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

by Louise DeSalvo

  "Yes," I said, "I know Grace Paley," and nothing more. I remembered that I shared so little of my life with her because my mother disapproved of the life I lead, of the time I took away from my children to do my work.

  Even when it was clear that my mother was dying, my father wouldn't believe it. Against doctor's orders and common sense, he would help her out of bed, and force her to try to walk, and when she collapsed on the floor, he would complain to the nurses that she wasn't getting enough physical therapy.

  Once, I saw him trying to feed her pudding after she had stopped eating because she couldn't swallow. I saw him trying to force the spoon into her mouth, thinking, perhaps, that if he could get that small mouthful of food into her, he could keep her alive. My mother's eyes said, "I'm too weak to fight him; I can't resist; but I can't do what he wants."

  The pudding dribbled off the spoon, down my mother's chin, onto her nightgown.

  "Stop that," I said, rushing to the bed, pulling the spoon out of my father's hand, away from my mother's mouth. "Can't you see that she couldn't eat even if she wanted to?"

  "But," my father said, "if she doesn't eat, she'll die."

  Two years after my mother died, my father and Milly came to Paris with my husband and me to celebrate his seventy-eighth birthday. This was the trip that I had wanted my mother and father to take.

  For my father's birthday dinner, we took him to the restaurant Jules Verne in the Eiffel Tower.

  Morels were in season, and we each ordered them, prepared in a cream and cheese sauce, for an appetizer.

  "How your mother would have loved this," my father said.

  "Yes, she would have," I responded, although I was sure that my mother never would have come to Paris, never would have dined in this restaurant, for it was difficult for her to indulge in such sybaritic pleasures. She was always uncomfortable in restaurants, thought them a waste of money. Aside from eating at roadside stands when we went on vacations, my mother didn't go to a "proper" restaurant until after I was in college.

  If, by some miracle, we had lured my mother to Paris, and to the Jules Verne, she never would have ordered the morels. She never would have permitted herself to spend so much money on food—$ 60 for an appetizer— even if she was being treated; especially if she was being treated.

  She would have filled up on the bread. She would have studied the menu, rejected the possibility of an appetizer, asked about the prices of the entrees and picked out the least expensive item on the menu, even if it was something that she didn't like. She would been delighted at the amuse-bouche, for she would have felt that she was getting something free. She would have permitted herself coffee, even dessert— a chocolate mousse perhaps. But when the little sweets that are presented with coffee in French restaurants arrived, she would have been upset, realizing that she could have done without dessert and saved money.

  She would have taken a box of matches as a memento of the evening. She would have been delighted at the little tongs for picking up the cubes of Demerara and white sugar served with coffee, and she would have taken several cubes, placed them in her handbag.

  Taking sugar from restaurants was one of the many ways that my mother economized. When she and my father went on road trips, she always took four extra rolls and several packets of sugar from wherever she and my father ate their supper. If they had eaten at a buffet, she would take, too, some extra meat, some cheese, some fruit for the next day. When she got back to her table, she would pack it all into a plastic bag that she kept in her purse. Then she would take two tissues from her purse and shake some salt into one, some pepper into another, and fold the tissues into neat little packets and stow these as well. She would use the salt and pepper to season the tomatoes my father and she ate on the road.

  Though stale, the rolls would form the basis of their breakfast the following morning, which they would eat in their motel room. They would drink coffee that my father would make in the small automatic coffeemaker that I had gotten them one Christmas. (The stolen sugar would sweeten my mother's.) For lunch, they would stop somewhere on the side of the road, and picnic on sandwiches made with the two other stale rolls and whatever my mother might have scavenged from the buffet table. They always traveled with a capacious Styrofoam hamper, into which they would pack cold cuts, fruit, and ground coffee (Eight O'Clock Coffee from the A & P) for the road. There would always be a package of Stella D'oro biscuits for my father to have with his coffee.

  At the end of each day, my mother never recorded in her trip diary notes about where she and my father had traveled or notes about the sights they had seen. For she was uninterested in seeing new places; she went on vacations for my father's sake and because he insisted upon it. She never climbed to the tops of hills to see views, or mounted stairs to gaze down into the water of a canal, or clambered into a small boat to see a sight across the water. She lingered behind, and not grudgingly, while my father had his little adventures.

  Staying behind gave her the opportunity to figure her accounts and to record what that they had spent for gas, food, and lodging.

  "Monday, 16 July, Lexington MA. Breakfast, $0.00. Lunch $0.00. Dinner (Early Bird Special): $25.36 (with tip)."

  She never recorded what she ate, just as she never recorded what she saw, for what she ate was immaterial, just as what she saw was immaterial. Because where my mother really wanted to be was in her own home, engaged in her daily routine. Habit was the way she warded off disintegration and chaos.

  In the hospital where my mother died, they did not let their patients starve to death. It was inhumane, they said. And so, the tube. Against her wishes and ours. Inserted when none of us was there. While my father was having a greasy hamburger and fries in the hospital canteen. While I was shopping for the chicken, pea pods, and potatoes that I would cook for dinner.

  And so the prolonged suffering. Hers. Ours (though ours was nothing like hers, of course). The prolonged dying. The prolonged life that would have ended sooner if it had ended naturally.

  And the rage— my rage, chiefly, for my father was too spent to rage— that this had been done to my mother at the end of her life. That the choice she had made, a choice about which she was certain (and she had been uncertain much of her life, unsure of what to cook for supper, what to buy at the supermarket) was contravened.

  I looked at my mother, through her long dying days, wanting conversation, wanting what she could not give, wanting what I would never have again, for she had long since ceased to speak. Wanting what I had never had with her, really: the sustenance of stories shared, embellished. I wanted normal talks, ordinary talks, talks like other people have, like other mothers and their daughters have— about what we did during the day, about what we cooked for dinner, about what we felt about our lives.

  I wanted to know, too, what had happened to her when she was a child. What did she remember? What had my grandmother done to her? What did she know of my grandmother's life? Her father's life? Did she know about what life was like for them in Puglia before they came to America?

  And I wanted to know how she made her pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, the one thing, the only thing, she cooked that I would miss, that I wanted the recipe for. I wanted to know what her secret ingredient was, for that there was a secret ingredient, she told everyone who loved her pumpkin pie.

  I wanted to talk to her about work, and love, and books, forgetting that, although intelligent, she was a woman who did not read much— Reader's Digest, or Life magazine, perhaps, at the end of her day, for there were far more important things for her to do, like cleaning her kitchen, doing the laundry, ironing my father's shirts, straightening her closets (though there was not very much to straighten, for she had few possessions).

  "Come closer," I said to her, once, as she lay dying, hearing my voice come back to me through the ether air of the hospital. "Come closer," I said, and nothing more, though she couldn't respond to me, I know, couldn't move, couldn't come closer. I wanted to say, "I'll tell you someth
ing wonderful, something you've been waiting for me to tell you for a long, long time."

  I wanted to speak to my mother one last time, though I knew she couldn't hear me, for there is a work in dying that excludes the living, work that requires concentration, work that precludes listening to, or caring about, the living. I have seen it, and so I know that dying is hard work, solitary work, work unlike any other, for it is the ultimate and most difficult work of one's life.

  What my mother was doing must be done by each of us, alone.

  I wanted to speak to my mother just one last time, for she was moving into the land of the dead, a place I didn't know about, didn't want to know about yet, though that place has beckoned me once, twice, three times, and that place had already claimed my sister, younger than me by four years. It is a place into which I will one day follow her, but not, I hope, too soon.

  Would she remember me after she died? I wondered. Would she remember light? Music? The taste of oranges?

  That my mother had loved me, I couldn't be certain. I sometimes thought that her not loving me was her greatest love. In not loving me, she could ensure that I would stay alive, for everyone whom she had really, truly loved— her mother, her father, my sister— had died. In not loving me, she ensured that I would not be like her, for I would despise her for not loving me, and so would not want to be like her, and so would not become mad. As she had become, often; as my sister had become. I would linger at the boundaries of madness, still, and often, though not recently.

  What I wanted to say to my mother as she lay dying was "I love you," although I was not sure I did love her. But I thought that, perhaps, if I said the words "I love you," words that I had never managed to say to her before, words that she had never managed to say to me, then perhaps the feeling might follow. I wanted to love my mother before she died.

  TEARING THE BREAD

  My mother died in autumn, like my grandmother. Though these two could agree on nothing during their lives, they agreed that autumn, with its leaves all dry and sere and red and bronze and gold and falling to the ground, was a fitting time to die.

  As my mother lay dying, I wanted to tell her this story. What I wanted to tell her, but could not, was a fantasy, a dream. I could not tell her because she could not hear. I could not tell her because we were beyond language, because whatever we should have said to each other before had not been said. Whatever we should have said to each other, we would not say. And so, this.

  Imagine that we are together. And imagine that, just once, we aren't fighting, we aren't hating each other, you aren't disappointed in me, and I am not disappointed in you. Imagine that we know it will come to this; imagine that because we know it will come to this, we have learned to love each other.

  Imagine that we are having a picnic. There is a cloth laid upon the ground (an embroidered cloth) and on it there are simple things: some cheese — the smoked mozzarella from Dante's that you liked so much, the fresh mozzarella from Fairway that I liked so much — and roasted peppers (I might have made them myself if I had the time that day); some mortadella, because neither of us likes the taste ofprosciutto. And bread, yes, bread. Not my homemade bread, because today I was too busy to bake the bread. But good bread, nevertheless, a sturdy Italian bread, like the one your stepmother used to make.

  I had asked you whether we should take your stepmother with us to our picnic. But you hesitated, not wanting to introduce any discord into this day that we were planning. And then said, "Not this time; maybe next time," and so I knew that you were not yet ready, that you might never be ready to join her in celebration. But that we were together in this way was miracle enough for me for now.

  About the bread, there would have been some disagreement. You would have argued for a fat crusty Italian loaf without sesame seeds. (You had, by now, given up your taste for what we used to call American bread.) I would have wanted them — the seeds, that is — for the complex, nutty flavor they gave the loaf. But we decided that at this time in our lives, we could buy two breads and enjoy them both: the one that you wanted, without the seeds, and the one that I wanted, with.

  Today, we sit together on the cloth under the shade of an almond tree in a sacred grove of almond trees in full blossom, this place that we return to where we have never been before, and we eat. And because there are almond trees, we must be in the South of Italy, in Puglia, perhaps, where I have been, but where you have never been. The South of Italy, the place I return to often, as if, in returning, I might find what was there when our people left, and what was left behind.

  It is a place that I inhabit in my imagination, though I have never lived there, and it has marked me, for it is the place of our people. Italy, a place that we never visited together, although such a journey might have helped us understand what neither of us understood during your lifetime: how we were shaped by the past, how all that was good, and all that was not good, had its origins in a place that we never experienced together, but that we experienced always.

  I take us there in this imagining although we lived our story in suburban New Jersey, a place where I have never seen an almond tree, a place where we never picnicked together alone, a place where we carved the initials of our unhappiness into the gnarled tree trunks of our lives.

  Today, though, we are content — blissful, even. How beautiful the trees are, you say, their flowers, so silver-pink, the searing eyes of the individual blossoms seeing that we are together. They are, I say, a transfiguration, a predilection, and a blessing, and I tell you that I am so happy that we are here in this place together.

  We eat, and we drink the milk of almonds. And we talk. We have an ordinary, normal talk, about what we did during our day. Mine was filled with writing, reading. (Books about the South of Italy and the life your parents and stepmother left there and, yes, they are helping me at last understand you, understand myself. Understand how you were between two worlds, which both despised who you were, so that you had to become "American," had to bury the Southern Italian in you, had to hate your stepmother for what she was so that you would not hate yourself for who you were. Understand that our people were hungry, always hungry. Understand that they came here so that they could eat enough to fill their bellies.).

  Your day, you told me, was full. You had changed the lining in all the cupboards in the kitchen, made a soup for dinner — a nice minestra (so strange, so wonderful, to me, that you were now cooking the foods your stepmother cooked, as I now cook the foods that she cooked, the foods you despised for their foreignness) — and you sat down in the afternoon to embroider: primulas, roses, poppies on a beige linen ground for the pillows that now decorate my bed.

  Today we do not cut the bread, for we have forgotten to bring our knives. Today we tear the bread with our hands. It is hard, this tearing of the bread, this partaking of it. It is hard because the loaves have a thick, nearly impenetrable crust. Yes, it is hard, we both agree, to break the bread, to tear into it, to get at the tenderness inside. It is hard to break the bread. But it is not impossible.

  EPILOGUE: PLAYING THE BOWL

  One Friday, I take my granddaughter, Julia, to her toddler music class. She calls the class "Oh my" because these are the first words of her favorite song, "Oh my, no more pie." Whenever she knows she's going to "Oh my" she sings the first line of the song "Oh my, no more pie," over and over again.

  When Julia sings, I hear a young voice, but there is something old about the voice, just as there is something old about the child. She is one of those children who look like they are older people locked in childish bodies, one of those children who understand.

  On this particular day, the teacher shows the grown-ups how to improvise musical instruments at home: how measuring spoons can be jangled; how measuring cups can be smacked against each other to produce percussive sound.

  "See," the teacher says, picking up a cheese grater and playing it with a spoon, "use your imaginations; you don't need to buy musical instruments to make music." The teacher is smil
ing; she's making music seem like so much fun.

  On this day, preoccupied with a piece of writing that has not been very much fun in the making, I am cranky. I think, This is one message — that music is fun— but not the most important message. The arts, I think, aren't just fun. They're essential. They're bone, flesh, blood, sinew, soul, spirit. And art can be hard, goddamned hard. To make; to witness.

  But these are kids, after all.

  The teacher dumps little plastic bowls and wooden spoons onto the floor in the center of the room. "Just watch the chidren and see what they do," she says. "Plastic bowls, turned upside down, make perfect drums. You can let them do this at home."

  She turns on a recording of African drums, the rhythms insistent, intricate, energizing. The children start moving to the rhythm. They sway and stomp and jump and run. Even I start moving.

  One little boy dashes into the center of the circle, picks up a bowl and a spoon, turns the bowl over, starts beating it. Soon, all the children are beating on their improvised instruments.

  All, that is, but Julia.

  Julia sits in the center of the circle, flips her bowl, takes her spoon, starts stirring. She's stirring clockwise; she's stirring counterclockwise; she's stirring as quickly as the other children are drumming. She's shaking her head and stirring. She's throwing her head back and stirring. She's stirring and tasting and stirring and tasting some more. She's closing her eyes, lost in the stirring. She's pretending to cook as if cooking were all that mattered in this world, as if her life depended upon her cooking, as if the gods cared.

  And she's making waffles, sauce, matzo balls, biscotti, scones, she's making pudding, she's making pie, and she's calling out the names of what she's making, and she's tasting what she's making.

  So here is this little girl, this little child with a wise face, who seems to have seen all things, to remember all things, this child with her mother's face, and my face, and her mother's mother's face, and my grandmother's face, and her mother's grandmother's face, and the face of every woman in the world. And this child is stirring and cooking and singing through the celebrations, through the pogroms, invasions, bombings, evacuations, emigrations. She's stirring in Russia, in Austria-Hungary, in Puglia, in the Abruzzi, in Campania, and in Sicily. And she's stirring and singing, this child who sees the future, who knows the past, who sees sorrow, sees joy, this wise, wise child, who looks to the future, but who brings back the ancestors.