Teresa Maria,” Father Lynch called her in his summation of Tony’s “Life in Christ,” was up front shit faced. The family acted as if she wasn’t there as they greeted associates and loved ones. Later, Tony’s brother Angelo shot Coco in the chest and had Teresa sped to the airport with a one-way ticket back to Napoli.

At the Last Viewing, there was stirring at the back. The room hushed when a woman in black, about my age, appeared escorted by two men. She had a miniature Sofia Lauren thing going on with three-inch heels that gave her a jittery equine look before wobbling toward her father’s face. Her deep, dark eyes were highlighted by vibrant shadows of silver and cinnamon blue under long waxed lashes to accentuate a crown of high, raven hair.

Guided to her father’s side now by a shuffling cordon of cousins and uncles, she collapsed to the floor. After fanning her with a newspaper with a photo of her family’s market on the front-page, “No Leads in Market Slaughter,” she was able to weep in front of the father she hadn’t seen in eight years.

I copped a ride with Rosie’s cousin Leo to Calvary Cemetery in Queens, resting place for three million Catholic bodies sans souls, where Tony was mourned in ordered ranks by blood, organizational status, and incidental friendship.

The final processionary, performed by a blackness of elderly women versed in the ancient Italian grieving arts, inched toward Tony with moans and choral sighs to let drop red roses in the vicinity. The women fell onto the grass where they remained until removed. I melted in with the family.

“Hi, Rosemarie. I’m Mickey Lafferty. I’m sorry about your father.”

“I know. Thank you.” Her hand might have glanced off my forearm.

I wanted to ask if I could see her later, but the timing was so wrong, and I was unusually nervous. However, the Zuccarellis knew how Tony and I were, so Angelo said, “We’re going out to eat in the neighborhood. Come with us.”

I squeezed into a limo next to a weeping woman who did not stop. We went to Maniago’s, a family ristorante with great food and poorly painted murals of villages under cliffs on the lapping Mediterranean. I rehearsed what to say to Rosie, while making small talk with the family.

We exaggerated Tony stories. He shot a man in Sicily. He jilted a Roman countess. He worked on location for Fellini. I told them about his blackbirds, which did not make much of an impression. Rosie was contemplative.

The funeral party, if that can be said, was making way for dinner customers, when I got a few minutes alone with Rosemarie. She looked like a small movie star. Perhaps my right eyelid spasmed.

“So, how have things been for you and your mom?” I asked.

“I’m working at a clothing store in St. Louis, after some wasted years. Just bad choices. You know? Mom passed a few years ago.”

My social intelligence was shot. I grappled for things to say. I said, “I missed you.”

I waited for her to speak. When she didn’t, I made it worse.

“I said I missed you.”

“I heard you the first time. What am I supposed to say?”

“I don’t know; I’m not you. I looked for you on buses, in parks, among people crossing streets. I’d turn on a whim and you wouldn’t be there. In church, I felt you next to me, but you weren’t. My dates were somebody else.”

“That was my fault? I’m sorry. We were kids. I stopped being a kid a long time ago, Mickey. I tried not to think about Brooklyn. And I didn’t. There wasn’t much to remember.”

“I remember.”

“Not really.” She took the long view of me through a high, right eyelid.

“I’m sorry. You must be tired and in shock and here I’m pestering you. Look, let’s sit in the back. Catch up. I’ll walk you home.”

Mr. Maniago, sorry for her loss, bought us complimentary shots of anisette. Windows cracked open in my head with little Me’s sticking their heads out to apprehend what I was going to say or had said, or she might say or said already. I had no clue who said what, so I told her how Tony spelled “twolips” and how he thought flowers had souls people could smell. Her sketched eyeline pushed into her forehead. Up close, I could see her black beehive hairdo, as I hoped, was not of human origin.

She said something so softly, with perhaps a smile too tiny to notice. I pressed her hand to the tabletop. She thought I was angry.

“Stay in Brooklyn where people love you,” I said, “where you have family. You could be yourself here, where you come from. Please.”

“I already am myself.”

 She was right. She looked into another village mural to cast a cold shoulder. I had to admit, her dispositions and comebacks were deadly and she knew it, so I resorted to bullshit.

“Something happens when you’re thoughtful. Like now—a spirit opens. Your body goes still, but you would be thinking with your eyes. They’d move ever slightly. I know things about you. About us.”

“What?  What are you saying?”

She adjusted her bra strap through her blouse. I measured my odds being close to nil.

I said, “Your eyes. They’re adorable.”

I didn’t think her eyes in contemplation were that adorable. They gave her a medicated, injected look. There were lots of things that were adorable, just not necessarily that. Her stifled yawns with squinty cheeks and chickpea nose were adorable. Her as if stare was not. But that’s what she did, so that’s what I said.

She turned to send a perfectly performed, double-eyed twinkle through her flicked false lashes straight into me. It was 6 p.m. She had an early plane in the morning. We walked down a steep hill from Fourth Avenue to her uncle’s house, next to where she used to live. I grabbed some of her fingers to fiddle with. She had a child’s hand. Her high heels brought her face to my shoulders, not counting hair. But she was not a child. She was Rosemarie Zuccarelli, 30 May 1971, a woman complete, walking down Ninety-Second Street toward Gatling Place with Mickey Lafferty.

xxx

At the side door of her Uncle Angelo’s combo garage/basement, we kissed like the thirteen-year-olds we used to be. No probing tongues. No grinding into each other. I pulled away to see her face.Rosemarie looked surprised to find me looking down at her, so I closed my eyes to kiss her again, but she grabbed my tie, which hung dissolute from my collar like a donkey’s tail.

“Come. Tell me another lie,” she said and pulled me into an interior scene from an Antonioni film with intertwining rooms behind doors and walls on the garage level that smelled of sausage and gasoline. Her wig was off. Her hair was unruly, which I liked very much, and her feet were bare. We took a blind step.

I held what I could hold, a thigh, a hook of elbow, a clutch of hair. She grabbed my hand. We sensed our way into the darkness where we fell over ourselves, padded seats and settees, up and down stairways to nowhere. No retreats. No lies. She was not a woman you could prepare for. She was holding me when a thing came over us with deranged speed with no words for. She kept me tight to her through graveyards, mountain tops, and fields of stars until we broke through whatever barriers there could possibly be between two people.

Two hours later, I was again outside her door. Changed, yes, utterly. But also bound, tethered by inescapable, rudimentary laws I did not understand that now applied to me.

Instead of the safe course home, I walked up the hill, turned left at the market still wrapped in crime-scene tape, to find a corner at the bar in Mulcahy’s. The exchange of coin for beer was highly recommended by urban philosophers and barkeepers for psychological and metaphysical repair. The shrink got $50 for fifty minutes. Father Lynch got us to lie for nothing. Mr. Mulcahy got 25cents per.

Mr. Mulcahy needed to know how today went. He didn’t remember Rosemarie. Later, he leaned over for a closer pass, “Mick, take some time off. Nothing rash. Whatever yer thinkin’, you’ll think different in the morning.”

 He could fold a customer into a safe nook for the night. It was his business. The mornings-after were ours. After another couple of beers, I was half out the door when he said, “Listen, Mucker. I wouldn’t wring myself too tight over dreams. Take some time off for yourself.”

He meant it, or he wouldn’t have said it. I would be drafted in a few weeks if I didn’t land a teaching job, which was unlikely.

The next morning, I headed up the block to see was Vinnie up to lending me his car, when I was struck by something looking moony at me with a brazen little puss on the top step of Junior’s stoop.

Rosie missed her flight. She decided to live with her uncle’s family, next to the house she grew up, where people loved her, where she could be herself even though she already was.

We sat with the electrified eyes of birds looking at each other, thinking what to say, which didn’t happen. There was not a chance in a million

“Wanna go for a ride?” I asked.

Gerry Coleman

Image by Shirley Hirst from Pixabay. Multicoloured and varied flowers in port pink, white, red, geraniums, pansies etc and green and variagated leaves.