Crazy in the Kitchen

by Louise DeSalvo

  My father has allowed himself this camera because he wants to memorialize the family he has returned to. The family he yearned for while he was away. The wife he loves, whom he feared he'd never see again. The daughter who was just a baby when he left. The father-in-law who was more father to him than his own father. The mother-in-law who helped his wife take care of his child when he was gone.

  So many people in my father's life have slipped away from him— his Italian grandparents, whom he loved as a boy, then never saw again; his Italian friends; the friends he saw killed. And he lost himself to war, too. He is not the man he was, and he knows it, and there is no way to explain what happened. No way to tell what burning bodies jumping from torpedoed ships look like; no way to speak of the men who killed themselves in gruesome ways rather than face battle; no way to describe the sound of bombardment; the sound of airplanes strafing a beach, the sight of men's backs ripped open; no way to say what it felt like to pry a wounded man from a plane that crashed into the deck of an aircraft carrier; no way to tell what it was like to pick up the remains of the dead after a battle (one bucket of remains equaled one body).

  He is unused to small children, to a wife, and to civilian life. A man whose life now runs in slow motion, or in quickstep, but never in ordinary time. A man who wants to run for cover when trucks backfire; who wants to attack and kill anyone who disagrees with him, even his daughter; who wants to make love to his sometimes unwilling wife whenever he can, for making love helps as nothing else does; who wants to weep for what he has seen and what he has lost, but who cannot weep.

  And so, he takes motion pictures of his family. For by taking pictures, he can be with his family, yet apart.

  His father-in-law he loves, as he never loved his own, that reprobate, who escaped to Italy whenever he could (to a comare and to another family in Italy, my father sometimes thought), leaving his wife and five children to fend for themselves. He doesn't think that there is anything wrong with his father-in-law's antics. He doesn't turn the camera away; he even eggs the old man on, although he sees his wife's and his mother-in-law's disapproval. But they are women, after all, and their job is to criticize. There's not enough pleasure in this world, he thinks. Let the old man have his fun.

  "They gave them wine to drink," my father tells me. "All the wine they could drink. Not water. Not very much food. But a lot of wine."

  My father is telling me about my grandfather's life. About his work on the railroad.

  "Why did they do that?" I ask, though I think I know the answer. Alcohol: antidote to rebellion.

  "To keep them quiet," my father says. "To keep them working." But he tells me that in the South of Italy, it wasn't always that simple. There, water was scarce, and safe water, scarcer still. He was lucky, he said. There was a good well in Scafati, where he lived when he was a little boy, a communal well close to the church in his neighborhood. Contaminated water could kill you. And one of the lessons your mother taught you as a child was not to drink any water, no matter how thirsty you were, unless she gave it to you.

  Water was scarce. Water was dangerous. Wine was plentiful and safe. It wouldn't kill you, at least not right away. When my father lived in Scafati, he watched workers in the fields stop to eat their small meals— a piece of bread and a slice of onion— always washing their food down with wine. Between meals, they drank wine when they were thirsty. "Passing the saint," they called it.

  I imagine what it must have been like for my grandfather to work in scorching fields in summer with no water to drink, only wine. Now, there is an aqueduct that brings water into Puglia. But when he lived there, there was no aqueduct. Always, the people of the South were promised water. And they knew that, for centuries, aqueducts brought water into Rome. Why water for Rome? And no water for them?

  When my grandfather retired from the railroad, he was an alcoholic. But that clinical word cannot describe the man he had become.

  By the time I was born, the man who had stood so tall and proud beside two wives in his wedding photographs had lost his pride, his strength, his steely-eyed determination. Wine, antidote to his pain, his sorrow, his loss, his rage.

  Anger was an extravagance. An emotion a peasant couldn't afford. Anger wasted energy. Anger changed nothing. Anger singled you out, anger made you a target.

  Unless you used that anger, channeled it into political action. As the anarchists in his family had; as the labor organizers had; as the farm laborers who demanded a living wage had. But by the time my grandfather left Puglia, whatever his people had gained through work stoppages, strikes, land seizures had been taken away from them. They fought; many people were killed; they lost. Nothing changed until after the Great War.

  So it was inside the house where anger appeared. Anger against the padrone who held you captive. Against the landowner who didn't pay you enough money to feed yourself. Anger that, no matter how hard you worked, you had little or nothing to show for it. Anger that you couldn't feed your family. Anger that you weren't treated like a man. Since you couldn't show your anger to the padrone, the landowner, it was your wife and children who saw the rage, who felt it.

  My grandfather never hit his wives, never hit his daughter in anger. But you could see the rage. In his eyes when he talked about his days on the railroad. See it, when he pounded his fist on the table as he talked about how a man he worked with died because of a worn cable. Hear it, when he raised his voice about how you could expect nothing from politicians, how they were all corrupt.

  He'd take a glass, pour himself some wine, and then some more. After his third glass, he couldn't remember why he was angry. After his fourth glass, he'd become sentimental, teary-eyed. That's when he missed his mother, his father, his paisani, his dead wife.

  My grandfather dies at home, in his kitchen. On the day he dies, my mother, my sister, and I come home from shopping. We don't buy much; we buy every day. Still, wrestling two children, a stroller, and a bag of groceries up the steep tenement stairs is difficult. By the time we get to the fourth floor, my mother is sweating, she's dropped a few things on the stairs, and she's yelled at us to move along. My mother knocks on my grandparents' door to tell her father we're home, to get some help. She'll settle my sister and me in his apartment for a snack while she unpacks, tidies up her kitchen. But there's no answer. My grandfather is supposed to be home. My mother knocks again. Still no answer.

  "Maybe," my mother says, "he's in the toilet. Maybe he's gone out."

  But my mother sounds worried. No one in our family goes anywhere without telling everyone where they're going, when they'll come back. Everyone always knows where everyone else is. My mother bangs on the door. She yells, "Papa!" Still no answer. Something is wrong. We go into our apartment. My mother drops her package on the kitchen table, puts my sister in her high chair. She tells me to crawl out the kitchen window, across the fire escape, through my grand parents' kitchen window, into their apartment. The window should be open; it's a warm September day. I've done this before, my mother watching. It's safe; still, it's a great adventure.

  When my grandfather is taking care of me, he lets me sit outside, on the fire escape. He ties a rope around my waist, ties the other end to a chair. He lets me have a treat there— some bread brushed with olive oil. Lets me water my grandmother's plants. This is another of our secrets.

  I look into the open window. See my grandfather on the floor. I crawl over the table, onto the chair, onto the floor. Rush to my grandfather.

  He's on his side; his eyes are open; his mouth is open. In his hand, he holds a pencil. On the floor, there is a piece of paper.

  I unlatch the door for my mother. She pushes past me, begins to scream. My sister hears my mother screaming and starts crying. I go back into our apartment, help my sister out of her high chair, bring her into our grandparents' kitchen.

  I'm not crying. I don't know why my mother is crying. I'm wondering why my grandfather is sleeping on the floor. I don't know that he's dead. That he's had a massive
heart attack. (My father blames the wine, the hard work my grandfather's done all his life. "He was like a father to me," my father says. "They killed him.")

  "That doesn't look like Grandpa," I say at the wake. "And that doesn't smell like Grandpa, either."

  I've gone up to the casket to see my grandfather's body. I'm a curious child. There is the smell of flowers, and the smell of mothballs, too, wafting from his suit.

  "What did your grandpa smell like?" a neighbor asks.

  "Like wine," I say. I remember my grandfather crushing grapes in the basement. Remember him drinking wine with me. Remember him drinking it, sometimes, right out of the bottle.

  Our neighbor laughs when I say my grandfather smelled like wine. It's good to have something to laugh at during a wake. " 'Mbriago," our neighbor says. It's what they called my grandfather in the neighborhood. 'Mbriago, the drunk.

  After my grandfather dies, everything changes. My grandmother starts wearing only black, wears it until she dies. My mother stops paying attention to me and my sister, forgets to feed us. After my grandfather dies, my mother stops smiling, and she rarely smiles again.

  Soon after my grandfather's death, we leave Hoboken. Without him, my mother says, there's no reason to stay. My father thinks it will be a good move for all of us.

  When we move to Ridgefield, and my grandmother comes to live with us, all the trouble between my mother and grandmother starts.

  My grandfather is not around to broker the peace between them. The hatred they've felt for each other all these years explodes.

  After my grandfather dies, no one asks me if I miss him. No one asks me if I'm sorry he's dead. No one wonders why I don't cry. My father is too worried about my mother. My grandmother is always quiet. My mother is in a fog. Everyone thinks I'm not crying because I'm a good little girl.

  Soon after my grandfather dies, I start forcing myself to look at the dead bodies of animals— pigeons, squirrels, the occasional rat— in the streets and in the park around the corner from where we live.

  When we go to the park, my mother sits on a bench and does nothing. My sister sits in her stroller and does nothing. I play alone, bounce a ball, skip rope, hide behind trees. And I poke at the bodies of dead animals with a stick. I wonder whether if I poke them long enough, they'll start moving, come back to life.

  On the day my grandfather dies, he's sitting at the kitchen table. He's adding columns of numbers, using a system he devised for counting, for he never went to school.

  He wasn't working on the docks for the railroad anymore; he had retired. But he had been working, digging basements, because he needed the money. At the start of each day, they'd give the workers a bottle of wine to drink.

  The people he worked for hadn't yet paid him for his labor. They owed him several weeks' wages. When he died, he was trying to figure out just how much money he was owed.

  FOOD ON THE TABLE

  I am nine years old, and I am standing on a pier in New York City, waving my white-gloved hand to my paternal grandfather (that no-good bastard, my father calls him), who is going back to Italy, again. My mother has dressed my sister and me in the Easter clothes she sewed for us this year. Although my sister and I are separated by four years, we are dressed identically. Pink dresses with starched lace collars; navy blue coats with decorative capes; natural straw hats; black patent-leather purses; black patent-leather shoes; white frilly anklets. And white gloves. Also gathered on the pier to see my grandfather off are my four aunts and uncles and my eight cousins, all also dressed in their best clothes.

  Unlike anyone else, and against the rules, my grandfather has climbed onto the railing of the ship. He grips a pole for support, waves a large white handkerchief in a grand, sweeping gesture. My grandmother has washed and ironed it. She has washed, starched, and ironed the shirts he is taking, packed his clothes, cooked and packed a little snack— a frittata with onions— should he get hungry before it's time to eat on board.

  There is no love between them, there has never been any love between them, but my grandmother does this every time my grandfather leaves because it is her duty. Theirs was an arranged marriage, not a love match, and although he has mistreated her for years, she takes care of him. This is her obligation.

  My grandmother stands next to my father, her only son. He has his arm around her shoulders to support her. She waves a smaller version of my grandfather's handkerchief, and she is weeping. Why she is weeping, I don't understand, because even when he's home, he's never at home, he might as well be gone. My grandfather isn't weeping. And though I am waving at my grandfather, though we are all waving at my grandfather, my grandfather isn't waving at us. As always, he's putting on a show. He is acting the part of the Italian patriarch, reluctantly leaving his family in the United States because it is his duty to visit his relatives in Italy.

  My grandfather plays to the crowd. We might as well not be there.

  My grandfather leaves my grandmother to go to Italy for as long as he wants at least twice a year. And leaves her with no income to support her while he's gone.

  (Years later, when I ask my father why he dragged us to New York to say good-bye to his father, when he didn't even like his father, my father says that we went not for my grandfather, but for my grandmother, and that my grandmother went because that is what a wife is supposed to do.)

  I think I know why my grandfather is going away. I think he's going to see his girlfriend. I think he has another family back in Italy. What else can explain these frequent trips? And why he doesn't leave his wife any money? My grandfather doesn't know when he'll be coming back to the United States. When he's asked, he shrugs his shoulders. He'll stay there for a while, he tells the family, until he feels like coming back. Or until his money runs out. But no one knows how much money he has, so we can't guess how long that will be. When he answers his children's questions, he answers them like they have no right to ask them, like he's answering them so that they'll stop pestering him, not because he wants his family to know anything about his plans.

  "But, Pa," one of my aunts says, "who's gonna put food on the table for Ma when you're gone?"

  My grandfather rolls his eyes heavenward. He puts his palms together as if he's praying, and he shakes his hands up and down.

  "How should I know?" my grandfather responds. "She's your mother, not mine."

  When my grandfather says this, my father and my aunts walk out of whatever tiny kitchen the family has packed itself into. They look up at the ceiling. They mutter. They make little circles in the air with their upraised hands. This is a gesture that is Italian for "I don't believe this is happening. This can't be happening. Things like this don't happen, at least in our family," even though this has been happening in this family from when my father was a little boy.

  My father looks angry; looks like he's trying to control himself. He looks like he wants to hit my grandfather. Years later I learn that, after my father came home from his first tour of duty in the navy, he saw my grandfather hit my grandmother. My father took his father, threw him against the wall, and said, "If you ever touch her again, I'll kill you."

  My father loves his mother with a love that borders on adoration. "She was a saint," he tells me when I'm older, "to put up with that man." I don't think she was a saint; I think she was stupid.

  My father tells me about how my grandmother always made do. How whatever she cooked— heart, tripe, lung— was good, nutritious, tasty. How she spent fifty cents a day on food, how he went to the market with her every day before she went to work and he went to school. How she shopped for the day, saw what was good, what was cheap. How she made pasta during the week, mostly with a red sauce, or with a vegetable sauce, or a sauce with a little prosciutto, or a handful of peas. How they ate lots of fruits and vegetables, especially broccoli rabe. And how on Sunday, she'd make a meat gravy, or, on special occasions, some beef or some pork, sometimes a stuffed veal pocket, or a casserole.

  When my father was older, and working, she
always cooked him a steak on Sunday, pan fried, with onions. She didn't make steak for anyone else, not her daughters, not herself, even though they all were working. "A man needs his strength," she'd say.

  She had her little quirks about feeding herself, my father tells me. She'd cook for the family, but she wouldn't eat with them. After they finished eating, she'd cook something for herself, eat it alone, just like my other grandmother, something different from what she'd cooked for them. When she got older, she didn't feel like cooking anymore, and, though she'd fix herself a little something, she wouldn't cook for my grandfather. She was tired, she said, tired from cooking for all those people all those years.

  When I ask my father why she never left him, he says, "Because the Catholic church didn't allow divorce. And besides, she wanted to keep up appearances, she wanted the family to stay together."

  My paternal grandfather gives me more attention than I get from any other grown-up. I'm his favorite grandchild and I know it. He signals this when he offers me one of the eyeballs from the lamb's head my grandmother prepares for Easter Sunday.

  I know it's a delicacy, given to special guests. I refuse it, very ungraciously, and, though my father is distressed, my refusal seems to give my grandfather as much pleasure as my acceptance would have. I am a child with a will of her own, like him. He respects this more than the dutiful attentions of my sister and cousins.

  Once, my father tells me, "He treats you like a grandson, not like a granddaughter." Another time, he says, "He treats you like his eldest son. He's pinning the hopes of the family on you."

  My grandfather has always stood outside the family. Always acted as if his family doesn't matter. He never lets them stop him from doing whatever he wants. He always indulges himself, even if there isn't enough money to pay the rent.

  Even on ordinary days, my grandfather wears a solid gold watch chain; carries a hand-hemmed linen handkerchief in his pocket; douses himself with expensive cologne. He wears handmade Italian leather shoes. Tweed. Cashmere. Silk. Knee-length socks held up by elaborate and colorful garters. But not a hat. My grandfather thinks that if you're Italian and wear a hat, you look like a Mafioso.