From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(25)
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.