I watched Rachel as she continued down the aisle to her assigned pew. She kneeled deeply before she slid along the wooden bench and made a very precise Sign of the Cross. Only a couple years older than Cody, but little Rachel had such dignity. I sighed, too loudly, because now Antoinetta elbowed me and glared. But I didn’t care. Not only was my poor brother being deprived of having a family that was not broken, but he was deprived of being a Catholic. Right then I wished I could pick him up and hug him tight. But all I could do was sigh again and have Antoinetta glare again and elbow me even harder.
Antoinetta had put on makeup: globby blue on her eyelids and two circles of blush on her cheeks. She had lipstick on her lips and dots of it on her front teeth. She tried to pull her hair into a chignon, but already strands had fallen loose, and her eyebrows looked even thicker and more like caterpillars with her hair off her face. Antoinetta always looked like a mess, even when she wasn’t trying so hard to look good. She had two runs in one leg of her stockings and her skirt had twisted so that the zipper, which should have been on one side, was in the front. It was probably her sister’s skirt, a hand-me-down, along with the mismatched jacket. Both were dark green, but different fabrics and shades. Her disheveled look made me love her even more.
I, on the other hand, had purposely dressed plain, in a sleeveless cotton dress with a cardigan to match. Still, Antoinetta’s grandmother had frowned at me and muttered something in Italian, and Aunt Eleanor had tried to put lipstick on me, a scary shade of red. But I was only allowed to wear lip gloss, not lipstick, at least until I was thirteen. When I pointed out that I had lip gloss on, they all stared at my mouth and shook their heads. No matter how hard I tried, I would never fit into the Calabro family. But I didn’t really care. Being around them was enough, standing in the kitchen on Sunday mornings while Mama Angie fried sausage and Aunt Clara and Aunt Fanny smoked cigarettes and pressed the tines of forks into dough to make gnocchi.
The church bells started to ring and Antoinetta yanked on my sweater, pulling me down to the kneeler. Content, holy, saintlike, I knelt.
Antoinetta had told me that Aunt Eleanor thought she was better than everybody. That’s why she was having Rachel’s First Communion party at Wright’s Chicken Farm instead of at Mama Angie’s, like everybody else always did.
“She’s a big show-off,” Antoinetta had said. But then she added, “I don’t care. I’d rather go to Wright’s Farm, wouldn’t you?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what it is.”
Antoinetta had given one of her really big laughs, the kind that sounded like a donkey hee-hawing. “You’ve never eaten at Wright’s Farm?” she finally managed to say, before she started laughing all over again. “Where does your family go for special?”
“If my mother just doesn’t feel like cooking we either go to Minerva’s for pizza or Hot Pockets for falafels. If it’s Cody’s special night we go to China Inn for pupu platters. If it’s my special night I don’t care where we eat as long as we go to Pastiche for dessert, and I always get Key lime pie. And my mother makes us go to Al Forno to celebrate her special things, but we have to go at five and sit in the bar area so we don’t bother the serious diners.”
Antoinetta shook her head. “Well,” she said, “you don’t know what you’re missing. Do you get the ziti at Al Forno? Big platters of it?”
“No.”
“Just wait,” Antoinetta had said.
Now we were inside Mr. Calabro’s big Oldsmobile on our way to Wright’s Chicken Farm. He was going to wait in the car while we all went inside and celebrated Rachel’s First Communion. He wouldn’t let that big show-off Aunt Eleanor pay for his meal, and also, Antoinetta had explained as we left the church, he didn’t like parties very much since her mother died.
Antoinetta was talking about Johnny Depp; she had seen the movie Pirates of the Caribbean forty-seven times. But I wasn’t listening. I’d already explained to Antoinetta that I thought Johnny Depp looked like a girl. Still, I let her keep talking about his girly face because I knew that eventually she would get around to something Catholic to talk about—she always did.
Until then, I was happy to think about all those little girls dressed like brides, how solemnly they’d knelt at the altar to receive the Communion wafer. You couldn’t chew it, Antoinetta had explained. That would be like chewing Jesus’s body up. You just had to let it dissolve on your tongue.
“Who’s your patron saint?” Antoinetta asked all of a sudden, done with her Johnny rant.
I smiled. Boy, did I have Antoinetta figured out. “Maybe Saint Agatha?” I said.
Antoinetta looked horrified. “You don’t want her,” she said. “She’s for breast cancer. That’s too creepy.”
“Who’s yours?” I asked her.
“Saint Teresa. The Little Flower.”
From the front seat, Antoinetta’s father snorted.
“Pop hates her because she’s French,” Antoinetta explained. “But I don’t care. She was so beautiful and young. All three of her sisters were nuns.” Then she added, “She died of tuberculosis.”
“Like Bernadette!” I said. “Maybe I should choose Bernadette as my patron saint?”