Mary

Whenever one of her grandsons started dating a new girl Mary would sigh "I hope he doesn't take it too hard when it ends." And when her neighbor bragged that his daughter had been invited to study art in France she said "That will be nice if she can turn it into something." Her watery eyes drooped and her lips pursed, Mary had the perennial look of a graveside mourner. She wore clip on pearls in her dangling ears, she had never gotten them pierced, and her hair was done up in a sandy bun. Every joint in her hand was swollen with arthritis, and the last knuckles on her fingers were permanently crooked, she used them like a schoolmaster's wooden pointer. Mary always shook her head, frowned, and shrugged, and the young people would roll their eyes and laugh to each other "You know how grandma is."

She was a little Polish girl, with thick curly hair, in a pretty dress her matka had sewn with bone needles. Mary loved to sit on the sunny porch with her sisters, the licorice smell of basil perfuming the yard, and tin cans tied to strings to ward animals away from the bed of vegetables. Across the way was an old bent strega sitting in her wooden rocking chair, always in black lace. One by one Mary's sisters would go into the house, complaining of the hot sun and the summer doldrums, and when Mary was alone the old woman would wave her withered hand, and beckon Mary to her knee. "Parla?" she asked and Mary shook her curls. "I see you help your mother," her Italian accent was dripping, "that's very good. I think she could not string all her beans without you." The old woman dotted the sentence by touching Mary's nose. "My sons wont do the women's work, I always wanted a daughter to be my friend. Let's have an ice cream," she clapped her ancient, papery hands softly once, and Mary grinned. She went into the house for a moment and returned to stand next to Mary on the walk, a large black bag under her arm and a hat with a scrap of black veil. A hulking black Mercury pulled up and Mary recognized one of her three sons, who were all bald and wore undershirts, and never seemed to work. Merrily the two women continued their friendship for the breadth of the summer.

Mary had a sister she never knew, the only of her siblings born in Poland, taken by influenza when mother and father had newly arrived in this country. They had never had pictures made, so Mary's image of her ghostly older sister was a delicately knitted baby blanket. Mary left school during the depression to help work, picking up small jobs where she could until the WPA was launched. She rode the back of a pie truck and handed out lunches to the men working the roads, more than likely feeding the teenage boy who would grow up to be her husband. Her only brother was killed in the war, it would be the only time anyone in her family had ever been back to Poland. She married and worked in a factory, her wedding ring keeping the lecherous bosses at bay, but she still earned a swat every now and then, and was dismissed without warning from several jobs. The other girls had it rougher though, the girls that still had accents and didn't have husbands who might come to work with a length of pipe or a pistol. And after her children grew and left to have children of their own she fought off four cancers and a bypass between her husband and her, and then he finally retired.

The old lady took a lick of her ice cream cone and made a sign with her hand, twisted like the roots of a tree, and kissed Mary's forehead with it. "The moloik is everywhere, little girl. You'll see nonna is right one day." Mary's mother had been cross that the mob woman across the street had adopted her pretty daughter. It would come to an end, she swore, but today Mary could sneak out. "The nicest thing you can do for someone you love is worry for them, and maybe you keep the evil eye from seeing them. It will see you instead." Mary didn't understand what the old lady meant. It was the last days of August and the old lady would not see October, the evening sun was a marathon of orange and the grass like gold thread in the field before them, the buzzing of insects lulling into the cooling dark. Mary squeezed the old lady's leathery hand. "It's okay ragazza, things are hard for old people, but you're still young."