From Scratch

by Tembi Locke

  It was as if no time had passed. My seat was where it usually was. Nonna positioned herself nearest to the stove so she could serve without standing. Zoela plopped down to my left. One bite and my heart eased, my stress lowered. Los Angeles began to fall away as if it literally existed in another time and place.

  “Mangia—Eat,” Nonna said to Zoela, who, after twenty-six hours of travel, was more tired than hungry.

  I put my spoon to the bowl once again, consuming fortune, fate, and grief. All of it. Then I grabbed a roughly sliced piece of bread from the pile that lay on the table.

  “How are you?” I asked, aware that Nonna would be inspecting me for signs that being in her home, eating her food, was in fact restoring me, putting me back together.

  “I’m as God wants. No more, no less,” she said, shrugging in her shoulders and simultaneously reaching for the stack of napkins that lay just beneath a statue of the Virgin Mary.

  Over the past year, I had received reports on who had become ill in town, who had been born. I had gotten a blow-by-blow of the contentious local election in which Nonna had refused to vote because two cousins were up against each other for the same post. I knew of her high blood pressure and diabetes. I knew she had nerve pain in her shoulder. I knew my nieces were studious and Franca and Cosimo were toiling in precarious work that left little for any of life’s excesses, let alone luxuries. And just days before I arrived, Nonna and I had talked about the raging wildfires that were engulfing parts of the island.

  I turned to Zoela, who had eaten only a few bites and was about to get up from the table to go sit in the small living room to watch Italian soap operas, her favorite pastime when there was nothing else to do. Before I could ask her to, Nonna intervened.

  “Mangia, Zoela, amore. Mangia, perche ti devi fare grande.—Eat, Zoela, my love. Eat because you need to grow,” Nonna implored. She wanted the pleasure of seeing her grandchild eating vigorously at her table. She put another filet of cheese on Zoela’s plate.

  “Zoela, Nonna is happy that we have returned,” I said to her in Italian in the hope that the three of us could have a shared conversation. In our common language.

  “I know, I heard you,” she responded in English. Then she got up and walked to the adjacent living room.

  “Well, do you want to tell her something about how you feel about being here?” I pressed.

  “Sure.” She plopped herself onto the couch and began to take off her shoes, never taking her eyes off the TV. Eight years old was the new eighteen.

  “Okay, why don’t you come back here and say it to her personally? Or give her another hug.” I switched back to English suddenly and in a tone that I failed to make sound easy breezy.

  Nonna sensed that something was amiss.

  “Picciridda mia. I know how happy she is. I can see it in her face and how she liked the lunch.” The way Nonna said “picciridda mia—my littlest one” in Sicilian as an emphasis of affection made me suddenly have to hold back a torrent of tears. Grief was still like that. The tenderness brought it all forward. We were a trio of different ages and languages trying to make it work. The little things meant a lot.

  Zoela came back into the kitchen all smiles and kissed Nonna on the cheek. Then she pivoted on one foot and trounced out again.

  “Barefoot like a gypsy,” Nonna said, smiling, an affectionate reference to Zoela. “Let her be.”

  When Zoela got to the other room, she turned and called back to me in English, “Mommy . . . how come there are no pictures of you and Babbo getting married on Nonna’s wall?”

  It was the last thing I had expected, but she was eight and seeing her world differently with each passing day. And it was the first time I realized I’d eventually have to answer the question. But not yet.

  As Nonna had begun to clear the table, I responded carefully, “There are no pictures of our wedding hanging, but there are many other pictures of us in the house.” And she didn’t press me anymore.

  She wasn’t old enough for me to tell her the details of the ways in which families can hold back on accepting whom their children love. I didn’t want to create any division between her and her grandparents. A full answer would require context first. And to provide a context would require breaking down the long-ago past.

  One day I would have to articulate what at the moment remained unspoken: that we were a family stumbling toward connection and the process of forgiveness is sometimes graceless. I would tell her about the drive for love, the capacity for human change, and a reunion in a hotel garden by the sea. I’d have to try to illustrate how life required constantly repairing and rebuilding relationships. How her dad’s illness had brought us closer. And how her birth had changed everything.

  She would know these visits as fixtures of her childhood. She had been coming to visit her “Nonno Pepe,” as she had called Giuseppe, and her nonna since she was six months old. Her relationship with them happened in fleeting moments, vignettes of connection. Like the summer when she was four and she had sat on her grandfather’s lap every afternoon, unaware that it was his final summer. He had been too ill to take walks with her, sick with cancer in his kidneys that had come on suddenly and aggressively. So she had blown bubbles in his face and tickled his neck to make him laugh. Their conjoined laughter in the air had made Saro cry. He was six years into his own battle, and he knew that was the last summer he would ever see his dad. That summer Nonna had seen both her son and her husband slipping away because of il male—cancer—at the same time. It had made her weak and desperate with heartache. After Giuseppe had died, she had donned her black widow’s weeds and would wear them the rest of her life, as was the traditional way. It reminded the community of her loss, that she carried mourning with her. It gave her a public role to play, the carrier of the stories and memories of the deceased. I’d have to tell Zoela all of that one day. And that the beginning of our story as a family did not foretell the ending. That time forgives.

  All she had ever known was the love of two grandparents who had welcomed her with open arms because she was the beloved daughter of their only son. Whatever had come before was, as my own grandmother would say, “the road that got us there.”

  And it struck me clearly in that moment that now Nonna and I were the ones standing at the end of that road. And we were starting down the beginning of another.

  Zoela continued watching TV, seemingly satisfied with my answer/nonanswer. Nonna dried the last dish and moved to put the after-lunch espresso on the stove. I brought my attention back to the cheese and took one last bite of the tender, firm slice. Nonna saw me as she twisted the top on the moka macchinetta.

  “It’s from the cheese maker across from the bar in the square. She and her husband make it. She has a daughter about Zoela’s age,” she said.

  I had always been on the hunt for social hookups for Zoela while in Aliminusa. Now more than ever, providing her with peer interaction was the only way to get her to settle in, speak the Italian that I knew she could, and have unexpected moments of joy and spontaneity. Her cousins Laura and Giusy were much older, finishing high school and entering college.

  “Zoela, do you want to meet the cheese maker’s daughter?” I asked her in Italian as I pulled another piece of bread off the loaf, topped it with cheese, and brought it to her. “We could sample everything in their shop.”

  “Not really,” she said, indifferent to my efforts to expand her circle of friends.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t.” She shrugged, a sign that she was wholly uncommitted to anything beyond the moment right in front of her.

  “But I’ll be there with you. Maybe we can get Rosalia to come with us.”

  I was trying hard. It was something that I had been doing in L.A. as well. At home I struggled to keep her socially active. Being alone at home, just the two of us, was often the hardest parts of our days. I rarely had the energy after a day of auditioning, prepping meals, doing laundry, and car pooling to entertain her beyond j
ust sitting together, curled up watching TV. We missed the way Saro had played guitar while she sang her lungs out to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” Instead, we watched Chopped and The Voice. Walking together to get ice cream was a significant outing most weekends. I knew she needed more. So my in-box and text threads were full of seven to eight exchanges with other kids’ moms trying to coordinate scheduling, figure out activities, discuss meal preferences. It was exhausting being a kid’s social planner. But hanging with friends was better than relying on me, her grieving mother, to be wholly present. I knew that if I didn’t actively step up the role of social coordinator, the two of us might get swallowed up in inertia and sadness. Worse yet, she’d be some modern version of Laura from The Glass Menagerie.

  In Sicily, it was easier. Every kid ate pasta; no one was gluten free. If they wanted to play, they went outside and played. She could move around freely with a friend, buy gelato at the town bar without fear of getting lost. In L.A., though I was not a helicopter parent, she certainly didn’t make a move without my knowing her coordinates at all times. Here she roamed according to her own curiosity and interest. I was thrilled for her. And I was determined that we’d make cheese.

  Later, as Nonna and I sipped espresso in the kitchen, I let Zoela shake out the tablecloth in the middle of the street. Then I walked four houses down to Giacoma’s, Rosalia’s grandmother. I asked about Rosalia’s whereabouts. Within ten minutes she was in Nonna’s kitchen and we made a plan to visit the cheese shop.

  * * *

  Two days later, Rosalia, Zoela, and I walked into Donatella’s cheese shop at 6:30 p.m. One glance, and I could tell it wasn’t like my favorite cheese purveyor and hipster haunt back in L.A., the Silver Lake Cheese Shop. It was not a swanky retail outlet replete with a tasting table and jazz piped in through Bose speakers. This was a real shop in the truest sense of the word. I knew from the minute I stepped down from street level onto the tiled floor and saw the larger-than-life stainless-steel cauldron in the room to my left that the work of making cheese happened there. Retail was secondary. Sure enough, there was only a small glass display case holding just two medium-sized wheels of cheese, and the case wasn’t even illuminated. There was no one manning the counter. The calendar on the wall was from the previous year. The shop was dark. Clearly cheese was made and purchased quickly in this shop. There was no need for copper-patinaed presentation plates straight out of Elle magazine or John Coltrane.

  Nonna had told me not to go any earlier than 6:00 p.m. She explained that Donatella’s family rose early, 4:00 a.m. They herded their flock of sheep from the fields above town to the valley below where the animals grazed openly along the creek that ran to the sea. Then they tended and milked the sheep and took the milk to market. In the early afternoon, they transported the milk back to town for the afternoon and evening work of making cheese. Wednesdays they made fresh ricotta. Families in town placed their orders the day before and picked the cheese up, still warm, around 7:00 p.m., in time for the evening dinner. It was not Wednesday, so Nonna wasn’t sure if I would be able to find Donatella in her shop. They lived in the house above it. She told me to call out to her in the street if no one was there. As Old World charming as that sounded, the American in me found the idea a little pushy since Donatella and I had never met.

  Nonna had also told me that before moving to Aliminusa, Donatella and her husband had sold their cheese at the market. Donatella had thought it wise to teach herself the art of cheese making because she had married into a family of herders. She thought it was stupid to waste the milk they didn’t sell or, worse yet, sell it cheaply to others who would turn it into cheese, making a bigger profit than they ever saw. The more I knew about Donatella, the more I wanted to meet this female cheesemonger and flavor visionary.

  Zoela and Rosalia giggled in the corner as they took turns trying to sit on top of an old wine cask. I was happy to see Zoela smile effortlessly. I wanted to bundle up such moments. And I wanted to reward Rosalia with anything her heart desired because she was making my child smile. She also had Zoela speaking Italian, something with which I had had middling success since Saro’s death. I watched them for a minute waiting. Then I asked Rosalia if she knew where I might find the cheese maker.

  Rosalia had become my pint-sized intel agent. In past summers, she had been my go-to person when I wasn’t sure about the time or location of minor happenings in town. She had reminded me when Mass got out. She had informed me when the bakery closed. She had told me which street to take if I wanted to take Zoela to see the last donkey in town. With her red-rimmed glasses and head of thick, dark hair, she reminded me of a kid version of a public radio host. Her raspy voice instantly made me a sucker for all things Rosalia.

  “We can ring her bell. She may be upstairs,” she said to me in Sicilian. And before I could answer, she was out the door with Zoela in tow.

  I stood alone inside Donatella’s cheese shop, and it hit out of nowhere. Suddenly I missed Saro anew. It happened like that in Aliminusa: I would be moving through the day, and his absence would come to me in the faces of the people I met. I would feel a sudden sense of loss so acute that it would momentarily destabilize me. Now his absence was in the sound of a kid taking our daughter to ring the bell of a woman I had never met because that was the way things happened there. The way they always had. The way Saro always believed was intuitive and superior to the American way. Very little happened in Sicily because of adroit planning; everything happened all’improvviso—on the spur of the moment. It was about being in the right place when an opportunity presented itself, and suddenly it seemed like the most obvious thing in world. Saro would have loved that Zoela was knocking at the door of someone she didn’t know. That within a matter of minutes, I would likely be asking that person to let us help her make cheese. That was the part of Sicily he had wanted me to love.

  I thought about what he had always said of the island: “Li ricchi cchiù chi nn’hannu, cchiù nni vonnu—The more you have, the more you want.” I collapsed onto the wine cask to take the weight off my bones.

  Rosalia returned with Donatella at her heels. I jumped down off the wine barrel just as our eyes met. She was a stout woman in her late thirties with red cheeks and a short bowl cut tapered at the neck. Flushed from the summer heat, she wore an apron that suggested she had likely been doing housework when Zoela and Rosalia had called to her.

  I extended my hand. “I’m the daughter-in-law of Croce,” I said in Italian while I scanned her face for recognition. I found none. “My husband was Saro. We live in the US, in California.” I was giving out identifiers, letting her know I wasn’t a complete stranger.

  “I know of you. Saro’s wife. I never met him, but I know your mother-in-law.” She wiped her hands on her apron before reaching out to shake mine. She was almost two generations younger than Nonna; her Italian was effortless even behind a Sicilian accent. She, like others her age and younger, had been taught Italian in school and grown up hearing it on television. Some members of the younger generations now had to be encouraged to learn and speak Sicilian because they considered it an inferior language. Teens sometimes made gentle fun of their grandparents, who spoke an even older dialect. This complex, beautiful oral language dies a little with each generation.

  I shifted my feet and nodded. Of course. I was the only black American woman in perhaps a thirty-mile radius. Zoela and I needed no introduction.

  “My condolences,” she offered. “It’s nice you came to visit. Za Croce must be happy.” “Za” is a familiar Sicilian title given to older women, like saying “Aunt Croce.” “How can I help you?”

  “I want to buy some cheese or place an order. And I am also wondering which day you make cheese here in the shop.” Donatella raised an eyebrow. “My daughter, Zoela, has never seen it. I want her to know where the food she loves comes from.” Across the room, Zoela perked up at the mention of her name.

  “Of course. What kind of cheese do you want? I just need to know the size
and flavors.”

  “I will be eating it here and then taking some back at the end of the month to my home in Los Angeles. Small wheels for travel.”

  “Two kilos?” she asked, moving to the display case and retrieving a small notepad from underneath a dusty cash register.

  “Sure,” I said, unsure exactly how big two kilos was but figuring she knew best.

  She wrote a note to herself in the notebook and then looked back at me. And then across at Zoela and Rosalia.

  “Are you sure you want to make cheese? Most people here don’t want their kids to get dirty doing something like that. They want the cheese at the table, but they are not interested in how it gets made.” She looked at me with skepticism.

  “I live in Los Angeles. I don’t have a cheese maker down the block. And Saro would love this. I can always wash her clothes.”

  Donatella nodded. “As you like.” She seemed pleased by if not curious about this American woman standing before her.

  After all, I was a visitor, not a local woman with a home to keep, a husband and children to cook for. I had time to be curious about things that other women saw as the work of someone else.

  “Well, it’s my American curiosity,” I said, making a joke that I suspected was both unclear and lost in translation the minute it left my mouth. “What day should we come?”

  We set an appointment for two days later in the late afternoon. She would be making fresh ricotta. Zoela could make a batch to take home to Nonna. We would make small wheels of salt-cured pecorino that would mature in her shop. The whole endeavor seemed exciting, educational, and full of savory promise.

  “We’ll bring aprons,” I said to Donatella as Zoela, Rosalia, and I spilled out into the street and the afternoon sun. The main street had come alive in the late afternoon. We waved hello to a brigade of old men gathering in front of the bar and in the piazza alongside the church to play cards before dinner. Each one had a face tanned by work in the fields and was wearing a starched shirt and a well-worn coppola storta, the traditional Sicilian cap that makes people outside Sicily think of the Mafia. Again I thought of Saro and how he had once told me that his father had lined the top of his coppola with newspaper in the winter to keep his head warmer. It was a detail that had endeared Giuseppe to me.