Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

  “Did you find it?”

  “I didn’t look.” Mikhi’s voice caught. “Aww, Nadia. It doesn’t matter.”

  “But why didn’t you just—” she stopped herself, realizing that Mikhi probably had come down here for her sake, because she was afraid and she’d asked him to come with her. And the strange thing was that she wasn’t so scared anymore. At least not now. There she was in the deepest corner of the cellar; she almost laughed.

  When she turned to Mikhi, his head was down, eyes on the trunk beneath him. Brass and black leather, one side of the trunk was crayoned with writing from forty years ago. Their father had once pointed out to them the different languages—Turkish, Arabic, French, and finally, in English, the yellow and blue admittance stamp of Ellis Island, New York.

  “What is it, Mikhi? What’s wrong?”

  “She’s not going to die,” he said with sureness. Then, the sureness faltering: “Do you think she’s going to die?”

  “Yes.”

  “Honest?”

  “She’s old, Mikhi. Old people—”

  “I don’t care,” he said quickly. “I’m going anyway.”

  “Where?”

  For a moment there was silence—only the muffled sounds of Sitti’s footsteps above them—before Mikhi sighed, “I don’t know … out there. Away from here.” Then he touched his hair with his fingertips.

  “Don’t do that,” Nadia said, and he lowered his hand. “When are you going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She nodded once, slowly, as if in solemn agreement, but it was relief that she felt. If he didn’t know where and he didn’t know when, then maybe he wouldn’t really go. And then she wouldn’t have to go either, because what would they do? Who would take care of them out there in America, a girl and her little brother?

  “I mean it, Nadia.”

  But he didn’t mean it, not really. Alone, Mikhi wouldn’t know what to do. Not even what to take and what to leave behind. Especially that. He wouldn’t know that any more than Papa had known it.

  “Nadia, will you come with me?”

  “Sure,” she answered quickly, easily. After all, a boy can’t just walk off the way a man does.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mikhi said, the disappointment in his voice showing her that she’d answered too quickly. “But at least you won’t tell on me, will you?”

  “I don’t tattle. Not anymore.”

  Above them, Sitti was moving something heavy, dragging it across the floor. Her moans carried even to the cellar.

  “You promise?”

  He still didn’t believe her. She began to promise, but just then the moans from upstairs were cut short by a brief cry of surprise as something, glass or china, shattered on the dining room floor. The two of them remained still for a moment of teetering imbalance that ended abruptly with a heavy, resounding thump. Mikhi leaped from the trunk and ran ahead of her up the stairs.

  “Help to stand,” Sitti said, hearing the sound of their feet. She had fallen to her knees, the side of her face leaning against an open drawer of the buffet. She must have been trying to shove the buffet away from the wall so she could search behind it.

  “Sitti,” Mikhi spoke quickly, “should I go find Uncle Eddie?”

  “No,” Sitti said, whispering, as if she had strength only for that. “Jus’ help to stand.” She held out one arm, and Mikhi took it.

  “Ach!” she cried out at the force of his grip. Immediately, Mikhi released the hand.

  “My heart,” Sitti hugged herself, “my heart. Achhh….”

  “Is it a heart attack?” Mikhi’s voice rose on the word attack, threatening to rise to a screech if she answered yes, but Sitti didn’t answer. Instead, she braced her forearms against the buffet and slowly, but with less effort than Nadia had imagined it would take, raised herself to her feet.

  “Did you find it, Sitti?” Nadia asked. She looked down at the shattered remains of what had been the china teapot. “Was it in the tea—”

  Sitti closed her eyes as if to silence her. She stood that way for a few seconds, consulting some inner pain. Then the three braids that stuck out over the collar of her nightgown quivered a little, and she belched, a low weak sound.

  “G’wan,” she told them—they were staring at her—”G’wan, don’t lookit me.” She leaned against the buffet. “Achhh….”

  “What is it, Sitti?” Again Mikhi’s voice rose, like a girl’s.

  “Nothing. G’wan.”

  “Can I get you something? What do you want us to do?”

  “Nothing,” she answered, but simply, even lightly, as if somehow pleased.

  Mikhi looked to Nadia. His eyes were wide, near panic. Then he lowered his head and spoke. “You’re not sick,” he said.

  There was utter silence, and Nadia was frightened by the sudden realization that she was about to laugh.

  “You’re not sick at all,” Mikhi said once more, looking up now. He was actually smiling, although his eyes kept blinking as if somebody were shaking a fist in front of them. “You’re all right. It’s just gas. I know it is.”

  “You be shaddap!” Sitti growled. Then she cursed him in Arabic, “Ibn menyouk!”

  Mikhi flinched, but stood firm. “You’re not sick,” he said again.

  Sitti turned furiously to Nadia, as to a witness. Mikhi, too was looking at her now. Then, slowly, he shifted his gaze to Sitti, and her face collapsed in fear at the sight of him. She raised both hands to her eyes and began to cry out weakly, muttering like a child on the verge of tears.

  “And that was when he give to me the Evil Eye, ya djinu, ya ibn menyouk! The girl here, she see it all!”

  Uncle Eddie listened patiently while Sitti went on and on, slipping in and out of Arabic and rushing the words so rapidly together that the children—made to sit quietly at the kitchen table—could barely follow it. She paced back and forth behind Mikhi’s chair, and Nadia watched her uncle smoke his cigarette with those nervous double-drags. Now and then, distractedly, he reached to his neck and touched the golden thread. The charm against the Evil Eye was suspended from it, a single porcelain gleam at the hair of his throat. Nadia had noticed it as soon as he walked in the house. She was sure Mikhi must have seen it. And Sitti too, as she hurried to the door, grasping Eddie’s sleeve with both hands before he was hardly inside. Uncle Eddie didn’t even try to hide it. All he did was shrug—a son cowed by the suddenness of his mother’s fury—and call her and Mikhi into the kitchen. Then Sitti started all over again from the beginning: Mikhi had been tormenting her all day. Worse yet, she was sick to dying, and the boy gave her the Evil Eye—wasn’t that so, Nadia?

  She squirmed in her chair, answering neither yes nor no. She was innocent, but for the first time uneasy in the tattletale pleasure of such innocence; after all, Mikhi was right. Here their grandmother stood, alive, hands working as she spoke, and her voice strong. She wasn’t sick at all. Mikhi knew that. She wasn’t going to die.

  “Isn’t that so, Nadia? Speak up, girl,” Sitti paused only a second before again launching into an angry jabber of Arabic.

  And the charm, all the good luck of it hanging there at Eddie’s throat the whole time they were searching, seemed forgotten; its luck granted or not—both Sitti and Uncle Eddie were acting now as if it never mattered in the first place. And Mikhi had known that too.

  Her brother was watching her. She could feel the heat of his stare, and she turned to him. No matter what you answer, his look told her, I’m still going to catch it. Then he turned away. So save yourself, his turning away said, and she was free.

  “Well, Nadia?”

  Uncle Eddie put out his cigarette. Then he reached down and rested one hand on the buckle of the snake skin belt, waiting.

  “Sitti isn’t sick,” she found herself saying, and so calmly that her own voice sounded strange to her. “And all Mikhi did, he just looked at her, that’s all. It wasn’t the Evil Eye.”

  “Ach!” Sitti was furious, betrayed.
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  And so, after Mikhi got the belt, Nadia would be next. She knew that. But already, calmly, she was beginning to think about what it would be like for them afterward. It would not be easy; even so, she felt a wordless yet certain anticipation: the two of them luckless, free in Boston and Chicago and Holy Toledo, the rest of their lives lost in the American homesickness. What should they take with them?

  Next to her, Mikhi released a nervous sound, almost a laugh.

  Then it was over, her brother’s voice cut off in the suck of breath as Uncle Eddie reached out to grasp him by the arm. The belt flashed, and Mikhi shrieked with each sharp flick and slap, again and again and again.

  Nadia would be next. Calmly, she closed her eyes and tried to imagine America, how it will be, and what they should take with them when they go.

  Carlton Fredericks and My Mother

  MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN

  On the counter the battered black radio hummed with advice to the housewife, the dieter, the car owner, the consumer, the bargain hunter, the average American. Carlton Fredericks proclaimed that vitamins could cure anything. Bernard Meltzer warned of stingy insurance companies waiting to cheat their customers. Joan Hamburg tipped single women on the best places to meet men. They alternately bellowed and soothed as their disgruntled or dissatisfied callers pleaded, fumed, and ranted, their duets complementing the clanking pots and sizzling garlic perpetually boiling and browning on my mother’s stove. My mother always listened to the radio in the kitchen while she worked, her small hands, efficient and quick, cleaning the counter, washing the dishes, cutting vegetables. If she could, she would have listened all day to these radio voices—Carlton Fredericks and his array of vitamins meant to cure everything from hammertoes to cancer or Bernard Meltzer with his practical advice on buying a home or saving money. The advice competed in the kitchen with the popping sounds of frying peppers and the whistling of the steam blowing out of the spout of the tin espresso pot. As she performed her daily food preparations, she was enveloped all the while in the comforting advice that for my mother had an almost olfactory presence, an elusive aroma of Americanness. It was as if Hamburg’s or Fredericks’s advice saturated her clothes with the essence of that intangible something that made an American. Those voices crackling from their various AM frequencies comforted her, because through the democracy of radio, they treated her as American—something the rest of the world certainly never did.

  Often, my mother acted as if those radio shows were lectures of a great professor and gave us oral reports on such topics as vitamin C as a cure for hair loss. She informed us of the dangers of the scheming con artist who might pretend to be a roofer who happened to be passing by your house and notice that the roof was severely damaged; he might then offer you a special “one-time-only” roof repair with only $200 down, payable immediately in cash, of course. She treated me to one of these minilectures every time I sat at the kitchen table to sip espresso or taste the meatballs before dinner. In a way, those radio shows were her university education, teaching her how to be more American or at least revealing to her the fears and foibles of a typical American. When she learned something from the radio, she seemed amazed as if something that had eluded her for many years was finally within her reach.

  My mother was twenty-three when she came to America from San Mauro, a little Italian village in southern Italy where she attended school through the third grade, when public education ended. Even fifty years later, she talked about her days in school as exciting. Her voice took on a lilt when she described the classroom, the teacher, the books. She even recited poems she had memorized in first grade and still remembered the exact words the teacher used to describe them. She hung on to these memories because she desperately desired more knowledge.

  Sometimes she seemed wistful when she told us stories about her past. Although she left the Old World behind, she had no intention of losing us too. She believed in keeping us all close to her. In a way, those radio shows allowed her to do that by giving her something to talk about she thought we’d understand. More important, she wanted to convince us that she, too, was learning to be an American. This language of radio seemed to provide her with the questions to ask that would open the door between us, the door that was slowly slamming shut, even while she tried to keep us safe in her warm kitchen.

  Once on one of those radio programs she heard someone mention “petting.” I was about eleven years old, and she asked, “So, what is petting?” I, who was still lost in a world of books, explained, “Why it’s like when you touch a cat, you are petting the cat.” To illustrate, I made smooth motions as if I were petting the cat’s fur. My mother giggled and averted her eyes so I knew that the answer I had given her was not the one she was looking for. It was a couple of years before I realized what she wanted to know.

  My mother was the hub of our lives. We all revolved around her. Yet as we grew older, it became harder and harder for her to give advice we didn’t mock. I remember my brother teasing her. When we were in the car, he’d point to her head and say, “Hey Ma, what’s that little bump on your shoulders?” Ignoring him, she’d sit in the front seat of the car, her head barely reaching the top of the seat back, her purse securely tucked under her arm, her hand clutching the door handle. All the while, her feet made jerking motions as if she could stop the car. Though she’d never driven, she would direct my father, “Too fast.” Or “Watch out. Here comes car.” My brother called her the “little general,” teasing but also serious because she did, after all, want to keep her hands on our lives, kneading us into shape the way she kneaded bread in the big bowl.

  She was fiercely protective of us. I was not even allowed to step off the front porch unless my older sister was with me. Mostly, my mother encouraged us to play Monopoly, dominoes, or checkers at a rickety table that we set up for that purpose on the stoop. The few times we were allowed to go anywhere, my mother paced and worried until we were home again.

  I was surprised, therefore, when I told her I was applying to the University of Virginia and she didn’t tell me that I couldn’t go. Instead, her dresser quickly filled up with votive candles that formed a circle of flickering light around the Saint Anthony statue that already presided over her room. The candlewicks glowed ominously in the weeks before the letters from colleges were scheduled to arrive. I am not sure what I imagined the University of Virginia to be like, but I wanted to go there since I was positive that it was a world away from Paterson. I cringe now when I think of the picture of me I attached to the application, a picture in which I looked about as un-American as anybody could. Of course, since I had rarely been out of Paterson in my life, I don’t think my mother would ever have really let me go. The matter was settled when I got a full four-year scholarship to the branch campus of a working-class university, a campus in Paterson a few blocks from the high school I had attended. Her prayers were answered; it didn’t matter what other news the mail held. I would live at home, taking the bus at the corner of our street to the college.

  My dreams of ivy-covered buildings receded as my fear about going to college consumed me. On the first day of class, I was terrified because I thought I’d never fit in. Those first weeks were exhilarating and terrifying. I joined everything I could and soon made more friends than I ever had. I even took twenty-one credits a semester because my scholarship paid for as many classes as I wanted to take. I guess I was my mother’s daughter after all. I wanted to learn everything I could, hungry for the world outside the isolated Italian neighborhood and the sometimes overpowering atmosphere of my mother’s fragrant kitchen. I threw myself into college life, made friends with other working-class kids, and enjoyed it all. Of course, each night I had to ride the bus home.

  The world I was constructing for myself was so different from the world my mother had known. From the time she left school, she worked in the fields, cooked the family’s meals, and helped her father in his grocery store. Her life followed the same routine until she married my father. He was an Am
erican by virtue of his birth certificate and his one year of life he spent in Philadelphia as a baby. As an adult, he went back to Philadelphia to work and returned to Italy when he decided to find a wife. The first time he saw my mother she was chasing the family pig up the mountain, her face rosy-cheeked, her body strong and sensual. He decided then and there to marry her.

  Three months after she caught that reluctant pig, my mother found herself married and living in an Italian neighborhood in Paterson, New Jersey. Maybe she thought that America would be a place where she could break out of the constrictions most women faced when they married and lived the rest of their lives in San Mauro. I know she hoped to go to school, to pick up where she left off in Italy. Although my father went to night school to learn English, he insisted, “Women don’t need to go to school.” My mother cried for days, remembering how much she loved going to school. She knew she needed to learn English and night school was the only way she’d be able to find out about all the things she wanted earnestly to know. She pictured herself reading a book or memorizing poems in English as she had done in Italian. At the very least, she’d be able to read the signs in the grocery store and on the street. But all her pleading and tears would not change my father’s mind. Consequently, she never did learn English correctly. She only knew the words my sister and I taught her and those phrases she learned from the radio.

  Perhaps the voices of Meltzer, Hamburg, and Fredericks replaced the elders that my mother might have known in her village of San Mauro. Certainly, she accepted the radio hosts’ advice as sage wisdom, wisdom she believed could improve my life as well. Daily she’d repeat the advice she’d heard, her mind serving up these tidbits on demand. “Oh, yes,” she’d say. “Take vitamin C. Good for your hair,” When we’d argue, I’d scold, “Ma, where did you hear that garbage?” She’d retreat, muttering, “Levermind, levermind,” and go on believing what she chose, not even accepting that the word was “nevermind.” She’d continue to say it as she heard it. Her mind appeared to be a jumble of information, much of it contradictory, picked up from her favorite radio show hosts—advice on love and dating, on how to raise children or where to find the perfect cashmere sweater.