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Lock Your Eyes on Mine

Francesca Di Fabio

    She couldn’t say the words after the first time they had had sex. He is literally, and quite amusingly, the boy next door. No, this will not be another standard, overdramatized romantic comedy. There will be no scene when all is good with boyfriend hot jock; there is loud early 2000 alternative rock music playing, and then there is... silence; the camera zooms in, she drops the cup of alcohol at the party in the realization that her best friend is, indeed, the man she has been yearning for. I couldn’t do that to you. This love story will be exhilarating, electrifying, moving, inspiring, and seductive because it is the story of how I came into existence.
    My father had just moved to Scotch Plains, New Jersey, after living in Garwood for the first two years of his life and in Westfield for the next eight years. He, his two older siblings, and his two genitori molto Italiani, had been moving around the county in anticipation for their hand-made, brick from-the-inside-and-out home my Nonno had been building since their departure from a little commune named Monteferrante in ‘58.
    The brick house from-the-inside-and-out was nothing short of a classic early ‘70’s Indo-European household. His father was an artisan contractor, and his mother a partial housewife and factory assembly line worker. At such a young age, his siblings seemed irrelevant to him. His brother was obsessed with himself and a soon-to-be-made traditional pop band. His high school-aged sister was merely a ghost about whom he did not know much even though she was always home because his parents never allowed her to go out. The brick house from-the-inside-and-out consisted of fig, tomato, and parsley gardens and dangling, dried peppers, and homespun pasta dough stuck between the creases of a stainless-steel grinder.
    My mother was also a hundred percent Italian but experienced a slightly different outlook of the Italian culture. I have been told that the lifestyle disparity dates back to the causes and consequences of an organized crime syndicate - the Sicilian Mafia or Cosa Nostra (“Our Thing”). The social hostility many Sicilians faced from the remaining regions of Italy could be due to their fondness of seafood over pasta, or their spliced vernacular. Still, my mama always told me it was mainly because of their way of life. Sicilian families, now including my mother’s Ribera-bound origins, are relaxed yet thick-skinned, and certainly not those who will hold your hand during the toughest of times. They also gambled, drank like skunks, and cursed as if they were to die tomorrow, the last word out of their mouths undoubtedly being “Va Fangul!”
    The house around the corner and three homes down was my mother’s. There you would find no garden and certainly, no shriveled-up peppers. There you would find cigars, ashtrays, booze, and a close-knit family who bet at the race track every Sunday after their 2 PM dinner. My mother did have two older sisters, but she really grew up with three mothers - two of whom were never home. The oldest of the two, Anne Marie, was thirteen years older than my mother; Annmarie was twenty-six and married with a four-year-old already. Annette, the younger of the two, was twenty-two, finding herself, and had just moved out with her burned-out, naturally high best-friend. It was safe to say my mother felt lonely, similar to how my father felt around his irrelevant siblings.
    As he was walking down Montague Avenue arriving at the corner intersection of Bartle Ave, he saw six pairs of high waisted bell-bottom jeans hanging out. Some jeans were partnered with button-downs and turtlenecks, but hers were not. On the top of her jeans, there was a black faint, “The Doors” T-shirt, and just below her jeans, there were these glimmering black booties he swears he’ll never forget. As he passes the bell-bottoms clang...
    “Aye, Aye! You’ll be the only boy on the block! How does that make you feel?” -shouted the girl with the glimmering black booties.
    “Umm...,” feeling consumed by all the estrogen surrounding him, “I think it will be fun!” He was trying to act tough in front of the six, intimidating thirteen-year-old girls, but he was shitting his pants.
    That day, the bell-bottoms’ clang gave a skinny, nerdy boy a grand ole’ tour. He came to know the hangout spots, the must-go-to-restaurants, and the please-stay-away-from restaurants because the owner is a perv. That day, he also found out where the hidden booze in glimmer-shoe-girl’s house was, and the type of rock music she listened to.
    The sun eventually went down that day. And the bell-bottoms-clang-and-glimmer-shoe girl (who he happened to find out was named Laurie) and skinny, nerdy boy (who she happened to find out was named Franco) all had a curfew to attend to. Both at home, silencing the preexisting silence they feel in their homes to think about how...
    He: ... bewildered, perplexed, and intrigued by glimmering-shoe-girl’s bluntness and boldness, and quite unlike him, her badassness.
    She: ... Calmed, she was, by his voice and delighted by his ability to ask and answer questions without sounding or acting like a pretentious ass. He knew it all, and she wanted to show him what she knew.
    They both knew it from day one. They even knew the sex part would eventually come. Franco became indisputable, thinking, whatever she would do, he certainly wanted to do it even more.
    Two years passed of “Hi, Mrs. Di Fabio, is Franco home?” and “Hello, Mr. Marinaro, is Laurie home?” After they found out one another was available came the “Meet me at the corner intersection with your bike.” He listened. He met her. He never knew where he would end up that day on his bike, but he knew not to question her guidance.
    Besides the home phone calls, there were a lot of off-railing conversations; some deep, some ending with a flick on the back of the head. “Do you ever wonder why...,” “What if...,” and “Don’t touch my father’s booze, Frank!” with a response of “I’m just kidding you, crazy lady!” There was not one day without communication; they just had to tell each other the stupidest of things. My mother once told me a story about when she found a spider in her room, instinctually killed it, and then instantly felt bad. She then walked to my father’s house (the brick house from-the-inside-and-out in which my Nonna still lives) and mourned over the situation.
    Even though it was silly and quite toddler-like, he never failed at understanding her and making her laugh. He was balanced. And, luckily for her, that was just what she needed; more balance in her life. Hearing that story as young as I could remember and not being able to understand it was okay. Thinking back to that story as a twenty-year-old and still not being able to make sense of it is a problem. I guess I have yet to meet that well-balanced person.
    Soon came the time of my mother’s freshman year dance. My mother secretly despises the whole thing: dressing up, makeup, feeling innocent and vulnerable. Yet she continued to go for some reason. “For the pictures, maybe?” she thought. But I know she wanted to go to pretend my father was hers. She was hesitant to ask him to go to the dance with her. She convinced herself it was because he was a year younger. However, it was because she’d be revealing a level of interest she wanted him to reveal first. She thought she might as well tackle the situation as a joke like they always did when their friendship seemed to shadow a relationship. It took her three practice breaths behind the locked bathroom door to successfully pretend she was her careless self. She arrived in his room as her reckless self to say:
    “Frank, I am too sexy for all the boys in my grade. I fear they are scared to ask me to the dance. So, I thought, I’d take you and scare them all.” She notices how he lifted his glasses on the top of his head after releasing his undivided attention from some science-fiction novel. “Laur...” Her heart beating, throbbing and twisting into pieces. “I’m screwed,” she thought.
    “Can we spike the punch?”
    Sudden relief; she was unstoppable. “Hell yeah!” she replied.
    The night of the dance was the first night they locked eyes not as friends. I could ramble on about their cute, innocent pre-teen and teenager memories that had an underlying sexual interest, or maybe something more. But I am not going to do that because we would be here for years, decades, centuries perhaps. What I thought was most entrancing about my parents’ love story is how they managed to ignore the temptation of what if this could be something more. As humans, we are driven by nothing more than our curiosity. So, I wonder why they weren’t curious enough to act on it?
    Because my parents were both stubborn, they often found themselves slipping out of each other’s hands, not as friends, but as something more. When Frank began to date Kerri in the tenth grade, Laurie could be found at every house party and was too single for her own good. When Frank and Kerrie broke up two years later, Laurie was three months into her first serious relationship with George. Between each breakup, they relied on each other to feel better. The pattern felt endless, so much so that the temptation began to fade.
    The eyelock happened again at one of my mother’s annual family parties deep in the Pocono Mountains. This time they were twenty-six and not thirteen. Their age made it that much harder to avoid the tension. At the party, cousins of cousins went, friends from out of state, last year’s boyfriends and girlfriends would come if they survived another year around the sun. But the immediate families remained a constant, and so did Frank.
    Sitting on the table bench and smoking a cigarette, Laurie couldn’t help but look at the way Frank played with all the children. He was so gentle, smooth, caring, and knew what to do if one were to fall and cry. It reminded her a lot about the spider she killed or the breakup stories he voluntarily listened to. She also thought about how sick her father was and how much she hated the words “bladder cancer.” She stopped looking at Frank to look at her father. He was sick as a dog but continued to smoke a cig with a half-drank can of beer in his hand. God, she hated him but loved him dearly. She was upset and wanted Frank to assure her everything would be okay.
    Running around aimlessly with children he only knew from once a year, he couldn’t help but notice how alone Laurie looked from the side of his eye. All of these years, he knew how empty she felt even though she had a family — surrounded by alcohol, gambling, and sisters that were never there. No wonder she had been smoking since she was fourteen, she was alone. He wanted to do more for her, mainly because the man she admires most might be leaving her side. He watched her as she threw her cigarette on the floor, stomped on it, and walked toward the cabin behind someone else’s trailer. He followed.
    “I need to tell you...” but he was cut off by her lips before he could even finish the sentence. Her eyes locked with him when she said, “Frank, I know.” Frank was hesitant to remove her red silk blouse from her shoulders, but he did it in the softest of ways. It only took a thirteen-year-old friendship that was nothing more to lock the door of the room they were both in.
    She couldn’t say the words after the first time they had had sex. He said them first, and she affirmed. The prolonged absence of the phrase “I love you” is partially due to the reason why I exist now, rewriting their dragged-out love story. It wasn’t the time in the cabin, though; add a couple of dates, marriage, and more locked doors, and I was finally born.
    My parents’ love story is not supposed to be like any other. A reader could argue that my claim is biased simply because I am telling the before stages of my own existence. That point in itself is important to me, but maybe not for you (don’t worry, I won’t take it personally). But, if you look deep beneath the corny flirting or the cliché headstrong, secretly-in-love young adults, you will find that we often forbid ourselves from experiencing love. Think about that older man who never looked up for any woman because his work was that much more critical. Or the hopeless romantic woman who puts her walls up because no man will compare to Augustus Waters. Or those who have lost their significant other at an unfortunately young age and deny that love exists elsewhere for them. It then makes sense to say that our self-incurred doubts, fabricated internal thoughts, or the I’m-scared-to-say-it-first attitudes are inevitable. However, the promising news is that love exists between these moments of frustration, you just need to find delight in seeing it, or as in this story, acting on it.

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