Free Worn Masks by Phyllis Carito Page B

grandfather,
long deceased. They told her they tried to
reconnect with her mother, Teresa, af ter he was gone. They called her Maria
Graziella . She still shivered at the name.
    Mary Grace even started playing the piano again in Aunt Maggie’s living
room, remembering how it was to sit there and play “On Top of Old Smokey,” and
how easily it came back to her as her fingers played on the keys. It comforted
her again. All this uncertainty suddenly felt like it was leading somewhere,
like she was close to understanding something about her own life, by
understanding her mother’s life.
    Then an unexpected letter arrived, from Giuseppe, written by
Elena. She had gone to visit him and as he dictated, she wrote, “I am happy, as
so we all are, to know you are well, we had worried for you.”
    Mary Grace lingered over those words, wondering what they meant,
that they worried for her? She was doodling on a pad by her bed, thinking—her
mother was one of eight siblings. She was doodling the number eight. She thought
about the precision of compensatory movements in figure skating, the continuum
line that curves and crosses forming 8.
    She fell asleep to the motion of the figure eight, and she saw the
salt timer on the kitchen stove, thrown at her by her mother, the eight
breaking apart–her mother had split the
family. She awoke confused. Had she fall en to sleep–or was she
remembering—her mother had spilled the salt, but that wasn’t what she just
heard in her mind–her mother had split the family. Why? Why had her mother been
so angry with her? Mary Grace only knew that she had cleaned the salt from the
floor, and then brought a salt timer from one of her childhood games and left
it in the kitchen for her mother.
    It seemed everyone tread softly around Teresa,
ev eryone
tried to appease her. Maybe Teresa was more like her father than she would want
to know. And Mary Grace was getting obsessed with the fear she was like her
mother.
    This was a restless night for Mary Grace. So many people, and
names, and stories crashing together, like waves pounding the shore with the
unexpected undertow ready to take you down at any moment.

 
    Aunt Elena
    Chapter 20
     
    ELENA WAS A beautiful woman with long salt-and-pepper hair,
intense light brown eyes, and a large mouth that filled her thin face out. Mary
Grace saw that Elena was the sister of Teresa. She saw her mother in the shape of the face, and the mouth, but the eyes were
op posites. Her mother’s dull, Elena’s sparkling with smile in every
photograph.
    Elena wrote more about Giuseppe, now the only living full sibling
of her mother. More about the visit to America he took to see his beloved
Teresa, and how as a boy he clung to his sister, Teresa, when their mother
died, and when Christina first came into the family. He struggled accepting
Christina as Momma. The first time Giuseppe
spoke badly of Christina, crying for his sis ter, Papa beat him, but
Christina eased his wounds with cool compresses, and promised him she would
help him keep close with Teresa.  
    But Teresa was angry with her papa, and when she could she left
for America. Christina arranged it through their cugina Rosalie
Giordano, daughter of Giovanni’s brother, to send Teresa away. “They only meant
to help her,” Elena wrote.
    Rosalie kept connected to Teresa with her letters, even after she
married into the Maschere family. It was against Papa’s will. Mary Grace
wondered how much her mother had answered the letters? She felt uncer tain. When she had the translations done of those
let ters, each time Rosalie questions how is America, tell us about the bambina ?
    In Elena’s letter she apologized for her sister, Teresa, and that
she had caused the family turmoil, and yet they loved her and always wanted to
reconnect with her. Unfortunately, Rosalie had passed away and they had no
evidence of letters sent back to her from Teresa. So, maybe Aunt Maggie was
right, that her mother didn’t write back to