From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(55)
“Great, break a leg.” Although she ran a multi-million-dollar business, she loved the fact that I had made a career in the arts and always got excited about my auditions. “You’ll do great. I’ll pick up flowers. You deserve them.”
Ten minutes later I was seated in a waiting room full of actors. Five minutes after that I was in front of the camera. Another five minutes, and it was done.
When I got home from the audition, the sun shone through my kitchen window in a golden hue, bathing the hundred-year-old floorboards in a light that made me think of candy caramel laid in strips. I listened to the swell of silence that had descended on my house. I still hadn’t gotten used to it. At times it was deafening. The silence seemed to bat against the windows, rattle the panes. Zoela was at school, but I called out her name and then Saro’s to drown out the sound of nothingness. Then I pretended that Saro was calling from another room, lobbing easy conversation back and forth. It was a game I played to fill the emptiness, physical and emotional. Still, that day their names fell from my mouth onto the floor with a thud. Only silence echoed back.
In two hours, I could pick Zoela up from school. She would set the house vibrating with cartoons, card games, doll play, and music at the piano. She had recently written a story wherein a young girl had lost her mother because the mother had gone out “wandering” for the girl’s father, who had died.
Over the last year, she had marked her first birthday without her dad. She had often asked me, “Who will take care of me if you die?” The question peppered our conversations at the dentist’s, on airplanes, when she put her head onto her pillow.
“I am well, I am healthy, I am here for you. I plan on being here to see you grow old.” My answer had become a mantra.
“But you don’t know that for sure.” At eight years old, she knew about life’s trapdoors.
“You’re right. None of us knows when we will die. What matters is that we are alive now. And I am here with you now. Right now.” It was the kind of thing therapists and books had taught me to say to ease her anxiety.
With work done, the heaviness of the day was barreling down on me, and I was suddenly aimless and distracted. I needed fresh air. So I went outside to Saro’s garden, where fava beans were growing. It was the place in my home that lifted the heaviness from my heart. Resurrection, renewal, sustenance—the promise of this bean.
Standing in front of the central fountain, I remembered how the garden had originally come together in a January years earlier. By that spring, Saro had recovered from surgery and he was once again on chemo when I finally tasted the pasta con fave that he made directly from the garden. There was something about that first meal from his garden. He had found a way to transform anxiety, fear, and worry into something beautiful. It literally made me cry when I took the first bite. Right then, I vowed to plant fava beans every year going forward. When the season ended, we dried two handfuls of beans, and those were our seeds for the next year. It had been that way for five years.
Even this first year following his death, I had planted the beans again on a late-January day, the anniversary of when we had eloped in New York City.
As I surveyed the bounty in the garden, there looked to be five pounds of beans waiting to be picked. Saro had taught me how to eyeball a harvest. I wanted to make his favorite spring dish, purea di fave con crostini for the forty friends who were coming over to help me mark the anniversary of his passing. In two days, we planned to celebrate his life and raise a glass to the fact that Zoela and I had somehow made it through the hardest year of our lives. I had gone from being a caregiver, with its constant triage and putting out of fires, only to have that chaos give way to the melancholy of grieving wife. I wanted to acknowledge that transformation, that I was learning to survive. I wanted to get it right. So I started plucking the bean pods from the stalks.
As I picked, I felt grateful for those these beans would nourish. If friends are the family you choose, I have chosen the best family on the planet. They are my tribe. Each one came into my life through some chance encounter—a freshman college class, the first day on a new set, looking for shoes in the sandbox that belonged to our barefoot toddlers at nursery school, Saro introducing himself to the parents of other biracial kids in the park with the sentence “My kid looks like your kid, we should know each other.” My tribe comes from all walks of life, ages, interests, and professions—a mosaic artist, lawyer, teacher, therapist, investment banker, actor, writer, limo driver, cartoon artist. The common thread among all of us is a fundamental willingness to walk beside one another in the most uncertain and painful of times. They had come to me by chance; they had stayed by choice. I wanted them to have Sicilian fava beans. Beans that I had grown all winter in anticipation of this day. I wanted to huddle the team to let them know that their love and care in the preceding twelve months was the only reason I was standing upright.
Since this was my first time having people over to the house in big numbers, I was literally attempting to resurrect something—a tradition Saro and I had had of opening our home to friends for convivial connection and seriously good food. He had always been the magnet that drew people to our home. His company, his food, his rambling stories about his childhood in Sicily, where a teacher had once made the students walk home through town with “I am a donkey” signs pinned to their backs because they hadn’t been paying attention in class. Friends loved those stories of a time and place that seemed to be drawn from outtakes of Cinema Paradiso.