Her oldest son would be summoned occasionally by her excited shouts as he was getting ready for school when it suddenly occurred to her that some laborer hadn’t stopped by for his panino. She’d scream, “Eh, Giaco, ven’acà! Su!” and have him run down to the railroad before he went off to school.
She worked hard, she made money, and she was quick to see that profits would be even greater if she had her own store of provisions instead of going out to buy them. She decided to open a spaccio—a space, as it was known in the old country—in a little storefront on Third Street, near Scalise’s bar.
When summer came they leased a piece of Brown’s farmland in Muskieville and bought a horse and wagon for getting there and back. All the defeatism of the former years was worked out of her straining, sweating body as she bent and stooped and ached and felt the joy of hard exertion against the earth, defying and prodding it to bear. Umbertina felt strength flow back into her as she worked under the hot sun.
This challenge she could understand: the one that pitted her and Serafino and their arms and craft against the caprices of nature. They had to outwit upstate weather, stay vigilant against weeds and insects, look out for the young shoots. In two summers they expanded the spaccio into the Longobardi groceria, a grocery store. And here, too, she had to concentrate and remember and plan ahead and pay attention when the salesmen called and not let them play tricks on her. She was a sharp questioner and compared prices and had one of the boys read what she couldn’t when necessary. But she could do it. The adversary she could not contend with had been the dark slums of the city.
As she hated waste and had none in her home, so she also could not tolerate stinginess and was an abundant provider to her family. What she and Serafino raised they consumed or conserved for the winter or sold, or even bartered with Mrs. Brown for fresh eggs and milk. Umbertina would nod and smile and say, “Yessa, yessa” to Mrs. Brown when they met, but she would be thinking to herself how ugly American women were—so sharp and angular with thin little faces and pinched noses and lips; she wondered how they gave birth from such bony frames.
She herself had girth; she rounded and billowed beneath her full skirts despite the hard work. She wore no corsets as the other Italian women did, but let herself flow in generous waves of flesh. Two more children, her daughters Pina and Anna, were born in the early years of the store. Her face was still full and round-cheeked and her skin still had the fairness of the people from the Sila. Her cheeks and chin always had a pink tinge to them, and on feast days she dabbed the juice of pomegranate seeds onto her lips to make them redder. Her dark nature turned jovial as the years became good; bitterness drained from her as the visible proof of success accumulated in savings and she laughed heartily, shaking all over while her chin flushed an even deeper pink. She wore her still-dark hair in a pompadour held up with tortoise shell pins and combs, though strands of it kept straggling down so that she was always pushing it back.