My friend June - tall, lithe, smart as a whip and the best forward the girls basketball team had ever had - lived on the east edge of town near the Cambridge line. From the back porch of her neglected triple decker, you could see the lights of the chemical plant and on certain days, if the wind was right, smell it's toxic fumes. From her front door, just across the city line, the neon lights of liquor stores and grimy convenience stores blazed. The first time my daddy dropped me off, he kissed my forehead and gave me a weary smile. Call me if you need a ride, he said to me, No need to have your mother know about this. I almost asked why and then realized that this was not the sort of neighborhood she would approve of nor the sort of friend she would like me to have.
All of June's family - mother and father, four brothers, and her grandparents who spoke only Italian - lived in this near tenement housing together. The rooms were small, well ordered, adorned with religious pictures and dimly lit. Laundry hung on a makeshift clothesline on the shabby back porch and there was always a welcoming smell of garlic in the air. Her daddy, a streetcar conductor and her mother who cleaned office buildings three nights a week, were devout Catholics and it was close knit family - loud, affectionately argumentative and demonstrative - they welcomed me as generously as they had the tiny stray kitten June had rescued one winter night and brought home in her coat pocket. Now, a well fed and prominent member of the family named Arpeggio ( in honor of Maria Callas and the old country, one of the boys told me with a grin ), he twined around my ankles in greeting and purred like a locomotive.
After supper, a massive assembly line affair with warm bread, platters of ravioli, meatballs lathered in rich, red, spicy sauce and a bottle of chianti, all shared around the old wooden kitchen table with multiple and good natured collisions of elbows and knees and a great clatter of silverware and conversation, June and I found a quiet corner and opened our books. The math equations and formulas that I struggled with as if they were a foreign language, came easily to her and while I breezed through the English reading assignments like falling off a log, she kept a dictionary close at hand. Arpeggio joined us and an Italian tenor aria'd in the background - the hours passed and before we knew it, it was almost midnight. It was decided that June's oldest brother, Michael, should drive me home - a call at that hour would almost certainly provoke too many questions from my mother - and in the interests of propriety, June tagged along for the ride. It was the first of many late night study sessions and many amazing suppers, none of which ever caught my mother's attention. Their English may have been less than perfect, their finances less than sterling, their background that of immigrants, but in this crowded and enthusiastic household, everyone understood discretion and intolerance.
After high school, we went our separate ways and as happens, lost touch. I remember hearing that all four boys served in Viet Nam and that only three came home, that June had won a scholarship to a small college in Vermont. After that I heard no more but the memory of those late suppers and that family with little money but all the love in the world, is still clear.
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