The Funhouse

butterfly that had never really had a chance to try out its wings. Her hair was dark brown, almost black, so were her large eyes, and there was a natural, rosy tint to her cheeks that perfectly complemented her olive-tone skin. Before marrying Conrad Straker, she had been Ellen Teresa Marie Giavenetto, the daughter of a handsome, Italian-American father and a Madonna-faced, Italian-American mother. Ellen's Mediterranean beauty was not the only quality about her that revealed her heritage, she had a talent for finding joy in small things, an expansive personality, a quick smile, and a warmth that were all quite Italian in nature. She was a woman meant for good times, for parties and dances and gaiety. But in her first twenty years of life, there had not been very much laughter.
        Her childhood was grim.
        Her adolescence was an ordeal.
        Although Joseph Giavenetto, her father, had been a warm, good-hearted man, he had also been meek. He had not been the master of his own home, and he hadn't had a great deal to say about how his daughter ought to be raised. Ellen had not been soothed by her father's gentle humor and quiet love nearly so often as she had been subjected to her mother's fiery, religious zealotry.
        Gina was the power in the Giavenetto house, and it was to her that Ellen had to answer for the slightest impropriety, real or imagined. There were rules, an endless list of them, which were meant to govern Ellen's behavior, and Gina was determined that every rule would be rigidly enforced and strictly obeyed. She intended to see that her daughter grew up to be a very moral, prim, God-fearing woman.
        Gina always had been religious, but after the death of her only son, she became fanatically devout. Anthony, Ellen's brother, died of cancer when he was only seven years old. Ellen was just four at the time, too young to understand what was happening to her brother, but old enough to be aware of his frighteningly swift deterioration. To Gina, that tragedy had been a divine judgment leveled against her. She felt that she had somehow failed to please God, and that He had taken her little boy to punish her. She began going to Mass every morning instead of just on Sundays, and she dragged her little girl with her. She lit a candle for Anthony's soul every day of the week, without fail. At home she read the Bible from cover to cover, over and over again. Often, she forced Ellen to sit and listen to Scripture for hours at a time, even before the girl was old enough to understand what she was hearing. Gina was full of horrible stories about Hell: what it was like, what grisly tortures awaited a sinner down there, how easy it was for a wicked child to end up in that sulphurous place. At night young Ellen's sleep was disturbed by hideous, bloody nightmares based on her mother's gruesome tales of fire and damnation. And as Gina became increasingly religious, she added more rules to the list by which Ellen was expected to live, the tiniest infraction was, according to Gina, one more step taken on the road to Hell.
        Joseph, having yielded all authority to his wife early in their marriage, was not able to exert much control over her even in ordinary times, and when she retreated into her strange world of religious fanaticism, she was so far beyond his reach that he no longer even attempted to influence her decisions. Bewildered by the changes in Gina, unable to cope with the new woman she had become, Joseph spent less and less time at home. He owned a tailor shop-not an extremely prosperous business but a reliably steady one- and he began to work unusually long hours. When he wasn't working he passed more time with his friends than he did with his family, and as a result Ellen was not exposed either to his love or to his fine sense of humor often enough to compensate for the countless, dreary hours during which she existed stoically under her mother's stern, somber, suffocating domination.
        For years Ellen dreamed of the day she would leave home, she looked forward to that escape with every bit as much eagerness as a convict anticipating release from a real prison cell. But now that she was on her own, now that she had been out from under her mother's iron hand for more than a year, her future looked, incredibly, worse than it ever had looked before. Much worse.
        Something tapped on the window screen behind the booth.
        Ellen twisted around, looked up, startled.