John Donato got out of the cab and looked at the simple house that he had called home for all of his 18 years until going off to college last fall. The house looked smaller, in fact the whole neighborhood looked smaller than it had a few months ago.
That was a product of spending time in Denver and then coming home to little old Troy, New York, a old industrial town no match for a major city in any way except in his heart. John had gone to school out there, because of a scholarship he won, but he was home here.
In the house was Mom, the love of John's life. Her husband, John's father, had died too young, leaving Mary Donato all alone. John didn't want to go to school so far away from his mother, but as she told him, the opportunity was too good to pass up.
So he left Mom behind, all alone in the house built for 3. Mary Donato worked at a dry cleaners nearby and then went home, ate, slept and went back to work. That's the way working class people did things. She would be home now though, John knew, but she would be surprised to see him because he wasn't expected until next week.
When he slipped in the house, Mom was at the stove making soup and humming some tune that John didn't know, probably one by Jerry Vale or Mario Lanza or some other guy John wasn't familiar with, and his heart skipped a beat when she saw her wearing one of her old house-dresses, one of the sleeveless ones that showcased her beautifully shaped arms, which were slightly plump but still nicely toned with the bronze tone of her skin reflecting her Italian heritage.
John coughed, making his mother jump, but when she saw him she screamed out and ran to him, crying and carrying on like she always did when she got excited. After about 5 minutes she finally calmed down enough to sit at the table a talk to her son, grilling him about school and college, and even though the talked every week on the phone, she needed to hear it all again.
As John looked as his mother carrying on, all he could think was how much he loved her. Loved her like a son loves his mother and also in another way. A way that, if she knew, would probably make her faint or worse.
What would she think if he knew that if her son had a choice to go to bed with any woman in the world, he would choose her? He had gone to bed with 3 girls in his life so far, and they were nice enough in their own ways but they all had the same flaw. They weren't Mom.
***
"So Johnny," my Mom said after giving me the third degree about school and making sure that I was indeed hitting the books as hard as I had promised. "You still have that girlfriend out there? The one you told me about?"
"Uh - no," I said. "Didn't work out."
"You know that Teresa Benvenuti - she's still around," Mom said.
"Over and done," I said about a past flame who had been my second lover. "Her father is still alive, isn't he? He's a widower. Why don't you get together with him?"
"Ah, my time has come and gone," Mom said. "I'm happy as I am."
I doubted that, I thought as I looked over the table at my mother, who was pushing 50 but still looked nice to me. A little bit chubby, I supposed, but not certainly not fat, and a hell of a figure.
"I remember that dress," I said, referring to the green and red striped house dress that I recalled her wearing several years ago but had disappeared. "I thought you must have thrown it out."
"Probably should, but I didn't think anybody would be seeing me here today," Mom said. "Little snug. Maybe I'll dump it after today."
"No, don't," I said. "I love it. You look sexy in it."
"Oh, you kidder," Mom scoffed.
"I'm serious," I said. "I always told you that you look nice in dresses without sleeves. You've got sexy arms and you used to wear things like that all the time, but then you stopped."
"That's when your father was still around," Mom said. "I wore them for him. After he passed - eh - between that and your friends..."
"My friends? What about my friends?"
"Let's not get into that," Mom said. "When does soccer start?"
"Forget soccer. What were you talking about?"
"I know how they used to tease you about me," Mom said, and when I started to protest she cut me off. "The names they used to call me, and then the one time I heard you got in a fight over it."
"What - you mean?" I said, finally realizing what Mom was talking about. "Oh, that asshole?"
"Johnny! The mouth."
"Sorry but he was," I responded. "Gene Savoca was an idiot. Why would you care what somebody like that thought?"
"Him? No, I didn't care about what some snot-nosed kid thought, but I didn't want you to get harassed over it," Mom said. "Besides, I did it for your father because he liked me that way."
What Mom was talking about was was the fact that unlike most of the women in the neighborhood, my mother didn't shave her armpits. Even though this was an Italian part of the city, most of the women had adopted the ways of this country by 1966, and one of the rituals involved women removing the hair from their legs and under their arms.
My Mom didn't, even though she was born in this country, arriving when she was 3, but I didn't know that my father was the reason. That might account for the fact that it turned me on as well. Used to, and still did. I wasn't the only one because my friend Tony Lanni admitted to me once that he thought Gene Savoca was an idiot and besides, he used to masturbate thinking about my Mom and her armpits. Join the club, I could have told him.
Anyway, this moron Gene Savoca, who didn't like me any more than I liked him, used to bug me about Mom's armpit hair. A couple other guys made cracks once or twice but then let it go. Not Gene. He kept going, calling her Hairy Mary and telling me that my mother looked like she had Cassius Clay in a headlock, so one day I popped him one in the mouth even though he was bigger than me.
