by Tembi Locke
“Okay, so that was then. What does that have to do with you telling them you are moving here?” I knew what it meant, but I wanted him to say it.
“They will think they have failed me as parents. I’m abandoning them, not marrying an Italian or a Sicilian. But I love you. That’s all that matters. And right now, I need to swing by Acqua al 2 before I leave.”
“You need to handle this, Saro. That’s what you need to do. And I love you, too.”
The whole situation left me feeling a little more aware of the deep fractures that must have existed in their relationship. And the whole Valentina thing felt insane. Like saying someone from Louisiana couldn’t have a successful relationship with someone from New Jersey. I was getting hot under the collar trying to process all this. I left the couch and poured myself another hefty glass of the kind of wine that can be found in a corner liquor store for under ten dollars. Despite trying to push Saro’s parents to the margins of my mind, inside I felt a weird mixture of confusion, frustration, and anger at the mountain people I had never met. Furthermore, they seemed to paralyze my perfectly capable man with indecision about whether to even talk to them about the most important aspects of his life. And if what he said was true about his parents’ reaction to a girlfriend from a different island in the Mediterranean, what the hell would they think of an American black girl from Texas?
On a crisp afternoon in late November, Saro arrived at our front door after tackling five flights of stairs with all of his luggage from Italy. I had spent the whole day in an excited mania—cleaning, stocking the fridge, rearranging new throw pillows from Pottery Barn on the white shabby chic couch I had purchased with my cash tips from the bar. I had even bought his Italian newspaper and placed it on the kitchen counter. I wanted the place to be perfect and for him to feel at home as soon as he walked through the door. I imagined that we’d make love and make our way across Broadway for a late-night snack, then walk back home via West End Avenue.
The first thing he said when he crossed the threshold was “We did it. I’m here.”
I jumped on him, tying my legs around his waist, refusing to let go. I couldn’t believe the reality of the moment. He held me for a while, and then I gave him a tour of all five hundred square feet of our new home. He loved the exposed brick wall best of all.
“After we settle in, I’ll make us some pasta and let my parents know I made it.”
“What did they say when you told them?” I asked, trying to be casual and nonjudgmental.
“Not much. They aren’t very talkative. My father said nothing. My mother sighed and said, ‘Take care of yourself.’ ”
“That’s it?” I tried not to betray my feelings about their less-than-supportive response as I began to help him unpack a few of his clothes. Still, I was unable to push back even as I felt a growing apprehension and distrust for people who could wall off parts of themselves. People like that seemed destined to inflict a world of hurt on themselves or others.
It didn’t take long to finish unpacking. Saro’s wardrobe was minimalist compared to mine of many colors, shoes of every heel height known to womankind. When we were done and he had put his last T-shirt away, I handed him the phone to call his parents. His younger sister, Franca, who was recently married and pregnant with her second child, answered.
“Tell them I arrived,” I heard Saro say in Italian. Then they talked for a few more minutes in Sicilian. Unsure if what I was hearing was a dialect of Italian or a language unto itself, either way I didn’t know or understand a word of it. Hearing just one side of the conversation, it was hard to tell if Saro’s parents were home or not, harder still to gauge how the call home was settling with him. When he hung up, he just smiled and headed into the kitchen. As much as I wanted to launch into a full inquiry, I chose to let it be. He was visibly tired. It was our first night in a new city, starting our new lives. All I wanted was to make love, eat, and perhaps take an evening stroll along the Hudson. In that precise moment, I was more than willing to let his parents remain at the margins of the dream life that was just coming into fruition.
* * *
Saro mixed fresh pasta dough delicately by hand in that postage stamp–sized kitchen. I came up behind him, looked over his shoulder, and said, “I think we should get married.” In the three days since he had arrived, that was all I could think about. We had talked about it generally for months, but now that we were living together the desire had new urgency.
He didn’t look up. “Sure, of course.”
My asking him to marry me while he was making pasta just seemed the most natural and logical thing to do.
“We need it for the INS. You need to have permanent resident status so you can work. We can go down to City Hall.”
He laid the dough out on a cutting board and sliced into it, making ten-inch-long strips and then rolling them over into long thin tubes.
“Of course, let’s do it, amore.” And he reached over and kissed me. It was the kind of kiss that was both simple and affirmative. Half an hour later, we ate while looking out onto the terrace and back sides of the brownstones of 91st Street. We agreed we’d tell no one of our marriage plan. A wedding would come later. For now, this moment was just about us. We chose my close college friend Susan to be our witness. Susan was good with discretion and anything romantic. She worked at the World Trade Center, near City Hall in lower Manhattan. A quick call, and she agreed to meet us on her lunch break and be our witness.
We applied for a license and bought rings in the West Village. They were simple silver bands—two for twenty dollars from a vendor who sold incenses, roach clips, and I LOVE THE BIG APPLE T-shirts. We put the rings on and then walked around the corner to get a cappuccino at Caffè dell’ Artista on Greenwich Avenue. I loved that café, with its mismatched antique tables, bohemian lamps, and deep couches throughout. But my favorite thing about the café was the custom of patrons leaving an aspirational message, confession, desire, or literary quotes in the drawers of the desktops and tables throughout the café. Sometimes there were whole love letters written years earlier. That day I left my own message: “I want to spend my life in love and companionship.”
When we finally stood in the small government office with the justice of the peace at a podium and a sliver of a view of the East River through a small window, I was giddy in a white floral blouse and black pleated pants. Saro had his Italian newspaper in hand. Susan, always one to wear her emotions on her sleeve, stood behind us in tears. I held Saro’s hand and couldn’t believe the clipped speed at which the county clerk married folks. In less than five minutes, we were husband and wife, and neither of our families knew. It was just what we wanted.
The sun was bright as we left the dark recesses of City Hall. We figured the best way to celebrate was with a slice of pizza and a slow walk back uptown. Traversing Manhattan as newly married people would happen only once. We took the scenic route, stopping in Chelsea, crossing Times Square, and then passing Lincoln Center before making our way back to the apartment on 92nd Street. We stopped and bought cheese at Zabar’s. That night we had pecorino grated over more of Saro’s homemade pasta. I poured wine, and we toasted each other. My life felt rich with possibility. I had the man of my dreams at my side and the sense the career I had always dreamed of was within arm’s reach. I was in the pulse of magic.
* * *
“You’ve got to tell them,” I said to Saro as we went for a late-morning jog around the Hollywood Reservoir, a glorified municipal pond perched on a swanky hill among celebrity compounds and eucalyptus trees. Our time together in New York had turned out to be short lived. After I landed a minor recurring role on a soap opera, my first real TV credit, I had immediately gotten an agent, who told me I needed to come to Los Angeles as soon as possible. We had no furniture or jobs but plenty of aspiration. I booked my first audition and immediately I told Saro, “I think I could get used to this.”
The years since we’d been in L.A. had flown by in a clipped pace of aud
itions, scripts, rejections, and figuring out where to get the best Italian coffee. We didn’t know many people yet, and the sheer expanse of the city was mind-numbing. But we had the distraction of planning our official wedding, which would take us back to Florence to exchange nuptials in front of friends and family.
In the nearly five years that Saro and I had been together, I had barely even so much as exchanged hellos with his parents over the phone. Still, it was a surprise for me when I learned that Saro had yet to tell his parents that we were getting married (again), this time in Italy.
The invitations had been ordered in English and Italian. “We request the honor of your presence at the marriage of . . .” Saro had scored a rather grande dame of a sapphire ring with facets so blue it was audacious enough to make the Mediterranean go green with envy. It was a five-carat Ceylon royal blue oval flanked by six round-cut diamonds in an antique setting of 18-karat white and yellow gold. I knew that ring would take me a lifetime to grow into. Everything was coming together.
“I know, I know,” he continued the conversation. He struggled for breath, him the tortoise to my hare. “Slow down!”
“So when?” I picked up the conversation in the confines of our tiny Toyota as I coasted down the winding Hollywood Hills and Saro searched the floorboards for a stray bottle of water. Any mention of his parents reminded him of their relationship, fraught with disappointment, worry, and fear. Those had been fracture points long before he had fallen in love with me.
“Not on the phone. I have to do this my way,” he said, flushed with growing anger by the time he turned the key to our apartment on Kenmore Avenue in Los Feliz.
“Saro, you are not leaving this apartment until you sit down and write the letter,” I said, angling past him to be the first to get into the shower and putting in my final two cents’ worth.
Exactly five drafts, three days, and two nights of painful insomnia later, he had a letter ready to send. It read (in Italian):
Dearest Mamma and Papa,
I had hoped to not have to share this news with you in a letter, but there is no way I can say this in person. I am getting married. I love Tembi, and we will spend the rest of our lives together. Our wedding will be in Florence this summer on July 26. I hope you will choose to come. I welcome your presence.
Your son,
Saro
I mailed the letter, and then we waited.
When the response came from Sicily two weeks later, it was decisive and delivered in a three-minute crackly phone call. His father, Giuseppe, said, “Non ho più figlio—I have no son.” Saro was devastated. Watching him retreat inward was painful, like wanting to soothe a wounded animal but having no means to do so. I tried to cheer him up, but I was crushed under the weight of my own free-floating disappointment and disillusionment. I had never seen this coming.
If mistrust had a minion, Saro’s father was its most loyal one. That much I had gathered from the bits and pieces Saro had reluctantly offered up over the years. I knew, for example, that Giuseppe hadn’t spoken to his own brother-in-law for nearly twenty years because of a joke—he hadn’t liked the punch line. I also knew he raised garlic and fermented his own wine; he had flat feet and knobby knees; he played cards, not dominoes, but never for money. Money he kept in a tight wad, swaddled in plastic and stuffed between the slats under his mattress. Rarely in the bank. He trusted the post office more than the bank because the postman lived in his town; he knew where to find him. The banker was from one town over. Basically, Giuseppe trusted no one born outside the entrance and exit of his nearly forgotten mountain town. That included me.
I didn’t think their estrangement could get any worse, but now he was cutting Saro out of his life and using me as the scalpel. A potential no-show at the wedding I could handle, but casting a son out of his life was beyond my wildest imaginings. I suspected the first time I would meet my in-laws would be at someone’s funeral.
“But what about your sister? Will she come?” His silence told me everything. Not waiting to court any more disappointment, I said, “Well, I’m sending them an invitation anyway.” I had had fifty shimmering, ocher-embossed invitations specially printed in Italian for friends in Florence and in the hope that, even though we weren’t exactly close, someone from his family would come. I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to send them.
“Tembi, I told you. They will not come. My father is the head of the family. He conditions everyone to his wishes. My sister won’t come out of respect for him.”
“Saro, please with the ‘respect.’ Enough, already. What am I in, a Godfather movie?”
His mouth curled into a smile as he squeezed lemon juice onto a plate of fennel, sliced paper thin atop a bed of parmigiano and arugula. He was trying to feed me out of a fight.
“Look, my father thinks he will be gossiped about, even mocked. He thinks all Americans divorce. And in his mind, I am marrying ‘down.’ ”
“Marrying down? Please! I’ve got news for him. Growing garlic isn’t exactly highbrow.” I broke a baguette in two with my bare hands.
“I know. I know.” With that he handed me the plate and gave me a kiss, which was intended to remind me I was marrying him, after all, not his family.
“Well, they are getting an invitation. Let them deal with the consequences of their actions,” I said as I hoisted a forkful of aromatic, citrus-sweetened fennel into my mouth and turned my attention to how I was going to break the news about Saro’s parents to my family.
* * *
I come from a long line of progressive, barrier-breaking Texas black folks. At the top of the list is my great-great-grandfather Roebuck Mark, who was brazen enough to start his own post office/feed store for newly freed slaves in the backwoods of rural East Texas. He fended off robbery and threats of lynching and is said to have trained his horse to travel alone, in the dark of night, back to his homestead so that he could return undetected on foot through the backwoods, avoiding Klansmen and small-time robbers. After Roebuck, there were a president of a historically black college, a mayor, one of the first black colonels in the US Army, an uncle with a university library named after him, and my great-aunt Altha of Coldspring, Texas (population 649). Among her claims to greatness were not only the prizewinning tomatoes she grew every summer but the fact that she had had the balls-out audacity to marry the town’s only (and very Irish) doctor, “Doc,” in 1962. Altha and Doc defied Jim Crow by setting up shop in a one-story redbrick ranch house across the street from the Coldspring jailhouse and hanging rafters. Their presence is said to have ensured that not another Negro was hung outside the jail, because “Doc” was revered in town.
Then there are my mother and father, activists. Those are the people I come from.
So when I made the call to my parents, long divorced but still friendly, to say that Saro’s family would not be attending the wedding for reasons they could probably imagine, I hoped they wouldn’t turn their backs on a long family history of rising above less-than-ideal circumstances. And I hoped that whatever opinions they had about what I was about to say, they would have the good sense to keep them to themselves. My dad had loved Saro since they had met in Florence. My mother had sat next to him at my college graduation. He’d made pasta alongside my dad’s barbecue at my graduation after-party. He and my mother shared an appreciation of Siddhartha. They adored his sense of humor, his generosity, and, undoubtedly, the way he loved me. Still, I dialed their numbers with a pit in my stomach. I couldn’t take any more drama. It was my dad who finally said, “Well, his family will be missed, but we are going to have a damn good time in Italy.”
They did not disappoint. It was exactly the response I needed.
Saro had come to understand that our wedding was about celebrating with my family, if not with his. Having the wedding in Italy left the door open in the event that his father changed his mind. Where, exactly, Saro put his feeling of loss during those days, I don’t know. It was off limits; he wouldn’t talk about it. It pained me,
but I respected his process. I chose to love him through what I didn’t understand. He kept saying “You don’t know them.” And he was right. I had, in fact, seen only one picture of them. They were standing outside their house in Sicily. In the photo, Saro’s father appears to have just come back from working the land, standing in a window opening in the front door. He is wearing a coppola (the traditional Sicilian cap), and his hands are still dirty from the day’s work. Saro’s mother is standing just in front of him on the sidewalk in the foreground. She is wearing an apron and stands bent as the sun shines down on them. The wind is blowing. It must be just before lunch. She looks just like Saro, and I kind of love her for that. In her hands is a broom, and she is frozen midmotion in the act of sweeping. The tableau is striking and full of the intimacy of domestic life, marriage. When I looked at that picture and thought of the in-laws I might never know, it hurt.
When we were planning our wedding, I worked for months disabusing Saro of the fear that our celebration would be like something out of The Godfather. He imagined ill-fitting suits, a priest, and a hot church, a gaunt Christ hanging crucified above the whole ordeal. In short, he imagined every Italian church wedding he had ever seen. It was an image of a marriage ceremony that I knew nothing about. I had to tell him that what he was dreading was an impossible scene, one in which I would never cast myself. I had to remind him that I was not Catholic and that my formerly atheist, onetime Communist parents had made sure I was never baptized. So a church wedding in Italy was conveniently out of the question.
Still, his reticence about the whole affair bordered on near-corrosive fear. If he got past his images of his walk down the aisle—the prayers and the spectacle—his mind wandered to the reception. Friends and my family crowded into some hotel restaurant and dining on average food, that, if his family actually did come, guests would talk about for years to come. What they liked, what they didn’t like, the portion sizes, who had gotten indigestion, who had drunk too much. He didn’t want a wedding that, at the end of the day, was associated with gossip, sweaty armpits, and family who clung together at one table, fearful of the people on the other side of the room. Somewhere inside he hoped he’d be able to escape the whole affair or at least make it as low key as possible.