Advice for Italian Boys (10 page)

Inside her bed, down the hallway, Nonna is asleep and dreaming. Her dreams are liquid and lucid and they have the heavy weight and swelling undulations of the ocean. In her dream, her grandmother Rosa Catterina has died and the women of Arduino have laid out the thin old woman on the battered kitchen table dressed in her long white nightgown and with a blue knitted cap fitted around her head from which all the flesh seems already to have fallen away. They have borrowed four candelabras from the church and have placed them on the floor, one at each corner of the table to remind the mourners to keep their chairs well back in order to leave room for the unseen dead, who are known to be not so unlike us: they rush to visit the newly dead, to pay their own cold condolences and in hope of forming new alliances that might be useful in the afterworld. The flames redden the faces of the mourners, and cast the shadows of giants on the room’s four walls. The shadows stretch up to the ceiling and merge with a century of soot.

Nonna is a girl again, three years old, and small and bony as a kid goat. She is not yet Nonna, but Filomena. Her mother calls her Mina-mia—the mother who will die in childbirth in
another two months, a stillborn daughter stuck fast behind the bones of her pelvis which will refuse to soften to grant the insistent infant passage. Filomena has crept unseen underneath the table. Looking up, she can see the rough underside, on which the marks of her grandfather’s axe are visible, and, extending from one end, toward the fire, her grandmother’s feet, narrow and as icy blue as the surface of winter milk. She stretches up one hand to touch her grandmother’s foot. She wants to know if the toes are as cold as they look. Why have they left the poor woman’s feet bare, with no shoes or stockings? Reaching, she strikes her forehead on the underside of the hard table and bursts into startled tears.

“Hear how the little one mourns,” the women all exclaim, a collective, indivisible sound like the throaty, fluttering coos of doves roosting warmly together.

“
Poverina.
Look. See how she grieves. Such a good and loving child.”

Nonna’s girl-heart swells in protest—no one has remembered to feed her her dinner, no one has come to comfort her, no one understands her. They are confusing her with their praise. Forlorn and misunderstood, she cries harder. Hands reach down all around her, from all sides of the table, offering her consolation in the form of biscotti and sugared almonds and dusky black figs that have been soaked in wine, like small, tough dried hearts reconstituted, and even thumb-sized glasses of
limoncello.

“Leave off crying,” the women say. “
A ciancere ’u muortu, su’ lacrime perse
.” Tears for the dead are wasted. “
Dopo il dolce vien l’amaro
.” There will be time for bitterness after the sweets are finished.

But even in the thick cloud of her dream, Nonna understands that this dream must be one of her mind’s senseless and random excursions and not a true memory.
Dopo il dolce vien I’amaro
is a real
proverbo,
but it doesn’t belong in this story. It is something that might instead be said to a young girl at risk of falling for her sweetheart’s pressing flattery, at risk of the rancour that will almost certainly follow if she falls for his too-urgently pressed and sweetly fleeting love.

A
s it happened, everyone in Nicolo’s family went out after dinner on Tuesday night the following week. Massimo played bocce at the Colombo Lodge in one of its five raked basement lanes on Tuesday evenings. Enzo had been called in to work to cover for someone who had phoned in sick with the flu. Nicolo had decided to sign up for Sue Hopewell’s cooking classes along with Monica; the classes were starting that night and would run for the next six weeks. Paola surprised everyone by announcing at the dinner table that she had decided to go to a public open house to be held that evening at the community centre to discuss the future of the landfill a kilometre east of the house. She would take Nonna with her.

“An outing,” Paola said firmly. “She doesn’t get out enough, especially in winter. She’s in the house all day. She should be able to understand what’s going on in the community, in the city, some of it, anyway. What goes on affects her as well as the rest of us. She lives here too.”

Nonna nodded severely and folded her hands in her lap. Before dinner, she had put on her second-best dress and the black shoes that she wore to funerals. Paola had explained to her that they were going out and that they might even have a chance to state their minds. After years of promises that the nearby landfill would be permanently closed, the neighbourhood was humming with rumours that the garbage dump might instead be expanded. Paola’s eyes narrowed at the thought.

“It’s not just our trash,” she pointed out at the dinner table, gesturing with her fork. “The whole city brings its garbage up here, dumps it and then turns around and forgets about it. It suits them perfectly. Out of sight, out of mind. But we’ve done our part. It’s time for some other community to take its turn. Marissa Stefanio down the street was saying that what we should do is take over the highway and force all those trucks to turn around and dump it all on the grass in front of city hall for a few days, and see how they like it when they have to live on top of it like we do.” She speared a meatball and pointed it toward Massimo. “It’s not right. You know it isn’t. But no one’s doing anything about it.”

Massimo nodded. He had learned as a barber the art of signalling support, even encouragement, without himself committing either way to whatever cause was under discussion.

Sue’s class was held on familiar territory, in Nicolo’s
old high school, in the large tiled room with its six home-ec kitchens where in grade ten Nicolo had learned how to make chicken soup and spaghetti Bolognese and tea biscuits. Thirty or so students perched on stools in the lecture area, men and women in their early twenties or a bit older, roughly the same number of each. Many of them showed evidence of a lifetime of generous eating; they balanced and shifted on their stools with varying degrees of awkward self-consciousness. Nicolo took one of the few remaining places, near the front of the classroom. Sue was already standing behind the demonstration counter. She smiled at Nicolo.

“Great to see a familiar face,” she said.

Nicolo ducked his head and nodded.

Sue glanced at the clock and then walked briskly around to the back of the room to close the door. Monica dashed in just as it was about to close. She hurried to the front of the room and sat down beside Nicolo.

“I couldn’t get the kids to settle,” she whispered hoarsely. “What’d I miss?”

“Nothing so far,” Nicolo reassured her.

Sue had returned to the front of the room. She cleared her throat and began to speak. “As I am certain you all know, there are many ways to pack on weight,” she began. “Unfortunately, there’s only one way to lose it and that is to adopt a healthy diet and lifestyle, one that will, over time, ensure we attain and then maintain an ideal weight. This is more sustainable than the kind of get-thin-quick schemes that advertisers spin, the ones that tell us all we need to do is modify what we eat drastically but temporarily so that we shed weight rapidly, only to have it all come back as soon as
we go off the diet. How many of you have had that happen, lost weight on a diet, and then gained it back again as soon as you revert to your old, evil ways?”

Many hands were raised, and then lowered, Monica’s among them.

“Can anyone name a diet they’ve been on that had this effect?” Sue prompted.

No one spoke.

“Anyone?”

“The grapefruit diet,” someone volunteered. There was a ripple of laughter.

Sue turned and wrote
GRAPEFRUIT
with a marker on a portable whiteboard that she had wheeled to the front of the room.

“The hard-boiled egg diet.”

Sue wrote
HARD-BOILED EGG
on the board.

“The South Beach diet,” someone said.

“The Scarsdale diet.”

“Fasting.”

“Bingeing and purging.”

Sue wrinkled her forehead. She did not write this one on the board.

“Dr. Atkins.”

“The Hollywood Miracle diet.”

“G.I. diet.”

“Jenny Craig.”

“Weight Watchers.”

“The caveman diet; you can only eat what you’re willing to kill yourself with your bare hands.”

Everyone laughed.

Sue wrote these suggestions on her whiteboard.

“What we are going to try to do is forget about diets and focus instead on eating properly by preparing a few wholesome meals together,” she said. With her marker, she made a circular motion, a gathering lasso in the air, as if pulling everyone in the classroom together. Sue picked up a stack of photocopied pages and began to hand them around the room.

“Here are today’s recipes. You’ll see that we’re going to make cheese and vegetable—stuffed tortillas, peach-blueberry crisp, apricot-ricotta muffins, and decaf mocha lattes—the kinds of foods and drinks that you might make for a break-fast or brunch with a few of your friends on a weekend gettogether. Please divide yourselves into groups of four or five at a workstation, and you will be able to follow along with me as I demonstrate. You’ll find all the ingredients and other materials already set out for you. Everything should be labelled, just in case you’ve never seen a manual egg-beater before.” Sue held one up and spun its handle vigorously. “If you are missing anything, any equipment or ingredient, or have any questions or run into trouble, just call out and I’ll come over to your workstation.”

In his group, Nicolo was assigned the task of grating cheddar cheese, slicing dried apricots, measuring rice and grinding coffee beans. He tried to imagine his mother or Nonna making any of Sue’s colourful, balanced, up-to-the-minute recipes, but he could not. Would he be preparing food like this—wholesome meals in modest portions, meant to be quickly made and swiftly eaten—if he was living on his own, or married? he wondered. Both possibilities were blanks in
his imagination, at best vague and generic, not unpleasantly imprecise but mysteriously evasive.

Several blocks away, at the Future of Our Community Landfill meeting, Paola and her mother-in-law were also, as it happens, watching a kind of cooking lesson. A brisk woman with her hair in a ponytail and a matching swinging, jaunty manner—she had something of Sue’s upbeat energy, but tuned to a higher pitch—had just introduced herself as “Cara Cooper, Certified General Public and Government Relations Consultant.”

Cara started by inviting the fifteen “interested citizen participants” who were gathered in rows in folding chairs to take turns introducing themselves. When each of them stated his or her name, Cara wrote it on a name tag with a bright blue border preprinted with “Hello! My name is——,” and then she pressed the sticky tag onto the citizen’s chest. “Paula” she wrote on Paola’s name tag, and then turned to Nonna.

“Mrs. Pavone,” Nonna said.

Cara hesitated, but capitulated without argument. She wrote “Mrs. Pavoney” on the tag. Nonna took the tag from her and applied it firmly upside-down on the sagging front of the black cardigan that she had put on over her dress.

After ensuring that everyone had a name tag, Cara went to stand behind a large table covered with bowls and bags and packages. “Next,” she said. “I thought it might be useful
to provide you with an overview of what a landfill actually is and the way in which it is put together. I think you will find that this little demonstration will answer many, many of the questions you might have had.”

Cara reached into one of several large plastic shopping bags.

“We have here all that we need to make our very own working landfill demonstration model. One pre-made pie crust. Four pudding cups, two caramel, two vanilla. One bottle of chocolate syrup. A bag of licorice twists. Spearmint candy sticks. A package of chocolate cookies that I’ve already crushed into crumbs. A bag of green sprinkles.” Cara assembled these on a table.

Paola exchanged glances with her mother-in-law. She was baffled herself, not sure where this was all leading, and curious as to what Nonna was making of this.

Nonna nodded toward Cara, stiff-necked, and reset her shoulders almost imperceptibly. Her name tag began to curl inward from the top edges.

“Now, we will have to use our imaginations here just a little bit. We are all going to try to think of the pie shell as representing the bottom of the area where the brand-new landfill will go. Specially trained engineers, graduates from top universities around the world, prepare the entire area carefully, and then they line it with clay in a process that is a bit like when you put a pie shell into a pan in your own home.” Cara placed the pie shell in a glass pan. She pressed it down on all sides.

“So that any groundwater underneath our new landfill will be safely protected, the engineers line the clay shell with
a special thick layer of heavy plastic. I am going to cover our crust with this chocolate syrup and that will represent this special impermeable plastic liner.”

Paola glanced sideways at Nonna, who leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest while Cara squirted chocolate noisily out of the bottle into the pie pan.

Nonna’s name tag peeled away from her sweater, rolled itself into a sticky cylinder on her lap, and then fell to the floor. Better without it, thought Nonna, who noticed more than most people believed. Names should not be shared before trust, only afterward.

“As material is added to a landfill, a kind of juice is created as rain and moisture percolates through the deposits of material inside. This liquid has a special name: leachate. Leachate can’t get through the plastic liner or the clay, but it has to go somewhere, so pipes are put in by our team of engineers and these pipes collect and pump the leachate to the surface, where it can be whisked away in special container trucks. As you can see, these black licorice sticks that I’ve brought are hollow inside. They can be our collection pipes.” Cara snipped the licorice into shorter sections with a sharp pair of scissors, and arranged the pieces on end inside the pie plate.

Nonna’s expression changed from guarded to bewildered—a garbage dump made of candy and sugar?

“Over time, through natural processes, the material we bring to the landfill begins to break down, and a side effect—an added bonus if you like—is the production of gas. Methane gas. Your neighbourhood landfill, you’ll be pleased to know, is completely state-of-the-art, and so this gas doesn’t
go to waste. Instead it is carefully vented and collected and used to produce power, many megawatts of natural electricity, which the city uses for the benefit of all. How about if we use these long stripy spearmint candy sticks to represent our methane collection pipes?” Cara arranged the candy carefully, and then pulled the covers off the pudding cups and dumped the pudding into the pie shell on top of the chocolate syrup, licorice and candy.

“This pudding represents the material we bring to the landfill in trucks every day. It really doesn’t look very attractive, does it.” Cara stood back so that everyone could see.

Nonna’s eyes widened and she began to chew on her lower lip.

“But, not to worry; it doesn’t look like that for long! A thick layer of good, clean topsoil is placed over our waste, in layers, like a cake. I’ll sprinkle these cookie crumbs on top and smooth it down like so.” Cara patted a thick coating of crumbs evenly across the pie dish.

Nonna wasn’t able to watch any more. She closed her eyes and pinched her lips together.

“When the landfill is full—and that can take many, many years—another plastic liner is placed on top. This prevents water that occurs naturally in the environment—rain and snow and sleet and hail—from leaking into the site and making more ‘juice’ or leachate. We’ll use another coat of chocolate syrup to cover the top of our landfill to protect it from the elements.”

Paola reached over and patted Nonna’s hands, which were now clenched together in a single fierce knot in Nonna’s lap. A rare gesture of solidarity between them.

“The last part of the landfill is the grass that is planted on top. These green sprinkles”—Cara shook a container of can-dies over the top of the accumulation of chocolate and candy—“represent our approach to the final stage in the life cycle of a landfill. Contouring and landscaping is the finishing touch and is all that is needed to turn our neighbourhood landfill into an attractive, useful community park available to all.”

Cara reached into her front pocket—she was wearing a pale blue smock-like garment over her sweater—and pulled out a handful of small plastic figures, which she placed on top of the sprinkles. A pink mother holding a white baby. A brown-skinned, black-haired father with a pipe. A blonde girl in a red dress holding a skipping rope. A curly haired boy with a black-and-white spotted dog at his feet. Cara pressed down firmly on the top of their rigid heads so that their feet were held fast in the pudding and sprinkles.

Nonna turned, her mouth close to Paola’s ear. “You do. You say something,” she said. Her elbow pressed into Paola’s side.

Paola rose to her feet. She was shaking.

“What about the birds, eh?” She opened her mouth again, but no more words appeared to be willing to be spoken. She closed her mouth and sat down, heavily, and the hinges of her chair squeaked.

Nonna glared at her, disappointed.