# Carmella Commands/Chapter 12

armella also slept badly that night. Out of the incoherent thoughts of anger there ﬁnally emerged in her mind the ﬁrm determination to go to the movies with Nicolo, if his work would ever let him oﬀ in the afternoon.
After all, if he was to be an eminent man, then her father was wrong. Never was it wrong to be the friend of an eminent man, nor wrong even to be his wife.
Here, for once, Tommaso was wrong. It was her duty to guide the family in this, as she had in so many other things since she was ten or eleven.
She rolled and tossed. Once the wakeful Maria heard her cry out in her sleep, something that to her Italian ears sounded like “Attaboy, Nick.” But Maria did not waken Tommaso.
In the morning Carmella slept until after her father had gone to work. Without complaint she washed the breakfast dishes, aided by her sisters. Once she cuﬀed Paola for almost dropping a cup.
“You don’t dare do that to me,” said Raffaela, “because I’ll tell dad.”
​“I’ll tell dad if you do it again,” declared Paola loudly.
Carmella did not do it again. She planned to rebel on a large scale. It was just as well not to err in minor ways, which might complicate the situation.
When the dishes were done she hastily got her hat and slipped out of doors, saying nothing to her mother. She was hoping to encounter Nicolo.
In front of Mike Laudini’s house she met him, smoking and lounging against the gateway. He sneered as she approached.
“Got kept in last night, after all!” he said.
“Yes, I did,” said Carmella bluntly. “Dad was in a terrible temper. Wouldn’t let me go out evenings except with him. So I didn’t go.
“Are you as smart as you think you are?” she asked.
Nicolo shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and snarled:
“You sound like the whooping cough. Something’s bit you.”
“If you were as smart as you think you are,” went on Carmella, “you’d think up some way to get oﬀ to a movie in the afternoon now and then.”
“I’m working now,” he answered. “Get that through your head.”
“You look it,” said Carmella, adding a phrase in Italian:
“Ti è entrato in testa!”
​Which, being his own sneer turned into his own mother tongue, made him suddenly furious.
“You think you’re mighty bright, don’t you, dishwasher!”
“Most as bright as you, bottle-washer,” she answered, shrewdly, guessing that preparing the bottles was part of his job.
“Say, kid!” he said. “You’re damn uppy this morning. Did you get licked last night?”
“I did not get licked. But I got kept in. So now are you going to take me to the movies some afternoons, or do I go and get me a new feller?”
This was a new idea to Nicolo. He had regarded Carmella as his own for so long that he could imagine nothing else.
“Great Scott, kid!” he said. “Don’t blow up like that. I gotta job, but there’s evening work to it, sometimes. Like enough I can get oﬀ afternoons when I want to. Maybe this afternoon.”
“That’d suit me,” said Carmella. “I wash dishes for a while. Then I’ll come out.”
“Righto, kid! I’ll ask Mike.”
Having told Carmella that he was a regular, fulltime employee of Mike he thought it best to stick to the lie and all the forms that followed.
Shortly before two o’clock that afternoon Carmella emerged, clad in the best of her frocks, except the white conﬁrmation dress. Nicolo was again in front of Mike’s house, smoking.
​“So you made it while dad’s away,” he said.
“I made it, and where are we going?”
“They say there’s a swell Western over at the Gaiety,” suggested Nicolo.
“But there’s a swell society comedy over to the Dante,” said Carmella. “Let’s go there.”
“That’s a punk place. Nobody goes there,” said Nicolo.
“But if they have a good play, that’s what we want to see. I don’t go to look at the crowd. Let’s go. I want to see Dolly Dutton—she’s in it.”
“Oh, all right!” agreed Nicolo, pretending vast weariness.
Carmella led him eagerly, with a swift pace that annoyed his shuﬀling gait. Still swiftly visioning the future, with Nicolo as a man of substance and aﬀairs, she saw more clearly than ever before the need of educating him up to certain standards which he now lacked.
In the matter of movies, for instance. She hoped this summer to be able to lead him to new ideals of taste—away from the crime and adventure pictures which he now sought, up to, perhaps, even a liking for society drama. Costumes and furniture and manners in gorgeous quantities—these were the things that Carmella wanted on the screen. She followed with almost a fever of quick study those scenes where the modern social graces were most conspicuously emphasized.
​The qualitative note had entered Carmella’s study of America on the screen. She felt a new sense of discrimination. Every butler on the screen must measure up to or beyond the Barrington butler.
Every dining room was appraised in terms of the Barrington dining room.
Every host and hostess of the silver sheet was, in her mind, a competitor with Mr. and Mrs. Barrington.
Every chauﬀeur, too, was good or bad as he was above or below the form of Dixon.
Carmella had a feeling that in some way Dixon was not quite all that a chauﬀeur to the rich should be. Possibly he was too young, or possibly he was too companionable. She studied screen chauﬀeurs with particular intensity.
Where she detected false notes on the screen Carmella openly scoﬀed, to the annoyance of those in neighboring seats and the bewilderment of Nicolo.
“Where’d you get that stuﬀ?” he asked gruﬀly, in the course of the afternoon’s bill.
“Huh! Anybody knows that the butler serves the cocktails, not the cheap second maid,” answered Carmella calmly. “And he uses a silver tray, not one of the enamel things.”
“Where’d you get all that stuﬀ?” he repeated.
“Aw, ask me! That stuﬀ is lying around for anybody to get,” she said. “You never saw a butler serve cocktails without he had a silver tray, did you?”
“Sure not, duchess!” said Nicolo mockingly. “And ​they stuﬀ the graft they get in their left hip pockets. The right-hand pocket for graft would be a terrible social error, countess. Get me, kid?”
Carmella gazed steadily at the screen, and kept silent.
To Nicolo, this was a new form of retort. He was not used to companions who did not chatter.
Bewildered, he blundered on:
“Gotta carry the gat on your right hip, ain’t you? That’s why.”
Low hisses from nearby spectators made him realize that he had carried the conversation too far. Several turned in their seats and glared at him.
It annoyed Nicolo to discover, when he and Carmella argued at the theater, that he was always the one who achieved this rebuke. She seemed to have an instinct about the stopping point.
He slumped in his seat, while Carmella gazed steadily ahead, and gently tittered as a comedy scene was ﬂashed.
Having missed the continuity, Nicolo sat sullen and watched Carmella, ignoring the picture. How come that she knew so much, this kid? How come that she always put him in the wrong and made him feel miserable over nothing at all?
The same thing happened whenever they went to the movies together—whenever they went anywhere, in fact. Even so simple a thing as drinking coca-cola in Raﬁaeli’s drug store invariably revealed new airs in ​Carmella, and new awkwardness of mind or hand in Nicolo.
Something was happening, but he could not explain it.
Something was happening to Carmella, like her latest trick of saying nothing and looking elsewhere when she was through with a quarrel. He could not understand it, and it irritated him. It was nothing, he knew, that Doty Street had taught her.
To Carmella, it was a new and secret triumph. Where she had learned it, she could not have told. Mrs. Barrington to Miss Sargle at the settlement house, perhaps. Perhaps out of the American ether.
There were a few such afternoons that summer, bitter and sweet by turns. But increasingly Nicolo found himself enmeshed in his business.
“Sorry we can’t go,” was Nicolo’s usual greeting.
“But you need it,” said Carmella.
“Need it? Hell!”
Afterwards Carmella realized that she had committed a tactical error when she told Nicolo that he needed anything.
He was of her own breed and generation.
She should have known better.