Crazy in the Kitchen

by Louise DeSalvo

  Did I believe I would find someone who could tell me about my stepgrandmother's life, what she was like as a girl? Yes, I think I did. These things happen, after all, in novels, in films. But not in real life. At least not in my life. But I want to know her history, not just imagine it. For although we are not related by blood, I consider her my ancestor.

  No, I will never know my grandparents' histories. No matter how much I try to remember my grandparents' stories; how much I listen to my father's stories; how much I read; how much I study my grandparents' photos, their papers, the few artifacts that remain of their lives. No matter whether or not I visit the places they lived.

  All I can do is conjecture, imagine, invent their lives. My story of their story, a distortion, a misrepresentation of what they lived. But my story of their story, now a respect I must accord them— though I cannot possibly get it right, though I cannot possibly understand who they were— so their lives do not pass into oblivion.

  My story of their story gives me something I did not have before. It fixes me in time.

  This place holds nothing for me, though I thought it would hold so much. Rodi Garganico is, for me, a place imagined, described to me in my grandmother's stories. But that imagined place is as real to me as if I had experienced it.

  Even though I'm here, in Rodi, I'm in some in-between place. Trying to find a place that cannot be found on any map.

  The memory of these places was all my grandparents had after they left. But places change, become someplace else. And the only real place I can visit is the Rodi Garganico in my memory. Horace Walpole: "Our memory sees more than our eyes in this country."

  Standing on the beach, I realize the obvious: how far Rodi Garganico is from Hoboken, New Jersey. It has taken us a long time to get here even in the age of the airplane, the automobile. How much greater the distance between these places for my grandmother.

  What could it have been like to leave this place she'd never left before, and leave its ways, for a man she didn't know, for a world she was unprepared to experience?

  Everywhere in Puglia, round crocheted doilies, like the ones my grandmother crocheted. Placed between cup and saucer. Inside bread baskets. After my grandmother died, we found scores of them. My mother never used them; I didn't know what they were for. And so disposed of them.

  On a walk, I see a woman, her back to the road, sitting outside her house, embroidering flowers like those that bloom on the hillside behind the village.

  Deep sorrow. A yearning that will never be satisfied.

  I know that what I wanted, what I needed, I will never find here, and that I will have to live with this knowledge, and that learning to live with it will be another kind of education.

  If my people hadn't left, I would be: The woman washing her steps in Rodi. A woman in a field, bending to hoe the earth. A woman in black, walking along the side of the road, distrustful. A screaming woman in a kitchen— angry words; pots and pans smashing. The woman gathering snails by the side of the road after a rainstorm. The old woman embroidering a tablecloth for her granddaughter's trousseau, taking care that each flower is stitched perfectly. The woman cutting pasta on her guitar outside on a hot day. (Pasta, transubstantiation of water and flour.)

  Ernie and I decide to leave. I am nothing but an invader here.

  BIG SHOT

  When my father is about seven or eight years old, my grandfather decides to move the family back to Italy, to Scafati, where his family and his wife's family live. He's sold his business. He has some money. And he has a plan.

  My grandfather wants to go back home to show his relatives how well he's done in America. He has an older brother in Italy who has a Ph.D. in philosophy, and who's become a priest. The family doted upon this brother, gave him everything. They believed that if they used all their resources to put one son in a position of power, then he would help the other members of the family. Only it didn't turn out that way. For the older son did nothing for the family. He believed that if he entertained them with a lavish dinner once a year, they should be satisfied. Their pride in him should be enough.

  Because his brother refused to use his influence to find him employment, and because jobs were scarce, my grandfather was forced to emigrate. He's returning home to show his family that, without their help, he's done well in America.

  My grandfather's plan is to find a little rundown house in a good location, by the river in Scafati. He'll use cheap labor to fix it up. He and his family will live in one part of the house; he'll rent out the rest. He'll save the rent money from the first house, buy another, rent that one, save the rent money, buy another. In no time at all, he imagines, he will be one of the biggest landlords in Scafati. His family will respect him. Everyone will say how clever he is. He will live in an impressive house. He will give his mother expensive presents. He will take all his friends out for sumptuous meals.

  "The reason he takes us back to Italy," my father says, "is because he says he's going to live there for the rest of his life. He has this plan that he's going to become a big-shot landlord, a big shot like all the other big shots he says he knows. This way, he won't have to work. He can live off all the rent money without working, without having to lift a finger.

  "We last less than a year in Scafati before my father's money runs out. But my mother has saved money she's earned while we lived there, working in the canning factory, so we can move back to New Jersey.

  "After we come back to the United States, my father never takes us to Italy again, although he goes back several times a year.

  "By the time we come back to the States, he and my mother aren't getting along. That's when things get bad at home, and they stay that way until I join the navy to get out of the house."

  I know some terrible things happened to my father in Scafati. There was a trumpet player in the local band who molested him and some of his friends. He lured boys up into his room, threatened them into submission, fondled them until they were aroused, then beat their erect penises because he was disgusted by them. My father was one of these boys. As he tells what happened, though, he laughs.

  "We got the son of a bitch," my father says. "My friend tells his parents, and the trumpet player is driven out of town by a gang of angry parents. If they caught him, they would have killed him. And no one would have said a word."

  Many times, my father was beaten by gangs of fascists. When they marched through town, he, a group of other children, and protestors, stood on a street corner singing the Communist anthem, "Bandera rosa." My father's resistance to fascism was visceral, not political: "I was just a kid," he says. "I didn't understand what was happening. But I knew these people were dangerous, so that when I saw groups of Communists gathering to resist, I joined them." His mother was working; his father was with his cronies. So his parents never learned what happened. He told his mother his cuts and bruises had been dealt out by a local bully. He stopped taunting the fascists when his mother told him that if he was beaten up again, she'd beat him up.

  Despite all this, my father remembers his time in Scafati as idyllic. He remembers a life filled with adventure— throwing stones into the river, playing with his friends, visiting his grandparents— and with wonderful meals and intimate family gatherings.

  My father was considered a celebrity in the village, he says, because of the roller skates he brought to Italy with him. They were the first anyone in the village had ever seen. As my father glided through the village, over the blocks of granite paving the streets, people would point to him and call him il diavolo che rulla, the devil on wheels, the devil who rolls. He made money from those skates, he said, by renting them out to his friends.

  There were days when he'd skate down the road to the ruins at Pompeii to beg money from travelers. Sometimes he'd take off his skates, wander about, look at what remained from this ancient city, imagine the past. My father's love of history, he says, dates from these excursions.

  My father's maternal grandparents live close to his fam
ily. His grandfather is a conductor on the railroad, so they live well. They have a little patch of land behind their house to grow vegetables and raise chickens, turkeys, pigeons, and rabbits, which they share with my father's family. The family gets together several times a week and on weekends. Every time, they have good meals— pasta with vegetables from the garden; a roasted chicken, or stewed rabbit, or pigeon, on weekends.

  My father becomes very attached to his grandparents. And they dote on him. He is the only boy in the family. They treat him well, unlike his father, who ignores him. They also lend help and emotional support to their daughter, his mother, which lessens the impact of her husband's indifference. (After the family moves back to New Jersey, my father never sees his grandparents again.)

  Because his father wants to rent out all the other rooms in the derelict property he buys, the six members of the family (and later seven, when his mother gives birth to her last child, a girl) crowd into two rooms. There is no electricity, no heat, no stove, no icebox, no running water, no toilet.

  When it gets cold, his mother lights a charcoal burner in the middle of the bedroom. Everyone sleeps in one room, on pallets on the floor. The air is smoky from the charcoal burner, but the windows stay closed. His mother is afraid of the night air.

  His mother cautions the children each night to be careful: people's bedclothes often catch fire, and children are burned in their sleep. This never happens in his family. But my father has nightmares of rolling into the fire in his sleep. His screams wake the whole family; his sisters get mad at him, and his father calls him a sissy.

  My father's mother sets up a charcoal grill on the balcony of their apartment. From the balcony, you can cast a line into the river and fish. Here, outside, his mother does all her cooking over a charcoal fire, even when it rains.

  My father remembers the charcoal vendors coming through the streets, remembers the fires on the slopes of the Apennines when the woods were burned for charcoal, remembers the stench of smoke, and how the forests shrank, even in the short time that he is there. At this time in the South of Italy, charcoal is the only fuel used to heat homes and cook food.

  All the family's water— for cooking, washing, cleaning— is hauled from the well near my father's grandmother's house. His grandmother is lucky because she doesn't have to haul her water far. The well makes her neighborhood very desirable. But my father's family lives a mile away.

  "Who hauls the water?" I ask my father.

  "Me, my mother, and my sisters, of course," my father answers.

  "Not your father?"

  "Not my father."

  "Even after your mother has the baby?"

  "Before she has the baby. And after."

  "What's your father doing?"

  "Who knows what my father does during the day? He's a man of leisure. He might have had a job in a barbershop, but I don't think so. My mother was working in the canning factory to make some money. I think he spent his days just hanging around."

  "Didn't your mother complain?"

  "Of course. But it didn't do any good. Besides, there were lots of men like my father who did nothing but hang around. How he behaved wasn't exceptional."

  "Let me get this straight," I say. "Your mother gives birth to a baby, is raising five kids, one of them an infant, while she's also working in a canning factory, hauling water every day all the way to that miserable place where you live, and she's cooking outside even when it rains, and you don't remember your father helping her with anything?"

  "No, he didn't help her with anything. Didn't I tell you before that my father was a shithead?"

  My grandmother's work at the canning factory, and her relationship with her parents, keep her family going through this time. Like so many women of the South, though she complains, she accepts her fate. She resigns herself to the circumstances of her life and plows through the routine of her days, never stopping, never resting.

  She awakens early in the morning, dresses the children, folds the bedding, starts the charcoal fire on the balcony, trails down to the well with my father and the three youngest girls. The oldest daughter stays behind to watch the baby.

  After they haul the water back to their house, my grandmother heats it to wash the oldest children and dress them for school. She gives the children breakfast: some stale bread soaked in coffee, a piece of fruit; "We always had fruit," my father says— and sends them off.

  She carries the baby to her mother's and goes to the factory. There, she cleans string beans, peels carrots, cuts plum tomatoes (the famed San Marzano tomatoes) in quarters to prepare them for canning. Sometimes, to make extra money, she takes a bushel of vegetables home to prepare them. My father and his older sisters help. Sometimes she keeps a handful of string beans, a couple of carrots, a few tomatoes, for herself. My father says she never gets in trouble; the owner of the factory expects the workers to take some food so they can be well-fed and work hard; besides, he is a relative.

  When I tell my husband about my grandmother's life, he tells me a similar story about his grandmother's life.

  His grandfather was a tailor, and after he established himself in America, he contacted someone in his village in the Abruzzi to arrange a marriage. Money was exchanged; my husband's grandmother was bought and paid for, more a possession than a person.

  What his grandfather wants, my husband says, is not a wife, but a servant. When she comes to America, she knows no one. None of her relatives are here to give her support, to make sure she's well-treated. So she's at her husband's mercy.

  He comes and goes as he pleases. Visits his friends whenever he chooses. Pays no attention to her except to have sex as often as he chooses, and to tell her what he wants to eat. After they have children, he pays no attention to them unless he's brutalizing them.

  His eldest son is sent to college and graduate school: all the family's resources support this son. The three other sons— one of whom is my husband's father— and daughter are taken out of school and sent to work at unskilled or semiskilled jobs to help support the family and the eldest son, who becomes an engineer.

  Through the years, a portion of their pay is handed over to this privileged son so he can indulge himself; he buys nice clothes, goes to the movies, to bars, to houses of prostitution. No one in the family complains about the injustice of this arrangement. Their father has terrified them into submission. He allows this son to take whatever he wants from his siblings.

  Once, when my husband's father refuses to give his brother one of his shirts, his father tries to murder him. But he escapes, leaves home.

  He doesn't stop seeing his parents. He can't abandon his mother.

  She spends her life cleaning and preparing food for the family and for all the friends her husband brings home. He is a tailor. He does well in America. He likes to show off by bringing his male friends home and having his wife cook for them.

  He never takes her anywhere. She never visits anyone. Her domain is the household, her place is in the kitchen. Her only forays outside the house are to buy food. She never visits her children once they marry. They all come to see her.

  I imagine my husband's grandmother as a young woman on the eve of her departure for America, knowing that she will probably never see her family again. Her family is happy that this marriage has been arranged, for it means that there will be one less mouth to feed in the harsh countryside of the Abruzzi, and the honor of one less daughter to worry about.

  I can see her holding the photograph of her husband-to-be given to her by the intermediary. Imagine her wondering what this man is like, wondering what her life will be like with this man. If she is like many Southern Italian women, she probably doesn't hope for much from this alliance; it is wise not to hope, for if you do not hope, then you will not be disappointed. She would have known that they would not be intimate, that they would live parallel lives, as men and women do. She knew she would be responsible for the household and for the children, though he would make the rules. She knew that h
e would work and provide money and visit with his friends at the end of the day. And that, over this, she would have no control. He would come home whenever it pleased him. And if luck shined upon her, he would not come home drunk, and he would not come home wanting sex.

  Still, she might have hoped for this much: That because there was so much money in America, her life as the wife of a well-respected tailor might have permitted her a few pleasures. A beautiful dress, say, to wear as they walked through their neighborhood. A trip to visit her family. Some money saved for her old age. And she might have hoped that this man would be loyal to her, and that he would treat her with respect and decency, if not with warmth, generosity, and kindness.

  My husband's grandfather will eat only fresh-killed chickens, fresh-killed game, fresh-killed fish. So his wife buys them live, as he demands, and butchers them in the backyard. He will eat only homemade pasta and homemade bread, so she makes them daily for her large family. Nor can he abide store-bought tomatoes and vegetables, so she keeps a garden out back, and she hoes, weeds, harvests, without his help. He likes to eat alone, without conversation. So she feeds him first. Then she feeds her family. When all the others have taken their meal, she eats, alone, in the kitchen.

  When he sits in the living room, and reads the paper, and smokes his pipe, and drinks his wine, he likes to be alone to think. So she cannot sit in the living room with him. Besides, at the end of the day, she has too much to do to sit down.

  On holidays, when her grown children come to their parents' home for a festive meal, she cooks for days. She emerges from the kitchen halfway through the celebration, and sits at her place at the table for only a few moments before returning to the kitchen, the place where she spends most of her life. My husband says she never eats with the family. My husband says no one in the family thought this was strange or unjust.

  She would stand in the kitchen, frying tiny meatballs to feed people as they came to visit, so they wouldn't spend even a moment in her home without having something to eat. As she stirred vats of tomato sauce, she wiped her brow with the handkerchief she concealed in her sleeve. She struggled up from the basement with trays of homemade pasta, often in intricate shapes that would take a long time to fashion.