Sometimes I Dream in Italian by Rita Ciresi

Author:Rita Ciresi [Ciresi, Rita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49113-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2000-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

Here they come—eccolè!—the Pockabookie Ladies! The factory whistle blew at 3:59 each afternoon, and the drivers dumb enough to come down the avenue at 4:00 had to stop their cars for the long file of ladies streaming out of the factory. The Pocka-bookies did not believe in crossing at the light. They cut across the avenue wherever it suited them, like a horde of water buffalo charging across a river. If you sat in one of the waiting cars—or followed behind the ladies on the street—you heard nothing but a babble of Sicilian, the squish of their flat, padded shoes, and the fat swacks of their hands, which they used to slap and poke and prod one another to drive home the point of their stories. The Pockabookies wore nude-colored knee-his that plastered the black hair on their legs against their skin, sleeveless paisley muumuus in lurid color combinations, and, always, black crocheted sweaters on top. Each had her own black leather purse to carry, courtesy of the factory. The ladies appreciated such largesse. Who were they, anyway, to expect decent treatment from their employers? Just plain old Pockabookies!

When Lina and I were young, we looked upon the Pockabookies with absolute dread. Never mind Michelangelo, the Medicis, Mona Lisa, and all the folks we someday would learn about during our college art-history classes. For us, being Italian meant being Pockabookie-issima. Horrors!

Lina and I wanted to look and act like Marilyn Monroe— before she killed herself, of course—with sultry bedroom eyes, lush big lips and tits, and a rear end that curved like the back end of a Studebaker. Marilyn had all-American looks, said the magazines. We read Life in the waiting room of the dentist's office, and we believed it.

After a short conference with some of her older girlfriends, Lina told me the way to avoid becoming a Pockabookie was to drink a lot of ginger ale, a beverage that in our house was considered highly American. Lucky for us Babbo worked for a soda distributor, and we could swill all the Dixon Park ginger ale that we wanted. Unable to figure out why we suddenly had lost our taste for orange soda and root beer, Babbo brought home case after case of ginger ale. Then, after another conference with her girlfriends, Lina broke the bad news. “Not only do you have to drink tons of ginger ale,” she said, “but you can't eat anything along with it.”

I squinched up my face. “Sounds like Lent,” I said.

“I think it's called a liquid diet.”

Lina and I thought about the cannoli and cornetti that Babbo brought home from the bakery, the spumoni we got whenever we visited our aunties, and the frosted cookies that we ate at Communion parties and wedding receptions, and decided the Pocka-bookie Lady Diet could vaffanculo for all we cared. We didn't have a scale anyway and were weighed only at the beginning of the school year in the nurse's office, where we also had to bend our

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