From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(60)

By the eighth day of their stay, I had reached my limit. Saro and I were strained in our interactions, both fatigued for different reasons. I was tired of hosting and assisting, feeling subtly less than because I wasn’t a wife who bore children and ironed her husband’s underwear, as Croce did for Giuseppe. Saro was emotionally exhausted from constantly reassuring his parents that he would be okay.

“We have to get out of here and go to Houston, or I’m going to lose my mind,” I said as we lay in bed that night. His body was tender, undeniably fragile. Even his hands, the hands that had once labored to create magic, even they were soft. Attempting to process it all brought terror to every cell in my own body. I hadn’t said anything about the kid comment and had decided I never would. No good would come of that. “I need to see my parents. I can’t face Christmas morning with all this.” I pointed to his medicine on the nightstand and the crutches in the corner. But what I also meant was the presence of his parents.

“Okay, amore. If you want to go to Houston, we can go.” He leaned in to kiss me. Then he pulled me close. “It’s going to be fine. It’s all going to be fine,” he said. He wanted to believe it, he needed to believe it.

Neither of us said it aloud, but I believe that somewhere in that discussion was a desire for our families to meet for the first time. I think we both feared there might never be another chance.



* * *



That trip to Houston has become a composite of key moments, captured in photographs that help me remember the early period in his illness when I was so exhausted and traumatized that memory is hard to access. I remember taking Saro’s parents to see the Gulf Coast; Giuseppe casting a fishing pole for the first time; his parents giddy as they held up the gold medal my uncle Frederick had won for track and field in the 1976 Olympics; my dad taking them to a Texans football game and his dad waving a pennant when the cheerleaders took the field. I have a flash memory of Saro’s mom standing in a buffet line staring at trays of barbecue and shaking her head. That memory is the clearest because it happened just before we sat down to dinner together as two families for the first time. We ate at a large communal table at my aunt Rhonda’s house. Croce said in genuine bewilderment, “I don’t understand why Americans pile so much food onto one plate.”

“I don’t know if all Americans do, but Texans do,” I said with a smile, happy to be with my family and have her sitting at their table.

A tray of ribs was being passed around. “Mamma,” Saro said, “you don’t have to eat it all.” Then he took a rib just as my father offered him a glass of tea. The table was full of the southern soul food that nourished my family and told us who we were culturally. Food my family was always happy to share with others.

“I’ll try it,” she said. Then she stealthily took the meat off her plate and foisted it onto Giuseppe’s while he sat speaking Sicilian to my uncle. My uncle in turn looked to me for translation. Giuseppe was asking how much land it took to graze one head of cattle, a conversation that surprisingly was right up my uncle’s alley, because he was a rancher.

Nonna sat quietly observing the room, taking in the faces at the table, noting the gestures and interactions of another foreign language so far from her home. But mostly she kept looking at her son. Since her arrival, I had caught her casting long glances his way. I imagined that she was trying to process his physical changes: weight loss, thinned hair, the need for crutches. But in Houston at the table, she was looking at him in a different way. She finally spoke up sometime between the potato salad and peach cobbler. She turned to my sister, who was sitting next to her. “Non lo sapevo che mio figlio avevo tutto questo, questa vita, quest’amore qua.”

My sister called to me across the table to translate. But it took me a moment before the words could leave my mouth. I looked back at Croce, who held my gaze as I translated.

“She said, ‘I had no idea my son had all this, this life, so much love here.’?”

Saro had built a life for himself abroad, she could see that for the first time. A life that included a family that claimed him as their own. I saw the relief in her eyes.

And as I sat there with everyone eating—not just consuming food but sharing our dreams, our aspirations, our histories—I could see how the stakes, the specter of illness, had changed all our lives. What was important had changed. We were far from the wedding in Florence, reading telegrams from the half of our family who had refused to come because of race and fear. That trip to Houston was the first time we didn’t have to wonder what it would have been like to have both parts of who we were together in the same room.

I read somewhere that a wedding is more than just the joining of two people in unity; it is a symbol of the conjoining of two families.

That had not happened for us at our wedding. It had taken a rare cancer to bring these two very different families together.





RICOTTA




“La famiglia Gullo è tornata—The Gullo family has returned,” Nonna said, using the family name to call us one, to claim us all. She had never done that. She was wearing the same earrings she had worn for more than forty years and the same wooden cross necklace that her sister Carmela, the nun, had brought her from the Vatican. She rose from the bench outside her front door. Her wedding ring sat snug on her arthritic hands as she put her hand on my shoulder.