RESPECT What it means to be American and Italian, Catholic and single, a granddaughter and a professional woman Or how I came to live in Brooklyn, the place my grandparents left behind
Mason, Alane Salierno
RESPECT An Italian-American story Alane Salierno Mason It is a love and a rage. The love you already know about, lurking in all the cliches of ethnicity: pungent, generic. Like garlic, it stays...
...what is freedom compared to love...
...I told her she'd find someone eventually, because she's goodlookin...
...My grandfather said, "I spent my life trying to get the family out of Brooklyn, and now you're going backwards, back where I started...
...Though her husband comes home at night, she is alone, alone, alone, alone...
...On a Sunday morning, grandmother with fleshy arms in a house-dress, swaying as the kitchen cabinets open and shut, the refrigerator opens and shuts: basil, big cans of tomatoes, the golden blocky pillar of a tin of olive oil, meat for the braci-ole to spread with Crisco and breadcrumbs and spices, green bean and potato salad, chilled...
...Perhaps because they see me in church, because they know I have Italian blood, they think I should live exactly as they do...
...When my old building was sold, I stayed in the neighborhood...
...It used to be, everyone came together for Sunday dinner, and they spent the day, eating, and talking hours went by, the whole day...
...In Naples, I stayed with the daughter of my grandfather's cousin, a grade-school English teacher...
...Whaddya have them all sleepin' over...
...Her mother was di-vorced...
...Like my grandfather, I have a sociable streak, and once in a while, like to have an out-of-town guest, or friends over to eat and talk...
...Gianquito, lived on the ground floor of the building I lived in when I moved here ten years ago...
...I've tried to tell them I want to be left alone to live in peace, in my own way, in my own home...
...If you respect others, others will respect you...
...He did not sponsor his wife and children to follow him to this country...
...Since Hoover was president when he became an American, he became a Republican, to express his loyalty to his new country...
...VI As for the rage close to grief, you may know that too: like parsley, curly or flat, bitter, individual...
...I have, I know, my grandfather's cardiovascular system, the same relation between blood and heart...
...Shortly after I moved here, the Italian lawyer moved to California...
...Hadn't he told me from childhood that Mussolini made the trains run on time, just as Marconi invented the telegraph...
...are you sorry you have these children...
...and interrogating guests, male or female (including a seventy-year-old former teacher) about what they were doing here, and how soon they were leaving...
...Between my grandparents' house and my mother's, I am always carrying cheese, vegetables, fruit, half a vat of soup, half a loaf of bread...
...On Saturdays in the supermarket the old ladies' carts jam up against each other...
...They are full of disregard riguardare also means to look again they look away...
...I did go to Italy to see the town my grandfather was born in...
...I wonder, with all the modern tools at hand: is it something in my grandmother's childhood, something about Christmas in the convent school where she and her sisters were raised by nuns...
...That's different," he said, and when I asked why, he answered, "Because you're my granddaughter...
...In the months of his ultimatum, as I tried to bring myself to decide to marry him, or not, I often lay awake at night, alone, trembling with anger or sorrow...
...They wanted to introduce me: "This is our cousin from America...
...On Good Friday, the women wear black and carry candles in a funeral procession around a wax figure of the dead Christ in a glass casket...
...Sometimes I will remember to ask the bakery for additional small boxes, for my grandfather always buys enough to give away...
...She used to cry when I saw her: "Sono sola, sola sola...
...he wanted to appear a man of means, he once told me he wanted to make Salierno a respected name in this country, as it had been in Italy...
...She says, "I don't want you to have to quit your job," which means, of course, that in some part of herself she has already imagined, already wished that I will...
...He loves politics, and ran for local office three times on his own "Productivity" ticket before finally winning over those whose partisans called him "uneducated" and "a foreigner...
...When my grandfather always says, this generation of today, these kids of today have no respect, I think he is telling the truth...
...Three times I tell them to be quiet...
...Nothing wasted...
...The landlady and landlord I have had, now, for the past five years, are not, as far as I can tell, a different class of people from those a few blocks away...
...at the last minute she recovers and the dinner is cooked...
...I had had enough...
...I want to point out that I am a different class of people...
...Eventually they came anyway, sponsored by other, more distant relatives...
...And when they shouted, I couldn't understand they were just enjoying a conversation...
...Unlike my grandparents, who have been married for sixty-five of the seventy-two years since they first met, I have been serially monogamous, and remain unmarried...
...the dinner goes on...
...And is it not the proper role for the only daughter of an only daughter in an Italian family, to care for her parents, for the old and the sick...
...She asked him what his intentions were...
...I said, even without Hitler, he was a fascist, he was a bad egg...
...Well, not always...
...You see, they are related...
...his grandfather used to make wine in barrels in the back yard, he says, and when he hosed out the barrels the yard was stained purple...
...It is a close family full of distances...
...My grandmother, who doesn't talk much, doesn't participate in the debate...
...at the end, the table is strewn with orange and tangerine peels, the hulls of walnuts and chestnuts...
...before that, I had confused this great-grandfather with another relative who had made decorative wrought iron, like the grillwork I see everywhere in Brooklyn...
...I said indignantly, thinking for a moment that I was in America...
...But the law doesn't matter here, I know, it is the kitchen table that matters...
...He always told me he wanted me to grow up to be president, though when Fer-raro ran for vice-president, he thought it a bad risk what if we ended up, God forbid, with a lady president...
...Now he says, "I'm going to shoot that Brooklyn Bridge!," because he imagines it transporting me away from the family...
...I saw the dry-goods shop my great-grandmother used to run in the corner of their house, the church bell my grandfather used to ring in the dusty town with onions drying on the rooftops and horse-drawn carts returning from the fields...
...When I started seeing someone else, Rosa began standing at her front window, peeking through the curtains, whenever she heard more than one set of footsteps on the stairs...
...The men stand outside the bakery or in the doorways of their social clubs: The Society of Citizens of Pozzallo...
...And ever since a second cousin married a divorced man with children, both of my grandparents have been saying, "Why couldn't she find a single guy...
...For four of my first five years in Brooklyn I dated an Italian-American lawyer living across the street, who made bis-cotti from his grandmother's recipe, and on Sundays liked to make a marinara sauce, and espresso with a shot of anisette...
...Was it that she learned to cook from her mother-in-law, and not from her mother, who died so young...
...My second cousin Rosean-gela in the Bronx has been making it in her father's deli since she was eleven...
...Then there is the man in the family-owned fruit market who flirts with me in front of his mother and brother, but when he asks me why I'm not married yet, such a bella ragazza, I know how to behave: flattered, embarrassed, not scornful but reserved, proper...
...While she called me "you sonuvabitch, you tramp," I slammed the door in her face...
...I'm not the person you say I am," I tried to tell her, but she insisted...
...Her husband shouted: are you sorry you met me...
...The old woman cried, and my cousin said to me, "Is your grandfather also very emotional...
...On the old block there was a man in a wheelchair whose friends always gathered on his stoop...
...He says, "I want to see the mothers home with the children, the way it should be, not the child comes home and the house is empty...
...I wanna know what's goin' on up there, that guy, he's been there for a week...
...These kids don't have respect and nobody tells them any different, not the parents, not the church...
...His landlady, sitting in a chair on the building stoop, would stop me as I went in to tell me how he did his own laundry and cooking and housecleaning, that he was "un ragazzo buono, oggi e difficile a trovare, un ragazzo buono," a good boy, the kind difficult to find these days...
...is it the pressure of living up to the ways of an Old Country she herself never knew...
...The freshbaked anisette biscuits and regine (sesame) and pignoli (pine nut) cookies, the cannoli and sfogliatell' and pas-tidott', the boxes tied with red-and-white string...
...People around here, they talk," she said...
...My grandfather points out that it is impractical for unmarried people to live apart from their families: "two phone bills, two electrical, two water bills, heat, groceries...
...This essay is part of an anthology of writing by and about Italian-Americans, Beyond the Godfather (University Press of New England...
...Or if her doctor, he has only prescribed an-tidepressants, which she calls her "depression pills...
...V My grandfather, I understand now, is an idealist of a sort...
...My mother says my grandfather will have a heart attack if I bring my boyfriend to meet him...
...That's a mystery," my grandfather says...
...My friends think I visit my family often...
...When I told him I was moving a few blocks away, he said, "Eh, you're moving up, you'll find a different class of people over there...
...Rosa shouted back, "None of my business...
...Rosa, there must be some kind of misunderstanding...
...On Sundays, the stairwell of my building smells of garlic frying in oil, of marinara sauce or zucchini in breadcrumbs...
...He says, "I want you to know, dear granddaughter, that family is the most important thing...
...and when I shyly said, "mio amico," she gave him a complete report: I was "una buona ragazza, educata, rispettosa, fa i fatti suoi, non riguarda nessuno" (a good girl, well-mannered, respectful, does her own thing, doesn't look at other guys...
...I have my grandmother's gut, which twists up with the knowledge that I am not, somehow, what I am expected to be...
...And perhaps the finucchi: fennel, or gays...
...What's more important, freedom or love...
...Do you know that in America, the fathers don't come home for lunch with their families...
...We both paid our respects at the kitchen table...
...In the summer, the fruit peels and the nut hulls might be thrown in the garden...
...Listen to me, you do what I say, you'll be happier...
...I don't have parties, why do you have to have parties...
...He met my grandmother when his eldest sister married a widower, also Italian, with four daughters born in America, one exactly his age...
...And also, "It's very important to have respect for the old people...
...Her children say that next year they will do it differently...
...In such good spirits, she will sometimes sing the songs she sang with the other girls as they worked in the garment district making wedding dresses, sewing thousands of tiny beads...
...Yes, God is going to let us see her a beautiful bride, I just have that feeling...
...They roll their eyes...
...sometimes I boil in silence, or gently demur, depending on the subject...
...You got to have a good foundation," he always told me, pointing out Alane Salierno Mason is an editor at W.W...
...My grandfather usually buys his pastries in New Jersey, but since I've lived here I like to bring him the real thing from Brooklyn, where they're better and cheaper...
...Grandfather wearing his best vest and ruby ring and cologne for the midday meal, having washed up for company after coming in from the garden with zucchini flowers to be basted in egg and breadcrumbs and fried in olive oil...
...They also do this in the south of Italy...
...Make sure he has a job...
...In any case, of her torrent of words I understood only "sola," and this single saying: "Sesi rispetta, si sera rispet-tata...
...They have no right to harass you...
...My grandfather looked confused...
...She said, "Don't you look at me that way, I'm tellin' ya the truth...
...my grandfather decorates the house with blue lights and flashing multicolored rosettes still in the box...
...I said I didn't think a title from Mussolini was anything to be proud of...
...I went downstairs to sit at her kitchen table...
...I stopped having parties...
...I thought I had made them angry...
...Each holiday, now, I can expect a call with his "order" (roccoco and mustacioli for Christmas, sfingi and zeppole for Saint Joseph's Day), which I bring to him in the big white boxes tied with red and white string...
...There are also half a dozen places in the neighborhood where they make homemade mozzarella, the firm strings of cheese dripping moisture...
...Yet each time she calls, I shake with anger, then burst into tears...
...Neither does my grandfather seem to mind that I disagree with him...
...I want her to understand that I am respectable, a professional, that I take pride in my work...
...Now they eat and run, an hour and then they're off to play golf, if they give you two hours it's a miracle...
...take it, you might need it, I'm not gonna use it," she'd said...
...When he complains about this generation of today, and I try to defend us, he says, "I don't mean you...
...Or so my grandfather was told...
...My grandmother counts the weeks...
...That time, he'd been visiting a day or two from the distant city where he is a university professor...
...Rispettare, to respect, has the same root as as-pettare, to wait, to expect...
...If you're goin'steady, and he's the only one, it's all right...
...I rolled my eyes...
...The long table with the lace tablecloth, hours later strewn with orange and apple peels and the hulls of walnuts and roasted chestnuts, to be cleared away and thrown in the fireplace before black coffee and anisette are poured...
...My father would've killed me if I so much as looked at a boy, and I tell ya I'm glad I was brought up that way, to respect myself...
...Up in the country, when my grandfather moved houses for the first time in forty years, he took with him a couple of wheelbarrows full of topsoil, and several of his favorite rocks...
...to respect, then, must be to look again, maybe to see the same thing from another point of view, through someone else's spectacles...
...You get out of the ground what you put into the ground" (referring to the seedlings that sometimes sprouted from discarded peach pits), "and what comes out of the ground goes back in...
...the landlord's fig tree, the back yard stained with wine...
...And don't worry, you'll get married eventually, because you're good-lookin...
...He says, "The problem with this country is no one has time for family...
...She doesn't believe me, but I'm tellin' her the truth...
...The next time my boyfriend was in town, the next time the phone rang from the landlords' downstairs, I tried to be respectful, I took him to meet Rosa...
...But if I see any other guys around here, I'm gonna snitch on ya...
...If I don't visit for more than three weeks, my grandfather greets me, "Hello, stranger...
...This is one of my great joys or was, before Umberto started standing on the doorstep at the beginning of a dinner party shouting "this is not a club...
...They did not understand the meaning of privacy, or solitude...
...My friends say, get a lawyer to write your landlords a letter...
...He tells of how, when he got off the boat in America, his father came to meet them but he did not recognize him, did not know which man was his father...
...and laughs...
...This is very important, that no visitor should leave the house empty-handed...
...Relatives from the Bronx, New City, Paterson, Saddle River, Suffern, Croton-on-Hudson, all strung like beads from the landings on Ellis Island...
...One of these, Mrs...
...each year it is the same, even when they bring over the main dishes ready cooked: still the bald head with wisps of white, the red-rimmed eyes, the burping, the wishing to die...
...My grandmother suffers from what she calls "nervous tension...
...I tried to tell her...
...because of my grandfather's accent, I thought it was a ladder factory...
...But without my saying any of this, the laundromat woman said, "Non odi tua mama," don't hate your mother, it's natural for a mother to be concerned about such things...
...You live to work, instead of work to live...
...Umberto immigrated in the fifties and still does not speak English well...
...If he took the subway into Manhattan, he says, he would have to carry a gun, because of the melanzane: eggplants, or black people...
...I' m alone, alone, alone...
...I say, "Grandpa, we don't pay for water in the city...
...The problem with this country is career before family...
...To expect something is to look toward its arrival...
...What about my pride in my work...
...Then he was away for a month, then here for three days in one week: Rosa called up and said, "What's he livin' with you...
...Yet his store hasn't launched him into their world, he is still a fixture of the neighborhood...
...As I left, she said, "I'm tellin' ya for your own good...
...they sponsor card games and trips to Atlantic City, and, a few times a year, accompany a statue of the Virgin Mary in promenade around the streets...
...My grandfather said, I know, he made that mistake, making friends with Hitler...
...I moved to Brooklyn in 1987, a year after I graduated from college...
...The past is inscrutable, but not my grandmother's radiance when, inexplicably happy again, the holidays past, she giggles and her eyes shine...
...my grandfather refuses, says they will stay home, "right away he steams up, gets so excited," my grandmother says...
...For the same reason he came home one day, to their apartment in a building full of relatives in Italian East Harlem, to tell my grandmother he had bought a house in the country, they were moving up and out, taking his mother with them...
...If I were a true American, wouldn't I be living someplace where no one cares what I do...
...for sixty-five years of marriage, he told her how to vote, now he wants to have a discussion...
...Sometimes I sat beside her in the building's tiny courtyard, separated from the street by a short iron fence, keeping her company while she talked to me in an Italian I couldn't understand...
...And I says to them, I donno, they're friends of hers...
...Recently my grandfather told me about his friend who was a friend of Caruso, and how Caruso was given a title by Mussolini...
...Anger at the rigidity of expectation, the tyranny of ritual, the respect for authority, the insistence that certain truths not be uttered and certain feelings not be had...
...Maybe they come from the mountains of Sicily, and are so suspicious of strangers that they can't stand to see anyone around they don't know...
...A relative, once in a blue moon, it's all right," Rosa once said to me...
...He has strong ideas about how things should be He was not easy on his children, and disapproved of each of their marriages (one too young, another from the wrong side of the tracks, another, an artist whom he threatened to shoot) and even now, thirty and forty years later, they have not forgotten...
...An Italian-American writer once told me that his mother made him take home half an onion...
...they thought I was melancholy, depressed...
...Over the years I've tried giving my landlords plants, homemade panettone and gingerbread, a bottle of anisette, a pleading letter written in Italian...
...Once he complained that my grandmother never wants to have a discussion...
...My Italian cousins could not understand why I was quiet...
...My grandfather was born in Naples in 1908, and Brooklyn was the first place he lived when he came to America in 1920...
...A hard block of pale tart cheese to grate for the table...
...when he decided to open the store everyone he knew told him he could not succeed, but there has been an influx of Manhattanites into the neighborhood and the store thrives...
...These kids of today, they have no respect...
...grandfather without a father, grandmother without a mother, holiday dinner with red-rimmed eyes, best vest coffee soda mozzarella black coffee anisette zucchini flowers orange peels hulls of walnuts roasted chestnuts kids today without respect love rage love...
...I roast the nuts, set the table, make the salad, mix the parsley, garlic and oil into the breadcrumbs to stuff the mushrooms...
...but his Italian best friend, a former head gardener for a big estate, is a Democrat, a tall bony man with a freckled forehead, always neatly dressed in jacket and checked shirt and wide florid tie...
...The first of my ancestors to come to America, he was also the only one to set foot again on Italian soil...
...The other day, Rosa tried to raise the rent a second time in six months, and I refused...
...And I just have a feeling, she's going to bring us a lot of happiness one day...
...I have to worry about your reputation," she said...
...The expectations of my family are not those of a modernity so fluid it carries effortlessly along even nostalgia for the smell of the marinara sauce bubbling on the stove, the "Kiss Me, I'm Italian," the San Gennaro Festival in Little Italy of an America where we might have the bakeries without the landlords...
...Dear granddaughter, listen to what I say: you have to have respect...
...they trade Italian gossip about their friends and advice about different brands...
...Her sons argue and cajole, offer to have the dinner elsewhere, at a restaurant...
...It's none of your business...
...Somewhere near Naples, my great-grandfather might be buried...
...My cousin said she could understand why I wasn't married yet: I didn't have to live with my parents, I lived alone, I had my freedom...
...It was the smell in the bakeries that drew me here, the strong smell of childhood, sharing my grandfather's expectation of an occasion, a holiday or Sunday company...
...I wanted my children to have Italian traditions, to know themselves as something other than just plain American...
...she says her rosary and votes as my grandfather votes...
...She asked what my family thought, and I said only that my mother did not approve...
...Dear granddaughter, I'm telling you something very important: you get out of life what you put into it...
...me is susceptible to rhetoric: family values, God and country, productivity, not tax and spend...
...they don't understand that my living alone, visiting only thirty-six or forty-eight hours every two or three weeks, is one version of poverty, just as it is an American form of wealth...
...That's why there's so much divorce...
...I pray God finds you a good man, a good man like your grandfather...
...While the evil eye must see in one direction only...
...II In the brownstone neighborhood where I live in Brooklyn, there are many old ladies, as hardy to the eye as olive trees...
...My grandmother loves to crochet and sew, and would have liked to keep working, she once told me, but my grandfather wouldn't let her, once they could get by on his earnings alone...
...what's the most important thing, love or freedom...
...Each time I see her, she cries, "I wish you could come more often, when are you coming again, I wish you didn't have to leave...
...When I arrived, she had already read my mail...
...you want freedom over love...
...I asked my dinner guests to tiptoe down the stairs when they left so as not to disturb the landlords...
...My grandfather hates beards he considers facial hair a sign of disrespect...
...Wine, mixed half-and-half with sweet soda for the children...
...They are both nearly ninety, and like to argue about things on which they don't really disagree: "If we only made a dollar, we were glad to have that dollar, as long as we had a job...
...Rosa was born in this building, where her senescent mother lived with her in the same three rooms on the ground floor until her death...
...What comes out of the ground goes back into the ground," my grandfather always says as he throws the peelings from the kitchen between the tall stakes of the tomato plants...
...I tell them, "You may not want to be here, but that doesn't mean you have to be disruptive for people who do...
...Some mornings in summertime, when I look out my window in slanting morning light over the low buildings to see Umberto watering his fig tree in his white sleeveless undershirt and long black shorts with black kneesocks, and I hear someone shouting in Italian in the street, I don't know what country I'm in...
...As each aunt and uncle, cousin and second cousin arrives, a kiss for everyone in the room...
...Then Rosa started calling on the telephone...
...you're a good tenant, you're hardly ever there, you're always working, even when you' re home you're working, you're quiet, you pay your rent on time...
...Norton...
...Recently, when my grandparents both had the flu, I stayed away from the office to make them a big vat of chicken soup...
...Either my grandmother herself does not know, or if she knows, has never told anyone...
...It wouldn't look right," she said...
...He flirts with all the young women who go into Manhattan to work...
...You have to take pride in your work...
...I reminded him of his plans for me, and he laughed...
...In this neighborhood of four- and five-story buildings with gardens in the front and back, there are grapevines growing on the telephone wires...
...I rolled my eyes again...
...Like garlic, it stays with you...
...That month, I had had two other male visitors and a work-related dinner party...
...I think that little child misses us...
...In my church in Brooklyn, its walls lined with lurid statues of bleeding saints, two teen-age girls gossip in the pew, playing with a beeper, whispering loudly over the pages of a young adult novel...
...Shortly after that, his father got sick, and went back to Italy to die...
...And some mornings, I wake up with my stomach in knots, burping like my grandmother...
...III I, too, collect stones from many of the places I've been...
...They ask me, what'sa matter with that girl, she's got so many boyfriends...
...Sometimes he tells me it's better not to get married...
...When they come to visit, I shouldn't offer them a place to stay...
...The other night you had six people over," Rosa added, "and I didn't hear any of them leave...
...He had been working in a leather factory in Newark, my grandfather told me...
...Satisfied, she delivered her verdict: "He looks like a nice guy, an intelligent guy...
...She said, "You wanna have foreigners...
...You're working for the landlord...
...I don't know if he has yet spotted me with my fidanzato, or what he will say, but this is not the neighborhood to live in if you want a life protected from the eyes of strangers...
...You already know: the smell of garlic frying...
...Every week I see a different guy, what'ya do, take every guy in the neighborhood into your bed...
...The next time I saw her, she advised me to find another man, younger, and see both of them for a while, then decide...
...But I gotta look out for your reputation, and the reputation of the house...
...When my boyfriend and I went to pick up the dryclean-ing, the lady who runs the laundromat asked me, "who's he...
...First, when Umberto saw him on the stairs, he raised the rent fifty dollars...
...When I was a child and my grandfather brought this kind of mozzarella home, I would eat it right from the milky wet waxed paper it was wrapped in while my grandmother made us mozzarell' in carozz', in a carriage, that is, between two pieces of bread, dipped in egg and breadcrumbs, then baked in the oven...
...At the neighborhood church my old landlady Mrs...
...I have a very good reputation...
...Rosa," I said, "Let me worry about my own reputation...
...My neighbor yells to her kids, "Get in hee-yah...
...Looking at Rosa, I think I begin to understand why in tribal cultures and small villages, people needed protection from the evil eye...
...A man should bring home the bacon, the wife, put it in the pan...
...VII First the garlic, then the parsley, then the breadcrumbs and oregano...
...cracked pavement a year after new road work was done, peeling paint in places where no one had bothered to scrape the old coat...
...I'm a hospitable person, I'm Italian...
...The building with the ground floor wine shop was owned by the proprietor's grandparents...
...Amaroso used to call the "cathedrale," there is a Rosary Society, a Cabrini Club, and the Our Lady of Loreto Council Columbiettes...
...Do you hear me...
...The grandson, in his thirties, has lived here all his life...
...You know, Joe, I think she misses us," she shouted...
...Isn't family the most important thing...
...The problem with this country, nobody anymore takes pride in his work...
...When he came to America he had delivered eggs and milk, worked in a laundry and a candy factory, became an apprentice plasterer and ultimately a building contractor, constructing and renovating churches and schools...
...Let them find a hotel...
...Or if she told my grandfather, for instance, he then has never told...
...While the soup was cooking and I sat working in the other room, I could hear my grandmother talking about me loudly, because she'd taken out her hearing aids...
...They know something about life you don't know...
...They would not let me go anywhere alone...
...He is not Italian, not Catholic, divorced, sixteen years older, and has a beard...
...With me, he doesn't consider it a sign of disrespect...
...They'll respect you for it...
...My grandmother told me once she loves to hear me talk, I talk so nice: grammatically and with a big vocabulary...
...Or did it mean, more literally, "If you respect yourself, you will be respected...
...Lately, when something happens my grandfather does not understand when the family does not all come together on a holiday, for instance, or we show up at his house at different times he has taken to saying, "I must have been born in the wrong country," or simply, "I was born in the wrong place...
...My blood boils...
...Perhaps it was mostly dialect, or perhaps because I spoke a few words she granted me perfect comprehension, and spoke very rapidly...
...Each time they ignore me...
...I get steamed up right away...
...I, too, was raised to respect myself...
...Later they lived in the Bronx, then in Italian East Harlem, and finally in upstate New York, where I was born...
...These Brooklyn bakeries even carry Manhattan Coffee Soda, the sweet, carbonated espresso in a small glass bottle with an old-fashioned yellow label...
...A week before Christmas in this neighborhood, they begin selling fish for the Christmas Eve feast the stocca, the bac-cala, or salt cod, the eels, the vongole, or clams from the back of a truck parked near the fruit market, in front of the bank...
...The casket is born aloft by burly darkhaired men wearing medals on long red ribbons around their necks...
...I did not say that my grandparents do not know he exists...
...He says, "The landlord pays, but you pay in the rent...
...I explained that I had friends in Washington, in California, in North Carolina...
...I'm tellin' ya, listen to me, because I'm tellin' ya for your own good, don't go with a guy just because he likes you...
...In the country, within twenty minutes' drive (but she won't drive now, which leaves her housebound) of each of her brothers and her parents, my mother suffers, terribly, from the depression which struck each of her parents, as well as a premature decline from Parkinson's disease...
...IV You might say I have a bad case of third generation-itis...
...that's when I know he has had a fight with his wife...
...We took a picture to bring back to my grandfather of a distant relative, a stout old woman in black she tried to pull a small boy to her, but he pulled away he was afraid of having his picture go to America...
...I always argue...
...Now that I have had a man in my life more seriously (truly, the most seriously) for over a year, Umberto and Rosa have become increasingly agitated...
...Each Christmas, before preparing the Christmas Eve feast, of eels and macaroni with fish sauce and lobster, she disintegrates into days of hiccuping, burps, and sobs, her eyes rubbed red under her glasses, sometimes not even wearing her wig to cover the baldness caused by menopause...
...I want God to keep me living to see you a beautiful bride, then he can take me," she says...
...There is no greater family occasion none so garlanded with expectation than an Italian wedding...
...The great uncle with the cigar, the favorite great aunt with freckled arms hardy as a hazelnut...
...I've tried to rationalize: Maybe there's too much noise on the stairs...
Vol. 124 • October 1997 • No. 17
