Crazy in the Kitchen

by Louise DeSalvo

  When we start dating, Ernie's mother is as happy as mine, and for the same reason: he's never before dated someone she considers suitable. "Don't screw this one up," she says. "If you hurt her, I'll kill you."

  Ernie's parents take us to Amerigo's, a restaurant in the Bronx serving what his family believes is the best pizza in America. On the drive there on the Cross Bronx Expressway, I sit in the back with Ernie. He puts his arm around me. His parents don't object.

  And the pizza at Amerigo's is memorable. (Still the best I've ever eaten, including the pizza I've eaten in Italy.) It's made by the grandmother of the proprietor, baked in a wood-burning oven. Glorious crust. Chunks of tomato. Fresh mozzarella. Fresh basil.

  It's the pizza at Amerigo's that makes me sure I want to marry this man.

  When I see my mother so happy to be serving Ernie lobster, I realize how unhappy she has been with me.

  There we are, gathered round a nicely set table. There is good food. Good wine. Conversation.

  My mother leans forward, smiles at Ernie across the table, asks him if he'd like another helping.

  "Don't mind if I do," he says, and fills his plate a second time.

  "Be sure to save some room," she tells him, pleased that he likes her food. "We're having something special for dessert, something I know you'll like."

  MATCHMAKING

  Just before Ernie and I get married, we hatch a misbegotten plan to introduce his maternal grandfather, who has been living with Ernie's family since the death of his grandmother, to my grandmother, who has been living with my family since soon after the death of my grandfather.

  Their spouses have died. They are lonely. They are unhappy living with their relatives. Ernie's grandfather didn't want to move away from his apartment in the Bronx when his wife died. But his daughters insisted he couldn't live alone; insisted he had to live with Ernie's mother so she could care for him. He refused; got sick; went into the hospital. When he was ready to leave, they told him they'd given up his apartment, moved his belongings. He cries about this still.

  "Maybe they'll get along, become friends," Ernie says.

  "Maybe they'll get married," I say, and not facetiously.

  The fantasy of these two old people setting up house together makes me happy. Now that I am preparing to get married, I view marriage as the solution to every problem. It is certainly the solution to my problem— wanting to move out of my parents' house which, for the daughter of an Italian American family in the 1960s, isn't possible without getting married.

  That they are both Italian, Ernie and I are certain, will be enough, we're sure, to kindle a friendship, if not spark a love match.

  But what do Ernie and I know of the numerous dialects and regional differences among Italian-born Italians? Of the loathing that people from one part of Italy have for people from other parts of Italy? What do we know of the fact that Italian-born Italians don't think of themselves as Italians, but as people from Sicily, or from Puglia? And not only as people from Sicily, but as people from Palermo (not Catania); not only from Puglia, but from Rodi Garganico (not Bari)? And not only as people from a particular town, but as people from a particular neighborhood in that town. And not only as people from a particular neighborhood, but as people with a certain set of affiliations within that that neighborhood. What do we know of the racism in the North towards people from the South (in Turin, for example, no one will rent to a Southerner)? We don't know that the South is called Africa, that Italians born in the North often believe Southern Italians are barbarians?

  What do we know of the regional differences in Italian cooking? We don't know people from one part of Italy won't eat the food of people from another part of Italy. That people from one village cook different specialties from people in another village. That people from one family cook the village specialty differently from the people from another family. That each thinks the other's food is a travesty, inedible.

  And what do we know of the profound divide of class in Italy? We don't know landowners do not mingle with their workers. People who are workers do not mingle with people who are artisans. People who are peasants do not mingle with shopowners.

  About all of this, we understand very little. We were born and raised in the United States. Our families have taught us virtually nothing about the country our ancestors came from. We have learned nothing about the history of Italy, the history of the South of Italy, the reasons for the great emigration. Neither of us speaks Italian or dialect, though each of us understands the dialect spoken in our households.

  Ernie and I see ourselves as similar because our grandparents were born in Italy. We think of ourselves as being more alike than different, although my grandparents are from Puglia and Campania, and Ernie's are from Sicily and the Abruzzi. Ernie and I have often heard disparaging remarks about our being Italian. And each of us has gotten into fights over it— at school, in our neighbourhoods.

  However, we have also heard from our relatives the disparaging remarks that people from various parts of Italy make about people from other parts. We have heard our grandparents call people from Calabria hardheaded; people from Naples thieves; people from Liguria penny-pinching; people from certain parts of the North polenta eaters (which means they are bland, colorless, without passion or excitement). And we have heard everyone say that anyone from anyplace else in Italy is not to be trusted. So perhaps we should know that bringing our grandparents together is not as simple as it seems.

  On the day that has been fixed for their meeting, Ernie's grandfather arrives punctually. Ernie's mother drives him, and she'll pick him up after she does a bit of shopping. My mother goes shopping with her; they are future in-laws; they are getting to know each other.

  (The closer we get to my wedding day, the more congenial my mother becomes, the more time she spends with Ernie's mother. As much as I can't wait to move out of the house, so, too, it seems she can't wait for me to leave. "You are a thorn in my side" is what my mother says when she gets mad at me.)

  The plan is that we will leave the two "old folks," as my mother calls them, alone together, so they can get to know each other. I am home, but I plan on staying upstairs, at my desk at the top of the stairs, from which I can hear what's going on but stay out of the way.

  My grandmother has refused to change her clothes for the occasion, has refused, even, to wash up or tidy her hair, irritating my mother beyond measure. And she is a mess, her apron all stained with blood from the tripe she's been preparing. "Ma," my mother has pleaded, to no effect, "at least change your apron, for Christ's sake." Wearing her blood-stained, battle-stained apron, my grandmother chops her onion, her carrot, her celery stalks, her garlic, her tomatoes for the sauce for the tripe, doing all the things she would do on a normal day.

  She puts the tripe into a pot of salted water to cook it until it's tender. She ignores the time. Ignores my mother, who follows her around, haranguing her. Ignores me, as I urge her to clean up. Ignores the fact that Ernie's grandfather will arrive shortly.

  When Ernie and I planned this meeting, I had imagined my grandmother would welcome it as a change from her dull routine, which, I had hoped, would change her life. But no.

  My grandmother, exasperated with my mother and me, shouts at us in dialect. Something that sounds like "Fatifatadoi," which I know means something like "Mind your own business." And continues stinking up the kitchen with the tripe for her supper. When she meets Ernie's grandfather at the front door, she's red-faced and sullen from her battle with my mother.

  Ernie's grandfather has dressed nattily for the occasion. He wears his good brown tweed three-piece suit, a heavily starched white shirt with an old-fashioned rounded collar, and a cravat. He carries a small clutch of flowers from Ernie's mother's garden for my grandmother. And he has doused himself with the cologne he always wears, which Ernie's mother complains about because it gives her a headache.

  Ernie's grandfather enters, bowing slightly. He is a very dapper dude. How can my grandmothe
r not like him? But how could he ever like her?

  My grandmother wipes her dirty hands on her blood-stained apron, pushes a few steel-gray strands of hair away from her eyes. Grunts a few syllables I can't understand. She takes one look at the flowers, makes a face, grabs them from his hand. She mutters under her breath that he smells like a whore, retreats to the kitchen, where she is cooking.

  Ernie's grandfather bows to me, pinches my cheek, laughs. I've met him a number of times; we can't converse, but he shows me he likes me. He makes his way past me, and follows my grandmother into the kitchen.

  As soon as he enters, she begins smashing the pots and pans down on the stove the way she does when she's furious at my mother, although my mother has already escaped out the front door.

  I'm beginning to see that this wasn't a very good idea. I'm beginning to see how different they are.

  Ernie's grandfather doesn't know what to do. He hesitates. Turns. Should he retreat to the porch? Stay in the kitchen? He hasn't even been offered a chair, and he's too much the gentleman to pull one out for himself. Should he continue standing? Should he sit?

  I want to return upstairs. But I want to see what transpires. Want to make sure my grandmother behaves herself. I go over to her by the stove, gesture towards the refrigerator, suggest that she gives him something to eat, something to drink. But she ignores me. I turn to leave, but hover in the doorway to the kitchen. I don't know what to do, and I don't have enough Italian to speak to Ernie's grandfather myself.

  Though my grandmother and Ernie's grandfather are both " Ita­lian" in our eyes, neither is, of course, Italian. Ernie's grandfather is a highly skilled, cultivated man from the metropolis of Palermo, in Sicily. When my grandmother has been apprised of this, she raises an eyebrow, mutters "Siciliano," and shrugs. She knows everything she needs to know about him.

  Ernie's grandfather is well-read and well-informed. He reads the newspaper // Progresso from cover to cover every day. Though he doesn't understand English, he watches the news on television avidly. He has opinions about everything. He is loquacious even if the person he's with doesn't understand what he's saying. He holds forth at Ernie's family's supper table, which annoys Ernie's father, who insists upon silence at meals. But when he lived in the Bronx, his opinions were highly respected and he was regarded as an orator. He sat in coffee bars catering to Italians with his admiring cronies, and articulated his beliefs about politics, mores, and opera.

  He likes President Kennedy, although he thinks he'll run into biga trouble; he wonders whether the Cuban missile crisis was really a showdown; he thinks the cost of medication is an obscenity; he believes rock and roll is nothing but noise.

  He was a stone carver. He was invited to come to the United States to work on the adornments of St. Patrick's Cathedral, and never experienced the hardships my grandmother faced. He is proud of the work he did, and talks about it often. Now, though, he is ill with emphysema, a result of his lifelong profession, and can't live alone, though he would like to.

  My grandmother ignores current events and she cares nothing about politics or world affairs, in spite of her anarchist family. She can write her name, and she knows how to read some Italian. But she never reads. She believes that no matter who is in charge, the people will get screwed— you have to look out for yourself, look out for your own. She is a farmworker from a very small village in Puglia, and is superstitious and a believer in the evil eye. She attends the local Catholic church for its ritual and to get away from our house, rather than for its system of belief.

  My grandmother always earned her own living, though she never talks about her jobs. Her life with us consists of fighting with my mother, making bread and pizza, crocheting, knitting, cooking, protecting me from my father's rages. She is tough, spirited, and vulgar. Apart from the time she spends on Long Island with her sister, she prefers being alone, although she doesn't mind when I sit near her, and we sometimes bake bread, make pasta, or knit together. But what she thinks about when she sits in her chair by the window in her room, saying her rosary, staring at the New Jersey meadows, I don't know.

  Ernie says everyone knows what his grandfather's thinking, what he's feeling, because he's always telling them— how much he misses his wife, how awful it is to have been taken away from his friends, how he'll never forgive his daughters for what they've done to him, how he loves Ernie's mother better than his other daughter with whom he fights all the time, how glad he is that Ernie is getting married to me, how proud he is that Ernie is going to be a doctor.

  I see them still. Ernie's grandfather, ever the gentleman, even in these peculiar circumstances, is politely standing in the kitchen, his hands clasped behind his back, at a safe distance from my grandmother's vengeful splashings and spatterings. She stands at the stove, stirring, ignoring him profoundly, looking at the wall, gazing into her pot, at her tripe, hoping she will not ruin it. She knows she will eat it alone. She knows she will not offer him any. She knows that soon his daughter will come to pick him up and that all she needs to do is ignore him until that time.

  Ernie's grandfather edges closer to the stove, closer to the pot, closer to her, repelled by the aroma, or seduced by it, who can say, wanting to see what my grandmother is cooking, but not wanting to provoke her. He has never met anyone like her before, though he has seen women like her from afar. It is his job not to roil this old woman; he senses that she can become dangerous. It is his job to be as inconspicuous as possible until his daughter returns.

  Sensing the old man's nearness, my grandmother stirs even more furiously than before. Splatters of tomato sauce fly from the pot. The tripe will take at least an hour to become tender. She will stand here and stir until it's finished. The time will pass. And he will leave.

  Ernie's grandfather retreats, afraid that his best suit will be stained. He glances at his flowers, which my grandmother has unceremoniously thrown on the kitchen table. She has no time for such nonsense. She has work to do. Who does he think she is?

  Ernie's grandfather stands there, not knowing what else to do. Stands there until an hour has passed and his favorite daughter comes back from doing her shopping, to rescue him. Stands there, as still and silent as the angels he has carved for St. Patrick's Cathedral.

  I retreat to my desk. This is too painful to watch.

  When, later, Ernie asks me what has happened, I tell him only that they seem to have had great difficulty understanding each other. They don't seem to speak the same language.

  I don't say how ashamed I am for what we have done. I don't say I believe that, in our ignorance, we have done something harmful. I don't say that, during that hour, I am sure that my grandmother and Ernie's grandfather felt more alone than either of them felt before.

  RESPECT

  They were standing there, the two of them, the father and the son, the father, about my father's age (eighty-five or so), the son, about my age (late fifties), in front of a bin of cantaloupes on sale for a good price at the farmers' market in Hackensack where I shop sometimes. It was late autumn, not the season for cantaloupes. But I thought I could pick one for a salad I could make for my lunch with the prosciutto I had at home, and peperoncino, lemon, and olive oil. But the old man was looking for a cantaloupe, and their cart was blocking the way, and so I moved on.

  I had gone to the market for vegetables for yet another recipe for minestrone, in my search for the quintessential minestrone. As if there were such a thing, the perfect minestrone, although at the time I thought there might be. I didn't yet realize— this would come later, at about the fiftieth minestrone— that each minestrone is different from every other minestrone, even if you use the same recipe, the same combination of vegetables, because the same vegetables taste different all the time, depending upon the weather, the soil, the season. That the pleasure in minestrone making, minestrone eating, comes from the appreciation of this particular minestrone before you, which never was before, which never will be again. And when I arrived at this insight, which
I believed to be an important truth, I felt a remarkable sense of peace, for I knew that the searching could cease. That I could enjoy what is rather than searching for what might be.

  I had been picking out the kale, the cabbage, the curly endive that I needed for my current minestrone with far less care than usual because I thought that I should be hurrying back to my house, back to my desk, back to my writing. Work that I sometimes believed was far more important than picking out vegetables (though I sometimes believe that there is nothing more important than picking out vegetables). The shopping trip on this day was a break from the day's work rather than an excursion in and of itself. And I was not taking my time; I was not "in the moment." I was preoccupied. I was rushing. I was in a hurry.

  So. I was annoyed at not being able to get past them, the father and the son, who were standing in front of the bin of cantaloupes, blocking the way with their cart, but I was not annoyed at them. I had encountered them before, near the carrots (which I needed). And made up a little story about them, formed a very favorable opinion of them, and because of this, couldn't be mad at them even though they weren't moving, even though there was no way to get past them, even though they were blocking my way.

  Near the carrots, I had observed that only the father was shopping, and surmised that the son (I knew he was the son, for they looked very much alike, large-nosed, flared-nostriled, full-lipped, and both dressed in lumberjack coats) had taken time out from his workday to help his father shop. And thought that this was a good thing, this taking care of the father, this taking of the father to the farmers' market to shop.

  As I passed them, the son glanced at me, met my eyes, averted them (out of respect, I imagined, for to hold the gaze of a woman my age would have been discourteous), looked at my purchases, nodded slightly, as if he seemed to know from what I was buying— the cabbage, the kale, the curly endive, the carrots— that I would be cooking a vegetable soup, and to know, thereby, what kind of woman I was. Not a fancy woman who shunned work. But an ordinary woman who put a good meal on the table every evening. And he approved of me. Though I am not sure he would have approved of me if he knew I was a writer, a breaker of the silences, not a keeper of the secrets.