By the Rivers of Brooklyn by Trudy Morgan-Cole Page A

when he gets to New York. I don’t want him feeling he has to stay back here on account of us. Though I’m sure I don’t know what we’re going to do,” she added, staring down at her hands lying on the yellow flowered oilcloth.
    One of Bill’s hands moved to cover hers. “Don’t worry about it, girl. You don’t have to solve all your problems today. We’ll take one day at a time, that’s all. You know I’m here to help you.”

ROSE   BROOKLYN, AUGUST 1930
    R OSE STANDS IN M ARCELLA’S kitchen, the heat from the stove like a slap in the face. Outside it is August, ninety-five degrees, even small children scurrying for shade or water. In five years Rose has still not adapted to the heat of a Brooklyn summer. Marcella’s kitchen is the back porch of hell, she thinks.
    Marcella, unmoved by heat or, apparently, any other force of nature, stands at the stove stirring her sauce. She moves back and forth between the stove and the kitchen table, quickly and gracefully for such a big woman, sprinkling handfuls of this and that into the pan, speaking to her food in a soft singsong voice. Rose’s legs ache. Shooting pains right up the back. She’s been standing all day. Time to quit this job, find something where she’s not standing all the time. All day in the factory, and now she’s here in Marcella’s kitchen, watching this thick Italian peasant woman who is only five years older than herself but seems of another generation, this woman who has finally decided to accept Rose into the family as a necessary evil and has, unfortunately, chosen to show her acceptance by teaching Rose to cook.
    â€œNow, a handful of oregano,” she says, scooping up what looks like grass clippings and scattering them over the chicken breasts simmering in the big castiron pan. Earlier, Rose watched Marcella pound the breasts almost paper-thin and dust them lightly with flour, watched as her plump quick hands sliced through bell peppers and green onions. Marcella is doubtless gratified at Rose’s attention; she has not guessed that Rose is watching with what amounts to horrified fascination. Such attention, such passion, such love, even – lavished on something as trivial, as menial, as cooking a dinner.
    Did her own mother cherish the act of cooking like this? Rose wonders, dragged unwilling back in memory to the canvas-floored kitchen on Freshwater Road with the Ideal Cookstove that dominated the landscape and set the hours of the women’s days. Did Annie? Annie loved to cook, had taken over most of the cooking from Mom when she was about thirteen. Mostly Rose remembers Annie baking, up to her elbows in flour, dipping her fingers in a bowl of water, sprinkling one drop, two, three…but no more, never too much. Rose, when she tried, would dash half a cup of water into the pie crust, ignoring Annie’s shrieks, not caring about the tough chewy crust anyway. Annie flushed with pleasure when the family cooed over her flaky crust. Annie has probably never seen a bell pepper, or oregano either, but perhaps she and Marcella would understand each other.
    â€œThis is Tony’s favourite dinner, this is what I make for him on a special occasion. You can’t afford to do chicken like this on an ordinary Sunday. You know on a Sunday, coming home from church, Tony likes macaroni with meatballs and gravy,” Marcella says. She knows Rose doesn’t go to church, isn’t Catholic. She doesn’t know that the first time Rose came for macaroni with meatballs and gravy she was expecting gravy, like at home, a beef gravy or something, and didn’t know what to make of the rich red tomato sauce all over the noodles and meatballs. That was a long time ago: Rose has been coming here for meals for nearly three years now. But she knows, and Marcella knows, that she will always be an outsider.
    Marcella knows that Rose hates to touch raw meat and loves to