With a view of the parking lot, my mother and I sit in a booth at Chick-fil-A. My father’s in the hospital again. This time for a sore knee precipitated by a staph infection, which found its way into his bloodstream. It’s not the worst kind of staph infection, only the second worst. Lucky us. The worst is resistant to most forms of antibiotics. The second worst targets artificial joints like replaced knees and hips—it likes to settle in amongst all the titanium parts and pins. It likes to enter bones and create fluids that cause my father to yelp in pain. It likes to be susceptible only to select intravenous antibiotics with potential nasty side effects, like rashes and kidney damage. It likes to leave biofilms on the parts and pins and bones, which exponentially increases the chance of recurrence. Recurrence means re-treatment will be exponentially worse.
Though it’s an hour before closing, the crowded counter bustles out orders at a quick clip. I repeatedly hear the canned response “my pleasure” after each customer thanks the cashier. My mother picks at a plain chicken sandwich, extra pickles on the side. I fiddle with a cup of iced tea, taking small sips while scraping my fingernails against the Styrofoam cup until it looks like a miniscule bear mauled it. My thoughts eddy through the required surgical procedures and recurrence percentages quoted to us by the infectious disease doctor. My mother seems similarly disposed.
“It’s the malook,” she says.
Startled out of my thoughts, I stare and don’t respond. In four decades, I’ve never heard my mother say the word malook and, while it seems familiar, it sounds strange coming from her. My mother then tells me she first felt the malook a week prior, in the dentist’s office where she does the weekly bookkeeping. One of the dentists asked too many questions about my father. Now in his seventies, my father has dealt with a variety of illnesses over the past six years—knee replacement, sleep apnea, atrial fibrillation, excruciating migraines—many requiring repeat hospital stays until a diagnosis and treatment was found. This particular dentist peppered my mother with questions about my father’s health, ending with his thoughts on how since; things were going so well she must always be waiting for the other shoe to drop. This is what she says caused the hairs on her neck to prickle.
“The malook,” she says again.
She tells me the malook is Italian-American slang for il malocchio, which is Italian for the evil eye. Her Aunt Josie “had the powers” to tell if someone was under malook influence just by looking deeply into that person’s eyes. She could then remove it with some heavy breathing and finger crosses on the accursed’s forehead, like a priest on Ash Wednesday. I knew my mother was mildly superstitious. She grew up believing in old Italian aphorisms like it’s good luck if it rains on your wedding day or if a bird shits on your head. My mother also grew up flinging Holy Water around the house, especially if it was blessed in Guadalupe, Lourdes, or the Vatican, but what Italian-American Catholic didn’t?
“You don’t say those things to an Italian,” she says speaking of the non-Italian dentist who had inadvertently malook-ed.
A quick phone search on the malook revealed envy, intentional or not, to be the main cause of il malocchio. In case of the dentist, he’s over eighty and single after two failed marriages while my parents recently celebrated their forty-fifth wedding anniversary. At the weddings of other co-workers’ daughters, he’s seen how my mother laughs at my father’s cheesy jokes. He’s seen the delicate way my father takes her hand when they dance.
My mother’s Chik-fil-A-malook-declaration shouldn’t surprise me. In 2014, to celebrate my fortieth birthday, I took her on a ten-day tour of Italy. When talking about the trip, my mother said either, “We’re going to Italy,” or, “I’m going to Italy with my daughter.” To a very select few did she say, “My daughter is taking me to Italy.” A subtle difference until I now think about it in malook terms. The first two statements imply a shared vacation with shared expenses. Move it along folks, nothing to see here. The last has subtext. “My daughter has/makes enough money to pay for me to go on a trip to Italy.” This could be seen as bragging. This could invite in il malocchio. This is why she only told her closest friends.
The fourth day of the trip, on the way to Florence from Rome, the tour bus stopped for a few hours at the Basilica di San Francesco in Assisi. The Lower Church of the Basilica contains a centuries-old crypt said to hold the remains of St. Francis. It’s a simple resting place, barren of any elaborate decoration, save an abundance of burning white tapers regularly lit and replaced by the Franciscan friars. We walked down a small aisle separating rows of wooden chairs, each side filled with supplicants bent in wordless prayer. As the brown-robed friars gently and silently ushered us single-file around the crypt, a seated man suddenly cried out “Aiutami, San Francesco!” Help me, St. Francis.
We all believe in something. Our brains are biologically hardwired to seek out patterns and make connections, and our brains ramp up this connection effort to find order in scary random occurrences. It’s a survival technique we can’t shake. Stomach virus? Blame it on the last thing you ate. Common cold? Blame it on the last person you were near. Husband in the hospital with the second worst staph infection in existence? Blame it on an Italian curse accidentally invoked by a dentist who asked too many questions.
When people hear about my father’s latest hospital stay most of them say, “I’ll pray for him/you.” I usually respond with the requisite politeness of a smile and a nod, sometimes a “thank you.” Whether or not they actually do pray for us I don’t know, but it’s a sentiment that goes back to those pesky ancestral survival techniques. The world became a much less frightening place with the belief that someone or something created it just for us. Things beyond our knowledge or control—illness, life, death—now had an answer and a reason. Maybe that’s why the eighty-plus-year-old dentist who inadvertently malook-ed recently became a Catholic after his addict son died from a drug overdose. Maybe that’s why my mother asks her neighbor to include my father in a prayer circle each hospital stay, while also believing in curses and old-wives-tales about rain and birds. Maybe that’s why an elderly Italian man shouted his anguish in an ancient crypt.
My senior year of college I became obsessed with the numbers thirteen and fourteen. Thirteen was bad luck. Fourteen was good luck. It started when my casual glance at the digital VCR clock showed a time ending in “xx:13” p.m. as I worked on a presentation for my class in Inventory Production Lifecycles. The next time I checked the clock it happened to be exactly one hour later at “xx:13′ p.m. I found it weird. It happened again. I found it weirder. And again. Weirder still. I went back to working on my presentation and tried to dismiss it as coincidence. But every day after whenever I looked at a clock, it was “xx:13” followed by a fluttering of dread deep in my stomach.
The day of the presentation, my assigned partner stood next to me holding an index card containing two written sentences. I began to sweat and feel warm, a signal my face was turning an unappealing shade of magenta. I stood in front of twelve bored classmates. Inventory Production Lifecycles was stagnant enough without my fifty-minute presentation regurgitating the same talking points over and over. My note cards crinkled in my sweaty hands as I flipped from one to another, painfully aware I was going too fast. In desperation, I resorted to lifting sentences and passages straight out of the open textbook in front of me. In the end, I managed to stretch twenty-five minutes of prepared materials into thirty or thirty-five max. When cramming my notes and poster board into my backpack, I thought back to the thirteens. The constant deluge over the previous days. The deep dread in my stomach. And something clicked. It hadn’t been just weird. It was a sign. A sign I had willfully ignored.
I couldn’t stop thinking about “the thirteens” as I trudged across campus after class to my dorm. I thought of them as I descended the front stairs of the Business Admin building to the main quad. I thought of them as I passed by the library and the dining hall. I thought of them hours later when I finally fell asleep, still in my clothes, consumed by my ineptitude in not picking up on the sign. Thirteens. Thirteens. Thirteens.
When I left for morning classes the next day, the digital VCR clock showed xx:14 a.m. Finally, a reprieve. My focus on the prior day’s presentation began to wane. In the same building, I ran into my professor from the day before. He pulled me aside in the hallway and, while I roasted in my heavy winter coat, told me it was obvious my partner flaked. He was giving me an A and flunking her. Afterward, I darted into the ladies room. Once inside a stall, I stripped off all my winter gear, leaned my hot forehead against the cool metal of the door, and grinned until my cheeks hurt. It was the fourteen. It had to be another sign. This one I wasn’t going to ignore.
That was the first time I thought fourteens were a harbinger of good things to come.
And so, a belief cycle was born which in turn became a series of secret rituals. If there was a thirteen, I had to find a fourteen immediately to cancel out any potential bad juju. If I couldn’t find a fourteen then I knew I was fucked. If a clock was xx:13, I had to look away until it was xx:14 and then stare intently for those sixty seconds until the clock changed to xx:15. I persistently counted, searched, avoided. It didn’t matter how trivial the result or any evidence to the contrary, my brain rationalized anything and everything in my life to either a thirteen or a fourteen. Stubbed toes. Found money. Lost pens. Good grades. If I had a fight with my long-distance boyfriend. If I had fun out a bar with my friends.
At the time, I didn’t connect that my intense belief in “the thirteens” was accompanied by other behaviors. Sleeping less. Crying more. Eating less. Drinking more. It would take years for me to learn that noticing thirteens wasn’t a manifestation of impending bad luck, but instead a very real indication of an impending major depressive episode. It would also take years for me to wear a watch again.
I sometimes still struggle with “signs” as they were once such an ingrained part of my daily living. The digital age sorely tries me on my most vulnerable days. Especially as clocks are seemingly everywhere—phones, tablets, laptops, kitchen appliances, cars.
About a year ago, my father was hospitalized due to an unidentifiable illness consisting of shortness of breath and floating orange orbs on the edges of his field of vision—two things that usually don’t happen at the same time according to docs. I mentioned to a good friend, who’s witnessed most of my mental health struggles, that I had known something bad was coming because I had seen thirteens the entire week. After I explained my rationale behind thirteens and fourteens, she didn’t say anything, but the look on her face suggested that maybe I was a little nuttier than she ever thought.
“It’s stupid, I know,” I said to make her feel better.
After my experiences with “the thirteens,” I can understand why my mother needs and wants to believe that my father’s latest illness is due to an Italian curse. Blaming an invisible malevolent entity makes it easier to get through yet another round of hospital roulette with its bitter stench of sickness and antiseptic. It distracts from the constant roster of doctors, nurses, and aides carrying clipboards and taking vitals whose names we finally remember just before they are replaced. It distracts from aging bodies and how my father’s generation is the first in his family to make it to seventy, let alone pass it. It distracts from the inevitability of death, and the realization that a husband who has witnessed more than half her life will most likely die before her (Aiutami, San Francesco).
My mother is still picking at her Chik-fil-A chicken sandwich and pickles as I continue to scroll through a Google search for malook on my phone. I say her only recourse to de-malook is a ritual using a bowl of water, three drops of olive oil, and a pair of scissors. Now she’s the one staring. When she finally finishes her sandwich, we stay seated in the booth so I can choke down the remainder of my iced tea. I briefly mention “the thirteens” and how when I consistently notice the number thirteen bad things seem to follow. My mother asks if I’ve seen them before my father has gone in for any of his hospital stays, and I tell her yes.
“I believe it,” she says.
And for once, I don’t feel so crazy after all.