Chapter Fourteen:

I don’t know how the family tradition started, but my mother has put it upon herself to prepare the dinner for Christmas Eve, Southern Italian style, which means all Fish dishes, and a lot of money that most years my parents don’t have. It also means that there is a lot more screaming and yelling pre-Christmas Eve about cleaning the apartment. One would think that the Queen of England is coming for dinner the way my mother carries on. Nothing is good enough for her. She complains that there are still spots on the mirrors, that there is still dust around the edges of the windowsills, and that I haven’t really scrubbed the bathtub. I ask if any of our relatives were planning on taking a bath after dinner.
“Don’t you get flippant with me, missy, just keep cleaning”
“I am just asking.”
“Don’t ask stupid questions.”
I ‘ve gotten in the habit of flipping my mother off behind her back. However, recently I am getting a little too careless with my timing. Case in point, as I am scrubbing the bathtub for the tenth time, she comes in demanding that I scrub harder and as she is exiting, I flip her bird, not realizing that she catches my gesture in the bathroom mirror.
“What did you just do to me?” She screams.
I feel my heart stop for a second as I realize what I ‘ve done. I feel as if everything is going in slow motion. I cannot move my legs and arms. The room starts to spin out of control. I grab hold of the bathroom sink. It’s all a bad dream. Could I have just flipped off my mother? No way, and then I was like-- “Shit”, I did just flip off my mother, and as the reality of it all hit me at once, I make a mad dash out of the bathroom, dropping the kitchen cleanser on my way out. I’m a chicken without a head as I am fleeing the scene of my crime, but having nowhere to really go. I run to the living room, mother is right behind me. I make a quick spastic leap behind the sofa. She has cornered me. Her hands are flying everywhere, slapping me on the head and shoulder. I pull a sofa pillow over my head for protection. It seems to work because I no longer feel the blows. I squat there for a minute, and then slowly stand up. My mother is slumped in a chair.
I make some feeble explanation that I have only given her the pinky finger not the real thing. She sits there staring off and then softly whispers that it meant the same thing. She then gets up and goes to her room shutting the door behind her. I went back to scrubbing the bathtub letting the water run to muffle her cries which I hear from her bedroom.
My god, I am in so much trouble- and wait until she sees my grades.
I need to knock on her bedroom door and say I am sorry, but I don’t. Instead, I stand there for a moment, listening for any sounds or movement coming from within, and then I do my little flip off dance where I stick both my middle fingers up and dance around in a circle mouthing the swear word that goes along with the gesture. I am in such a trance, dancing around like some crazed dancer that I don’t see my sister standing behind me until it is too late. I whack her across her face by accident with one of my swinging arms. Before she can start crying, I grab my purple jacket and run down the porch stairs.
I start walking down Devon Ave towards Western, all I feel is anger toward my mother, and I really don’t know why. I mean, I was the one that flipped her off, and caused her to cry. My mother isn’t so bad; she feeds me, gives me bus money, and tells me she loves me daily even when I am a jerk.
The other day she asked me why I don’t call her Ma anymore and instead, call her Mother. “When did that all start?” she asked. I just shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t really know. Maybe when she enrolled me in an all girls high-school, or maybe when I got my period and she told everyone, or maybe it just happened one-day for no reason. I had become a teenager and I no longer felt the need to call her Ma.
Ma was the word I used in Grammar school, when Anna and I forgot our lunches, Ma would bring them to us, and she would be standing at the chain link fence with a smile on her face, knowing that she had bought us a special lunch from the corner Deli. A corn beef on rye with a pickle and a What’cha’macall’it candy bar, instead of the ordinary peanut butter sandwiches we slapped together in the rush to get out of the apartment in time to catch the bus for school.
Mother was the one that piled the dirty dishes in the middle of my room, when I forgot to wash them at night! Mother was the one that could not take a joke or keep a secret and who read my diary and then made little notes on the sides of the pages telling me that I should not be thinking of Rock stars but my homework!
I started to walk faster; I didn’t bother looking at any of the Indian shops like I normally do when I walk down Devon Ave., wondering how the hell one puts on a sari It was cold as usual, my thighs burned and my toes and fingers were numb. Everything around me looked grey.

I knew the second my father walked through the door at 6 o'clock that my little sister was going to run right up to him, and he’d greet her by saying “Hello cupcake” and she’d just say “Dad, Gianna gave mom the finger.” And then he’d go to my mother and she’d go right into how I flipped her off and wondering where she had gone wrong with me. Anna will be at the doorway saying how I should be grounded for a year and that’s not all, that I am also flunking every single one of my classes. And then my Dad would get a stern look on his face and say, “Anna goes to your room this is between your mother and me.” And then he’d turn to my mother and say, “I think we need to rethink keeping Gianna at that school. It is causing her great grief and it is not mentally healthy for her.”
Yeah, right!
As I walked up the back stairs, and opened the porch door I heard laughter coming from the dining room. There sat my parents across from each other, my Dad had a glass of wine in his hand and my mother was sitting there laughing so hard that tears were streaming down her face. As I walked into the kitchen I heard my father say: “So have we been reading a bit of Shakespeare?”
“Are you talking to me?” I asked.
“Hmm, yes, have a sit Gianna.”
I swear my parents must have both been high because they proceeded to lecture me for an hour about the origin of the word “Fuck, and the proper English usage of “Fuck-you”. Apparently, Shakespeare was the first to use it in one of his plays. By the end of the hour lecture from my father, I was informed that my punishment for flipping my mother off was to find the play in which Shakespeare first used the word “fuck”, and learn how and when it became an expletive.
I looked at them like they were both fucking crazy. I mean couldn’t they just wash my mouth out with soap like normal parents or better yet just yell at me and tell me I was a jerk. I was having a hard enough time just reading my assigned homework from English class! Now I was going to have to read Shakespeare during my Christmas break! Like that was going to stop me from continuing to flip my mother off when she pissed me off?
“Can you just send me away to boarding school?” I asked them
“Nope, too expensive,” they said in unison, and started to laugh.
***