Rena

Bensonhurst, Brooklyn

Sunday, June 11, 2006

After Sunday morning Mass and her regular coffee date with her friend Jeanne at McDonald’s, Rena Ruggiero is back on her block, Bay Thirty-Fifth Street. So strange to be from a block, to feel at home on only your block while all the others, even the ones directly surrounding you, feel so foreign. Her whole life spent on this block. Growing up in the house, staying through her time at Brooklyn College, and then moving into the upstairs apartment with Vic when they got married. And when her parents died, taking over the whole place. It was big for three people. Even bigger for one. Sixty-eight years the house has been in her family, bought eight years before she was born.

She stands out front now, as she often does, and considers the house’s flaws. It needs new siding. That was a project Vic had been in the process of setting up before he was killed. Probably needs a new roof, too. The porch sags. Posts and railings need to be scraped and painted, a lot of the wood rotten. The windows are old. Too much cold seeps in. She could sell it – the Chinese are buying up houses in the neighborhood like crazy – but selling seems like such a hassle.

And the stoop. She still sees Vic slumped there, as he was on that awful day nine years before. She remembers the exact way the blood pooled on the steps. She looks hard enough, she can still see spots where it has browned the cement forever. Poor Vic. Probably watching the pigeons on the roof of the apartment building across the street, Zippo the landlord guiding his kit in formation with a big black flag. And then Little Sal approaching with his gun raised.

Rena had been inside at the stove, frying veal cutlets. She heard the shot, figured it for a car backfiring, maybe some dumb kids with an M-80. She didn’t come out until she heard screaming and sirens and tires screeching. Walking out of the kitchen, down the hallway, the way she remembers it, was all in slo-mo. She wasn’t thinking something had happened to Vic. He was just sitting there; he wasn’t off at work. The fear had always lingered in her, but it wasn’t there just then. They had a ballgame to listen to, cutlets to eat. Little Sal was long gone when she made it to Vic.

Rena remembers how she crouched over him in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, crying, holding her rosary. Vic, who was in a bad business but had a soft voice and thoughtful brown eyes. His associates called him Gentle Vic. He’d raked it in for the Brancaccios. A huge earner. What had gone wrong had nothing to do with his work, just a beef with a punk, a kid named Little Sal trying to make a name for himself by knocking off a made guy. Shot Vic as he sipped on espresso, squash flowers from Francesca up the block in a ziplock bag on the step next to him.

Everyone knows about Vic, what he did, how he died, but no one talks to her about it in specifics. No one asks her what it’s like to see your husband bleeding to death. Or what it’s like to hose dried blood off your front stoop after burying the only man you’ve ever loved. The Brancaccios took care of her after the fact, paid for the funeral, gave her some money, but no one comes around anymore. She was never very tight with any of the other wives.

Rena goes inside and turns off the alarm. The alarm was Vic’s idea, after some break-ins on the block back in the early nineties. He was gone a lot and wanted her to feel safe. She takes off her coat and puts on water for tea and then decides she doesn’t want tea and shuts the burner. The phone is right next to the stove, an old yellow rotary mounted to the wall. A picture of her parents is encased in the plastic center of the dial. They’re smiling. It’s their thirtieth-anniversary dinner. They’re younger in the picture than she is now.

Her friend Jeanne had to go and bring up Adrienne over coffee at McDonald’s. Adrienne is Rena’s daughter, who lives over in the Bronx. Rena hasn’t seen her since Vic’s funeral. Hasn’t seen her granddaughter, Lucia, either. Lucia’s fifteen now; she was six the last time Rena held her, in tears, standing in front of Vic’s casket.

Rena wasn’t happy when she found out – in the middle of everything else – all the details about Adrienne and Richie Schiavano, Vic’s right-hand man, and she let it be known. Turned out they’d been an on-again, off-again thing since Adrienne was in high school. A kid, that’s what Adrienne was when they started up. This all came out at the funeral. Rena was floored by the news. She couldn’t believe it had gone on behind her back, behind Vic’s back. She couldn’t believe that Richie would disrespect their family like that. She couldn’t believe that Adrienne was such a puttana. Sure, she had bigger things to worry about, but she channeled much of her anger toward Adrienne. A natural reaction. Still, Adrienne holds this grudge against her for speaking up about the relationship with Richie. Rena was just concerned with the order of things, that’s all, what’s right and not right in the eyes of God and everyone. She remains concerned.

But it goes back longer than that, too. Adrienne was always either embarrassed by her mother or hating her for something. Not right. Rena’s more than a little sick in her heart over all of it, especially Lucia being caught in the crosshairs. High school age now and she doesn’t even have a relationship with her grandma. Shame.

Rena picks up the phone and dials Adrienne. She’s written hundreds of letters over the years, tried calling thousands of times.

One ring. Adrienne picks up. Rena hasn’t heard her voice since the last time she tried calling a couple of months back. ‘Yeah?’ Adrienne says, sounding sleepy.

‘Adrienne? It’s Mommy.’

Click. Adrienne slamming the phone down without hesitation.

Rena hangs up and just stands there. She takes a few deep breaths. She’d prefer not to cry. She thinks about a horrible article from the Daily News she read the day before, about a man hacked to death with a machete on the D train. A machete. Thinking about it keeps the tears back. What kind of person thinks this way?

The doorbell rings. She wonders who it could be on a Sunday. Or any day, really. Maybe those Watchtower people. Or a real estate agent trying to get her to sell the house again. Sundays don’t really matter anymore. Not what they used to be. Like everything else.

She goes into the hallway and sees a bulky figure through the tattered curtain on the window in the door. ‘Who’s there?’ she calls out, refusing to get too close.

Sound of throat-clearing. A man. ‘It’s Enzio!’

She moves closer and pushes back the curtain to look outside. Her neighbor Enzio is standing there wearing a Members Only jacket, his hair slicked back, blowing his big nose with a white handkerchief. He’s holding flowers in his free hand – daisies, her favorite. This is no coincidence. Over coffee, Jeanne had been hounding her to get a boyfriend again, saying she was only sixty and far from dead. All the eligible bachelors in the neighborhood had come up. Enzio from the corner was one. Eighty, if he’s a day. He washes his beautiful old car with no shirt on in his driveway. He wears his shorts high, the button often undone over his belly. He calls her baby and honey and dollface when she passes his house. He’s got the skeeviest smile.

‘It’s Enzio,’ he says again, softer this time. He tucks his handkerchief into his pocket.

‘What do you want?’ Rena asks.

‘Just to talk.’

‘What’s with the flowers?’

‘Come on, open up, huh?’

She hesitates but makes a move toward the lock. She’s what, gonna be afraid of a sad old man like Enzio? All he does is wash that car and read the racing forms in a booth at Mamma Mia across the street. A widower. But a different kind of widower. His wife, Maria, is fifteen years gone. Long as Rena knew her, Maria was a shut-in, wore a housedress and watched TV all day, doped on meds. Whatever the problem was, Rena was pretty sure it was made up. The whole neighborhood knew that Enzio ran around on Maria. Could’ve been that Vic had a goomar or two over the years, but he kept it quiet if he did, showed Rena respect. Still, everyone forgave Enzio his indiscretions. A wife like that, gone in the head, someone who’d totally cashed in her chips – well, a man needed a little excitement. Rena had always heard the gossip and didn’t give it much thought. Disgraceful on his part, sure, but a wife had certain duties.

Enzio had a few out-in-the-open girlfriends over the years. Jody from the bank was one. Jody wasn’t her real name. She was Russian. Pretty. It didn’t last. Enzio was loaded but cheap. Jody found a guy who took her to Atlantic City every weekend and wasn’t afraid to spend. Now Enzio is after Rena. The world in all its strangeness. She pulls the door open.

Enzio pushes the flowers at her. ‘Daisies,’ he says. ‘Your favorite.’

She accepts them, but instead of hugging them to her chest, she lets them dangle from her closed fist. ‘You know that how?’

‘A little angel told me, dollface.’ He smiles his terrible smile. She feels like she’s never seen it this close before. His teeth are glommed up with food. His lips wormy. He’s missed spots shaving around his mouth.

‘Jeanne’s a pain in my ass sometimes.’

‘Your friend has your best interests in mind. She knows I’m a good guy, a...