How can I still be embarrassed by something that happened when I was 15 years old? Recently the Italian word for laundry bleach, biancolino, literally “white linen”, appeared in the captions on a cooking show, where a pleasant old lady was reminiscing about growing up in Little Italy and how the biancolino (pronounced bee-yung-go-LEEN) man would come to your house with his gallon bottles.
I remembered being sent to Cucinotta’s grocery store by my German-English mother to get a bottle of “buy-anka-leena”, her pronunciation of the label pasted over her empty Coca-Cola Syrup makeshift bleach bottle, then eventually having to point to one, and Dolores laughing and laughing and showing her white teeth.
Everyone said Dolores looked like Pier Angeli, shown here. /courtesy livejournal.com
Writing a few days ago about Mary Ann, the first girl I ever asked out on a date, got me to thinking about Dolores, the second.
Dolores was Vince’s daughter, and ran the cash register in the family store on days she wasn’t in school. She was fun to talk to, but really out of my league. She was two years older, a lot when you’re 15 or 16. She lived all the way up in Livingston. She had a boyfriend with a car, a silly, absurd lilac-colored convertible.
She was beautiful, but unlike a lot of girls, she never acted like she knew it. An exception was made for a Fourth-of-July Festival beauty contest that her friends convinced her to enter. She won second place. First place went to the mayor’s daughter.
My crush only got worse the day she laughed at my comical mangling of the Italian word for laundry bleach.
A year later, we were in the store talking and I asked if she’d like to go bowling with me some time. She said yes, and next Saturday afternoon we met at her aunt’s house, a block from the store. We walked up High Street and then over Main to the Palladium.
She was wearing shorts, not short-shorts, just regular ones that come halfway down the thigh, all just normal clothes a girl would wear to go bowling. Still, she was hard not to stare at, and people did take notice. Each time she got up to bowl it was like everything slowed down around her. For me, anyway.
I still worked part-time setting up pins at the Palladium, so a few of my colleagues found a minute to come up out of the pits to say hello, but mainly to get a better look at Dolores.
When we got back to her aunt’s house, we had a sweet goodnight kiss, one I still remember.
A few weeks later, she invited me for dinner at her aunt’s. That was the first time I ever had a real Italian meal. I stuffed myself on the strange, never-before-seen appetizers and barely had room to sample the later courses. Through the meal, her aunt and the other female relatives kept encouraging me to eat, eat, eat. That meal was one of the life events that made me wish I’d been born Italian.
That dinner turned out to be the last time I ever saw Dolores. A few months later I had my first car, a clerk job in the next town, and a new circle of friends. Someone said she went off to college; I don’t know what happened in her life after that. I think of her and her family often. I tried looking for her name online, but no luck.
In his poem Woolworth’s, 1954 Raymond Carver recalls his youth as a stockboy, and lists the girls he went with then, “All those girls. Grownup now. Or worse.” Maybe I’m like him, and I don’t really want to know.
