Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family

by Louise DeSalvo

  "Two women in the same kitchen," my mother says. "Dear God, why have you done this to me?"

  When we first move to Ridgefield, before my grandmother comes, there is not another Italian in sight, which pleases my mother. She is moving up in the world. Away from the coal stove, the icebox, the four flights of stairs, the shared toilet, the washing of clothes in the kitchen sink, her stepmother's relatives, whom she detests for their coarseness.

  Now my mother is away from the old ways, away from the dimly lit, cold-water tenement where she struggled up the stairs with two children and a stroller and groceries. She is away from the smell of other people's cooking, away from the old men playing pinochle on the folding table on the sidewalk. For a while, until my grandmother comes, my mother seems happy enough, though the loss of her father still propels her into a wordless, noiseless grief that takes her to some other place.

  But now my mother has a new gas stove in the kitchen that she doesn't have to load with coal, or stoke, or wait for as it heats. She runs her fingers over her stove like a woman teasing a lover. She can't believe the magic of this stove. She walks into the kitchen. Turns the burners on and off. On and off. She is mesmerized by the flame and by her good fortune, though she will never use the oven in this stove.

  Now my mother has an electric refrigerator that doesn't need huge blocks of ice that melt onto the floor. This one has a freezer compartment and shelves and bins for fruits and vegetables. Now my mother has cupboards so she doesn't have to shop every day like she did in Hoboken. Now my father can drive her to the supermarket at the bottom of the hill so she can stock up on the canned goods that will free her from the drudgery of making meals.

  My father, with his passion for gadgets and for fixing things, buys, secondhand, a toaster, a waffle iron, and a little electric griddle for my mother's kitchen. He takes them to his basement workshop, tinkers with them evenings after supper. While he works, we hear, "Shit," "God damn it to hell," "Jesus Christ Almighty." We know the work isn't going well. We know the broken machine is not yielding its secrets.

  So the pop-up toaster never pops up. The waffle iron browns on only one side. The red light on the griddle comes on when it chooses to, not when the griddle is ready. And because my parents are frugal, these renegade appliances are never replaced: they are on my mother's countertops when she dies.

  My parents buy a run-down Victorian. But in it, they want to create a "modern" home. What the old house, with its wood moldings, parquet floors, arched doorways, and sleeping porches wanted, I suspect, was to be understood, respected, rehabilitated. But my parents have other plans.

  They rip moldings off walls and throw them into the furnace. Cover wooden floors with rose wall-to-wall carpeting. Refit the wood stairway with sensible linoleum. Straighten the arched doorways. Rip doors with glass panes off their hinges—" Too hard to keep clean," my mother says. Paint the green glass tile surround of the fireplace with white semigloss. Enclose the upstairs sleeping porch for a study for me. Enclose the porch downstairs to make a room (it later houses a television) where my father spends much of his free time.

  Instead of huge windows swinging out to invite the air, my father installs picture windows that don't open. The room pays my parents back for their desecration: it's asphyxiating in summer, bone-chilling in winter. Still, my father sits in it. But alone. No one else can stand it.

  My grandmother moves to Ridgefield to live with us, reluctantly, a short time after my grandfather dies. She wears only black. She has entered a widowhood that lasts until her death, mourning a man she didn't love, a man who never loved her.

  Her relatives don't want her. She has no place to go, and she can't afford to keep herself in Hoboken. She doesn't have much money. My grandfather's pension has gone to my mother. And my mother doesn't give any of it to my grandmother. Which makes my grandmother dependent upon my parents' generosity.

  It never occurs to my mother to turn over the money to my grandmother so she can live alone. She believes that she is entitled to the money and my grandmother is not, though because my mother has it and my grandmother does not, the stepmother my mother hates lives with her.

  The life my grandmother desires is among her people in Hoboken, close to the shops where she can buy the foods she loves.

  Once, several years after she moves in with us, at my father's urging, my mother relents. Gives my grandmother a small allowance for rent and food. But the place my grandmother can afford in Hoboken terrifies her. It is at the edge of town, in the projects. Police sirens blare; searchlights rake the windows. Gangs of teenage thugs scuttle up and down the stairs all night, shouting obscenities, banging on walls. She is ridiculed, taunted, threatened.

  My grandmother sleeps with a knife under her pillow, a tower of pots and pans stacked against the front door, which is secured with two deadbolts. She lasts less than a month. Even Ridgefield, and life in my mother's house is better than this. My mother never lets her forget that she once tried to live alone. And that she failed.

  My grandmother has always had very little, for she and my grandfather were very poor. And of the little she has, she hasn't taken much with her. A rolling pin, fashioned by my grandfather from a broom handle. A colander for draining pasta, and a handmade fluted wheel to cut ravioli— both bought with money sent her by my grandfather and brought to America when she came as a mail-order bride. Her bedroom set, bought by my grandfather when he married his first wife. A kitchen chair she positions next to the window in her bedroom to mourn in, to knit in. A gigantic cross with a crucified Jesus dripping blood to hang over her bed. A reclining statue of Jesus taken down from the cross, oozing blood from open wounds. A standing Virgin covered by a glass bell. Two sets of rosary beads: one for every day; the other, fashioned from crystal, a wedding gift from my grandfather, for special occasions. (For her wake, my mother has the undertaker twine the crystal beads through my grandmother's fingers. Before she's buried, my mother orders them removed. She keeps them all her life. And bequeaths them to me.)

  My grandmother gets the smallest, the least desirable bedroom. She is in this house on sufferance and because my mother feels a filial obligation to her stepmother although she has no filial feelings.

  The room looks north and west, over the swamps where the power plant and the New Jersey Turnpike will soon be built. And the room isn't completely hers because it has no lock on the door and because my mother keeps her clothes in my grandmother's closet. My grandmother doesn't have many clothes, my mother says, so she can spare the room.

  After supper, in summertime, my grandmother sits in her chair, pulls back the curtain so she can see the setting sun, and says her rosary.

  Sometimes I stand next to her and lean on the windowsill and watch, too. Doing nothing with my grandmother is preferable to doing anything with my parents. And watching the sun set is something only my grandmother does. At the end of the day, my mother is too busy clattering pans in the sink to take time to look out the window. Nor does she know when the sun is setting, for she keeps the curtains drawn.

  To escape my mother, my grandmother goes to visit relatives in Long Island for a few weeks each summer. She would be glad to live on Long Island, but her relatives will only accommodate her for a little while each year.

  On Long Island, my grandmother helps her cousin farm a small plot of land. They grow tomatoes, corn, beans, peas, zucchini, eggplant, basil. During these times, my grandmother eats lustily each day.

  She and her sister rise at dawn, collect eggs from the chicken house, weed and till the soil before the heat of day. Some mornings they walk miles to pick wild blueberries and raspberries. These are made into pancakes, cobblers, muffins, and pies by my grandmother's cousin's niece, who lives with them. Other mornings, they hitch rides to the sea to collect mussels or periwinkles.

  In Long Island, my grandmother is happy, living a life she might have lived in Italy had she not been so poor. Even when we visit, she is happy, and doesn't argue with my mother. These we
re my grandmother's relatives, not my mother's. And my mother could visit because my grandmother invited her, not because my mother was entitled to visit. In Long Island, I saw what might have been between them but wasn't.

  I remember my grandmother sitting outside before supper, in the warm light of late afternoon, shelling peas into her apron. Stripping the husks off just-picked corn. Setting aside worm-eaten ears for chicken feed.

  As she worked, my grandmother sang Pugliese songs that sounded Greek or North African. She sang to herself, beating the insistent rhythms with her foot. She sang songs that told of the Passion of Christ, of how Mary searched for her son Jesus; that told how farm laborers lost their love to the lust of overseers; that insulted inhabitants of neighboring villagers. Songs that praised the gifts of the land— figs, melons, wheat, herbs, wine (especially wine). Songs that blessed the cooking pot, the bowl, the spoon.

  These songs my grandmother sang only in Long Island, never in Ridgefield.

  When I am a teenager, although I dream about boys, and I dream about having sex with boys, I also dream about food. I imagine the food I will make someday when I have my own kitchen. Sauteed garlic, a tiny bit of lemon juice, a few twigs of steamed asparagus sliced on the bias, a bit of heavy cream, some salt and pepper, twirled through some fresh pasta like the one my grandmother cuts on her "guitar." Fennel and anise seeds mixed together, crushed, sprinkled on top of a nice pork chop, pan-seared on the top of the stove, finished in the oven, served with a sauce made from the drippings laced with red vermouth, served on a bed of caramelized fennel.

  Where these ideas come from, I don't know. I don't read cookbooks; we don't get magazines. I think about these foods as I wander the aisles of the local food market before I cross the street to join my friends at our hangout. And even though I have my own money, can afford to buy whatever I want, I know my mother would never yield her kitchen to my efforts. I know I must wait until I marry to eat beautiful food with startling tastes.

  Occasionally, even though I know it's hopeless, I ask my mother if I can cook. She looks at me like I have a strange disease. Reaches into the cupboard for a can of ravioli to heat for supper. Chases me from the kitchen.

  I want to marry as soon as I can. Not to have my own husband, but to have my own kitchen. One with a four-burner gas stove, an oven. Where I can cook and bake and roast whenever I want without anyone bothering me. Where I will have absolute control over what I make, over what I eat.

  When I go to junior high, I have to take home economics, which I take every year until I graduate from high school.

  The boys, of course, take shop, which I also would have taken if girls were allowed. I liked the thought of using dangerous machinery, of wearing goggles to protect your eyes, of cutting into wood, of working on cars, of welding metal to metal.

  Girls were too fragile for shop. But I knew, from experience, that kitchens could be dangerous. There were knives, of course, and vegetable peelers, and hot burners, and scalding water and puffs of steam. These did not qualify as dangers for girls. It is the 1950s, when girls cook, and boys weld. So it's home ec, and only home ec, for me.

  For part of the year, we learn to sew. This, I do disastrously (though as a young woman, I learn to sew very well from my mother, who insists sewing is important). In home ec, our first project is an apron trimmed with rickrack. Sewing this will teach us necessary skills.

  It is the rickrack that undoes me. Instead of neatly trimming the edges of my apron, my rickrack wanders wherever it chooses. It even hangs off the edges.

  I fail sewing. So I am very motivated to succeed in cooking.

  Everyone in my class but me hates home ec. They make fun of our teacher, all round and soft and net- and apron-wearing and full of enthusiasm. She has very red cheeks because she's always thrusting her face into pots and pans and ovens. And she wears sneakers instead of shoes so she can race around the class to check oven temperatures, simmering sauces, sauteing pieces of chicken. She wears her hair in a crown of tiny spitcurls tucked hygienically into a net so that not a strand of her hair will fall into the food.

  We have to wear hairnets, too. Most of the girls balk and complain.

  But I like it because the hairnets ruin the fancy girls' teased hair.

  My hair, like everything else about my outward appearance, is sensible and can't be ruined. My clothing, which I buy with my mother on our infrequent angst-ridden shopping trips, is always the cheapest, the most serviceable, the least stylish, and I'm mocked for it by the fancy girls with teased hair, and so it pleases me to see their elaborate coiffures ruined. Unlike the fancy girls with the teased hair, I had no "look" to speak of, unless looking like you're fifty when you're a teenager is a "look." I have more important things on my mind than clothes and looking in a mirror— sex and books, to be exact. And I'm not "collegiate," either. I'm too dark and foreign looking. Besides, I'm not altogether sure I can go to college, even though I'm smart, even though I want to go to college and study hard things— philosophy, literature. There is the money, of course. My parents don't have much, certainly not enough to afford tuition, room, board. And a guidance counselor tells me that a person with my background (Italian? Working class?) will make very poor college material, that there were very few of us in college, actually, and those who entered didn't do well and usually dropped out, and so I should sign up for Secretarial.

  But I sign up for College Prep anyway because, though my clothes are sensible, my spirit is far from sensible. It is, dreamy, artistic, and, at times, cantankerous and cynical. I'm different, I've convinced myself, from everyone else. At pep rallies, I can be found trying to read And Quiet Flows the Don while waiting for the festivities to begin, or scribbling in my diary about the idiocy of running back and forth to throw a large ball into a hoop several feet off the ground, or mocking the school cheers. When my boy pal Eddie asks me why, if I hate these events so much, I bother to attend them, I tell him that they get me out of the house, and besides, I love hating them.

  I am very happy in the kitchen at school because I see our teacher as a soul mate. She acts as if she doesn't care what people think of her.

  I love the long line of clean ranges in the center of the classroom. The cupboards filled with packages of spaghetti, jars of spices and herbs, tins of chicken broth, bottles of olives. The refrigerators that ring the room, which cool a substantial quantity of food: thick pieces of beef for stews; whole chickens; racks of spareribs; fresh vegetables; curly parsley.

  I discover that there is ceremony in cooking. In the donning of aprons. In the tying of apron strings. In the sharpening of blades. In the rituals of the preparation of ingredients.

  I don my very ugly rickrack apron, tuck my short hair into my hairnet, pull a knife out of the woodblock like King Arthur, sharpen it on the stone expertly, prepare to make magic. I begin my education in the pleasures of the kitchen, in the pleasures of the flesh. I learn how little effort it takes to produce something that— unlike so many of the other things I must do in my life— can always be counted upon to provide pleasure. If you select fine ingredients, prepare them well, and cook them exactly right according to a set of rules, our teacher says, you can never fail in the kitchen. Your meal will always turn out perfectly.

  I like this. Here, there is order, discipline. Here, I feel safe.

  Of course, there is abundant drama, too, in cooking. And the transformation of the raw into the cooked becomes as compelling to me as the Russian novels I am forever reading.

  What I learn about cooking appeals to the diva in me. And my teacher is a diva, too. She insists on perfection, scolds delivery boys if they bring inferior merchandise, gushes if what is brought is fresh and wonderful. The kitchen is her stage, and she swoops and twirls and stirs and beats and slices her way through our class in a dance for the ages.

  One of the reasons I'm very happy in the school kitchen is that we get to eat what we cook at the end of class. These are our "tastings." And they are very serious affairs.r />
  We have them at very neatly appointed tables set with serviceable matching placemats, dishes, glassware, and cutlery. We have sparkling water because our school, of course, does not permit wine. We have cloth napkins because our teacher believes that a beautiful table is essential to dining well.

  Before we sit down to eat, our teacher insists we clear away all the dirty pots and pans. These are organized behind a screen.

  "Only barbarians eat with dirty pots and pans in view," our teacher says. "When you get older, girls, you'll know you're in a fine restaurant if they whisk the dirty dishes off the table, take them into the kitchen. If they don't, if they make piles of filth on trays and leave them there for all to see, don't stand for it. Summon the captain. Insist that they be removed. One can never dine well surrounded by garbage."

  And the food we make is, of course, better than the food my mother makes at home. Oh, it is 1950s food. And, yes, there are tuna fish casseroles, and chicken salad made with homemade mayonnaise.

  But our teacher has been "abroad," and she is, she tells us, forever changed. So there is also sauteed sole with browned butter and slivers of roasted almonds, served with rice tarted up with little bits of sauteed celery, onion, and red and green pepper. A stewed beef, exquisitely tender, with carrots and tiny onions melting into the sauce. (She sneaks wine into the sauce, defying school regulations.) A roasted chicken stuffed with whole pierced lemons and fresh parsley (the only fresh herb she can find in the United States, she complains).

  Our teacher shows us how we should take our food. Slowly. Seriously. Sensuously. Pleasurably. With eyes closed to intensify the sensation.

  "Close your eyes, girls," she says. "No peeking. No gulping. Tiny tastes. Tiny sips. Appreciate, appreciate."

  It is a bacchanal, this class of ours. And I sometimes think that if our very sensible principal had known what was going on in this room, he would have canceled the class.