Crazy in the Kitchen (2 page)
Read Crazy in the Kitchen Online
Authors: Louise DeSalvo
CUTTING THE BREAD
My grandmother is in the kitchen cutting the Italian bread that she has made. The bread that my grandmother has made is a
big bread, a substantial bread, a bread that you can use for dunking, or for open-faced sandwiches, or for scraping the last
bit of sauce from a bowl of pasta, or for toasting and eating with jam, or for breaking into soups and stews, or for eating
with a little olive oil and a shake of coarse salt, or with a thick slice of slightly underripe tomato, or with the juices
and seeds of a very ripe tomato and some very green olive oil
(pane e
pomarole).
My grandmother's bread is a good bread, not a fine bread. A bread that will stay fresh, cut side down, on the breadboard for
three or four days, depending on the weather. A thick-crusted, coarse-crumbed Italian bread. A peasant bread. A bread that
my mother disdains because it is everything that my grandmother is, and everything that my mother, in 1950s suburban New Jersey,
is trying very hard not to be.
My grandmother's bread and the pizza she makes from her bread dough— tomato and cheese; garlic and olive oil; onion, sugar,
and poppy seeds— are the foods that sustain me throughout my childhood. Without them, I know I would starve, because I hate
everything my mother cooks. Hate it, because my mother burns the food that she cooks or puts too much salt in it or forgets
to time the chicken and brings it to the table running with blood because she doesn't pay attention or because she is angry
at my grandmother, at me, at the world, or because she is depressed and doesn't care about food, doesn't care about anything.
Hate it because the ingredients themselves are terrible— gristly meat, bloated bratwurst, fatty sausage, slightly off hamburger
gotten for a bargain that she tries to disguise with catsup and Worcestershire sauce. Or hate it (without realizing it then)
because I can taste the rage in her food, can hear it in the slamming and banging of the pots and pans in her kitchen, in
the clash of metal against metal in her stirring.
The kitchen, when my mother is cooking, is not a place I want to be. And so. No cookie-baking in the kitchen. No rolling out
pie dough together. No lessons in how to make sauce.
And my mother's rage— at me for being selfish, at my grandmother for living with us since my grandfather died, at herself
for her never-ending sorrow at not being able to create a life that can sustain her in spite of her loving my father, loving
us (me and my sister), or so she says to my father, but never to me— scares me, makes me want to hide in a closet or rush
from the house. It is a thick, scorching rage that I cannot predict, cannot control, cannot understand, a rage that I can
feel against my skin. It is a rage that I do not want to catch from her. Though, of course, I do.
And so. I do not eat my mother's food if I can help it. Do not enter the kitchen when she cooks. Do not help her cook, for
she will not let me, and prefers when I am not near her, when no one is near her. Do not help her clear the dishes, do not
help her clean after we eat. And I leave the table, leave the kitchen, as soon and as fast as I can after what passes for
supper in our house.
My eating my grandmother's bread and my not eating my mother's food is one reason my mother screams at me. (She has others:
that I will not play with my sister and so keep her out of my mother's hair; that I sulk; that I answer back; that I have
a mind of my own; that I am a burden; that I always have my nose in a book; that I do not love her; that I escape the house
as often as I can; that I climb onto the roof from the upstairs bathroom window whenever there is a fight in our house, which
is often, and so make a spectacle of myself, and let the neighbors know that despite my mother's superclean floors, her superladylike
behavior, and her super-American ways, all is not well in our house.)
My eating my grandmother's bread and my not eating my mother's food is another reason my mother hates my grandmother, her
stepmother, not her "real" mother, who died when my mother was a baby. A mother, she laments, who would have loved her, who
would have taken care of her, and not resented her, as this woman does, this fake mother of hers, because they are not the
same blood. My mother shouts this whenever they fight, which is often.
But I do not know what being the same blood means or why their not being the same blood should divide them. For, at times,
when my mother talks to my father about what is happening in the world, she says that all people are created equal, and that
the differences among people are only skin deep. But once, when I ask her if she and my grandmother were created equal, she
said, no, because my grandmother never showed her any love, because my grandmother is a pain in the ass, because my grandmother
drives her crazy. She says that some people, like my dead grandfather, deserve respect, and others don't. And that my grandmother
is one of the ones who don't. And that if I don't shape up, I'll become one of the ones who don't, too.
My mother does not eat the bread my grandmother bakes. My mother eats the bread that she buys a few times a week from the
Dugan's man, who comes round in his truck to our suburban neighborhood in Ridgefield, New Jersey, where we move after my grandfather
dies. This bread, unlike my grandmother's, has preservatives, a long shelf life, my mother says. You can keep this bread for
a long, long time without it becoming green-molded. To my mother, this bread is everything that a good bread should be.
The bread my mother buys is white bread, sliced bread, American bread. A bread that my father, my sister, and I eat only under
protest or when it is transformed into something else. A bread that my grandmother would never eat, even if she were starving,
and she told my mother so the one time she tasted this bread, and she told my mother, too, that she knows what it is to starve,
what it is not to have enough food, and that even if she did not have enough food, she would not eat this bread.
My mother thinks that eating this bread will change her, that eating this bread will erase this embarrassment of a stepmother—
all black dresses and headscarves and scavenging for dandelions on the neighbors' lawns, and superstitions, and tentacled
things stewing in pots, and flurries of flour that ruin my mother's spotless kitchen, and infrequently washed Old World long
woolen undergarments— this embarrassment of a stepmother who, my mother swears, never bathes, who treats water as if it is
something to pray to, not something to wash in. (When my grandmother sees the amount of water my mother puts into the bathtub
when my sister and I bathe, she mutters "Mare Adriatico" in disgust, clucks her tongue, and walks into her darkened bedroom
to say the rosary.)
Maybe my mother thinks that if she eats enough of this other bread, she will stop being Italian American and she will become
American American. Maybe my mother thinks that if she eats enough of this other bread, people will stop thinking that a relative
of my father's, who comes to visit us from Brooklyn once in a while, is a Mafioso, because he's Italian American and has New
York license plates on his new black car, and sports a black tie and pointy shoes and a shiny suit and a Borsalino hat tipped
way down over his forehead so you can hardly see his eyes. And if you can hardly see his eyes, my mother says, what kind of
a man must the neighbors think he is? Maybe my mother remembers the incarcerations, deportations, and lynchings of Italians,
the invasion of Italian neighborhoods in Hoboken, New Jersey, during the war when we lived there. Maybe my mother thinks eating
this bread will keep us safe.
This bread that my mother buys from the Dugan's man is whiter than my grandmother's bread. It is as white, as soft and as
spongy, as the cotton balls I use to take off my nail polish when I am a teenager, as white as the Kotex pads I shove into
my underpants.
My mother eats this bread all the time, morning, noon, and night, and she uses it to make us toasted-cheese sandwiches. Two
slices of American cheese pulled in shreds from their cellophane wrappers, slapped between two slices of buttered American
bread (torn when buttered, because it is so soft) fried in a too hot frying pan while my mother, distracted, walks away to
do something else until she smells the butter burning, says "Oh my goodness," returns to the stove, flips the sandwiches,
gets distracted again, walks away again, smells the butter burning again, says "Oh my goodness" again, and serves the sandwich
to us with lots of catsup on the side to disguise the filthy taste.
After Thanksgiving, my mother uses this bread to make turkey sandwiches with stuffing and gravy and cranberry sauce, the most
acceptable use for this bread because then the bread is toasted, which hardens it, and, because the toaster we have is automatic,
my mother can't fuck up the toast, unless she shoves it back in for a second round. My mother uses this bread to make French
toast, too, what she calls her special Sunday night supper. But because she has never developed the knack of completely beating
the
egg
that coats the bread, her French toast always has little pieces of coagulated egg white hanging off it, which I call snot
strings.
Sometimes I pull the snot strings off the bread and hang them out of my nostrils. This I do, not to infuriate my parents,
but for my own amusement, to distract myself from the funereal atmosphere of our supper table. But when I do it, my father
reprimands me for my bad manners, tells me to respect the food my mother made, says all he wants at the end of a day's work,
after taking guff from his bosses and hearing the rat-a-tat-tat of the machines all goddamned day long, is a nice meal, and
some goddamned peace and quiet. I ignore him, look at the ceiling, pretend he's not there. He comes after me. I jump up, run
away. He chases me around the table, out of the room, up the stairs.
But my sister and I like having this bread in our house because you can do many things with it. You can take a piece of this
bread, pull off the crust, smash it down, roll it into a little ball. You can play marbles with this bread. You can pull the
middle out of a slice of this bread and hang it over your nose or twirl it around your finger. You can pull the middle out
of a slice of this bread and bring it up to your eye and pretend you're Nancy Drew looking for clues to a crime that was committed
in your kitchen. You can take circles out of this bread and smash them down into Communion wafers and play "Holy Priest of
God" dishing out the body of Christ. (This doesn't get my mother angry; this amuses her. She has no use for Holy Communion,
for the Church or its priests, even though she sends us to Catholic grammar school.)
You can also eat this bread with your meal, and sometimes we do, if there is none of my grandmother's bread. But when you
eat this bread, it sticks to the roof of your mouth and you have to pry it off with your fingers. Then you get yelled at for
your horrible table manners, and are told to leave the table and go up to your room. Which is a good thing. If your father
had a hard day at work and is in a lousy mood, or if he was out fighting fires as a volunteer and is exhausted, he'll chase
you up the stairs to your room, but you can usually outrun him, slam your bedroom door shut, push your bureau against the
door. Then you get blamed for ruining dinner.
My grandmother's bread doesn't stick to the roof of your mouth. Which is why I like it. Which is why my father likes it. That
my father likes my grandmother's bread more than he likes my mother's bread makes my mother angry. That my father likes my
grandmother's bread means that he's on my grandmother's side (the wrong side) in the ongoing bread war. That we like my grandmother's
bread means that there's no hope for this family making it into the big time. It means that we're stuck in the rut of where
we came from, that we're satisfied with who we are, and not striving for all that we can be. My mother is striving for all
that we can be, here in suburban New Jersey. And she wants us to strive along with her.
From the Dugan's man, my mother also buys apple pies, blueberry pies, lemon meringue pies, pumpkin pies (in season), seven-layer
cake, pound cake, chocolate-covered donuts, and crullers, to satisfy my father's sweet tooth when she is too depressed to
make a dessert of her own, and she is usually too depressed to make a dessert of her own. Italians, even rich ones, I know
from my grandmother, don't eat much dessert— a piece of fruit, maybe, expertly peeled and sliced with a little knife— so my
father's wanting dessert every night means that all is not lost, that he might become American American. And so my mother
buys pies, donuts, crullers, and cakes a few boxes at a time and displays them on the counter, invitingly, and dishes out
dessert after dinner to him, triumphant.
Me, I reject dessert. I am suspicious of things that come in boxes, things that get delivered to your door by a man who drives
up to your house in a little white truck. I have learned this from my home ec teacher in junior high school, who teaches us
that "fresh is best," who tells us that there should be no shortcuts in the kitchen.
But my mother just loves it when the Dugan's man comes cruising down our street. "The Dugan's man, the Dugan's man," she shouts
as soon as she spies him, and she grabs her wallet and runs out of the house to be the first on line.
The Dugan's man knows that a warm smile can charm a woman into an extra box of sugar donuts, an extra pie, an extra box of
English muffins, which "freeze well." My mother, usually frugal, buys far more than she needs, far more than our family will
ever eat.
After the purchase, there's always some small talk with the Dugan's man, some laughing, more laughing than there is in our
house. The Dugan's man wears a uniform and a hat. He seems like a respectable gentleman. But I think he's a con man. So I
rush out of the house after my mother to superintend the interaction. She carries on, ignoring me. With the Dugan's man, she
becomes someone else. She smiles like she did in pictures of her taken during the war when my father was away in the Pacific,
when she hung out with her friends in our tiny living room, or when she sang as she made a simple supper for the two of us.
"Merda," my grandmother calls everything that my mother buys from the Dugan's man.
From time to time, unsure that my grandmother's assessment is correct, I take a tentative bite of something and conclude that,
yes, the stuff from the Dugan's man tastes like the cardboard box it comes in, that it is
merda.
And the canned stew my mother gives us is
merda,
too. And the canned vegetables she believes contain more vitamins than the real thing because they are canned "at the peak
of freshness," and the canned spaghetti, the canned ravioli, and the canned soups. All these, my mother thinks, make great
midday meals or really good quick dinners. All these, my grandmother thinks, are the devil's work.
But my mother is a convenience food junkie. I think she has things ass backwards. I'd rather have something wonderful to eat
at the end of the day than have a spotless house, which I can never invite my friends to play in anyway. I'd even make something
for myself if my mother would let me cook, which she won't, because she believes that the kitchen is her domain.
But when I tell her I want
real
food and not the fake food she thinks is food, she calls me spoiled and ungrateful, and she launches into a lecture about
how good I have it, how I don't know anything about doing without, and how there are lots of kids in this world who would
love the privilege of eating what she serves.
In our house, good food on the table probably wouldn't matter anyway. Because even if we had good food— a little eggplant
Parmesan; tiny lobster tails grilled with a little olive oil, lemon juice, and parsley; a pasta with a simple tomato sauce—
our mealtimes would still be the disasters they always are.
