From Scratch

by Tembi Locke

  As we settled into our seats, I sensed that this was an important first, testing my ability to step into the old me, my adventurous self, the person who had traveled so much before cancer and caregiving. Did she still exist? Could I awaken that old self? With Saro, I had seen nearly every corner of Sicily, but there were some places, special places, that he and I had longed to go to but never could due to his illness. I had visited Stromboli twenty years prior as a single coed but never with Saro.

  I told myself that in my new life, I would be the one to show Zoela the world. I would have to show her that we could still find kernels of joy or excitement in the midst of grief. I didn’t yet know it to be true, but I wanted to test the idea. Stromboli seemed a symbolic, epic first step. But once we were on the boat and the engines turned and the underwater propellers set us into motion, I realized I had miscalculated.

  My anxiety swooped in like a cleaver hacking down on a chicken bone. Five minutes into a nearly four-hour ride, and I was riddled with fear of the things that could go wrong, aware that I was now alone with Zoela on the open sea without cell reception until we reached land. Also, I had no real plan as to what we would do when we arrived. I had never traveled with her like this alone. In her daypack there was an envelope with the emergency contact info I had typed up back in L.A. It held copies of our passports from both nations, in case we got separated or something happened to me. If all hell broke loose, I wanted people to know to whom she belonged, whom to contact, and that this little girl with pigtails and brown skin was not alone in the world. I had spent hours on the Internet looking for tips on how to travel abroad as a single parent. That’s how I had learned that when traveling abroad, solo parents who have different last names from their children, which I did, can experience challenges. I needed some document that united us on paper, something that reconciled our different last names. So in addition to the picture of the two of us together, I hyphenated my name to “Locke-Gullo” on the emergency contact list. Then I typed, in bold, “PADRE MORTO 2012—FATHER DECEASED 2012.”

  I didn’t want to transmit all of my fears to Zoela, so as she fell asleep on my lap, I whispered into her ear, “Sweetheart, we’re gonna get to climb a volcano and see lava.”

  Then I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the geological wonders of Stromboli, the memory of molten earth, sea, wind, and Mother Earth coughing up her inner core. The magnitude of a volcano and its constancy in the face of so much human frailty fascinated me. There was something so primordial about it, something about the way its aliveness contrasted my grief. The island was a magnet for a widow, adventurer, curiously creative like me. Or so I tried to tell myself.

  As I caressed the top of Zoela’s head, I conjured up joyous images of us happily trekking up a volcano, spending an afternoon on the black sand beach, watching lava set against the backdrop of the setting sun in a faint blue sky. I fantasized about the two of us being transformed as we set out on a kind of pilgrimage to a place where humanity had managed to make peace with the impermanence of life. The people of Stromboli lived at the base of an active volcano, for fuck’s sake. Though it hadn’t done damage in hundreds of years, if there ever were an emergency, there’d be no easy way out. Yet these people carried on their lives with that ever-present awareness, accepting throngs of seasonal tourists, then living in relative solitude in the off months. The idea of this place was both alluring and vexing. I tried to lull myself with the hum of the boat’s engine.

  But my anxiety was bigger than my National Geographic musings. It grew into a free-form amoeba, attaching itself to all manner of doomsday possibilities—from the boat sinking to Zoela getting seasick to my being incapacitated by heat to losing my American Express card and having to wash dishes to pay for our boat fare back to Cefalù. Suddenly all I wanted to do was get back to land, back to Aliminusa, back to the safety of Nonna’s house. Then it hit, a reckoning of who this widowed me might be. I was either willful or naive or, worse yet, both. What in the hell possessed me to do this? I wasn’t twenty years old anymore, I didn’t have a partner to back me up. I was taking a young child for a long adventure with no adult companion. No extra set of hands. Suddenly I was hyperaware that we were away from Nonna’s kitchen and community. We weren’t surrounded by people who knew us, nor in a place where we instinctively felt protected. Where Zoela’s whole well-being didn’t depend exclusively on me. If anything happened—illness, accident, loss of documents—in Aliminusa I had a town at my disposal to help remedy it. And I’d certainly have to entertain Zoela at times, ply her with gelato when she bumped up against the inevitable boredom, and possibly carry her when she got tired. I had taken a grand adventurous leap and then panicked once my feet left the ground. So much so that I lifted Zoela’s head off my lap, reached for my bag, and popped an Ativan.

  German and French families sat around us on the boat along with some young Italian couples eager to brown their skin while lying on black volcanic sand. Zoela and I were among a handful of Americans, mostly young college kids with greasy hair and wrinkled shorts they had pulled from the backpacks they were using to hike through Europe. We were the only people of color.

  Out on the open sea, in a boat full of strangers, I became acutely aware of my vulnerability and in turn Zoela’s—the structural rawness in our lives and our inability to handle any additional upset. I pulled her closer and sent a prayer out into the horizon.

  * * *

  The first thing I noticed when we got to Stromboli was the port. It was much more built up than when I had been there twenty years before. The second thing I noticed was Rocco, my one-night stand, now two decades older. It wasn’t hard to miss him. He was positioned near a bar at the port. The identifiers were all there—the Vespa, the same frame, the same face, each a little more worn. I let out an audible cackle. Saro, you are heckling me from the heavens.

  Seeing Rocco at the port greeting throngs of tourists was like peering through a looking glass into an audacious parallel universe. In that universe, the twenty-year-old me had made different choices. I had chosen Rocco, my one-night stand, and that romp on a black sand beach at midnight had turned into a life serving beer to tourists in the summer season and ironing his underwear in the off-season. Rocco was a 3-D, bronzed-by-the-sun, cautionary tale. For every romantic cliché—nice girl forever crushing on unattainable bad boys, Italian gigolos on the prowl for American coeds—we had been both. Only he was clearly still at it. One look at him, and I drew Zoela closer.

  I wanted to warn her that men perched on a Vespa are like gelato that looks like pistachio but tastes like anchovies. But I decided that was a conversation for another time, a future way off.

  Instead I was surprised by a feeling that crept over me, a subtle, almost indecipherable sense of injustice. How was this man still there after twenty years? A lifetime had passed for me with a breathtaking love, a marriage, a child, and death. So much sweeping change. Yet here he was, as fixed and constant as the volcano behind him. I felt a ping of vague resentment in my belly as I stared at Rocco. He was a sore point, a visual demarcating my life before Saro and my life after. His presence was a reminder of Saro’s absence.

  I took a deep breath, trying to relax and take it all lightly. Okay, Universe, I get it. You are mercurial.

  Then I steered us along the length of the port hand in hand, away from any possible eye contact with Rocco. Within a few steps, I suddenly felt emboldened, invisibly stronger. I had brought my daughter this far. I had done it. Alone. My earlier doubt melted away, I felt capable. As though maybe, just maybe, I could navigate the complexities of my new life and not get completely lost. Or, at the very least, I could get Zoela and me onto and off of an island far from home. Or maybe it was the Ativan talking.

  I squeezed her hand and pointed to the top of the volcano ahead. “Sweetheart, that’s an active volcano. The first one you’re ever seeing.”

  She took one look at it and then turned to me. “How long are we going to be here, Mommy? I’m hungry.
”

  Of course, children have priorities that don’t include volcanoes and memories of one-night stands.

  I promised pizza and gelato, magic words that can shift the mood of any reasonable person. Then we started our way into town, following the narrowing ascending street that I remembered from years before. I knew there would be places to eat along the way because of the smattering of tourists headed in the same direction. If nothing else, we’d have a great meal on the island. Now that I was here, it didn’t much matter to me that we actually trek the volcano. The trek, at least the one I was navigating internally across the landscape of loss, had already begun.

  Half an hour later, we were seated at a restaurant perched in the foothills of the volcano with a head-spinning view of the Mediterranean. Zoela ordered spaghetti alle vongole—pasta with clams, fresh parsley, and red pepper flakes. When I was seven, on trips to East Texas, I had eaten canned Vienna sausage and drunk Tang by the gallon. She was her father’s child, in all her culinary sophistication.

  The clam dish was something that I almost cautioned her against. All I could envision was the shellfish hitting her stomach the wrong way and an ensuing disaster on the boat ride home. But she wanted it. And Saro, I knew, would have said, “Yes, go for it. Enjoy.” I wasn’t proud that I was becoming a mother more familiar with no than yes. So I encouraged her to have the pasta. “But maybe don’t eat all the clams. Just a few,” I advised.

  A quick scan of the leather-bound menu, and I knew what I wanted, pasta con pesto alla siciliana. What makes the dish stand out are the two ways it differs from its sniveling sibling, the pesto you find in every American supermarket. In Sicily, the chef uses almonds instead of pine nuts, and vine-ripe tomatoes are added. The almonds give it a robust body and a dense texture. The tomatoes add a rosy under hue and a fruity acidity to the dish. The whole entrée announces its presence in vibrant earth tones and a fragrant intermingling of basil and tomato.

  Zoela and I ate in silence, something we had been learning to adjust to since Saro’s death. When something so big has happened, chitchat seems banal. Even to a seven-year-old. Plus, in my experience, two adults were always better than one when it came to drawing conversation from the under-ten set. Saro had effortlessly found ways into Zoela’s ever-changing topics of interest. That day I felt I had exhausted the conversation landscape. So I drank a local white wine from a quarter-liter minipitcher, the perfect amount to push through dinner and still have my faculties intact.

  Zoela unpacked her My Little Pony figurines from her backpack and lined them up on the table as our additional guests. In another life, I would have told her, “No toys on the table.” But we were in the kind of life where finding moments of joy was like finding a winning lotto ticket in an empty parking lot. You took them, and you didn’t ask questions.

  “How about we toast Babbo?” I asked after a few moments. All the books on grief and children suggested talking about the lost loved one, bringing him or her into everyday conversations.

  “Do we have to?”

  “No, I guess not. I was just thinking about him.”

  “I don’t really want to toast him.” She had lined up the empty clam shells on the rim of her plate. “I just want to know why he died.”

  Some kids ask Why is the sky blue? Why can’t my tongue touch my nose? This was my daughter’s Why?

  “Sweetheart, he was sick, very sick, for a long time. What I know is that he fought to stay alive as long as he could because he wanted to be here for you.”

  “Well, I don’t like loving him. It hurts.” She didn’t take her eyes off the clams.

  “I know. It will feel that way for a long time. That’s what people tell me.”

  She moved the pony that was wearing a periwinkle-colored felt wide-brimmed hat, which made it look as though it were attending a wedding at Windsor Palace. Then she said, “Well, I just miss him. So I wish I didn’t love him.”

  She had said that before. She had also said she wanted to die, to join him. She had said she wished I were dead and not him. She had said many things, things that were hard to hear, harder still to push through. Things the therapist and books all said were very normal. When those moments happened, when the grief was too big and it threatened to buckle the frame of the house, we’d often go to the back yard of our house and lie on the grass, put our bodies prostrate on the earth. On the blanket looking at the stars, I would tell her to give her hurt to the stars. They could take it. I told her she could say anything to them. She could cry, she could scream, she could curse. Anything she felt. She often said only one thing: “Babbo, you should not have left me.”

  Now, seated at a table nestled at the foot of a volcano, I told her, “Not loving him would only make you feel a different hurt. It’s because there was so much love that there is so much hurt. And he loves you always and forever.”

  “Well, I’m gonna stop loving him,” she said emphatically, convinced of her own power over love. Pools formed in her eyes. But she continued, “And being here makes me miss him, and I don’t like that.”

  I felt seasick on dry land.

  “Being here in Stromboli? Or here in Sicily on the trip?”

  “Both.”

  She had said it, the thing that worried me. That I was a mother intent on opening wounds for which I had no salve.

  The waiter appeared and poured more water. I started to order more wine and then realized I still had a few ounces left in the quarter-liter carafe. I had to face this as clearheaded as fermented grapes would allow. For a moment I watched the skinny, black-haired waiter move on to other guests at other tables—families who were actually on vacation. Moms and dads with cherubic toddlers and moppy-headed teens. People jovial and sun-drenched. People Zoela, Saro, and I had “sort of” been, could have been, might have been but for il destino—destiny.

  “Angel Pie, to stop loving your dad is no more possible than to stop the sun and moon. His love is part of you.”

  She looked at me long and hard, penetrating me with her deep brown eyes. As though she didn’t like my words, me, the conversation, her life. Then she cast her eyes outward and down to a cluster of stray cats gathered on the clay tiles of a roof below. She made the tiniest shrug of her shoulders and then asked, “Can I have another clam?”

  Fuck, have them all.

  * * *

  The rest of the day passed uneventfully as we moved from tourist shop to gelateria and back to tourist shop. She wanted a dolphin figurine fashioned from the black volcanic rock that was everywhere on the island. It was tourist kitsch, but I was happy to comply. We passed Rocco again at the edge of a crowd in the port. He stood sun-drenched in too-tight shorts, schmoozing with tourists. I pitied the duo of twenty-something blondes in bikini tops he was talking to. “Get on the boat, girls,” I wanted to say. “Trust me, he’s not worth sand up your ass.”

  At sunset, Zoela and I climbed back onto the ferry. When it pulled out into the open sea, the captain allowed the vessel to idle as the sun turned the sky amber. From the crowded deck, we watched the volcano erupt. Incandescent liquid rock spouted into the sky, the earth’s inner core in full purgatorial glow. To be bobbing on the open water and watch the earth cough up its molten core, expelling it into the sky, opened my heart as wide as the day Zoela was born. It was perhaps the most spectacular experience in nature I had ever had. I was glimpsing the earth in progress, bearing witness to geological history. I held Zoela tight, I held Saro close in the locket around my neck. I felt he was with us, bearing witness to his wife and daughter in progress. We were survivors of a kind. We held, between us, a kind of secret of life and what mattered most. And that secret, that deep understanding of the constancy of nature and its opposite, human impermanence, was what I hoped would eventually help us regain our equilibrium.

  After the sun had set and we were traversing the water once again, Zoela fell asleep on my lap. I stared out a portal window of the lower deck into the noir sea, illuminated only by an undulating streak of
moonlight. Though it was impossible to see anything, I kept looking. In the darkness I saw a sliver of the moonlight dance on the water. It was a visual metaphor of that precise moment in my life—a fragment of light and darkness. I hoped that the next path in my life would be illuminated the way the moon brought light to the waves.

  BITTER ALMONDS

  “La lingua va dove manca il dente—The tongue goes where the tooth is missing,” Nonna said to me as we sat talking in the kitchen before her afternoon Mass. Zoela and I would be returning to Los Angeles in a week, and Nonna was telling me a story from her childhood about a boy who liked a girl his parents didn’t approve of. One day he took the girl, unchaperoned, into the fields outside of town. They spent the afternoon in an old mule stable and then he returned her to her parents that evening. In the Sicily of Nonna’s childhood, that was akin to eloping. It meant that the couple had to get married because the girl’s virginity was in question. There would be gossip and shame.

  When the boy returned home, his outraged parents barred the door, banishing him. They tossed his clothes into the street and set them ablaze. He never went home again. And the girl’s family refused to let her marry him. He was destined to be alone. And he was until the day he died. Nonna concluded that ill-fated love story, a version of which existed in nearly every small town in Sicily, with a proverb about a tongue and a missing tooth.

  I was intrigued as she recounted it to me. Its meanings were multiple, and coming from Nonna, given our personal history, it was undeniably significant. We had avoided the fate of that family, rising above lives that played out like characters in a Sicilian morality play. We had bridged estrangement; there were no clothes burned in the street. Where we stood that day, the piece of the story that was most relevant was that the boy had spent his life tracing what was gone: family, a girl, his dignity. She was telling me that throughout life, we revisit the empty spaces. That was her understanding of grief. That we are always trying to reconcile memory with reality. The tooth was a metaphor for all the missing things we lose in life.