From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(22)

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 relationship 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.”

“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.