by Lee Gutkind
If I have indulged my father’s love of the open space, like his mother, I fear every departure from home—mine and those of loved ones—even as I no longer know where home is. The two strains of my father’s family, agoraphilia and agoraphobia, meet in me, in my wandering, my self-imposed exile, my dread of departures. Loss and longing have been following me ever since I left Sicily. And so every departure strikes me, heavy and inevitable, a sense of doom spiraling me down in the entrails of memory.
Nonna Ciuzza, buried in a grave nobody visits—my mother was the only one who ever brought her flowers; Nonna Ciuzza who did not leave me anything; Nonna Ciuzza who in the end did not get her wishes. After her death, Zia Edvige turned the house upside down, threw away all the old stuff, renovated the whole place, bought new furniture, and squandered the money—probably a few hundred thousand dollars—her mother had left her. What would she say? Nonna Ciuzza haunts me, like the gifts she unwittingly bestowed upon me, gifts I forget but that occasionally sneak up on me, surprisingly familiar, like old lovers with whom I never quite broke up, whose ghosts visit me unexpectedly and ask that I do not forget, that I tell the story, unrelenting.
EDVIGE GIUNTA is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors and coeditor of The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture. She is Associate Professor of English at New Jersey City University.
I Denti Famiglia
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PHYLLIS CAPELLO
There are those who dive into New York’s treacherous harbor to end their lives. Not my Barese grandfather. Belongings clamped between his teeth, he jumped ship and swam ashore to start a new one. Good thing Francisco was young and strong, barrel-chested, his arms hardened by farm work. He married Bessie and they raised five children. My mother was their youngest. I was never told to which borough his strokes took him. Bessie liked to remind us she was American, a New Yorker, “born on the kitchen table,” in a tenement on Bleecker Street, the Neapolitan part of Manhattan’s Little Italy. Later, along with the many things he lost—family, country, language, customs—my grandfather lost his teeth, too. His tiny wife (she was barely four foot seven) had to cut the corn off the cob before she served it, the way you do for a child.
She told me the story only once—something about how he avoided Ellis Island, needed to marry a citizen. We were at a kitchen table in Brooklyn. It was crooked because the whole house leaned. My large family lived above her on the third floor; she kept us going. I was ten, her first granddaughter. My mother was already sick. There was a new baby, another girl, two months old. I no longer know to which side the house leaned. I tried to keep the old stories whole inside me, learn what I could about the mysterious country from which we’d come, never tired of hearing about their lives there, how they’d reinvented themselves here. Frank went from farmer in a desolate landscape to merchant marine, fruit vendor, storeowner, and, finally, junk man. The other grandfather, a shoemaker in Sicily, arrived in Canada indentured to a railroad company, escaped during his first winter, walking over the U.S. border in nothing but his thin jacket. He sought shelter in the kitchen of a small Rochester restaurant and ended up marrying the sister of the owner.
Bessie was twenty-three; her younger sister had already married, so her father married her off quickly, sweetening the deal with an old truck. Frank got citizenship, a bride, and a Model T Ford. One day she told me the story of a princess who had, while looking for a perfect husband, spurned every man who’d come courting. Finding fault with every one, she commanded her royal baker to “make” her a man. She fell in love with her “King of Sugar and Honey,” caressed him, took him out on the balcony one night to show him the stars, but she forgot him there. In the morning light she found him, liquefied by a rainstorm, and a perfectly beautiful princess died an old maid.
We did not always have a bed for each new child, or clothing appropriate for the season, but each Easter Sunday was an extravagant show. In completely new outfits we went to church and then made the maternal-to-paternal grandparents’ house promenade, really a walk from southern Italy to Sicily, or from our part of the twentieth to another century entirely. Our part of Brooklyn, with its alleys, vegetable gardens, and churches, mimicked a small Southern Italian town. The avenue was our piazza; the barbershop and the shoemaker’s basement were the men’s clubs. Our clamshell-studded Mary niches harkened back to Demeter, but at the church the hands of immigrant women had worn away the Madonna’s marble foot. They asked not for themselves, these women; their prayers were in hope that alcoholic sons would dry out, that emotionally fragile daughters would get well enough to tend the children, that a husband’s lungs would be free of cancer.
Maybe Bessie prayed for me after those weeknight novenas when she kissed her hand and reached up to rub that marble foot so fervently. Perhaps she prayed that I’d be the one to carry on the old ways, look after things. You need strong young women, especially in a new country, willing to work doubly hard, to keep what’s good in a family, ameliorate what is not. If that was the case, I failed her. I do not pray or cook, have family over once a week or even every holiday. I do not roast chestnuts on Sunday morning or take the first granddaughter on that small (was it uphill or downhill?) journey from kitchen to bedroom to uncover them still warm under the pillow. Not much is left of the old ways; all her hard work and all of mine have not kept them from unraveling. In houses that tilt things roll away faster than we can get hold of, though we wear away the surface hoping. Here we are, still in the intersection of old and new, swimming everyday between worlds, parcel in our teeth.
PHYLLIS CAPELLO is a writer and musician. She is a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in fiction, and her work has been published in many anthologies.
Sacrifice
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MARIA LAURINO
The geraniums sit in a large aluminum planter on the windowsill; their leaves pulsate like the beat of tiny hearts. The soft slap of morning air has awoken these plants of different stripes: the tender green-leaved young, the sturdy reddish stalks of the already bloomed, and shriveled petals, brown and hunched, that hang from stems like empty cocoons or garden bees humming silently. Each nervously awaits what’s in store, fluttering, fluttering its little heart, supplicants to the wind. A pigeon swoops down for a breakfast snack and munches on some blushing flowered stalks. When will the fluttering stop; how much of the delicate plant will the pigeon destroy?
“Perhaps none of us are truly ourselves, it occurs to me, but only ourselves at a certain age.… We have no identity apart from our age,” remarks the narrator of Tim Parks’s novel Europa. To stare at the potted geraniums, the life cycle handed to me in a silver-colored planter, how can I not accept Parks’s observation? If I were to define myself today at forty-five, no doubt I’d answer differently than twenty years before.
There’s an old parlor game about identity that supposes an alien descends from outer space to learn about the strange creatures that inhabit this place. In this close encounter of the therapeutic kind, the alien asks each person to describe himself with three nouns. When the scenario was posed to Lyndon B. Johnson, he famously declared: “I am a free man, an American, and a Democrat.”
Simone de Beauvoir addressed the issue of female identity in her classic work, The Second Sex, stating in the book’s preface: “But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman’; on this truth must be based all further discussion.”
Half a century later, after the feminist movement sought to erase discrimination based on gender, does de Beauvoir’s assertion remain true, that who we are must begin with “I am a woman”? It’s doubtful that women would offer the same response as LBJ: “I’m a free woman” sounds more like the line of a husky-throated divorcée with a scotch in her hand than a declaration of national and individual liberty.
When I worked at the Village Voice two decades ago, I would have answered “journalist” for the first no
un, probably “American” for the second. But if I had honestly acknowledged the particular genetic, familial, and cultural blend that made me who I am, my response would have been: an Italian American woman of southern Italian descent who grew up with a disabled sibling. The answer probably disqualifies me from the parlor game’s catchier format—and my response would need to change over time because the word “mother” is now essential to my identity.
Back then, however, I had no interest in motherhood and authoritatively claimed that if I had a child he would be in full-time day care so I could continue my work uninterrupted. I wanted to be autonomous, not bound to serve others, wishing for little more than a satisfying job and a room of my own. I had seen the wounds inflicted from too much self-denial delivering continual care.
“Could you hold my watch for me, pigeon?”
Pigeon, the girl bird, was Henry’s nickname for me. It was the 1960s, when LBJ was president and suburban adolescents reveled in summer’s freedom, playing leisurely games of softball after dinner around our cul de sac, running the bases while crickets hummed. On this evening, a rare event had taken place—the neighborhood boys had asked my brother to join them. Henry didn’t have any friends on the block, but at least the Short Hills teenagers were nicer to him than the rougher-edged boys from Cranford, according to my mother, who wished to leave the working-class town as soon as my parents had moved there. In Cranford, my mother preferred that Henry stay inside after dinner because the neighborhood kids would routinely humiliate my mentally retarded brother, greet him with lines like “Hey, stupid.”
Henry was eager to play ball, but always fastidious about his possessions, so he asked me to hold his prized Bulova watch. Happy to be the girl cheerleader, although anxious about how my oldest brother would be accepted, I sat on the curb and leaned my back against the telephone pole dug into our front lawn. On this balmy summer evening, I listened to the clatter of wooden bats hitting the pavement and the scratch of sneakers sliding toward the curb that stood for first base. I mindlessly stretched the gold-plated watchband, praying that Henry could catch the tossed ball and rooting for both my brothers, little accordion links in my hands, pull, press, pull, press, pull, press, pull …
Snap.
Could you hold my watch, pigeon? What did the pigeon destroy?
With little gold links resting in sweaty palms, I wished I could fly away to escape the circle of hell that I had inadvertently created with my own two hands. At eight, I was old enough to know that even minor events could have enormous consequences because my brother’s mental retardation, coupled with mental illness, was a toxic combination. I knew how my brother raged against imperfection, until each nick, wound, or broken link could be repaired.
Before the game was over, I ran up the staircase, two steps at a time, to warn my parents about what I had done. My father shook his head in icy silence. “Oh my God,” my mother moaned, already anticipating the ferocity of Henry’s reaction. My carelessness had made the more-than-fair share of daily pain she experienced caring for my brother even worse than she could have imagined. I had expected their anger, but was still unprepared for the rage this incident would unleash in my brother. When I handed Henry the tiny links of his favorite possession, his face turned from bewilderment to anger. Turning red, he screamed and cursed at me like the man-child he was, out of control, flailing his arms, moving closer as my parents pulled him away.
I began my Pavlovian dash around the dining room table, the “Maria run,” as my brother Bob labeled my routine response to Henry’s outbursts. Never knowing how to handle my fear, I’d circle round and round, the tiny mouse scratching the treadmill to nowhere, seeking relief in mere exhaustion. Finally my father, who could stand it no longer, jumped into the car to search for any repair shop that might be open in the evening. Miraculously, he returned with a new watchband, providing a temporary calm by closing the door on this crisis until the next one emerged.
“Think about your other children,” my mother used to repeat aloud the advice of friends who told her it was best to put Henry away for the sake of the rest of us. When Henry was born in 1946, the era of early intervention, social workers, and consent decrees to ensure that special education children received proper resources didn’t exist for working families. There were no national models of compassionate care but rather sinister stories about private pain, like our former president’s mentally retarded sister who had been lobotomized decades earlier when the paterfamilias decided to permanently institutionalize his daughter to preserve the good Kennedy name. Americans had not yet been exposed to the shocking scenes inside Willowbrook; the response in the sixties was to shut damage away.
But my mother, who looked to the blessed Madonna as her archetype of maternal compassion and sacrifice, would never put her own flesh and blood in an institution. I’m not sure why she repeated her friends’ admonition, perhaps out of sorrow for what Henry put us through. I was a child, too innocent to understand places like state mental institutions, and I retreated to my small room.
Thirteen years younger than Henry, I didn’t know my brother in a gentler stage, the little boy with a patch over his lazy eye, prone to seizures and trying to navigate the larger world. When my parents lived with my grandmother, life was easier for my family because my brother had not yet experienced adolescence and its hormonal outbursts, and he was surrounded by cousins who enjoyed playing with him. But Henry entered my consciousness as an isolated teenager, and his irrational behavior caused a crazy anxiety in me.
For my mother, Henry’s problems reinforced a lifelong guilt about a bad turn of luck—her doctor was absent from the labor room during a critical moment in my brother’s birth, and like all parents, she questioned each decision that she made affecting her child’s development. Should she have left my grandmother’s crowded apartment in Maplewood, a town with good schools, to move to a house in Cranford? “The teacher said not to move, that he was making progress,” my mother remembers half a century later.
My brother was placed in special education, and his “assignments” were humiliating, such as being told to pick up the other kids’ garbage on the school grounds. He hated being in the “special class,” words he repeated often, knowing that his uniqueness was not the kind that others coveted. When he eventually dropped out of school, my mother found an occupational therapy program that offered Henry the assembly-line privilege of placing pegs in holes. Unhappy and bored, one evening he mistakenly stepped off the train at the wrong station. The anxious search that followed proved too much for my mother, and she pulled him from the program.
Throughout each of these ordeals, one constant remained in the face of Henry’s humiliation and defeat: my mother’s unrelenting care of and devotion to her son. After years of my brother’s sitting at home with nothing to do, my mother begged the personnel director at our local Saks Fifth Avenue to hire him as a maintenance worker. For a while, he thrived in this job, satisfied by the results of his hard work: sparkling glass shelves, lint-free carpets, clean-as-a-whistle windows. He left the house early each morning for his ten-minute walk to Saks, changed into a brown uniform that hung in his locker, and proudly wore a soft cotton shirt with the word “maintenance” sewn in a fancy script above the pocket. His boss, an Irish-American saint named Bill, watched over my brother as he pushed his heavy cart around the store.
“Hey, shop steward,” Bill teased, and Henry beamed as Bill would affectionately pat the top of Henry’s head and call him the boss.
But when Bill retired, replaced by a man who routinely picked on my brother, Henry lost his way. He became moody, wore his hair long, and because of a lack of coordination, occasionally banged the sharp corners of the maintenance cart into well-heeled suburban shoppers. Inevitably, he was fired and dealt a personal blow from which he never fully recovered.
And neither could my mother recover a life of her own. The constant attention that my brother required, along with raising two other children, cooking, cleaning, an
d reentering the workforce as a typist to help pay for Bob’s college tuition ensured that my mother personified the opposite of a “free woman.”
“You must have a really strong mother,” a young woman at the Village Voice remarked to me one day as we stood by the restroom sink, the central place for girl talk at the paper.
Her observation, announced out of the blue by someone who didn’t know me but seemed extremely intuitive about mothers, startled me and I fiddled with the faucet, unsure of how to respond. She was the shy and literary daughter of a well-known feminist who wrote novels and essays about trapped women like my mother. Finding my way through the labyrinthine world of New York City politics working with a macho gang of reporters, I regarded my ambition and determination as a reaction to, not the fruit of, my mother’s steady presence.
“I don’t know.…” I mumbled and reached for the soap, momentarily washing my hands of the matter.
At the time I couldn’t tell her, or myself, the obvious answer to the question—yes, I do—because in my new world strength through sacrifice was not a virtue applauded but a response considered both weak and stereotypically female. The place I worked, the vision I shared, was about achieving equality—girls just wanna have parity, don’t they?—and sacrifice was interchangeable with martyrdom and subservience.
“You must really like to serve people,” I once said to my mother, with the cruel indifference to her feelings of which only a daughter may be capable.