disbelief: Oh Jesus Christ Almighty, Yoli!
The next weekend, the couple came again to take Fritzie back to their farm in Maine, where he was going to be a happy dog with so much room to romp. I went with my father when he drove the dog shit incinerator to the town dump and on the way home sat turned away from him while sobbing like a German war widow: Fritzie, Fritzie, oh Fritzie.
Jesus Christ Almighty, this: I’m lying on my back among the weeds and pebbles of the apron at the top of Sacco Road, gasping for breath, unable to draw any air, in a rising frenzy of panic and terror because I’m suffocating to death. My recall is hazy, but I do know that Gary Sacco and some of the others had caught me alone, insults, shoves, a burst of boy punches, clumsy and savage, a hard punch to my throat. When they saw me on my back gasping for air, they ran away. There were no houses there on that side of Sacco Road where it ran alongside the steep hill that the old house of the Sacco family matriarch, Grandma Enna, sat atop, though there were houses on the opposite side. Panic, harshly gasping, unable to draw any air, that’s what I most vividly remember, and that I was lying near a telephone pole, long slightly drooping strands of black wire high above me against the brilliantly azure sky. Soon enough my throat relaxed, opened, I gulped air, could breathe again. Then I must have gotten to my feet and walked home. How could I explain to my mother or Feli what had happened, describe the improbable punch that had caused my throat to close and how terrifying that had been, lying there unable to breathe. Whenever I go back to our town, usually by train, to spend some hours just walking around, I sometimes pass that way and see Grandma Enna’s house up there, looking like something out of an old New England horror story or movie, with its always-curtained windows, two skinny chimneys, sagging porch, in winter the snow-blanketed wide downward incline of the lawn, crows waddling across it, pecking for pine nuts from the tall pines separating the property from the old part of the cemetery where the jagged, slate gravestones from colonial and Revolutionary times are. Peter Lammi and I once found in that part of the cemetery the ripped apart, hollowed carcass of an owl devoured by crows, eyes gone, its blackened mouth or throat lining partly pulled out through its pried-open beak.
One day a small round stone, hurled without warning from the Saccos’ backyard in a missile arc over the Rizzitanos’ yard and into ours, undoubtedly meant for me, struck Lexi in the middle of her forehead and laid her out flat. Though she didn’t lose consciousness, the rock left a dark-blue welt. It wasn’t long after, at the start of fifth grade, that we moved to a split-level house with mostly Jews for neighbors on Wooded Hollow Road, just on the other side of the hill, with the town cemetery atop it, between the two neighborhoods.
Not even my mother had ever given me the slightest indication of remembering or ever even having known about that time when I was punched in the neck, yet years later I found out that Lexi knew all about it. She told a girlfriend of mine when we’d come from New York on a visit. They had a conversation that I wasn’t present for, just my sister and Camila. My sister was telling her how terribly I’d been bullied as a child and that in fact we’d had to move from our house because boys in our neighborhood had almost murdered me. They’d left me for dead, and I’d almost suffocated to death, she told Camila. You mean they strangled him? Camila asked. And Lexi said, No, but they hit him so hard in the neck his throat closed. Lexi said she’d witnessed it and that she’d run to my side to help me. I didn’t want to let on what a disagreeable surprise it was to learn that my sister knew about that incident and to find out now, as an adult, in this way from Camila. Lexi had never been a part of my memory of what had happened. It felt like a too-intimate intrusion for her to be telling Camila about it now. At least that’s what I decided later, when I tried to understand why it had so angered me. I wondered if that was a sort of trauma effect or if maybe it was the corrosive acid of humiliation that had wiped her and anyone else but those boys and myself from what I did remember. That memory should only belong to me, a terror and pain I couldn’t or didn’t want to share, especially not with someone who would later make such annoying use of it and who seemed to have a much clearer and more complete memory of what the episode had looked like, at least, than I did.
Almost murdered me? I scoffed. That’s nonsense. I had enemies, but I don’t remember anyone almost murdering me.
Well, that’s what Lexi told me, said Camila. It sounded like something out of Lord of the Flies. I hated that book when I was a girl, because I used to imagine it was one of my own brothers those boys murdered.
Camila was half-English half-Cuban, and she’d grown up “posh” in England, daughter of a Tory politician. Her parents were long divorced, but she and her three brothers were incredibly close with each other and with their mother and also with their sometimes difficult Pa.
I’ve never asked Lexi what she knows or remembers about that episode. I didn’t say a word to her about what she’d told Camila.
Lexi has blue-gray eyes and is pale and blondish, her hair the tint of rain-soaked straw. My mother used to love putting my sister’s hair, when she was a little girl, in Heidi braids and coils and dressing her in frilly white smocks, like the girls from German coffee plantation families she remembered from childhood. She attributed Lexi’s hair and complexion to her golden-haired Spanish rancher grandfather whom none of us had ever seen a picture of, though now I know that Mamita’s abuelo was as far from a golden-haired gachupín as could be. Aunt Hannah had been blonde, too, but I only knew her after she’d gone gray; she was older than my father. Mamita’s natural hair is orangish and curly, even kinky, though she’d been dyeing it black and straightening it, usually doing it herself at the kitchen sink, for as long as I’d been capable of noticing. Now that her hair is so sparse, she doesn’t straighten it anymore but dyes it a soft maroon with a slight orange tinge, a sort of cranberry-orange English marmalade color. In photographs I’ve seen of her when she’s young, most of them black and white, Mamita wears her hair like a forties movie star in thickly flowing waves over her shoulders.
Lexi was tall for her age, and as a little girl, when I was still in my infirm years, she was faster than me, could hit a rubber baseball harder and farther. She was a straight-A student, too, and played violin in a children’s orchestra in Boston. All of this gave her the air of a favored child, even if her high-strung nature and explosive temper already hinted at some of the difficulties she’d have later on. Our father encouraged Lexi’s athletic gifts but Mamita didn’t at all, endlessly cajoling that a girl should always let the boy win in any sports competition, even bowling, as I recall still from a candlepin bowling birthday party when Lexi beat everybody and afterward was made to feel terrible. Mamita was still a captive back then of certain Latin American prejudices that hadn’t changed since even before José Martí’s epoch: a well-brought-up girl should have delicate, even coquettish manners and be dependent on the protection of men. Why should she be physically strong, was she being made to carry stacks of firewood or sacks of onions on her back or to till mountainside corn milpas? Later, to her lasting remorse and guilt, Mamita realized how horribly mistaken she’d been and dedicated herself to supporting her daughter in every way she could, even if it was too late now for her to become the college and Olympic softball star she probably could have been. Around when I was finally beginning to develop muscles and becoming more athletic, Lexi began having weight problems that seemed less attributable to genetic inheritance than to emotional states; in better times, at least into her thirties, she regained her youthful trimness, had romances and all that. But then would come the more difficult times, the causes of which she and my mother always kept secret from me.
Those girls sitting back there are going on about Pabla again and I don’t know what else, their laughter rising to happy shrieks. Every Sunday morning throughout my childhood, Boomtown was on TV, with its opening routine of Rex Trailer, the Boston Wild West singing cowboy in the bunkhouse futilely trying to wake up his snoring Mexican sidekick, Pablo. Staged before a laughing and cheering live audience of New England children, the show even had a contest for TV audience members to write in suggesting new ways for Rex to try to get that lazy Mexican out of bed. Pablo was one of my nicknames too: Hey Pablo, wake the fuck up. In the kitchen at a house party, Fitzy flicking lit matches
