From Scratch Read online

  Telling stories, particularly old stories and fables of Sicilian life, was a special connection Saro and his mom shared. They liked to revisit, through the oral tradition, a Sicily gone by. Now she was sharing a similar moment with me. And even though I had to ask her to slow down, repeat certain words in dialect, translate phrases into Italian, she was willing to do so. I wasn’t her son, but I could be her listener. It gave us a way to fill the silence we were learning to traverse. Nonna liked to dole out wisdom in the context of old parables. I guessed that the unspoken wisdom of that tale also had to do with good-byes and living with goneness. In one week, we’d be saying good-bye to one another. The pending departure was foremost in my mind. Earlier that day, she’d asked me if I’d started getting the suitcases ready. For an American like me that seemed excessive, but each summer she had encouraged us to have our suitcases packed two whole days before departure. “Think about what you want to leave here,” she had said. The statement dangled in the air.

  After three weeks in her home, I had come to feel a new bond with her, one forged through shared circumstances and love for Saro. I had grown a tiny bit more comfortable with our periods of silence. I respected when emotions swelled up and she told me not to cry. “Se cominici tu, non possa fermare—If you start, I’ll never stop,” she had said several times during my stay. She wasn’t denying me my feelings, but she was also letting me know that this was hard for her. She was doing her best. I suspected that she preferred to cry alone, as I had once seen her do while reciting the rosary.

  I was not doing much better, often crying at night after Zoela had fallen asleep. Good-byes have never been easy for me. But the idea of Zoela and me returning to Los Angeles to an empty house, to the slog of commercial auditions and dinners alone, was almost crippling, even if I was also ready to be back in my own bed, ready to see my friends and family. I was still leaving one of the most peaceful places I have ever known and relinquishing a certain closeness to Saro that could be found only in this community, in the presence of his mother, in her home, at her table. That indescribable closeness was overrun with loss, but it was also comforting. Part of me couldn’t take another day, part of me never wanted to leave. It was a duality that was difficult to make sense of. I kept thinking of something Vincent Schiavelli had once written of Sicily and L.A.: “It’s a strange conundrum. When I’m in Sicily, I want to get back to L.A. When I’m in L.A., I long for Sicily.”

  The question of whether we would return to Nonna’s next summer remained unspoken, mainly because I didn’t have a definitive answer yet. A year seemed so far away. There would be finances to consider, a mortgage to refinance, auditions, and the ultimate reckoning of whether I could face another season filled with so many bittersweet memories for me, for Zoela. Who knew where I’d be in a year? Nonna had to be wondering if we would come back again now that Saro’s ashes were interred. Sure, it had been our little family’s summer tradition, but she of all people knew the ways widowhood changed one’s ideas and plans for life. She also knew, I suspected, that although we had a strong tie that bound us to each other, we weren’t exactly close. It would be up to me to decide whether I wanted to come back.

  Nonna and I didn’t have a shared language with which to explore all that. So we simply didn’t talk about it. Instead what we had was our time together, especially in her kitchen, the place where her house came alive three times a day.

  She stood up from her chair and adjusted the nylon stockings that stopped at her knees. Then she turned off the flame and put a mismatched lid onto a pot of stewing tomatoes. They had been picked earlier in the day by a neighbor. By afternoon, they were sweating themselves out of their skins, reducing themselves into an intense juice and fleshy fiber that would somehow play a part in the evening’s dinner.

  “It must have time to come together,” she said, referring to the tomato sauce. I had begun to appreciate that in her world, nothing was rushed—love, grief, joy, or a pot on the stove.

  Zoela played upstairs with Rosa Maria, or “Rosalia,” as she liked to be called. She was the granddaughter of Giacoma, who lived at the edge of Via Gramsci. A year older than Zoela, Rosalia was easygoing and affable. The girls had met when Zoela was perhaps four or five, and they had been playing together each summer ever since. She was fascinated by a girl so unlike herself—American, black, bilingual, and with a mother readily willing to open her purse and dispense euros for gelato at the bar in the square. They were inseparable. They waited for each other at the front doors of their grandmothers’ homes. Zoela had told Rosalia where to find candy in the houses of the women of Via Gramsci. Their friendship was as firm as the cement between the stone blocks of the church’s facade.

  Upstairs they made forts with sheets, acted out various roles with large puzzle pieces of zoo animals and a one-legged Barbie. They communicated like twins with a shared language only they knew—part Italian, part Sicilian, part English. They found a way to bridge the vocabulary each of them didn’t know. When I had checked on them earlier, Zoela had told me to leave. She liked making Nonna’s upstairs her play domain each afternoon as the sun began to recede and the town came to life after the siesta. And while Nonna was at Mass, Zoela had gotten accustomed to leading Rosalia downstairs to swipe the Italian version of Twinkies that Nonna kept in a cupboard.

  * * *

  Two days later, I met a farmer while walking through town to mail a postcard at the post office. He was unloading almonds in front of his house, hoisting them from his truck to the narrow sidewalk with a swiftness that made me look twice. He was Nonna’s age. His face was both ancient and youthful, a network of lines etched around bright blue eyes that could have belonged to a movie star had he been born in a different place. I couldn’t believe how deftly he lifted his harvest given his arthritic, bowed legs.

  “Signora, prendane un sacchetto—Mrs., take a sackful.” He motioned for me to come closer. “Portine alla Croce—Take them to Croce.” Then he told me to tell her they were from her cousin. Before I could answer, he disappeared into his house and returned with a sackful for me to take home.

  Until that trip, I had never had a soft, green almond, tender and fleshy with a sweet aftertaste. They grow on trees everywhere around the periphery of town. In summer, they jut from the branches, green with a soft shell. They are an edible gift for those willing to do the work of il raccolto—the harvest. Sicilians are known to eat them alone as a snack or after dinner with fruit. But he was giving me a large sack of the dried variety because, as he explained, he needed to make space for the green ones he would be bringing home in the coming days.

  I took them and thanked him.

  It was a rookie move to try to carry three kilos of almonds through town. Halfway up the last hill to Nonna’s house my back told me to fuck off. When I drew back the curtains to enter her house, she shook her head as she watched the bag hit her kitchen table with a thud.

  “Che cos’è?—What is that?” She was already opening it for inspection.

  “Sono mandorle—They’re almonds.” I knew I had just brought more kitchen work to her home on an otherwise uneventful morning.

  “Dove le hai trovate? Ma sei pazza?—Where did you find them? Are you crazy?” Her tone belied the fact that she actually liked that people gave me gifts to bring to her. It was a sign of consideration and respect. Even if it meant that there’d be work to do.

  “I need my own mule when I walk through town,” I quipped as I watched her take the bag and walk it toward her “cellar,” the cool space under the stairs where she stored olive oil, a year’s worth of homemade tomato sauce, jars of caponata and artichokes, and bulbs of garlic hung on a rope. It was also the place where she napped on the hottest days of summer.

  The next morning I awoke to the sound of Nonna hammering steadily outside the front door. Looking from the door of the upstairs balcony, I saw wind snapping freshly washed sheets on the line. I tied my hair back, slipped on a linen dress, and went downstairs. I found her, mallet in
hand on an upturned wooden crate, bearing down on the almond shells, a blanket of massacred shells at her feet.

  “Can I help?” I asked.

  “You’ll only slam your finger.” Her voice was neither low nor loud. It came from the distraction of some thought. I knew immediately that she wanted to be alone. “I left the coffee ready on the stove for you,” she told me without looking up.

  I watched her work a few seconds more. Steady, repetitive. Peeling, slicing, chopping, working was how she contemplated life’s problems; prayer was how she turned those problems over to God.

  Just before I turned to go light the flame under the caffettiera, she called over to me, “If you want to take them back, I have to begin now, no?” She was talking about the almonds.

  Instantly I knew it was our forthcoming departure that was occupying her mind. It was on mine, too, as I drank my coffee, listening to the sound of cracking shells.

  A vendor came by, Nonna continued to work. Her cousin Emanuela shuffled down the street to retrieve bread. Nonna kept hammering. Emanuela returned, and I took the bread from her. Nonna went on cracking nuts. I placed the loaves near the stove, next to stewed artichokes and a pot of zucchini pieces jostling lightly in a broth of mint and basil over a low flame.

  Then I walked out into the morning wind. I got a brick from under the bench and placed it on the stone walkway. I took a second mallet, the one I could see had been next to her all along and began to pummel almond shells.

  “They are delicious. Here.” She gave me an almond from the shell she just forced into opening its heart.

  It was divine, its flavor gentle with a delicate hint of sweetness. The flesh of the nut was somehow structurally firm but also tender with delightful elasticity. When left unattended to dry out, almonds became ever better, more robust. Those Sicilian almonds were nothing like the nuts in six-ounce plastic bags sold at gas station checkouts in the United States. They were a singular act of natural goodness. They reminded me that a thing can be tender or hard, depending on conditions and care, intended or otherwise.

  I reached for another.

  “Non quella. È amara.—Not that one. It’s bitter,” she told me. “There is nothing worse than a bitter almond.”

  Amaro—bitter—is the one flavor profile that is at the epicenter of Sicilian culture and cuisine. It is a flavor foraged for in wild greens. It is distilled into liqueur. With amaro, Sicilians get intimate with nature’s lack of sweetness; they get up close to its marked intensity. In the kitchen, when Sicilians juxtapose something amaro with something dolce—sweet—they bring the contrasting flavors to life, make a stage for both, side by side. Bitterness, Sicilians understand, is an essential flavor both in food and in life. It has shaped the island’s culinary identity. There is no sweet without bitter. The poetry of the island tells us that the same is true of the Sicilian heart.

  Nonna showed me the moisture inside the shell I had just cracked.

  “When there’s too much rain, this can happen.” Inside the shell I saw a small amount of mold and rotting. “Too much of anything can ruin. Even water.”

  I knew she was talking about almonds, just as earlier she had been talking about a tooth. But I couldn’t help but feel that she was also talking about so much more. We had both been drowning on dry land in a sadness that seemed to stretch to infinity. One look at Nonna, and I knew she knew that life could be bitter—as could joy and love. She had lost her husband and her only son. She had had the taste of bitter almonds linger on her palate. She wanted to spare me the same.

  I worked with the wind at my back. Gentle and silent, the wind was a persistent character in a town of characters. It caused curtains to billow, windows to shutter. Damp socks batted against stone walls on the laundry line because the wind compelled them to. It carried the rooster’s crow above and across the bell tower, depositing a faint echo among the budding olive trees in the orchards at the edge of town.

  I was aware that in four days that same wind would carry me off the island.

  * * *

  Getting into the olive grove wasn’t hard. I found an opening past a large laurel bush where the earth was low and I could bend the rusted barbed wire without much effort. I squatted near a sprout of fennel, did a tuck and roll, and hauled my body inside the family land with only minor scratches on my legs, prickly spurs stuck to my pants. Small clumps of earth had made their way into my shoes, and my ankles were dusty, which I’d likely have to explain later. But I was in.

  Standing, I could see that many of the trees had tiny fruits, baby green olives not bigger than a small grape. Saro had taught me that when they are that hue of green, with a yellow undertone, they are months from harvest. A line of black ants scurried on a diagonal along the gnarled trunk of the nearest tree. Their procession seemed urgent. Below the tree and throughout the sloping grove, it looked as though the ground had recently been cleared. That would make getting to the chosen spot easier; I could walk without worry of snakes or large holes that would otherwise have been hidden by knee-high tumminia—an ancient variety of wheat that sprouts everywhere after the wind sows its seeds back into the earth each season.

  I moved deeper into the grove, carefully navigating the de-scending earth so as not to fall. Once I arrived in the center, I stood before the tree where I would scatter Saro’s ashes. The late-afternoon breeze moving in from the Mediterranean refreshed and emboldened me.

  The tree I chose was neither the largest nor the oldest. It was just one with the clearest view to the dazzling, ever-present blue sea, the one with enough level ground at its base for me to sit on because I felt the emotion coming on.

  Taking the small wooden box from my pocket and opening it, my hands shook just a little. I removed the clear plastic bag meant for small jewelry and opened the seal. If I had planned better, I would have had a prayer committed to memory, ready to recite. But it didn’t go like that. Standing in this sacred space of nature was the only form of prayer suitable to consecrating Saro to terra firma.

  The ashes left the bag easily, falling gently but slowly to the earth. I watched them disappear into the grayish sienna dirt. Then the last almost imperceptible bits were carried away by the wind.

  He was back, returned forever to the soil of his childhood, free between the sea and the mountains.

  When I finally stood, my shirt was stained with sweat and spotted with tears. The cicadas had never stopped keeping time. They were a Sicilian symphony. Then a tractor engine sputtered in the distance below. Life in Sicily went on.

  Part Three

  SECOND SUMMER

  Casa quantu stai e tirrinu quantu viri.

  Home for as long as you need it to be and land as far as the eye can see.

  —Sicilian proverb

  HEIRLOOMS

  Two days before the first anniversary of Saro’s death, I felt woozy as I stood outside Stage 7 on the Paramount Studios backlot in Hollywood when I was struck with a surge of grief. I was about to audition for a police procedural, a television pilot. And I could barely hold it together.

  It had now been fifty-two Wednesday mornings since Saro had died. Enough Wednesdays for Zoela to get taller, her baby teeth to become fewer. Enough Wednesdays for her to ask me again and again, “Why did Babbo die?” and have my answer still not satisfy. Enough Wednesdays to see just a little more peeling paint on our hundred-year-old house, enough Wednesdays to watch the apartment building next door empty and fill again. I had seen Wednesdays when I couldn’t get out of bed and Wednesdays when I couldn’t fall asleep, so weary and bereft I had asked other people to drive my daughter to school, pick up groceries at the store, stand at my dining room table and help me fold clothes.

  I had stacked fifty-two Wednesdays on top of one another, at the base of which was that Wednesday morning that had changed everything. In that time, I had been guerrilla grieving—stealthily mourning out of public view, using any tactics necessary to get by. Moreover, I had an unspoken belief that if I just pushed through and k
ept everything from falling apart, at the end of the first year things would get easier. They hadn’t, and I felt duped.

  Instead, I had come to think of my grief as a character in my life, something I had to get to know, befriend, make peace with, because it was bigger than anything I had ever known. It pulled me down and sometimes propelled me forward. That day, I wasn’t sure exactly what it was capable of doing.

  As I walked across the lot to the casting office, I rehearsed my lines in my head once again: “I found the body,” then “Perp never saw it coming.” Later in the script: “I’m not sure I want to be on this job.” There was a singular, personal truth in that last line. One year out, I still felt unsuited for the job of widow.

  I looked up at the looming water tower above the fabled Hollywood backlot. I loved the Paramount Studios. It had been the home of my first television series, and I never tired of its Italianate and Art Deco architecture. But the water tower gave it a small-town feel. The first time I had ever driven onto the studio lot, I had used the water tower as the landmark to find my way back to my car. It was emblazoned with the Paramount logo—a mountain peak surrounded by stars. As I headed to the audition, I wondered what it would feel like to stand at the apex of a mountain. To have climbed so far and be able to stand above it all, above the mist and the clouds. I wondered what a reprieve from the hard work of grieving might feel like.