But still I craved some arugula to go with it. Some broccoli rabe, even.
To Alda I said, “Is there arugula, even, anywhere?”
But Alda shook her head and tsked—“Non è stagione. Non è stagione.” Not the season.
In the shade of the tree in front of the old school that sits on the market square, I see my old man. My spirits lift to see my vecchio, the old bent-in-half farmer with his pants held up by twine, but even he has only a few eggplants, four lonely eggs, and some incredibly small dried white beans in a knotted plastic bag in the wagon of his ape. I buy the eggs and the beans. I am running out of eggplant ideas. I have roasted it with harissa and caraway. I have smoked it with garlic and lemon and parsley. I have fried it with egg and bread crumbs. I have quickly pickled it, sort of, with Alda’s rough red wine vinegar and some green onions. The beans might be a nice jump-start to my imagination. But when I soak them later and start to skim off the dried skins which are floating to the top of the pot, I notice that there is a brown spot on each pea. I split one open with my fingernail and inside is a larval shell of a tiny worm. I split open another and it holds another larval shell. And on I go, splitting each tiny bean, until I realize that the whole kilo is bad with worms.
“Imbroglione!” Alda cries when I show her the beans and tell her from whom I bought them.
There is only a week left of my vacation and I am falling apart from maintaining my chill with Michele, who has, oddly, perhaps in being faced with his failing mother, started to call me Mamma as well. He has always had difficulty saying my name, he kind of chokes on it, stumbles on it—but this is new, this calling me Mamma. With a tremendous fervor, since the day of the birth of Marco, Michele has taken to fatherhood so completely, so thoroughly, that it has become his priority to the exclusion of all other relationships, including our romantic one. This new habit of calling me Mamma sips the very last lungful of air from our romance.
I’m also falling apart from nothing but eggplant at the market since we arrived, from trying to strike a balance between cooking what I’d like to eat and cooking what Alda would like to eat. Alda has started to give me instructions while I am cooking, and seems no longer quite so pleased to have all the cooking done for her so she is free to enjoy her family around the table.
I cook a pot of mussels to tender perfection and she says, “E, Gabrielle, non credi sono crudi?” Don’t you think they’re still a bit raw?
I don’t, obviously. I think they are all open, tender and perfectly cooked, but I say, “Should I cook them a little longer?”
“Five minutes,” she says.
After each five-minute interval, she suggests another until I have cooked the mussels to rubbery bits, fifteen-minutes later, and she is satisfied with the results.
It’s the last straw that my beloved vecchio sold me shitty wormy beans. Giovanni digs around in the heavy drawer once more, still searching, fifteen days later, for the right cap for the olive oil jug. To me, he seems insane. This repeated futile search for a thing that doesn’t exist in a drawer full of promising crap is my definition of insanity. But of course, that is just the mechanism of hope itself. And it’s not lost on me that I’ve been doing the exact same thing, in a way, digging around in that drawer looking for something that doesn’t exist. It’s promising and seductive, that huge Italian family, sitting around the dinner table, surrounded by the olive trees. But it’s not my family and I am not their family, and no amount of birthing sons, and cooking dinner and raking the leaves or planting the gardens or paying for the plane tickets is going to change that. If I don’t come back in eleven months, I will not be missed, and no one will write me or call me to acknowledge my absence. Which is not an accusation, just a small truth about clan and bloodline. To Giovanni, I seem insane. I spend a quick fifteen minutes before starting to cook each day, tidying up the cyclone debris of scattered toys and toy parts and single shoes and old dried bits of half-eaten toast that my kids have scattered about in each room. He laughs at me as I am bent over picking up little pieces of a miniature Italian soccer team.
“Why do you bother?” He smiles. “Fifteen minutes after they get back from the pool, it will be exactly like this again.”
I stand up.
“Yeah, Giovanni. That’s right. But I also brushed my teeth this morning even though I know perfectly well that I will have to brush them again tonight.”
Michele is getting ready for a day at the pool with the kids, loading up his insulated bag with iced tea and frozen water and prosciutto for lunch while I am sitting here with wormy beans, a craving for arugula, radishes, scallions, well-marbled beef, cilantro, avocados, and other more spiritual impossibilities, and somehow, I don’t even remember how, our fifteen-day frost heaves. In a flash we are yelling at each other in the kitchen, our first real conversation with each other since the taxicab to the airport—if you can count that as a conversation—and we’re having it in my preferred, if vulgar, style, at full pitch, with his mother and two brothers sitting at the kitchen table. In English—our only form of privacy, if language can be considered that way—he yells, “Why didn’t you just say so?”
Then he lectures, as if educating me: “Eeet’s so eeeezy,” he says. “Eeet’s so eeezy to just say: Eennuffa with theeee new iPhone. We could have avoided this fifteen-day war!”
And in that moment I find it impossible to explain to him that it’s not about the iPhone. Eeeeezy for somebody, but impossibile for me.
ALDA WANTS TO SEE THE SEA. The rest is a pity to her—the badly repaired front wall, the fallen dead branches, the dry dead garden, the leaves crowding out the driveway, the electricity that fails, the doorknobs that fall off, the burners on the stove worn away to nothing—but the rest is not as imperative as sitting on the front terrace overlooking the sea and actually being able to see the sea. The oleander trees in front have grown so tall over so many years, that, while beautiful, they nonetheless suffocate the house and obscure the incredible wide-open vista of the sea. I, like Alda, have been wanting to sit on that terrace and see the sea since we’ve been coming here. It’s silly. You can stand on the terrace and look out at the sea, but as soon as you sit down with your negroni, you look straight ahead into a thicket of branches and pink-and-white flowers. Like the mealy-moths in the cabinet, I’ve been quietly noting the fact that Michele has a villa, an actual giant villa by the actual sea in Italy Italy, from which you cannot see the sea because the oleander trees have grown over so thickly and tall. You feel stupid, sitting on the old splintered patio furniture, looking straight ahead into an encroaching jungle of soft branches, beyond which we can hear, smell, and feel the sea, the gentle breeze tinkling the mast cables and rings of all the boats in the marina, but we can never see the sea when we sit on the terrace.
Unexpectedly, I find myself offended by this. This casual nonchalance at the demise of great wealth. This effortless letting go of the last of what’s left. Giovanni’s quiet and easy submission to the force of entropy. Michele’s willingness to let me go. The trees fall, the walls crumble, the doorknobs fall off; easy come, easy go. The way I’m wired, with my Protestant dishwasher’s mentality, I bristle at the passivity, the way they just roll over and let defeat pat them on the head.
If I had this incredible asset, this wealth just handed to me, I would take obsessive scrupulous care of it. I would mend the fence myself. Prune back the trees. Oil the locks. Take a second job. Set aside forty dollars a week for a garden rake and seed packets and some soil. The property sags and crumbles each year, subject to weather and vandals, and no one puts up a fight. Michele warns me it would be offensive to his mother, who is legally and bodily the owner until she passes, to display any proprietary care for the place. The art and furniture and “objets” have been robbed and burgled so thoroughly over the years that the villa feels empty enough to rent. But Michele walks around barefooted, checking his email on wifi, leaving a juice glass or an espresso cup wherever he forgets it, as if the domestic staff were sti
ll about to show up. He seems to not have realized yet that there is no man coming to cut down the branches and rake the driveway. There is no Swiss au pair coming to take care of the kids. The aristocracy is over.
But Donna Alda wants to sit on the terrace and admire the sea from her chair. Besides the fact that I happen to totally agree with her, I also have felt an urgent need to make sure she has what she wants. I am possibly overconscious that this may be her last summer. She mentions it herself, with humor and matter-of-fact-ness, but I am really taking it to heart. I also can’t shake this feeling that it may also be my last summer here—it seems likely that we will start to speak of divorce when we return to New York—and I want at least some of what I want. If I will never be close to, if I will never be truly known by this man, if we will never have the parties, the five kids, the fire that burns outside all night long, then the self-bankrolled martyr wants at least a negroni on the terrace while looking out at the sea, even if she has to make it herself. With only four days left of our vacation in the south, before we will have to pack up and head back to Rome, and then back to our lives lived separately in New York, I take the car and drive alone to Tricase, about twenty minutes away, and find the store that has clippers and saws and shovels and rakes. I buy a brand-new pair of sharp pruning scissors and a long-handled branch cutter, and while I am there I pick up packets of seeds for arugula and parsley and lettuce, knowing that I will never see them grow in our last four days, but reasoning that it will be good to show Marco and Leone how to plant and care for something daily. So I get them anyway.
For the next four afternoons in a row, when I am finished cooking and while Alda is taking her nap, I climb the trees, sometimes barefoot, with the scissors and the clippers. I trim at least six trees, bracing myself in their crotches in the hot summer sun, cursing and grimacing, trying to hold on with one hand and work the clippers with the other. I am twenty-five feet in the air, and can see the sea and all of the life on the promenade. I try to notice where each branch forms so as not to cut the very one I am standing on and plummet to the ground below, but sometimes it’s so thick and tangled that I cut with a little niggling doubt hovering over me, between my head and the hot sun. When two hands are required I try to use another branch or my own body as leverage, but much of the time I am forced to simply wedge my foot into the tangle of branches below and then just reach all the way out with both hands on the clippers, hoping for the best.
Giovanni, in disbelief and I think maybe irritation, looks up from where he is reading on the terrace to discover what all the rustling is in the trees. Regarding my labor, he pauses, sitting still in his chair a moment, letting it sink in that this fucking girl has just climbed the tree and is now pruning it back. Ma Donna, I bet he mutters. He drops his book in his lap and sits there one more moment, relishing, I feel certain, his last few seconds of idleness. And then he patiently lifts himself from the chair and descends the stairs into the garden until I hear him below me, under the trees, dragging away the branches and sawing them into smaller manageable bundles. I can’t see him but I hear him. It is exhilarating to be so high up, at the very tops of the trees, and to be able to look out at the sea and back at the house completely unobstructed. To have my bare feet wedged into the crotches of tree branches—like they haven’t been for thirty years—makes me feel instantly, kinesthetically, very young again, as if the soles of my feet had memories of their own. Below, Giovanni quietly and deliberately cleans up every branch that falls to the ground. I hear him sawing below. In his undeclared way, he stays nearby to make sure that when the crazy American bird falls out of the tree, someone will be there to pick her up.
I laugh out loud from the treetop.
“Hey, Giovanni, what book are you not reading because of me?”
“Eehhh,” he calls back, and I can hear the smile in his voice.
It is his vacation as well, but he has been religiously counting out all the pills Alda must take and gently putting them next to her plate at each meal. He has fixed the electricity, fetched the big glass canisters of olive oil, and made sure there is propane in the stove when I noticed the flames running low. Giovanni seems to truly like the food I’ve been cooking and jokes at the table one evening, about a week and a half into our vacation, with anchovy butter all over his lips and chin, a pile of shrimp shells and tails on his plate, “This can’t possibly continue for three weeks!”
On our last day, when Alda comes out onto the terrace after her nap, I can see her clearly from my treetop. She looks confused. Before her lies the sea. “Sit down!” I yell, waving. “Sit!”
I tell Giovanni to go sit with her on the porch to see if she can see the sea.
“Dimi si che besognio tagliare piu,” I say, butchering the Italian. Tell me if I need to cut more. But the job is finished. I have accomplished a full view. You can sit on the terrace and look out at the sea. Everything feels different. I feel unclenched, thawed-out, and hopeful. I have defied the entropy. I descend from the trees and walk up to the terrace to look out. Michele returns home and even manages to compliment my work, modestly.
“Brava, Mamma,” he grunts with an acceding tone, but touches me warmly on the back.
Alda is glued to her chair and won’t move. I take a seat next to her, equally unable to move. The view is riveting, as if a whole new room in the house suddenly appeared that no one had known about before. The kids run in and out. Michele goes inside to make them some pasta and I don’t budge. Giovanni neatly stacks the last of the fallen branches. The wide-open expanse of sea lies before us, reflecting us. Alda gazes out at the boats coming into the marina for the night, anchoring, and the lights come on along the promenade as the teenagers start to convene in little packs and the sun starts to set. Michele calls from inside the house, “Mamma?”
And in unison, we answer.
“Si?”
Author’s Note
I have changed the names of some people in this book and on two occasions have made the names up when I couldn’t remember them. I have airbrushed a couple of people right out of scenes where they should have existed because they had nothing to do with, and would have distracted from, the larger story. I have compressed, contracted, and subtly rearranged time in several instances, effectively reducing two or three or four consecutive years into one. And I have conflated several recurring, similar events into one for clarity, drive, and momentum. Otherwise, this book is a true account of my experiences as I remember them.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Kimberly Witherspoon, the hands-down best agent in the business, who’s had my back in a way I’ve never known before, who is as tough as she is warm, and for whom I would do anything, anytime, anywhere.
I would like to thank David Young who singlehandedly and effortlessly improved my writing—and my whole life—just by rolling his giant glowing glass marbles of wisdom down the hill and letting me pocket them.
I would like to thank Pamela Cannon, equal parts gentle mensch and prodding editor, as well as Jennifer Hershey and the rest of the team for creating the exact environment for me at Random House in which I thrive.
I would like to thank the many hardworking crews who have cooked and served and cleaned at Prune during the five interminable years of my engagement with this book, who held Prune in one delicious piece when I was locked in the office, typing madly before and after and often during my shift.
And finally I would like to thank my bestie Heidi Dorow, who pushed me, pulled me, bullied me, and cheered me to the finish.
About the Author
GABRIELLE HAMILTON is the chef/owner of Prune restaurant in New York’s East Village. The author received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Bon Appetit, Saveur, and Food & Wine. She has also authored the 8-week Chef column in The New York Times, and her work has been anthologized in six volumes of Best Food Writing. She has appeared on The Martha Stewart Show and
the Food Network, among other television. She lives in Manhattan with her two sons.
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