From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(76)
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When morning broke, it was time to rise and start my third year of Sicilian July mornings as Saro’s widow. But my mind was still thinking of the dream. I was more aware than ever that I hadn’t had sex in nearly three years. On my annual visit to the gynecologist, she had joked that my lady parts might atrophy. The conversation had disturbed me so much that I had looked up the definition of “celibate” while still in the parking lot. Celibacy was for nuns, grandmothers, and women in a coma. Sure, I knew women my age who had lived through periods of celibacy. But they had been coming off a bad relationship or trying to heal a sexual addiction. Honestly, I felt like a forty-year-old virgin with twenty years’ experience. One of my married girlfriends had suggested masturbation. I told her that that was like telling someone who wanted a five-course meal to grab a can of Spam out of the bottom of her earthquake kit. Sure, it would do in a pinch as a bridge to get you out of disaster, but it is no substitute for a well-balanced meal. After that visit to the doctor, I had started doing Kegels in the car pool lane and while I stood at the stove in case I ever wanted to take my lady parts for a spin again.
Maybe Saro appearing in a dream was his way of reminding me about a part of myself with which I had lost touch since his death. Maybe he was inviting me to be open to the possibility again.
As I lay in Nonna’s house, Zoela asleep next to me, I knew I had spent a good deal of the last year of my life in the process of continually making peace with loss, taking wobbly steps forward. In two years, my disorientation had eased, but the sadness was still there. And although I felt a little more stable in the world, more comfortable navigating the changes that come with loss, my life still felt misshapen in many of the unfamiliar places. The waves of grief still came; I just had a better sense of how to ride them out. It was the reimagining and rebuilding that didn’t come easy. Before, the grief had been like being caught in the undertow. Now I felt I had fought my way to the top of the water. I could see the sky, but I had neither the energy nor the inclination to swim in a new direction. I was just learning to breathe again.
I know that people rebuild their lives all the time after divorce, job loss, death, illness. We are destined to have to remake our lives at least once or twice in a lifetime. I had come to accept that reconfiguring the pieces of my life, as both a solo parent of a still grieving child and a forty-something actress was something that would take time. And time was what Sicily gave me. So I lifted my feet from the bed and put them onto the marble floor.
The day stretched out ahead of me like an open field. I emptied my bags while Zoela slept the sleep of a child between time zones, languages, and worlds. Then I went downstairs to share a first espresso with Nonna.
I took her in for the first time since arriving the day before. She was doing well, was more joyous. Her smile met me like a familiar friend. She put a basket of fruit on the table, poured sugar directly into the moka caffettiera just as I set the demitasse cups on the table.
Before we could speak, Emanuela poked her head through the lace curtains that hung in the open doorway.
“Mi’ nora è tornata—My daughter-in-law has returned,” Nonna said, releasing a guttural laugh that could be heard two houses away. The word daughter-in-law in Sicilian is nora or nura, which, to me, is similar to the Italian word onore, meaning “honor.” It gave me an indescribable sense of warmth to be referred to as something that might in some way honor her.
She and Emanuela gossiped for a minute about the statue of the Madonna at the entrance to town. From what I could gather, it needed to be cleaned and adorned with fresh flowers. They felt that leaving the Madonna with the faded plastic ones left over from winter would be a sign of disrespect.
“But eat breakfast first. I’m going to get bread. How many loaves should I get you?”
“Two, the long ones.” Nonna gave her two euros from the stash under the vase of carnations sitting beside a picture of Saro and his dad. With that, Emanuela pivoted and was out the door nearly as quickly as she had entered.
Nonna and I went over the particulars of our lives since we had last sat down together: her blood pressure, my garden in L.A., work. We still talked on the phone weekly, but rehashing the news in person made it fresh and new again. I entreated her to report any new gossip, regale me with stories of local politics, tell me who was ill or shut in. It made her feel good to tell me about her world and listen to bits of mine. We both wanted to assure the other that we were fine. Pulling ourselves forward.
“That movie I filmed in Atlanta will come out in the fall.” I knew she would never see Dumb and Dumber To or any of the other work I had done that year. She certainly had no idea who Jim Carrey was.
She listened intently. To her, my work as an actress was magical, as if I pulled each job like a rabbit out of a hat. The unemployment level in Sicily was so high that the idea that I was working—even if she couldn’t quite understand what I did other than to describe it to strangers as “she works in the environment of film”—gave her satisfaction.
She folded her soft, fleshy arms across her chest and looked toward the calendar of saints on the kitchen wall, “After health comes work. In life, it’s good to have both.” Then she took off one house shoe, to give her foot a vacation from the straps of leather that left an impression across her instep. “And school, are you able to pay for Zoela’s school?”