The music started when the food had just started making its way to the different mouths and the wine had just started filtering through the different souls at this and other tables. The year is this one, the month is this one, and the day is today. It's tonight. It's the longest running fundraiser in Connecticut. Most people have followed the even for a while. But one couple, I've heard, over there at table number 23, have been coming since the the first time they tried raising money for charity. It was a very different charity back then, a different America, but the guests were still more or less the same, mostly Italian Americans. This couple didn't know each other then, forty two years ago. It was at the second fundraiser that they started talking. It was like in the movies. He was a dashing America-born Italian man still has a bit of an accent inherited from his parents. She was just half, or a bit less. Her father was from the Irish side. They started talking at the bar, and like in the movies, he charmed her, she fell in love almost as soon as he fell in love, and by the third fundraiser they had wedding bands on.
They are playing still more or less the same oldies from Italy from back then. The singer and the live band is having just as much fun as the old timers. Surprisingly, it's the younger people who are too embarrassed to go on the dance floor. But the old folks don't care. And especially not Helen and Joey. They have grand children now, though they aren't here this year, living far far away on the West Coast where there are far fewer Italian-Americans. They are happy here. They come here because it makes them remember their youth. The bar's interior has changed over the decades, but for them, the moment they walk in together, they can see themselves again, sitting there, both so nervous, and yet so hopeful. Decades have passed since then, waves of hope and despair, the usual calamities and joys of life, forty one year since they first met. Their only complaint was having missed each other the year before.
They can't have the sweets their are dishing out later because they are diabetic, but they are grateful that they can eat all this wonderful Italian food that, though is a proud and integral part of their heritage, rarely makes its way to their lives. They live a very American, purely American, life now in a nearby town where most people think Italy has just pasta and pizza. They are still proud that they could understand Italian, though not because of their parents, who refused to Italianize them lest they didn't integrate in their native country, but rather over the years being close to Italians who did speak their Southern dialect with one another, especially the newer immigrants who were much more proud of their mother land than the earlier Italians.
The music is of the right beat, the right loudness, and the right voice is singing like the old stars used to. Helen had her hair done just the day before. It's the typical old lady's hairdo, puffy, to hide the thinness of it. Unlike most ladies of her age on the dance floor, she was extraordinarily thin, but not sickly. While her peers over the years were gorging themselves with pasta and meatballs and everything else fat and starchy, she did her best to keep her youthful slenderness. She worked out just until her bones and joints started causing pain and even then she watched what she was eating. Her husband never complained and always adored her. She couldn't understand why her only daughter, Rosa, had such trouble with men. She always said, "Women these days are too picky for their own good and just too busy to fall in love." Her daughter has managed to divorce twice and is now as lonely as before. Her grandson comes from her eldest son, who works in real estate; she thinks he's the most boring person in the world, but at least she never has to worry about him. He may not adore her wife nearly as much as Joey adores Helen, but boring Benito gets by with life.
The first songs are slow ones, drawing the old, romantic couples to the floor. Helen falls again for the forty-first time in this ballroom into the arms of the aging but still protective embrace of her husband with whom they've gone through so much. When was it that she stopped remembering that long ago he used to beat her. When was it that she stopped remembering that he had stopped bringing her flowers but instead beer home to drink in his own solitude. Or that time when she threatened to go back to her mother. That was a long time ago, and nearly as long, the last time she thought about it. She hardly thinks about the past, which is something her girlfriends do a lot, more and more each day that passes. She enjoys being in Joey's arms. Joey is a short man with skin like prunes but whose color is still that golden olive tone. Old people's spots? Who doesn't have them? She just enjoys being in his arms. She just enjoys the idea that they could make it another year and another and another so that she could keep being in his arms. They don't get to do this any other time. When they go home later, they will just be sleeping in their separate beds just because it's more comfortable. They've been doing this for, "Gosh, I can't remember", she suddenly thinks. She tenses a little at the thought. At this magical moment, once in a year moment, why can't they have it another time? She realizes how much she loves being in the arms of her husband, how much she loves his musky scent that has changed so much over the decades. And yet, when they go home, before going to their different beds, they wouldn't be cuddling, they wouldn't be telling each other something they already know and take granted for. Why not say it? Why not say it now. She surprises him by squeezing his hand a little tighter and looks at him. Her cheeks even wrinklier when she smiles at him, and he smiles back. He recognizes that smile; it's the one they would have when they enter the bar, which they would do later, almost as a ritual. But even at the bar they wouldn't say what she was wondering why they don't say at home or any of the other 364 days of the year. She looks at him more intently, her eyes start to burn with a fire he nearly doesn't recognize. But he does. There's nothing she would do that he doesn't recognize or isn't at least familiar with. He is only surprised when familiar things happen at unfamiliar times.
"I love you, Joey," she said to him as the melody of their song lingers a bit, quiets a bit.
"I always have loved you, Ellie," he said. He is wearing a black suit and a red tie, which drapes over his big tummy he's carried for the past twenty, thirty years.
And they move a little more slowly, and he brings her slender body a little closer to his soft tummy. They didn't say anything to each other then, but they both thought about the same thing, a surprise: for some reason, they no longer feel a need for the ritual, to go in the bar together, to see the image of their first conversation forty one years ago. They'd just keep dancing, even after the night is over, and look forward to remembering things yet to come.
