play bingo with her mother every Saturday. She told me. What is that, her sixth baby now?”
“Fifth, Mimoo. Stop it.” Gina rubbed her eyes. “How does she do it?”
“Clearly you haven’t taught Verity your foolproof methods of family planning,” Mimoo said. “Someone should tell her that human beings in many ways are like vegetables: quality and not quantity is what counts.”
Gina smiled, leaning down again to kiss her mother. “I learned that well,” she said. “No one can accuse me of disastrous overbreeding.”
“Mia figlia, no one can accuse you of any breeding at all.”
The smile gone from her face, Gina stepped away to the door.
“Tell them to keep it down,” Mimoo said, clutching her rosary beads. “Some of us have to get up in the morning.”
Four
HARRY WAS TRYING TO sleep, but she wasn’t having any of it.
“Don’t give me this tired business,” she whispered. “You weren’t too tired for revolutionary blather.”
He put his hand over her mouth. “It was just blather. I’m exhausted.” He kissed her. “Tomorrow we’ll talk. As long as it’s not your usual Christmas sermon.”
“Which is …”
He mimicked her. “Harry, when oh when are you going to make amends with your family?”
“What a good question.”
“I’m sleeping. I can’t hear a word you’re saying. I’m dreaming you’re quiet.”
She shook him.
He groaned.
“Shh,” she said. “Or Mimoo will think we’re up to no good.”
“If only,” said Harry, his fingers pressing into her.
“First we talk, then we’ll see about other things.” They were conjoined under the covers of their small bed. It was cold. They pressed against each other to stay warm.
“I won’t be awake for the other things.”
But something was signaling to Gina that he might be.
“Why aren’t you nicer to Arturo?” Harry murmured into her neck. “Angela feels deeply wronged that you and Mimoo aren’t more friendly to him.”
“I’m friendly.” But it was true her mother was intractable when it came to Arturo. As if she saw black ravens above his head.
“American polite. Not Italian friendly.”
“I’m trying to be more American and less Italian in all my ways.”
His hands were over her body, under her nightgown, his mouth finding her mouth. “Please don’t. Anything but that. Be Italian, I beg you.”
“Italian then in all ways,” she murmured back. “Not just in this one way you love.”
“I’ll take the baby with the bathwater.” The blankets came off slightly as he clung to her, his mouth on her bare shoulders, the nightgown pulled away. She squirmed away from his mouth, she was hypersensitive, and what to say about that? Nothing really, except …
“Speaking of babies … um, listen … I wouldn’t mind a little baby, Harry.”
“What?”
“You mentioned babies.”
“I didn’t mention babies. I mentioned a metaphor.”
“I was thinking of an actual baby.”
“Since when?”
She didn’t want to confess that for a long time she had been counting out her days, crossing them off her womb’s relentless calendar. “For a little while now.”
“I thought we agreed no. We both said no.”
“We did agree this,” she said into the pillow.
He had been lying on top of her back. Now he climbed off. “Well, then.”
“Well, then nothing. I changed my mind. That’s the prerogative of being a woman.”
Harry sat up. He was perplexed in expression and body. Gina had to suppress an affectionate laugh. “How can that be?” he asked. “Every other week you’re distributing illicit pamphlets about some reproductive freedom thing or other. Just this morning I saw in your bag an article from Lucifer the Lightbearer.”
“Okay …” she drew out an answer. “Reproductive freedom also means having a baby, does it not?”
“Not according to your pamphlets. Have you read them?”
She didn’t want to admit she had stopped reading them. “I don’t know what to tell you. I want a baby.”
“So sudden?”
“We’re married six years. That seems sudden to you?”
“It doesn’t seem un-sudden,” Harry said. “Besides, you expressly told me no babies. Remember Chicago?”
“Yes, I remember Chicago. Our few brief days of rainy honeymoon bliss.” The only honeymoon they’d had, she wanted to add, but didn’t. “I was twenty! You can’t imagine that at twenty and still in college I would not want a child?”
“I thought it spoke to a larger state of your independent character.”
“It spoke to me being twenty and in college.”
“And going to hear Emma Goldman sermonize every week? Did you not hear her say babies are slavery?”
“Like I pay attention. She also says God is slavery. And marriage is slavery. And work is slavery. We must choose carefully what to agree with.”
“Oh goodness, but is the bloom off the rose!” Harry half-feigned shock. “Quite frightening. Is this what’s ahead for me, too?”
“No, I’m still fond of you. Do you want me to show you how fond?”
“Kill me if I ever say no.”
He took from her some sweet, not so quiet love, and afterward in the dark, in bed, held her close, caressed her face, her body, and softly whispered to her, as confounded as before. “I simply don’t understand your precipitous change of heart.”
“Yes, it’s like falling off a cliff,” she whispered, tired herself, relaxed, sated, happy, and yet still needing to say what
