Page 20 of Mafia Bride
Gia goes around the bed and plucks something off the inside hook of the closet door and drags the long bag along the floor. I can’t really see it in the bag, but I don’t have to. It’s a wedding dress.
“No,” I say, hugging my knees.
She unzips the bag. “It’s from Avanti!”
I’ve never heard of Avanti and I never want to, but Gia wiggles the dress between the zipper teeth, exposing a hideous tiered lace and satin thing. It offends me. Not just because I was supposed to choose my wedding gown, and if I had, it wouldn’t look anything like this. I’m offended by its existence on Earth.
Gia reads me like a book.
“You don’t like it.” Her arms drop, bending the dress against the floor.
“Burn it.”
“Wait!” She throws the gross cake-frosting white gown over the bed and runs back to the closet. “Okay so Santino and I argued…” She comes back with another garment bag. “And I swore the Avanti was better but he insisted I show you both.”
She unzips the second one, and I wait to tell her I’m going to shred it with my bare hands, then burn it. It was the one he wanted. They argued and he insisted on this one so if the first one was an offense…the second one is…wait.
They argued?
Re Santino—the king—argued with a teenage girl and didn’t demand it had to be his way or the highway?
The crack in my perception appears just as Gia gets the dress out of the bag. It’s a moment of weakness that puts all my judgement into parsing the circumstances under which Santino allows dissent, and that dress just crawls right in.
It’s fine antique lace, slim from the shoulder straps to the hips and gently flared to the floor. Gia pulls another hanger out from behind it to reveal a little matching jacket and veil.
If I could choose a dress for my wedding to a man I know and love, this would be it. I stand and reach out for it, snapping my hand back before my skin meets the lace.
“No.”
“No?” Gia’s stricken.
“I don’t want to marry him, and I don’t want to wear a dress he picked out for me. As a matter of fact, him picking it makes it worse. It’s hideous. It’s the most disgusting thing in the world, and I won’t wear it.”
I’m shouting, and Gia holds out her free hand to tamp down my voice.
“Please?” she pleads. “Look, it’s going to be fine. Santino’s really great. Super great. But if I don’t help then he’s going to send me back.”
“He will?” I say, crossing my arms. “What a super great thing to threaten you with.”
“No, I mean my dad. Please. Violetta, please. If I go back, I have to marry Umberto and he smells like…” She wrinkles her nose and lowers her voice. “He smells like farts.”
She’s trying to avoid her fate on the one hand, but on the other, there’s a kind of resignation to it. As if she’s just trying to postpone the inevitable.
“Why is your father going to make you marry some guy you don’t like?”
“Because his father owns the land between my father’s and my brother’s. Anyway. No. It’s not about me. It’s your wedding day! There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s going to happen anyway…so you might as well wear something you like.” She pushes the dress in my direction. “And that he likes.”
Santino’s preference only makes me want to choose the ugly dress, but that’s denying who I am and what I like. Being anything less just makes my choices about him and what he’s dragged me into. Not me or what I want.
Slowly, I take the dress I like. I’m not going to wear it for him, but for me.
* * *
St.Paul’s is the more beautiful of the two churches in Secondo Vasto. There used to be five, but the Spanish Flu wiped out two in 1919 and a war between rival camorra factions took out another. I always took that kind of thing for granted, weaving tales for my WASP friends. How St. Paul’s is where mob royalty worships, while the rest of us spend an hour each Sunday at humble St. Barnabas where I had my first communion, confirmation, and always assumed I’d get married and baptize my children.
Instead, my wedding’s about to take place under the buttressed walls and sky-high stained glass windows of St. Paul’s. I half hope Zia’s there to fix me up, while the other half of me doesn’t want her to witness my helplessness and shame. Instead, Gia manages the whole operation, transforming me from girl to bride, inside a prison, wielding an eye shadow brush.
“Close your eyes,” she’d said. “You’re going to be so beautiful walking to your king. Like a princess turning into a queen.” She gently wiped away every tear sliding down my cheek as if they were the only thing ruining the perfection of this scene. She held my train up as Armando led us to the car and placed the veil over my face when we got to the church.
