Crazy in the Kitchen (5 page)

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My father tells me that when I am about four, just after he comes home from the war, we are sitting at the kitchen table in
Hoboken, and I decide I don't like what my mother's made us for supper.

Before my father's return, my mother or one of my grandparents would have gotten me some bread and jam. Now, things are different.
Now, when I don't like what my mother has cooked, my father says, "Eat what's put in front of you."

I climb out of my chair, go to the icebox, pull out some chopped meat, some margarine (there's no butter because of the war).
Grab a pan and a spoon from the cupboard. Push my chair over to the stove. I shape a tiny hamburger. Turn on the burner. Start
to cook.

My parents laugh. Tonight they've had some wine. They're happy their little family is together. The war is over. My father's
safe. At other meals they've told me to eat my mother's cooking. But tonight they think that what I'm doing is adorable.

My father gets the camera. Focuses. Shoots a picture of me cooking.

"She'll be a good cook someday. Make somebody a good wife," he says to my mother, smiling.

My father and I haven't had our first big fight. The one that starts when he tries to take me to the park so we can get reacquainted.
That starts because I want to dilly-dally as I did when I went with my mother during the war. That starts because I want to
jump on and off every stoop we encounter. That starts because I won't soldier on to the park so we can have a good time.

Halfway there, I want to return home for a glass of water. A snack. To pee. To see my mother. To see my grandparents. Anything
to get away from this man who carries me when I balk at walking, who insists that we do what he wants, not what I want.

We haven't
yet
had the fight that starts because he knows I'm not happy he's home, that I don't want him here, that I want my mother all
to myself again. My father hasn't yet concluded that I am spoiled, selfish, incorrigible, ungrateful.

After my father takes his picture of me at the stove, he stops my cooking. Takes away the pan, the spoon. Takes away my hamburger.
I'm too little, he says. It's dangerous.

He carries me back to the table. Pushes my supper towards me. "Children are supposed to eat what's put in front of them without
complaining," he says. "And aren't we lucky we have all this good food?"

The kitchen is my mother's. But after we move to Ridgefield, when my grandmother moves in with us, she needs to cook, for
she will not eat my mother's food.

My mother regards this as an attempted coup, a potential usurpation. (But what else was my grandmother to do? Go hungry?)

My mother retaliates by refusing to give my mother any space in her cupboards, in her refrigerator, in her pantry. So my grandmother
lines up her pots and pans on the stairs going down into the basement. Shops every day and leaves her leftovers on her window
ledge in winter, in the coal cellar in summer. Stores her beans, her olive oil, her orecchiette, which catch the sauce like
little pools of sorrow, in her clothes closet. All this proves to my mother that my grandmother is crazy.

"Two women in the same kitchen," my mother says. "Dear God, why have you done this to me?"

When we first move to Ridgefield, before my grandmother comes, there is not another Italian in sight, which pleases my mother.
She is moving up in the world. Away from the coal stove, the icebox, the four flights of stairs, the shared toilet, the washing
of clothes in the kitchen sink, her stepmother's relatives, whom she detests for their coarseness.

Now my mother is away from the old ways, away from the dimly lit, cold-water tenement where she struggled up the stairs with
two children and a stroller and groceries. She is away from the smell of other people's cooking, away from the old men playing
pinochle on the folding table on the sidewalk. For a while, until my grandmother comes, my mother seems happy enough, though
the loss of her father still propels her into a wordless, noiseless grief that takes her to some other place.

But now my mother has a new gas stove in the kitchen that she doesn't have to load with coal, or stoke, or wait for as it
heats. She runs her fingers over her stove like a woman teasing a lover. She can't believe the magic of this stove. She walks
into the kitchen. Turns the burners on and off. On and off. She is mesmerized by the flame and by her good fortune, though
she will never use the oven in this stove.

Now my mother has an electric refrigerator that doesn't need huge blocks of ice that melt onto the floor. This one has a freezer
compartment and shelves and bins for fruits and vegetables. Now my mother has cupboards so she doesn't have to shop every
day like she did in Hoboken. Now my father can drive her to the supermarket at the bottom of the hill so she can stock up
on the canned goods that will free her from the drudgery of making meals.

My father, with his passion for gadgets and for fixing things, buys, secondhand, a toaster, a waffle iron, and a little electric
griddle for my mother's kitchen. He takes them to his basement workshop, tinkers with them evenings after supper. While he
works, we hear, "Shit," "God damn it to hell," "Jesus Christ Almighty." We know the work isn't going well. We know the broken
machine is not yielding its secrets.

So the pop-up toaster never pops up. The waffle iron browns on only one side. The red light on the griddle comes on when it
chooses to, not when the griddle is ready. And because my parents are frugal, these renegade appliances are never replaced:
they are on my mother's countertops when she dies.

My parents buy a run-down Victorian. But in it, they want to create a "modern" home. What the old house, with its wood moldings,
parquet floors, arched doorways, and sleeping porches wanted, I suspect, was to be understood, respected, rehabilitated. But
my parents have other plans.

They rip moldings off walls and throw them into the furnace. Cover wooden floors with rose wall-to-wall carpeting. Refit the
wood stairway with sensible linoleum. Straighten the arched doorways. Rip doors with glass panes off their hinges—" Too hard
to keep clean," my mother says. Paint the green glass tile surround of the fireplace with white semigloss. Enclose the upstairs
sleeping porch for a study for me. Enclose the porch downstairs to make a room (it later houses a television) where my father
spends much of his free time.

Instead of huge windows swinging out to invite the air, my father installs picture windows that don't open. The room pays
my parents back for their desecration: it's asphyxiating in summer, bone-chilling in winter. Still, my father sits in it.
But alone. No one else can stand it.

My grandmother moves to Ridgefield to live with us, reluctantly, a short time after my grandfather dies. She wears only black.
She has entered a widowhood that lasts until her death, mourning a man she didn't love, a man who never loved her.

Her relatives don't want her. She has no place to go, and she can't afford to keep herself in Hoboken. She doesn't have much
money. My grandfather's pension has gone to my mother. And my mother doesn't give any of it to my grandmother. Which makes
my grandmother dependent upon my parents' generosity.

It never occurs to my mother to turn over the money to my grandmother so she can live alone. She believes that she is entitled
to the money and my grandmother is not, though because my mother has it and my grandmother does not, the stepmother my mother
hates lives with her.

The life my grandmother desires is among her people in Hoboken, close to the shops where she can buy the foods she loves.

Once, several years after she moves in with us, at my father's urging, my mother relents. Gives my grandmother a small allowance
for rent and food. But the place my grandmother can afford in Hoboken terrifies her. It is at the edge of town, in the projects.
Police sirens blare; searchlights rake the windows. Gangs of teenage thugs scuttle up and down the stairs all night, shouting
obscenities, banging on walls. She is ridiculed, taunted, threatened.

My grandmother sleeps with a knife under her pillow, a tower of pots and pans stacked against the front door, which is secured
with two deadbolts. She lasts less than a month. Even Ridgefield, and life in my mother's house is better than this. My mother
never lets her forget that she once tried to live alone. And that she failed.

My grandmother has always had very little, for she and my grandfather were very poor. And of the little she has, she hasn't
taken much with her. A rolling pin, fashioned by my grandfather from a broom handle. A colander for draining pasta, and a
handmade fluted wheel to cut ravioli— both bought with money sent her by my grandfather and brought to America when she came
as a mail-order bride. Her bedroom set, bought by my grandfather when he married his first wife. A kitchen chair she positions
next to the window in her bedroom to mourn in, to knit in. A gigantic cross with a crucified Jesus dripping blood to hang
over her bed. A reclining statue of Jesus taken down from the cross, oozing blood from open wounds. A standing Virgin covered
by a glass bell. Two sets of rosary beads: one for every day; the other, fashioned from crystal, a wedding gift from my grandfather,
for special occasions. (For her wake, my mother has the undertaker twine the crystal beads through my grandmother's fingers.
Before she's buried, my mother orders them removed. She keeps them all her life. And bequeaths them to me.)

My grandmother gets the smallest, the least desirable bedroom. She is in this house on sufferance and because my mother feels
a filial obligation to her stepmother although she has no filial feelings.

The room looks north and west, over the swamps where the power plant and the New Jersey Turnpike will soon be built. And the
room isn't completely hers because it has no lock on the door and because my mother keeps her clothes in my grandmother's
closet. My grandmother doesn't have many clothes, my mother says, so she can spare the room.

After supper, in summertime, my grandmother sits in her chair, pulls back the curtain so she can see the setting sun, and
says her rosary.

Sometimes I stand next to her and lean on the windowsill and watch, too. Doing nothing with my grandmother is preferable to
doing anything with my parents. And watching the sun set is something only my grandmother does. At the end of the day, my
mother is too busy clattering pans in the sink to take time to look out the window. Nor does she know when the sun is setting,
for she keeps the curtains drawn.

To escape my mother, my grandmother goes to visit relatives in Long Island for a few weeks each summer. She would be glad
to live on Long Island, but her relatives will only accommodate her for a little while each year.

On Long Island, my grandmother helps her cousin farm a small plot of land. They grow tomatoes, corn, beans, peas, zucchini,
eggplant, basil. During these times, my grandmother eats lustily each day.

She and her sister rise at dawn, collect eggs from the chicken house, weed and till the soil before the heat of day. Some
mornings they walk miles to pick wild blueberries and raspberries. These are made into pancakes, cobblers, muffins, and pies
by my grandmother's cousin's niece, who lives with them. Other mornings, they hitch rides to the sea to collect mussels or
periwinkles.

In Long Island, my grandmother is happy, living a life she might have lived in Italy had she not been so poor. Even when we
visit, she is happy, and doesn't argue with my mother. These were my grandmother's relatives, not my mother's. And my mother
could visit because my grandmother invited her, not because my mother was entitled to visit. In Long Island, I saw what might
have been between them but wasn't.

I remember my grandmother sitting outside before supper, in the warm light of late afternoon, shelling peas into her apron.
Stripping the husks off just-picked corn. Setting aside worm-eaten ears for chicken feed.

As she worked, my grandmother sang Pugliese songs that sounded Greek or North African. She sang to herself, beating the insistent
rhythms with her foot. She sang songs that told of the Passion of Christ, of how Mary searched for her son Jesus; that told
how farm laborers lost their love to the lust of overseers; that insulted inhabitants of neighboring villagers. Songs that
praised the gifts of the land— figs, melons, wheat, herbs, wine (especially wine). Songs that blessed the cooking pot, the
bowl, the spoon.

These songs my grandmother sang only in Long Island, never in Ridgefield.

When I am a teenager, although I dream about boys, and I dream about having sex with boys, I also dream about food. I imagine
the food I will make someday when I have my own kitchen. Sauteed garlic, a tiny bit of lemon juice, a few twigs of steamed
asparagus sliced on the bias, a bit of heavy cream, some salt and pepper, twirled through some fresh pasta like the one my
grandmother cuts on her "guitar." Fennel and anise seeds mixed together, crushed, sprinkled on top of a nice pork chop, pan-seared
on the top of the stove, finished in the oven, served with a sauce made from the drippings laced with red vermouth, served
on a bed of caramelized fennel.