Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell Read Free Book Online Page A

that he had promised his wife he would bring dessert home. His instruction to his partner in crime is an entire moral manifesto in six little words: “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”
    I loved Clemenza’s command because of its total lack of ambiguity. I yearned for certainty. I’d been born into rock-solid Christianity, and every year that went by, my faith eroded a little more, so that by the time I got to college I was a recent, and therefore shaky, atheist. Like a lot of once devout people who have lost religion, I had holes the size of heaven and hell in my head and my heart. Once, I had had a god, commandments, faith, the promise of redemption, and a bible, The Bible, which offered an explanation of everything from creation on through to the end of the world. I had slowly but surely replaced the old-fashioned exclamation points of hallelujahs with the question marks of modern life. God was dead and I had whacked him.
    Don Corleone, the Godfather, was not unlike God the father—loving and indulgent one minute, wrathful and judgmental the next. But the only “thou shalt” in the don’s dogma was to honor thy family. He dances with his wife, weeps over his son’s corpse, dies playing in the garden with his grandson, and preaches that “a man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.”
    Don Corleone would not have paid actual money to sit in fluorescent-lit rooms listening to frat boys from Spokane babble on about Descartes, boys in baseball caps whose most sacred philosophical motto could be summarized as “I drink therefore I am.” Don Corleone had no time for mind games and conjecture. I, on the other hand, had nothing but time for such things, probably because I’m a frivolous female: “I spend my life trying not to be careless,” the don tells his son Michael. “Women and children can be careless but not men.”
    The Godfather is a film crammed with rules for living. Don’t bow down to big shots. It’s good when people owe you. This drug business is dangerous. Is vengeance going to bring your son back to you or my boy to me? And then there is the grandeur, the finality, the conviction of the mantra “Never tell anybody outside the family what you’re thinking again.”
    That last one was a rule I myself could follow. Not only did I not tell anyone outside my family what I was thinking, I was pretty tight-lipped with family too. If I was confused about the books I was reading in school, I was equally tormented by my seemingly tranquil life. At twenty-one, I was squandering my youth on hard work and contentment. I had two jobs, got straight A’s. I lived with my boyfriend of three years, a perfectly nice person. We were well suited to the point of boredom, enjoying the same movies, the same music, the same friends. We didn’t argue, which meant we didn’t flirt. I’d always dreamed of The Taming of the Shrew and I was living in—well, they don’t write dramas about young girls who settle for the adventure thatis mutual respect, unless you count thirtysomething, and I already had the same haircut as the wifely actress who smiled politely waiting for her husband to come home to their comfortable house. Thanks largely to the boyfriend’s decency and patience, my parents and I were getting along better than ever. My sister was my best friend. We all lived within ten blocks of each other, one big happy family, frequently convening for get-togethers and meals. Friends clamored for dinner invitations to my parents’ home, acquaintances told the boyfriend and me that we renewed their faith in love, and every time I turned in an essay exam my professors’ eyes lit up. I was a good daughter, a good sister, a good girlfriend, a good student, a good citizen, a responsible employee. I was also antsy, resentful, overworked, and hemmed in.
    Just as I did not divulge my secret