Copyright © 2016 Louisa Ermelino
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ermelino, Louisa, author.
Malafemmena: stories / Louisa Ermelino.
First edition. | Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, [2016]
LCCN 2015037229 | ISBN 9781941411308
BISAC: FICTION / Cultural Heritage.
LCC PS3555.R55 A6 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037229
Cover design and interior by Kristen Radtke.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
For the next ones: Lulu, Conrad, Nick, and Joe
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Where It Belongs
Sister-in-Law
Mother Love
Fish Heads
Marguerite
Six and Five
James Dean and Me
Malafemmena
Louise Ciarelli
The Ménage
The Baby
Death Becomes Her
A Smuggling Case
The Cellphone You Have Called
The Child in the Sun
Sudder Street
Acknowledgments
About the Author
WHERE IT BELONGS
When the baby was born, the mother asked the midwife to take the afterbirth outside.
“I can’t,” Alfonsina whispered. “You got a girl. Don’t you want her to stay home?”
The mother didn’t. Armando was somewhere in the streets, already drunk, angry that he’d made a buttonhole.
“Take it outside,” the mother said. “This is America.”
“I can’t,” Alfonsina said. “Men go out of the house. No one wants a man who stays home, a ricchione, under his mother’s skirts. You know that. A woman belongs in the house,” she told the mother. “Let me put it down the toilet.”
“Take it,” the mother said again, “and dig a hole.”
Alfonsina looked out the window at the lines of laundry.
“Don’t ask me to do this,” she said. “I’m too old now. I can’t dig a hole so deep the dogs don’t find it.”
The mother leaned forward. “Take the money from the jar in the kitchen and get someone to help you. Pay them to dig a place and don’t say anything.”
“But if someone sees?” Alfonsina said. “Everybody knows you got a girl. And Armando? What about Armando?”
Alfonsina pulled a handkerchief from under the sleeve of her dress and twisted it in her fist. The baby cried and the mother turned away.
“Take her,” Alfonsina said. “Take your baby and forget this. You got a girl. Girls are always with you. You’ll get more babies. You’ll get sons.”
The mother would not look. She would not take the baby. She would not be persuaded.
“Trouble,” Alfonsina said. “You make trouble with this thing, I can tell you.”
She went to the kitchen to find the jar. It was behind the tins of flour on the shelf covered in yellow oilcloth.
Alfonsina put the afterbirth in a rag and wrapped it in newspaper. She tied the package with a string. The things people want in America, she thought.
Downstairs in the yard, Alfonsina remembered the baby had no name, and she walked back up the stairs. The mother was sitting at the kitchen table. The sweater over her shoulder had no buttons. She was drinking wine.
“The baby has no name,” Alfonsina said.
“Take some wine,” the mother said, going to the shelf to get a glass.
“And the baby’s name?” Alfonsina said.
“When I go to the priest . . .”
“No,” said Alfonsina. “I need it for the legal paper. This is America.”
The mother poured the wine. “I don’t know.”
Alfonsina shook her head. “I come another time, but you don’t wait too long. I need it for the paper.”
She finished the wine and got up to go. “Don’t forget,” she said. “You tell Armando no if he tries to bother you. You just had a baby. You tell him Alfonsina says he can’t bother you.”
“He won’t listen,” the mother said.
“Ah,” said Alfonsina. “If it was Donna Vecchio said it, he would listen. They all listen to Donna Vecchio. She makes it fall off with her magic when they don’t listen. You should have called Donna Vecchio for your baby.”
Alfonsina opened the door. She was already in the hall when the mother touched her arm. The mother pointed to the package wrapped in newspaper.
“You swear to me, Alfonsina,” she said.
“Yes, yes, I swear. Rest now or the milk won’t come. And then where will you be? You and your mixed-up baby?”
When Alfonsina had gone, the mother picked up the baby. The baby was bound in strips of bedsheet, beginning under the arms and pulled tightly to the toes, where Alfonsina had tied a knot.
“You have to do this,” she had told the mother, “to make the legs grow straight.”
But now the mother
