The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

her husband would almost never be around to drive the wolves away.

the problems inside the pot are known only by the spoon who stirs it. In other words, only a family can know all its own secrets.

She was a different person than when he had left. She was a mother now, and understood the thing that mothers understand, that nothing in the world is more important than the tiny breaths of your child—not obeying your husband, not romance or desire or even one’s own physical self.

This was the trouble with emigration—it dismantled the patriarchy. Because really, what did Assunta, or any woman, need a husband for, when she did every goddamn thing herself?

“You make sure you are good, but you don’t worry whether other people are good or not because they must make their own peace with God.”

The truly good among us may experience no distress at the good fortune of our loved ones, but for the rest of us jealousy is shameful, secret, and poisonous.

Without faith there are no miracles, just coincidences.

When all the cool had gone from her palms, Assunta flipped them, the same way she had done that night in 1918 when her first Stella had fought the fever, and when Assunta had tried to suck the heat out of her daughter’s skin with her own hands.

There was a flash in Stella’s mind, an image that flared like a bonfire, of another hand on the other side of the door, its supernatural aura burning through the wood, holding it so that Stella couldn’t wrench it open.

Stella was exactly old enough to wonder what the point of having a husband or father was, when he seemed to be a source of arbitrary disorder and suffering.

I wanted to come to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I learned three things: One, the streets weren’t paved with gold. Two, the streets weren’t paved at all. Three, I was expected to pave them. —“OLD ITALIAN STORY,” ELLIS ISLAND

History marches on, and names and destinations change, but not the injustices we let one another suffer.

Colt Armory,

The idea passed through Stella’s head that maybe Carmelo was checking up on Tina for his pal, keeping her loyal. She felt a new flare of distrust for him.

Perhaps it wasn’t a premonition that had given her chills, just regular cramps.

You work hard, time passes. Even hard times pass.

But he was a monster who didn’t care whom he hurt, as long as he could celebrate his own damage. She didn’t see his suffering, like her mother did. He was an agent of corruption in their house, a perfect thing that had rotted and was determined to rot everything around it.

Regarding Joey

Had Tina, with her controlling husband and unresponsive womb, desired to see her pretty, smart, charismatic sister thwarted?

She had no control over anything here. The feeling reminded her of one of her earliest memories, her child-hand clamped indelibly around a piece of bread as the pigs circled. She was about to be trampled, and there was nothing she could do, because someone else had seized her hand.

she had misjudged Joey, that she finally understood why he had shot himself rather than offer his body up to circumstances beyond his control.

The fact was, Stella Fortuna, who had survived five near-death experiences, had endured the thing she’d feared even more than death. This time, no one had any sympathy for her.

jealousy was two-sided, and the second Stella did not feel lucky to be the living Stella anymore.

Tina only had answers other people had given her, the answers other people had assured her it was correct to believe, and then she knew them beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Stella wondered about God’s tricks in this matter of the baby. This had been the thing she had wanted least in her life, and God had changed her heart to make her want it more than anything. At least, that was her mother’s explanation for Stella’s attachment. Stella thought it was more like an infection in her mind; her thoughts were not her own anymore, no more than her body was hers. She remembered—vividly—that only months ago she had not wanted to live; now not only had that shadow fled her psyche but she was also desperately devoted to making something else live, as well. Her richness and her darkness had been filed down to one fist-size glowing globe she carried in her womb.

Assunta saw Tina’s envy, too. She made the unfascination on Stella’s forehead at least once a day. She came up to the third-floor apartment to hang mint in the windows.

When she wondered how she would put all the bad things behind her, she realized that her mind did not even want to remember what they were, and the path was suddenly quite clear. She would bury the first year of her marriage with her baby boy. That was how she would save herself.

then her caring was divided, and then there would be a third, and it was divided again, and so on and so on until she was so fractioned and diluted by her own caring that every other thing in the world receded into winking stars on a peripheral horizon.

Bernie would be Stella’s only daughter and would grow up unintimidated by the prospect of telling whole roomfuls of men what to do.

Yay!

Praying made her feel as foolish as getting caught talking to herself in the grocery store.

But what if we said that the power of human faith is in making things real even when they are not—that by giving imaginary entities our credence we allow them to assume power over us—to step into being? Because what is faith but a willingness to believe?

But the Stellas should never have been enemies; they should have been the most faithful of allies against the monster they had in common, the man who had

taken away each of their lives in different ways, who had never considered regretting what he had destroyed, who had tortured their sweet shared mother, the woman each of the Stellas had loved more than they’d loved the rest of the world.

Why did the first Stella keep trying to kill the second? It was their father she should have killed.

All her life, Stella had believed she was haunted by the ghost of her dead sister. Now, finally, she saw the truth—she was haunted by her living one.

To point a finger at a sinner is to have known the sin yourself, Nonna Maria had taught Stella. But the surgery has removed this ingrained life lesson. In the murk of her mind, Stella no longer can see the finger of accusation turning on herself.

I have come to understand Stella as a woman of incredible will and strength, of charisma, of innate intelligence. She was not a woman of her time, and she was made to pay a high price for her unwillingness to conform. If only Stella had been allowed to live her life on her own terms, how might things have been different? I wouldn’t exist, it’s true—would I write myself out of this if it would spare her the suffering? No, I wouldn’t, selfish girl. So I’ve written myself into it, instead.