Crazy in the Kitchen (7 page)

SLINGSHOT

I am sitting at my grandparents' kitchen table in Hoboken. My grandfather and I are drinking our wine (mine diluted with water)
and eating lupini beans for a snack. I love peeling the covering from the bean, love popping the bean into my mouth. I love
its salty softness. Love that my grandfather lets me eat as many as I want, as messily as I want; love that he lets me pile
my lupini beans in front of me on the oilcloth-covered table without telling me to put them on my plate.

The time is during World War II. My father is in the Pacific. My grandparents take care of me often. They live right next
door to my mother and me, our apartments connected by a toilet.

Whenever my grandfather takes care of me, he gives me wine mixed with water. He drinks his wine; I drink mine. (In high school,
I will be the girl who drinks too much at parties. The girl who drinks so much that I can't remember who took me home. The
girl who drinks so much that I often pass out on the way home— once, in the middle of a four-lane highway.)

My grandfather tells me stories, in dialect. Sometimes he tells me what I think are stories about where he used to live. Sometimes
he tells me stories about my mother when she was a child. Sometimes he tells me about what is happening in the world right
now. Some of what he says, I understand. Some I don't. Words, phrases, sentences get through to me; then, suddenly, and always
when the story gets interesting, I'm lost. But because I can't speak dialect, and he can't understand English, I can't tell
him to repeat what he says, to slow down. So I can't be sure, now, if my memories of what he told me are pure, or if they
are riddled with my own interpolations, and so part fabrication. I nod to keep him talking, nod as if I understand. I am sleepy
from the wine, but not yet sleeping, and I fill in the blanks in my grandfather's stories. Soon, I will want to sleep. And
will sleep, until my mother comes back. In the middle of my grandparents' feather bed. Under a giant cross with Jesus bleeding.

During the war, my mother welcomes my grandparents' help raising me. Whatever my stepgrandmother wasn't— warm, tender, congenial—
she made up for by her brusque competence in caring for children.

I remember my grandmother's no-nonsense way of washing me, remember how she sang Italian songs as she cared for me, though
she was not singing to me. I remember wandering into my grandparents' apartment, where I would be given small treats— a few
almonds to nibble, a crust of homemade bread with honey, a hard biscuit. When my grandmother watched me, she sometimes played
with me, though never when my mother was around. A game of patty-cake, cat's cradle, peekaboo.

While my father was away, I don't remember my grandmother and my mother fighting. My mother was happy to be near her father,
whom she adored. And with my father gone, my mother had less to do, so she tolerated my grandmother's ways— how she ate cockles
with a safety pin; how she rarely changed her clothes or washed; how she never combed her hair; how she didn't love my mother
(though she seemed to love me).

If my mother came home, and found me drunk, she'd be angry. But my grandfather never stopped giving me watered-down wine.
And my mother never stopped leaving me with him.

On this day, my grandfather tells me that I will go to school when I'm older. And that, when I go to school, I should be a
good girl.

He looks out the window as he talks. Stops talking. Gestures for me to be quiet. Takes the slingshot he keeps on the windowsill,
a stone from the assortment he keeps in a small dish. Slowly, carefully, he leans out the window.

There is a pigeon perched on our neighbor's clothesline, not far from the open window. Many of our neighbors keep pigeons
in pigeon coops. My mother thinks they're a nuisance and disease-ridden— flying rats, she calls them— and can't understand
this old-world practice.

My grandfather pulls back the elastic on the slingshot. Takes aim. Lets go.

The pigeon drops to the ground. In my alcohol-induced haze, this happens in slow motion.

My grandfather tells me to stay where I am. He runs downstairs, out the back door, into the courtyard. And though I know I'm
not supposed to, because it's dangerous, I lean way out the window to see what happens next.

My grandfather picks up the pigeon, inspects it. The bird doesn't look dead. It looks startled. I think I see it move its
wings.

Satisfied, my grandfather tucks the pigeon under his shirt. Back in the kitchen, he wrings its neck. The pigeon's head dangles,
like the head of my abused and broken doll.

I have, in my young life, seen many animals brought home live from the market and slaughtered in my grandparents' kitchen.
Also, on my grandmother's relatives' farm when we visit. My grandparents won't eat anything that doesn't come into their home
alive.

I am curious about, horrified by, how my grandparents wring birds' necks, pluck their feathers, kill eels with sharp blows
to the head, kill fish by plunging a knife between their eyes. I watch them strip the skin off animals with pliers, remove
entrails, drain animals' blood. I am beginning to wonder when life becomes nonlife; beginning to think about death, beginning
to have nightmares in which I, too, am dressed for cooking.

I watch my grandfather's work with the pigeon. He dangles the head before me, teasing me. This, he won't discard, for in this
household nothing is wasted. Later, he'll dress it, impale it on a metal skewer, thrust it into the coals of the stove to
roast, share it with my grandmother.

The entrails, though, are his alone. These, he chops and fries, dousing them with wine. He toasts a piece of my grandmother's
bread, smears it with pigeon guts, pours the juices over, serves himself a little more wine. He is, at this moment, a very
happy man.

After my grandfather eats the entrails, he puts the pigeon in a pot and stews it with a few tomatoes, garlic, parsley, and
wine. Though it smells delicious, when mealtime comes I won't eat it. Won't say where it comes from when my mother pressures
me to tell her where my grandfather got the pigeon.

Because it's wartime, there is much talk of death in our household. My mother and grandparents discuss the carnage of the
war at the supper table and I have heard it. I have seen the pages of newspapers filled with pictures of GIs victorious, of
GIs slain, though my mother tries to hide them from me. Images of the war, though, are everywhere and can't be hidden— on
the newsprint the vegetable man uses to wrap my mother's purchases; on the front pages of the newspapers for sale at Albini's,
our corner drugstore.

Italy is at war against the United States, and my grandparents wonder how their relatives in Italy are faring. Throughout
the war, they send them packages of clothing, of dried beans, dry biscuits. My grandparents want the Allies to win. Still,
they don't want anyone from their villages to die.

And whether my father will come back from the war alive, we don't know. My mother knows he's in the Pacific, near some heavy
fighting. She knows this because of coded messages in my father's letters.

During the war, my mother eats whatever is put in front of her (and it is almost always cooked by my grandfather). She is
happy to have someone else attending to the business of food, happy to be with her father, happy to have help managing me.
She enjoys what he cooks. She has not yet developed her revulsion for the peasant fare he and my grandmother eat. This comes
later, when she moves to the suburbs and tries to put her Italian past behind her.

My grandfather was a farm boy, born into a family of farm laborers. As a small child, he worked the wheat fields with his
parents. My father tells me about one difficult day, when my grandfather's small hands were covered with cuts from the stalks
he was binding after his parents cut the wheat, and he looked up to the road above the field. He saw a small boy, about his
age, walking along the road, alone, carrying a bookbag.

This was during the 1890s, when workers in the South were poorer than they had been before. They borrowed money to live, couldn't
pay their debts, lived like indentured servants. There was never food enough or money enough, though they worked from long
before dawn until after dusk, and had to walk to and from the fields to the villages where they lived.

"Papa, where is that boy going?" my grandfather asked. His father looked up at the boy walking alone on a road, for a boy
walking alone on a road was an unusual thing.

"That boy," his father said, "is going to school."

"Papa," my grandfather said, "I would like to do that. I would like to go to school." For surely my grandfather must have
thought that walking alone on a road in the morning was preferable to what he was doing, even if he was doing it with his
parents.

Figlio mio,"
his father said, "you cannot do that, you cannot go to school."

"But why can't I go to school, Papa?" my grandfather asked.

"You cannot go to school," his father answered, "because you are a laborer and your lot in life is to work in the fields."

"But Papa," my grandfather said, "what about my children?" "Your children," his father answered, "cannot go to school, for
their lot in life is to be peasants to work in the fields, like you."

When my father tells the story, he says that my grandfather paused a moment, looked at the boy on the road, and said, "But
Papa, my children's children. Surely they will go to school."

According to my father, one of the reasons my grandfather came to America was so that his children, and his children's children,
could go to school.

When my grandfather first came to America, he worked on the Lackawanna Railroad. In 1908, the year he left Italy, the income
of farm workers in the South had plummeted; workers could not buy enough food to sustain life. My grandfather once told my
father that, in Italy, he had always gone to bed hungry. Whenever I had a meal with my grandfather, he would pat his belly
and smile. I would pat my belly and smile. Here, he always ate enough. And for this he was grateful. But it was not always
so, not when he first worked on the railroad.

I don't know how my grandfather paid for his steamship passage to America. But, as with other Southern Italians, it was probably
paid for by a
padrone
or a recruiter who went to the South to find laborers. He talked about the man who brought him here to work on the railroad.
He always said this man was not a good man. My grandfather would have received instructions to lie about why he was coming
to America, because recruiting workers in Italy, though a common practice, was illegal. He would have been told to say to
the officials that, no, he had no promise of work, but that yes, he intended to work. Please God he answered correctly, or
he would be shipped back to Italy.

Family lore has it that his passage was paid for, that its cost was deducted from his pay, that he paid far, far more than
his passage cost, and that it took him many years to pay off the debt. This was why his young wife worked.

A dream of America was sold to laborers to lure them to America, where they provided the cheap labor needed for building railways,
subways, buildings. During my grandfather's first years here, the dream faded. Though he never would trade life in this country
for life in the Old World.

"Here," he said, "you work hard, you get paid little, you eat, maybe not too much, but you eat. There, you work, you work,
you work, you don't get paid, you don't eat."

For years I believed (as I was taught in school) that the men who built America, made it great, were men like Henry Ford,
John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie. But the people who built America were people like my grandfather.

The men who worked on railroad gangs awakened at three in the morning and walked to the line they were building, as they had
walked to the fields in Italy. They worked from five until twelve without rest.

They had hard bread for lunch. Water, if it was available, was usually fetid. But always, there was wine.

After lunch, they worked again until four. Then they walked back to the boxcars where they lived, ate whatever supper they
could manage, fell into a comalike sleep.

They slept, eight men to a windowless boxcar, on bags of straw crawling with vermin. They covered themselves with discarded
horse blankets and they slept in their filthy work clothes, for there was no place to wash them, there was no place to wash
themselves. Their bodies were lice-ridden, encrusted with dirt, covered with oozing sores.

People who saw them along the line made fun of them. Called them dagos, wops, filthy guineas. People who saw them working
were afraid of them, of their filth, of their foreignness, and mothers pushed their children behind their backs, for they
believed these men were dangerous.

If the men complained that they had no fresh water, the
padrone
would say they were never satisfied, they should starve to death, they didn't belong here. But they were here. And it was
a
padrone
who brought them, who profited from their labor.

Their work was difficult and dangerous. They worked hunched over, in pain. They were too hot or too cold. They picked their
way across the gashes the railroads made in the land, laying track, repairing track.

They were gone from their new homes in America for months, sometimes longer. Because many of them couldn't write, their families
didn't hear from them, didn't know where they were. When they returned, looking older, more beaten than when they left, they
said little, for there was little to say. They wanted to sleep.They wanted to wash. They were filthy. Filthy with the soil
of America.

Here, the unexpected happens: my grandfather becomes a cook on the railroad. The gang boss has decided that the men will work
better if someone cooks for them, if they eat good food. So my grandfather trades pickax and shovel for frying pans, pots,
and knives.

My grandfather knew how to cook— knew how to cook outside, for that's where you cooked, if you had something to cook, when
you worked the fields. On the railroad gang, my grandfather wanted a hot meal at the end of a hard day's work, not just the
bread and cheese rationed to the men for supper.