Crazy in the Kitchen (22 page)

I stood across from them, miming an interest in the melons, but more interested in them than in the melons.

The son stood behind, waiting, watching his father choosing the melon, as if choosing the melon was all that mattered, as
if choosing the melon was the most important thing in the world.

And I wondered if this son had always treated the father in this way, with such respect. (Respect. What my father said I never
gave him. Respect. What my father said I never gave my mother.
All I ask
of you is that you show us some respect.
) Or if it was not respect that I was seeing, but stony silence, born of years of enmity, of the son's learning that the less
he said to this old man, the better. Had the strife of decades worn them into this placidity? Did the father tell the son,
"You show me the respect I deserve"? Had the son shouted back, "You earn respect; you don't deserve it simply because you're
my father"? But no, I thought, it couldn't be that. The son's face was too composed; too serene.

I wanted there to have been no strife between them, none of that intergenerational struggle born from the hardship of the
past.

The father turned to his son and handed him the melon. The son placed it on the seat meant for babies. They were ready to
move on.

I stood there, watching them go, wishing that I could have prolonged the moment. Imagined myself calling out to the old man,
imagined him turning when he heard me. Imagined myself asking him to pick me a melon. Imagined him returning to the bin, choosing
one for me with the same care he had devoted to choosing his own. But I knew that to demand his attention would have been
a terrible imposition, given his age, given that we were not acquainted. And given the shopping he still had to do.

FEEDING THE DEAD

The last time my father and I talked, he told me that he is doing most of the cooking in his house. His wife (the woman he
married not too long after my mother died) is now living her life behind a scrim of forgetfulness and often doesn't remember
to cook their food, and when she does cook, she sometimes walks away from the stove, forgets she is making a meal, and burns
it. So far, there hasn't been a fire because my father's always going into the kitchen, always vigilant, always checking.
But still, it's a dangerous situation. And he wonders what will happen, who will take care of them, if he gets sick.

It's a shame, he tells me, because, when Milly cooks, when she remembers what she's cooking, she cooks well. She still makes
a fabulous pot roast (he loves to soak up the gravy with a good, crusty bread) and a mean apple pie if she carries a timer
around the house with her and if she remembers what the timer is timing. So it isn't as bad as all that. Then, too, her family
helps by coming over with prepared foods and having supper several times a week. And there are "dinner and a movie" nights
at our house, when we all have a simple meal— last night, some fresh figs and prosciutto; a pasta with vine ripened tomatoes,
smoked mozzarella, garlic, and basil; some green beans with garlic oil— and then watch an Italian movie together.

These dinners occur once a week, usually on Mondays. And we have settled into a wonderful routine. My father goes to a local
flower shop where the proprietor is Italian; he converses with her and buys some flowers to adorn our dinner table. Milly
arranges the flowers for a centerpiece while we cook. Me, I just take flowers and shove them into a vase, add water. But Milly
takes each flower, clips the stem, arranges, rearranges. Her centerpieces are beautiful. She jokes that she can't forget what
she's doing because what she's doing is right in front of her.

Milly mourns the loss of her recent memory. But she can laugh about it. "The advantage," she says, "is that I never remember
the movies we watch. You could show me the same one a dozen times and I'd be happy."

Last night, we watched Carlo Carlei's
Flight of the Innocent.
It's one of my favorites, not only because it's gorgeously filmed but also because it describes the brutalizing effects of
centuries of racism towards Southern Italians, shows how gangs in the South kidnap wealthy children in the North for ransom
and also for retribution.

The hero of the film is the child of a family that has kidnapped and killed a boy from the North. A rival gang assassinates
his family, but he escapes by hiding between the mattress and box spring of his bed.

He knows they want him dead, so he travels all the way to Rome to find a cousin to help him. Witnesses the cousin's murder.
Finds the ransom money paid for the murdered child.

But he will not continue the legacy of his family. He decides that what they have done is wrong; he longs for life in a family
untainted by criminality and bloodletting, and decides to return the ransom money to the murdered child's family. He saves
the child's father's life— a rival gang, pretending his son is still alive, tries to murder him when he delivers more ransom
money.

At the end of the film, the child is shot by the rival gang. While unconscious, he has a fantasy about a dinner. Everyone—
Southerners and Northerners alike, he and his family, the murdered child and his parents, all the people who are alive and
all the people who are dead— sit around a table in the sweet light of sunset, serving one another pasta. He imagines an end
to vengeance, an end to racism, an end to injustice.

Earlier in the movie, the young hero enters the room of the murdered child. He sees his desk, his toys. He sleeps in the child's
comfortable bed. The difference between the hero's bedroom and this child's is staggering. Here, opulence. There, poverty.

At the end of the film, my father says, "That's the way it was when I lived in Italy. The people who had, had a lot. The people
who didn't have, didn't have anything."

My father doesn't like to complain, so when he tells me that meals in his house are a problem I wonder whether things are
worse than he says.

"I make out a menu every week," he tells me. "Tuesday,
aglia olio;
Wednesday,
pasta fagioli;
Thursday, some kind of pasta. Mostly Italian foods. All those things your grandmother and my mother used to cook. Nothing
fancy, nothing that takes too long. This way I know what to buy."

My father tells me he likes to have a nice meal at the end of the day. If he doesn't, he's unhappy. The meal doesn't have
to be fancy. He prefers something simple but wonderful to something elaborate. "All I need," he says, "is a hunk of cheese,
some good Italian bread, a few grapes, and a glass of wine."

I tell him I like to have a good meal at the end of the day, too. "Life's too short," I say, "to have one bad meal." I think
of all the bad meals we had when I lived at home, wonder how my father could have been satisfied by my mother's cooking.

I watch the Food Network on television more than I care to admit. Watching people I don't know cooking food I can't eat has
become my drug of choice. I figure it's better than booze, better than cocaine. I think watching TV Food has something to
do with repairing wounds from childhood, with seeing a kitchen where no one fights and every dish turns out perfectly, my
antidote to everything imperfect in the world. There is nothing I like doing more at the end of my workday, before I step
into my own kitchen to prepare a meal, than watching TV Food. It's where I learn easy recipes and arcane information— that
male eggplants are far better than females, for example, and that you can tell a female by the little dimple at the bottom
of the eggplant. Knowing this kind of thing makes me feel smug and superior to Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary Shopper.

But it also makes me a fussy, obsessive, extremely inefficient, take-an-hour-to-buy-a-few-items kind of food shopper. This
is why shopping takes me so long, leaves me so exhausted, why I can only choose three or four items to my husband's thirty.
He finishes our weekly shopping during the time it takes me to pick out a pineapple (surreptitiously pull out a frond and
smell it), a pound of Portobello mushrooms (examine the gills on the underside of each), asparagus (check out the base of
each stalk, see if it's dried out; check out each tip, see if it's dried out or mashed up or wet or missing); search out purple
potatoes, Forbidden rice, truffle oil, faro (an ancient grain I don't know how to prepare, but, I assure myself, I can learn),
aged balsamic vinegar. This is why I usually shop alone.

No one in my family wants to shop with me unless they have a lot of time, are in a good mood, or want to have a good laugh
at my expense. "Hurry, tie a ribbon around those little jars, double the price," my son Jason quips as we enter a market,
pretending he is the store manager. "That little lady's in the store again, and she's coming this way!"

As I approach my sixtieth birthday, I sometimes regret that there are only three meals a day I can prepare. When I say this
to some of my friends, they look at me as if I need to be institutionalized, or as if I've become a homemaker, the kind of
woman they don't admire. I sit on my sofa, surrounded by cookbooks, making lists of foods I want to cook.

Homemade pumpkin ravioli with crushed amaretti biscuits mixed into the filling.

Sweet potato gnocchi with Gorgonzola sauce.

Pasta with the little veal meatballs I learned how to make in Puglia.

This is my futile way of dealing with the fact that someday I am going to die. Making a bread, stirring a sauce, cutting a
frittata into little wedges— the way I have chosen to shake my fist at mortality; the way I remind myself that I am still
alive.

My husband once asks me, jokingly: if I had to give up cooking or writing, which would it be? I answer, "Writing, of course,"
which surprises him. He believes that I am a writer above all things.

But without cooking, there can be no writing. Maybe it's because books take years to write and a pesto is finished in a few
minutes, so that if I couldn't make a pesto, the burden of making a book would be too onerous. Maybe it's because the rewards
in cooking, if you know your way around the kitchen, are predictable and immediate, and they temper the reality that the rewards
of writing are few, infrequent, and unpredictable, so that cooking is a wonderful antidote to the writing life. Cooking gets
you out of your head. It's social. It makes you focus on the present. It's sensuous. Whatever the reasons, I know that I couldn't
write if I didn't cook.

Though sometimes, it does
get
out of hand, like when I engage in cooking marathons, and sometimes I wonder what kind of a writer I would be if my writing
time weren't interspersed with endless trips to the kitchen to check on something I'm cooking.

The urge to engage in a cooking marathon comes upon me when I least expect it, and usually when I have an enormous number
of writing tasks to do— a muddle to clear up in my writing, an article to finish, proofs of a book to correct. At these times,
the urge comes upon me to cook something incredibly complicated that will take me the better part of the workday and foreclose
the possibility that I will unmuddle the muddle, finish the article, correct the proofs, that I will, in fact, do anything
but cook all day.

Although this is very much a when-the-mood-strikes-me kind of thing, a few principles have become apparent over the years.

1. What I decide to cook must require an enormous amount of time and employ a cooking technique I have always wanted to perfect
but have not yet mastered.

2. What I decide to cook must require a long list of ingredients and/ or special equipment, and I must have none of the ingredients
or equipment, so that I must travel to one or (preferably) several markets and also to Williams-Sonoma.

3. What I decide to cook must require that I use many pots and pans and that I make a gigantic mess, which I am not able to
clean before my husband comes home from work.

4. What I decide to cook must require that I use every knife I own, so that my husband, when he walks in the door and sees
them all neatly lined up, will say, "I see you've been practicing your knife throwing again."

5. What I decide to cook, when it is cooked, must not yield something that we would, under normal circumstances, really like
to eat. In fact, it is essential that what I cook will be an enormous disappointment (the onion, escarole, and anchovy pie,
for example; the
sformato di
melanzane
— eggplant mold) and that, the day after, Ernie and I will both admit that it wasn't very good, and I will say that it was
a foolish waste of time and vow that I will never make it again.

Like today. I'm supposed to be writing. But I am involved in what has turned into a gigantic baking project even as I've promised
myself that I'll finish working on this piece about my father and me. It's not yet noon, but the baking has already gotten
completely out of control.

Early this morning, I thought I'd make a simple little Italian bread, an old favorite. I thought it would be nice to fill
the house with the smell of bread baking as I was writing about how the smell of bread baking would make the words come more
easily.

Then, I thought, Well, why not try a complicated recipe from my new bread cookbook, a fig-walnut bread. I needed the figs,
the walnuts, a pan of a size I didn't own. If I'm making one loaf, I reasoned, I might as well make two, and if 1 make two,
I might as well make four so I have a few loaves to give away. So here I am, on a writing day, shopping for supplies, then
making four loaves of fig-walnut bread, a leavened bread using a
biga,
an Italian starter, which I keep frozen and can easily defrost.

I cut up all the sticky little figs, which took half an hour and destroyed the edge of my good knife. So I took a little break
in the baking (which was supposed to be a little break from the writing) for some knife sharpening.

I sit down at my desk; I want to begin writing a little scene about how I've been going shopping with my father. I also want
to write about how I've gone to the cemetery with him because he's been pestering me to see where his parents are buried,
where my mother and sister and other grandparents are buried, all crammed in death into one cemetery plot like we were all
crammed in life into our tiny tenement apartments. I want to write about how freaked out I get when I see my father's name
and birthdate are already carved on the gravestone, and yet how I don't feel any sense of loss while I'm there, how I don't
feel very much of anything, though I like that you can see New York City from the gravesite, perhaps even catch a sliver of
one of the buildings of Hunter College where I teach.

While I'm at the cemetery, I get pissed off at all the rules— no evergreens, no photos, no plastic flowers— so that there
is a totalitarian sameness to all the graves, none of the lively eccentricity I have seen in foreign cemeteries— little strands
of beads, locks of hair, braids of palm, gaudy plastic flowers, faded photographs of families adorning the graves. I decide
that I will not be buried in a place like this, that I will be burned and have my ashes tossed across the waters of a nature
reserve I love in Sag Harbor. I want to write about this dumb obvious insight I get about how we all die and how the dead
outnumber the living and how the trees outside my house will be there after I'm dead, and this crazy idea that you shouldn't
bring flowers to people's graves, you should bring food to the dead, that you should bring them the kinds of meals they liked
to eat in life, that you should feed the dead, that you should have little picnics at their gravesites; and I want to describe
how, when my father's not looking, I plant a biscotti my husband's baked (I happen to have it in my bag in case I
get
hungry) deep into the soil of my family's grave for my mother and sister and grandparents. I want to write about this, even
though I know that what I've done is crazy, that feeding the dead is a crazy idea.