The Domino Effect (17 page)

“You got the list your mother left?” Pop asked on our way to the bus stop.

“Yeah, Pop.”

“Read it to me.”

“We went over it in the house already.”

“Just read it, will ya?”

I read him the grocery list while we waited for the bus. He looked so funny with his olive skin, cleft chin, and bumped nose, his stocky upper body wrapped in a brown bomber jacket. A porkpie hat tilted back on his head, letting some brown curls fall from his widow’s peak. Blowing in his thick hands, he listened to me read the list.

“Baccala,”
he interrupted. “Why every year with the
baccala?
You know what a pain that stuff is, Pal?”

“I know,” I said, “but it’s tradition.”

Italians keep from meat on Christmas Eve, and make up for it by having every fish in the sea instead, or at least seven of them, including salted cod, or “baccala,” as the old-timers called it.

“Tradition?” Pop complained. “You gotta soak that stuff for three days to get the salt out. Then, after all that rigmarole, you know what you got? Cod. Why don’t we just have fish sticks? Call Gorton’s, we’ll start a new tradition.”

“OK, Pop. I’ll put it on the list.”

“Good boy,” he said.

The sun was out, but the cold air stung. The sky shivered like blue ice beyond the bare trees and telephone wires.

“You know,” I said. “We could have walked to the Flushing market by now.”

“Don’t start with that again,” he warned. “We buy our fish every year from Marrone & Sons. That’s a tradition we're not breaking. It’s important, and time for you to start coming along again. What’s it been, three years since you’ve been to the neighborhood?”

“Why can’t we just drive?” I asked. I could see our car in the small driveway of our large Tudor house.

“What, we’re too good for the bus now?” he asked, twitching his shoulders. “Besides, you can’t find a place to park over there anymore.”

“You could double-park while I run inside.”

“And let you have all the fun?”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll drive and you can sniff the fish with Mr. Marrone.”

“How many times I have to tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“The reason we go to the old neighborhood, on the bus, to buy fish from the guy who’s been selling it to us for 20 years.”

“I know, Pop,” I said, rolling my eyes. “It’s a tradition.”

“Hey,” he warned with a back of his hand to the top of my arm. “You might want to forget where you came from, but it’s important to remember. There’s something to that, no matter how you feel about the place now.”

The bus lurched down the block, jerked to a stop, then hissed as the doors folded open. Pop gestured, as always, for me to go first.

“I know, Pop,” I repeated, before climbing on board.

“You don’t know nuts,” he said to my back.

After wishing the driver Happy Holidays and dropping our fare in the box, Pop sat next to me and tapped his wedding ring on the back of the empty seat in front of us.

“Look,” he said turning to me. “I didn’t mean that. There’s a lot that you know, but there’s also a lot that you don’t know. You know?”

“Well said, Pop.”

“I’m not kidding, Pal. I worked with teenagers for a lot of years, and I can honestly say that the one thing you all have in common is a certain amount of ignorance.”

“What a nice thing to say to your son.”

“Hey, I didn’t make it up. It’s the truth. You want to know the worst part about it?”

“Not really.”

“The worst part is that none of you knows it. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Don’t worry. You’ll learn.”

“Can’t wait.” I said, with my eyes out the window.

“You, probably after the others,” he said, nudging me.

“Oh, now I get it,” I said, turning toward him. “The reason we go to the old neighborhood, on the bus, to get salty white fish from the same guy every year, is so you can have the opportunity to tell me what a dope I am.”

“This time,” he said, picking up his tapping routine. “Let’s not make it part of the tradition, though. Alright, Pal?”

We scored our bounty from the sea and walked the main avenue of our old neighborhood. Pop nodded or smiled at some of the people we passed on the street, stopping to talk with a few. We didn’t recognize most of the people, though, which was weird, because we used to know everybody. We walked past familiar buildings that didn’t seem to know us anymore. I could still feel it, though, that same concrete under my shoes, the asphalt in my veins.

The people were a little darker than us, and there seemed to be more of them. More cars, too. The metal garbage cans on some corners spilled over with trash. I heard music, and the only time you heard music before was when someone got married, or that time in ‘86 when the Mets won the World Series. Almost everybody spoke in Spanish. People were out on the street, shopping and mixing it up, just like we used to. I got sad thinking about the way things used to be. I missed my home.

My thoughts vanished, on the spot, when I saw these three girls coming down the sidewalk. They were about my age, and had dark hair and dark eyes and soft-brown skin. They wore down jackets over pleated Catholic school skirts and nylon socks up to their knees that were red from the cold. With locked arms, smiling and laughing, they came closer and closer. The one in the middle stared at me. She was beautiful in a friendly, exotic way. When they passed, she said something I couldn’t make out, but it must have been funny because all the three of them girls cracked up. She turned her head between her two friends and smiled back at me. I thought about chasing after my very own “Rosalita,” until Pop came back and pulled me along. At the end of the block, Pop went into a place to pick up lunch. I stayed outside the shop, across the street from the string of two-family A-frames, each with a little porch and patch of concrete inside a low iron fence. I looked at our old house.

I remembered running from our door, jumping down the steps and hopping the fence to join the pack of kids waiting for me. I remembered my mother on the porch, talking and laughing with the neighbors and the ladies in the window above the pastry shop across the street. I thought of all the hours in the alley beside our house, playing catch with Pop until it was too dark to see. I smiled, thinking Pop had it right — it is important to remember.

Next to the sandwich shop was an open door. It used to be an insurance office or something, but the sign was gone and someone inside worked on a ceiling panel. Across the room, four old guys sat around a card table slapping down dominoes. Music came from a radio. I couldn’t make out much because of the dark, but in the light of the doorway sat a little kid. He had some pieces from the game that he slowly set up. He balanced the first piece on its end. Then, not too far away, he lined up the second. Then, the third piece, he placed just right. He paused for a moment before knocking them all down: bop, bop, bop. He did it again and again, and I kept watching. After a few turns, something struck me. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.”

I realized, right then and there, that those pieces were like people, and if one falls down or stays up or doesn’t do anything at all, it affects somebody else, which affects somebody else, and so on, and there you have it. On and on. Good or bad or whatever, it was why Pop always said to do the right thing, because it goes down the line, just like the effect of dominoes falling. I started to think of all the things I had done or hadn’t done, and the effect of all those things, good or bad or whatever, when Pop poked his head out of the shop door.

“You coming in or what, Pal?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m coming.” And just like I used to, I followed my father, right in line: bop, bop.

People from all five boroughs came to Vito’s Latticini for sandwiches, homemade cheeses, sausages, you name it. Cured meats hung from the ceiling and the shelves were lined with fresh pastas and sauces and imports from Italy. Through the glass in back, you could see the guy making the cheese, stirring the steaming tub with a wooden paddle. The salty smell filled me with sweet memories. I had lived across the street all my life, and worked there, on and off, since the 4
^th
grade.

The Mozzarella Sisters, as Pop named them long ago, came from behind the counter to greet us with kisses and hugs and questions, always questions, about how well we’d been eating and behaving. I hadn’t seen them in years, and they went crazy over how much I’d grown, how handsome I’d become. With flour-dusted hands, they tugged and stabbed and barked at me, like Italian ladies do: tough like that, but always with a ton of heart. I missed the sisters. I missed my job and the smell of their shop.

After they got done with me, they moaned a little about the changing of the neighborhood but, to tell the truth, they didn’t seem all that much worse for the wear. They brought us some justmade mozzarella, which Pop asked them to put on top of the roast pork sandwiches he’d ordered. We took our bags, said our goodbyes, and rode home in silence on the bus.

Back at the house, the cod was left to soak, and the six other types of fish were all stored proper, before we spilled our bulging Vito’s bag on the kitchen table and got to work. Oh man, the taste of that roasted pork, cut thin and slathered with gravy and mushrooms over the mozzarella — I felt like rubbing it on my chest.

“You got all your college applications in?” Pop asked after a few sloppy bites.

“Yep,” I answered from a full mouth.

I’d gone to the guidance counselor after Thanksgiving. We’d talked about my grades and extra curricular activity, my other interests and whatnot, and I’d left there with a handful of college applications.

“Tell me the schools again?” Pop asked.

I went down the list for the umpteenth time since he’d cut the application checks.

“How come I didn’t hear St. John’s on that list?”

“I’m not going to St. John’s, Pop.”

“Why not? It’s a good school, and it’s right here near home. I went there, your mother went there, for two degrees, no less. They owe us.”

“Hey, Pop,” I said. “I didn’t have a bad time today, but that doesn’t mean I want to be around here again.”

“You wanna go back to school next week?”

“Yeah,” I choked.

“Then do yourself a favor and send off an application to St. John’s.”

“Whatever,” I said, dropping my sandwich to the plate.

“I’ll tell you another thing,” he said, wiping his hands. “I don’t care where you get in. I’m not sending you away again unless I think you’re ready.”

“What?” I asked, my head starting to spin.

“You heard me,” he said, taking a bite.

“You can’t do that!”

“Who are you talking to with that tone?” he asked, chewing slowly.

I cursed under my breath. Pop swallowed his food.

“Ascoltame,”
he told me to listen in Italian, tugging on my earlobe until I jerked away. “I lost the argument with your mother about sending you to sleep-away at this private school, and the results on that aren’t in yet, but come the end of this year, if I don’t think you’re ready to be away from home again, at college of all places, then you’re not going, simple as that.”

“What will I do?”

“You can do lots of things,” he shrugged. “Go to St. John’s or another school around here, get a job. There’s lots you can do. This is America.”

“Come on, Pop,” I begged. “You can’t do that.”

With his elbows on the table, he laced his thick fingers. “I don’t know what they’re telling you over at that school, but going away to college is a privilege, OK? In fact, going to college at all is a privilege. I had to do time in the service in order to go, and your mother had to wait until she was a grown woman. So if you think you’re going just because your parents can afford it and some school says they’ll take you, you’re way off the mark.”

My drowning dreams and burning intestines forced me to make a face.

“Make that face if you want,” Pop said, “but you have to earn the right to go to college, and I don’t care what the other kids are doing. That’s between them and their parents. What happens with you is between you and me and your mother.”

Another face wasn’t going to help me any, so I put my head on the table.