Emma Who Saved My Life Read Online Free Page A

stupid.”
    Tell me again, I said, how you met Emma.
    â€œI put all that in a letter to you —what were you doing with my letters?”
    Lisa NEVER wrote ANYTHING TO ANYBODY—pay no attention to her.
    â€œHow I met Emma?” Lisa paused and decided which rundown, dangerous-looking street to take. “I met her at a Susan-party. She’s staying with Susan—poor girl—until she moves in with us. Emma wanted to meet you first before she moved in, though, so make a good impression … we’ve passed this porno bookshop thing before haven’t we?”
    We found it after fifty wrong turns: BALDO’S PIZZA , in flashing pink neon. Inside there was a waiting area with green and white and red patterned floortiles, Italian flags, several posters of a national soccer team on the walls, postcards from awful places, and one-dollar bills glued to the cash register under a sheet of faded yellow tape. There was a sample pizza out on display that looked like some modern art conceptual-thing, all dried out, the tomato and cheese a surreal red and yellow, all sort of glazed over in grease.
    â€œYou think it looks bad,” said a woman behind the counter, “you oughta taste it.”
    And that was Emma Gennaro.
    She was covered in flour (one got the impression more flour lingered in the air than ever went into the pizza at Baldo’s), but I could still make out that she was about an inch taller than me—a tall girl, lean, angular, with long straight brown hair that got tossed back angrily a lot, or in disgust—a trademark gesture. I’m not good at describing people. Just think of a pretty Italian-American girl who is not an immediate knockout—not Sophia Loren—but in five minutes or so, after getting used to her, she’s quite striking, made very striking by her hand gestures and expressions that seem to take up all the space in the room. Give her ten minutes and you’d be convinced she was a beauty, but now that I think back I’m not so sure anymore—the photos could go either way. I’m not much help, am I?
    Gee, I haven’t described Lisa either. Let’s see … Lisa was the pretty girl in high school who was popular and Class Secretary, looked like she belonged in an Ivy League college recruitment catalogue, the girl in the stylish outfit—yes, she wore outfits—sitting by the river that reflected willows and rowers and swans; and she looked like the kind of girl who might be the only cool member in her sorority but dropped out of it once it got too cliquish and stupid but she might not mind your knowing that she got into it in the first place. You could see her as a woman in business, but you could take her camping too—she wasn’t conservative-looking, really, just clean and bright and dressed tastefully, just not her own tastes. Even when she had a punk phase (that’s later on) she looked stylish, nothing too outrageous or jarring. It doesn’t seem like someone who would want to be an artist, does it? She should own a bookstore or something.
    â€œWhat is this, the UN?” yelled a big man with hairy shoulders who stormed out of the back room in a U-necked t-shirt, he too covered in flour. “I pay you Emma to talk or to dish out pizza?”
    â€œYeah, you pay me next to nothing to dish out the worst pizza in town,” she said, waving a finger at him provocatively.
    â€œWhadya mean woise pizza?”
    â€œI mean when I wanna pizza I go down the street for some; that’s what I mean by the woise pizza.”
    When she wanted to, Emma could really lay on the Italian-American routine, the singing insults, the exaggerations and drama, the gestures. She was a quarter Italian and she told me the family history a few times, full of hard work and immigration and American Dream and bootstraps and fingers being worked to the bone. Gennaro is Neapolitan, but in the late 1800s her family moved north so