by Tembi Locke
I hadn’t yet told her I’d be bringing some of his ashes to Italy, a final promise I had made him. I hadn’t told her because I wasn’t sure about the details. I needed time to process everything. Moreover, I wasn’t sure when I wouldn’t be riddled with anxiety about just leaving the house, let alone leaving the country with my daughter in tow.
I couldn’t even imagine making lunch.
* * *
I turned on the gas and lit a tiny flame in all that darkness. I wanted to set fire to my grief, I wanted to bring him back. Maybe water boiling in a pot would bring him back to me, even for a second.
As I stood in Saro’s kitchen, I caught a glance of my family as they gathered around the dining room table. They were navigating burial arrangements, hospice wrap-up, and memorial details. They did it with vigor while I was struggling just to drink a full glass of water.
Earlier that morning, my stepmom had knocked on my bedroom door after Zoela had left for school.
“Yes, come in.”
Aubrey appeared in the doorway, all five feet of her, with a cup of chamomile tea.
“I’m doing a final proof of Saro’s bio for the memorial program. Would you like to reread it once more before I send it?”
I had forgotten that I had somehow written out his life story the second day after he died. Flashes of manic productivity followed by hours of total incapacity seemed to be part of how the initial impact of losing my husband was playing out. She handed me a typed piece of paper, his life in six paragraphs, single-spaced in Corinthian font.
I had never imagined writing what amounted to my lover’s obituary. But I had. I had in fact pulled quotes from his journal, his letters, and the backs of postcards. Things he had jotted down piecemeal in the final year of his illness. Things he wanted to be known to himself and others, things he wanted our daughter to know.
My eyes fell on words in the second sentence, Saro’s own words about his origins: “from a lineage of peasant farmers that reached back to Byzantium. They labored for olives, lemons, garlic, and artichokes from an impervious soil, hillside and rocky.” Farther down, he called himself “an accidental chef.” Even farther down, in a paragraph about his fatherhood, I had added an excerpt from a poem he had written on the occasion of Zoela’s birth. He had described the arrival of her love in his life as a “seasoned vessel” steady enough “to cross tormented waters” and “bring a seaman to his native home.”
An invisible trapdoor opened up beneath me, and I felt a part of me fall in as I handed the paper back to Aubrey.
“It’s fine,” I said.
She showed me two pictures of Saro and asked which one I wanted to use. I didn’t want either; I wanted him. But I chose the one I had taken of him on our tenth anniversary—the one in which his smoldering eyes seemed to promise a lifetime.
She asked me about white flowers and whether I wanted a soloist to sing. I rallied all my focus. I tried to summon answers through the gray fog in my brain that made it difficult to finish thoughts, and then I collapsed back into bed. I wept into his pillow until my eyes were nearly swollen shut.
An hour later, I had come downstairs and found my family seated at the table. “I don’t think I can go to Saro’s memorial. I don’t think I can. I’ll stay home. You go,” I declared.
My family gently convinced me otherwise. They promised to shore me up. Friends stopped by daily in small groups and alone. They hugged me, then we’d sit on the couch and stare at the walls in disbelief. Death is like that. The specter of its possibility was grand and had been on full display for years of Saro’s illness. Then, when it happened, there was only disbelief. And for me, there was fatigue and its companion, disabling anxiety. I felt as new in the world as I had been the day I was born. And just as vulnerable.
Aubrey, in a gesture of grace, had decided to move in with us temporarily. She had been with me three days earlier when a grief counselor had advised that we not be left alone for at least the next three months. I don’t think the woman meant it literally, given that Aubrey lived four states away in Texas. But Aubrey had heard the call. And being who she is, what she could see before her eyes, she knew I was in no way capable of caring for myself, let alone a child. We were raw, and simple tasks took mammoth effort. The mere sound of running water hurt my ears, Zoela cried from 8:00 p.m. until nearly midnight each night, asking for her father back. When I attempted to get behind a wheel, it took me upward of ten minutes to back the car out of the driveway. Space and time disoriented me and flooded my memory. Panic rose in my chest before I even attempted to get out of bed. Eating was perfunctory. So Aubrey was there to make sure I took a bath, to prepare Zoela’s lunch, and to turn the sheets down for me to crawl back into once I dropped her off for her first day at school.
Zoela’s school and former preschool community had circled around us and organized meals during hospice and in the immediate wake of Saro’s passing. It was a steady stream of southern California fusion, mostly vegetarian cuisine. High-quality food from serious home cooks surrounded us. Yet when Zoela and I sat down to eat it, the texture and taste of it on our plates were unfamiliar and difficult to digest.
Grits were the fallback Texas comfort food. Hominy was in the ancestral lineage. In times of need, keep a pot of it on the stove. Aubrey’s grits with butter were the only thing I could stomach. Every time I went to spoon some onto a plate, I thought of it as Saro’s polenta—but leached of its natural color and flavor. Yet under generous pats of butter and seasoned with salt, the grits went down smoothly. Though I deeply appreciated all the food gifted to us in those weeks and often wept at the bottomless generosity of our close circle of friends, in all honesty, it was emotionally indigestible. Much like my new life. Quinoa, in particular, had become my personal grief aggressor. Whereas I had loved it before, in grief it took work to eat, work to digest, work to make it into something that soothed. Take-out wasn’t any better. I would sign for it, take the bag, open it, and look down at lukewarm food whose aesthetic and texture has been undone by moisture trapped in plastic and tin. I’d move it around my plate because everyone around me kept telling me to eat. The thought of a lifetime of this hung at the back of my mind, a different kind of loss not easily explained to anyone who had never been loved by a chef.
It was that aspect of my grief that took me to the kitchen. It was both an instinct and a desire. There was also fear. I wanted to be near my husband. My family intuitively knew that and left me alone in there for the first time in a week. I understood that in this first attempt to cook on my own, my grief demanded that I take it slow. Feel my way through. Trust that I would be led in the right direction.
“Begin with the soffritto,” he’d say.
So that’s what I did. I chopped my first tiny pile of garlic. I brushed it into a narrow white line with the palm of my hand, as I had seen Saro do at the beginning of thousands of meals. The palm of his hand had guided the garlic toward what was to come next.
He had told me, “It’s a humble herb, but it adds a dose of courage to every dish. A little goes a long way.”
Il soffritto is an act of submission, submitting onion and garlic to oil.
Cooking is about surrender. He had always demonstrated that.
So I diced the onion next, rendering it into rough cubes.
I had watched Saro bring raw ingredients to a state of surrender, releasing their form and flavor to create something new. He was my master alchemist. I felt like the onion I had just placed in the pan, translucent and vulnerable.
I wanted to get back to the first tastes—the risotto con sugo verde I had tasted at Acqua al 2. I understood that everything that happened to me next, at this stove, in my house, in the world, would from here on be a life of second firsts.
Fai una salsa semplice—Make a simple sauce, I imagined he’d say.
I reached for a bottle of tomato sauce, the last one from our previous summer in Sicily that sat in my cupboard. I opened the bottle and poured a liquid Sicilian summer in
to the pan, on top of the soffritto.
“Use basil, not laurel. Add a bit of sugar to balance the acid.”
I mimicked the movements and gestures Saro had shown me, and I stirred.
Un piatto di pasta ti farebbe bene, amore—A plate of pasta will do you good. That was always his advice.
Like water, doubt is fluid. A week after Saro’s death, I doubted I could do much, either in the kitchen or in life. But I knew how to put a pot of water onto the stove. I watched the water fill the pot, aware of its fluidity, its pliability. Was my life like that now, a thing that flowed according to the capriciousness of life’s situations?
I turned off the water, put the pot onto the stove. I added salt and waited for it to boil.
“A fistful is a single serving. Always do two fistfuls, six if friends are coming over.”
Six fistfuls of pasta seemed unimaginable. For now, preparing a single-serve pasta col sugo di pomodoro was all I could manage.
Twelve minutes later, I drained the water from the pasta and let the vapor warm my face. I poured the sauce over the fistful of spaghetti I had made, finishing the pasta in the pan the Italian way. I had made my first meal for one in Saro’s kitchen.
I took a bite. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t bad. I could taste doubt and love, maybe a pinch of faith, a dollop of determination. After a few bites, I pushed the plate way. As I looked out onto our back yard, the fig tree with the promise of summer fruit had fully formed bulbs facing the sun, I made a decision: I would take Saro’s ashes to Sicily this summer. I would keep a promise to my lover, and I would, maybe, in the process discover a new promise for myself and for a future that at the moment felt incomprehensible.
A VILLA. A BROOM.
Saro took the lead in nurturing our long-distance relationship. When I returned to the United States after my extended stay in Florence, he devised a plan: I would come back to Italy during the summer and read books by the beach while he did a summer stint as a chef on the island of Elba. He visited Wesleyan in the fall of my senior year, then came again for my graduation in spring. After I graduated, he searched for apartments for us in Florence while I did summer stock theater in the Berkshires until we could figure out next steps. We were making it work across time zones, an ocean, two languages, and being at different stages in our lives. And even though I still hadn’t met his parents, we were following the dream of our relationship, and sooner than we thought I would follow another big dream: a career as an actress.
While doing summer stock theater, a New York talent manager agreed to represent me. It took all of about half a second to decide that my future was in New York, not Italy as Saro and I had thought. And I couldn’t wait to tell him the news. When I called him, I was standing at a roadside pay phone in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, between rehearsals. “Luckily, people eat all over the world,” he said with excitement in his voice. “I can be a chef anywhere.” A month later, he decided to sell his interest in a successful new bar he had opened with friends. Two months later, he gave notice at Acqua al 2 and was ready to move to New York.
“Are you sure?” I asked him. By then I was living in New York and sleeping on my aunt’s couch on the Upper East Side to save money while taking acting classes during the day and waiting tables at night.
“Of course. I don’t see a future without you,” he declared. I couldn’t wait for him to join me in the States, but I knew it would take a few months for him to wrap up his life in Florence, and it would be hard for him to say good-bye to all his friends.
But I knew he welcomed the idea of moving to America. I hoped he’d see it as a sort of reclaiming. He had, after all, spent his teen years in Buffalo, New York, when his parents had emigrated there briefly. His father had taken a job in a pasta factory, and his mother had gotten shift work on a jacket assembly line. His father hated the snow; his mother had been assigned the mind-numbing work of attaching the same lapel to the same style men’s sports jacket for three years. Saro had told me about their disillusionment with their American dream. His family had ultimately returned to Sicily when he was seventeen and had just graduated from an American high school. He hadn’t wanted to leave.
At that time, this story of his parents going from farmers to factory workers, then back to farmers again was the cornerstone of what I knew. Also that neither had more than a fifth-grade education. I felt empathy for the dreariness I imagined in those Buffalo years. And I was curious about people who could pack up their kids, move them to the land of opportunity, and then deliver them back to the place, Sicily, where Saro said they had less opportunity. His parents struck me as determined, hardworking, and committed, if not terribly imaginative—things I could say about certain people in my own family. What I didn’t yet feel was their resistance; what I didn’t yet understand was the depths of the complexity and strife that ran through their relationship. That reality came crashing down on me just two nights before Saro was set to finally depart Florence to come join me in New York City.
“What do you mean, you haven’t told them yet?” I was pacing in the sparsely furnished apartment I had secured us on the Upper West Side, winded by the five-story walk-up. I had chosen it because I had an idea about the kind of first apartment a couple like us should have: indoor/outdoor space, brick walls, a tiny but serviceable kitchen, and a closet large enough to hold mostly my clothes and some of his. I had just come back from waiting tables at Jekyll and Hyde, a theme bar in the West Village, and I was pissed and incredulous at what I was hearing.
“Telling them is a big deal,” he said. His voice was tight and slightly rushed. I could hear the Italian street sounds behind him—Vespas and an ambulance siren in the distance.
It was late November. For a second, I imagined chestnuts roasting in steel drums and people sipping hot chocolate in Piazza della Signoria. Then I was pulled back to the gravity of what he was saying.
“Of course it’s a big deal. We’re going to be living together. In America! I think you need to give them a heads-up.” I was trying my best to be supportive, but I was impatient with his handling of it.
“I will. I will,” he said.
“Saro, you leave in two days!”
“I know that. I just need to figure out how to break the news. They are going to be devastated. They’ll think that they’ll never see me again.”
“What? Why would they think that?”
“Because for them when people leave Sicily, they don’t come back. Life in America means forgetting home.” I could hear the distress in his voice.
“That doesn’t make sense. You can fly to Sicily anytime you want.” By now I had taken off my black work T-shirt and was standing in my bra looking out the back window onto the terraces of the apartment on 91st Street, not caring if anyone saw me. “You have an uncle in Buffalo, and you’re telling me he never goes back to Sicily?”
“Maybe once every few years. But his life is in America, his family. Sicily is his past. It’s a place you visit, not a place you stay.”
We had different understandings of mobility. I had been getting onto planes since I was ten years old. However, Saro had taken his first big trip when he had traveled to the United States on a ship—an actual transatlantic ocean liner named SS Michelangelo. It had taken three weeks of nights spent in a third-class cabin. He had taken his first flight when his family returned to Sicily. And although he had come to visit me in the States several times, he seemed to be suggesting now that traveling back to Sicily was somehow different, if not physically, then emotionally.
I pressed on. “Fine, then. Just promise them that you will visit. Done.”
“It’s not that easy. I’m not going to go there until I can take you. And that’s a long way off. Who knows when that will be?”
“Wait, what do you mean?” This was the first time he was saying what had until then remained unspoken. In the two years we’d been together, we had never talked about my visiting his parents. We had been so busy just trying to keep a long-distance r
elationship going—buying tickets to and from the United States and Italy—that the thought of going to Sicily had never fully entered my mind.
“I mean, I keep my personal life separate from my parents. I learned that with Valentina.”
Valentina was his ex-girlfriend. They’d dated for five years before she had become a Buddhist and moved her things out while he was at work. Valentina was code for “failed relationship.”
“What exactly did you ‘learn’ with Valentina?”
“That my parents don’t approve of mixed-cultural relationships. Can we talk about this later, like when I’m there?” He was ready to be done.
“Wait! What are you talking about?” By now I had taken off my work jeans, put on sweats, and was sitting on the couch about to open a bottle of wine. “Valentina was Italian!”
“No, she was from Sardinia.”
“Sardinia is a part of Italy.”
“A part from Italy. An island away from Italy. Being Sardinian is different from being Italian and definitely different from being Sicilian. My parents didn’t approve and didn’t get along with her. When I took her there for a visit, she hated it and my father told my mother that our relationship would never work. Tembi, this isn’t important.” He had gone too far into a conversation that should never have happened on the phone with an ocean between us. “I need to go, really.”