From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(62)
One day I would have to articulate what at the moment remained unspoken: that we were a family stumbling toward connection and the process of forgiveness is sometimes graceless. I would tell her about the drive for love, the capacity for human change, and a reunion in a hotel garden by the sea. I’d have to try to illustrate how life required constantly repairing and rebuilding relationships. How her dad’s illness had brought us closer. And how her birth had changed everything.
She would know these visits as fixtures of her childhood. She had been coming to visit her “Nonno Pepe,” as she had called Giuseppe, and her nonna since she was six months old. Her relationship with them happened in fleeting moments, vignettes of connection. Like the summer when she was four and she had sat on her grandfather’s lap every afternoon, unaware that it was his final summer. He had been too ill to take walks with her, sick with cancer in his kidneys that had come on suddenly and aggressively. So she had blown bubbles in his face and tickled his neck to make him laugh. Their conjoined laughter in the air had made Saro cry. He was six years into his own battle, and he knew that was the last summer he would ever see his dad. That summer Nonna had seen both her son and her husband slipping away because of il male—cancer—at the same time. It had made her weak and desperate with heartache. After Giuseppe had died, she had donned her black widow’s weeds and would wear them the rest of her life, as was the traditional way. It reminded the community of her loss, that she carried mourning with her. It gave her a public role to play, the carrier of the stories and memories of the deceased. I’d have to tell Zoela all of that one day. And that the beginning of our story as a family did not foretell the ending. That time forgives.
All she had ever known was the love of two grandparents who had welcomed her with open arms because she was the beloved daughter of their only son. Whatever had come before was, as my own grandmother would say, “the road that got us there.”
And it struck me clearly in that moment that now Nonna and I were the ones standing at the end of that road. And we were starting down the beginning of another.
Zoela continued watching TV, seemingly satisfied with my answer/nonanswer. Nonna dried the last dish and moved to put the after-lunch espresso on the stove. I brought my attention back to the cheese and took one last bite of the tender, firm slice. Nonna saw me as she twisted the top on the moka macchinetta.
“It’s from the cheese maker across from the bar in the square. She and her husband make it. She has a daughter about Zoela’s age,” she said.
I had always been on the hunt for social hookups for Zoela while in Aliminusa. Now more than ever, providing her with peer interaction was the only way to get her to settle in, speak the Italian that I knew she could, and have unexpected moments of joy and spontaneity. Her cousins Laura and Giusy were much older, finishing high school and entering college.
“Zoela, do you want to meet the cheese maker’s daughter?” I asked her in Italian as I pulled another piece of bread off the loaf, topped it with cheese, and brought it to her. “We could sample everything in their shop.”
“Not really,” she said, indifferent to my efforts to expand her circle of friends.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t.” She shrugged, a sign that she was wholly uncommitted to anything beyond the moment right in front of her.
“But I’ll be there with you. Maybe we can get Rosalia to come with us.”
I was trying hard. It was something that I had been doing in L.A. as well. At home I struggled to keep her socially active. Being alone at home, just the two of us, was often the hardest parts of our days. I rarely had the energy after a day of auditioning, prepping meals, doing laundry, and car pooling to entertain her beyond just sitting together, curled up watching TV. We missed the way Saro had played guitar while she sang her lungs out to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” Instead, we watched Chopped and The Voice. Walking together to get ice cream was a significant outing most weekends. I knew she needed more. So my in-box and text threads were full of seven to eight exchanges with other kids’ moms trying to coordinate scheduling, figure out activities, discuss meal preferences. It was exhausting being a kid’s social planner. But hanging with friends was better than relying on me, her grieving mother, to be wholly present. I knew that if I didn’t actively step up the role of social coordinator, the two of us might get swallowed up in inertia and sadness. Worse yet, she’d be some modern version of Laura from The Glass Menagerie.
In Sicily, it was easier. Every kid ate pasta; no one was gluten free. If they wanted to play, they went outside and played. She could move around freely with a friend, buy gelato at the town bar without fear of getting lost. In L.A., though I was not a helicopter parent, she certainly didn’t make a move without my knowing her coordinates at all times. Here she roamed according to her own curiosity and interest. I was thrilled for her. And I was determined that we’d make cheese.
Later, as Nonna and I sipped espresso in the kitchen, I let Zoela shake out the tablecloth in the middle of the street. Then I walked four houses down to Giacoma’s, Rosalia’s grandmother. I asked about Rosalia’s whereabouts. Within ten minutes she was in Nonna’s kitchen and we made a plan to visit the cheese shop.
* * *
Two days later, Rosalia, Zoela, and I walked into Donatella’s cheese shop at 6:30 p.m. One glance, and I could tell it wasn’t like my favorite cheese purveyor and hipster haunt back in L.A., the Silver Lake Cheese Shop. It was not a swanky retail outlet replete with a tasting table and jazz piped in through Bose speakers. This was a real shop in the truest sense of the word. I knew from the minute I stepped down from street level onto the tiled floor and saw the larger-than-life stainless-steel cauldron in the room to my left that the work of making cheese happened there. Retail was secondary. Sure enough, there was only a small glass display case holding just two medium-sized wheels of cheese, and the case wasn’t even illuminated. There was no one manning the counter. The calendar on the wall was from the previous year. The shop was dark. Clearly cheese was made and purchased quickly in this shop. There was no need for copper-patinaed presentation plates straight out of Elle magazine or John Coltrane.