From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(42)

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.