From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(50)
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.