Crazy in the Kitchen (9 page)

My grandmother would continue to buy nothing new, nothing American, nothing warm enough for winter, even though wearing more
than one dress and all those sweaters and that shawl around her shoulders when she went to Mass or did her shopping on frigid
winter mornings marked her as a peasant, disgraced my parents, and embarrassed me. Embarrassed me so much that I betrayed
her by laughing with my friends rather than silencing them when they called her the old witch, or the garlic eater, when they
held their noses and said "Pew, pew," when they claimed she ate babies for breakfast and people's brains for supper. (She
did eat brains, though not people's; but this, I never conceded my friends.)

My father rarely communicated with my grandmother directly. He resented her intrusion into their lives, thought she was the
reason why my mother was depressed, though he often ate her food, for he missed his mother's peasant fare. What could he do?
Turn the old woman out of his house, into the street? Her relatives didn't want her all year round; she had nowhere to go;
she couldn't afford to support herself. She was his cross to bear.

"Tell her to buy some new clothes, some warm clothes, goddamn it," he'd yell to my mother within earshot of my grandmother.
"Tell her she's a disgrace. Tell her people will think we don't take care of her. Tell her to take a bath. Tell her she stinks."

My grandmother would manipulate another complicated stitch on the white tablecloth that rested on her lap, and she would ignore
his yelling, ignore his words, and defeat him, as always. For this, if for nothing else, I loved her. I cannot count the times
she threw her needlework to the ground, stitches slipping off crochet hook, ball of cotton unwinding across the floor, to
put her body between his and mine. I cannot count the times she took a blow that was meant for me.

On rare occasions, my mother came home with a new dress for my grandmother (black, but with a pattern of tiny flowers), or
a heavy cardigan (black, of course), or an overcoat (black, again). My grandmother, knowing that it was better to yield than
to resist, and knowing that yielding was the most potent form of resistance, would take the item, hold it at arm's length,
inspect it, take it upstairs, and put it in her bureau drawer or closet, where it stayed, unused, until she died.

Once only, she wore something new. A black silk scarf I bought her for Christmas with butterflies embroidered in black. It
was expensive, but I bought it, because it was the only black scarf in the store.

When she unwrapped it, she wound it around her neck. "Seta," she said to me. Silk. I knew I had pleased her, and though she
was unused to silk, and resented finery, she did wear the scarf, and I was glad.

There, by the radiator, my grandmother sat, ignored and despised, through the years, in that darkened room, on the straight-backed
chair, in a space that was not Italy but that was not America either, crocheting tablecloths, knitting sweaters, making afghans.

There she sat, this woman at her needlework, through the late 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, into the early 1970s, until 1974.
In that year, she became ill, couldn't get out of bed, and was taken to a nursing home run by the state, because my mother
said she could afford no other. And there she died.

The sweaters are gone, and the afghans too. They were collected, thrown into giant plastic bags, and dropped into a Goodwill
box after she died, together with all that unused clothing my mother had bought her. The worn underwear, dresses, sweaters,
the old black shawl, tattered and motheaten, my mother threw into a garbage bag and put into the trash.

But the tablecloths I still have. They are now treasured heirlooms, which adorn our family's festive tables. I have many tablecloths
to give, presents for my sons and their wives; gifts for my grandchildren, for you can crochet many tablecloths through the
years when you have little else to do. And I will pass on, too, stories about the woman who made them.

My grandmother must have known how little we valued what she made. Yes, we used the tablecloths on Thanksgiving, Christmas,
New Year's, Easter. But we never wore her sweaters, used her afghans. When my grandmother finished an afghan, we would throw
it into the bottom of a closet; so garish and ugly were their colors that no one with any self- respect— this is my mother
talking— would use them or display them.

But still, my grandmother kept knitting, kept crocheting. As if to crochet and to knit was what mattered. As if what she made
was not important. As if the admiration of others did not matter. When she died, there were twenty or more sweaters, fifteen
or more afghans, thirty or more tablecloths with patterns that looked like constellations of stars or gatherings of snowflakes
or clutches of flowers or spiderwebs or motifs in Moorish temples, stuffed in bureau drawers all over the house, in boxes
under her bed, and in the bottoms of closets.

Once, I saw my grandmother finish a tablecloth and begin a new one on the same day without stopping to take some refreshment,
without holding the completed work up to the light of the window, without stopping to admire what she had accomplished. To
crochet and to knit in the absence of anyone's desire but your own. To crochet and to knit because the very act of knitting,
of crocheting gives you what others do not, what others cannot give you, what the country you left, what the country you came
to does not give you: a sense of worth and some small scrap of human dignity.

My grandmother's hands, all dry and cracked and sere like the land she fled, making beauty. My grandmother at her needlework,
affirming her right to exist in a world that did not want her.

DARK WHITE

In the photograph of my grandmother on her Certificate of Naturalization, she is dressed in black, as she always was: her
life was one of perpetual mourning even before my grandfather died, for the family she had left in Puglia that she never saw
again.

In the photograph, she is double-chinned, although she was not corpulent. Since arriving in America, though, she was well
nourished. And for this, she was grateful, always blessing her food, blessing herself, and saying a prayer of appreciation
before eating.

My grandmother never ate excessively. She considered gluttony unpardonable; and if you committed this very great sin, she
believed you would burn in hell. She said that to eat just enough was a very good thing, and this is why she was happy she
lived in America. But to eat too much was a very bad thing.

She condemned those of her relatives and my father's relatives who put too much food on the table, who ate too much, who threw
food away when they could have transformed leftovers into another meal— a beautiful pasta, a nourishing soup, a simple frittata.
My grandmother believed that eating too much, or throwing food away, meant that you were eating or discarding what could have
been eaten by someone who was not eating enough. And when you were fat, according to my grandmother, you were showing those
who could not eat enough that you could eat whatever you wanted, waste food even. This was the sin of pride: showing that
you were rich enough to eat too much.

After we visited relatives, whenever my grandmother talked about the people who had eaten too much, she derided them, and
walked around in imitation of them, and puffed out her cheeks as theirs were puffed out. She cursed and swore at them. She
said that they were no better than the rich people where she came from, who ate too much while the poor ate too little. That
they were no better than the Romans, who ate and puked while their undernourished slaves looked on. No better than the popes,
cardinals, bishops, and priests who dined lavishly, who, if they were true Christians, should have been giving food to the
people. (They took money from the collection boxes, my grandmother said, and used it for themselves. This was why she never
donated money during Mass. She told me never to put the money my parents gave me into the collection box at church— better
I should use it for myself or give it to the poor.)

Once my grandmother, when she was very angry about this, told me they should suck the fat out of all the people who ate too
much, and fashion it into candles. (You can do this, she told me; you can make candles from fat.) And with these candles,
she said, you could light the darkness of the world for a hundred hundred years.

In the photograph, my grandmother is light-skinned, although her skin burned when she stayed in the sun too long. But by late
summer, she was well tanned because of her outdoor work on the farm of her relatives in Long Island. She was dark-haired,
though graying at the temples, and her hair was pulled back away from her face, though not austerely, so that one wave dipped
over each temple, its lustrous length braided and fashioned into a neat circlet at the nape of the neck. This does not show
in the naturalization photograph, and, although her hair was beautiful and long, I could never imagine her wearing it down,
for women who wore their hair around their shoulders, she said, were
puttane,
whores.

At the corners of my grandmother's mouth in the photograph, there is a smile playing, and it might have been because she was
happy that she was becoming a citizen of the United States. But I don't think so. For she was always suspicious and contemptuous
of the ways of bureaucrats and government officials, and also of rules and regulations, taxes and fees and stamped documents
and official ceremonies. But I think the hint of a smile on her face is one of disdain for the proceedings.

That her name was Libera suggests she probably came from an anarchist family, like my grandfather. His father's name was Libero,
and these names— Libera, Libero— were ones that only Italian anarchists gave their children. Which is how their families might
have known one another, through anarchist circles, for many Italian anarchists settled in Hoboken, where my grandparents lived.

It is during World War II. It has taken a long time— over twenty years— for my grandmother to decide to become a citizen.
But now the United States is at war with Italy— Sicily has been invaded— and being Italian in the United States is dangerous.

When the United States first declares war on Italy, thousands of Italian Americans are arrested; more than two hundred are
interned. The news sends shock waves through the country's Little Italys. And here, in Hoboken, police have raided Italian
neighborhoods.

Many of my grandmother's relatives living in the United States are fighting in the war, both in the Pacific and in Europe,
demonstrating their loyalty to the United States, their new land. In Italy, they are perhaps even fighting against family
and
paesani.
Still, Italians and even Italian Americans are suspect. So she and my grandfather decide to become citizens.

Until the United States declared war on Italy, my grandparents had sent nonperishable food, money, and clothing to relatives
there.And until Mussolini's abuses became known, they had defended him because he supported the South. After the United States
joined the war, they were anguished and torn: they wanted to know the fate of their people— parents, brothers, sisters, uncles,
aunts, cousins; they didn't want the land of their people destroyed; they feared that relatives in the United States would
wind up on battlefields in Italy fighting against
paesani;
yet they wanted the United States to win the war.

Renouncing their Italian citizenship was fraught with difficulty. Though they knew they had opportunities here that they hadn't
had in Italy, that they lived better here than they ever could have lived there, changing their citizenship meant admitting
that they never would go back. And though they were deeply suspicious of governments, this constituted a betrayal of what
they valued most highly: loyalty to their families.

Becoming United States citizens was the single most difficult act of their lives in this country.

My grandmother is eligible for naturalization because Italians are legally considered Caucasian, and only Caucasians, at this
time, can become citizens. (In the 1890s, Italians hadn't been considered white, but by World War II, they were; until 1952,
people not considered white were not eligible for naturalization.)

Naturalization granted my grandmother some of the rights and privileges of native-born Americans, but she was not completely
accepted nor absorbed into the mainstream of life in the United States. Still, her naturalization papers remained precious
to her always, for she kept them in the locked box that held her visa, her steamship ticket to the United States, her birth
certificate, a lock of my grandfather's hair (cut after his death), the set of crystal rosary beads he bought her when they
married.

She showed her papers to me once. When I brought home a certificate of my own: my grammar school diploma. Now each of us had
important papers.

I am a toddler when my grandmother is naturalized, and my father is fighting somewhere in the Pacific. My mother and I live
next door to my grandparents in Hoboken. And though I don't remember the event, I know that I attended the ceremony, for there
is a picture in our family album commemorating the occasion, and the simple celebration of coffee and Italian pastries (cannoli,
my favorite) that followed in my grandparents' apartment.

I am in my good tweed winter coat, leggings, and hat, and I stand next to my grandparents, who are soberly attired in their
black winter coats. We stand on the steps of the courthouse; my grandfather holds my hand.

Though I am not aware of it, this is a defining moment in my life. For who I am (not quite Italian, not quite American), and
who I will become (a person aware of inequities faced by Italian Americans in a country that has not yet fully equated the
Italian American experience with the human experience) begins here.

Naturalization

1. The act of admitting an alien to the position and privileges of a native-born
subject or citizen.
Well, not really.

2. The act of introducing plants or animals or humans to places where they
are not indigenous, but where they can thrive freely under ordinary conditions.
This is Charles Darwin's meaning of the term. He said, "I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey . . .
as from a savage . . . who knows no decency."

But what are ''ordinary conditions"? And what does it mean to "thrive freely"? According to this definition, everyone in the
United States, except Native Americans, is not "native" but "naturalized." But in the United States nonindigenous people are
the ones deciding what other categories of nonindigenous people should have a legal right to be "naturalized."

3.
The action of making natural.
Which means that what you were— Italian— was unnatural.

4.
The act of becoming settled or established in a new place.
All those Italian Americans who feel settled, established, accepted, and com pletely at home, kindly raise your hands. Or
have you ever, like me, been told that you were "an embarrassment," "irrational," "too emotional," "too noisy," "too shiny"—
these last words, those of a former employer of mine, and on that day I wasn't even wearing my plaid taffeta blouse, pink
stockings, and patent leather shoes.

Once, potential business associates of my husband wanted him to sign a clause permitting them to break the contract if he
went crazy or was put in jail. This was the first time they were doing business with an Italian; they had to protect themselves,
they said.

5. The act of becoming naturalized, of settling down in a natural manner.
If, by "settling down in a natural manner" is meant doing things the way things are supposed to be done in the United States,
then neither I nor my parents nor my grandparents ever became naturalized.

I remember reading Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance" in high school, and not understanding why self-reliance was considered
a virtue. I remember arguing in college that not wanting to move away from your family was not necessarily neurotic, and neither
was calling your family daily. I remember arguing against a twenty-three-minute lunch period when I taught high school.

Recently, in Liguria, my husband and I saw the students of a rural school having a leisurely three-course lunch in a celebrated
local restaurant. We learned they ate there three times a week at the government's expense. I am sure this doesn't occur anywhere
in the United States. "Now that," I thought, looking at the children eating their pasta, "is civilized."

"Libera Maria Calabrese." My grandmother has signed her name beneath her picture and on the line of the document calling for
the "complete and true signature of the holder." She has signed slowly, carefully, for writing her name, I know, took much
effort and concentration.

Years later, she watched
Sesame Street
with my children. She was trying to learn how to write, trying to learn to read English, after years of speaking only dialect.
And I remember her signing the back of her Social Security check; this was the only time I saw her write her name.

I wonder, now, what it's like to live a life where you almost never write, almost never sign your name; what it means not
to be able to use the act of writing to keep a record— of your feelings and thoughts and who you were and where you came from.
Wonder what it means not to be able to participate in the creation of your identity through writing.

I can imagine the clerks waiting impatiently for this small and soberly dressed foreign woman to finish signing her name before
they scrawled theirs (illegibly) at the bottom. (Who were these people? And why did they write their names so that I can't
read them? But I have noticed this. Poor people, foreign people, people without power, often sign their names carefully, so
that we will know who they are.)

No matter how much my grandmother cherished it, this is a strange and terrible document.

The clerk has recorded the petition number. Then typed a "personal description of the holder as of date of naturalization."
A verbal portrait of my grandmother by a paid functionary who took my grandmother's testimony (about how much she weighed),
but who also wrote down an observation. Much like the secretary who worked in the hospital where my husband was an intern:
after listening to discussions among doctors about a potential diagnosis, she preempted their decision by writing hers—" paranoid
schizor-phrenic," say— on the form. They who have the power to fill in forms have the power to define us. And so it was with
my grandmother.

I make my living reading books, mulling over the nuances of words, teasing out innuendoes, wondering why something is phrased
one way and not another. And when I study this document, I realize there is something fishy here. There is what Virginia Woolf
would call "an aroma" about the page.

The physical appearance the clerk has recorded reads: ''Age 57 years; sex Female; color White; complexion Dark; color of eyes
Brown; color of hair Gr. Black; height 5 feet 0 inches [she was short, my grandmother], weight 120 pounds; visible distinctive
marks Mole on forehead; marital status Married; former nationality Italian."

Of course, some of what is recorded is significant— age, color of eyes, hair, height, weight, distinctive marks— so that no
one else can use this document. And calling my grandmother's "color" "White" at this time in history meant that she was deemed
Caucasian, hence eligible for naturalization. I can understand this, though I do not agree with what it signifies: that race
exists; that it can be determined; that those deemed members of certain races should be afforded privileges, while others
should not; and so on.