John Woman

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Lucia Napoli’s family name had been Tartarelli before her great-grandfather migrated from Naples to the Lower East Side. No one was certain how the name got changed. Lucia’s Aunt Maria said it was a drunken Irish customs officer on Ellis Island who mistook their origins for their name. Lucia’s great-uncle Christopher said his father, Alesio, introduced himself as Alesio from Napoli so often that the name stuck.

Lucia didn’t care where Napoli came from. It sounded better than Tartarelli. There were pastries and breasts and something flip in the sound. She liked the way it brought her lips together. “Like a kiss,” she once told her girlfriends after her part-time shift as a filing clerk at Household Insurance Company. The neighborhood girls would go to smoke cigarettes and drink bitter Chinotto sodas at Uno, a little coffee shop on the Lower East Side patronized mostly by young students from NYU and old Italians from the mob.

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