“Huh,” Mama Angie said, and she put the asparagus in the refrigerator.
I brought my mother and Cody into the kitchen and introduced them to all the aunts and uncles, and to Antoinetta’s father, and to Antoinetta herself. She was wearing a yellow ruffly dress. Antoinetta dressed pretty badly, but I didn’t care. She went to Catholic school and wore a blue plaid jumper or a skirt with a white blouse, a navy cardigan, and either navy kneesocks or tights every day. She didn’t have to think about clothes. She could use her brain cells to think about religion, about saints and things.
Cody was with the little kids. Mama Angie had made him a little loaf of sweetbread, like she did for her own grandchildren, in the shape of a cross. Smack in the middle was a boiled egg. One of the aunts—Carla? Fanny? I still couldn’t keep them straight—was showing my mother the special Easter breakfast foods: the homemade cheese and the frittata, which was like an omelette, and the pastera, which was a rice pie.
“This is so interesting,” my mother was saying. “Did you know I have a cooking column? And my project now is ethnic food.”
“Yeah? Who do you write that for? Good Housekeeping?”
“No—”
“Ladies’ Home Journal?”
“No. It’s a magazine called Family.”
“I never heard of it,” the aunt said, and went back to layering a lasagna.
Mostly, during breakfast, I was miserable. My mother kept embarrassing me. It was like she was incapable of doing or saying anything right these days. Who cared about her stupid column? Worst of all, she didn’t even realize how she was coming across.
Now she was asking Aunt Mary how they made the pastera. “We don’t tell strangers our recipes,” Aunt Mary said coldly. I couldn’t believe what was happening.
Then she went over to Antoinetta’s father and asked him stupid questions about being a barber, and when he answered them she gushed, “How interesting!”
She even tried to explain Unitarianism to two of the uncles.
“You got the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. You understanding what I am saying?” Uncle Al said.
“Well, yes,” my mother said. “But—”
“There is no but,” he said. “That’s what you got.”
Then, Mama Angie, all four foot ten of her, climbed onto the kitchen table. She took a bottle of holy water from her apron pocket and sprayed it over all our heads, saying something in Italian.
Still on the table, she called to me, “You staying for lunch? We got lasagna.”
I felt so proud, being singled out like that by Mama Angie, but my mother had to open her big mouth. “We couldn’t possibly eat one more thing. But thank you.”
Antoinetta pulled me into the hallway while my mother went around shaking everyone’s hand like she had just gotten a new magazine assignment.
“I had the most incredible idea,” Antoinetta said. “Wouldn’t it be great if my father fell in love with your mother?”
I almost laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.
“What’s wrong with my father?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just that what would he ever see in my mother?”
Antoinetta looked at me, shocked. “But she’s so beautiful,” she said.
I watched my mother coming toward us, holding Cody’s hand in one hand and the dish with the asparagus in the other. No one had even tried it.
“She is?” I said, seeing nothing but a person who messed up everything she touched.
In the car on the way home Mom said, “How do you know this girl?”
“Church,” I said.
“What church?”
I shrugged.
Then Cody, who had eaten his entire miniature loaf of bread, pizza, two slices of pastera, canned pineapple, and ham, said he was carsick.
“It was a mistake to let you eat so much strange food,” my mother, the expert on ethnic cuisine, said, swerving into the breakdown lane.
She took Cody out of the car and stood way over near the scrub that grew by the road. I watched them, Cody’s face with its greenish cast, my mother in her silly business suit.
She saw me looking and waved like an idiot.
“We’re okay!” she shouted.
“No, we’re not,” I said to myself.
Chapter Six
BETRAYALS