As a child, I wondered whether I could inherit St. Vitus's Dance. I wondered if my fainting spells meant that I had it. I wondered if I would begin to tremble like my mother, and need to stay home because I would never know when an attack was coming, never know when I might drop to the ground and bang my head against the sidewalk. Sometimes, alone in my bath, I would fill a plastic cup with water and practice trembling.
My mother's afflictions— her trembling, which made her drop things (the dropsies, she called it), her depression, her fits of weeping— made her the center of our attention. They gave her an unfair advantage over the rest of us. We, believed to be normal, resilient, and capable, were supposed to understand her needs, and care for her, although she seemed not to want our attention. And she was absolved of responsibility for our care. Given all she endured, how could we ask for help when a teacher berated us, a friend mistreated us, when our throats or our stomachs ached, when someone touched us where they shouldn't have?
I imagined the child who was not yet my mother spinning, whirling, falling to the ground, jerking like someone taken by the Holy Spirit. I saw her dancing before St. Vitus. I knew that my mother was marked, different from everyone else's mother, different from ordinary, competent mothers, who put food on the table at preordained times, who washed clothes without damage to themselves, who listened to children when they said they were sad.
"Leave your mother alone when she says she wants to be left alone": my father's first commandment. We dared not break it for fear of the consequences— banishment to our room, the loss of all privileges, bed without supper, a backhand to the face. But there was no time when my mother did not want to be left alone. "Your mother is a saint because of all she's suffered": the catechism of our childhood. But regardless of what my father said, I knew my mother was no saint.
Sometimes, my mother went crazy. Not just a little crazy. So crazy that we were sent off to relatives to be cared for. So crazy that she became a danger to herself.
Once, the day before my mother signed herself into the locked psychiatric ward of our local hospital, she made a menu plan and a shopping list for a whole month, and posted it on the bulletin board in the kitchen where one of us would find it.
I was married then. My sister had just finished having her latest nervous breakdown. She'd come back to live with my parents after the man she'd lived with left her.
It was my sister who called to tell me about the menu plan and the shopping list. It was full of stuff my mother never cooked, full of stuff we never ate.
Barbecued spareribs, roasted corn, green beans
Tacos, sour cream, guacamole, green salad
Roast beef, baked potatoes, peas
Chicken cacciatore, rice, asparagus
Macaroni and cheese, tomato salad
"She's not crazy," my sister says. "She's just pretending to be crazy. No one who's crazy makes out a menu and a shopping list."
"Oh," I say, noncommittal. I think the fact that my mother made a shopping list and a menu plan of meals my father and sister were supposed to prepare that she herself would never make, especially given all the crap she fed us while we were growing up, proves she's crazy. But I'm not going to get into this with my sister.
"It's nuts," my sister says. "What does she think? I'm going to shop for all this shit? Cook it? I think she went crazy just to spite me because I came back home."
I want to say, "First you say she's not crazy; then you say she is; which is it?," but I don't. I want all this to go away. My sister and her nervous breakdowns. My mother and her nervous breakdowns. I want to be left alone to raise my family. So I don't ask my sister why my mother might want to spite her. Instead of asking, I say, "What else did she put on the menu?"
When we were young, my mother never told us about her suffering. But she wore her life like a hair shirt. She lived as if she had joined a secret cult that practiced the mortification of the flesh, the annihilation of desire.
My mother's ascetic practice included many small, voluntary privations and punishments, ones that did not require a trek to a distant monastery. Ones she could tuck into the fabric of her ordinary life. Like not going out when it rained, because she never bought herself an umbrella or rain boots. Like scratching herself until she raised stigmatalike welts on her body. Like plunging her hands into scalding water while she did the laundry. Like touching the bottom of the iron with a fingertip to see if it was hot enough and burning herself. Like moving too quickly and bashing a leg into the corner of a chair. Like tasting boiling liquids without blowing on them and scorching her tongue.
Because my mother and grandmother were always fighting, my mother didn't pay attention when she cooked. And so. She'd slice a piece off her finger. Peel her hand instead of the vegetables. Stick her head too far into the oven and get a blast of steam on her face, and it would be red for days.
"Battle scars," my mother called her injuries. And they were. My mother rarely spent money on herself for small luxuries, even though she could afford them, desired them. She would gaze into the window of a store, and look at something that captured her fancy— a filmy blouse, a slim skirt, a jaunty hat— knowing that she would never allow herself to buy it. Whatever she wanted, like the love of a devoted mother, was always beyond her reach.
She diluted dish detergent, laundry detergent, liquid soup, shampoo, with water until they were useless. Still, she used them, forced us to use them. "A penny saved is a penny earned," she would say. She rarely replaced anything she broke— a hand mirror, an electric mixer— but made do without it, as if she should be punished for the rest of her life for her transgression.
But mostly, my mother did without food.
She did not put anything on her plate until everyone else had eaten. She ate everyone's leftovers (and called herself "the garbage pail"). Ate stale bread instead of fresh. Drank cold coffee or coffee dregs instead of making a fresh pot. Ate foods she detested— fish, liver, eggs— because they were cheap. Didn't stop for lunch but made do with a leftover crust of toast from breakfast, which she ate standing by the counter.
When I was a girl, my mother never made enough food. It wasn't that we were poor, for she always managed to save money. It seemed like she wanted to starve us. Like she wanted to starve us because she wanted us dead, because she didn't know what to do with us, how to care for us.
When I was an infant, my father said, I'd cry, but my mother wouldn't nurse me. I'd cry so loud that the neighbors would knock on the apartment door to see if something was wrong. But still she wouldn't feed me.
If I started crying because I was hungry at four, my mother would wait until five to feed me. If I started crying at five, my mother would wait until six to feed me.
By the time I fed, I was so exhausted from crying that I would suckle for a few minutes, then fall asleep. My mother, assuming I'd had my fill, would put me back into my bassinet. But I would soon awaken, howling. By now, it was past feeding time, so my mother wouldn't feed me. And I would cry until she decided it was time for me to eat.
She was breast-feeding, so throughout this time she wasn't feeding me, she had my father yelling at her to feed me, and her breasts were leaking milk into the protective pads she put into her nursing bras, because her breasts would start to drip milk when I cried. (After my mother died, I found a supply of these pads and the nursing bras in her bureau. My mother never threw anything away.)
My father thought this was crazy. Me crying. My mother not feeding me. "Why don't you feed her, for Christ's sake?" my father would say.
"Why didn't you feed me yourself?" I ask my father.
"You know your mother," he says. "There was no arguing with her."
Still, my father insists that my mother was a good mother. She didn't throw us out the window, or against the wall, or drown us in a bathtub, or strap us into car seats and drive a car into a lake. My mother was too good a mother to do any of that.
When we were still children, my sister told me she had seen my m
other naked, and that my mother had an extra set of nipples on her body. Maybe the extra set of nipples was the reason my mother was so uncomfortable feeding me. Maybe my mother couldn't figure out which nipple to use. Maybe my mother wanted to feed me; maybe she just didn't know how.
There we all were, in our dimly lit kitchen painted a garish shade of yellow, at the Formica table set with our "everyday" chipped dishes and mismatched glasses and flatware, waiting to see how big our portions would be, hoping that the food at this meal would be edible, and would be enough.
Breakfast. Burned toast, and watered down canned orange juice.
Lunch. A small plate of instant mashed potatoes and instant gravy.
Or a can of Campbell's soup diluted with an extra can of water to "stretch" it. Or a hard-boiled egg sliced with a rusty egg slicer (an extravagance my mother bought on impulse at a garage sale).
Supper. Two burnt toasted cheeses for the four of us, or three sausages, or three pieces of chicken, or an omelet made with three eggs.
Sometimes my father doused his food with my grandmother's olio santo, holy oil, olive oil steeped with fiery chile peppers, to make my mother's food palatable. "Devil's oil," my mother called it.
My mother had absolute control over what was put on our plates. No bowls of food served family style for this family. No popping up out of your chair to look into the refrigerator for something else. No cooking your own food if you didn't like hers. No happy Italian family gathered around the table stuffing themselves with meatballs and spaghetti, sausage and peppers, everyone talking at the same time.
Our meals were like those in a badly run prison where someone is putting the food money in their pockets instead of on the table. My sister and I waited through meals like two inmates watching the guards through half-closed lids, to see whether they were dangerous.
But at the end of what passed for supper, my mother would go over to the cupboard and pull out one of her Dugan's desserts— seven-layer cake, pumpkin pie, lemon meringue. These kept my father from getting after her to make her own.
She always offered dessert to my father, never to me or my sister, though we knew that if we pestered her for something we could have it. Although my mother was abstemious, she indulged herself in a few bites of dessert.
During the meal, all I wanted was to head up to my room, bury my head in a book, and imagine I was someplace else. After supper, my father wanted us to stay at the table for some conversation, which really meant that he wanted to yell at us for everything my mother told him we'd done wrong that day. But I tried not to linger and left the table as fast as I could.
Although my mother wanted to eat like an American, her food habits recreated the privations experienced by her people in the South of Italy, though I am certain she did not realize this. For the families of many immigrants, living in America meant that you would no longer be hungry, that you could eat as much as the rich ate in the Old World. But in our house, there was no culture of abundance to erase our family's history: there had never been enough food to eat, and my people had never been able to control how much food was given to them.
Throughout my mother's life, her hands shook, causing dishes to fall and shatter on the floor, flour to spill all over the counter as she tried to shake some from a bag into a measuring cup, soap to enter my sister's eyes or mine when she washed our faces. But my mother's hands never shook so badly as after her stepmother died.
After my grandmother's death, my mother was alone in the house while my father was away at work. I had my family to take care of; my sister was living on the West Coast. Being completely alone never suited my mother. Yes, she loved to be by herself and not be bothered by anyone, but only so long as someone else was there.
Now that there was no one for my mother to fight with, she became detached and depressed. Having an evil stepmother in the house for all those years was better than having no mother at all.
While her stepmother was alive, at least my mother felt something, even if what she felt was hatred, rage, even if what she wanted was retribution.
Perhaps my mother really missed her stepmother. Yearned for her, as she had yearned for a mother's love. Or if she didn't miss her, missed the drama that having my grandmother in the house permitted her. But whatever the reason, unhappy as she had been before her stepmother died, afterwards my mother was unhappier still. And the affliction she'd lived with intensified.
After my grandmother's death, my mother had to grip a cup of coffee with both hands to bring it to her mouth. She had to make her hands into tight fists and rest them in her lap to still them. She had to steady her right hand with her left to put on lipstick, and often the effect she achieved was that of a raw wound rather than a cosmetic enhancement. Many pieces of her forget-me-not dishware fell to the floor as she wiped them.
Once, she was so distraught that she called me to come over and help her. She was clearing out my grandmother's room. I was married, busy with small children. Still, my mother's anguish was evident, and I couldn't forsake her.
She was packing things away, and she had dropped the glass bell that covered my grandmother's statue of the Blessed Virgin. It shattered on the floor. All morning, as she was cleaning up the glass, my mother was afraid she would slice herself with a piece because she couldn't keep her hands from shaking. And though she wasn't bleeding, I saw that there were little slivers of glass embedded in the palms of both her hands.
My mother believed that if she took up something that required using her hands, something that required concentration, it might retrain whatever was going wrong.
And so, she began to embroider.
She took little trips outside the house to a shop in the next town and bought what she needed— linen for a ground, silk and woolen threads, fine needles, a wooden frame, a tapestry bag to hold her equipment. Although all this was expensive, she indulged herself. She needed to. She believed that her life depended upon it.
At first, as she worked on scrap pieces of fabric to teach her hands their discipline, she pierced her fingers, and there were bloodstains on the cloth. But slowly, surely, she found she could insert a sharp needle into the material and pull it out without damage to herself or her work.
Her first successes were two pillows, a wheat-colored ground covered with flowers. Next were placemats and matching napkins that she would set atop her stepmother's crocheted tablecloths. (After my grandmother died, my mother used the tablecloths often, and not only on special occasions, but also for Sunday dinner in the dining room my grandmother no longer inhabited. She washed them by hand, starched them, and stretched them on a frame embedded with nails my father made).
Samplers came next. On one, my mother embroidered orchids, mimosa, almond blossoms, poppies, daisies, thistle, gorse, asphodel, iris, cyclamen, rockroses. On the other, parsley, thyme, sage, rosemary, dill. And although my mother didn't realize it, many of the flowers and herbs that she embroidered grew in or near Rodi Garganico, the village where her stepmother came from, on the Gargano peninsula in Puglia.
I didn't know this until recently, when I traveled to Puglia in search of my stepgrandmother's village, because I thought that going there would teach me something I needed to know about her, about my past, my family history.
One sun-drenched day, walking along a path on the edge of a hillside near the Adriatic, looking at the white houses of Rodi Garganico in the distance, I saw a very old woman dressed in black, sitting in the sunlight on a chair in the doorway of a small house by the sea. On her lap was an enormous white tablecloth (for her granddaughter's trousseau?). On it, she had sketched a wavering border and bouquets of flowers caught together by furls of ribbon. Many of the flowers she was embroidering were blooming on the hillside behind here, and they were the same as my mother's.
As my mother sat during those long winter days of sorrow after her stepmother died, her embroidery returned her to the old ways. And to the flowers on the hillsides of Puglia. All the way back to the village her stepmother
had left so many years before.
Part Three
CHASING GHOSTS
HUNGER
My grandfather once told me that, when he was hungry, he used to walk past the priest's house in his village so that the aroma of the priest's dinner would season the moldy bread he would be having for his supper. My grandmother once told me that the fart of a bishop was more nourishing than the food she ate while she lived in Italy, and that her food didn't taste any better than the smell of the bishop's fart.
I knew, from my grandparents' stories, that they had come to America for a better life. But because they were proud people, they got on with their lives, did what they had to do, and didn't waste much talk describing the past. So although there was much that I knew, there was more that I didn't know.
I didn't know that the fields my grandfather worked were seven miles from where he lived. That zappatori — diggers— walked there with their tools on their backs. That they began work at sunrise and left their homes at three or four in the morning. I didn't know that they worked from sunrise until sunset. Then they walked back to their homes, where they'd eat something— bread, softened with water; in a good year, a few broad beans; some pasta; and whatever their wives or mothers could glean or steal without getting caught. I didn't know they would fall into their beds too tired to unlace their boots. A few hours later, they were awakened by their wives or mothers to leave for the fields. (If they got sick while they were working, they had to find their way home alone; their friends were forbidden to stop work to accompany them.)
I didn't know that farmworkers had to use the mattock, an archaic tool with a short handle. (Long-handled tools cost more.) It was not uncommon for workers' bodies to become deformed from years of using the mattock.
I didn't know that during harvest they were forbidden to go back home. They slept in the fields, without shelter or blankets. Those would have cost money, diminished profits. And besides, these people were used to living like animals.
Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family Page 12
