Crazy in the Kitchen (3 page)

MAKING THE BREAD

My grandmother's bread (the bread that my mother will not eat) is a bread that my grandmother makes by hand in my mother's
kitchen, much to my mother's disgust, at least twice a week, sometimes more, depending upon the season and upon the appetites
of those who eat her bread— me, my sister, my father.

It takes a lot of time for my grandmother to make the bread— getting the fresh yeast, assembling the ingredients, mixing the
bread, letting it rise, punching it down, letting it rise again, shaping it, letting the loaves rise, baking them, letting
them cool, storing them properly. This is time that my mother thinks is wasted, time that my mother thinks my grandmother
should spend helping her clean the house. "Your house, not my house," my grandmother says when my mother complains that nobody
helps her. "Me, I have no house," my grandmother says.

To make the bread, my grandmother dumps a whole bunch of flour onto the Formica surface of the kitchen table. She mutters
under her breath about how this flour is not' 'real'' flour, nothing like the
semola
that rich people used in the old country. And she is outraged that the beautiful flour you could get there, you can't get
here, a sure sign of her adoptive land's barbarism (though there she couldn't afford that flour, often couldn't even afford
the adulterated maggot-infested flour sold to the poor). Still, she can't understand why what they grew there, they can't
grow here. Why what her bread tastes like here, isn't what fine bread tasted like there (even though the bread she ate there
wasn't fine bread). Here, she says, the flour is whiter than there, more like talcum powder than a proper flour should be.
And it is farmed on a land sprayed with poisons. It is bleached. It is bromated. It is packed in paper, not in cotton sacks.
And by the time you buy it, it is stale and has taken on the taste of the packaging.

My grandmother takes a pinch of my mother's packaged flour between her fingers, tastes it, and says
merda. Merda
is one of my grandmother's favorite words. Her other favorite words are
sonnama-bitch,
sonnamagun, bastardo
(my father),
bastarda
(my mother),
stunod,
bestia gramma
(evil beast— which she uses to refer to politicians, priests, movie stars, and anyone who parks their car in front of our
house), and
staccim!
my favorite, which, my father says, means sperm of the devil. (I find this out when he smacks me for calling him
staccim!.)
From my grandmother, I learn not only how to bake the bread, I learn how to curse and swear like a Southern Italian peasant
woman.

The flour my grandmother uses, she takes from my mother's store, which is kept in a bin in the bottom of the kitchen pantry.
My grandmother uses a lot of flour each week, pounds and pounds of flour, because she bakes so much bread. This is because
she eats mostly bread, a great deal of bread, just like she did in the old country. For, she tells me, there, bread is the
food of the poor, bread dipped in water or wine if you were lucky enough to have bread and water or wine. Here, though, she
can eat soups that she dips her bread into. And she can eat other things made with flour— pizza,
zeppole,
calzone stuffed with onions, black olives, capers, tomatoes, cheese, anchovies, parsley. This she considers a boon, a bounty,
a blessing. This outweighs all the evil of this new country that she has come to.

My mother doesn't let my grandmother have her own supply of flour. Even though my grandmother uses more flour than my mother.
Even though letting my grandmother have her own flour would be the logical thing to do. Even though it would remove one of
the causes of friction between them. That my grandmother uses so much of my mother's flour is a source of contention between
them, because my mother often reaches into the pantry for a little flour to thicken a sauce or bake a piecrust (and although
my mother is good at very little in the kitchen, she is good at baking pies), only to discover that my grandmother has used
all of her flour.

"Jesus Christ," my mother says. "How much more of this can I take?"

When my mother discovers that there is no flour left, she searches the house to find my grandmother, who is down the basement
tending her bread, or in the dining room sitting by the radiator knitting or crocheting, or in her bedroom near the window
saying her rosary or staring out the window at the plumes of smoke from the Public Service electric plant. And when she finds
her, my mother starts yelling.

"If you had any respect for me," my mother shouts, "you'd keep your hands off my flour. Or you'd have the decency to tell
me when there wasn't any more."

My grandmother glances at my mother with disdain, shrugs, and continues doing whatever she was doing— tending, crocheting,
knitting, staring, praying. This drives my mother crazy. This makes my mother shout even louder. Because what my mother wants
at this moment is confrontation, drama, resolution, change (on the part of my grandmother). And my grandmother will never
change.

Sometimes my grandmother wants to fight. Sometimes my grandmother spits back at my mother, "You're not my blood," to answer
my mother's accusations. But usually when my mother comes ranting, my grandmother just waits for my mother to go away, to
leave her alone. My grandmother has come from a land of the poor, of the despised, of the powerless, a land where she has
learned that the most potent weapon you can wield against your adversary is an utter and complete indifference.

To compensate for the dreadful flour she is forced to use, my grandmother uses fresh yeast, a little barley flour, and some
salt. The barley flour gives her loaf some character, some color, some heft. Yeast in foil packets my grandmother regards
with as much disdain as the tomatoes in little cardboard boxes with cellophane windows my mother buys from the local supermarket.
Both are
merda
as far as my grandmother is concerned. And so my grandmother gets her yeast from the baker who owns the local bakery where
I work during the summer and after school, who agrees to let my grandmother buy some of his yeast.

At first, the baker wants to give my grandmother the yeast free. But she is too proud to accept his generosity, which she
misperceives as charity, and a condemnation of her. Besides, she is far too wary to accept something from someone she doesn't
know. This would put her in his debt. And so they have agreed (through me, for he speaks no Italian and she speaks little
English) that she will pay him twenty-five cents a week for some of his yeast.

And so, every baking day, she walks down the big hill to the bakery, and back up the big hill to our house, carrying her fresh
yeast. It is one of the few errands she undertakes that gives her any satisfaction.

When my grandmother makes her bread, she makes a well in the middle of the flour and into it pours bay-leaf-scented water
she has warmed on the stove. In my grandmother's village, they used water from the sea to make their bread so you didn't have
to add salt, which was too expensive. Besides, the water from the wells, if they contained any water at all, was often contaminated.
So in my grandmother's village, you had to buy water from the water vendor, if you had money to buy water.

My grandmother flicks the flour into the yeasty water with her fingertips a little bit at a time and stirs the mixture round
and round until it comes together into a shaggy mass.

Making the bread, a welcome ritual that redeems the difficulty of my grandmother's days, of my days. A time I share with her,
sometimes wordlessly, sometimes accompanied by her stories; and her bread, her pizza, her
zeppole,
are food I like, food I can swallow, food that does not disgust me, food that instead sustains me and nourishes me.

The two of us, in the kitchen, ignoring my mother's annoyance and disapproval, her unnecessary clanging of pots and pans during
this important time. The two of us, enveloped in a nimbus of flour, inhaling the yeasty, narcotic vapors that transport her
to a little white village by the sea, where she returns in reverie. Though she would never return there, she said, because
life was so difficult. No work to be had. No food to be had. And the land was poor though it had once yielded bounty beyond
imagination, even for the poor. Melons round as a baby's bottom; tomatoes red as blood, artichokes the size of a man's fist
or as small as a little snail; grapes, oranges, fennel, onions, olives— all so perfect, all so delicious, she was told. Until
those
sfaccM
(may they rot in hell through all eternity) took the land from the people, wouldn't let the land rest, wouldn't let the workers
rest. They worked the land until it refused to yield; they worked the peasants until they dropped dead or left for America.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, when I hear about Italy, it is this impoverished village she describes to me while
she makes the bread, this little white stone village that tumbles down a hillside to an azure sea, that I imagine all of Italy
to be. And when I travel to Italy after she dies, it is this bread, her bread, that I hope I will find there.

KNEADING THE DOUGH

When my grandmother kneads the bread, she takes off her shawl, her sweater, her apron, her dress, because she sweats a lot
because kneading is such hard work, and she stands in the kitchen at the table in her underwear. Coarse unbleached white undershirt
over a substitute for underpants that looks like a large diaper (these, she makes herself because you can't buy them here).
Black stockings, rolled down around her ankles. Old black shoes, their backs cut off, with a hole cut into the front of the
right shoe for her bunion.

When my grandmother strips down, my mother huffs and leaves the room. My grandmother acts as if nothing has happened. She
has mastered the art of pretending that my mother isn't there unless she wants to argue with her. And because she is making
the bread today, she has better things to do than argue with my mother.

We can hear my mother in the living room complaining about how, if she ever wanted to, she could never have a friend over
for tea in the afternoon, what with my grandmother walking around the house in her underwear. "Dear God, what have I ever
done to deserve this?" my mother asks. My mother has only one or two friends and would never invite them over to tea in the
afternoon anyway, so what she says seems ridiculous. Still, I understand what my mother means, because I never invite my friends
to my house. It's too risky, what with my mother and grandmother's constant arguments over my grandmother's strange ways.

When my grandmother kneads the dough, she gives me a little batch to knead too. She shows me how to lean into the dough, to
push it away, to gather it back onto itself, to lean into it again. The two of us kneading the bread, rocking together.

After my grandmother kneads the dough, she gathers it into a ceramic bowl one of her relatives has sent to her from Italy
to let it rise.

When she first came to live with us in Ridgefield, she would take the big bowl of dough, carry it up the stairs to her bedroom,
and settle it into her bedclothes. This is where she would let the dough rise. To my grandmother, this was normal. This is
what her mother had done, and her mother's mother, and her mother's mother's mother. But to my mother, this was barbarism
incarnate. Dough belonged in kitchens, not in bedrooms. "Jesus Christ Almighty, how much more of this can I take?" my mother
asks, as she slides past my grandmother on the stairs.

To keep peace in the family (even though he himself disrupts the peace), my father builds my grandmother a special little
platform with little legs that sits on top of the radiator in the kitchen where she can place her dough to rise. The platform
is made from plywood stained maple to match the Early American furniture in our kitchen.

My father tells my grandmother that it's warm here on top of the radiator, warmer than in her bed, and so better for rising.
My grandmother is skeptical. Still, this is where she begins to rest her bread. (This annoys my mother. So after a while she
starts using the platform to store her pots and pans so there is no room for my grandmother's bowl. So my grandmother again
trudges her dough up the stairs to let it rise in her bed.)

After my grandmother sets the bowl of dough to rise on the platform, she dresses herself again. Pulls on her black dress (and,
if it is wintertime, pulls on a second black dress over the first); pins the bib of her apron onto her bodice; ties the apron
strings behind her; puts on her sweater; pulls on her shawl. Then she goes upstairs, pulls a multicolored crocheted blanket
off her bed, takes it downstairs, tucks it around the breadbowl. Whether this is because she believes bedclothes make the
dough rise higher, or because she is saving face by showing my mother that she will use her bedclothes even though she is
no longer allowed to let the dough rise in her bed, I never learn. `Still, this gesture, which seems part compromise, part
self-assertion, shows my mother— and me— that although my grandmother may never win, neither will she ever lose.

When my grandmother arranges her blanket around the bread, she acts as if she is putting a child to sleep, that unborn ideal
child against whom she compares my unfortunate mother. It is my grandmother's most tender gesture, this swaddling of the bread.

After the dough rises, my grandmother shapes her loaves into round puffy pillows, and she helps me shape mine into a little
braided crown. These she puts onto a wooden board to carry up to her bedroom to rise again. While our breads rise, my grandmother
takes some scraps and shapes them into little figure eights, which she fries in hot oil, then sprinkles with confectioner's
sugar for my sister and me.
Zeppole.
These, we will eat when my sister comes home from playing with her best friend. This is our lunch on baking days. This is
why I love the days when my grandmother bakes the bread.

My mother disapproves of me and my sister eating anything my grandmother cooks for us.
"Zeppole"
she sneers, "nothing but sugar and starch, sugar and starch," as if she were the queen of nutrition. But she lets us eat
them anyway. As usual, she has been too busy fussing and complaining and cleaning our already clean house to make us lunch.

After the loaves have risen, my grandmother bakes them in the oven down in the basement. We have an oven in the kitchen but
my mother won't use it, won't let my grandmother use it. She uses it to store pots and pans, so even though there are two
ovens in our house, she fights with my grandmother over who gets to use the oven in the basement.

My grandmother doesn't mind going downstairs to bake her bread because in her village in Italy she had to bring her bread
to a communal oven for baking when she had collected enough flour to make a loaf of bread. And although other women, scarves
on heads, hands on hips, welcomed the opportunity to stand around the oven to socialize, and to gossip about the malefactions
of anyone who wasn't there, my grandmother was never one for wasting time in idle talk. When we moved to Ridgefield, my mother
got a new stove for our kitchen, because she considered the old stove that came with the house unsightly. She had my father
install the old stove in the basement, so she could use it during summers so the kitchen upstairs wouldn't get hot.

But my mother never uses the oven in the kitchen upstairs, even in winter, never lets my grandmother use the oven in the kitchen.
My mother only uses the oven in the basement, only lets my grandmother use the oven in the basement. So even though there
is an oven in the kitchen, my mother and my grandmother have to run up and down the stairs to and from the basement several
times whenever they are baking.

My grandmother doesn't seem to mind. She doesn't have all that much to occupy her. Usually, when she's baking, she stays below
ground in our dimly lit basement, sitting on a cast-off straight-backed chair near the furnace where it's warm, away from
my mother, away from the commotion upstairs. This, I can't understand, though I do see why my grandmother puts as much space
as she can between herself and my mother because I do the same thing. Still, the basement is dark, damp, unpleasant. (Years
later, when I'm in the South of Italy, I learn that sitting on straight-backed chairs in dimly lit rooms where dust motes
dance is what peasant women like my grandmother do when they're not working, which isn't often. In our basement, my grandmother
must have felt at home.)

I think it's crazy that my mother won't use the oven in the kitchen. Especially since, when she bakes, my mother is always
also cleaning out a drawer, tidying a closet, scrubbing the toilet. So she always loses track of time and often burns whatever
she's baking. My father can't understand this either. Whenever my mother runs up and down the stairs to and from the oven
in the basement, my father asks, "Why are you always making things harder for yourself, Mil? Why can't you treat yourself
right? Why do you make things harder for yourself than they need to be?"

Like how my mother washes clothes. In Hoboken, my mother used to heat water on the coal stove, wash clothes on a washboard
in the sink, wring them by hand, and hang them outside on the clothesline to dry. It was hard work and it took a long time.
Here, in Ridgefield, we have a washing machine and even a dryer in the basement; they came with the house. My father imagines
that these appliances will save my mother time, will make her into a lady of leisure.

But although my mother washes our clothes in the washing machine, she won't let it complete the cycle. She wrings the clothes
out by hand, because she wants to save water. She reuses the water in the washing machine for another load. This entails a
lot of running up and down the stairs to interrupt the wash cycle. This entails a lot of rinsing of clothes in the basement
sink. A lot of lugging heavy wet clothes out of the water, a lot of wringing, a lot of sweating, a lot of swabbing down the
floor with the rag mop, a lot of swearing.

My mother refuses to use the dryer at all. "Uses too much electricity; it's too expensive," she says, and so she hangs the
wash outside in summer, inside in winter on the lines that she has strung back and forth across the basement.

All this drives my father crazy. He calculates that my mother saves a dollar or so a month on water, five or so on electricity,
which, he says, isn't worth it. "Think about your time, Mil; think about saving your energy for better things," he says to
my mother, who doesn't listen. "A penny saved is a penny earned," my mother replies.

My mother won't wash my grandmother's clothing because it offends her. And my grandmother won't use the washing machine in
the basement to wash her clothing because she is afraid of it, as she is afraid of all electrical appliances, but especially
the washing machine because it combines water and electricity and she is certain that if she uses it, she will electrocute
herself. So my grandmother washes her clothes in the second-floor bathroom we all share, in the basin or the tub, depending
upon how many clothes she needs to wash.

"Jesus Christ," my mother says, when she wants to take a bath but encounters a tubful of my grandmother's clothes soaking,
"how much more of this can I take?"

After my grandmother finishes baking the bread, she cleans up, but not the way my mother wants: clean enough so you can eat
off the floor, even though we never eat off the floor.

My mother's face is red with rage. She rescrubs everything with Ajax. She curses. "Sporca, sporca, sporca," she says. "Dirty,
dirty, dirty." She spills water on the floor because she's so angry, makes an even bigger mess, tries to clean that. She turns
down the corners of her mouth.

It is impossible for my sister and me to ignore my mother while we sit at the table and eat our
zeppole,
for my mother is cleaning the table we sit at, she is scrubbing around our plates and under our glasses. "Sporca, sporca,
sporca," she repeats.

My grandmother is standing on the threshold of the kitchen, watching us eat, watching my mother clean. She is serene, proud
of the fat loaves of bread cooling on the counter. She is looking forward to eating the leftover
zeppole
all by herself after we have finished eating, after my mother has finished cleaning, after my mother finishes her snack of
a crust of toast and a cup of cold black coffee.

I concentrate on the crunchiness of the outside of the
zeppole,
on the warm pillow softness of the inside, on the cloying sweetness of the maple syrup that I use for dipping. Yes, it is
impossible for me to ignore my mother. But I try.