“Happy birthday, Jesus!” he says, and Connie’s heart swells with love and pride. Davy is smart. He is beautiful. Despite being conceived on that very night in that terrible motel in Seekonk, Davy is the very thing Connie has always wanted for herself: Davy is special.
The door finally opens, and with it comes a strong smell of fish. Tonight, Christmas Eve, is the festa dei sette pesci, the Feast of the Seven Fishes, a reminder to Connie of everything she tried to flee when she married Vincent and moved to Connecticut six years ago. The festa dei sette pesci screams immigrant, guinea, wop. The smell of fish and the dread at this step backward in her life make Connie’s stomach do a little flip.
Her sister Gloria stands at the open door wearing a sweater that makes her breasts look as pointy as ice-cream cones and a skirt that hugs her ass. Peeking out from behind that ass is Gloria’s daughter, Cammie, her hair in Shirley Temple ringlets and her dress a frilly white confection.
Cammie looks like she belongs on top of a cake, Connie thinks, even as she plasters a fake grin on her face and says, “Look at Cammie! So beautiful!” The girl, Connie decides, will have a hook nose like her father.
“Don’t just stand there like guests,” Gloria says, standing back to let them in.
Even then, as Davy goes inside, Vincent doesn’t move right away. He has his hands on Connie’s waist and he gives her the tiniest shove with his erection before releasing her. Like a teenager, he loves that thing. I’ve got a chubby, he whispers in her ear in bed at night. A woody. A Johnson. Little Vinny, he calls it. Little V.
Still grinning, Connie steps into the kitchen. The smells of fish and perfume and coffee percolating on the stove make her dizzy. All the faces looming toward her with their bright lipsticked lips flapping, their breath of cigarette smoke and anisette cookies, suffocate her.
The next thing Connie knows, she is going down hard onto the green-and-yellow linoleum squares, and someone—maybe her mother?—is shouting She’s fainting! Oh my God! And then she is down, flat, her head throbbing and spinning at the same time, the sharp ammonia smell of smelling salts burning her nose.
She opens her eyes and tries to make sense of what she sees: Her sister Gloria with those ridiculous tits, her skinny arched brows frowning. Her sister Angie with what Connie hopes is a red wig and not her own hair, sprayed into a strange stiff flip, her eyes lined in heavy black liner and a fake black beauty mark beside her very red lips. Her sister Anna, so pregnant she can hardly kneel without toppling over. Little Cammie, wide-eyed, banana curls bobbing. Her own Davy, his face scrunched up the way he does when he tries not to cry. The smelling salts have been jammed up her nose by her mother, who is kneeling beside her frowning, her faded flowered apron splattered with grease. On the other side, Vincent kneels beside her. Was he smiling? Was that asshole smiling?
Vincent looks up at everyone and announces, “I guess this confirms it. She’s knocked-up again.”
Immediately, everyone’s worry turns to squeals of happiness.
Connie watches their faces transform. Now they are smiling and their frowns are disappearing. Even her mother is smiling at her, stroking her cheek. She looks at Vincent, smug and proud, trying to decide whether he should be happy or not.
“What’s knocked-up, Mama?” Davy says in a breathy voice. “You mean knocked down? Like, you got knocked down to the floor?”
Connie opens her mouth to answer him, but instead of words what comes out is a loud, painful cry that sounds like the cry their cocker spaniel Ziti made when he got hit by a car last fall. Even after Connie is lifted to the green couch and covered in a hand-crocheted afghan; even after Connie’s mouth is long closed, she still hears her own awful cry, echoing.
FOR THE PREVIOUS five Christmases, since Connie married Vincent Palazzo, she stayed home in their small white Cape in Middletown, Connecticut. She did not make seven fishes on Christmas Eve; she made a rib roast and roasted potatoes and string beans amandine. On Christmas morning she served Vincent and Davy French toast and maple bacon. Her family did not eat in the kitchen, they ate in the dining room on the china she bought piece by piece with S & H Green Stamps that she dutifully pasted into a book, filling one after another so that she could get the matching gravy boat and teacups and salad plates—all creamy white with a border of tiny off-white raised flowers. All perfect.