From Scratch

by Tembi Locke

  I sat there, thinking half thoughts in our shared silence. Fragments of memory rushed in and receded with equal speed. In Los Angeles, I had become obsessed with remembering everything. I had a deep-seated fear of losing more of Saro in the form of lost memory. I wrote everything down. I kept a notebook with me to remember images, like his knuckles when he held a knife. How he dried the lower half of his body first after a shower. The near-pathological commitment he had to driving miles for a printed copy of his Italian paper, la Repubblica, from a newspaper stand bordering Beverly Hills because that guy held a last copy for him, rain or shine. The bridge of his nose the morning he had died. At Nonna’s table, the memories were coming faster than I could grab hold of. I felt light-headed.

  Nonna placed a shallow bowl of lentils with ditalini in front of me. On the table, there was water, no wine. Never wine. She didn’t subscribe to the proverb Mancia di sanu e vivi di malatu—Eat with gusto, drink in moderation. Nonna didn’t drink, never had in her entire life. Nor had she ever worn pants. I knew I’d have to find wine for the days to come.

  She had cut the daily bread, un filoncino, a small loaf that, from the moment we sat down, she would consume silently, tugging one piece after another, pulling and twisting deftly the way one pulls ripe fruit from a branch. On the table she had also placed marinated olives, pickled artichoke hearts, and a salad of tomatoes with oregano, drizzled with family-pressed olive oil.

  “Chiama la picciridda,” she said in Sicilian. “Call the little one.”

  I lifted myself from the chair with its handwoven straw bottom and headed toward the narrow stone staircase that led upstairs. In a strange way, I felt comfort in maintaining the treasure of simple routine. I was climbing a rough mountain, smack in the middle of the unknowable, stranded in the heart of a wild grief. I could only hope that by following the bread crumbs of the familiar routines, I would eventually find my way out of the forest.

  Upstairs, Zoela was on the bed. She had abandoned Pippi and the DVD. I couldn’t tell if she was awake or asleep. There is a natural drama to Sicilian light at certain times of day. That light was casting itself across her small, narrow torso, strong and commanding. It’s the kind of light that I have only ever experienced in Aliminusa. It came from the single window in Nonna’s large but sparsely furnished bedroom. Zoela must have opened the shutters and pushed them back on their hinges. It was one of the details of Italian life that she loved. She had brought light into a room that rarely saw such a light, especially at that time of day. We both always found the dark of Nonna’s house both disorienting and restorative. As I took in the sight of her back lying across the starched, sun-dried sheets, I imagined Saro there in the light. I imagined him holding her.

  “Vieni, amore. È ora di mangiare. La nonna ti ha fatto la pasta.—Come, my love, it’s time to eat. Your grandmother has made pasta,” I said. I was slipping into Italian with her, as I always did within days of arrival. “Eating will do us good.”

  “Carry me,” she said back to me as if she were scared or still sleepy. I knew that periodic emotional or development regressions were among the signs of grief in children. I’d seen it in myself, so I sympathized with it in her. I was willing to meet her where she was even if that meant carrying a seven-year-old. But I was secretly hoping that this was not what every day would be like. A fleeting but familiar flash of anger grazed me. For a split second, I wanted to kill Saro for dying. Those moments often caught me by surprise but also regularly appeared when I needed another adult to turn to for help. When she woke up in the night, when I needed an extra hand getting out the front door, when she wanted to be carried.

  “Sure, but when we get downstairs, you will walk to the table.”

  She knew there were few things I would deny her while this far away from home. Giving in to her needs gave me purpose as a mother, as a grieving person, and as a former caregiver experiencing disorienting withdrawal from a decade I had spent tending to someone else.

  A few minutes later, I pushed my chair in to the table and took in the meal before us, food that was both prayer and an oration of grief.

  “Ma che farai nelle prossime settimane?—What are you going to do in the next weeks?” Nonna asked me as Zoela reached for a piece of bread.

  I hadn’t thought past getting there and interring the ashes. The rest was a blank slate.

  “Non lo so—I don’t know,” I said.

  “Riposati, devi riposarti—Rest, you must rest.” She knew something about widowhood. So I listened.

  We continued eating. When at the table, all else was suspended.

  Her food went into me like mystical sustenance. I was like a child calmed by the comfort that lay in consistency and tradition—the comfort and consistency I craved. I had come to count on the woman stirring a pot. She showed up with steady grace and the understanding that the best she could give us was a full belly and lots of rest. It was a recipe to counteract the kind of brokenness the three of us—her, myself, and Zoela—now shared. There was a low hum of grief that undergirded everything; I heard it as constantly as the birds in the sky. It seemed as though everything going forward in my life depended on making peace with that hum.

  We had four weeks ahead of us. That was a lot of time for three grieving people to be together, a lot of unpredictable emotional terrain to be surmounted. I didn’t trust my own feelings. And I certainly didn’t trust that any of us was up for the work of creating a new relationship when we were all so raw. As I ate the last bite of the earthy broth of lentils, they were like flattened pebbles of promise in my mouth. Then I looked over to Zoela, who seemed momentarily content, at ease eating at her grandmother’s table.

  SCHIAVELLI’S CAKE

  “Saro, this is killing you.” I was holding a picture of a cherubic baby wearing a pristine christening gown with an adult-sized gold necklace and cross dangling from her tiny body.

  Since Saro had moved to America, his sister, Franca, had given birth to her second child. A child we had never met and, the way things were going, never would. Franca sent us pictures of her girls at holidays. But it was the baptism pictures of his second niece that showed me how dire the situation was.

  “I’m fine. I’ll see them one day,” he said, glancing over my shoulder, then abruptly turning away as if he saw something in the picture that made him nauseous.

  I had come to the realization that our marriage would suffer a silent loss if there weren’t some attempt to change the narrative of his relationship with his parents. Though they hadn’t exactly kept up the vow to never speak to him, the relationship was locked in a stalemate. They had exchanged hellos by phone only a few times in two years and mostly when Saro was sure his father was not home.

  “One day when? When someone dies?” I was not above employing a dramatic scenario to make my point. “You don’t want the first time you see your parents again to be at a funeral.”

  “I won’t go to anyone’s funeral.”

  “Okay, that’s extreme.”

  “No, I mean I can’t go to their funeral. There won’t be time. You can’t get from Los Angeles to Aliminusa in twenty-four hours.” He had screwed the top off a liter of San Pellegrino and was drinking it directly from the bottle.

  “Wait, you mean you’ve calculated this? The hours, the flights?” I put the picture into the kitchen drawer. “I had no idea.”

  “Of course I have.”

  “Sweetheart, that means if something doesn’t change, you could never see one of your parents again?”

  “Yes and no. I guess so. Well, yes.” He put the bottle into the fridge. “Let’s not talk about it.”

  But talking about it had become the thing I liked to do. I had made peace with their absence at the wedding, sort of. But I had never expected this to go on for so long. Now I was seeing that he had resigned himself to play out this Sicilian family melodrama to its painful end. And the more that landed on me, the more I needed to meet these people. Ignorance was changeable. My love for him was not. I
f they wanted to hate me or dislike me, then at least they’d have to hate me, not an idea of me. But enough was enough. It was time for a good old-fashioned Sicilian sit-down.

  I bought two tickets to Sicily for the next month. I added on a trip to Morocco, long on our wish list, in case our attempts at peace and reconciliation were met with indifference or, worse, overt hostility. I figured we could always make love on a tapestry in Fez and ride the train to Marrakesh drinking mint tea and devouring couscous and harissa at every turn. Morocco could be the palate cleanser if Sicily and family reconciliation proved too bitter a dish to digest.

  “We are going to Sicily,” I announced one night. Saro had just come home from his latest job at a five-star hotel in Beverly Hills. The smell of the grill and fryer filled the room as soon as he shut the front door. His clogs showed stains of soup or sauce, white with green flecks. Immediately I thought of herbed béchamel.

  “What?”

  “Sicily. We’re going to Sicily.” I took the phone off the kitchen wall and handed it to him. “Call your family now, tell them we are coming.”

  He hated an ambush. But ambushing had become the only way I knew to talk about the thing we didn’t talk about.

  “First of all, it’s six in the morning there.” He threw his bag and keys onto the counter with an emphatic thud.

  “They are farmers, no? Up with the chickens?”

  “Before the chickens.”

  “Even better.”

  “T., what are you doing? Hang up the phone. I just walked through the door.”

  I put the phone down. He took the stairs of our new home two at a time up to a hot shower and away from me.

  I shouted after him, “If you won’t call them, then write another letter. But soon. I already bought tickets.”

  He did call, and this time the response was an immediate, straightforward “Non venite al paese—Don’t come to town.”

  I was beyond floored. There wasn’t a word I knew in English or Italian to describe the pit in my stomach. Then, just as quickly, my spine straightened as though I were Oprah Winfrey’s character, Sofia, walking down the road in the movie The Color Purple. Those four words, “Don’t come to town,” strengthened my resolve. His family was so dysfunctional, I would have to be the one to take the mountain to Mohammad. I loved Saro in a way that left no alternative. Their resistance was in direct proportion to my growing determination to try to make some kind of peace. I could ultimately take his family’s rejection, if that’s how it went down. However, I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t throw one last Hail Mary pass in the direction of Sicily and try to end this.

  Saro, on the other hand, was nervous about the possibility that this trip would in fact prove to be the final rejection. If it didn’t go well, I imagined he’d quietly turn his back on them, push back his own history.

  Uncertain but undeterred, six weeks later, we boarded a plane to that ancient island in the middle of the Mediterranean, with the hope of maybe visiting Aliminusa, a town built over a fifth-century Arab outpost in a part of the world I had seen only in movies such as The Godfather and The Star Maker.

  What I knew about Sicily was snapshot details trickled down to me in the stories Saro had told me. He had played soccer at the edge of olive groves in shoes borrowed from an older cousin. His family could afford only one pair at a time, and his mother had forbidden him to ruin the shoes. He had eaten apricots off his grandfather’s trees. The town, for many years, had boasted more heads of livestock than people. The kitchen in his family home had been a stall for the family mule until he was a teenager. And there had been but one television in town during his childhood. Although I hadn’t seen childhood photos of him, I could clearly picture Saro as a boy, knobby-kneed with a head of thick black hair and piercing curious brown eyes. He had been too clever for a one-room classroom, terribly sensitive, and capable of harvesting a row of artichokes as fast as boys twice his age. He had kept a book of poetry under his bed at night. But there was so much I still didn’t know.

  Saro didn’t have high hopes for the trip. But he said that even if the meeting with his parents didn’t happen or, perhaps worse yet, if I met them and didn’t like them, he promised I would love Sicily. Of that he was certain. I wanted to believe him, because I knew how much my loving Sicily would mean to him. So I said, “Of course” while secretly setting my sights on Sicily as little more than a pass-through to Morocco.

  As soon as we landed, though, I was hooked. Sicily beckoned with her sapphire blue sea, her rocky arid terrain that, without warning, offered up verdant fields of poppies.

  We handed over our passports and checked into a small family-owned hotel on the northeast coast near Cefalù that we would call home for the next ten days. Me, the black American wife. Saro, the Sicilian son who had married a foreigner who hadn’t even bothered to take his name, legally or socially.

  Hotel Baia del Capitano was our base to get over our jet lag and take our time building a line of communication to Saro’s family in a town forty minutes away. The restaurant in the hotel became our second living room. We read the newspaper there, hung with the staff, ate with the chef. The foods I savored felt like the very origins of flavor; everything up to that moment now felt like approximations of tastes. I devoured tomatoes, fennel, asparagus, and oranges baked, cooked, sautéed, and cured into dishes that were pungent but delicate, complex but simple. The island was getting me even further into its clutches, one bite at a time.

  And there was nothing like seeing a part of the world previously unknown to me through the eyes of a native. It was sublime to see it through the eyes and stories of someone I deeply loved. Saro became my guide into the heart of his culture, his language, and his cuisine. I began to empathize with that part of him that was prone to reminisce after seeing Cinema Paradiso or Il Postino, each a cinematic portrait of Sicilian and island culture.

  Now, in Sicily, we made love to the sounds of church bells in the early morning, then rose with an urgency driven by the desire for espresso and the pleasure of chatting with locals. We fell deeper in love as the man I had married crystalized into focus, like seeing a part of him that had been invisible to me until it was contextualized. Home was making him more himself. Whether I met the parents or not, this trip had hooked us into each other more fully. We had traveled together in the heart of the conflict as a team, risking rejection but willing and openhearted. I began to understand the hidden parts of him, which needed the light of the Sicilian sun in order to breathe. And suddenly that awareness made the idea of possibly meeting his family less fraught. In a strange way, they no longer mattered. At least not in the way I had imagined they would. On that trip, it was as though I married Saro again and also wedded myself to his homeland.

  Still we remained hopeful for a reunion with his family.

  * * *

  The logistics of Operation Family Reunion went like this. Each morning we left word in town with Franca, telling her we would be at the hotel between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m., if anyone chose to come down the mountain and visit. Franca was desperate to see her brother in person. Since our arrival, she had been attempting to broker peace and convince their father to come with the family to meet us at the hotel. Family mores dictated that if his father refused to come, then his mother, as was the custom in the Sicilian patriarchy, would not come. And if her parents didn’t come, Franca couldn’t come. Going outside that ancient code of conduct would have been seen as a sign of disrespect, an act of defiance. Saro explained that it was a Byzantine arrangement, one that, if not handled carefully, could end in a jagged line down the center of the family, a war zone on both sides. Giuseppe, as was his right, was dictating the actions of the whole family, just as he had done two years earlier regarding our wedding.

  In town, it was no secret that we were less than twenty miles away, patiently waiting in a hotel. News had spread, as it does in small towns. Saro’s mom had sought counsel from the priest, she had talked to her closest friends. From what Saro t
old me, Franca and his mom “were working on it.” We just had to give it time. Every time he tried to explain, I threw up my hands and told him to pour me more wine.

  In the meantime, each afternoon we waited, sipping wine or espresso or both and biding our time in case anyone came to meet the prodigal son and his American wife. Those afternoons in the garden were surreal. We got dressed up. I put on makeup, styled my hair. I laid out the gifts we had bought as a gesture of goodwill. Then we waited like storefront mannequins with a Mediterranean backdrop until it was clear no one was coming.

  I felt as though I were in a parallel universe. Sicily seemed a place where individual free will had been abandoned and a town of people was under the spell of something greater than them—history, tradition, fear of reprisal. I had never been witness to a culture so willing to pledge allegiance to the group over an individual. Saro kept trying to explain to me that it was about keeping the peace. That families were forever divided when a wife or a daughter or a brother-in-law went against the head of the family. A visit could happen only with his blessing. Otherwise, it would all be rancor and tension with a hefty dose of gossip. He didn’t want that for his mom, he didn’t want it for his sister. So we just waited. And I held my tongue as my plan to take the mountain to Mohammad was going up in smoke.

  On the third afternoon of waiting, I looked out our hotel window onto the dazzling blue waters, and I broke. I finally allowed the disappointment, hurt, and rejection to wash over me. I had flown halfway around the world only to have no one stand up and do the right thing. No one was willing to put Saro and his feelings first. I had brought myself into exile.