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  PRAISE FOR

  PINK SLIP

  “Rita Ciresi plumbs the Italian-American experience to reveal some home truths about every woman’s life. Wisecracking, warmhearted, blessed with perfect pitch, she’s the Sinatra of contemporary women’s fiction.”

  —Ellen Feldman, author of God Bless the Child

  “It’s refreshing to find a female narrator with an authentically lusty voice—someone who swears, talks back to tiresome relatives and doesn’t shy away from her own sexuality. It’s even more refreshing to find a heroine who can make a mean eggplant Parmesan yet disdains the humble domestic goals her old-world mother has set for her. Rita Ciresi has created just such a heroine in Pink Slip.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A wonderful read, a warm and romantic love story that is also sharp and funny.”

  —Library Journal

  “A captivating dispatch from the front lines of office politics and the back porches of Italian America. Rita Ciresi knows her turf.”

  —Suzanne Strempek Shea, author of Hoopi Shoopi Donna

  “[A] wisecracking romantic novel … thoughtful and lyrical.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “She has a great ear for the spoken language … wonderfully descriptive detail.”

  —Tampa Tribune-Times

  “Rita Ciresi’s dialogue is pitch-perfect, her characters so real that we ache as we laugh at and with them. Pink Slip is even better than Blue Italian, which was already a triumph.”

  —Lucy Ferriss, author of The Misconceiver

  “A very romantic comedy … light yet complex. Even in the laugh-out-loud sections it has real gravity. It’s an amazing performance, start to finish.”

  —Stewart O’Nan, author of A World Away

  Please turn the page for more extraordinary acclaim.…

  PRAISE FOR RITA CIRESI’S

  BLUE ITALIAN

  “Rita Ciresi’s beautifully written, bittersweet first novel examines love and marriage with unflinching honesty … resonates long after the book is closed.”

  —Elle

  “Biting humor … tactile prose … a vibrant tableau of marriage’s imperfections and redemptions.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “ENTERTAINING READING … There is real substance in this tragicomic story of two people with smart mouths and starved hearts.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Ms. Ciresi … gives us parental lunches and trousseau shopping … that make us laugh, cringe, and identify all at once.”

  —Elinor Lipman, The New York Times Book Review

  “Who is Rita Ciresi? And how has she kept me up half the night devouring this book? It is not enough to say this novel is real or captures the Italian-American experience or the spirit of a generation, all of which it does. This is a well-crafted, evocative tale that envelops the reader, taking us to another world, where we befriend Gary and Rosa, where we laugh and cry. And even after we close the book, we don’t forget them.”

  —Ken Auletta, author of The Highwaymen

  “Breezy, irreverent humor … unexpectedly moving … remarkably accomplished. Ciresi keeps the humor flowing while never shying away from the painful emotions, the fear and the regret, that intimacy brings.”

  —Booklist

  “SURPRISINGLY FUNNY, POWERFULLY SAD, AND SCRUPULOUSLY HONEST.”

  —Frederick Busch, author of Harry and Catherine

  Also by Rita Ciresi

  REMIND ME AGAIN WHY I MARRIED YOU

  SOMETIMES I DREAM IN ITALIAN

  BLUE ITALIAN

  MOTHER ROCKET

  A Delta Book

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Chapter One was published in a slightly different form in Quarterly West

  Copyright © 1999 by Rita Ciresi

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

  Delta® is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79681-3

  Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press

  v3.1

  for Celeste

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to thank the Collins C. Diboll Foundation, the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society, the Ragdale Foundation, the University of South Florida, and the Virginia Commission on the Arts for their generous financial support, and Kathleen Jayes and Geri Thoma for their suggestions on the manuscript.

  My deepest thanks to my husband, Jeff Lipkes, for his editorial advice and encouragement.

  O love, love, love!

  Love is like a dizziness;

  It winna let a poor body

  Gang about his biziness!

  —JAMES HOGG

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One: I Know You Are, But What Am I?

  Chapter Two: Deep-Six

  Chapter Three: The Story of My Abortion

  Chapter Four: There’s a Man in the Picture

  Chapter Five: All Business

  Chapter Six: That’s the Way I Like It

  Chapter Seven: Solid

  Chapter Eight: Lower and Lower

  Chapter Nine: A Thunderously Dumb Guy

  Chapter Ten: The Woman in the Ingres, The Woman in the Whistler

  Chapter Eleven: Then the Girls Could Rule the Sea

  Chapter Twelve: It’s Your Funeral

  Chapter Thirteen: That’s Your Real Name

  Chapter Fourteen: Hurts Is a Verb, Not a Possessive

  Chapter Fifteen: I Pray

  Chapter Sixteen: She’s Positive He’s Not

  Chapter Seventeen: Home for Christmas

  Chapter Eighteen: My Father’s House Has Mansions

  Chapter Nineteen: Somebunny Loves You

  Chapter Twenty: Red Rover, Red Rover, Why Don’t You Come Over?

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  I Know You Are, But What Am I?

  1985

  On my twenty-fifth birthday, my mother gave me a man.

  This was unusual. I hadn’t received a gift from Mama since my father had a massive coronary four years before. After Daddy’s death, Mama claimed I didn’t appreciate her last birthday gifts (the turquoise nylon briefs and the plastic Pagliacci shower cap), nor did I carry the tote bag she had ordered after sending in sixteen blue stickers off the Chiquita bananas—so that would be the end of any largesse from her social-security check, thank you very much.

  I started to protest, then thought better of it. “Fine by me,” I told Mama. Because the tote bag showed a dancing twelve-inch Carmen Miranda banana shaking a pair of maracas to this message: JUST PUT ONE IN YOUR MOUTH. I needed those kinds of gifts like I needed the kind of whopper crotch infection I got after wearing those polyester birthday briefs Mama surely had picked out of a Railroad Salvage Store bin labeled: CHOO-CHOO CHEAPO ASKS SHOPPERS—CAN YOU BEAT THIS PRICE? FIVE FOR A BUCK! Mama must have been having trouble with her bifocals that day, because not a single one of the five briefs was the right size. Either t
hat, or she didn’t like how skinny I was getting and hoped I would eat enough to fill out first a size six, then a size seven, and then three size eights.

  Twenty-five was a big birthday for me—if only to put twenty-four behind me. On the cusp of my quarter-of-a-century anniversary on earth, I found in my kitchen cabinet a monstrous rodent chewing himself blue in the face on a Brillo pad, causing me to bag Brooklyn and my grunt job in publishing and move out to the ’burbs—Ossining, to be exact, where I had landed an assistant-manager position in the Editorial division of Boorman Pharmaceuticals, whose corporate headquarters squatted like a behemoth battleship in the middle of the lush Hudson River Valley. The job—or rather, the seemingly hefty paycheck attached to it—permitted me to rent an apartment with a closet and a real bathroom sink. I bought my first car—a silver Toyota Corolla—and wondered, as I drove it back to Connecticut to show it off to my mother and sister, if I would get free samples of drugs.

  It was unusually hot for May, and my T-shirt was soaked through by the time I made it to New Haven. The only way I could afford the car was to have the dealer strip it of the power brakes, the power steering, the floor mats, the cassette player—and, unfortunately, the air-conditioning.

  “You want me to remove the engine too?” the salesman asked.

  “You can keep that in,” I said, as I signed on the bottom line. After he asked me, too pointedly, if I’d like to take a ride up to Hyde Park in his fully air-conditioned Celica, I told him, “Sorry, I need to stay home and clean out my vegetable crisper.” I honked my horn long and loud when I left the lot. Cocky men like that gave me the creeps—yet sometimes they had their uses. In my brief but wanton sexual career in the city, I prided myself on having whipped more than a few hopeless characters into datable shape—or at the very least I had pulled the plug on one sheepskin-lined water bed and trained its owner not to wear black shoes with tan pants, and vice versa. But the quest for a tolerable Friday-night escort was slow going. A girl could easily get discouraged. She also could get desperate. I posted the car salesman’s business card on my freezer door, underneath a magnet that said MONEY STINKS, BUT BOY DO I LOVE THE SMELL! just as a reminder of that.

  At home I found my older sister, Carol, parked on my mother’s red plaid couch. Why Carol ever had gotten married was beyond me. She moved only two blocks away and visited Mama every afternoon. Her husband’s name was Alfonso. Everyone called him Al. His middle name was Dante. Carol didn’t even think this was funny. Al Dante was the ultimate in guido: He used to work for our father’s cement business before Daddy died and the company went under. Al drove a gold Cutlass with a jacked-up rear. Al said, “Whazzadoin’ now?” whenever he got annoyed at Carol—which was practically every time she opened her mouth—and every Friday night he took his bowling bag down to the Ten Pin. Once Carol begged me to come along to watch, and I actually saw Al make the sign of the cross before he sent the big black ball barreling down the alley. “Fuggin’ A!” he hollered when the Holy Mother granted him a strike.

  But Al loved Carol, in a way no man yet had loved me. I knew it from the way he came up behind her and licked—like a kitten lapping at a bowl of milk—the back of her neck as she washed the dinner dishes. And Carol loved Al, in a way I had yet to love any man—I knew it from the way she squawked, “Get outta here,” and jumped so hard that dish soap flew like joyous Spumante bubbles over the faucet and dishwater dripped from the sink.

  Sometimes I envied what my sister and her husband had together: a closeness that allowed them to sit in silence after dinner, Al crushing walnuts with my father’s old pewter nutcracker and Carol using a silver dentistlike implement to pick out the meat, saving the particularly good-looking nuts to pop into Al’s mouth. Other times I thought that what Carol and Al had between them was nothing more than what my own parents had possessed: a beat-up car, a chipped front porch, and a worn shag carpet. Like my mother, Carol wore an apron every day. Like my father, Al never dressed up except to go to a wedding or funeral. On such occasions Al would not let Carol wear high heels, because then she would be taller than he was. “Why don’t you just tell Al to go blow?” I asked once, and Carol said, “Oh, for God’s sake, Lisa, until you get married yourself, you just won’t get it. You don’t get it.” Then she sighed as she bent over the creaking wicker laundry basket and sorted Al’s underwear into one pile and hers into another. His and hers. His and hers. I watched her, horrified. If that was marriage, I thought, those two could have it.

  The back door of my mother’s house usually was locked against murderers, burglars, and aunts who wanted to borrow (without asking) my mother’s prized no-stick lasagne pan. But the early advent of summer apparently had melted down Mama’s caution. I let myself in through the screen door.

  On the couch, Carol dropped her knitting needles and clutched the double skein of white yarn in her lap. “Lisa, you scared me. I lost count of my purls. Besides, you could have been a rapist!”

  “Why don’t you lock the door if you’re so scared of that?” I asked.

  “Because it’s ninety degrees outside!”

  “Tell me about it,” I said, wiping my face on my wet T-shirt. “How can you knit in this heat?”

  Carol resumed clacking her teal-green needles together. “I just got these new number nines,” she said. “And this great white yarn for half price—” Then she brayed up the stairs, “Ma. Maaaaa! The working girl is here!”

  There was a thud—my mother’s feet hitting the ground as she rolled out of bed from her afternoon nap—and then the dull sound of something being dragged along the bare wooden floor. My mother came downstairs the way things usually got done in my family, culo avanti—or in regular English, bass ackwards. On each step Mama bumped a long brown box that reminded me of the cardboard coffin my cousin Dodici and I used to fashion out of the container that held our five-foot artificial Christmas tree.

  Dodie and I were strange kids. We liked to play funeral.

  “What’s that?” Carol asked.

  “For the birthday girl,” Mama said. After making a real production out of dragging the box downstairs, Mama hoisted it up so easily I suspected there was nothing but tissue paper inside. She motioned me to sit down on the couch and put the box in front of my feet. Carol made annoyed clucking sounds as she gathered up her white yarn and looked so enviously at the box I could tell she hadn’t a clue about the contents. The sheer size of the box seemed to promise that whatever was inside would make up for all those past bad gifts and prove that Mama was a real mother.

  Then I remembered how the words real mother always were used as an insult in junior high.

  YOUR UNIQUE SECURITY PRODUCT HAS ARRIVED! the outside of the box announced in green letters. With the sewing scissors Carol reluctantly offered me, I slit the tape. When I turned down the flaps, a man mannequin—dressed in a white V-neck T-shirt—solemnly gazed back at me. He was naked from the waist down. On his head he wore a navy Yankees cap exactly like the one that had belonged to my father.

  “It’s a dead man,” Carol said. “In Daddy’s baseball cap!”

  “It’s not a real uomo,” Mama said. “Not a real man.”

  “I can tell that, Mother,” I said, as I checked his groin and found only two white buttons—big as cream doughnuts—that connected his limp cloth legs to his more substantial body.

  “You put him in the car,” Mama said. “Next to you. While you’re driving. So people don’t think you’re alone.”

  I reached into the box, uncertain how I should retrieve the man from his resting place—by the waist or the legs or the arms. Finally I grabbed his head—which was covered, beneath the Yankees cap, with very nonthreatening reddish hair—and pulled him into my lap, where I discovered (from the soft, lamenting fart sounds he made) that the top half of his body was fashioned from vinyl and full of hot air. He wore an ID tag around his neck that gave his name and dimensions: SECURITY MAN is a life-size simulated male who appears to be six feet tall and weigh 175 pounds. When
not watching over your well-being he easily deflates and stores in his own optional tote bag. I riffled through the tissue paper left in the box, but apparently the tote bag was a luxury Mama had not indulged in. A repair patch, however, was included.

  “You like him?” Mama asked.

  “I’ve never dated a redhead,” I said.

  “Or any man in a baseball cap,” Carol added.

  “Where’s his pants?” I asked.

  “Nobody sees him from the waist down if you’re driving,” Mama said.

  “What if I get pulled over by a cop?”

  “He’s supposed to scare away strangers,” Mama insisted.

  In one of our rare sisterly moments—usually inspired by our mutual amusement at Mama—Carol and I looked at one another and cracked up laughing. I thrust Security Man into her lap like a beanbag and then she tossed him back. He was the guy nobody wanted to dance with, the one you loathed to sit down next to at dinner, the one to whom you confided you were considering joining a convent, so Saturday night was—sorry, Charlie!—totally out of the question.

  Security Man looked up at me. He had a smooth face and impassive brown eyes, like one of the crash dummies used to test seat belts or demonstrate CPR. I had the insane urge to slit his lips with Carol’s scissors and thrust my juicy tongue into his dry mouth.

  After Carol asked Mama, “Why’d you waste your money on that useless piece of wuss?” my mother wrinkled up her nose, not because she disapproved of the word wuss, but because it was yet another Americanism she didn’t understand. Mama defended herself by saying she had heard—from Auntie Beppina—that in Ossining there was a maximum-security prison—with a Chinese name—right in my own backyard.

  “Sing Sing guys are all locked up,” I said.