Begin Again: Short stories from the heart by Mary Campisi

Author:Mary Campisi [Campisi, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Mary Campisi
Published: 2012-12-15T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

The Death of Mary Alice Olivetti

Some say it was the Catholic Church that killed Mary Alice Olivetti. Others say it was her mother, Nicolena’s obsession with holy water and olive oil. And there were others still who blamed the rest of us, throwing out words like indifference and ridicule.

Me, I think it was a mix of all three, a trinity if you will; Church, mother, and us. I was Mary Alice Olivetti’s friend, her best friend, according to her. It wasn’t true, not for me, at least not in the beginning. I let her be my friend because she copied psychology notes for me while I did more important things like wrote my name along the margins of a black and white steno book, block style. And she saved me a place in the cafeteria line on pizza day, like it was an honor for her to be doing it. Of course, there were the pizzelles—vanilla because I didn’t like anise—thirty of them that she brought once a week to our lunch table to guarantee herself a seat.

Mary Alice believed us when we said Alex Delensen had a crush on her. Didn’t she know the captain of the football team would never look twice at a girl with a big fat braid who wore rosary beads around her neck and black elastic pants with white cotton shirts?

I don’t like to think too much about the early days when I thought she was just the new girl in the robin’s-egg-blue house with yellow trim whose parents spoke broken English and drove a beat-up Plymouth Fury.

I like to dwell on the after; after I went to her house that day to deliver a dozen freshly made cannoli because my mother said we were just as Italian and just as Catholic as the Olivetti’s even though we didn’t wind our hair in tight buns or hang a crucifix in every room.

“Do they really have a crucifix in every room?” I’d asked my mother as she arranged the cannoli on a Styrofoam tray layered with wax paper.

She looked up at me and raised a black brow, an Italian black brow. “Go deliver the cannoli,” she’d said. “Then you tell me.”

The Olivetti house was two blocks from ours, up a hill and around a bend on a patch of land surrounded by clumps of crabgrass and holy statues. There was one of the Virgin Mary tucked in the flower bed by the front door, hands extended, a stone visage of white purity, blessing, and welcome. Another was of Baby Jesus decked out in a scarlet robe and matching crown, two tiny fingers forming a peace sign. He was propped against the opening to a fence that led to the backyard and what looked like grape vines. The house was newly painted to robin’s-egg-blue, the trim a daffodil yellow, except for the screen door that hung at an odd angle, its off-white paint peeling around the edges.

I’d stood there, half holding my breath against the smell of garlic and burned grease filtering through the screen in a cloud of stale disgust.

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