Crazy in the Kitchen (8 page)

He began by cooking meals for himself along the railroad line, using what he scavenged. Then he cooked for himself and a few
friends who scavenged with him. In time, my father told me, he persuaded
the padrone
to let him cook for all the men in his gang, with provisions provided by the railroad. By then, muckrakers were writing about
workers' living conditions and the railroad owners were forced to improve them.

How he persuaded the
padrone,
I can only imagine.

Before the railroad provides him with equipment to cook for the men, he gathers twigs, pieces of wood, pieces of charcoal
by the side of the railbed, marveling that there are such things to be had for the taking. If things had been this easy in
the old country, if you weren't punished for taking what you found, he thinks, there would have been no reason to leave.

I see my grandfather trudging back down the line after his day's work, collecting twigs, putting them into the sack he carries
on his back. I see him digging a hole, surrounding it with rocks, lining it with kindling, placing the wood carefully, paying
attention to the direction of the wind, and lighting the fire with a match from the metal matchbox he carries.

He fans the fire, coaxes it to life. Takes a grate he's taken from over a drainage pipe, places it over the fire. But what
will he cook?

My grandfather was a country boy. He knows how to study the land. How to hunt animals, how to forage. This, he learned from
his parents.

He knows how to find land snails after a heavy rain. How to scout for edible wild herbs and greens— bay laurel, savory, thyme,
sorrel, dandelions, spinach, chicory, nettle tops— and for onion shoots, wild leeks, berries. How to make a trap, make and
use a slingshot. How to rig a net so he can wade into a shallow stream and catch fish, river crab, river eel.

While the fire burns, I see him dressing what he's hunted. A squirrel, perhaps, killed with his slingshot. He puts on a pair
of gloves, pulls the skin over the head, the legs. Cuts off the head and feet. Removes the glands and the internal organs.
Cuts the squirrel into pieces. Rubs the meat with the pork fat he carries in his backpack, then rubs it with the wild thyme
that he's found.

He puts the squirrel on the grill over the fire. After a while, the wild onions he's gathered. Then the bread he's given.

I see him eating his meal, slowly. Sharing his food (for he was always generous). I see him drinking from his flask of wine.
A laborer, in filthy clothes, sitting on a rock by the side of a fire near a railroad track somewhere in New York State, eating
food that satisfies him, not just food that fills his belly.

HANDWORK

Most days, as I was growing into young womanhood, my old Italian grandmother used to sit, silently, all day long, very close
to the radiator in the corner of the dining room of our house in Ridgefield, New Jersey, her old black shawl covering her
shoulders, her feet supported by an old painted stool, as she crocheted white tablecloths, or knitted sweaters or afghans
with wool unraveled from old sweaters we had outgrown, had outworn, or despised.

Before leaving the house, I would stop by where my grandmother was sitting, to see what she was working on, to get a coin
from her to buy a treat. Though she had very little money, she was generous, giving me surprise gifts of silver dollars, a
paper bill she had safety-pinned to the underside of her skirt so my mother wouldn't find it and steal it. Her love for me
defied explanation; she detested my mother, and I did little to deserve her love, nothing to invite it, except bake with her
on occasion, or bring her a cool glass of water now and then so she would not have to interrupt her work, or let her teach
me how to knit.

I spoke to her in English (for I spoke very little dialect); she answered in dialect (for she spoke very little English).
My mother discouraged us from speaking dialect, from speaking Italian. I think my mother didn't want us to know our grandmother,
and through knowing her, come to love her, as my mother did not love her. (I did love my grandmother. But as one might a forbidden,
graven image. For my mother, I felt no love, but rage, and, yes, a deep and bitter yearning.)

My grandmother cared for me as she could not care for my mother.
Mia figlia,
she called me: my child. Something she never called my mother. For my mother wasn't her child but some other woman's child.
The child of a woman more beautiful than she, a woman my grandfather loved until he died. A woman my mother mourned until
she died, though she had experienced that mother's love only briefly.

"Mia figlia," my grandmother would say, a finger to her lips, when she thought it was a day that would be dangerous for me,
a day I should stay out of my father's way.

"Mia figlia," as she pushed me behind her body when my father came at me, behind the body no one embraced.

"Mia figlia," when I graduated from grammar school, high school, college, though my education would separate us. "Mia figlia,"
when I married, when I became a mother, though she held no regard for maternity.

"Mia figlia," in a whisper, when she was dying.

As she worked throughout the day, my grandmother nibbled on almonds that she kept in her apron pocket. When I asked her why,
in English, she would respond, in dialect, "For strength and for remembrance."

For strength and for remembrance.

I thought that it was my dead grandfather my grandmother was remembering. But that she had left family behind when she came
here, I didn't realize. In the myopia of my childhood, this woman existed as my grandmother only, baker of bread, maker of
pizza, knitter of garments I didn't often wear, crocheter of white lace tablecloths my mother used on our dining room table
on holidays. I did not understand that she was a woman with a past.

Maybe it was not my grandfather my grandmother was remembering. But a father who loved her gruffly or not at all. A sister
she slept with, or worked with in the fields or in the orange groves behind her village. A brother who tormented her or who
looked after her when the boys of the village chased her and made fun of her, for she was no beauty, and long past the age
when women marry.

Maybe it was a mother, too. A mother who sent her daughter to be married in America. A mother anguished in the knowledge that
she would never see her child again, perhaps never hear from her. But happy, too, that her daughter would have a better life.

Was my grandmother remembering the mother who took her broom and swept the steps to her dwelling the day after her daughter
left for America? Remembering the mother who wept as she wiped away the footprints her daughter had left in the red dust that
blew up with the winds from the Sahara, footprints that had remained on the threshold through that mournful, windless night?

But sweep she must, for this was the work of women, and her duty, this sweeping, like working in the fields when there was
work to be had, and fetching water when there was water to be had, and gathering herbs and vegetables— chicory, cardoons,
fennel— on damp and misty days when it was possible. Yes, sweep and work and fetch and gather and weep she must, for her daughter,
and for all those who left this small and ghostlike place. And weep, too, for those who remained behind.

During the winter, the radiator hissed and clanked, creating more noise than heat, though its corner was nevertheless one
of the warmest places in our drafty old house. But sitting there had a price: it meant that my grandmother never sat in sunlight,
and that she could barely see her work, for her corner of the dining room was forever in shadow, and the economies of our
household forbade the use of artificial light during the day.

I knew that my grandmother was there, for she had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do after she did her small bit of shopping
and her baking, but crochet and knit. She had no friends and no employment in Ridgefield. She was far from Hoboken, far from
a meaningful life earning her keep as a building superintendent and complaining with her cronies on the stoop of our building.

I knew nothing of the South of Italy where all my grandparents came from. Knew nothing of my grandmother's village in Puglia,
though I thought it was a barbarous place, for she sang me a song about a wolf coming through a window to steal a baby. This
song scared me, but it was a song about something that happened only in that faraway place where my grandmother used to live.

All I knew of my grandmother's village was that she had left it behind. She never described where she came from, never told
me its name, never said she missed it, never said she wanted to go back. So my grandmother's Italy became an Italy I created,
a little white village with cubical houses tumbling down a rocky hillside to a crystalline sea. Imagined flowers blooming,
trees fruiting. I saw black-clad women in headscarves walking through narrow alleyways, balancing huge bundles on their heads.
I saw these women cooking in tiny kitchens with tiny windows.

When I thought about my grandmother's Italy, I did not imagine invasion, conquest, war, hunger, thirst, fatigue, resignation,
despair. I did not see a waterless, sunbaked, grief-stricken, apocalyptic land bleeding its people to America.

My grandfather's first wife, his girlish wife, sold vegetables door to door from the handcart she pushed through the streets
of Hoboken; she took in washing during her pregnancy and after, wearing herself down.

She died of influenza, like so many others, when her baby, my mother, was only three months old. Undertakers were so busy
during this time they could not take the dead away, could not bury them quickly enough. My mother's mother was buried in an
unmarked grave without ceremony, for during this time it was against the law for people to gather to mourn the dead.

Years later, my mother would wander that cemetery, looking for her mother. My mother would make a cross from pieces of wood
she found, to mark a place that might have been her mother's grave, to stop her mother's soul from wandering.

Soon after his first wife died, my grandfather worked out an arrangement through people he knew with a woman from his province
who was looking for a situation. He needed someone to care for his child, for the people who cared for his child did not take
good care of her. He was desperate and had very little time, and he settled for Libera because she was known by people he
knew and she came from his province, Puglia. She was desperate and had very little hope and needed him so she could come to
America, and so she settled for him.

It was 1919. Because of the war, life was harder and more dangerous in Puglia than it had ever been. The poor were poorer;
the rich, richer. And it was more difficult to leave.

A peasant army had fought the war. "They took our men, and gave them sticks to fight with, and marched them to the machine
guns, let the Austrians kill them," my grandmother said.

On the boat, on the way over, my stepgrandmother knit the man who would become her husband a sweater from finely spun wool
she had bought with money he sent her. She knew that it was sometimes cold in this new land, even cold indoors, and very cold
where he worked outdoors on the railroad for many months of the year near a lake, far bigger than the one near her small village.
She knit this man a sweater to show concern for him, to please him. She did not yet know that she would never please him,
that no one could please him now but the tiny daughter she was to attend.

She crocheted herself a shawl, too, on the voyage over, for she was quick with her needles. The wool was thick, and the work
went fast; she had nothing else to do, and was unused to inactivity. The shawl was black, and she was happy at her knitting,
though she was crowded below deck with so many others, and permitted on deck for fresh air for just a little while each day.
The black shawl was something she would wear around her shoulders to keep herself warm in this strange new place where, at
least, she had some relatives.

She had enough to eat on her journey, and she was grateful for this. He had sent her much more than the 435 lire for her passage
(he was a generous man, and this was good, her mother said). So she fed herself well, fed herself food that could be bought
for a price, food she did not have to cook herself, more food than she had ever eaten—
pasta asciuta alia conserva di pomodoro; pasta asciuta al sugo; minestrone di
pasta e ceci.
Although others complained about the food, she did not complain. She knew what it was like to have nothing to eat, to fill
your belly with dirt and air.

But generous as the man was, she decided that she would not knit the child a thing, not now, perhaps not ever. For, although
she would care for her, the child was his. Not hers. Not theirs. The child was not her blood.

My grandmother did not begin crocheting tablecloths until my grandfather died. When he was alive, she was inclined neither
to finery nor extravagance and through all the years she lived with him, the tables she set were functional and austere.

Why she began crocheting her tablecloths, I cannot say. Perhaps to pass the time. Perhaps to leave something of herself behind,
for there would be no children, no namesake, no one of her blood to tend her grave when she died.

If her stepdaughter wanted to use these tablecloths, all well and good, though Libera would never sit at the table with her.
But if her stepdaughter didn't want to use these tablecloths, that too was all well and good. She would give them to the child
who suffered, as she had, in this house filled with rage and sorrow.

Why my grandmother sat close to the radiator during the winter, I could well understand. Her body had never gotten used to
the cold.

But I think, too, that the radiator became my grandmother's companion. It didn't yell at her, like my parents. Nor mock her.
It didn't tell her what to do, what to wear. It didn't condemn her for who she was: a peasant from the South of Italy.

The radiator didn't betray her. In winter, it was warm; in summer, it radiated the idea of coolness, so that, for a woman
used to so little, it might have seemed little enough. The radiator, her needlework, her food, her mornings at church, our
few moments together, her only comforts.

My grandmother took all her meals alone, even on holidays, when she'd bring a loaf of her bread into the dining room, place
it directly on the tablecloth, and return to her place at the kitchen table, as if to protest how she was treated, or perhaps
because my mother was not her blood, and so she would not break bread with her. (My mother would take the bread off the tablecloth,
take it back into the kitchen to slice it, and place it in a bread basket, lined with a napkin.)

She ate, often, in her chair by the radiator, from the chipped bowl that was companion to my grandfather's. She fed herself
with a large metal spoon she had brought from Italy, adjusting her shawl around her shoulders as she ate. It was larger than
my mother's soup spoons, and bent and worn. My mother said it was dangerous to eat from such a spoon because who knew what
it was made from, and whatever it was made from might react with the food my grandmother ate, and poison her.

My father said not to worry, my grandmother was too mean to die. My grandmother held the bowl up close to her face, clutched
her spoon in her fist (this annoyed my mother), and sucked her food into her mouth, satisfied that she was eating. Sometimes
she'd offer me some of her food, but I'd refuse. I liked her bread, her pizza, her
zeppole,
but not those viscous greenish liquids she preferred for supper.

Sometimes she'd tease me, try to shove her spoon into my mouth to force me to taste what she was eating. I'd recoil. And she'd
laugh. When she laughed (which wasn't often), you could see her gums, and her single pointed tooth in the front of her mouth,
and then I thought that she looked like the witch in my book of Grimm's fairy tales, thought that my friends had good reason
to fear her.

By the end of November each year, my grandmother would be wearing her long underwear; two or three dresses (one atop the other);
two or three hand-knit sweaters (one atop the other) in fanciful lace patterns out of keeping with her otherwise austere appearance;
and her old black shawl. Everything except her long underwear was black, everything was frayed and worn, everything was poorly
mended, for she had no patience with the needle.

Whenever she wandered into the kitchen to cook something warm for herself— a bean soup with whatever greens she could find
at the market down the hill, a
minestra
made with a few winter vegetables, a bread soup with a handful of dried herbs from her cousin's garden, my mother would complain
about her appearance. "You look like the wrath of God, dressed like that," my mother would complain, leaving the kitchen to
go upstairs to organize an already tidy drawer. "Can't you dress like a civilized person?"