Crazy in the Kitchen (15 page)

When he sits in the living room, and reads the paper, and smokes his pipe, and drinks his wine, he likes to be alone to think.
So she cannot sit in the living room with him. Besides, at the end of the day, she has too much to do to sit down.

On holidays, when her grown children come to their parents' home for a festive meal, she cooks for days. She emerges from
the kitchen halfway through the celebration, and sits at her place at the table for only a few moments before returning to
the kitchen, the place where she spends most of her life. My husband says she never eats with the family. My husband says
no one in the family thought this was strange or unjust.

She would stand in the kitchen, frying tiny meatballs to feed people as they came to visit, so they wouldn't spend even a
moment in her home without having something to eat. As she stirred vats of tomato sauce, she wiped her brow with the handkerchief
she concealed in her sleeve. She struggled up from the basement with trays of homemade pasta, often in intricate shapes that
would take a long time to fashion.

After the family ate their antipasti, their pasta, their meats and
contorni,
their desserts, their nuts and figs, after they relaxed for a while at the table, after the children played, the old man
would tell someone to go into the kitchen to tell his wife to make some
panini
from the leftovers in case someone was hungry.

My husband remembers that his grandfather never cleared a plate from the table, never entered the kitchen, never spoke to
his wife.

"He never lifted a finger to help her," my husband said. "And no one objected. Sometimes the women tried to help. But she
shooed them away. She didn't know how to let anyone help her."

After she died, my husband learned that his grandmother, who had given birth to five children, had become pregnant nearly
every year. His mother once told him that the women in the family knew she had had more than twenty abortions. She had hidden
these pregnancies from her husband because they were illegal and also against Church doctrine, and he would have forbidden
her to terminate them.

Everyone in the family was terrified of my husband's grandfather. He had a murderous temper. That his sons were stronger than
he was and could have defeated him didn't matter. His children were taught to respect their father, no matter what. In the
name of respect, he abused them. In the name of respect, they were supposed to allow him to beat them. When the children objected,
they were beaten even more severely. Their mother was too terrified, too worn out to protect her children.

And so, except for his favored son, he tyrannized his family, and treated its members as if he had the power of life and death
over them. He allowed them no freedom, no dignity. He colonized them, even as his people in the South had been colonized.

She died years before her husband. She looked thirty years older than she was.

"She died from hard work," the women in the family said. "And all those abortions."

"She died because the old man was a bastard," my husband's father says.

"She died because she was despised and mistreated," my husband and I say to each other.

After his wife's death, his favorite son moves in with him. Now
his
wife (not Italian American but Irish American) takes on the responsibilities of the kitchen. She works almost as hard as
her mother-in-law and she, too is mistreated. But she complains all the time. Her husband is always telling her to shut up.
But after the old woman's death, there are no more freshly killed chickens, no more fresh pasta, and no more home-grown vegetables.

When the old man dies, although they all send flowers with ribboned bands that read "Farewell, Father," no one, except his
favored son, mourns his passing. "Good riddance to bad rubbish," my mother says, when she finds out the old man has died.
("Good riddance to bad rubbish," she says when my father's father dies.)

At my husband's grandfather's wake, no one, except the favored son, sits in the chairs in the room with his body to welcome
mourners. Everyone stands in the hallway where they cannot see him. They share stories about what a bastard he was. About
how he would only eat fresh-killed chickens. About how their mother was a saint. About how he killed his wife. About how he
almost killed each of them.

And during the wake, which lasts for three days, no one in the family, except his favored son, goes up to the coffin to pay
their last respects.

After the wake, the family gathers in the Bronx at a local Italian restaurant. We eat the usual— antipasti, spaghetti with
red sauce, chicken parm, Italian pastries or gelato.

The eldest son, the favored son, stands up to make a toast. "To the dearly departed," he says. "May he rest in peace."

"May he rest in peace," the family echoes. But no one stands.

NIGHTMARE (WITHOUT FOOD)

My mother and I shared very little. But we had the same recurring dream. Sometimes I thought that this dream traveled from
her spirit to mine through the umbilicus connecting us while I was in utero, along with the fluids, nutrients, and antibodies
that passed from her body to mine.

I wonder whether I began to dream this dream as my mother was dreaming it, while I was still safely inside her. When there
was no decision she had to make about feeding me or not feeding me. When her body was generous with its gifts, generous in
nourishing me. When feeding me was not accompanied (as it was after I was born) by anxiety, recrimination, regret.

My mother told me about her dream just once. We were drinking tea in my apartment. I was a new mother. She came to help me
care for my newborn son in those difficult days after I came home from the hospital. Those days that no one can prepare you
for, when you realize that your life, your old self, has vaporized. When you do not yet know what the word "mother" will mean
for you, though you must do all the things that mothers are supposed to do.

During those weeks, we were closer than we ever were before, closer than we ever would be again. We were joined in a conspiracy
of bottles, blankets, diapers.

My need permitted our closeness. We would sit at the kitchen table, stirring our tea, in those precious moments of silence
when my baby was sleeping, those moments when new mothers understand, for the first time, the meaning of quiet, the necessity
of solitude, and how the mere act of sitting down can be the most satisfying pleasure the world can provide. And during those
moments, my mother spoke to me of her lost mother, of her loveless relationship with her stepmother, of her unrealized dreams,
of how difficult it was to care for me as a child, of her nightmares.

In the past, I would have foreclosed this conversation, would not have wanted to hear what she had to say. But I was failing
as miserably in satisfying this alien creature who, people told me, was my child, as she had as a young mother in satisfying
me. I understood my mother's stories as an apologia for her difficult mothering. And an explanation for mine.

I said very little, because I was beyond expression, beyond language, almost beyond comprehension. All I wanted to do was
sleep, for, like every new mother, I was sleeping almost not at all, and working harder than I ever worked before, at a job
that I didn't understand, and one for which I had no training.

Everything was a shock; everything was a surprise. My fantasy of a baby clean, fed, diapered, sleeping peacefully in my arms
while I rocked and read a book, was replaced by the piss-and-shit reality of new motherhood. "Why didn't anyone tell me what
it would be like?" I screamed inside. "Why didn't she tell me?"— even though I knew I wouldn't have believed, even though
I knew I would have thought it wouldn't be like that for me.

At a lull in the conversation, as we watch the snow accumulate on the street outside, I ask her why no one prepares women
for the reality of motherhood. "Because," my mother said, "then there would be no more children."

I looked and felt ravaged. I couldn't figure out when my baby was hungry, when he was full, when he was tired, when he needed
to be alone, when he needed me to comfort him. All his cries sounded the same, a wail of desperation in a code I could not
decipher.

It was a brutal winter. I washed laundry. Hung it outside, where it froze. Took it inside to defrost. Draped it all over the
apartment. Walked through snowbanks clutching my baby to my chest to buy formula, once leaving him at home sleeping during
a blizzard, terrified that when I came home, he'd be dead. I wished for spring. I wished for my old life.

My son was a tiny baby, premature, high-strung because I had smoked throughout my pregnancy. (This was before the harmful
effects of smoking were publicized.)

He couldn't drink very much in one feeding. Soon after I finished feeding him, burping him, changing him, and putting him
in his crib to sleep, he'd be ready to feed again. Whenever I fell into a sound sleep, he'd awaken.

Perhaps my mother believed that she could unravel whatever ill she had done to me as a child by helping me, by caring for
my son. Whatever the reason, she was a model grandmother. Taught me how to be a grandmother. When she came to help, she ordered
me to bed, took over, never told me whether she'd had any difficulty. My baby was fed and freshly diapered. My laundry was
folded; my dishes were washed, dried, and replaced on their shelves. All this now seemed easy to my mother.

When my mother was around my children (in a few years there would be another son), she came alive. She played blocks with
them on the floor; walked them in their carriages; took them on excursions to the beach; cooked with them; made them
zeppole
for breakfast when they slept over; let them bounce on her bed; laughed when they defaced her furniture, plopped their ice
cream onto the sidewalk, unraveled rolls of toilet tissue. Caught the moment with a photo. And she always let them eat whatever
they wanted— ice cream for supper; hot dogs for breakfast; donuts for lunch— whenever they wanted, though she would feign
disapproval.

I was grateful for all this. But envious, too. Where was the mother I had known? When had she shape-shifted into this loving
presence? If she could be so indulgent with my children, if she could enjoy them so much, I wondered, why couldn't she have
indulged and enjoyed me?

Grateful for her help, I listened to my mother's stories during this miasmic time. Stories I would hear once, and not again.
I was happy for them. They passed the time. They gave me explanations. They gave me more of her than I had ever had.

One of my mother's stories was about a dream she had every few days. A dream very like my own, although I never told her this.

Oh, the details diverged. Her dream might begin in a city; mine, in the country. She might find herself dressed poorly; I
might be unaware of my clothing, or I might be wearing nothing at all. And the people she encountered were different from
those I encountered. They had different faces, different ways of behaving, a different language. But stripped of all superficialities,
our dreams were the same dream.

To begin. We are in a strange place, not an unpleasant place on the surface, but there is a disquiet we feel because we know
we are not home. We want to be home, only we have forgotten where home is. We know we must leave this place soon, for otherwise
something awful will happen to us.

We are, of course, alone. And we can recall what home is like, or rather, what we want home to be like— safe, secure, serene,
beautiful. We know that there is a way to get there, if only we can find the right road, if only we can remember where home
is, or, rather, was.

At some point in our dream, we look for a car, a bus, an airplane. We decide that it is absolutely necessary to find a way
to hurry ourselves through a dark and unfamiliar landscape and if we just find the right conveyance, it will take us home.
It will know where home is, even if we don't know.

So we look. And we think that we have found what we need. But it disappears. Or it isn't where someone told us it should be.

This is where the dream starts making us toss and turn in our sleep. This is when we each start moaning. This is when our
sleeping partners try to wake us, when they ask us if we're dreaming, ask us if we're all right. They are used to this. This
happens regularly— once every few days for her; once every other week for me.

We are moaning because we can't find where we left our car, where the bus station is, where the airport is located. So, now,
not only do we not remember where home is, now we also cannot find a way to get there. Or, if not there, then anywhere but
where we are. For where we are is not safe.

You will notice there is no food in our dreams. No place where we stop, sit, sip some water, eat something to nourish us for
our journey.

At this point, we might encounter an earthquake, a mudslide, an invading army, a stampede of people running in our direction,
a huge snowstorm, a scorching sun-baked plain— something that makes it even more difficult for us to find a way to be miraculously
taken home. We never ask anyone to help us: we know that no one will or can.

Here, my mother becomes terrified of what confronts her. She freezes, like a deer caught in lightbeams. Sometimes, she finds
herself falling into deep crevasses, sucked into oceanic whirlpools, licked by sheets of fire. She is sure, now, that she'll
die trying to find her way home. This is when she awakens— screaming, thrashing, sweating, heart pounding. The next day will
be a difficult one.

At overcoming impediments, I am better than my mother. I summon my courage. I move over, around, through whatever blocks my
passage. I am not harmed, though what I am looking for still eludes me. And, by the end of my dream, when I awaken— thrashing,
sweating, heart pounding— what I so desperately longed for is still missing.

Sometimes, though, I get distracted. Decide that some children I find along the way need my care. So I abandon my quest, but
not without becoming enraged that I have put their needs before mine.

My dream. My mother's dream. A dream about losing a mother, a home, a country. Sometimes a dream about being a mother, too.

It is also a dream of exile. A dream about leaving, but not knowing what it is you have left. A dream of never being able
to return home.