Free Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons by Linda Cardillo

under my skirt. His face clouded with frustration and anger. I felt a sharp twinge of fear—that I might not be able to hold him back, might not want to. But then we both heard the sound of my name, frantic, wild. He rol ed off me, cursing, staying low, and I grabbed for my clothes and wriggled into them.
    "Stay down," I hissed, and then rose with my basket to see the top of Giuseppina's head coming up over the rise. I waved and hurried toward her, brushing the grass from my hair, my back.
    "Are you crazy to wander off by yourself! Never again, do you hear me!" She vented the fear she must have felt when she woke to find me missing." You look flushed, feverish," she observed as I came nearer. "You've been too long in the sun." She saw the mound of flowers in my basket. "That's enough for today. The fright you gave me has worn me out."
    We set off down to the vil age. I didn't turn to look back.
    But that night I couldn't wait to return to the dance and Vito's arms. Those hours contained everything my mother had tried to keep me from. I danced barefoot, like the daughters of Tomasino the goat herder, feeling the earth, damp with dew, between my toes. In the early hours of morning, when I returned in exhaustion to Giuseppina's, I poured water into the speckled washbasin and thoroughly scrubbed my feet before slipping back between the sheets of my bed. Giuseppina might not have seen the smudged evidence, but she would certainly have smel ed the loamy traces stil clinging to my skin.
    But my ablutions were not enough to hide my secret life.
    Mario Cucino's cousin Clara betrayed me. Clara had watched Vito and me al summer from the corners and the shadows, a skinny, sal ow-faced girl who was always chewing on a strand of her hair and did not know how to laugh.
    She shrewdly enlisted my brother Aldo as her accomplice. Aldo had embraced his position as Papa's favored son after Claudio left us. He postured in front of the hal way mirror, mimicking Papa's elegant style of dress. He passionately remade himself in Papa's image, taking meticulous care not only of his wardrobe but also of the wagons and horses. He polished, he groomed. He seemed determined to earn Papa's respect, eagerly volunteering for the hardest routes, even passing up the usual entertainments of the other boys in the vil age to pore over the ledger books late into the night. Papa rewarded him when he turned eighteen, entrusting him with the busy Avel ino route.
    Aldo had never ventured to Cucino's. He had never experienced the need to break free of the confining Fioril o name— not as Claudio had by leaving Venticano altogether, nor as I had, in my own fledgling way, by dancing, by dreaming. If he knew about Cucino's, he'd chosen to ignore it, until Clara, recognizing in Aldo a younger version of Felice Fioril o, whispered in his ear one day. My little brother Sandro, who sometimes tagged after Aldo, witnessed that encounter and later told me about it.
    Clara had been invisible to young men, especial y young men like Aldo. But then, Clara realized she had something Aldo might want, something that would earn him more favor with the father he seemed so intent on pleasing. She pushed that perpetual y loose strand of hair behind her ear, smoothed her dress and approached him.
    "You're Giulia's older brother, aren't you?"
    Aldo nodded, but eyed her quizzical y. "How do you know Giulia?" he asked, the surprise in his voice undisguised.
    Clara smiled disingenuously "She comes dancing at Cucino's sometimes. Weren't you aware? I had heard she was hiding it from her grandmother, but I thought she might have trusted you. You must know about Vito?" She looked at Aldo, offering her sympathy to the shocked brother. "Oh, no, I haven't said too much, have I?"

    "Not at al . I'm grateful to you, Signorina."
    Very few young men had addressed her as Signorina.
    That night, Aldo waited under Giuseppina's mulberry tree and watched me lower myself over the ledge of the window. When my