Thy Womb Jesus Part 1 (NARRATIVA) ~ di Joseph Bathanti - TeclaXXI

 NARRATIVA

 

Joseph Bathanti

Thy Womb Jesus

Part 1*

 

CANVA - progetto JSpaccini©2026

For indeterminate amounts of time, my mother refused to speak to my father and me. It always started with my father. Usually some trivial spark between him and my mother – what he said or didn’t say, innuendo, his tone, anything really – triggered her silence. It could last half an hour, two days, two months. My father would speak to her: “Good morning, Rita.” “Telephone for you, Rita.” “Rita, have you seen my belt?” “Where’s the aspirin? Rita, will you please tell me where the aspirin is?” Nothing. My mother was unswerving in her devotion to silence, her perfect work of art: a statue in the immense marble hall hushed by billows of ether. Face impassive, eyes vacant, she rendered all before her nonexistent.

Inevitably, her silence slabbed over me too. I felt it coming, slowly, inexorably, like a massive weather front. Whatever lit in her hands slipped from them like mercury: a clove of garlic, keys, her cigarette lighter. She put fire to cigarette after cigarette, then forgot them. Each ashtray filled with smoking worms of ash.

I studied her as she prowled the house like a strange sidling dog: painting her nails, tongue out, the fumes from the polish; the net of hair spray hanging in the bathroom, the faces she made as she daubed on make-up, the bullet of red lipstick racing around her mouth.        

Standing in the bathroom door, I tried to talk to her. In brassiere and half-slip, teasing high her mustard-colored hair as if I weren’t there. About what I was doing in school. How I was tripped up in the spelling bee by the word, sapphire, two p’s, not one. Maybe I’d try out for Little League baseball. Beside the rack of pink curlers on the sink I set the cup of tea I had fixed her, and a picture I had drawn of a house. I didn’t want her to point her invisible ray at me. I didn’t want to disappear. She’d swipe the yellow tangles out of the rat-tail comb and drop them, the planet of dead hair floating slowly down to the wastebasket. Then she’d walk through me like I was mist.

The longer it went on, the more convinced I was that she really didn’t recognize my father and me, or even see us, for that matter, that she had crossed into a shadow universe, like villains in Superman who languished in the Fifth Dimension, waiting to reenter the real world through an invisible seam. Gone from us forever, unreachable as a zombie. I figured it was my fault, though I was never sure what I had done.

         “You didn’t do a damn thing,” my father assured me from his perch of apathy and wisdom. “She can’t help it. It’s that deranged Italian blood. It takes her over like a spell.”

My mother hadn’t spoken to us in two weeks. She hadn’t eaten in days. We heard her in the living room, smoking one cigarette after another: a sough, then furious in-suck, the match fizzing, the crazy engine inside her carping. He shook his head and smiled like What can you do? Then brewed another pot of coffee, mixed a VO and water, no ice. It was time for him to start thinking about brushing the lint off his burgundy waistcoat, peeling a heavily starched tuxedo shirt out of the dry cleaner’s cellophane. He was a waiter at the Park Schenley. He needed to get moving, but he’d never rush. Life is short, Fritzy, he liked to caution me.

He and I sat at the kitchen table – red Formica and red vinyl and chrome chairs – playing poker, gambling blue-tipped wooden kitchen matches he lit the gas burners with. He patted his beloved newspaper: LBJ had just sent the first combat troops into Vietnam to protect an American air strip near Danang. There was a picture of two Marines in full battle gear carrying mortars. They smiled. Around their necks were garlands of flowers. Vietnamese girls with long straight black hair and plain white dresses walked behind them.

“This is the beginning,” my dad predicted. “A revolution’s coming.”

I didn’t know what he meant. He’d been to Niagara Falls and the Chicago World’s Fair. His mother and father were dead. He seemed to have little past. When my mother was on a tear, I was always afraid he’d pack his bags and leave. Travis Sweeney. That was my dad. And my mother: Rita Sweeney. Rita Schiaretta Sweeney. Shotgun bride and groom. My father knew how to get along in the world.

We shoved cards and matches back and forth across the table, killing time, glancing every now and then through the screen door at the kids playing baseball in the alley; sparrows swooping out of the eaves; the vaguest breeze, warm, with the scent of spearmint and wild onions, ruffling the dish towel draped over the oven handle. In the last moments of Spring, before the house got so insufferably hot that bedclothes sweated and molded if not changed every two days; the clock faces bearded with condensation, so we never knew the time.

But Spring, what was left of it, was different. Just my father and me before he had to hit the job. He and my mother always traveled to work together. Even when they weren’t speaking. Over time, they had perfected a way to make do without opening their mouths. She hostessed at a club near the Park Schenley. They had a faded 1961 two-door beige Impala. My mother did all the driving. My dad didn’t even have a license. We could hear her smoking and a guy’s somber stagy voice on TV. One of those afternoon shows.

My father asked me what I wanted to eat. He handled the cooking. I didn’t know what I felt like, just that I didn’t want him to leave. Or my mother either. It was okay, having her in the other room with the TV talking – now it was a woman in an imploring voice – almost as if she were calling to me and my father, telling us where she was. She had been lost, but now she was back. Sun slanted in through the screen door and lit up the red table face like stained glass tablets of blood. On it were an ashtray, cigarettes, and salt and pepper shakers: a Black man with white hair and beard and a slouch hat; and a wizened Black woman, maybe his wife, in a long white apron and kerchief. 

What my father had been telling me was that he and my mother were trying to have a baby: as he broke the eggs for an omelet, and whacked in some Velveeta cheese and chipped ham, sprinkled pepper, canned mushrooms, black olives, buttered two pieces of Italian bread and threw them in the oven to toast, sliced a tomato, shelled a grapefruit, boiled water for my cup of tea. Talking as he worked, his back to me, shirt off. He was broad and white, his sides butting out a bit from his belt. In the middle of his back on either side sat vents of excess flesh.

On the stove top, propped against the lime-green wall, was a framed placard: Rita is boss of this kitchen, and if you don’t believe it, start something: Beneath the script was an old crank-up telephone and a compote with scraggly yellow flowers looping out of them. Above it on the windowsill rested a planter, a ceramic Madonna and Child with a bright green vine of philodendron spraying up over the heads of mother and baby, pink cheeks, lips scarlet, eyes closed, cheek to cheek, haloes locked inseparably like twin suns. Our Lady’s soft blue cloak. Thirty-three years before little Jesus would meet his mother on the execution road.

For some reason, my mother couldn’t get pregnant. It was like she was trying to prove something, having another baby, my father said. He didn’t entirely understand it, but he was willing to go along with it – with anything, really – if it made her happy. I loved the idea of a baby, how we’d all have to walk on tiptoe and whisper, how we’d observe, like a sacred office, its lovely fragile presence.

“She’ll never be happy though,” my father said, putting the food in front of me. Then he lit a cigarette and sat down to watch me eat.

Wearing a frazzled pink slip, my mother burst into the kitchen and plopped down at the table.

“Good afternoon, Rita,” said my father.

“Hi, Mom.”

“No one talk to me.” She speared my father’s cigarette from the ashtray and puffed on it. She glanced at us. Furtive, like just paroled, or coming out of anesthesia. All comparisons are useless. She was Rita Schiaretta Sweeney. She didn’t give a shit about anything. That she had spoken, however, even to warn us not to speak to her, was a good sign.

As we looked at her, one of her hoop earrings fell off her lobe and rolled under the refrigerator. She threw herself into the giant white Amana as if to push it aside.

“Rita, I’ll move the refrigerator. Calm down,” said my father softly.

She grabbed the broom and pounded the refrigerator until on its blank face popped little craters, and black scars where the paint chipped. My dad just sat and watched her, mesmerized, as if the Blessed Mother had stepped off her pedestal in the sanctuary at Saints Peter and Paul, and he were witnessing it. He loved her for this very kind of thing.

When she wore out, she dropped into a chair at the table. My dad got up and shoved the fridge a few feet across the floor, retrieved the earring and handed it to my mother.

“Thank you, Travis,” she said, breathlessly, her body suddenly limp, grateful to be back in the world of words.

“It’s almost time to leave, Rita.”

“We can take a minute, though, can’t we? To sit here and pull ourselves together.”

“A minute’s fine, Rita. I think we can take a minute. How about something to eat?”

“Something to eat,” my mother repeated dreamily.

“You should eat something, Mom,” I ventured, my first words to her in days.

She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “You care about your mother, don’t you, Fritzy?”

Such questions aren’t meant to be addressed. I was sure of that fact even then, but the boldness of it startled me, and I never got around to answering. She wouldn’t have heard me anyhow. She was like an amnesiac during the first few minutes of discovering her true identity, still two people. Just standing on the narrowest strip of earth, a brink on either side. My father took care not to startle her.

“I’ll make you anything you’d like, Rita,” my father said gently.

“Just tea, and we can pretend that I’ve been sick, but the worst of it is behind me, that everyone is relieved to the point of tears, and I’ll lounge on the couch with a blanket and watch TV.”

“We can make all that happen, Rita. But you don’t have to be sick.”

“I don’t?”

“Of course not, but we’re going to have to get a move on, or we’ll be late for work.”

“I don’t think I can go today, Travis. Please don’t make me go.”

“You don’t have to go, Rita. We’ll call in and tell them we’re sick.”

My father lifted my mother from the kitchen chair, carried her into the living room, and laid her on the couch while I ran upstairs for a blanket to cover her, even though the house was quite warm.

My father and I sat with her while she daintily sipped her tea.

When my mother found her voice again, after a binge of silence, it was as if she had discovered with it the secret of lovely, glowing women, like June Cleaver and Donna Reed, who always wore pearls and dresses even during housework, who never raised their voices, who walked in a nimbus of chastity and gentility that bathed everyone around them with light and well-being.

There my mother reposed, bed pillows wreathing her head, blanket pulled to her bodice, covering the gaudy slip, placing her palm to my father’s cheek – “Travis, you are so good to me” – looking with absolute wonder and candor into his eyes.

He winked at her and patted her hand. “You’re doing fine,” he whispered.

“I am, aren’t I? Tell me I’m doing fine, Travis?” She even affected the breathless diction of those perfect women.

“You’re doing fine, Rita.”

She looked at me as though I were a wholly remarkable child, occasionally pulling me to her, running her hand through my hair, kissing my cheeks and forehead, then holding me a little way from her and studying me.

“So, what have you been up to, Fritzy?” she asked like she had never met me. What was my favorite subject in school? Did I like my teacher? What was her name? Was she pretty?

By then my father had called in sick for both of them, put Frank Sinatra on the dusty hi-fi, and set up the Monopoly game.

“Let me fix you something to eat, Rita,” my father offered.

“Can I wait just a minute, Travis? I don’t have to eat this second, do I? Not while everything is almost making sense? While you and Fritz are sitting here like soldiers at my feet?”

“Take your time, Rita. There’s no rush.”

“No rush,” she repeated, hunkering down on the couch like a child recovering from a long illness, grateful to be alive, evangelized by each mundane fact orbiting her.

We moved our tokens round the Monopoly board. My father, the ship; I, the race car; and my mother, though I had never seen her touch needle or thread, the thimble.

The neon board filled with our industry: shiny green houses and red hotels, occupied by people moored to the earth, like us, through kindness and optimism; the dizzying speed with which we hurtled along the avenues, the hazards of confinement and decrepitude, the thrill of the crisp bills doled into my palm by my father each time I passed GO. My mother leaning down from the couch to smooth the hair along my forehead, her tired and beautiful laughter as the nightbirds swooped in and the house darkened feebly. It was summer coming in. I hadn’t noticed how time had passed.

 “You’re growing up,” my mother said. “Isn’t he, Travis?”

“He is,” agreed my father.

Two sweethearts and the summer wind, sang Sinatra.

“I think I’m pregnant, Travis.”

My father beamed and patted her hand. “That would be something, Rita.”

“Would you like a little brother or sister, Fritzy?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking again about our house suddenly rarified and mysterious, the sacristy hush, the overflowing kindness. That infant turning in its pristine sleep, breathing the same air as me. I’d never be alone again. “Yes,” I said again, and my mother clutched me to her while my father continued to smile.

“I’m so hungry,” my mother exclaimed.

“Coming up,” said my dad, getting to his feet.

“I have this awful craving.”

“Name it.”

“You’ll think I’m awful.”

“Rita.”

“I’m dying for canned ravioli. Chef Bor-ar-dee. That’s awful, isn’t it?”

“It’s not awful, Rita.”

“I must be pregnant. What else could it be to have me craving canned ravioli, of all things. But it sounds so good.”

My dad whipped out a five and handed it to me. “Fritzy, run up to Chookie’s and buy a can of raviolis.”

“Two cans, please. I’m starved.”

“Two cans, and keep the change,” my father added.

 To be continued

*la seconda parte sarà pubblicata il 6 maggio 2026

[Thy Womb Jesus by Joseph Bathanti, was previously published in The Hight Heart, Eastern Washington University Press, 2007. The author extends his grateful acknowledgment.]

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JOSEPH BATHANTI

BIONOTA JOSEPH BATHANTI is the former North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14) and recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor. 

The author of over twenty books, Bathanti is McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and is the recipient of the Board of Governors Excellence in Teaching Award. 

He served as the 2016 Charles George VA Medical Center Writer-in-Residence in Asheville, NC, and is the co-founder of the Medical Center’s Creative Writing Program. 

His volume of poetry, Steady Daylight, from Louisiana State University Press, is forthcoming in 2026. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in October of 2024.