Crazy in the Kitchen (6 page)

Where these ideas come from, I don't know. I don't read cookbooks; we don't get magazines. I think about these foods as I
wander the aisles of the local food market before I cross the street to join my friends at our hangout. And even though I
have my own money, can afford to buy whatever I want, I know my mother would never yield her kitchen to my efforts. I know
I must wait until I marry to eat beautiful food with startling tastes.

Occasionally, even though I know it's hopeless, I ask my mother if I can cook. She looks at me like I have a strange disease.
Reaches into the cupboard for a can of ravioli to heat for supper. Chases me from the kitchen.

I want to marry as soon as I can. Not to have my own husband, but to have my own kitchen. One with a four-burner gas stove,
an oven. Where I can cook and bake and roast whenever I want without anyone bothering me. Where I will have absolute control
over what I make, over what I eat.

When I go to junior high, I have to take home economics, which I take every year until I graduate from high school.

The boys, of course, take shop, which I also would have taken if girls were allowed. I liked the thought of using dangerous
machinery, of wearing goggles to protect your eyes, of cutting into wood, of working on cars, of welding metal to metal.

Girls were too fragile for shop. But I knew, from experience, that kitchens could be dangerous. There were knives, of course,
and vegetable peelers, and hot burners, and scalding water and puffs of steam. These did not qualify as dangers for girls.
It is the 1950s, when girls cook, and boys weld. So it's home ec, and only home ec, for me.

For part of the year, we learn to sew. This, I do disastrously (though as a young woman, I learn to sew very well from my
mother, who insists sewing is important). In home ec, our first project is an apron trimmed with rickrack. Sewing this will
teach us necessary skills.

It is the rickrack that undoes me. Instead of neatly trimming the edges of my apron, my rickrack wanders wherever it chooses.
It even hangs off the edges.

I fail sewing. So I am very motivated to succeed in cooking.

Everyone in my class but me hates home ec. They make fun of our teacher, all round and soft and net- and apron-wearing and
full of enthusiasm. She has very red cheeks because she's always thrusting her face into pots and pans and ovens. And she
wears sneakers instead of shoes so she can race around the class to check oven temperatures, simmering sauces, sauteing pieces
of chicken. She wears her hair in a crown of tiny spitcurls tucked hygienically into a net so that not a strand of her hair
will fall into the food.

We have to wear hairnets, too. Most of the girls balk and complain.

But I like it because the hairnets ruin the fancy girls' teased hair.

My hair, like everything else about my outward appearance, is sensible and can't be ruined. My clothing, which I buy with
my mother on our infrequent angst-ridden shopping trips, is always the cheapest, the most serviceable, the least stylish,
and I'm mocked for it by the fancy girls with teased hair, and so it pleases me to see their elaborate coiffures ruined. Unlike
the fancy girls with the teased hair, I had no "look" to speak of, unless looking like you're fifty when you're a teenager
is a "look." I have more important things on my mind than clothes and looking in a mirror— sex and books, to be exact. And
I'm not "collegiate," either. I'm too dark and foreign looking. Besides, I'm not altogether sure I can go to college, even
though I'm smart, even though I want to go to college and study hard things— philosophy, literature. There is the money, of
course. My parents don't have much, certainly not enough to afford tuition, room, board. And a guidance counselor tells me
that a person with my background (Italian? Working class?) will make very poor college material, that there were very few
of us in college, actually, and those who entered didn't do well and usually dropped out, and so I should sign up for Secretarial.

But I sign up for College Prep anyway because, though my clothes are sensible, my spirit is far from sensible. It is, dreamy,
artistic, and, at times, cantankerous and cynical. I'm different, I've convinced myself, from everyone else. At pep rallies,
I can be found trying to read
And Quiet Flows the Don
while waiting for the festivities to begin, or scribbling in my diary about the idiocy of running back and forth to throw
a large ball into a hoop several feet off the ground, or mocking the school cheers. When my boy pal Eddie asks me why, if
I hate these events so much, I bother to attend them, I tell him that they get me out of the house, and besides, I
love
hating them.

I am very happy in the kitchen at school because I see our teacher as a soul mate. She acts as if she doesn't care what people
think of her.

I love the long line of clean ranges in the center of the classroom. The cupboards filled with packages of spaghetti, jars
of spices and herbs, tins of chicken broth, bottles of olives. The refrigerators that ring the room, which cool a substantial
quantity of food: thick pieces of beef for stews; whole chickens; racks of spareribs; fresh vegetables; curly parsley.

I discover that there is ceremony in cooking. In the donning of aprons. In the tying of apron strings. In the sharpening of
blades. In the rituals of the preparation of ingredients.

I don my very ugly rickrack apron, tuck my short hair into my hairnet, pull a knife out of the woodblock like King Arthur,
sharpen it on the stone expertly, prepare to make magic. I begin my education in the pleasures of the kitchen, in the pleasures
of the flesh. I learn how little effort it takes to produce something that— unlike so many of the other things I must do in
my life— can always be counted upon to provide pleasure. If you select fine ingredients, prepare them well, and cook them
exactly right according to a set of rules, our teacher says, you can never fail in the kitchen. Your meal will always turn
out perfectly.

I like this. Here, there is order, discipline. Here, I feel safe.

Of course, there is abundant drama, too, in cooking. And the transformation of the raw into the cooked becomes as compelling
to me as the Russian novels I am forever reading.

What I learn about cooking appeals to the diva in me. And my teacher is a diva, too. She insists on perfection, scolds delivery
boys if they bring inferior merchandise, gushes if what is brought is fresh and wonderful. The kitchen is her stage, and she
swoops and twirls and stirs and beats and slices her way through our class in a dance for the ages.

One of the reasons I'm very happy in the school kitchen is that we get to eat what we cook at the end of class. These are
our "tastings." And they are very serious affairs.

We have them at very neatly appointed tables set with serviceable matching placemats, dishes, glassware, and cutlery. We have
sparkling water because our school, of course, does not permit wine. We have cloth napkins because our teacher believes that
a beautiful table is essential to dining well.

Before we sit down to eat, our teacher insists we clear away all the dirty pots and pans. These are organized behind a screen.

"Only barbarians eat with dirty pots and pans in view," our teacher says. "When you get older, girls, you'll know you're in
a fine restaurant if they whisk the dirty dishes off the table, take them into the kitchen. If they don't, if they make piles
of filth on trays and leave them there for all to see, don't stand for it. Summon the captain. Insist that they be removed.
One can never dine well surrounded by garbage."

And the food we make is, of course, better than the food my mother makes at home. Oh, it
is
1950s food. And, yes, there
are
tuna fish casseroles, and chicken salad made with homemade mayonnaise.

But our teacher has been "abroad," and she is, she tells us, forever changed. So there is also sauteed sole with browned butter
and slivers of roasted almonds, served with rice tarted up with little bits of sauteed celery, onion, and red and green pepper.
A stewed beef, exquisitely tender, with carrots and tiny onions melting into the sauce. (She sneaks wine into the sauce, defying
school regulations.) A roasted chicken stuffed with whole pierced lemons and fresh parsley (the only fresh herb she can find
in the United States, she complains).

Our teacher shows us how we should take our food. Slowly. Seriously. Sensuously. Pleasurably. With eyes closed to intensify
the sensation.

"Close your eyes, girls," she says. "No peeking. No gulping. Tiny tastes. Tiny sips. Appreciate, appreciate."

It is a bacchanal, this class of ours. And I sometimes think that if our very sensible principal had known what was going
on in this room, he would have canceled the class.

He thought we were learning how to be good housewives. But I was learning, under the tutelage of this unlikely guru, the wanton
pleasure of the sybaritic life.

Part Two

WOUNDS

KEEPSAKES

After my grandfather dies, all his possessions fit into one large cardboard carton. His labor was of the manual, bone-crunching,
muscle-aching kind. And though he worked hard from boyhood, these belongings are all he left when he died.

Birth certificate. (Commune di Vieste, Provincia di Foggia. Dated 4 settembre 1881, though when he arrived in America, officials
gave him a birthdate in April, because they couldn't understand his reply to the question "When were you born?")

Passport. (Italian.)

Naturalization papers. (Dated 4 March 1944. The handwriting shows he doesn't often sign his name.)

Identification papers, bearing his photograph, for his work on the Lackawanna Railroad. (For the photo, he was docked pay.)

Identification papers, bearing his photograph, for his work on the piers. Occupation:
Laborer.
Height:
5 feet 3 inches.
Weight:
165 pounds
(he was a stocky man). Color:
White.
Hair:
Gray Black.
Complexion:
Ruddy.
(For the photo on the papers, he was docked pay.)

Cheap metal pocket watch, neither gold nor silver. (Worn on special occasions. But not to work. Not needed there, for the
bosses told him when to begin work, when to eat, when to stop. He was not in control of how he spent his time, so he had no
need to know what time it was. The watch, broken, is now in my possession.)

Nightshirts. (Two. Rough material.)

Nightcap. (One. The tenement was unheated.)

Long underwear. (Two sets. One heavy, for winter; one light, for summer. Worn day and night. Removed on Saturday, bathing
day. Though there was no bathtub and he washed at the sink, standing on an old towel to catch the drips. The day to switch
from the winter set to the summer, determined by a particular saint's holiday— which saint, I do not recall.)

Socks. (Five pairs, worn, darned.)

Workclothes. (Two sets.)

Workboots. (One pair, cracked, worn.)

Workgloves. (One pair, grime-encrusted.)

Gold signet ring. Initials "S" and "C" intertwined. (A rare self-indulgence. Now in my possession, worn every day, in memory.)

A slingshot. (Homemade.)

Lunch pail. (Metal. He ate only food prepared at home or by a relative; the only time he didn't was at his daughter's wedding
reception.)

Pinochle cards. (Worn; used nightly in games played during the summer, outside on the sidewalk in front of the tenement, with
neighbors, on a collapsible card table, lighted from above by a streetlamp.)

There were, of course, no books, no magazines (he could read neither Italian nor English); no recordings (he had no phonograph);
no paintings. Nothing but a very large crucifix and two large photographs adorned their walls.

The photographs. The first, a wedding photograph of my grandfather and my mother's birth mother, the one who died, for whom
my mother languished. The second, a wedding photograph of my grandfather and my stepgrandmother, the woman my grandfather
brought to the United States for my mother's care, the stepmother my mother detested.

They are gigantic, the photos. As large as movie posters. Backed with cardboard. Crumbling, now. Far too large to display
in any modest room (though they were displayed in such a room), or even in a large room, for that matter. I do not understand
the reason for their size. Except to indicate the seriousness of marriage.

Today, almost a century after they were taken, they rest on his granddaughter's desk. After his death, they went to my mother.
After her death, to my father. After my mother's death, when my father marries a second time, he wants to discard them and
he tells me so, tells me to come right away to his house or they'll be gone.He wants to put the past behind him," my husband
says. "Wants to start a new life."

Can my mother's family, my family,
I ask myself,
mean so little to him
now?

I imagine the wedding pictures in a garbage bag at the town dump, soiled by coffee grounds, yesterday's leftovers. "I'm coming
right away," I tell my father, hating him, thinking he is a mean, coldhearted prick.

When I get them, I clutch at them, as if, in having them, I have resurrected my grandparents. As if, in having them, I have
known my grandmother. I think that if I gaze at them long enough, they will yield secrets that will help me become more myself.

On the left of each photo, there is a bride, exhibiting a lavish bouquet of roses, two dozen roses, a bouquet far more sumptuous
than my wedding bouquet, far more impressive than any I've seen. My grandmother's flowers are in a formal arrangement, fresh
and alive. In a few years, she will be dead from influenza. My step-grandmother's flowers are arranged more loosely. Her name
was Libera, and she was a renegade, a breaker of rules, and so it would be like her to ask for an informal arrangement. But
her roses are wilted. Was she married on a hot day? Or as an economy did she and my grandfather arrange to have a bouquet
made from flowers past their prime? This would be very like them.

My grandfather wears the same suit in each photo (his one good suit), and the same shirt, same tie, same lily-of-the-valley
boutonniere, same handkerchief (folded differently— into a large white oblong when he marries my grandmother; into a tiny
saillike triangle when he marries my stepgrandmother). His shoes are not new, but polished: the first set, with buttons; the
second, with laces.

In each, he strikes a gallant pose: head cocked, dark hair neatly slicked back. The hint of a rakish pompadour when he married
my grandmother has disappeared by the time he marries my stepgrand­mother.

In each, he seems proud of his bride and of his position as groom. In each, he smiles. In the first, however, you can see
the pride in his smile, can feel the sexual tension between this woman and this man, can tell that this was a love match.
In the second, his smile seems born of relief that he will no longer have to worry about his daughter's care. In the portrait
with my stepgrandmother, he is not wearing a wedding ring. In his heart, he married only once; the second marriage was undertaken
from necessity, not choice.

And the backgrounds. In one, my grandfather and his first wife stand in front of a screen portraying the colonnaded great
hall of a palazzo; in the other, my grandfather and stepgrandmother stand near one depicting a stone wall and the trellised
window of a country estate.

The stone wall of such a place, though was built to keep him out. Yes, he might have worked its land. But he could not walk
on its lawns, lounge under its trees, swim in its brooks, eat at its table.

The photographers have done their best to make these folk look accepted, acceptable, well regarded, well respected. The poorer
they are, the more recently they have arrived, the photographers have learned, the more elaborate and elegant they want the
backdrops in their photographs. But the dresses. Oh, the dresses.

My grandmother's, adorned with tulle rosettes, decorated with a scalloped border trimmed with beads atop an organza underskirt.
My stepgrandmother's, layer upon layer of embroidered lace. The neckline of each, proper, decorous. The headdresses, closefitting,
with spikes of pearls. The veils, floor-length, embroidered.

My grandmother stands with her feet firmly planted, and she looks bold and sure and proud and determined and purposeful. (My
granddaughter Julia's face is very like hers.) And she was, I have been told, willful, like I am. But my grandfather didn't
complain, just shook his head and laughed when she stood firm against him, for he loved her and was happy that he was in America,
and not in the Old Country, for there, a man who could not control his wife was not a man at all.

My stepgrandmother stands in tiny pointed shoes fastened with satin ribbons, poised daintily. No sign, here, of the hardworking
capable woman she was. She looks vexed, uncertain of her future with this man and his child.

If you saw these photographs of these women in these dresses, you would not believe that my grandmother sold vegetables door-to-door
and took in washing; that my stepgrandmother would become the superintendent of our tenement, that she would collect rent
for the landlord, and shovel snow, and fix things. In their bridal attire (bought? rented?), these women look wealthy, as
wealthy as the wives of the
latifundisti,
the great landholders in Puglia.

On this one day, these poor women can pretend they are wealthy, privileged. Which is why, I think, these portraits are so
large— these images are meant to obliterate that they're immigrants, obliterate the poverty of their lives.

Still, each woman seems uncomfortable wearing these clothes. Neither will ever wear finery like this again. But the three-piece
suit is my grandfather's, and he wears it throughout his life. A man who works with his hands needs only one suit. To wear
to weddings, christenings, funerals (those of others, and his own). More than one suit would be an extravagance.

And this man, who leads a hardscrabble life in this richest of countries (whose streets, he was told, were paved with gold,
who tallies at day's end how little he's earned, how much he owes), has no need of more than one suit, carefully purchased,
so that it does not look like a wedding suit but like a good suit. A suit a man can wear with pride, though in wearing it,
he feels like an imposter. Feels like the bosses he despises, not like the laborer he is and the workers he respects.

My grandfather wears this suit eight times in his lifetime. At his first wedding. My mother's christening. His first wife's
funeral. His second wedding. My mother's wedding, when he walks her down the aisle with pride, with joy, for he likes the
man she is marrying; he gets drunk at her reception, he is so happy. (Drunk as he is, he is careful of his suit. He is always
careful of his suit.) And he wears this suit on the day when he becomes a citizen of the United States.

When his daughter marries, my grandfather tells her that he will wear this suit, though it now looks old-fashioned, when her
children are christened, when they graduate from college, when they marry— his grandchildren who will go to college, distinguish
themselves, fulfill his dreams, marry well, make his work worthwhile. (He wears his suit to their christenings. But he is
dead long before they graduate, long before they marry.)

He wears his suit, too, for his wake and his burial. But this time, it smells of mothballs, for his wife has not had the time
to air it.

Because he was buried in his suit, there was no good suit in the box of my grandfather's belongings. No good shirt, good socks,
good tie, for he was buried in them as well. Just one pair of everyday trousers. No everyday shirt (he wore the top of his
long underwear in the house).

Toward the end of his life, my grandfather would try the suit on to make sure that it still fit (he was not getting fat, but
was becoming bloated, retaining water for a reason he never discovered, for he never went to a doctor, not once). He tried
the suit on because he didn't want his wife or daughter to waste money on a burial suit, and he didn't want the undertaker
to slit the jacket of his suit up the back, slit the trousers to accommodate his girth, the way the undertaker had to for
a friend. My grandfather didn't want to imagine himself going to the other side in a damaged suit. That would have made a
bad impression, would have brought disgrace to his family. Even in death,
la bella figura.

And yes, the suit still fit, he would discover whenever he tried it on, though it was a bit tight, especially in the thighs.
And, as he pulled in his stomach and fastened the buttons of his trousers, he relaxed, knowing that this suit could still
be put to good use.

If my grandfather had been a nostalgic man, there would have been a small bag of soil in the box, Pugliese soil, stowed in
his luggage and brought with him to America so that he could be buried with it. But there was no bag of soil. No nostalgia
for the old country. Yes, he missed his parents (dead), his relatives (most of them dead), his friends (because he couldn't
write, he had never been in touch with them). But he did not miss the place he left. "I spit on that place," he said. He was
better off, he knew, in America.

In that cardboard box of my grandfather's possessions, there was this, too:

One pass, No. E 9155, good for riding any Lackawanna train between all stations, good from January 1st, 1948 through December
31st, 1949 (except for trains 3 and 6), in the name of Mr. S. Calabrese, Retired Laborer, signed on the back, in the hand
that showed he did not write his name often.

The pass was useless. By the time this perquisite was issued to him, he was too sick to travel. And by the end of 1949, he
was dead.