Crazy in the Kitchen Read online

  My eating my grandmother's bread and my not eating my mother's food is another reason my mother hates my grandmother, her stepmother, not her "real" mother, who died when my mother was a baby. A mother, she laments, who would have loved her, who would have taken care of her, and not resented her, as this woman does, this fake mother of hers, because they are not the same blood. My mother shouts this whenever they fight, which is often.

  But I do not know what being the same blood means or why their not being the same blood should divide them. For, at times, when my mother talks to my father about what is happening in the world, she says that all people are created equal, and that the differences among people are only skin deep. But once, when I ask her if she and my grandmother were created equal, she said, no, because my grandmother never showed her any love, because my grandmother is a pain in the ass, because my grandmother drives her crazy. She says that some people, like my dead grandfather, deserve respect, and others don't. And that my grandmother is one of the ones who don't. And that if I don't shape up, I'll become one of the ones who don't, too.

  THE OTHER BREAD

  My mother does not eat the bread my grandmother bakes. My mother eats the bread that she buys a few times a week from the Dugan's man, who comes round in his truck to our suburban neighborhood in Ridgefield, New Jersey, where we move after my grandfather dies. This bread, unlike my grandmother's, has preservatives, a long shelf life, my mother says. You can keep this bread for a long, long time without it becoming green-molded. To my mother, this bread is everything that a good bread should be.

  The bread my mother buys is white bread, sliced bread, American bread. A bread that my father, my sister, and I eat only under protest or when it is transformed into something else. A bread that my grandmother would never eat, even if she were starving, and she told my mother so the one time she tasted this bread, and she told my mother, too, that she knows what it is to starve, what it is not to have enough food, and that even if she did not have enough food, she would not eat this bread.

  My mother thinks that eating this bread will change her, that eating this bread will erase this embarrassment of a stepmother— all black dresses and headscarves and scavenging for dandelions on the neighbors' lawns, and superstitions, and tentacled things stewing in pots, and flurries of flour that ruin my mother's spotless kitchen, and infrequently washed Old World long woolen undergarments— this embarrassment of a stepmother who, my mother swears, never bathes, who treats water as if it is something to pray to, not something to wash in. (When my grandmother sees the amount of water my mother puts into the bathtub when my sister and I bathe, she mutters "Mare Adriatico" in disgust, clucks her tongue, and walks into her darkened bedroom to say the rosary.)

  Maybe my mother thinks that if she eats enough of this other bread, she will stop being Italian American and she will become American American. Maybe my mother thinks that if she eats enough of this other bread, people will stop thinking that a relative of my father's, who comes to visit us from Brooklyn once in a while, is a Mafioso, because he's Italian American and has New York license plates on his new black car, and sports a black tie and pointy shoes and a shiny suit and a Borsalino hat tipped way down over his forehead so you can hardly see his eyes. And if you can hardly see his eyes, my mother says, what kind of a man must the neighbors think he is? Maybe my mother remembers the incarcerations, deportations, and lynchings of Italians, the invasion of Italian neighborhoods in Hoboken, New Jersey, during the war when we lived there. Maybe my mother thinks eating this bread will keep us safe.

  This bread that my mother buys from the Dugan's man is whiter than my grandmother's bread. It is as white, as soft and as spongy, as the cotton balls I use to take off my nail polish when I am a teenager, as white as the Kotex pads I shove into my underpants.

  My mother eats this bread all the time, morning, noon, and night, and she uses it to make us toasted-cheese sandwiches. Two slices of American cheese pulled in shreds from their cellophane wrappers, slapped between two slices of buttered American bread (torn when buttered, because it is so soft) fried in a too hot frying pan while my mother, distracted, walks away to do something else until she smells the butter burning, says "Oh my goodness," returns to the stove, flips the sandwiches, gets distracted again, walks away again, smells the butter burning again, says "Oh my goodness" again, and serves the sandwich to us with lots of catsup on the side to disguise the filthy taste.

  After Thanksgiving, my mother uses this bread to make turkey sandwiches with stuffing and gravy and cranberry sauce, the most acceptable use for this bread because then the bread is toasted, which hardens it, and, because the toaster we have is automatic, my mother can't fuck up the toast, unless she shoves it back in for a second round. My mother uses this bread to make French toast, too, what she calls her special Sunday night supper. But because she has never developed the knack of completely beating the egg that coats the bread, her French toast always has little pieces of coagulated egg white hanging off it, which I call snot strings.

  Sometimes I pull the snot strings off the bread and hang them out of my nostrils. This I do, not to infuriate my parents, but for my own amusement, to distract myself from the funereal atmosphere of our supper table. But when I do it, my father reprimands me for my bad manners, tells me to respect the food my mother made, says all he wants at the end of a day's work, after taking guff from his bosses and hearing the rat-a-tat-tat of the machines all goddamned day long, is a nice meal, and some goddamned peace and quiet. I ignore him, look at the ceiling, pretend he's not there. He comes after me. I jump up, run away. He chases me around the table, out of the room, up the stairs.

  But my sister and I like having this bread in our house because you can do many things with it. You can take a piece of this bread, pull off the crust, smash it down, roll it into a little ball. You can play marbles with this bread. You can pull the middle out of a slice of this bread and hang it over your nose or twirl it around your finger. You can pull the middle out of a slice of this bread and bring it up to your eye and pretend you're Nancy Drew looking for clues to a crime that was committed in your kitchen. You can take circles out of this bread and smash them down into Communion wafers and play "Holy Priest of God" dishing out the body of Christ. (This doesn't get my mother angry; this amuses her. She has no use for Holy Communion, for the Church or its priests, even though she sends us to Catholic grammar school.)

  You can also eat this bread with your meal, and sometimes we do, if there is none of my grandmother's bread. But when you eat this bread, it sticks to the roof of your mouth and you have to pry it off with your fingers. Then you get yelled at for your horrible table manners, and are told to leave the table and go up to your room. Which is a good thing. If your father had a hard day at work and is in a lousy mood, or if he was out fighting fires as a volunteer and is exhausted, he'll chase you up the stairs to your room, but you can usually outrun him, slam your bedroom door shut, push your bureau against the door. Then you get blamed for ruining dinner.

  My grandmother's bread doesn't stick to the roof of your mouth. Which is why I like it. Which is why my father likes it. That my father likes my grandmother's bread more than he likes my mother's bread makes my mother angry. That my father likes my grandmother's bread means that he's on my grandmother's side (the wrong side) in the ongoing bread war. That we like my grandmother's bread means that there's no hope for this family making it into the big time. It means that we're stuck in the rut of where we came from, that we're satisfied with who we are, and not striving for all that we can be. My mother is striving for all that we can be, here in suburban New Jersey. And she wants us to strive along with her.

  CONVENIENCE FOODS

  From the Dugan's man, my mother also buys apple pies, blueberry pies, lemon meringue pies, pumpkin pies (in season), seven-layer cake, pound cake, chocolate-covered donuts, and crullers, to satisfy my father's sweet tooth when she is too depressed to make a dessert of her own, and she is usually too depressed
to make a dessert of her own. Italians, even rich ones, I know from my grandmother, don't eat much dessert— a piece of fruit, maybe, expertly peeled and sliced with a little knife— so my father's wanting dessert every night means that all is not lost, that he might become American American. And so my mother buys pies, donuts, crullers, and cakes a few boxes at a time and displays them on the counter, invitingly, and dishes out dessert after dinner to him, triumphant.

  Me, I reject dessert. I am suspicious of things that come in boxes, things that get delivered to your door by a man who drives up to your house in a little white truck. I have learned this from my home ec teacher in junior high school, who teaches us that "fresh is best," who tells us that there should be no shortcuts in the kitchen.

  But my mother just loves it when the Dugan's man comes cruising down our street. "The Dugan's man, the Dugan's man," she shouts as soon as she spies him, and she grabs her wallet and runs out of the house to be the first on line.

  The Dugan's man knows that a warm smile can charm a woman into an extra box of sugar donuts, an extra pie, an extra box of English muffins, which "freeze well." My mother, usually frugal, buys far more than she needs, far more than our family will ever eat.

  After the purchase, there's always some small talk with the Dugan's man, some laughing, more laughing than there is in our house. The Dugan's man wears a uniform and a hat. He seems like a respectable gentleman. But I think he's a con man. So I rush out of the house after my mother to superintend the interaction. She carries on, ignoring me. With the Dugan's man, she becomes someone else. She smiles like she did in pictures of her taken during the war when my father was away in the Pacific, when she hung out with her friends in our tiny living room, or when she sang as she made a simple supper for the two of us.

  "Merda," my grandmother calls everything that my mother buys from the Dugan's man.

  From time to time, unsure that my grandmother's assessment is correct, I take a tentative bite of something and conclude that, yes, the stuff from the Dugan's man tastes like the cardboard box it comes in, that it is merda. And the canned stew my mother gives us is merda, too. And the canned vegetables she believes contain more vitamins than the real thing because they are canned "at the peak of freshness," and the canned spaghetti, the canned ravioli, and the canned soups. All these, my mother thinks, make great midday meals or really good quick dinners. All these, my grandmother thinks, are the devil's work.

  But my mother is a convenience food junkie. I think she has things ass backwards. I'd rather have something wonderful to eat at the end of the day than have a spotless house, which I can never invite my friends to play in anyway. I'd even make something for myself if my mother would let me cook, which she won't, because she believes that the kitchen is her domain.

  But when I tell her I want real food and not the fake food she thinks is food, she calls me spoiled and ungrateful, and she launches into a lecture about how good I have it, how I don't know anything about doing without, and how there are lots of kids in this world who would love the privilege of eating what she serves.

  In our house, good food on the table probably wouldn't matter anyway. Because even if we had good food— a little eggplant Parmesan; tiny lobster tails grilled with a little olive oil, lemon juice, and parsley; a pasta with a simple tomato sauce— our mealtimes would still be the disasters they always are.

  MAKING THE BREAD

  My grandmother's bread (the bread that my mother will not eat) is a bread that my grandmother makes by hand in my mother's kitchen, much to my mother's disgust, at least twice a week, sometimes more, depending upon the season and upon the appetites of those who eat her bread— me, my sister, my father.

  It takes a lot of time for my grandmother to make the bread— getting the fresh yeast, assembling the ingredients, mixing the bread, letting it rise, punching it down, letting it rise again, shaping it, letting the loaves rise, baking them, letting them cool, storing them properly. This is time that my mother thinks is wasted, time that my mother thinks my grandmother should spend helping her clean the house. "Your house, not my house," my grandmother says when my mother complains that nobody helps her. "Me, I have no house," my grandmother says.

  To make the bread, my grandmother dumps a whole bunch of flour onto the Formica surface of the kitchen table. She mutters under her breath about how this flour is not' 'real'' flour, nothing like the semola that rich people used in the old country. And she is outraged that the beautiful flour you could get there, you can't get here, a sure sign of her adoptive land's barbarism (though there she couldn't afford that flour, often couldn't even afford the adulterated maggot-infested flour sold to the poor). Still, she can't understand why what they grew there, they can't grow here. Why what her bread tastes like here, isn't what fine bread tasted like there (even though the bread she ate there wasn't fine bread). Here, she says, the flour is whiter than there, more like talcum powder than a proper flour should be. And it is farmed on a land sprayed with poisons. It is bleached. It is bromated. It is packed in paper, not in cotton sacks. And by the time you buy it, it is stale and has taken on the taste of the packaging.

  My grandmother takes a pinch of my mother's packaged flour between her fingers, tastes it, and says merda. Merda is one of my grandmother's favorite words. Her other favorite words are sonnama-bitch, sonnamagun, bastardo (my father), bastarda (my mother), stunod, bestia gramma (evil beast— which she uses to refer to politicians, priests, movie stars, and anyone who parks their car in front of our house), and staccim! my favorite, which, my father says, means sperm of the devil. (I find this out when he smacks me for calling him staccim!.) From my grandmother, I learn not only how to bake the bread, I learn how to curse and swear like a Southern Italian peasant woman.

  The flour my grandmother uses, she takes from my mother's store, which is kept in a bin in the bottom of the kitchen pantry. My grandmother uses a lot of flour each week, pounds and pounds of flour, because she bakes so much bread. This is because she eats mostly bread, a great deal of bread, just like she did in the old country. For, she tells me, there, bread is the food of the poor, bread dipped in water or wine if you were lucky enough to have bread and water or wine. Here, though, she can eat soups that she dips her bread into. And she can eat other things made with flour— pizza, zeppole, calzone stuffed with onions, black olives, capers, tomatoes, cheese, anchovies, parsley. This she considers a boon, a bounty, a blessing. This outweighs all the evil of this new country that she has come to.

  My mother doesn't let my grandmother have her own supply of flour. Even though my grandmother uses more flour than my mother. Even though letting my grandmother have her own flour would be the logical thing to do. Even though it would remove one of the causes of friction between them. That my grandmother uses so much of my mother's flour is a source of contention between them, because my mother often reaches into the pantry for a little flour to thicken a sauce or bake a piecrust (and although my mother is good at very little in the kitchen, she is good at baking pies), only to discover that my grandmother has used all of her flour.

  "Jesus Christ," my mother says. "How much more of this can I take?"

  When my mother discovers that there is no flour left, she searches the house to find my grandmother, who is down the basement tending her bread, or in the dining room sitting by the radiator knitting or crocheting, or in her bedroom near the window saying her rosary or staring out the window at the plumes of smoke from the Public Service electric plant. And when she finds her, my mother starts yelling.

  "If you had any respect for me," my mother shouts, "you'd keep your hands off my flour. Or you'd have the decency to tell me when there wasn't any more."

  My grandmother glances at my mother with disdain, shrugs, and continues doing whatever she was doing— tending, crocheting, knitting, staring, praying. This drives my mother crazy. This makes my mother shout even louder. Because what my mother wants at this moment is confrontation, drama, resolution, change (on the part of my gra
ndmother). And my grandmother will never change.

  Sometimes my grandmother wants to fight. Sometimes my grandmother spits back at my mother, "You're not my blood," to answer my mother's accusations. But usually when my mother comes ranting, my grandmother just waits for my mother to go away, to leave her alone. My grandmother has come from a land of the poor, of the despised, of the powerless, a land where she has learned that the most potent weapon you can wield against your adversary is an utter and complete indifference.

  To compensate for the dreadful flour she is forced to use, my grandmother uses fresh yeast, a little barley flour, and some salt. The barley flour gives her loaf some character, some color, some heft. Yeast in foil packets my grandmother regards with as much disdain as the tomatoes in little cardboard boxes with cellophane windows my mother buys from the local supermarket. Both are merda as far as my grandmother is concerned. And so my grandmother gets her yeast from the baker who owns the local bakery where I work during the summer and after school, who agrees to let my grandmother buy some of his yeast.

  At first, the baker wants to give my grandmother the yeast free. But she is too proud to accept his generosity, which she misperceives as charity, and a condemnation of her. Besides, she is far too wary to accept something from someone she doesn't know. This would put her in his debt. And so they have agreed (through me, for he speaks no Italian and she speaks little English) that she will pay him twenty-five cents a week for some of his yeast.

  And so, every baking day, she walks down the big hill to the bakery, and back up the big hill to our house, carrying her fresh yeast. It is one of the few errands she undertakes that gives her any satisfaction.