Free An Italian Wife by Ann Hood Page A

hands to be set free; grasping his hot cock; then waiting, not coming yet, not moving, nothing but being still; only then did he get to Eva Peretsky.
    NO ONE COUL D UNDERSTAND why a man like Carmine Rimaldi, a man who had everything, would leave home for Coney Island. Here, in this small village of Italian immigrants in the middle of Rhode Island, no one saw what Carmine saw—that beyond this place lay opportunity. To Carmine, that opportunity was waiting for him in Coney Island. A person, any person, could go to Coney Island and make more money than this entire village could imagine. A person could find shops to open, products to sell, men looking for partners, investments to be made. Coney Island was ocean and beach and glittering lights, and all of it was calling to Carmine Rimaldi.
    This was in the summer of 1918. He was about to turn eighteen years old and had just gotten engaged to Anna Zito, arguably the most beautiful girl in the neighborhood. Anna was fifteen, so small that Carmine could lift her one-handed like a barbell, and easily move her up and down, up and down, in the air, Anna screaming the whole time for him to stop. But he knew this thrilled her, just as he knew that when he and Angelo went swimming, the cousins Carla and Anna sitting on a blanket on the stones by the quarry, peeling apples and pears or making sandwiches of mozzarella and tomatoes, she liked how he came out of the water, sleek and wet and cold, and wrapped his arms around her, making her shiver and scream. He had seen her tracing the damp outlines his hands made on her waist and smiling.
    Anna Zito, Carmine learned, was a girl who said no when she meant yes; who said stop when she meant go. Maybe all girls were like this. Carmine wasn’t sure. He asked Angelo if Carla meant yes when she told him no, but Angelo laughed. “Carla says yes and she means it,” he said. “I ask her if I can touch her breasts and she says yes and then she takes my hands and places them, one hand on each breast, and tells me to pinch.” Carla’s breasts were famously large. Even in a bra with bones and stays, her breasts swayed and rose magnificently.
    More than once, Anna had caught Carmine sneaking glances at Carla’s breasts, and swatted him and pouted. But they were breasts that demanded attention. The nipples, Angelo had confided to Carmine, were pink. They had both assumed, for reasons neither could explain, that nipples were brown. “And,” Angelo had continued, “a big pink circle surrounds the nipples that pucker when you touch them.” Whenever Carmine looked at Carla after that, he tried to imagine it: those breasts like dough that has just risen, still warm from lying under the cloth; the big pale pink circles; then the hard nipples, also pink, jutting from them. Then Carmine would put his arm around Anna, and she would slap his knee and say, “No!” which meant he should hold her closer still.
    EVERYTHING WAS I N CONEY ISLAND. This was what Carmine told everyone who tried to talk him out of going. In Coney Island, you’d find a wooden ride that plunged thirty feet down a wooden track. You’d find freaks, women with beards and men with feet where their hands should be and giants and midgets and even a person who was both a man and a woman. You’d find fine white sand and the blue Atlantic Ocean and women in woolen swimsuits running along the shore, showing their legs and arms to anyone. On the other side of that ocean, Carmine knew, lay Europe, and a war that would soon beckon American men. It would call him, too, if America didn’t get in there and win it, fast. Coney Island could be his only chance for something more, something big.
    â€œWhy would I go all the way to Coney Island when any day now, right here, Carla is going to let me put my thing inside her?” Angelo said.
    â€œIn Coney Island,” Carmine said, “girls will do that without any promises. They like to