From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(43)

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. If 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.