Crazy in the Kitchen (11 page)

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.

Next to him, my grandmother looks like a drudge. She spends most of her life in work dresses, or house dresses, covered with
neat aprons. Her few good dresses are black. She seems to be in perpetual mourning. And, of course, she is. For all the babies
she's aborted. For the family she left behind. For the happy life that has eluded her.

"Grandpa is going back to Italy to see his girlfriend." We say this whenever our grandfather goes to Italy. We test these
words far away from the grown-ups, who sit in strained silence on the sofa and folding chairs in our grandparents' living
room.

"That no-good son of a bitch thought the world owed him a living," my father says. "That's why he married my mother. So that
he could have a servant to work for him, to cook and clean for him, to raise his kids, while he took his trips to Italy, gallivanted
around, wearing his fancy clothes, playing the big shot, always pretending he was something he wasn't. He was a real shithead,
my father. The happiest day of my life was the day my father died."

My father and I are having lunch at Amarone's, our local Italian restaurant. Fried calamari for him; roasted vegetables and
battuta
for me. I have asked him to tell me about his father, about when he came to America, about his life here, about how he and
his family moved back to Scafati, a town just down the road from Pompeii, when my father was a little boy. My father is nearly
ninety now. These days, we meet weekly to share family stories. I want to find out as much as I can about my family before
he dies.

He's happy that, after years of indifference, I finally want to know about his past.

I am startled by the vehemence of my father's anger. I never knew that my father hated his father, wished him dead; never
imagined that the congenial grandfather who handed me five-dollar bills whenever he saw me, who took me to the Metropolitan
Opera and to Ebbets Field to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers play ball, wasn't as generous to his own children as he was to me.

"The first time he went back to Italy and left us to fend for ourselves, I was three, maybe four years old," my father says.
"We're living on New York Avenue in Union City. He's supposed to be going to Scafati, to see his mother and father, but who
the hell knows where he went or what he was doing over there. By that time there were three of us, my two older sisters and
me. The other girls would come later.

"All I remember about the first time is my mother crying, my sisters grabbing onto my father's pants, him swatting them off,
kicking them away as he left. 'But what will we do?' my mother cried. The neighbors open the doors a little to see what's
going on.

"That son of a bitch turns around on the landing, looks back at my mother, and says, 'Don't worry. You'll manage.' Imagine
saying that to a woman with three kids: 'You'll manage.' But I have to hand it to my mother. She stops crying, calls him a
bastard, looks her neighbors in the eye, slams the door, goes inside.

"So my mother has to find work and fast. All that no-good father of mine has left her is fifty cents on the kitchen table.
That's all. Fifty cents to tide her over until she can find work. Fifty cents was a lot more in those days than it is today,
but with four mouths to feed, and the rent to pay, and everyone that we knew just scraping by so that we couldn't count on
anyone else, fifty cents would last her maybe a day.

"My sisters are in school all day. But I'm too little to go. So my mother dresses me, takes me to one of the factories where
she has relatives working, and gets a job.

"This one, thank goodness, is piecework. This one, she can do at home so she doesn't have to worry about what to do with me.
It's an artificial-flower place. My mother has to make dogwood. There's this thin piece of metal; you wind some brown material
around it; then you put on the petals. My mother teaches me how to do the stems.I'm not too good at it, and I'm not too fast,
but it keeps me busy while she's working. Anyway, I have no toys, nothing else to do. I like being with her. Because no matter
how bad things are, my mother is always good to me.

"When she's finished, she goes back to the factory, picks up some new materials, comes home. Naturally, I have to go with
her; she doesn't have anyone to leave me with.

"All I remember is walking and walking and walking and wearing out one pair of shoes after another, and her not being able
to carry me because she's either carrying all the stuff for the flowers or all the flowers she's made or she's gone shopping
and has a couple of bags of groceries that she's carrying along with everything else. We don't have enough money for a carriage,
and she can't hold my hand because she's always carrying something, so she tells me to hold onto her skirt when we cross the
street.

"One time I don't listen to her, and I'm not holding on to her, and I take my sweet time crossing. Before I know it, I see
this horse-drawn carriage bearing down on me and I get so scared I lie down right in the middle of the street. There are two
horses; they're going at a nice clip and they pound along, one on each side of me. Then the wheels of the cart, the first
set, then the second. I can see it all happening. In slow motion, like they say. I can hear my mother screaming. I can hear
a whole bunch of people screaming. They thought I was dead.

"So I'm in the middle of the street. My mother drops her bundles, makes the Sign of the Cross, runs over to me. She thinks
I'm dead. But I'm all right. Right in front of all these people, my mother starts slapping away at me as fast as she can.
She calls me a
strunz,
asks me if I'm
stunod.
This is the only time she hits me, but I deserve it. From then on, I always hold onto her skirt, and I don't go anywhere
near any horses.