Blood, Bones & Butter - By Gabrielle Hamilton Page 0,102

are pregnant and uncomfortable and not sleeping well at night, the parallels to running a restaurant are almost over-obvious and all of that work you’ve done on your feet all day, with back problems from lifting so much heavy stuff or standing in one place for so long, with sometimes no time to eat or even to pee, and not sleeping much at all because of your commitment to your restaurant will all feel incredibly familiar and doable. And then when the suckling critter arrives, you will just fold that into your day like you have all the other leaking, sticky, oozy fluids you’ve been handling for the past decade. Every time you have to change the diaper of a noncompliant kid you will be reminded of every chicken you’ve ever trussed and every eel you’ve ever had to wrangle. Petulant adolescents who just want to borrow money, raid the refrigerator, and talk on the phone with their friends about what a bitch you are? That will be a piece of cake once you have managed a front-of-house staff, denied the bartender her vacation request, and uneasily loaned the new line cook her first and last months rent deposit on her new West Village apartment, knowing well you will never see that money again.

I wanted to interrupt my fellow panelists now going on about how women cook better than men, and how they’re faster and cleaner and smarter, and just tell this story to the young woman in the fifteenth row. But their essentialist drone drove me to silence. And I saved my tears for the train ride home.

Butter

17

CARMELUCCIA CAME ONE AFTERNOON TO PAY A VISIT. WE HAD ARrived in Leuca just a few days before, Michele and I and our two kids; the new one, Leone, while only a couple of months old, lavishly adored. We were just settling in, like butter on toast, to our annual July vacation. I unpacked our suitcases and stored them under the antique iron bed; Michele walked into town to get il giornale and i cornetti. Carmeluccia arrived with eight of her own eggs, biscotti she had made, a little hooded bath towel for Leone, and about a kilo of homemade orecchiette, “little ears,” and minchiareddhi, “little penises,” still damp and warm from her hands. Carmeluccia, in Michele’s family’s history of “help,” came before Rosaria and after Pasqualina. There has always been The Woman. The Woman who comes each day and helps with the cooking and the cleaning and the ironing. I have known only Rosaria in the years that I’ve been coming here, but I met Pasqualina, now in her seventies, one year when Michele took us all to pay a visit. She was, even in the depth of summer, all in widow’s black with heavy stockings and a woolen cardigan, and she showed us a couple of her own rabbits in her freezer, killed and skinned with her own hands.

I vowed to start my long arduous application for Italian citizenship by marriage as soon as I got back to the States when I saw those rabbits. In my vision of my own old age, I too, want to be shelling fava beans and skinning rabbits and having the people I have cared for stop by for a glass of cold tea. I want to grow old in Italy.

Carmeluccia, in her sixties now, the woman between Pasqualina and Rosaria, arrived to pay us a visit in the late afternoon.

She is stout and red in the face with good meaty hands and round hips and ankles so sturdy that they looked kind of wrong in the dressy heeled shoe that she was wearing. She was in a clean simple dress without earrings or makeup and wore only a gold chain that had a cross and a saint’s medallion and her wedding band. There was much kissing and hugging when she arrived and great koochy koo-ing with Leone and an extravagant display of amazement at how big Marco had grown since we were here last year. Every single Italian woman I have ever met is perfect with children, and Carmeluccia is more perfect than them all.

We all sat in the parlor, on the good chairs, kind of pleasantly staring at each other. Michele disappeared to the kitchen to spoon out pink and white ice cream into four glass bowls, place them on a tray with the real silver spoons, and as if he were again the thirteen-year-old boy in short pants that Carmeluccia cleaned