The Patron Saint of Ugly Read online

  (Miss Ferrari! Just a sentence or two for the eleven o’clock news!)

  They’re using bullhorns now?

  (Garnet Ferrari! Is it true you can cure shingles?)

  (And conjunctivitis?)

  (She can-a! I see it with-a my own eyes!)

  (Nonna! What are you doing down there? Don’t talk to them! On second thought, talk to them! She’s the real healer, people. It’s not me!)

  (It’s a-no true! She is the descendant of Santa Garnet del Vulcano. My granddaughter. Mine! Just look at-a her face!)

  This is ridiculous. All I want is my Ding Dongs, and now—

  (Pop! Pop! Pop!)

  —shit! The light bulbs in the lamps just blew, all of them. I have to fumble around in the dark. Ow! Fucking humidor. CAN YOU STILL HEAR ME? I’M JUST . . . LOOKING IN THE CLOSET . . . FOR THE BOX OF BULBS I KEEP IN EVERY ROOM. JUST HAVE TO—OW! FUCKING HUMIDOR! Okay. Hang on a sec. There. Much better. I am so tired of burned-out light bulbs. I go through two dozen bulbs a month. I know, I know, impossible for you, maybe, but not for me.

  Padre, I guess now’s the time to tell you something, but please don’t take it as a mark of sainthood. Though it’s admittedly weird, it’s not under my control, and it certainly hasn’t healed anyone. It’s yet more evidence that somewhere a jettatura is zapping a Garnet voodoo doll with jumper cables.

  My initial run-in with electricity began after that First Communion when I stuffed under the bed not only my veil but all the miracle-worker lore that went with it. I couldn’t heal Pippa Fabrini; I couldn’t cure myself; I couldn’t even heat up a stinking piece of steak. Whenever Nonna or Dee Dee or some other hopeful child tried to resurrect the legend, I’d plug my fingers in my ears and run away screaming. I lodged my supposed powers deep behind my pancreas and hoped that everyone would just forget about that made-up chapter of my life. Still, I couldn’t deny that there had been healings, and that’s when I realized that Nonna had been beside me for every successful cure. The next time I saw her, she was shelling peas on her front-porch swing.

  I sat beside her and whispered, “Are you the real healer?” It felt blasphemous to challenge the fable she had concocted just for me.

  “No!” Nonna’s body quivered so violently that several peas spilled from the bowl, rolled across the slanted porch, and bounced down the front steps. “Why you say such a thing! You are the healer. No deny this-a gift or bad things-a will come!” She crossed herself three times and I caught movement next door: Celeste Xaviero crossing herself at her kitchen window too.

  I knew better than to confront Nonna again, so from then on I watched from a distance whenever she hugged an ailing Saint Brigid girl or smooched some hill boy’s scraped elbow or squeezed a napkin around her nicked finger. She didn’t heal those kids or herself, but I knew she somehow fit into the miracle puzzle, a mystery I haven’t solved but that I’m hoping you will.

  I continued to wear my Saint Garnet necklace, however, because I couldn’t shake the Old Religion belief that bad things would happen if I wasn’t protected, especially since someone continued to fiddle with my geography while I slept, atolls emerging, coastlines retracting. Plus I still loved the idea of Jesus lulling Himself to sleep every night with tufts of my hair clenched in His hands.

  When I was eight I sat on a stool in the kitchen archway clutching that necklace. I was watching Dad prepare to paint the living room, dragging furniture to the center of the carpet to drape with a paint-splattered canvas.

  Though I was sitting right there, another splattered mass, Dad hollered, “Nicky!”

  My brother was in his room memorizing Webster’s letter-Q entries. Later I would rifle through his notebooks to see what sentences he had crafted to practice vocabulary. Garnet is a quidnunc who better stop snooping or she’ll suffer quid pro quo while she is quiescent. My brother liked polysyllabic words, but I think he was also searching for the term to describe what was secretly happening to him that made him cower behind chairs and prattle factoids.

  “Nicky!” Dad hollered again.

  “What!”

  “Get my flathead screwdriver!”

  Nicky thumped down the hall, squeezed by me—“Look out”—and went downstairs to the garage. Soon he edged past me again—“Will you move!”—and handed Dad the tool. Nicky was about to dart back to his room when Dad said, “Wait a minute, son. I want to show you something.”

  Nicky rolled his eyes as Dad unscrewed the wall plates covering the electrical outlets above the baseboard and stacked them one by one in Nicky’s palm. My brother eyed them as if they were a deck of turds.

  “Set them on the kitchen table,” Dad said. “Wait! Here are the screws.” Dad was trying desperately to begin Nicky’s apprenticeship as a jack-of-all-trades. My brother was a reluctant pupil. He slopped the rectangles on the table and they fanned out like playing cards, screws scrolling figure eights across the Formica before clinking onto the linoleum. I slid off my stool to gather them up, to show Dad who was the more attentive student. But when I looked for Dad’s approving gaze, he was hunkered on the floor, his back to me, Nicky crouched by his side, both staring at a spot on the wall.

  “Understand?” Dad said at the end of his private homily.

  “Yeah. Can I go?”

  Dad looked as if he just couldn’t understand how the fruit of his loins could be so uninterested in home repair. “Yes.”

  Nicky went to his room as Dad began edging masking tape around the windows.

  I was about to go remeasure Pluto on the solar system on my wrist. I always rooted for Pluto, that tiniest of planets, farthest from the sun and often overshadowed by its siblings.

  Dad halted my retreat. “Garnet, go get my radio.”

  “Okay!” I ran to the basement, unplugged the radio, and brought it back up, the cord dragging behind me all the way to the living room. Dad was gone, but this was my chance to show him that I was in tune with his needs. I would plug it in and turn the dial until I recognized the downhearted sighs of Billie Holiday or Sarah Vaughan. I looked for an outlet and there it was, that naked box without a plate, wires twisted up inside. The hole Dad and Nicky were bent over not long before, Dad trying to impart his secrets about the power of electricity.

  It was mesmerizing, those snaky wires coated in a web of frayed fabric, copper wires poking through here and there. I wanted to know the mystery behind those wires that enticed Dad to dismantle and reassemble lamps. There was power here, running through the walls, and I caught a hint of Dad’s passion to maintain the inner workings of this house. His fascination with plumbing; his dutiful crack plastering. He was an attendant, an altar boy to a priest. I was kneeling before a portal to that private world of studs and insulation that few ever saw. I wanted a glimpse of the mystery, and that’s why I jammed my finger into the wall socket that day.

  I didn’t see the mystery, but I felt it. A bzzzzzz that shot through my finger-hand-arm. I shuddered for what felt like hours but was only seconds until I pulled my finger out and ended the torture. I fell back on my bum, stunned, looking at my finger, which amazingly looked none the worse for the injury. I didn’t cry as I stared at that exposed outlet with a new reverence. There was danger there. That’s what Dad was imparting to Nicky just minutes before. I felt a second jolt that came with the question, Why hadn’t Dad warned me?

  That night another mystery surfaced. As I sat down for supper, Nicky reinforced Buttholia with an aggressive punch as retaliation for my Q snooping. Usually I suffered his blows in silence, but this time as I stewed, the bulbs in the wagon-wheel ceiling light began to flicker, and the socket Mom’s mixer was plugged into went kablooey. Dad rushed to the fuse box, but nothing was amiss, so he blamed it on an external power surge.

  Hours later while I was brushing my teeth, Nicky burst in without knocking and muscled me out the door, my mouth full of toothpaste glub. “I hab to spit,” I garbled, pummeling the locked door.

  “Swallow it, spaz.”

  Froth spilled from m
y mouth and splattered my new cowgirl pajamas. I growled and suddenly the slice of light beneath the door vanished as Nicky bawled, “Hey!”

  Four months later my inner current sparked again. One Saturday before Christmas, Mom and I were in the kitchen squeezing out Spritz cookies. “You are such a good helper, Garnet.” She kissed the top of my head. “You are my best-best, perfect-perfect girl.” As I decorated angels and stars I felt someone watching and discovered Nicky peeping in from the hall. He wore the exact same expression I must have worn the Palm Sunday I saw my father beam over him in the Saint Brigid narthex.

  Hours later I found Nicky sitting behind a wingback describing the parts of the Colt .45, because Uncle Dom, Aunt Betty, and Cousin Ray-Ray were on their way over for supper.

  I wedged in beside him, something I’d never attempted before, and for some reason he let me. I took a deep breath. “You know she loves you.”

  He snorted, then pressed his forehead into the chair back. “How do you know?”

  I didn’t have any answer except the obvious one. “Because you’re so beautiful.”

  Nicky cringed, as if being pretty wasn’t enough, or maybe it was too much, especially for a boy. He opened his mouth, but car doors slammed outside, and the color drained from his face.

  Uncle Dom barged in without knocking. “When are you going to move out of this dump? If Marina were my wife I wouldn’t lock her up in this mole hole.” He handed off his hat and coat to Betty, and then he and Dad sat at the kitchen table to conduct the business that always occurred before these meals. Uncle Dom pulled out the passbook for the college-savings account he’d set up for my brother. It was Grandpa Ferrari’s directive, since “There’s-a no way Angelo could afford it, and this boy has brains. Real brains!”

  Dad swallowed his pride at these sessions, which wasn’t easy with Mom watching her son’s future being secured by a man who wasn’t his father. For once Uncle Dom wasn’t braggarty, and that night as Dad again mumbled his appreciation, Dom patted Dad’s shoulder, saying, “It’s okay, little brother. I’m happy to do it,” though I noticed he was looking at Mom.

  Afterward he pulled out the novels he’d brought for her. Soon Mom and Uncle Dom dove into a heady discussion, leaving Dad to mix drinks and Betty to apply lipstick.

  Betty was not stupid; she could talk carburetors and expressed strong opinions about Chairman Mao and the recent death of Pius XII (Nonna was inconsolable—as devastated as Betty would be in a few months when Buddy Holly died), but she was not the intellectual equal of Mom, who had that one Wellesley year tucked under her belt.

  Aunt Betty sat at the table, Nicky and I beside her; she tapped a Lucky Strike out of the pack and then waited for someone, my father, as it turned out, to light it. She and Dad traded chitchat, though both of them were more interested in their spouses engrossed in a discourse that might as well have been in Urdu. I had seen these blather-fests, but until that night I’d never noticed the look in the left-out spouses’ eyes. Dad watched Mom, not only her lips, which he hadn’t sampled in months, but her hands. It was as if someone had zapped her with five hundred volts. Her fingers jabbed Dom’s shoulder as she argued about why Lolita was pubescent male-fantasy fluff. Uncle Dom was enraged but in an overcharged-battery kind of way.

  That night in the kitchen I understood that Mom and Uncle Dom were flirting. As smarmy and offensive as Dom could be, he offered Mom cerebral stimulation that my father could not, especially since my public spanking, after which Dad stood barely five feet. That meant he could easily fit on the army cot he’d set up in the basement, where he slept more and more often, not with winemaking paraphernalia but with his beloved saw.

  Dad poured the equivalent of a bucket of cold water on them. “Dom, did you bring the capocollo?”

  Uncle Dom barked, “Ray-Ray! Did you bring in the capocollo?”

  It’s not that I’d forgotten about Ray-Ray; it’s just that he always hovered in shadows around adults, a slag heap of quietude.

  When Dom’s voice boomed, I leaned back in my chair and looked at Ray-Ray over by the front door, cringing. He had forgotten his duty, but before Uncle Dom could rail further, Ray-Ray went outside to retrieve the meat.

  Capocollo. Head and butt. The most disgusting Italian concoction in history. Though I have no idea what goes into it, Nicky and I made uneducated guesses: pig brains and slick intestines, snooty snout drool and hiney holes. I never let that stuff touch my lips, but as soon as Ray-Ray reappeared, Dad grabbed it and arranged the chapel-veil-thin slices on a tray already laden with eye-stinging cheese. Dad centered the platter on the table and everyone gathered around it, including Ray-Ray; he squeezed his chair between me and Nicky, who started naming Civil War battles.

  Adult conversation turned to politics, specifically the conflicts over Vietnam that had begun tiptoeing into our news. I squirmed with boredom, since that particular land sliver had not even distinguished itself on the Indochinese peninsula on my right hip.

  Mom served dry pot roast, and Ray-Ray hacked at it with his knife, his elbows ramming into my shoulder. He used these tactics to take potshots at Nicky and me when we were in front of our parents. Once they were out of sight his strategies became overt. The previous time he’d visited, Mom sent Nicky and me down to O’Grady’s for a loaf of bread. Of course Ray-Ray had to come. We started our descent, Nicky and I shoulder to shoulder to create a sparse phalanx of two.

  “God, you all live in a dump,” Ray-Ray had said, shoplifted words that had no sting. He picked up a stick and waved it in our faces, trying to get us to flinch. We did not flinch, which irritated him, and soon he swatted the backs of our legs, our butts. Then he managed to poke the stick between Nicky’s knees, grab both ends, and yank up as hard as he could, lifting Nicky a foot off the ground. Nicky screamed and when Ray-Ray let go, Nicky collapsed on a sewer grate and curled into a fetal ball, hands covering his crotch, but he managed to sputter, “King Tutankhamen became pharaoh when he was only nine years old!”

  Ray-Ray stood over him, laughing. “That’ll show you who’s boss.” I had the feeling he’d filched those words too. Then he reached his hand toward Nicky. “I’m just messing with ya.” Nicky looked as confused as I was, but he let Ray-Ray help him up. Ray-Ray draped his arm over Nicky’s shoulder and suddenly they were the phalanx of two trudging down the hill, leaving me the tagalong little sister.

  Now it was December and Ray-Ray was back at our table mauling Mom’s pot roast, ramming his elbows into my side. “Quit. Humming!” After supper Nicky sprinted down the hall to his books. Ray-Ray rolled out of his seat to follow and I brought up the rear, but as soon as Ray-Ray entered Nicky’s room he slammed the door in my face. “Beat it, stain-ass!”

  I went to my room as dishes were piled in the sink to make room for the poker game that always followed these meals.

  In the morning I found cigarette butts floating in scotch glasses; poker chips in the French onion dip. Nicky and I usually scoured the detritus for leftover coins from the ante, and today I saw there were plenty. Nicky was still asleep, so I padded to his room, eased open his door, and saw him swaddled mummy-like in his blanket.

  “Nicky,” I whispered.

  No response.

  “Nicky!”

  “A scorpion’s venom paralyzes its predators!”

  “There’s over two dollars in change in the kitchen.”

  “Get the hell out!”

  I backed away, stung.

  Half an hour later I was counting loot at the table when Nicky finally emerged, blanket wrapped around him like a toga. I thought he was aiming for a cereal bowl, but he opened the medicine cabinet, pulled down the Alka-Seltzer, filled a glass with water, plopped in two tablets, and watched them fizz.

  “Too much capocollo?”

  If Nicky heard me, he didn’t let on. I wondered if Ray-Ray had smuggled Uncle Dom’s scotch into Nicky’s room last night.

  Mom emerged to make coffee, and Dad shuffled up from the basement, hair mussed, wea
ring the same clothes he had had on the previous night. He glanced at the curled, dried-up edges of capocollo and stifled a gag.

  “Why do they always have to stay so late?” Mom scraped stiff pot roast and gelatinous gravy into an empty milk carton.

  “You didn’t seem to mind last night. Have another scotch, Dommy.”

  “I was just playing my role. Isn’t that why you married me?”

  I leaned forward because I really wanted to hear the answer to that. Of course there was no answer, because Dad didn’t know how to fight.

  Mom jabbed him again. “Then let’s talk about you and—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  You and who? I wanted to press.

  Dad poured himself coffee and went back to his army cot, where he moaned and farted and burped for the rest of the day.

  Later that night Annette Funicello came calling. It wasn’t Beach Party Annette but Maureen Pasquali, who looked so much like my favorite Mouseketeer with her inky hair and perky disposition. This Annette lived next door with her daughter, Mary Ellen, a four-year-old with black ringlets and dimples for knuckles. Jake, Annette’s husband, was a traveling salesman who sold prosthetic limbs. Rumor had it that fake arms and legs dangled from the rafters in his garage, which was windowless, so confirmation was difficult.

  Annette had officially skipped into our lives a couple of years before. I was on the sofa fretting over South Africa. Once the lightest country on my thigh, overnight it had turned as dark as the protective chestnuts Nonna kept on her windowsills. I was rubbing an ankh over it as a safeguard against whoever was toying with me when someone rapped on the door. “Jettatura!” I yelled, certain that it was some old crone coming to appraise her handiwork. I froze, but the pummeling persisted, and Dad yelled from the basement: “Someone answer that!” I summoned the courage and when I opened the door, there stood Annette, eyes bouncing around my landmasses as if I were a pinball game. She swallowed her alarm along with her gum. “Is your daddy home?”