by Tembi Locke
With motherhood had come the blinding reminder that I couldn’t fly from the anguish of what it means to be human. Life is tumultuous and complex. Illness had taught me that. Being a mother under the threat of Saro’s illness drove the message home.
In just a few months, Zoela was expanding the scope of my vision in the world, my vision of myself, my capacities. She brought forth a well of determination and power within me. But I also felt incredibly vulnerable.
“I’ll do anything to make sure you are okay in the world. I’ll do my best to spare you unnecessary hurt,” I told her as she slept. Yet I knew firsthand that mothers can disappoint, they can wound, they can make their love conditional. What mother hasn’t done that in the smallest of ways or even more egregious ones? I thought specifically about the years Saro’s mother had gone without seeing her child because he had chosen a love she didn’t understand.
That night I made a promise to myself that if I did nothing else, I would be a mother who worked hard to set my own conditions and ideas aside and see this child I was blessed to parent for the person she might be. I’d be at her wedding, I’d be there for births and deaths.
As I rocked her to sleep, the expanse of L.A. city lights twinkling through the window above my chair, I thought about the various sadnesses she would undoubtedly feel someday. Pain is part of life. That much I knew. If I could just teach her how to be resilient, how to love big, how to fear less. How to weather hurt, either at the hands of others or even the hurts she might unknowingly inflict on herself. I wanted her to know that love can come in many forms. That sometimes it can look like letting go, but it can also look like never letting go. That one day she might have to love someone in ways the world wasn’t ready for. That reaching for that kind of love would bring with it struggle, but in the end, it could be grander than her wildest imaginings.
BREAD AND BRINE
Seven years later, Zoela was playing upstairs at her grandmother’s house, watching Pippi Longstocking in Italian on a portable DVD player just a few hours after Nonna and I had left her father’s ashes entombed in the local cemetery. Downstairs, I watched as Nonna moved about her kitchen like a sturdy, silent ship navigating turbulent waters. Her kitchen was the space where I imagined she unthreaded the tapestry of her life, inspecting each interrelated thread. I could hear the cacophony of midday street sounds as they rose and fell: a barking dog, the idling of a tractor engine, Emanuela calling Assunta from down the street to tell her that she had picked up her bread from the baker on the way back from the market. The sounds were familiar, comforting and discordant with the reality of my life in L.A., where my own kitchen had fallen silent since Saro’s death. Just planting my feet in front of the stove conjured sorrow from deep within my bones. But here in Nonna’s kitchen I could sit. I could observe. I could watch an expert hand dice fresh garlic, layer salt into the sauce with generous sprinkles as I once had done with Saro. I could be in company. Silent company. There was more to be said than either of us knew how to say.
I studied Nonna’s kitchen. It was small, gallery style: utility sink, dish sink, stove lined up in marching order along a wall with laminate cabinets above. A backsplash of eight-by-eight-inch brown ceramic tiles and plain brown cabinets lined the space. There was a repeating motif of antique rural vignettes painted on three tiles: a man making wine, a woman serving a family dinner by oil lamp, and a mother and daughter washing clothes in the town square. At the end of the service line was an antique wood-burning wall oven, typical of the turn of the last century. It had been used throughout Nonna’s childhood. Her mother had baked bread in there daily. It was where they had boiled water for pasta. These days Nonna threw her compost trash into its belly through a black forged-iron door with a latch.
At the other end of the kitchen was the house’s single bathroom and next to it a closet that held the refrigerator. Form followed function here. Each of those spaces had become what they were as modernity had arrived in town during the twentieth century: electricity, running water, refrigeration. Appliances were placed where there was space and where there was access to water. Design was informed by access and necessity and often according to the timeline in which a family could afford appliances and upgrades. Refrigeration was the last technological change to arrive in the home, so when a family could afford a refrigerator, it was put into the only space that was left. People worked with what they had. It was an approach to the structural changes of life that I suddenly understood with new urgency.
A big loss has a way of magnetizing all the other losses in one’s life. I was just beginning to realize that in the months after Saro’s death. His passing had resurrected all kinds of feelings of loss, including the dissolution of my parents’ marriage, which had happened when I was, as my therapist had pointed out, seven years old. The same age as my own daughter. It seemed that parts of me, both past and present, needed deep soothing, and grief commingled past and present. That Zoela and I had experienced a loss at the same age seemed to make the younger parts of me crave stability with searing intensity.
The comfort I got from Nonna was a strangely familiar feeling. It reminded me of being at my own grandmother’s house in the summers after my parents’ divorce. My maternal grandmother was the one who had cared for me and Attica each summer in the wake of my parents’ divorce. Then I had been a child grieving the separation of family. My parents had divorced, having given up on the notion of forever, and had started down separate paths. Leaving us with my mother’s mother for the first few summers postdivorce made the most sense as they went about the business of rebuilding their lives. Grandmother was retired, and as a former educator, she wanted to influence the lives of her only grandchildren. She wanted to give us something we couldn’t get at home: stability.
As a child I often sat silent, watching my grandmother Odell cooking in her kitchen. Studying kitchens and the women who commanded them is something I have done since childhood. Hers was the place where I played as a toddler on the floor and ate seated on a step stool. It was a modest brick house painted white with black shutters. And, like Nonna’s house in Sicily, you entered through the front door right into the kitchen. Built in the 1950s, it held all the promise of that American era: four-burner stove, laminate countertops, a Formica table, a refrigerator, and a deep freezer. An island with swiveling bar stools and a view into the living room that flanked her kitchen. A floor-to-ceiling pantry with a built-in lazy Susan and spice rack. My grandmother had risen above her sharecropper roots; her kitchen was a testament to that.
Her mother, my great-grandmother Fannie, lived two blocks away, and her house was where I spent afternoons shelling peas or playing jacks. She owned a roadside café for “colored folks” traveling up and down Highway 59 and the secondary roads that led to the rural black settlements that eventually became East Texas towns. Fannie served fried pies, chicken biscuits, soda, collards—staples of the South and of the piney region between Houston, Dallas, and east Louisiana, places with sloping porches, shotgun shacks with newspaper fastened over the windows for insulation in the winter. A casual breeze would send little tears of flaking white paint from those porches into the wind like snow. The boards underneath were gray and ashen and gave off splinters without warning. People kept one chair at the porch’s edge, a single pine rocker, maybe two for when someone stopped by to offer them a bushel of corn, sweet and fresh off the stalk. My family came from those sloping porches and various small backwoods points in between, including the town of Nigton, Texas, where generations of my family had been first slaves, then sharecroppers, and finally educators. From them I had learned about food as the physical and emotional sustenance that carried people across the terrain of hard-lived lives.
In Grandmother’s kitchen, I took my first steps in cooking. I first learned to stir SpaghettiOs with a wooden spoon in a tin pot. I wanted to mimic her, her actions. In retrospect, I understand that she let me “cook” so that she could tend to bigger matters. She was caring for her aging mothe
r, her mother-in-law, and her husband, my grandfather, who had Parkinson’s disease. While she cooked, she sighed, leaking out her own pain, resentment, and loss. She put all that into her food, in combinations of sweet and savory, brine and butter. I could tell she cooked out of necessity, but she also cooked in a way that seemed to me a form of self-soothing. And I didn’t bother her. Something told me, even as a child, to leave her alone or be quiet. Her kitchen taught me that flavor can bring forth love and set aside anger, and that something sweet can mend a fence and soothe a heart. “The love of a peaceful home” was her guiding principle.
* * *
Nonna stood at her stove, her back to me. That was how our meals had always begun. She put a metal pot on the gas flame. I noticed that the pot was smaller than the ones she had used in the past. The boiling pot was always the promise of pasta cooked in water flowing from the aqueduct that brought water from the Madonie Mountains. But there was less pasta to make that day. Saro could easily devour two bowls of anything his mother made. But that day it would be only Zoela and me.
I watched her salt the water with five-finger clusters full of sea salt likely extracted from the salt flats a two-hour drive from here. The salt was fine and damp, as if recently risen from the sea. She dusted what remained on her fingers over the water like a wistful prayer. I was still under the spell of the cemetery, the birds, the heat that commanded submission.
I couldn’t quite tell if Nonna even wanted to make this meal. I couldn’t distinguish need from obligation—the need to do something to feel alive in the face of loss or the obligation to feed guests who had come far. I suspected that neither of us was particularly hungry.
But that was what we did. It was what happened at midday, every day. The Sicilian lunch is sacrosanct. It was, as they say in Sicily, “Nè tu letu, nè iu cunsulatu—Neither you happy nor I consoled.” Still we would eat.
I had changed into a tunic dress. Nonna had taken off her formal black shirt and skirt and exchanged them for the simpler, more comfortable widow’s clothes she wore at home. The uniform was the same, a black shirt and tube skirt. The at-home version was less restrictive, made of cotton. She wore her wooden cross at her neck.
“May I help you?” I had asked that question in her kitchen for nearly fifteen years.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. She liked her kitchen to herself.
She had never let me cook in her house. Never. Not even her chef son was allowed to. No matter how many nights I slept under her roof, no matter how many times she washed my bras and ironed my underwear, I was her guest. Even if I was also family. She preferred to work alone, at her own pace; she didn’t want company while she cooked. In the past, I had just passed through, made small talk, but had never lingered from start to finish. She, like many women in town, saw their time at the stove as their domain. I was forbidden to even set the table.
So I stepped out on the street. I heard the loudspeaker of the latest roving street vendor: “Susine, pere, pesche, uva!” He was hawking fruit—plums, pears, peaches, grapes—varieties of which could only be found in Sicily and rarely in the supermarket. The vendor was fifty or so, narrow-faced, unshaven, tall with a subtle hunch in his back. He boasted a grin with teeth spread out in his mouth like missing dominoes. I’d seen him for years. For me his face was a collage of the island’s cultures: dark olive skin, blue eyes, the Greek nose that appears on statues of Apollo, topped with a head of curly black hair. I was fascinated by Sicilians, a populace that over centuries had found themselves subject to first one, then another ruler from Greece, Spain, North Africa, and Normandy. Sicilians were a mixed culture of victors and vanquished, people who managed the often uneasy mix of different languages, religions, and ethnicities that had come to coexist. In the spectrum of Sicilian faces you can see a combination of African, Greek, Arabic, Jewish, Spanish, and Norman people. As a result of all that invading and accommodating, Sicilians are characterized by an openhearted skepticism that I find both vexing and endearing. Their food is an intoxicating mixture of cultures colliding on the plate.
The merchant stopped the Piaggio minitruck in front of Nonna’s house, leaning his body out of the driver’s-side window, microphone in hand. It’s an old tradition in Sicily, the roving vendor calling out his goods in the form of song. Saro once told me that perhaps it dated back to the Arab rule in Sicily.
He stopped midway up the street, right in front of me. The location allowed the women who lived down the street to walk up to purchase and women from the houses at the top of the street to walk down. It was egalitarian, it was fair. Also, his speaker was cheap and didn’t work well. From that point on the street the sound carried best. Even the women who had televisions blaring while they cooked could hear what he was offering. He continued singing out his wares: plums, pears, nectarines. I knew immediately that he wouldn’t get much business. He was late in the day to be selling fruit. No one, I suspected, was going to step away from her stove to inspect, discuss, and then purchase fruit, especially since many of the varieties of fruit he was selling had already been gathered from nearby orchards by the husbands, sons, and sons-in-law who tended to the land. In Nonna’s kitchen, I had noticed a small wooden crate of fresh pears on the counter. It must have been left while we were at the cemetery. Her house was always unlocked. The pears, I assumed, were from her cousin Cruciano’s farm.
The man got out of the cab of the tiny truck and approached me. “Buongiorno, signora.” He extended his hand. I saw soil under his nails. When I grabbed hold, his hand was rough to the touch. “Condoglianze per suo marito—My condolences about your husband.” And just like that I wanted to fall into his hairy forearms. Something inside me softened. This was what a small town could give me that L.A. never could. The guy at the grocery store in Silver Lake didn’t know my husband was dead even though I have shopped there weekly for years. Here, a fruit vendor whose name I couldn’t remember knew and remembered that my husband had died.
“Grazie.” My knees suddenly felt like noodles, and I was surprised by the sound of vulnerability in my voice.
He steadied his arm to brace my body, which was leaning on its axis.
“Ma che si può far? La vita e così. Si deve combattere. Punto e basta.—But what can one do? Life is like that. We have to fight. That’s enough.”
I nodded in agreement, and something more broke loose in me. My eyes formed pools of tears. He neither flinched nor looked away. Instead he nodded back. “Sì, è così—Yes, it’s like that.” Then he took a step back, turning to his fruit truck. He reached for a susina—a Sicilian plum, small, tender, and oval with a purple that boasts blues and reds. He put two fistfuls of plums into a bag and gave them to me.
“Grazie, Salvatore” I heard over my shoulder. My mother-in-law had been standing on the threshold unbeknown to me.
“Signora, ha bisogna di qualcosa?—Do you need anything?”
“A posto—I’m good,” she said.
With that, Salvatore returned to his vehicle, grabbed his mic, and started once again calling out fruit as though it were a serenade. Within seconds, he was backing down the street, hanging his torso out the window and lighting a cigarette all at the same time. His engine sputtered in reverse.
I turned back into the house with my bag of plums.
“Banane e Patate viene più tardi,” Nonna told me. The vendor they all called “Bananas and Potatoes” would come by later. He was called that because those were the first words he called out as he rode up the street to sell his merchandise. I hoped to be asleep later in the day when he passed. Suddenly I needed to lay my head down. It would take everything I had to make it through lunch before stumbling upstairs to bed for a nap.
Back inside, I saw Nonna set the plates out on the kitchen table. Eating in the kitchen was always the case for breakfast. But for lunch and dinner we had always, for as long as I could remember, eaten at the dining table in the other room. The table sat under an oblong frame with a copy of a nineteenth-century roman
tic oil portrait of Joseph, Mary, and the baby Jesus. The baby Jesus sat full and upright like a man but with a teenager’s face. He was extending to Joseph a cluster of lilies still on the stem. In the shallow background, there was a valley, then fields, then mountains. I knew from my art history studies that the lilies represented purity, chastity, and innocence. But lilies could also represent resurrection. The painting told me of innocence but foreshadowed the resurrection that would come after that innocence was lost. I had always liked it. I found its obvious pastoral romanticism the most optimistic piece of art in a house full of crucifixes and photographs of popes. But it was its handcrafted frame that I really loved. It had always reminded me of a similar frame my great-grandmother had in East Texas. Hers framed a trio of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy. That was a different kind of romantic optimism. A different kind of loss. Eating at the dining table in Nonna’s had always been a private link to another life I had thousands of miles away. And I’d enjoyed that connection. But today that table was not set. Instead it served as the altar for a burning votive candle on a handmade lace trivet.
Back in the kitchen, Nonna moved a pot of lentils to the back burner. Prepared earlier that morning, before Zoela had awakened and asked to see the ashes, they were simmering again. I smelled garlic. I knew there was mint from the terra-cotta pot she kept under the bench on the sidewalk outside her house. We would have the lentils with the pasta, I suspected. They were grown here. I had never eaten lentils growing up. In fact, I don’t think I knew what lentils were until I was past the age of twenty-five. It was Saro who had taught me how to enjoy them and later understand that in Sicily, they are more than a staple. They are fortune, and they are fate. From a culinary point of view, they are eaten for sustenance, especially in times of drought or scarcity. From a cultural point of view, they are known to bring luck to travelers, good fortune at the New Year. But they are also a mourning food. Lentils bring the full human experience to the table. Lenticchie were the food this family turned to for comfort and sustenance when life gave you something irreparable.