From Scratch Page 18

  A golf cart passed me with a twenty-something assistant on NCIS: Los Angeles talking on a headset; a messenger dumped his bike by a palm tree before disappearing into the commissary. For a moment, I thought to stop inside and get an espresso. Then my cell phone rang. It was my mom.

  “Have you landed?” I asked. She was set to arrive later that day from Houston. My dad and Aubrey were also coming to town to help mark the first anniversary. I had planned a gathering of friends at the house. No one wanted Zoela or me to be alone. Least of all us.

  “What can I pick up from the store?” she asked. “I wanted to call now in case you’re busy with Zoela later.”

  She knew I didn’t usually answer my phone in the evenings. The end of the day was still unpredictable for us. Some days were still hard, especially as the anniversary neared. Zoela had returned to sleeping in her own bed, but we needed lots of lead time for her to feel safe and secure enough to fall asleep. Then I slumped into bed myself, worn down by single parenting while grieving. Often I would lie awake. When I did finally fall asleep, I was visited with a recurring dream of Saro and me making love on the beach, as we had done in Greece and Elba. In the dreams, there were sand dunes that formed around a tent on the beach where we met daily to wrap our bodies into each other. He entered me and I cried out, and then I’d look out to see the waves approaching. I could see that the shelter would be washed away. Us included. And in the dream I’d say, “Hurry, hurry, let’s do it.” Then I’d awaken to silence.

  “I don’t know, Mom. Can we think about groceries tomorrow? I’m actually walking into an audition.”

  “Great, break a leg.” Although she ran a multi-million-dollar business, she loved the fact that I had made a career in the arts and always got excited about my auditions. “You’ll do great. I’ll pick up flowers. You deserve them.”

  Ten minutes later I was seated in a waiting room full of actors. Five minutes after that I was in front of the camera. Another five minutes, and it was done.

  When I got home from the audition, the sun shone through my kitchen window in a golden hue, bathing the hundred-year-old floorboards in a light that made me think of candy caramel laid in strips. I listened to the swell of silence that had descended on my house. I still hadn’t gotten used to it. At times it was deafening. The silence seemed to bat against the windows, rattle the panes. Zoela was at school, but I called out her name and then Saro’s to drown out the sound of nothingness. Then I pretended that Saro was calling from another room, lobbing easy conversation back and forth. It was a game I played to fill the emptiness, physical and emotional. Still, that day their names fell from my mouth onto the floor with a thud. Only silence echoed back.

  In two hours, I could pick Zoela up from school. She would set the house vibrating with cartoons, card games, doll play, and music at the piano. She had recently written a story wherein a young girl had lost her mother because the mother had gone out “wandering” for the girl’s father, who had died.

  Over the last year, she had marked her first birthday without her dad. She had often asked me, “Who will take care of me if you die?” The question peppered our conversations at the dentist’s, on airplanes, when she put her head onto her pillow.

  “I am well, I am healthy, I am here for you. I plan on being here to see you grow old.” My answer had become a mantra.

  “But you don’t know that for sure.” At eight years old, she knew about life’s trapdoors.

  “You’re right. None of us knows when we will die. What matters is that we are alive now. And I am here with you now. Right now.” It was the kind of thing therapists and books had taught me to say to ease her anxiety.

  With work done, the heaviness of the day was barreling down on me, and I was suddenly aimless and distracted. I needed fresh air. So I went outside to Saro’s garden, where fava beans were growing. It was the place in my home that lifted the heaviness from my heart. Resurrection, renewal, sustenance—the promise of this bean.

  Standing in front of the central fountain, I remembered how the garden had originally come together in a January years earlier. By that spring, Saro had recovered from surgery and he was once again on chemo when I finally tasted the pasta con fave that he made directly from the garden. There was something about that first meal from his garden. He had found a way to transform anxiety, fear, and worry into something beautiful. It literally made me cry when I took the first bite. Right then, I vowed to plant fava beans every year going forward. When the season ended, we dried two handfuls of beans, and those were our seeds for the next year. It had been that way for five years.

  Even this first year following his death, I had planted the beans again on a late-January day, the anniversary of when we had eloped in New York City.

  As I surveyed the bounty in the garden, there looked to be five pounds of beans waiting to be picked. Saro had taught me how to eyeball a harvest. I wanted to make his favorite spring dish, purea di fave con crostini for the forty friends who were coming over to help me mark the anniversary of his passing. In two days, we planned to celebrate his life and raise a glass to the fact that Zoela and I had somehow made it through the hardest year of our lives. I had gone from being a caregiver, with its constant triage and putting out of fires, only to have that chaos give way to the melancholy of grieving wife. I wanted to acknowledge that transformation, that I was learning to survive. I wanted to get it right. So I started plucking the bean pods from the stalks.

  As I picked, I felt grateful for those these beans would nourish. If friends are the family you choose, I have chosen the best family on the planet. They are my tribe. Each one came into my life through some chance encounter—a freshman college class, the first day on a new set, looking for shoes in the sandbox that belonged to our barefoot toddlers at nursery school, Saro introducing himself to the parents of other biracial kids in the park with the sentence “My kid looks like your kid, we should know each other.” My tribe comes from all walks of life, ages, interests, and professions—a mosaic artist, lawyer, teacher, therapist, investment banker, actor, writer, limo driver, cartoon artist. The common thread among all of us is a fundamental willingness to walk beside one another in the most uncertain and painful of times. They had come to me by chance; they had stayed by choice. I wanted them to have Sicilian fava beans. Beans that I had grown all winter in anticipation of this day. I wanted to huddle the team to let them know that their love and care in the preceding twelve months was the only reason I was standing upright.

  Since this was my first time having people over to the house in big numbers, I was literally attempting to resurrect something—a tradition Saro and I had had of opening our home to friends for convivial connection and seriously good food. He had always been the magnet that drew people to our home. His company, his food, his rambling stories about his childhood in Sicily, where a teacher had once made the students walk home through town with “I am a donkey” signs pinned to their backs because they hadn’t been paying attention in class. Friends loved those stories of a time and place that seemed to be drawn from outtakes of Cinema Paradiso.

  After his death, I feared that our friends would stop coming over because I was not like him. I didn’t have his easygoing, drop-by-anytime, open-door policy. I was more rigid, a woman who relied on making plans to the point of pathology. But I hoped that by hosting this gathering I could bring back both some of the spirit of Saro’s conviviality and a house full of people eating, spilling wine on the table, and laughing at years of memories.

  I went back inside the house and dumped a minimountain of fresh fava beans from the garden onto the kitchen island, ready to make his favorite spring dish, but I couldn’t remember all the steps. I remembered the shelling and boiling part. But the rest was vague. Should I puree them with a bit of the water they were boiled in, or should I make broth? Should I add garlic or shallots? Garlic, I thought. Pepper? How much olive oil? Would butter work?

  When in doubt, there was only one other person I could call.
Nonna.

  “How are things in town?” Apart from cooking tips, she was now the only person with whom I spoke Italian regularly. Our thrice-weekly conversations kept me somewhat fluent, a tie to my former life. It was the way we stayed connected and kept current with how each of us was doing in Saro’s absence. He had talked to his mother daily after his father had died. It seemed natural that she and I keep up the tradition after Saro died. It had drawn us closer.

  “Beh, the usual. I’m not going out much. There’s no use taking my sadness on the road,” she said, responding to me in half dialect, half Italian. “But I will be at Mass for the anniversary.”

  A monthly Mass during which Saro’s name was read was her way of marking time. I hadn’t figured out how to tell her that we were having a gathering at the house in his honor, a celebration of his life. “Celebration” seemed the wrong word to use with a woman for whom there was no such cultural ritual. I had had many moments like this with her, when I had worried that something I’d say would get lost in translation. It was another way that Saro’s death kept reverberating. He would have known what to say, he knew the cultural ins and outs: what to omit, what to gloss over, what to explain in detail. In his absence, I was sensitive about how my language or misuse of it would create hurt or confusion.

  “Zoela and I are having people come over. My family is in town. We will commemorate Saro.” I had pulled up the Italian word for “commemorate” while I was on the phone with her. “And I’m making the fava beans from the garden.”

  She knew about the heirloom beans, passed down through generations in Sicily, that we had been growing every year. It made her happy to imagine them growing in foreign soil, feeding us thousands of miles away. She gave me tips on how to keep the beans creamy once pureed. Then we talked about Zoela and school. She asked me if Zoela still asked about Saro. And just before we were about to hang up, she surprised me. “Are you coming to Sicily this summer?”

  “Yes, we will be there,” I answered before my brain had time to calculate a response. The reflexiveness of my response surprised me. “I think it will be good for us,” I heard myself say.

  I hung up the phone and looked at the pile of fava beans. Some people have heirloom jewelry. I had fava beans.

  * * *

  Two days later, I put my energy into making an altar-like memory table in the room downstairs where Saro had passed a year earlier. Zoela and I lit candles around the room. I put on his favorite music, laid out his favorite books. We put a rosary around the statue of Buddha. Then I opened the pocket doors and said a prayer. An hour later, one after another, friends and family filled the house. I invited everyone who arrived to pass through the room, if they wanted, and leave a message for Saro. They could do it silently or openly or write it down in a book of remembrance.

  Outside, the back yard was teeming with people, all in midconversation about Saro, life, current events, food. The fountain bubbled, the scent of jasmine filled the air. That day the Los Angeles spring sky was bright and giving.

  As the afternoon moved toward the softening of twilight, we all went inside. Thirty or so people huddled in the living room around the fireplace, the piano, and the large picture window that looked out onto Saro’s garden.

  “Thank you all for being here. Saro would love that we are all gathered. He’s gathered here with us. And I know he’d have some story to tell. But for today, I’d like anyone who wants to to share a story about him.”

  Zoela sat on my lap as the room came to life with stories of his friendship, idiosyncrasies, political rants, gentle spirit, hospitality, and food. And of course, people talked of his love. For me, for Zoela. A few of our musician friends picked up his guitars, and an impromptu jam session took hold of the house. Piano, bongos, acoustic and bass guitar filled the air. It was the most alive I had felt in a year.

  When everyone left, well after 9:00 p.m., I was tired but still in the afterglow of so much love. As I put away the leftover food, I noticed that some of the fava bean puree remained in the fridge. I thought about my conversation with Nonna days before, the way I had been so worried about what I had said or not said. I had committed myself to seeing her again. There would be another summer. And just like I was still figuring out how to cultivate and prepare the beans on my own, I still had to figure out so much more—in life, in parenting, in the intimacy needed to stay close to his family across culture, geography, and the landscape of grief.

  AT THE TABLE

  “You know, you don’t have to do this. People do leave,” Julie said as we sat at The Ivy on Robertson. It was three months after Saro had been diagnosed with a soft tissue cancer that had metastasized to his bone, and he was in the midst of undergoing indeterminate rounds of debilitating chemotherapy. Julie was my acting coach, friend, and mentor. Even more relevant was the fact that her husband had died when she was in her early thirties, leaving her to raise a son all alone. She knew about grit, adversity, and making the best of the hand you are dealt. She had also faced life-threatening illness herself. “It can be too much, not what you signed up for,” she continued, looking me dead in the eye.

  Just two nights before, Saro and I had experienced the lowest point in our marriage. We were holding each other in bed after a particularly difficult week of chemotherapy. His immune system was reduced to so few white blood cells that we could practically have given each of them a name. The situation was dire. So I kissed him as we lay there and ran my hand along his chest.

  He moved my hand away and said, “I think you should take a lover.”

  “What?” He had never said anything like that. I felt the room spin. “No, absolutely not. No, Saro. I love you and only you. We’re in this together.”

  We hadn’t had sex in months. He had been too sick, too weak, too nauseous. Neither of us had spoken about it directly. We just held each other each night and then rolled over, resigned to whatever sleep we could find.

  “I will not take a lover. You are my lover. Period.”

  “I just don’t want you to suffer so much. You have needs, and I can’t meet them.”

  “If you say one more thing, I am gonna kill you. Stop it. Don’t do this. We’re fine.” I put my hand back onto his chest and gave him a kiss. “We will be fine.”

  Then I turned from him with a private understanding that we were in new psychological territory. It wasn’t just about fighting for his life; part of this would require fighting for our marriage.

  I had just shared that with Julie. I thought she’d cheer me up, say something to lighten the moment, lift my spirits. I had never expected her to suggest I leave him.

  “What are you talking about?” I demanded, an odd feeling ghosting up my neck, but before I could discern it another rushed in, anger. I pushed back my plate and clocked a room full of the strident celebrity hangers-on for which The Ivy was known. The setting was absurd to discuss cancer and leaving Saro. I suddenly felt weary. This lunch was the opposite of the easy, breezy girls’ time she had suggested when she had convinced me I needed a moment of levity after months of intense caregiving.

  “I’m serious. Leaving is an option,” she pressed on, undeterred. She even poured herself more tea.

  “No, there’s no way. I would never leave Saro.” Did she not get it?

  “Then,” she said slowly, “you have to choose this. And I mean really choose it.”

  She took another bite, sipped her Earl Grey, and leaned back. She had elicited a response from me, exactly as she’d intended. Then she continued, “Do your best and keep your heart open. Show up in the face of the unknown. And he, no matter how bad it gets, has to do the same. If you’re in it, you’re in this together.”

  I left The Ivy that day with the understanding that my marriage could go deeper than either of us had imagined. Or we could become strangers to each other as we fought a common enemy. That I would have to choose the path of caregiving. But even more important, I realized for the first time that what we were up against would require me to sh
ow up for Saro in a way I had not ever had to. That conversation with Julie gave me the awareness that it was my turn to be the kind of person who could stand in the rain for hours, steadfast and open, ready and available to this man, come what may.

  * * *

  Many rounds of chemo, three hospital stays, and a major surgery later, Saro still had not told his parents about his diagnosis.

  “I want to see how the complete treatment goes first,” he had told me in the days immediately after his diagnosis. “I want to wait for results. I don’t want to worry them. It will kill my mother.”

  He didn’t want to hear the worry in his mother’s voice half a world away at the same time that he was barely able to hold his own life together. I understood, but still it bothered me. I had told my parents right away, I leaned on them. They encouraged Saro, even offered to help financially since he was no longer working and his medical costs were staggering. I didn’t like having to withhold the incredible information from his family. We finally had open communication with his parents. Not telling them felt like a betrayal, a glaring lack of intimacy. But he had his reasons. Chief among them was that there was nothing they could do so far away and that the worry they would carry would be too much. He wanted to wait. So I made Saro a promise to say nothing, a promise that made me see the many forms of divisiveness cancer wrought. We were back to keeping things from the Sicilians.

  However, as Christmas approached, Saro had completed more than four rounds of chemotherapy and had had his knee replaced with an implant prosthesis, rather than having his leg amputated at his femur as we had feared. He was still walking on crutches. We had been told that his femur and tibia would take months to heal around the prosthesis and months would go by before he could walk on his own again. In the meantime, I helped him to be mobile and he had in-home physical therapy as we waited for his immune system to recover before he could receive more chemo in the new year. He chose that as the time to finally tell his parents that he had been diagnosed with cancer.