“Anisette,” she explained. “It’s good in coffee on cold days. Or in snow.”
“Snow?” he said, grinning at her.
“You collect freshly fallen snow and add coffee and anisette to it. You eat it with a spoon.”
“Crazy wop,” he said, chuckling.
Francie smudged the butt of the cigarette in the big green ashtray she kept outside. She took another sip of the anisette and looked at her lilacs in the moonlight. They hung in heavy clusters, like ripe things ready to be picked. Tomorrow she would bring some to her grandmother.
“I was there,” Mike said, just when she’d almost forgotten about him again. “France. And then Italy.”
Francie nodded. She didn’t care about Mike Macomber or his war stories. She hoped he wouldn’t tell her anything.
Mike lit another cigarette and handed it to her. This time she took it.
“I’m sorry about your husband,” Mike said.
“I hardly remember him anymore,” Francie said, and saying it out loud filled her with such sadness that she began to cry.
“No,” Mike said, spilling anisette as he jumped up. “It’s too painful to remember. That’s all.”
But Francie shook her head. She struggled for something particular about him, something to hold on to, something more than a cowlick or long legs or a scar so small it didn’t even matter.
Mike was shushing her. A woman crying made men nervous. Francie knew that. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“No, no,” Mike was saying. He said it like he was pleading for something.
All of the wives in Meadowbrook were fair-skinned, round-faced, flat-chested. They got their hair cut and dried and dyed and sprayed every Saturday. They had small waists cinched smaller with belts. They wore charm bracelets that tinkled when they moved. Francie had thought when she first saw them that they were exotic birds. But she was the exotic one, with her dark curls that could not be tamed, and her olive skin and her large breasts that came to two perfect points under her sweaters. Her hips were wide, her eyes were black, her nose was sharp with a small bump at the bridge. “You Eye-talians,” Elaine Macomber always said as a way of explanation for the way Francie looked or smelled or walked. “Why, look at you in that skirt!” Elaine would say in her hushed, nervous voice. “You Eye-talians sure have the hourglass figure, don’t you?”
In this moment, with an almost full moon and the intoxicating suffocating lilacs in bloom and the taste of licorice mingling with smoke and salty tears on her lips and Mike Macomber so blond and tall reaching to comfort her, Francie ached for her husband.
Later, alone in her bed, she would blame that ache for letting Elaine Macomber’s husband take her into his arms—all pointy, sharp elbows and small, tight muscles—and kissing her. His tongue was lazy and fat. His fingers long and slender. Long ago, before her little pale blue house here, before her husband, back when she was a girl called Francesca, Francie used to let boys kiss her all the time. She used to let them feel her up. She didn’t care. And she didn’t care now. Francie smiled into Mike’s kisses.
“Why are you smiling?” he whispered.
But how could she explain that letting him kiss her here in her backyard was somehow giving her a power that she had forgotten she’d had. It was like finding herself again. When they tumbled onto the grass, it was wet with dew. Francie felt it soaking her blouse and skirt. It was May, warm in the daytime but chilly at night. Francie shivered, and Mike mistook it for pleasure, for permission. She heard the sound of his zipper unzipping, let him reach under her skirt and pull down her panties, let him bunch up her skirt and put his thing inside. She had not done this with anyone except her husband; she had not done this since he died. It felt unfamiliar and oddly pleasant.
Mike whispered, “I’ve never done this with an Eye-talian.” He sounded out of control. “So different,” he murmured, and she almost laughed. She’d heard once that Orientals’ slits were horizontal instead of like everyone else’s. But were Italians different down there?
“So much hair,” Mike was saying. “So much.”
He threw his head back, teeth clenched, his face in the moonlight as pale as a ghost. The lights in all the houses on Mayflower Lane and Maplewood Street and Overhill Drive, all of them were off, the houses dark, the husbands snoring softly beside their wives.