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pot, making you food. Cook, add the e, ” Cookie said loudly and slowly. Cici hated when people spoke to her like she was a deaf child. And Cook and the e had a dialect she couldn’t understand, like the stronzo sicilianos .
    Cici has yet to dream in English, which Solomon says is the sign that you really know another language. These days she just wants to read the Italian magazines they get in Little Italy, keep up with the gossip about this prince and that princess. She hasn’t been in America long enough to understand their royalty, except of course that Marilyn Monroe had taken too many sleeping pills and died. Sol won’t let her walk around in the city by herself now she’s so far along so she’ll have to ask him to bring some home. “Speak to Gusmanov, he knows Italian,” Solomon said. Her husband was so sweet. He thought that because Gusmanov grew up with Italians he knew how to speak the language. Although he tried, he butchered it with his Russian accent and it made Cici’s ears hurt. She doesn’t even think Gusmanov is coming today. It’s too hot and she’s too fat and buuuuuuu, no lo so .
    Cook and the e must be cleaning the toilet because Cici hears the water going on and off, on and off. It’s too quiet. She’d wanted this house because the grounds were big and filled with fragrant lilac trees. She’d pictured their children playing and running in and out of the house all day. She likes a noisy house. It’s how she remembers life with her real papa; something always bubbling on the stove, fighting but also music—Papa’s piano, Mama’s opera on the Victrola, the ocean in the background. The complete opposite of her stepfather’s house with its dark, shuttered windows, everyone speaking in lowered voices because Mama was sick again and couldn’t be disturbed.
    Cici shuffles through a stack of papers on the counter; all bills go to Sol. Sol is good with money. Her mother taught her that it is déclassé to discuss how much money one does or does not have. She claimed to be a descendant of the Borgheses but neglected to tell her children why they moved like ants up and down the Liguria coast to stay one step ahead of the debt collector or why Papa spent his weekends betting on horses instead of riding them. Why she had to marry a devout, humorless man after Papa died, a man they all knew she couldn’t have loved.
    Beneath the bills, Cici finds pamphlets from St. Clare’s about the sacrament of baptism and the naming ceremony. There were only two Roman Catholic churches in Montclair, and Sol had left the decision up to her. Cici thought St. Clare’s was fine for their immediate purpose; while not marble, the baptismal font was clean and simple. Father Padua seemed kind and—best of all—young.
    Cici had had her fill of decrepit priests in Varese’s Chiesa Brunella. Just thinking about it evokes the smell of Father Dante’s onion breath seeping through the confessional grate. How she’d walk to church chaperoned by humpbacked old signoras who would stop at the bar for a shot of espresso chased by grappa and appear an inch taller going into Mass. The only thing Cici liked about Catholic school was the lives of the saints, because it included women and featured stigmata. Her favorite saint was Teresa of Ávila. People loved Teresa of Ávila so much that when she died, they stole her body parts. Sister Agatha said she knew someone who knew someone whose great-great-grandmother had touched Saint Teresa’s finger. Cici loved Saint Teresa because of the ecstasy of her visions and imagined that’s what sexual intercourse felt like. If it was a sin to have sex with a boy for pleasure, then why wasn’t it a sin to give yourself to Christ? Teresa of Ávila’s rapture certainly seemed to give her pleasure. Cici had these kinds of thoughts often and was certain something was wrong with her because of it. But she couldn’t help herself. When she was alone at night she’d remember the words of