All the Silent Spaces

by Christine Ristaino

  “Come on, Sam,” I say. “We’re late.” I carry him to the car and place him in his booster.

  Now where’s Ada? I look around. She’s picking flowers. “Come on, Ada,” I yell. I strap her into the car. We’re off.

  When we arrive home after aikido, my husband is outside talking with our neighbor, who has locked himself out of his house. He’s going to try a few things, but if he can’t get in, Mark and I decide we’ll invite him over for dinner. The living room and kitchen are a mess, toys everywhere, crayons all over the table, toilet paper wrapped around every piece of furniture by Sam.

  “Ada, Sam,” I say, “please can you help Mom and Dad clean the living room?”

  Neither child moves.

  “Come on,” I say. “We need your help.”

  “I’m not helping,” Ada announces.

  “Ada, Mom and Dad help you all the time. We’re not asking for much. Most of this is your and Sam’s mess.”

  “It’s not,” Ada says.

  “Yes, it is,” I say.

  I begin to rail about my children to my husband in front of them. “They have been like this all day. I don’t know what to do with them.”

  “Kids, if you’re not going to help us, then you need to go upstairs to your rooms,” Mark says.

  Both children march upstairs.

  Five minutes later Samuel returns. “Mom, I’ll help,” he says. “Ada won’t because she’s running away.”

  “She is?”

  “Yes. What should we do?”

  “I don’t know, Sam. Hopefully she won’t run away. I’ll really miss her,” I say.

  I go outside to invite my neighbor over for dinner. As I’m talking with him, I watch my daughter slip barefoot past me and begin to walk down the street.

  “Ada,” I say. “Are you going to run away?”

  “I’m running away now,” she responds.

  I walk behind her and we almost make it to the end of the street. It’s hot and humid outside, we’re both sweating, and Ada steps on a small piece of glass. She lifts her foot gingerly and looks at me, her mouth open and eyes wide. I carry her back. We use tweezers to pull out the glass and Ada screams the whole time. We eat dinner late, seven thirty, without my neighbor, who is by now safely inside his own home. Then it’s time for bed. Mark leads the children upstairs and I begin to clear the table, but when I look up, Ada is standing in front of me, tears sliding down her face.

  “I had a terrible day,” she says.

  “I know,” I say. “We both did, didn’t we?”

  “I can’t stop feeling sad,” Ada says.

  “I’m sorry,” I say and I take her into my arms. I sit on the couch and rock her. “I’m the luckiest mom,” I tell her. She continues to cry.

  “Mom, I feel like the little girl in room 205.”

  Room 205. I know the number is significant, but I can’t remember where I’ve heard it before. Then I remember. It’s a book Ada took out of the library that talks about a girl whose relative had put his hands in her pants.

  I steer Ada’s face toward mine and look into her eyes. I can barely breathe. Finally, I am able to get the words out. “Tell me why you feel like that little girl,” I whisper.

  “Because it says she feels alone and quiet,” she says.

  “Did anyone touch you like they touched that girl?” I ask.

  “No, Mommy. But I keep thinking, what if I ran away and you didn’t chase me? It’s dark now and I would be all alone and then I would worry about the wolves hurting me. When I think of that, I feel like the girl in the book.”

  “It’s okay, darling. You’re here with me. I did see you. You’re home now.”

  “But what if you didn’t see me?”

  “But I did,” I say.

  Retrogression 13:

  September 15, 2007, 10:15 p.m.

  Children wind around my legs, nourished by neon liquid sugar. My husband calls to them and takes their hands. My children jump from foot to foot. They talk, drink, dribble, spill their blood-red juice onto my husband’s tired feet.

  Chapter 13:

  Grandma, Wendy, and Anne

  I love the way I feel after my students take a test. Following a week of review and questions, nobody knocks on my door and it’s calm. This is what it’s been like lately—as though the test is over and I can relax.

  My grandmother died at ninety-six. The day it happened, a nurse called my mother, who arrived quickly and, eyes locked with my grandmother’s, talked her into the afterlife. After an hour, my grandmother closed her eyes for the last time and my mother sobbed into the arms of the Jamaican nurse who had been caring for my grandmother for four years.

  My mother asks me to write the eulogy for my grandmother, and so I begin writing about a woman whose decisions were at times controversial. She was the wife of an alcoholic and had to work full time at a diner to support her family. She made broomstick skirts for her daughters and beautiful hats. She would periodically pack up the rat-infested apartment where her family lived and move while my grandfather was at the bar, only to find him at her doorstep a few weeks later, begging to be taken back. When my grandmother moved her three daughters to Texas years later, she finally made a permanent break from my grandfather and then took on a series of men friends well into her eighties. At her daughters’ request, I don’t talk about this part of my grandmother’s life in her eulogy. Instead I focus on how she had stepped in as a mother figure when her own daughter, my mother, was ill.

  As a teen, I was awkward and shy. It was not that I didn’t know how to talk to others, but more that I didn’t even realize I should talk to them. Throughout my childhood, I was more likely to observe rather than participate. I often sat on my grandmother’s lap at the table and soaked in the conversations around me.

  One Christmas, my cousin took me to a party at her friend’s house. The room was filled with high school juniors who were two years older than me. Because I didn’t know them, I sat and listened as everyone talked, and conversations circled around me. At one point the room became silent while a girl spoke about violence she had experienced in a van. She laughed uncomfortably as she talked about it, and everyone remained quiet, as intent on listening as I had been the whole night. Her words floated by me, making very little sense until Wendy explained to me later that the girl had been raped. Wendy told my aunt I hadn’t spoken at the party, and this information trickled over to my mother, who awkwardly and sweetly tried to cultivate my social skills.

  At fourteen, the year of Wendy’s party, I was completely lost in the day-to-day activities of bringing up children. I had become proficient at this job at age eight and raising children was something I did well. In third grade, in a picture book about myself, I wrote that my favorite food was spaghetti and my favorite thing to do involved “touching Milo,” an innocent reference to a motherly instinct that had kicked in early, in second grade, the day my mother brought Milo home from the hospital and I began rocking him in the old rocking chair. By the time Zach arrived, I was almost fourteen and my mother fell silently into a depression that would last a number of years.

  When my parents married, my mother quit her job to be a stay-at-home mom, a decision they felt strongly would be worth any material sacrifices they would have to make along the way. Fortunately for us, even on those days when we seemed to have little in our refrigerator, our parents found a way to pull together delicious home-cooked meals. My mother’s creative sewing skills provided us with clothes to brave all four seasons. Although at times we complained we didn’t have what we wanted, we always had what we needed. More importantly, we knew we were loved.

  By the time I was fourteen, there were five children in our house. My grandmother often appeared at just the right time. She placed cookies on the table, and as soon as she had removed the plastic wrap from the dish, my brothers and I devoured them. During these visits, grandma talked quietly. “We have to do something. She doesn’t talk. We never know what she’s thinking. She’s so shy.
”

  When a black girl named Anne started tormenting me at swim classes, my grandmother began to show up to lessons. During class, my grandmother witnessed Anne yank a ribbon that held my hair back and throw it in the pool for “no apparent reason.”

  “She hates me, Grandma,” I said.

  Anne was an only child and I often thought she might be lonely. During class, she usually offered to help me do flip turns. She would stand and wait for me to swim toward her, and, instead of helping me, as soon as I reached the wall, she would push me as hard as she could, wildly, in different directions.

  My shyness and inability to stand up for myself, combined with a lack of the right kind of shoes, clothes, and accessories my classmates all seemed to have, led to long, uncomfortable days at school where minutes were hours. My mother turned to my grandmother for help, sending me to stay with her overnight on weekends. This was how they saved me. Grandma didn’t spend her days making spaghetti sauce from scratch, as did most of my Italian relatives. She bought it ready in a jar. We would eat store-bought raviolis and have long discussions, watch soap operas and baseball, and talk about her friends, all ladies in their sixties who caused her headaches and unthinkable inconveniences on numerous occasions. Watching her, I began to understand how to laugh easily, flirt, smile, and put an arm around a friend.

  By the middle of my junior year in high school, I had become socialized. I learned it was okay, even necessary, to talk to people, and I became decent at it, even began to enjoy it. I had my first boyfriend. I cried as my parents and I drove away from my childhood home one fall day, my college bags piled into the trunk.

  When writing my grandmother’s eulogy, I begin to understand my childhood on a new level. Suddenly I am not sure whose isolation I am still feeling, my own or that of countless others who in some way or other feel different. As I try to recall the faces and situations of my classmates, Anne comes to mind. I stop what I am doing and find her company website online. She is a beautiful woman and her hair is wild and personable. A well of unspoken conversations move from a knot in my stomach, through my veins, and circulate in my mind, finally free. Was it hard to be one of the few black girls in our school? How could I have better understood her? What could I have done differently? Could we have earned each other’s respect? How? There is a phone number on the web page, and I have a desire to call Anne and ask her these questions, but I don’t.

  Retrogression 14:

  September 15, 2007, 10:12 p.m.

  Ada and Samuel climb all over me and the plastic chairs at the store. The security guard gives me his card. We walk out the door and pass the bench where the attacker had been sitting only a few hours before.

  Chapter 14:

  Italian Americans and American Italians

  A colleague of mine describes an experience that occurred in her classroom. “A student on the first day of his beginning Italian course walked into my class and proclaimed, ‘I’m Italian.’ I’ve never understood this. What right does he have to say he’s Italian when he doesn’t even speak a word of it?”

  I think back to my childhood. As an Italian American, I was told by my mother, father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, great-aunts, great-uncles, cousins, and my great-grandmother, that I was Italian and it was something to be proud of.

  I motion for Antonia to sit. We have talked about this before, but I share my point of view once again. “When you are told over and over again that you are Italian, you believe it. It becomes part of your identity,” I say.

  “But you are living in the United States,” she responds. “Isn’t it obvious you are from here and not there? What right do Italian Americans have to call themselves Italians given most of them only know about an Italy that existed years ago?”

  “But this history is part of the identity Italian American families hand to their children when they are young. Their children feel Italian,” I say.

  Antonia thinks for a moment. “But how can they feel Italian when they’ve never been there? How can they feel Italian when they don’t even understand the language? I don’t understand!” she finally says. “And I told my student this.”

  I laugh. “I hear you,” I tell her. “But you’re challenging his identity. You need to let your students down easily. From experience I can tell you, it’s a shock.”

  As the daughter of two third-generation Italian Americans, I witnessed the struggle of Italian immigrants and their children firsthand. My great-grandparents were originally from Campania, in towns near Naples. Bernardino Lombardi, Maria Fidele Marinaccio, Carlo Ristaino, and Carolina Peppucci arrived with their families from Savignano di Puglia and Chiusano San Domenico in the late 1800s. They settled in Milford and Franklin, Massachusetts, quickly built homes, had families, and worked hard—my great-grandfathers building bridges and dams, my great-grandmothers running the family households.

  To survive in the New World, my great-grandparents passed on their work ethic and love for family to my grandparents and then on to my parents. My father’s identity wholeheartedly embraces his family—to talk about him without discussing his wife and children is nearly impossible, and the success or failure of his five children has everything to do with how well the family is doing and how he is feeling about himself.

  “Do you want to know who I am?” he once asked. “Look at my children. That’s who I am.”

  Every day of my childhood, I was reminded in some way (spoken or unspoken) of that magical land across the ocean my great-grandparents had left behind. All my relatives considered themselves Italian and said they were Italian. We made our own raviolis, homemade pasta, three-day sauce. We gathered every Sunday, ate, laughed, and drank together. I was convinced this was the way Italians behaved.

  I was not curious about Italian culture when I went to Italy for the first time. I thought I knew all about it. But I wanted to experience my Italian origins in their purest, cold-pressed form. I was shocked when I heard from the Italians that I was not Italian. During my six-month stay in Italy, I began to wonder who I was. Often, people would pull their children closer to them when I walked by.

  “Why are people afraid of me here?” I asked the family I was staying with.

  “They think you’re a gypsy,” the mom said.

  It was true. I had brought my best flowered skirts with me to wear in the hot Roman sun, and with my curly hair, I did resemble a gypsy.

  I saw that Italian women knew how to dress well and were also aware of social rules I had never been exposed to before. I discovered most Italians now make a twenty-minute sauce and buy pasta from the store.

  “You’re more Italian than the Italians,” one man said to me in Italy after having learned my family makes its own pasta from a flour and water base.

  Antonia has a change of heart following a visit to Italy. “It has not been an easy transition,” she tells me, “leaving Italy and moving here. I constantly feel torn. I often wonder where I belong. Sometimes I don’t know who I am anymore. I feel Italian and yet when I go to Italy, I cannot accept the mindset that keeps us tied to a status quo. In America I have learned to dream big and expect rewards for my hard work. I am free to be who I want, and my friends and family tell me I’ve become American. Italy is changing. So am I. But the Italian Americans have always wanted Italy to remain the same, to be that mythical land their parents and grandparents created for them. I know Italy is changing. Every time I return, I see it, and part of me wishes it wouldn’t. I guess I have more in common with the Italian Americans than I initially imagined.”

  I think back to a day during my first weeks in Italy, when everything had gone wrong. I had wandered the streets of Rome, trying to clear my head, and found myself in a luggage store in search of a small bag.

  “You can’t buy here,” the owner had told me. “This is not your type of store,” he said, pointing to the door.

  It was a few weeks into my first semester abroad in Rome, and I was wearing a flowered skirt, my curls falling against my neck. I left the
store in tears, walking down ancient streets, feeling the weight of a history I didn’t fully understand.

  A woman touched my shoulder. “Americana?” she asked.

  “Sì,” I replied.

  “America,” she said and smiled, handing me a tissue.

  Retrogression 15:

  September 15, 2007, 10:11 p.m.

  We finish our discussion with police officers and security. They look at me, warn me, “Change the locks when you return home. When a purse is stolen, they often come to your house to rob you again.” The store manager gives my children Hi-C in red plastic cups.

  Chapter 15:

  Barbs

  Here is the other side of my family. We throw barbs at each other sometimes. It’s great fun. We all love it, except my mom. To soften the game, my mother gushes and is overly kind. My family loves to laugh and joke, but occasionally the darts we throw stick where they shouldn’t and aren’t easily brushed away.

  We are all vacationing at my parents’ house in Maine. My brothers arrive on a Saturday, full of goodwill, with a Chuck-O beanbag game, beer, scotch, computers, iPods, and toys for my children. The beanbag game is a blast, but I’m terrible at it. No matter who I’m paired up with, we lose. Advice is shared. The jokes begin.

  “Maybe you should try holding the whole bag in your hand rather than using just the edge,” George wonders.

  “Maybe you should get a new partner,” Ernie advises him instead, chuckling to himself.

  “I heard that,” I say.

  Later my father comments, “I’m noticing a pattern here. Whatever team Christine is on loses.”

  I hold it together for the rest of the game, but my father’s comment hurts even though it wasn’t meant to. I’m sure he’s trying in his own way to reach me, get me to react, be more comfortable at our family gatherings. When I go inside, Ada is upstairs and won’t come down. She’s had a fight with her brother and doesn’t want to talk.