Authors: Nino Ricci
“You’ll go directly back to your room when your brother’s gone.”
In the rec room Elena and I sat in gloomy silence, Rita on the floor cross-legged and stiff-backed in front of the TV, closing us out.
“What’s your mother angry about?”
“I dunno, some plants Rita broke or something.”
“Does she get angry much?”
“I dunno. Not really. Sometimes.”
Rita turned up the volume of the TV. We sat silent in the noise, Rita’s back blocking our view.
“It’s too loud,” Elena said. “Mom’s gonna get angry.”
But Rita gave no sign of hearing her, continuing to stare into the screen as if we weren’t there, holding us in thrall even while she shut us out. For several minutes we sat silent in our places and she hardly moved; walled up like that in her wilfulness she seemed dangerous suddenly, seemed to have taken some hard malevolence into her like a changeling.
“I guess I better go,” I said finally.
Mrs. Amherst saw me out, still tense with the pressure of concealing and disclosing.
“Mr. Amherst’s just watered the lawn, you’ll want to stay off it on the way out.”
And before I’d stepped out the volume had already died on the TV downstairs, Rita’s shadow disappearing an instant later up the stairs toward her room and then her door closing with a hard controlled thud, ceding nothing.
When the fair came to town at the end of the summer I offered to take Rita and Elena to Children’s Day. They were dressed in blue jeans and Bee Gees T-shirts like uniforms when I came for them, seeming made small again in their girlish suspense at appearing in their public incarnations.
“This is all they’re allowed,” Mrs. Amherst said, handing me two five-dollar bills. “Don’t let them force any more out of you.”
But in the car Rita pulled quarters and dimes from her pockets, a few crumpled dollar bills, and began to sort through them ostentatiously.
“Where did that come from?”
“Just allowances and stuff.”
Canny, evasive.
“Well you’re not allowed to spend it.”
But she continued her silent counting, carefully folding the dollar bills, carefully slipping them back into her pocket.
At the fair I quickly grew bored in the noise and heat, the crowds of children, my embattled waiting while Rita and Elena made the rounds of the rides; I’d imagined some sort of sharing with them like a parent’s indulgent husbanding of possibility but was merely the half-forgotten chaperon, visibly out of place amidst the midway’s tinselly forced excitement. As a child I’d awaited the fair each year as I had the feast days in Italy, the din of it audible from our back field, its skyline of rides and lights seeming to turn the rest of the town into merely the fair’s dingy
outskirts; but then each year it had seemed to grow smaller and more tawdry, the island it formed like an illusion whose spell was broken once you’d sensed the edges of it, and it was hard to remember now in this onrush of children and noise what wonder had ever coloured it for me. Once I’d wandered alone into the barns beyond the midway where the competition animals were housed, the midway blare giving way to the murk of barn light and to straw-hushed animal sounds, and it was that image of the fair that most stuck in my memory now, as if I’d discovered then some older, truer fair still going like a spectre at the midway’s edge.
Rita and Elena met groups of friends as we went along, forming tentative congregations with them.
“You guys should try the Whirl-a-Wheel, it’s wild. We’re going to go on it again later.”
“I dunno, I think I’d throw up or something, it looks scary.”
But there was just this sidelong appraisal and then they moved on, this coming together and drawing apart. Rita would seem to need to impress herself on the others but then after some first boastful assault she’d lose interest suddenly and retreat into listless silence, attention slowly shifting away from her as from a threat.
“Well I guess we’d better go.”
Around three we joined the flow of the crowd as it moved toward the grandstand for the show. A helicopter sat discordant in the far corner of the oval the grandstand’s track formed, distracting like an irritation. I had seen it circling above the town during the course of the fair on its twenty-minute expeditions, though now its station seemed deserted.
“Dad said maybe he’ll let us ride in it if we come on Saturday night,” Rita said.
But from the furtive look Elena gave her it seemed she’d lied, had simply pulled the thought from thin air.
We threaded our way through the crowd into the bleachers, Rita leading. There seemed a kind of violence in the air, the shrill, amorphous energy of children. A stage had been set up across the track from the grandstand, its backdrop, propped up behind it like a false front, showing a yellow brick road winding toward a distant Emerald City, the image seeming to merge without division into the yellowing corn field that stretched out behind it beyond the edge of the fairground. In our seats Rita leaned back theatrically into Elena.
“There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”
A young woman sitting next to us with two small children, her thin knees exposed beneath the hem of her dress, smiled over at me at this as at another parent.
The show was a spoof of
The Wizard of Oz
, beginning with a small brass band’s slow, out-of-key rendition of “Over the Rainbow” and then taking twisted shape around the original, with a moustached magician in coattails and top hat named Professor Marvellous and a Dorothy-like character named Dotty in a skin-tight dress and high heels. My attention wandered, to the crowd, to the pale awkward knees of the woman beside us. The day seemed wrecked for me somehow by her smile, its simple acceptance of Rita when all day I’d felt only my irritation with her, my disowning of her though I could see now her tangled need. It seemed I had looked all along for these signs in her of some sort of rebellion but now that I had them would have preferred simply to see her whole and well and in place, not to feel this residual lingering of responsibility for her like an accusation. In a few days I would be gone, the whole of me focused now on this escape as on some last desperate hope; and
from all my years in Mersea it seemed I’d take away only this sourness in me, this sense that nothing that had ever happened there had been untainted or complete.
For a few years we’d come to the fair as a family, watching the shows together from the twilight hum of the grandstand and then dispersing into the midway, lingering sometimes near a booth where a barrel-chested hawker made outrageous bargains with the passing crowd to draw them in. Once my father had taken up the hawker’s offer to pay fifty-five dollars for a fifty-dollar bill, poising himself for the inevitable joke as he handed the bill over and then laughing louder than the rest when it came.
“Now I’m going to take
your
fifty-dollar bill,” the hawker said, slipping the bill into a pocket with a magician’s flourish, “and turn it into mine.”
Though true to his word he then peeled off fifty-five dollars for my father from a wad of bills in his hand.
“I used to see those same guys at the fairs in Trivento,” my father said when we’d moved on, seeming more knowing now than he had in his laughter. “Once they’ve got people taking their wallets out they can sell them anything.”
And I’d had an image of him then, young and unburdened and canny, his life all potential, visiting the fairs in the high wind-swept towns around Castilucci in some life I’d never known him in. It had seemed the first time that I’d ever envied him anything, holding inside him this other unencumbered past, his memories of this mountain freedom I’d imagined for him.
From the mass of calendars and forms and brochures my possible futures had been laid out for me in, I’d chosen a university in Toronto, Centennial. It sat on the outskirts of the city, the vast square of its campus hemmed in like an island by the sprawl of suburb that surrounded it, the long rows of highrise apartments, the strip malls and endless bungalows; though it shared with its surroundings a treeless brick-and-concrete newness, its outcrop of buildings seeming like some landscape of the future from a film or television show, a future where even the natural world had been stripped down and modernized, set out in its own careful symmetry like so much more concrete and steel. To the north, at Steeles Avenue, the city ended suddenly, the highrises on the south side of the road there walled up against the corn and wheat fields across from them as at a coast; and riding the bus along Steeles I’d get a sense what an arbitrary thing a city was, how imposed and artificial, though from the inside it gave the impression of a hard immutability and rightness, its stores
and streets and office towers seeming the very meaning and soul of the space they filled.
I’d chosen Centennial because it had offered a scholarship, and was new, and was in Toronto, though as it turned out the long trip downtown by bus and subway seemed to keep the city always at one remove, merely a distant place I visited from time to time; and I’d chosen it because I knew of no one else from Mersea who had, and going there seemed an escape from what I’d been, from what others had seen me to be. But in my first months there I felt as if I had stepped out suddenly into empty space: I had nothing, finally, that defined me, not even the dull routines that had made up my life in Mersea, what I’d thought of then as encumbrances, obstacles in the way of some freer, better self, but that seemed now all that had kept me from the brink of this emptiness I felt impelled into. Waking my first morning in residence to the clean, comfortable newness of my room, its seventh-storey view of the fields north of the campus, its privacy and self-containment, I felt a kind of awe at my sudden freedom, the whole day, my life, stretching before me to be filled as I wanted. But already at breakfast, sitting alone in the residence cafeteria, watching the other students sift into their groups and alliances, I felt the panic build in me at being thrown again into the strangeness of another beginning, at having nothing more to bring me through it finally than myself.
Classes started. I waited for the time when I might enter the university’s world, when my own life there might begin; but there seemed some rhythm I couldn’t quite catch, some crucial moment I’d missed when a decisive action or word could have brought me suddenly inside of things. Everything about the university gave the impression of a fixed but impenetrable order,
everywhere taken for granted and nowhere explained: people came and went, alone or in groups, purposeful, self-sufficient; in the lecture halls they whispered together, made notes, showed every sign of understanding and competence though the lectures were thick with names and references I knew nothing of. In the main complex’s large indoor square, groups of students formed daily around tables where people distributed pamphlets and flyers or in a small amphitheatre where musicians sometimes played or speakers held forth, the sense palpable there of what I’d imagined a university to be. Yet even these groups, continuing on in their places day after day without clear purpose or end, attracting every day the same crowds, the same long-haired young men in bandanas or pigtails, the same women in loose, flowered dresses or torn jeans, had an air of exclusion about them, of enclaves already complete and fully-formed.
It might have taken so little to step out of my isolation: in my residence, in my classes, other students spoke to me, were friendly, seemed willing to take for granted my normalcy. But somehow I couldn’t strike the right tone with people, felt I’d lost myself, could only impersonate, had to make up instant by instant who it might be acceptable for me to be; and the people who were friendly with me were exactly the ones I afterwards avoided, afraid they’d finally see into this falseness in me. Day by day the world seemed to narrow, its possibilities falling away, tapering down to the litany of my small failures, what I added up to, the true word that hadn’t come to me, the people I hadn’t met. I began to eat at odd hours or not at all, to keep to my room, sought out always the back corners of classrooms to be close to the safety of exits; for whole days at a stretch I spoke to no one, emerging from my room only for my two or three hours of class and my erratic meals. Yet the more I cut myself off the
more conspicuous I seemed, felt eyes burrowing into me always. Every venture outside my room seemed to carry a threat: if I heard laughter near me, or whispers or shouts, my body tensed instinctively against some expected humiliation.
I started sleeping incessantly, twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours a day. My lethargy seemed to feed on itself, irresistible, taking me over like a kind of possession: I sat for hours reading over and over again the same paragraph or page, stumbling through the thickness of words, their dreamy fading into gibberish; I began to nod off in the middle of lectures. For the first few weeks I attended every class, so frightened by my own ignorance, by what might be required of me, that the idea of skipping one never occurred to me; but then one morning I slept through my alarm and missed a lecture. I felt so panicked by what had happened that for the next few days I awoke with my heart pounding at the sound of my alarm. But my panic seemed exactly the fear that I might lose the one imperative that still gave some shape to my life, that my lethargy had understood now that there was no final authority to stand in its way and would slowly overwhelm me.
I began to think seriously of killing myself. It was my first thought now when I awoke every morning, my last before I slept; it was the shadow behind all my other thoughts during the day. I’d often thought of my suicide before, had a thousand times planned out its every detail, taking a strange solace then from the idea of it; but there was something different in me now, a sick sense of its inevitability. I didn’t will myself to think of it, merely found the idea present in my mind at the end of every train of thought, forcing itself on me with what seemed a clear and inescapable logic; I didn’t plan for it, only cast around each time the thought formed for the most immediate execution of it,
a passing car, the window in my room; I felt no pleasure in imagining what others might think of it, felt only the shame of it, wished instead that I might simply vanish into thin air like some character in a science-fiction film, all history silently shifting like water to efface every memory of me.