by Lee Gutkind
I remember how strong she seemed leaning over my father in his hospital bed, fixing the blanket: her hands moved without hesitation. I was twenty years old, standing near the door in the recovery room after his gallbladder surgery. My father was semiconscious, ashen, and skinny. Tears slid down his cheeks, and his lips were caked with dried blood. He would be fine, I knew, but when I saw him on the hospital bed I cried. I felt helpless. The more I tried not to cry, and to be strong, the more I cried, until I was sobbing and gasping. My mother had her arms under my father’s torso to adjust him. She straightened up and looked at me and said, “Stop it or leave.” I left the room and wondered if I could ever have her strength.
The last of six children in her family, my mother was three years old when her father died of throat cancer. Vicenzo planned for his family to be supported after his death by his wealthy father and stepmother. When his widow, Rovena, asked her in-laws for support, they told her there would never be money for her or the children because Vicenzo had not married nobility. Rovena went to work to support her family. My mother and one of her sisters, Adriana, were not old enough for school and needed watching during the day, so Rovena took them to an orphanage where she intended for them to live until they were old enough for school. “I wouldn’t stay there,” my mother says. “I wanted to live at home, so I kicked the nun who met us, scratched her arm, and pulled off her habit.” My mother tells me the story sixty-five years later with the same feistiness I imagine in that toddler. She grabs high in the air to demonstrate how she reached the nun’s habit and pulls down, her fist tossed to the floor. She straightens up and smiles. “Of course I remember what happened; I remember everything,” she says. “The nun said I was too young for the orphanage, so I left with my mother. Adriana lived there for several years. I was only a baby, but I knew that I didn’t want to live there.” Rovena asked her sister-in law to take in my mother. Although the Contessa did not consider her niece, my mother, noble (I’m sure she thought my mother’s blood was only half blue), she agreed to care for her at their country estate. “She hardly cared for me,” my mother says. “I tried to run away every day for a year, but it was too hard. I was so young. Farmers would pick me up on the side of the road, and I’d go pick potatoes with them, but they always took me back to my aunt’s house at the end of the day. The Contessa never looked for me when I was gone. For dinner she would feed her children soup and then give me just bread. I tried to jump out of a window one day, so she returned me to my mother, afraid that I’d kill myself and she’d be blamed.” My mother tells the story sitting at the table, leaning over it. Her elbows supporting her, she presses one fist against her heart. “I will never forgive that woman,” she says.
My mother was five years old when she left the Contessa’s home and finally old enough for school; instead she returned to Naples just in time for war.
Cynthia, my sister, calls our mom a war baby. “It explains everything.” The war made Naples poor and hungry and stripped its people of control. Rovena worked even more than before, and so did her four oldest children. While Adriana was in the orphanage, my mother stayed at home alone when she had to, stayed with neighbors when they were home, and went to school when it was available. She tells me a story of sitting up in a tree watching German soldiers walking underneath her, and later rummaging through their dead bodies for money and food. “I would roll them over and reach in their pockets. I was never afraid,” she says. During the last two years of the war, Rovena was afraid for her, however. She sent my mother and Adriana to her family’s farm in Tuscany, to what she saw as safety.
Maria, my mother’s oldest sister, took care of the family in Naples while Rovena worked. During the first part of the war and for years afterward, my mother was an apprentice to Maria in the kitchen. There wasn’t food to waste during the war, and so she learned to make meals from items we might discard these days: potato peels, the stalks of broccoli, leftover pasta. My mother still makes fabulous creations from remnants. I call these meals her “war food,” but she doesn’t laugh. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. She’s right. I don’t know hunger. I mean by the expression only that some of her best dinners are her most modest.
“Make sure the spaghetti is cold before you add the egg.” she says. “Otherwise the egg will cook too soon and look like it’s been scrambled.” We are making frittata di spaghetti, my favorite “war food.” It is simply a spaghetti omelet. First beat the eggs, and then add grated parmigiano, salt and pepper. “Use enough eggs,” she says, “but not too many or the meal will be too filling.”
“How many eggs?” I ask.
“Enough,” she says. Add the egg mix to the cooked and cooled spaghetti and mix well. Use a spaghetti fork to mix it: pull a bunch of spaghetti above the bowl, drop the spaghetti back in, and then fork some more.
“Don’t mix it like pancakes,” she says, “that’s not what I mean, you’re splashing, here, give that to me.” If a spaghetti fork is not available, then two regular forks will work nicely; use them as if tossing a salad. My mother adds chopped ham and mozzarella to the mix, and I put some olive oil in the frying pan. “Just enough to cover the bottom of the pan,” she says, “or it will splash out the sides.” Fold the spaghetti mixture into the heated frying pan, cover and cook on medium heat until it’s light brown. Then flip the frittata over to brown the other side. “Be careful,” she says, because she lets me do the flipping. I hold the frying pan in my left hand, place a plate face down, like a lid, over the frittata, and I quickly turn the frying pan upside down while pressing on the plate. The cooked side is then up on the plate and I slide the frittata back into the pan, keeping the cooked side up. Once again, cook it covered until light brown. Serve the frittata hot or cold; it’s delicious either way.
Maybe my sister is right and the war can explain everything about our mother. During the war she often went without enough food and for several years she was separated from her family. Now as an adult she seems to require steadiness from both. Or maybe it’s simply that food is what she knows best, and therefore it’s her favorite gift to those she loves. When I was in grade school, I would walk home from school each day for lunch. My mother refused to pack me a lunch and insisted that I return home for a better meal. She was working then, so she would leave my lunch set out on the table along with a note: “Valerie: don’t use the stove, wash your hands, lock the door when you leave. Love Mom.” The best lunch was a Thermos of brodo e pastina, chicken broth and tiny pasta, and a Nutella sandwich. Nutella, a chocolate sandwich spread, sounds like junk food, but somehow because it’s Italian, my mother tells me, it is not. What I really wanted was a marshmallow Fluff sandwich. “It’s too American,” she’d say. “Che schifezza!” She often uses this expression, “what nastiness,” to describe over-processed American foods. I didn’t mind schifezza at eight years old. For me, normal moms fed their kids Fluff, and I was desperate for my mom to be normal. I wanted a mom who didn’t talk with an accent, a mom who would pack my lunch with those little cheese and cracker snacks, the ones that included a small red plastic spreader, and whose package could double for a matchbox size semitruck.
When I was in middle school my family moved to Colorado for my father’s final military assignment. My parents made their home in Denver and slowly, over the following twenty years, all four of us siblings left for college, traveled, worked, and eventually made our homes near them so we could eat our mother’s Sunday dinner. She showed us love by cooking for us, and I think eating dinner at her table was our way to return the affection. I was on the Tupperware circuit then. My mother would package leftovers and send each of her children home with a meal for the week. Or if I missed the Sunday dinner, she might leave a container of food hidden on my back porch, and a phone message along with it: “Valerie: I’ve left some pasta in bottita on your porch, hurry, bring it inside, return the Tupperware on Sunday, and don’t forget to lock the door. I love you.” It comforts me to know that when I visit her,
she will say during the hello hug, “Are you hungry?” And perhaps due to some repressed teenage disobedience, I will always respond to her advances with retreat:
“No, not really.”
“Oh, just have a little. I’ve made you something special,” she will say. And I will eat because that is what we do. And because my mother does not like to hear “no.”
Several years ago, I moved to Michigan. My mother was worried I was losing weight. “Can’t you buy good bread there?” she asked. “Have it with butter. Your dinner would be so much better.” Really what she was saying, I think, was wouldn’t my wedding dress look better if I still had my plump breasts to fill it?
If I live too far for her to feed me, then she mails me food. In college, I received a package every few weeks. In it were my favorite foods: Cinnamon Apple Cheerios, a box of Little School Boy milk chocolate cookies, and a chunk of parmigiano. Although I reassured her I could buy these things where I lived, she regularly sent them. In fact, fourteen years later, just last week, I received a package of parmigiano from her. “You have to use good cheese,” she says.
“It’s the sauce of the whore,” she says, “that’s what puttanesca means.”
“Really,” I say, “why haven’t you ever told me that before? You’ve been making this all of my life.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says, “of course I’ve told you its name. Here,” she says, “cut the garlic thin.” We prepare the ingredients for this fast sauce, me cutting the garlic thin, and her dicing the tomatoes. “Slice the garlic,” she says. “Don’t chop the cloves; it’s better this way.” She puts olive oil into the saucepan, and when it’s heated she adds all of the ingredients: garlic, anchovies, capers, olives, fresh tomatoes, salt, and crushed red pepper. “Don’t use bad olives,” she says, “that American schifezza. Make sure they’re Greek or Italian, and don’t add too much salt. No, the olives are salty enough.” She covers the sauce and cooks it on low for fifteen minutes, then adds parsley, and cooks the sauce covered for another five minutes. “The Italian housewife would spend the day with her lover,” she says, “while her husband was at work. The wife would rush home in the evening to prepare her husband’s dinner and throw these ingredients in a pot. When he ate this sauce, the husband was sure that something this delicious would have taken her all day to prepare, not twenty minutes, and so the sauce was a good cover for her infidelities.”
“Oh,” I say.
“Hurry,” she says, “drain the spaghetti, it’s best al dente.”
I have been an apprentice to my mother in the kitchen my entire life. I was a reluctant cook as a teenager: “Why doesn’t Robert have to cook? Why can’t I talk on the phone?” Most of my culinary education has come with the enthusiasm of adulthood, and the realization that I need to cook my own meals now. I have pressed my mother for recipes and direction on some of my favorite foods. She says there are things that are too hard for me to make. A few summers ago I was eating at my aunt’s home in Naples. I asked the sisters how to make the gateau di patate. They looked at each other, and my zia Maria shook her head and laughed. “Ask us in a few years,” my mom said. The gateau is a dollop of milky potato and parmigiano that is delicately bathed in breadcrumbs and then lightly fried. This year my aunt gave me the recipe as a wedding gift.
When I quit my job last fall, my mother was concerned about my finances. To reassure her that my husband and I would be okay, I called her one afternoon to say, “I’m making risotto, Mom, with portobello mushrooms.”
“Oh,” she said, “that takes so long.”
“Yes Mom, I have time now,” I said.
“Oh good,” she said, “you really can’t make risotto when you have a job.” She is pleased that I cook for my new husband. I was raised watching her delight in feeding my brother and father; I’m sure she thinks cooking is my duty after all, and my ability to cook, a reflection on her mothering of me. “What are you cooking for Marc tonight?” she asked last month. “How about penne alla Bolognese; do you remember how much he liked mine at Christmas?”
“Yes,” I said, “I do remember, Mom.” While she wants me to be the primary chef in my home, she will say, occasionally, “Does Marc cook for you?” And she will mean by this, does he take care of you? Is he sweet to you?
“Yes Mom,” I will say, “he cooked for me last night.”
I can’t duplicate some of my mother’s recipes in my home. “What’s wrong with you?” she says. “Remember it this time.” We are making the Genovese, my favorite sauce. “It’s important,” she says, “to use a big enough pot; somehow it doesn’t taste the same cooked in a small pot. Here,” she says, “cut the celery, onions, and carrots very small. We’ll add a few tomatoes, and a little water, and cook these for an hour.”
“But Mom,” I say, “I thought they were supposed to be cooked in oil first and then water later.”
“No,” she says and gasps, “oh my God, never. Water first.” After an hour of cooking, the vegetables are passed through a hand mill. In Italian this hand mill is called a passalegumi, a vegetable passer. “Even Williams Sonoma doesn’t carry this,” she says. “I’ve looked, but no luck. So find something like it.” My neighbor once lent me an applesauce mill for this task, and although it did pass the vegetables through, the Genovese still failed. Maybe I needed a passalegumi. “Put the vegetables back in the pot,” she says, “and now add the olive oil, not before.” Something magical occurs to carrot, celery, and onion when they are cooked together. The three transform into a slightly sweet and tangy paste. I’m of course not the first to notice this. I’ve read in a cooking magazine that the French have many words to describe these three vegetables together, a word for each way the vegetables may be cut and cooked.
“Mom,” I say, “do you know what the French call this mixture?”
“Oh,” she says, “French food is so bad.” Add salt, pepper, and basil to the pot and cook it on medium. When it dries, add some white wine and cook it until this reduces. “Stir it,” she says, “let the sauce almost burn, but not quite, and then stir it. Keep doing that. Drain the pasta,” she says. I drain the rigatoni, pile it in pasta dishes, and top each with the Genovese and grated parmigiano.
I’m sure my mother has previously told me to add the oil first. I won’t say that now she’s lying, just that perhaps, at times, she purposefully omits some recipe details. Often my food comes out good, but not quite right. So I call my mother to find where I went wrong. In this way I need her. I live a thousand miles from her now, too far for the Sunday dinner, but our food conversation keeps our love steady. It is the Italian way: Mom and food are one. A few years ago I overheard my brother speaking with an Italian friend, Davide, at a café in Milan.
“Ciao Robert, how are you?” said Davide.
“Great, and you?”
“I’m well, and how is your mother?”
“Good. And yours?” said Robert.
“She’s fine. Did you eat at your aunt’s house yesterday?”
“Oh, yes,” said Robert.
“What sauce did your mother make?” said Davide.
“She made the Genovese.”
“Oh, delicious.”
I can’t think of an American friend who would ask so quickly about my mother, and none that would ever care to know what sauce she had made for dinner. I have come a long way since my Fluff fantasies of third grade. I now accept that my mom, although naturalized an American thirty years ago, is still, quite naturally, an Italian.
My mother will call me several times a week to ask what I’ve eaten for dinner. “I made pasta zucchini for first plate,” I say, “and then I pan fried trout and had a salad with it.” And she will coo, and ask,
“Did you lightly flour the fish like I showed you?”
And of course I will say, “Yes, Mom.” What she really wants to know, I think, is how my day went, if I am well, whether I eat healthy. I use this language to learn about her day as well.
“Tonight I made pasta a’burr
o for me and your father,” she says. And I know that her day was long, and that she’s tired, because all she could manage to cook was spaghetti tossed with butter and parmigiano.
Today my husband had a busy day planned at work. I called him and asked what he ate for lunch. He said he ate a Caesar salad with grilled chicken and a side of vanilla yogurt. I told him I was planning to make him pizza alla Napoletana for dinner.
“I love you too,” he said.
VALERIE K. WALDROP is working toward her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Western Michigan University. This is her first published story. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her husband and son.
Selling the House
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
MARIANNA DE MARCO TORGOVNICK
Not a ghost, not a vision, there he was: my father at age sixty-nine (though he had died at eighty), standing in the living room of my house in Durham and looking around as he had the day we moved in. Saying, “This is the kind of house you see in movies, the kind of house rich people live in. Congratulations, Marianna.” I was crossing from the foyer to the family room, filled with thoughts of family since I was teaching Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America the next day—a book about the kind of family I or, perhaps more, my husband, had grown up in. My parents and in-laws were very much on my mind. So there he was: my father, who has been dead since the end of 1992. Not a ghost, not a vision, but simply there. A presence summoned up, I realized, after some thought, not just by the book I was going to teach but also, and more, by my situation, the situation of being ready to sell the house, being at a place in life when it only made sense to sell the house, but being madly and irrationally reluctant to do so.