Life From Scratch (5 page)

A woman can leave a man several times, but still not muster the resolve to cleave through the stubborn tendons of attachment. Mom could navigate the emotional tightrope of Oliver’s drug use, drinking, and stealing; she could manage his moods and frequent disappearing acts. But in the end, her concern for Michael and me forced her to sever all ties. She couldn’t bear our disappointment when he’d vanish, and she couldn’t help us understand his temper.

The winter before my second birthday, Mom uprooted us from the Cape, abandoning a life and the friendships she’d meticulously built over eight years to give us a fresh start in Boston. She took only what she could cram into an old leather carryall from the shop. “At some point you just have to face the facts,” she said of her departure, “Nothing was going to change. It’s like math: Two plus two is four, and it always will be. The realization just hit me: We had to move on.”

In the years ahead, Mom rarely spoke of Oliver. If we wondered aloud about him, her eyes would flash, the corners of her mouth turned down. She tried to hide her emotions by looking away or changing the subject, but Michael and I could read her. They had been together five messy years—enough to leave more than one scar.

Mom never dated again and made sure we never knew our father, trashing photos and erasing all connections to that era. Sometimes, when we were out and about in the city, she’d pull Michael and me into a doorway, muttering, “Why won’t he go
away?
” If we asked, “Who?” she’d shake her head a little too quickly.

I wouldn’t learn my father’s name (or that I was once named Musashi) until I was 21, and wouldn’t see a photo of Oliver until I was 29. I only knew him as Mom described him: “a charismatic con artist.”

For a long time, it never occurred to me that my father could be out there somewhere. Father’s Day came and went uncelebrated, a holiday for other people, like Chinese New Year or Rosh Hashanah. Mom was the only father I ever knew. I even considered myself Italian Hungarian, like she was, never really considering that in truth I was likely only a quarter of each.

Years later, when Michael added “a father” to the top of his Christmas list right above “world peace,” the ache that bubbled up in me felt as alien as the words.

CHAPTER 3

Lean Y
e
ars

W
HEN WE ARRIVED IN
B
OSTON
, Mom waited in line with the rest of the city’s lost souls to secure the last two spots in an overcrowded homeless shelter. Even as everyone shuffled, Mom stood tall, frizzy mop clipped back, while three-year-old Michael ran circles around her with his baby doll.

I suppose she could have asked my grandfather or someone else in the family for help, but her chaotic relationship with my father made favors hard to come by. She’d left in such a rush that there’d been no time to secure work or accommodations.

Though the thin soups and stale bread at the shelter were miserable, my brother and I ate with gusto. Because we were still scrawny little tots, we were able to sleep on either end of one cot, while Mom slept on the other. We lasted there three days.

After Mom made a few collect calls, we ended up at a friend of a friend’s place on the cracked side of Boston’s suburbs. We crammed ourselves into the corners of Barbara’s tall, blue gingerbread town house. Mom paid her way by doing laundry and cooking. Little by little, she saved enough of her assistance checks of $350 a month so that we could finally move to our own apartment in Jamaica Plain.

Even in Barbara’s borrowed home, Mom had to improvise to make ends meet. She never lacked imagination.

In my first memory, I am three, maybe four years old, sitting at a small metal table with a white Formica top, just big enough for two. In front of me is a small white bowl, filled only halfway with Os. Michael sits on the other side of me, hungrily eating his dry cereal, his cheeks puffed up like a chipmunk.

“Where’s the milk?” I ask him.

“I don’t think there is any,” he whispers.

“But I want some,” I say, my voice drawn out in a whine.

Before either of us can utter another word, Mom pulls a bottle from the fridge and splashes a tiny bit of red juice into each of our bowls.

“It’s cranberry,” she says. “Barbara won’t mind if we borrow …”

“Why are we always eating Barbara’s food?” Michael whines.

“Try it,” Mom urges. As if to show us how good juice can be with cereal, she bends at the waist, spooning a bit into her own mouth. She makes exaggerated
yum
sounds, smacking her lips and making silly faces. Michael smiles up at her, despite himself.

He takes a bite, then another.

“Whoa, Mom, this is
good
,” he says, and starts to airplane the food into his mouth, making loud buzzing sounds.

I sit back in my chair, unsure.

“Milk is boring. This is—” She takes a deep breath and then pats my hand, lifting the corners of her mouth like a curtain. “Not everyone can say they’ve had juice in their cereal. Not even the Queen of England.”

That does the trick. I bring the spoon to my lips, only once pausing to look down at the now pink Os that look like candy. The tart juice squeezes at the inside of my cheeks.

For years after, Michael and I beg Mom to add juice to our cereal instead of milk.

Cranberry juice wasn’t what Mom wanted for us—she yearned for that bombastic kitchen of her childhood, that immigrant arena. She wanted to give us a
heritage
. But by the time we had our own place in Jamaica Plain, not only were her mother and brother gone, but her dad and sister had also moved away from Boston.

My own name became the victim in this crisis of identity. Mom changed it multiple times before my tenth birthday. Though I was born Musashi, I became Sashi, then Sashann, then Sasha. Much later at my ninth birthday, I became Alexandra. My last name was my father’s, then my mother’s. When I was about three, Mom settled on giving me her late mother’s maiden name “Lombardi,” which rolled off her tongue like an Italian lullaby.

The decision was both sentimental and feminist; Lombardi put the power of my female lineage behind me. From what I observed of my Italian cousins, whose homes we often frequented for Thanksgiving and Christmas, my new name gave me license to yell whether I was sad, happy, or anything in between.

Each time the Boston courts awarded my foiled and stamped name-change documents, Mom sent out calligraphic announcements to everyone she knew in purple marker on scraps of card stock. She treated each reinvention like a festive occasion, taking us on the train into the North End, where we’d eat Italian subs to celebrate. For dessert we’d go to Maria’s for cannoli or tiramisu.

When the festivities were over, if I complained about my new fate as “Sasha” or, later, “Alexandra,” Mom would look me straight in the eye. “Don’t you know?” she’d say with all the certitude of a weatherman, “You need a name for every stage of your life. Butterflies don’t go by ‘caterpillar’ forever. And they certainly don’t go by ‘pupa’ one second longer than they have to.
You
, my dear, are no longer a pupa.”

Immediately all sorts of questions about butterflies would occur to me, and I’d completely forget about the name change.

A name alone cannot keep a heritage alive. Mom shuttled Michael and me across town every month to the home of our closest living Italian relative, Great Aunt Fina. She’d boil hefty pots of her famous potatoes and spaghetti, tossing the classic Genovese combination with red sauce while Michael and I played with her rotary phone or ran through her parsley beds.

Mom also brought us to visit the Italian relatives on the fringes of our family tree—ones who wore gold
coronos
(squiggly horn pendants), white patent leather shoes, and pompadours. I never really knew where the bloodlines ran together, but I lapped up the culture eagerly. Nothing was done quietly; there was even drama when washing the dishes. I’d ask Michael: “Are they all mad—or crazy?”

Mom, who couldn’t understand the Italian cacophony, would hear us whispering, and offer, “Isn’t it great?! I could listen to them all day.”

One of our favorite excursions was to Cousin Alfred’s place. When we’d ask how we were related to him, Mom would always say, “Who cares? He’s family.”

Alfred always wore a bow tie. He was impossibly old, with memories from the late 1800s when the ice cream scoop, cotton candy, and stop sign were invented. Tall and lanky, Alfred bent slightly when he walked, as though he were perpetually rolling out dough. But his voice didn’t shake, nor did his hands. Mom said cooking kept him young, and she might be right: Alfred lived 104 years.

His signature dish was meat sauce and ravioli. But we knew better than to ask him how it was done. “Waddya mean, how’s it done?” he’d say, clucking his teeth. “Watch, watch. That’s the only way to learn anything.” Alfred’s sauce started weeks before he ever picked up a spoon, when he mail-ordered dried porcinis from Italy. The actual cooking took two days: one day to brown, stir, and bubble, and one day to rest. As the wild mushrooms, hamburger, and sweet sausage mingled with the onion and a crush of tomatoes, we all trekked down to the large plank table in his cellar to watch him make the pasta.

After rolling the dough into two thin sheets, Alfred spread one with pork and spinach filling, and then topped it with the other. He used a special rolling pin with a raised grid to crimp dozens of ravioli in one pass. Even though I was just four years old, Alfred let Michael and I drive the ravioli cutter through one of the crimp marks the pin had left behind.

The ravioli was an even more involved recipe than the sauce, taking upwards of three days. But Alfred prepped the filling and dough before our arrival, leaving us to delight in the magic at the end of the journey.

Cousin Alfred’s Meat Sauce

“Meat sauce” doesn’t do this recipe justice. It’s filled with nearly a dozen sweet Italian sausages, the umami of dried porcinis, and the best tomatoes Italy has to offer. There’s a richness that comes from using first-press olive oil and sweet, sweet onion (while any
onions will certainly do, Alfred specified Bermuda because their natural sugar helps balance the sauce)
.