Rosa quietly mouths the words along with me, smiling happily when I get to the end.
“Poetry. Pure poetry,” she murmurs. “Now you can profess your love to her and tell her you want to make babies with her.”
A hysterical laugh flies out of my mouth, but it’s quickly cut off and exchanged for screams of pain when something hard starts smacking repeatedly against the back of my shoulder. I’d know that stinging pain anywhere, and when I whirl around with my hands up to block my face, sure enough, my mother is standing there with a wooden spoon in her hand, hitting every part of me she can reach.
“HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME, ALFANSO? I HAD TO HEAR ABOUT IT FROM THE WOMEN AT THE BEAUTY PARLOR!” she screams, the wooden spoon slapping against the side of my arm.
“Ma! Cut it out!” I yell back, dodging her flailing arm wielding the spoon of torture, the same spoon she’s been using on my sisters and I since we were mouthy little asshole kids.
“I could have had a heart attack!” she screeches, chasing me around the island with the spoon above her head. “I could have died and you don’t even CARE!”
Luckily, Rosa snatches the spoon from mom’s hand when she races by her, so at least I can stop running away from my mother and her wooden spoon like a wuss. Unfortunately, when I stop and stand next to my sister, my mother doesn’t even notice the spoon is missing and her hands start wind-milling against my arm like she’s in a catfight with a chick.
“It’s like you don’t even love me!” she wails, her little hands reigning hellfire against my forearms while I shield my face. “I went through thirty-seven hours of labor with you, and I had to find out from a stranger!”
Not knowing what else to do, I start whipping my own hands against hers until we’re having the world’s most pathetic slap fight in the middle of her kitchen.
“It was two hours of labor and you got an epidural after the first contraction!” I remind her, our hands still smacking rapidly together.
“Well, it FELT like thirty-seven hours!” she argues. “How could you not tell your own mother that you’re going to be a father?!”
“WHAT THE FUCK?!” Rosa and I yell at the same time.
My mother manages to end our slap fight and whack both of us upside the back of our heads at the same time.
“YOU GOT SOMEONE PREGNANT?”
“WHO TOLD YOU THIS?”
Once again, Rosa and I shout at the same time, her at me and me at our mother. We turn to face each other and both point a finger in each other’s faces.
“WHO THE HELL DID YOU KNOCK UP?!”
“STAY THE HELL OUT OF THIS!”
I groan in frustration when we do it again, and before I can try once more to speak on my own, our mother grabs both of our earlobes and yanks our heads close to her face.
“Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!” Rosa and I whine, neither one of us caring when our words overlap this time because it fucking hurts!
“Ho intenzione di spingere il cucchiaio finora nel culo verrà fuori dalla tua bocca!” Our mother shouts in rapid-fire Italian.
Rosa and I immediately clamp out mouths shut. We only truly fear our mother when she does two things: Screams our full names or speaks in Italian. I can’t speak fluently, but I know enough to get by and I’m pretty sure she just said something about shoving her spoon up our asses until it comes out of our mouths.
When Rosa and I remain silent for a few seconds, mom finally releases our ears and we back away from her, rubbing our earlobes while shooting each other accusatory looks.
“How could you do this to me, Alfanso?” Mom starts in again, stomping away from me and out of the kitchen before I have a chance to explain.
I have no choice but to race after her as she storms across the hall into living room, muttering in Italian under her breath while she begins grabbing giant plastic shopping bags from the couch and starts placing them at my feet.
“Mom, I didn’t do anything. Will you just let me explain?” I ask as she makes five trips back and forth between the couch and me until there are at least ten bags lying at my feet.
“I distinctly remember your father showing you how a prophylactic works when you were thirteen and I started finding crusty socks under your bed,” she starts.
“Jesus, mom!” I yell.
“Eeeeeeew, you did it into socks?” Rosa says in disgust as she comes up next to me.
“I was thirteen!” I shout, wishing Molly was here to see that my family could give hers a run for their money in the crazy department. Then I realize I’m talking to my mom and my sister about my masturbation habits when I was a teenager, and I immediately erase that thought.
“You should have done it in the shower like a normal teenager!” Rosa argues.
“Yes, because I got so much bathroom time living with three women!” I fire back. “It’s not like the sock thing happened all the time, only when it was more convenient.”
“I bought you a twenty-pack of tube socks every other week when you were in eighth grade,” Mom adds. “I thought you had a foot fungus problem until I found sixty-two pairs stuck to the floor under your bed.”
Just a few minutes ago, I thought my mom finding out about this thing with Molly would be the worst thing that could possibly happen to me. Clearly, I was wrong.
“Uuugghhh, I will never be able to look at another pair of tube socks without throwing up in my mouth,” Rosa complains.
“Can we please get back on track here?” I ask with an annoyed shake of my head.
Mom reaches into the front pocket of her apron and pulls out a banana and a condom, holding them out to me.
“Fine. You’re going to demonstrate the proper way to use protection, and you’re going to keep doing it until you get it right,” she informs me. “Take the banana and the prophylactic. I had to ask the pharmacist to show me where to locate these things, and then he had to explain all the different kinds. It’s no wonder you screwed this up. Ribbed and magnum and tingling sensation…I do not understand today’s youth and why they make things so difficult. Your father and I managed just fine with the ‘pull-out-and-pray’ method.”
Rosa starts laughing and I start wondering what the possibilities are that I’m adopted.
“I’m not going to demonstrate anything and stop saying prophylactic; it’s freaking me out!” I complain, crossing my arms like a child and refusing to take the things in her hand.
Picturing my mother going to the pharmacy and asking where the condoms are is bad enough. Having to hear her continue to say that word over and over will make me never want to have sex again.
“We’re not leaving this room until you put this on the banana!” she argues. “I got glow-in-the-dark so we can be here all night!”
Grabbing the items from her hands so she stops shaking them in my face, I toss them over my shoulder and the banana thumps on the floor out in the hallway.
“I know how to use a condom, we are never speaking of my childhood masturbatory habits ever again, and I did NOT get anyone pregnant!” I yell at the top of my voice.
“I’m confused,” Rosa states.
I sigh, realizing I’ve reached a new low when I’d rather go back to talking about jerking off into gym socks than trying and explain this to them.
“It’s a long story,” I mutter.
Both of us stare at our mother as she bends down and starts pulling things out of the bags by my feet.
“There’s no sense in lying about it now, Alfanso. I had a nice long chat with that Molly girl’s aunt at the beauty parlor, and then we went shopping together,” she tells me happily, her mood doing a complete one-eighty as she digs through one of the bags and the sound of crinkling plastic fills the room.
Rosa’s head whips up from watching Mom dig through the bags and she stares at me in shock. “Wait, Molly as in ‘Cut the cord from mommy’ Facebook Molly? The Molly you just publicly asked out on a date on social media? That’s who you knocked up?”