by Mariya Karimjee
The woman at the rectory told me that the Golden Age Club met every Wednesday for a few at the St Athanasius Catholic School auditorium. I expected a gathering of 15 or 25 people. The room was packed when I walked in. The noise bounced off the wall and echoed around the auditorium.
I was told to look for Rose Lamisela who had been born in Bensonhurst and had spent her life there. Someone pointed me towards a tiny woman in a lime green shirt, her dyed black her pulled back in a matronly bun.
But Rose Lamisela did not want to speak to me. She was too busy playing dealer.
“We’re playing cards,” she said. “If I stopped playing now, the girls would have a fit.” Her partners stared at me in a way that left no doubt that I’d best not interrupt.
I watched a woman stooped over a cane yell about her cake being too stale. I watched another woman looked at the hand she’d been dealt and string together a combination of words that made me blush. I had expected to find loneliness at the weekly meeting of the Golden Age Club. I did. But I found something more.
Four women to let me watch them play Pokeno, a version of Bingo. I asked them how to play.
“Where are you from?” one of the women asked.
“Texas.” I replied.
“They don’t have Pokeno in Texas?” she asked. I shrugged. She looked displeased. After a few minutes they kicked me off their table.
“You ask too many questions” they told me.
I moved to another table. This time, I told them, I just wanted to watch. We began talking about how often they played Pokeno. Amy Principe, told me that all of the women sitting around the table had lost their husbands in the last two years. “This is therapy for us” she explained.
Principe told me that life was different when she was raising a family in Bensonhurst. People didn’t have air conditioning, so they spent time outdoors to cool off. She would sit on the stoop with her children. She knew her neighbors. The woman sitting beside her, Maria Bonacci, agreed.
“On hot summer nights we’d hang out on Tar Beach.” I asked where that was. They began laughing. “Honey,” they told me, “that’s the roof.”
“We were all poor back then” said Principe.
“But we didn’t know that we were poor,” added Bonacci. For a dollar they’d ride the subway to Coney Island, buy a frankfurter and soda from Nathan’s, and ride the subway back.
But these were not the things they missed most about the Bensonhurst they knew when they were young wives and mothers. They got used to living close to their families. Dinner meant 25 or 30 people around the table. But now, Principe says, her kids have moved away. Her daughter lives in Staten Island, and though she visits frequently with her grandchildren, there are no big family dinners every week.
“When we get kids, they’re on loan,” she said. “From there they sprout wings. Years ago, we thought nothing of taking care of our parents. We didn’t think of it as a sacrifice.”
She talks to her children every day on the phone. But, she said, this does not mean that she isn’t lonely.
At another table three women talked about being young in Bensonhurst, years ago. “Make this fast, honey” one of them told me, when I first approached them, but they found themselves sitting for an extra half hour as they remembered riding horses, and ice skating in South Brooklyn. Their names were Anne Alessi, Rose Favacca and Betty Stelafani. The three of them told stories that I suspect only they could truly appreciate about trips they took to Pleasant Acres, a campground Upstate, with their husbands.
They had lived in Bensonhurst for close to 80 years, and they all agreed that everything had changed. It wasn’t just the new immigrants were moving into the houses next door, but rather that their own children hadn’t remained behind.
“I thought they would live here forever,” Alessi said.
Favacca agreed. Her grandson went to college in Florida. He married a girl from out of state, and lives out of state. They recently had a baby, and everyone was coming back for the christening.
“My son’s coming from Arizona,” she said. “My grandson’s coming from Florida.”
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