From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(58)

“Il cancro non c’è più. Sto molto meglio.—The cancer is gone. I’m much better,” he said in the most real and honest conversation he’d had with his parents in months.

I heard the quivering in his voice as he responded to a barrage of questions from his mother and father, who were both on the phone. His mother said, “Rosario, Rosario!” with such lament in her voice that it frightened me. It made me nauseous. It brought back all the doubt. I instantly understood exactly why he had waited to tell them. There was no way we could have navigated the previous months with the additional responsibility of managing their anxiety.

Saro cried when he hung up the phone. I left him alone. We were learning something new in our marriage—when to leave each other alone to allow space between us and when to draw closer. It had been five months of him being at home every day, not working, me caring for every aspect of his physical needs as well as the needs of our household. We were with each other 24/7, in the trenches. We were forming a new way of being that included allowing him to cry alone.

The day after he broke the news to his parents, Franca called to say his parents were coming to L.A. to visit him for Christmas. She had purchased the tickets on their behalf. She said the tickets would be cheapest if they stayed for a month. No one had discussed it with us. It seemed that a mother who had missed her son’s wedding would not miss being at his side during cancer. The idea of a month of my in-laws being with us in L.A. nearly stopped me cold. When I tried to suggest to Saro that it might be too long, too stressful, he said, “Tembi, let them do this. They want to help. I don’t know if it’s the right thing for us, but nothing is as we would have it in this situation.” Lying in bed, he rolled away from me to face the window. “Plus I don’t know when I will see them again.”

His parents were on a flight two weeks later. Since our first meeting five years earlier, I had been seeing them roughly once a year. We interacted the way distant relatives might do at an annual family reunion: exchanged pleasantries and hugs, smiled at one another throughout the day, and broke bread together without ever really scratching the surface of intimacy. I had accepted that I would never be close to his parents. Just being in one another’s lives was a huge enough hurdle to overcome in one lifetime. I had never imagined them coming to Los Angeles, seeing our life in person. Cancer had changed all that.



* * *



The morning of their arrival, I was getting the house ready while Saro rested, still too ill to do much. But not too ill to hide his anxiety or keep him from directing me through what needed to be done.

“Have you been to the store?” he called out from his resting place, our bed, surrounded by books and two issues of la Repubblica, his Italian paper, to keep him occupied.

“Yes,” I responded from the guest room across the hall, where I was making the bed and putting out towels for them.

“Did you get an iron?”

“What? An iron? Why? I don’t iron,” I said, walking to the entrance of our bedroom to make sure I had heard him correctly and to get a good look at the husband who was suggesting that our house suddenly needed an iron.

“Yes, an iron. My mother will need to iron.”

“Really, Saro, you want me to go out and get an iron on top of everything else? Seriously?”

“Tembi, she’s going to need something to do in the house. She can’t drive, she doesn’t know English, so she’s not going to watch TV. She’s going to want to do housework to pass the time. She will want to iron.”

For fuck’s sake, I thought. “Fine, Saro, after I finish cleaning and picking up your antinausea prescription, I will pass by the hardware store for an iron. Does it have to be a certain kind of iron?” I asked, my resentment on full display.

“Don’t be that way. You know I would do it if I could. I can’t even leave this fucking bed without your help. I just want things to go as easily as possible. They will need to be taken care of. I want this time to go smoothly.”

I knew he was right, and I also wanted peace and ease for him. He deserved that. He deserved time with his parents, as his life still hung in the balance.

We gathered them at Los Angeles International Airport. Saro’s mother greeted him tearfully; his father kissed him on both cheeks. They were seeing their son for the first time postchemo and postsurgery. The change in his appearance startled them.

As we drove through the Westside, past downtown, into Hollywood, toward our house, they looked out at the city lights, the endless flow of cars, the different styles of architecture, the proliferation of billboards, including one with the L.A. icon Angelyne. The cityscape was immense. In the back seat, Saro’s mom clutched her purse.

“Ma dov’è il centro?—But where is the center?” Saro’s father asked, looking out the passenger-side window.

“There isn’t one,” I said in Italian. “It’s a decentralized American city.” I didn’t know if he knew what that meant; part of me didn’t care.

“There are just lots of little neighborhoods,” Saro said in dialect, covering my rudeness effortlessly.

I heard Saro’s mom let out a sigh from the back seat. She was visibly distressed. This was all impossibly new to her: the trip, the city, the circumstances. Her concern for Saro was formidable.

Forty-five minutes later, we pulled up to our house. I turned to Saro. “Show them the way.” Then I sat in my car alone. I needed time to process what was happening. In the silence of the car, the tears hit me. I cried from being overwhelmed and exhausted by what life was asking me to do. The ways in which love required more than I felt I was capable of doing. Spending a month with my in-laws at a time when Saro and I felt so fragile felt far outside what I had signed up for. I wanted to run, I wanted my life back. Instead I wiped my face, took a deep breath, and opened the car door.