From Scratch Read online

  “Il cancro non c’è più. Sto molto meglio.—The cancer is gone. I’m much better,” he said in the most real and honest conversation he’d had with his parents in months.

  I heard the quivering in his voice as he responded to a barrage of questions from his mother and father, who were both on the phone. His mother said, “Rosario, Rosario!” with such lament in her voice that it frightened me. It made me nauseous. It brought back all the doubt. I instantly understood exactly why he had waited to tell them. There was no way we could have navigated the previous months with the additional responsibility of managing their anxiety.

  Saro cried when he hung up the phone. I left him alone. We were learning something new in our marriage—when to leave each other alone to allow space between us and when to draw closer. It had been five months of him being at home every day, not working, me caring for every aspect of his physical needs as well as the needs of our household. We were with each other 24/7, in the trenches. We were forming a new way of being that included allowing him to cry alone.

  The day after he broke the news to his parents, Franca called to say his parents were coming to L.A. to visit him for Christmas. She had purchased the tickets on their behalf. She said the tickets would be cheapest if they stayed for a month. No one had discussed it with us. It seemed that a mother who had missed her son’s wedding would not miss being at his side during cancer. The idea of a month of my in-laws being with us in L.A. nearly stopped me cold. When I tried to suggest to Saro that it might be too long, too stressful, he said, “Tembi, let them do this. They want to help. I don’t know if it’s the right thing for us, but nothing is as we would have it in this situation.” Lying in bed, he rolled away from me to face the window. “Plus I don’t know when I will see them again.”

  His parents were on a flight two weeks later. Since our first meeting five years earlier, I had been seeing them roughly once a year. We interacted the way distant relatives might do at an annual family reunion: exchanged pleasantries and hugs, smiled at one another throughout the day, and broke bread together without ever really scratching the surface of intimacy. I had accepted that I would never be close to his parents. Just being in one another’s lives was a huge enough hurdle to overcome in one lifetime. I had never imagined them coming to Los Angeles, seeing our life in person. Cancer had changed all that.

  * * *

  The morning of their arrival, I was getting the house ready while Saro rested, still too ill to do much. But not too ill to hide his anxiety or keep him from directing me through what needed to be done.

  “Have you been to the store?” he called out from his resting place, our bed, surrounded by books and two issues of la Repubblica, his Italian paper, to keep him occupied.

  “Yes,” I responded from the guest room across the hall, where I was making the bed and putting out towels for them.

  “Did you get an iron?”

  “What? An iron? Why? I don’t iron,” I said, walking to the entrance of our bedroom to make sure I had heard him correctly and to get a good look at the husband who was suggesting that our house suddenly needed an iron.

  “Yes, an iron. My mother will need to iron.”

  “Really, Saro, you want me to go out and get an iron on top of everything else? Seriously?”

  “Tembi, she’s going to need something to do in the house. She can’t drive, she doesn’t know English, so she’s not going to watch TV. She’s going to want to do housework to pass the time. She will want to iron.”

  For fuck’s sake, I thought. “Fine, Saro, after I finish cleaning and picking up your antinausea prescription, I will pass by the hardware store for an iron. Does it have to be a certain kind of iron?” I asked, my resentment on full display.

  “Don’t be that way. You know I would do it if I could. I can’t even leave this fucking bed without your help. I just want things to go as easily as possible. They will need to be taken care of. I want this time to go smoothly.”

  I knew he was right, and I also wanted peace and ease for him. He deserved that. He deserved time with his parents, as his life still hung in the balance.

  We gathered them at Los Angeles International Airport. Saro’s mother greeted him tearfully; his father kissed him on both cheeks. They were seeing their son for the first time postchemo and postsurgery. The change in his appearance startled them.

  As we drove through the Westside, past downtown, into Hollywood, toward our house, they looked out at the city lights, the endless flow of cars, the different styles of architecture, the proliferation of billboards, including one with the L.A. icon Angelyne. The cityscape was immense. In the back seat, Saro’s mom clutched her purse.

  “Ma dov’è il centro?—But where is the center?” Saro’s father asked, looking out the passenger-side window.

  “There isn’t one,” I said in Italian. “It’s a decentralized American city.” I didn’t know if he knew what that meant; part of me didn’t care.

  “There are just lots of little neighborhoods,” Saro said in dialect, covering my rudeness effortlessly.

  I heard Saro’s mom let out a sigh from the back seat. She was visibly distressed. This was all impossibly new to her: the trip, the city, the circumstances. Her concern for Saro was formidable.

  Forty-five minutes later, we pulled up to our house. I turned to Saro. “Show them the way.” Then I sat in my car alone. I needed time to process what was happening. In the silence of the car, the tears hit me. I cried from being overwhelmed and exhausted by what life was asking me to do. The ways in which love required more than I felt I was capable of doing. Spending a month with my in-laws at a time when Saro and I felt so fragile felt far outside what I had signed up for. I wanted to run, I wanted my life back. Instead I wiped my face, took a deep breath, and opened the car door.

  When I went inside to join the Gullo clan, the first thing I saw was Croce and Giuseppe wandering around our home, touching the handrails along the stairs, opening the fridge, looking at the fountain in the atrium. Giuseppe tapped the copper-pipe railing that led upstairs. He stuck his face into the dryer. Croce took her shoes off and sunk her stockinged feet into the carpet.

  By the time I took them upstairs to the guest bedroom, it was obvious that they were proud. Not because the house was particularly big or opulent in any way. It didn’t matter that the beds still didn’t have frames or that we had Ikea side tables. It was their son’s house, something he had managed to own as an immigrant in a country that they themselves had found overwhelming and inhospitable.

  When I suggested that they should rest after more than twenty hours of travel, they balked.

  “Abbiamo portato da mangiare—We brought food,” they said in unison. “We need to unpack it.”

  Within a matter of minutes, two of their three suitcases were open in the hallway upstairs, and they began arguing over what to make for dinner from the fresh produce they had brought.

  Then Giuseppe took off his homemade money belt, an old undershirt Croce had stitched with muslin and fashioned with a draw tie. I could see a stack of euros inside, enough for a monthlong stay. That kind of money was the result of years of harvests, years of savings. He handled the money belt carefully, resting it on the floor so that he could freely unpack the food, unencumbered. Then we went downstairs to where Saro was waiting, still unable to navigate stairs unassisted.

  “Passami il cibo—Pass me the food,” he yelled up to his mother.

  Over the railing, Croce handed him eggplant, winter cardoons, a string of braided garlic, and artichoke bulbs for planting followed by bottles of tomato sauce, a two-gallon tin of olive oil, jars of marinated artichoke hearts, a small wheel of cheese, dried oregano, and plastic bags containing chamomile flowers still on the stalk and bundled with a tie.

  I learned two things about them in that moment. One, that my in-laws were wholly unaware of the fact that transporting fresh produce into the United States was illegal. I was shocked, staring at a suitcase full of food directly from the fi
elds of Sicily. How they had gotten bulbs of garlic, winter greens, and cheese through customs, I will never know. And two, that they had no faith in American grocery stores. If they were going to a foreign country, they wanted to bring what they knew: good olive oil, tomato sauce, caponata, garlic they had grown with their own hands.

  I helped the process along by taking the remaining items down to Saro. I was ready to laugh with him about how absurd it all was. Instead, he met my sarcastic smile with genuine excitement. “Bellissimo! Facciamo una pasta?—Beautiful! Shall we make pasta?”

  It was nearly 10:00 p.m.

  Half an hour later, Saro was talking to his father in the living room and I was showing my mother-in-law around our tiny kitchen. I shoved cardoons with the roots still intact into the lettuce crisper alongside my California rolls.

  She started cooking that night and didn’t stop for the next month. The house always smelled of something simmering, sautéeing, or frying. Once again it had the familiar noises of clattering dishes, flames clicking into action, the opening and closing of the oven door. Croce seemed happy to do it. It gave her purpose each day.

  We got Italian stations on satellite TV for Giuseppe, and when he wasn’t yelling at then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi on the screen, I was tasked with entertaining him on trips to Home Depot. He walked the aisles, marveling at all the choices, American surplus on display. He wanted me to translate everything from drills to drains to screen doors.

  After a week, it was clear that I was to be Giuseppe’s bread runner. I taxied him to the store each day for daily loaves. After a week of going there twice a day, as he would have if he had been in Sicily, I was exhausted. I had a husband at home who was still going to regular doctor appointments and still taking powerful drugs to help repair his immune system and promote bone growth before starting chemotherapy all over again. I had in-laws who didn’t drive or speak English. They had no interest in museums or restaurants or retail stores. They wanted to be with their son. They wanted bread. They wanted to make sure their love stood guard over cancer.

  One night, as Croce and I cleaned the kitchen while Saro rested and his father watched television, Croce asked me, “What do the doctors say?” Her voice was gravelly and full of tamped-down emotion.

  “They don’t give definitive answers, but so far he has responded well. Some people have years with no recurrences,” I responded.

  “But it comes back?” she asked, abandoning Italian and speaking to me in Sicilian. I hated the question. To answer it, I’d have to reveal the reality of the worst possible outcome.

  “I don’t know,” I responded in Italian.

  “Saro would have more to live for if there were children,” Croce said almost under her breath. I nearly dropped the plate I was drying, struck as I was with shock. Her words had hit like a gut punch in the place I was most vulnerable. How dare she? What does she know? We were fighting for life, and we had preserved the possibility of a future life with kids. But I didn’t have the words, energy, or desire to express all that. Even in that moment, I knew her statement, typical of a concerned Sicilian mother, was not meant as a rebuke of me as a woman, as a wife. Still, it made me feel that I had failed Saro. I wanted to cry, I wanted to scream. More than anything, though, I wanted her and Giuseppe gone. I left the plate on the counter and went up to my room, shut the door, crawled into bed, and didn’t speak to anyone until the next morning.

  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 t
he 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.

  I smiled and put my arms around her for an American-style hug. We were in the middle of our second annual arrival ritual. The widows and wives of Via Gramsci had surrounded the car once again, their usual chorus of salutations and physical evaluations in full swing: “Zoela is taller.” “Your hair is longer.” “You look tired.” “You look nourished.” “You need to rest.”

  The first greetings were always an evaluation of how we looked. It was the Sicilian way. “Nourished” was shorthand for well fed. It was true that I had gained back some weight since the previous summer. And Zoela was now chest high. She had breast buds. I was happy they didn’t mention that.

  Within an hour, we were seated at the table, ready for our first meal together in a year. Nonna ladled ditalini con le lenticchie, tiny tube-shaped pasta with lentils, into a shallow pasta bowl. There was cheese infused with large, jet black peppercorns. They reminded me of mini black-eyed peas in a sea of pecorino. I’d always enjoyed that variety of sheep cheese, its outer ring so salty, it made my palate spark to life. It had all the characteristics of Sicily, strong but inviting. Nonna had sliced it into wedges that rivaled a small filet of beef.