Nonna hid my face and told strangers at the supermarket that I was an ugly simpleton. If someone wanted to steal me, I thought, I must be a person of real value. Better still, someone wanted to protect me from being stolen.
WHEN MY MOTHER AND Michael got married, they slept in a water bed behind our living-room couch and used my bedroom closet for their clothes and other effects. The storage space of one closet wasn’t nearly sufficient to contain the hoard of their boxes and trash bags.These things piled up and blockaded the door to my bedroom so that it couldn’t be shut without causing an avalanche. It was clear to everyone that our family of three needed more privacy and space, so Nonna offered to swap homes with Kathi and Michael. She moved into our little one-bedroom apartment and we took over her house at 35 Eden Glen Avenue. In the spring of 1993, my stepdad disassembled my twin bed and reassembled it in the space where the water bed once stood behind the living-room couch. Nonna was in my old bedroom, her TV blaring all day and night. The oblong teak mask that my grandfather had brought home from the Pacific after World War II hung on the wall across from my bed. I would fall asleep staring into its wooden eyes, the thick lips pressed into a bemused smile, and wonder what secrets the mask was keeping from us.
My grandmother had recently retired from her job as a kitchen aide in a hospital cafeteria. She was in her golden years now, a time she spent screaming at her television and trying to re-clog her recently shunted arteries.
“Nonna, that has a lot of cholesterol,” I would say as I watched her drop an entire stick of butter into a pot of angel hair.
“Ba fangul,”
she shouted back. She added olive oil, salt, and a pound of crispy bacon to the pot. “Maybe I want to die!”
Nonna was very weak from her surgeries, and I enjoyed playing her nurse. I occupied myself with cleaning and other chores, keeping her to a schedule of medications, and taking her blood-sugar readings. After a triple-bypass surgery, Nonna couldn’t stand longer than a few minutes or raise her arms to wash herself. We put a plastic deck chair in the shower and I would stand outside the curtain with a cloth, gently soaping her back and shampooing her hair. At thirteen I was still afraid of the dark, but I didn’t flinch at the sight of my grandmother’s wiry gray pubic hair, the ribbon of scar tissue from the bypass that sliced her from heart to thigh, the pink satiny coil of skin left by the mastectomy she had before I was born. It was the image of my grandmother with wet hair that I found distressing. Nonna had those fabled Sicilian follicles—thick, coarse strands of hair, each one gleaming and tough as steel wool.Throughout my grandmother’s battle with breast cancer and the course of chemotherapy, she did not lose a single strand. All five of her children corroborate this story, which leads me to believe that it might actually be true. I had always known my grandmother as a woman with a thick pouf of hair, set and curled like the typical old lady’s and dyed a purplish red. Sitting in the shower with her head sopping, she looked small and meek in a way I had never imagined possible.
As with my father, I don’t remember my grandmother ever saying that she loved me, but I never questioned that she did because of the names she called me
—giugiunelle
or
putan
, chickpea or whore. Terms of endearment, obviously, because she also used to call her cats these names. Nonna’s cats, Balthazar and Nicodemus, were the two biggest whores we knew. They used to disappear for days. “Out whoring!” Nonna would yell as though summoning them home. When the cats finally returned, she would cook them their own dinner of liver and tripe. One of them—Balthazar, I think—contracted a feline strain of the AIDS virus. This was in the eighties, at the height of the HIV epidemic, when misinformation was rampant and everyone was paranoid
WHEN MY MOTHER AND Michael got married, they slept in a water bed behind our living-room couch and used my bedroom closet for their clothes and other effects. The storage space of one closet wasn’t nearly sufficient to contain the hoard of their boxes and trash bags.These things piled up and blockaded the door to my bedroom so that it couldn’t be shut without causing an avalanche. It was clear to everyone that our family of three needed more privacy and space, so Nonna offered to swap homes with Kathi and Michael. She moved into our little one-bedroom apartment and we took over her house at 35 Eden Glen Avenue. In the spring of 1993, my stepdad disassembled my twin bed and reassembled it in the space where the water bed once stood behind the living-room couch. Nonna was in my old bedroom, her TV blaring all day and night. The oblong teak mask that my grandfather had brought home from the Pacific after World War II hung on the wall across from my bed. I would fall asleep staring into its wooden eyes, the thick lips pressed into a bemused smile, and wonder what secrets the mask was keeping from us.
My grandmother had recently retired from her job as a kitchen aide in a hospital cafeteria. She was in her golden years now, a time she spent screaming at her television and trying to re-clog her recently shunted arteries.
“Nonna, that has a lot of cholesterol,” I would say as I watched her drop an entire stick of butter into a pot of angel hair.
“Ba fangul,”
she shouted back. She added olive oil, salt, and a pound of crispy bacon to the pot. “Maybe I want to die!”
Nonna was very weak from her surgeries, and I enjoyed playing her nurse. I occupied myself with cleaning and other chores, keeping her to a schedule of medications, and taking her blood-sugar readings. After a triple-bypass surgery, Nonna couldn’t stand longer than a few minutes or raise her arms to wash herself. We put a plastic deck chair in the shower and I would stand outside the curtain with a cloth, gently soaping her back and shampooing her hair. At thirteen I was still afraid of the dark, but I didn’t flinch at the sight of my grandmother’s wiry gray pubic hair, the ribbon of scar tissue from the bypass that sliced her from heart to thigh, the pink satiny coil of skin left by the mastectomy she had before I was born. It was the image of my grandmother with wet hair that I found distressing. Nonna had those fabled Sicilian follicles—thick, coarse strands of hair, each one gleaming and tough as steel wool.Throughout my grandmother’s battle with breast cancer and the course of chemotherapy, she did not lose a single strand. All five of her children corroborate this story, which leads me to believe that it might actually be true. I had always known my grandmother as a woman with a thick pouf of hair, set and curled like the typical old lady’s and dyed a purplish red. Sitting in the shower with her head sopping, she looked small and meek in a way I had never imagined possible.
As with my father, I don’t remember my grandmother ever saying that she loved me, but I never questioned that she did because of the names she called me
—giugiunelle
or
putan
, chickpea or whore. Terms of endearment, obviously, because she also used to call her cats these names. Nonna’s cats, Balthazar and Nicodemus, were the two biggest whores we knew. They used to disappear for days. “Out whoring!” Nonna would yell as though summoning them home. When the cats finally returned, she would cook them their own dinner of liver and tripe. One of them—Balthazar, I think—contracted a feline strain of the AIDS virus. This was in the eighties, at the height of the HIV epidemic, when misinformation was rampant and everyone was paranoid
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