Free Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons by Linda Cardillo Page A

feet touched the ground he sprang forward and tackled me, knocking me breathless into the flower bed. I shrieked and kicked, not knowing it was my own brother. Our scuffling, of course, roused Giuseppina, who threw open her shuttered window, muttering and cursing the disturbance until she saw who it was and—more pertinently—how I was dressed. I was no longer in the nightgown I'd been wearing when I'd said good night to her an hour earlier, but rather in my flounced skirt and bodice, with no blouse underneath.
    My arms and shoulders were bare. My hair, now unbraided, tumbled loosely down my back, somewhat unkempt thanks to the tousle with Aldo. As Giuseppina took in my appearance and realized what it meant, she began to wail and keen as if it were my stiff and lifeless corpse lying beneath her window. It might as well have been, given the catastrophic aftermath of Giuseppina's discovery.
    In the midst of her lamentation, she ordered me into the house. But she could not prevent Aldo from running to fetch Papa. I cursed at his retreating footsteps. Papa arrived from his card game in a frenzy.
    "You whore," he roared and slapped me twice, once on each cheek. "I forbid you to go to Cucino's again. If you disobey me, I swear I'll bring you back to my house and keep you under lock and key."
    I spent the rest of the night in Giuseppina's bed with her. When she final y fel asleep, I crept over to the window. Not to escape again, but merely to catch a glimpse of the night and hope that Vito was hovering somewhere in the shadows.
    The next morning my mother made her entrance. (No one had dared wake her the night before.) Her outrage was focused not so much on the dishonor that had provoked my father's anger as on the company I had chosen to keep and the manner in which I'd chosen to keep it.
    "Dancing in the mud with a Cipriano! Haven't I taught you to expect more? Wil you throw your life away to bear the squal ing babies of an uneducated peasant, just because you admire the shape of his buttocks?" she shrieked at me. Then she quieted and narrowed her eyes as a question—more a demand—formed in her head.
    "Are you pregnant?"
    "Mama! I've only danced with him!" I protested quickly, knowing that dancing alone was enough to anger her, hoping it was enough to keep her from suspecting more.
    "Wel , thank the Blessed Virgin for that."
    My mother did not know—and I did not reveal to her— what I felt when I danced. She could never have known the force of the yearning and urgency that propel ed me. She shifted her fury to Giuseppina, not for failing to guard me or seal me in, but for making me susceptible to the night.
    "It's you who've cultivated this wildness in her! You've encouraged her to befriend these people, to partake in their primitive pleasures. You let her go off into the hil s alone to gather your weeds and look what she brings back! She should've been reading books, not mixing potions for the lovesick."
    Giuseppina was no less upset with me than my mother was, but for other reasons. Giuseppina understood the longing. She had taught me the power of the feelings, the dreams that burned inside of people. She believed that to disown what you felt made you sick—sick at heart, sick in the head.
    Over the years, most often in arguments about me, Giuseppina and my mother had done their own dance around each other. This time was no exception. My mother, normal y decorous and contained, unleashed her words, her pitch, her pace. She brimmed with uncontrol able passion. Giuseppina, on the other hand, became impassive, impenetrable. My mother shril ed her words as if they were fists beating, hammering in futility at the wall of Giuseppina's silence. When my mother finished her tirade, Giuseppina dismissed her with the peremptory gesture of impatience she reserved for the truly stupid with whom she wouldn't even deign to speak. Once again, my mother was forced to retreat.
    When she was gone, Giuseppina said, "Before you find yourself