up after, who was forced to comb his hair and kiss the ladies’ hands and to serve the visiting guests, he came around to each of us and politely served us the ice cream from a tray.
And there we sat, three women accustomed to work from the moment we wake until the moment we lay down our heads, not quite seamlessly transformed into gentle ladies by a tray, a cushioned chair, and the polite sharing of a hot afternoon’s bowl of ice cream with silver spoons. Marco splashed around on the terrace in his little blow-up swimming pool, Leone snoozed in the linen basket, and Alda and I sat with Carmeluccia and they made conversation while I just listened and tried to decipher the Italian. I couldn’t understand but a few words of it and I wondered if they were speaking to each other in local dialect, but even so, or especially so without language, I could see that we were all kind of stiff and uncomfortable, with not that much to say once children and various family members had been asked about. During a pretty significant lull, I admired Carmeluccia’s orecchiette, and asked her a few questions about how she made them, while we finished up the last bites of our ice cream.
“Do you want me to show you? I can show you! It’s nothing, Signora, flour and water! Come, let me show you!”
And within a few minutes we have escaped the parlor and are all back in the kitchen where we are all most comfortable, rolling up our sleeves, forming a little circle around her while she prepares to make pasta at the kitchen table.
“Donna Alda,” she said, “where are you keeping your flour now? Where is the flour? We need the durum flour, only the durum flour.”
I smiled to think that she believed it possible that the location of the flour could possibly have changed since she was with the family. The flour, as it had been for decades, was kept in The Cabinet, and I retrieved it for her.
Without even removing her wedding band, she dumped a small pile of the flour directly onto the table, made a well in the center, and added water. There was nothing to measure. She began to knead the dough as familiarly as you or I might pet the family dog. The dough stuck to her fingers at first and she scraped it off and worked it back into the greater mass of dough. Alda found an apron, and from behind, like a tailor draping a client for a custom suit, tied it around Carmeluccia’s waist, barely disrupting the kneading. I don’t know what they are saying, but conversation has really picked up, and now Rosaria is with us, holding baby Leone and offering advice on texture and humidity of dough, and Alda, of course, has her own advice and opinions. Even Michele, who is so far removed from the time when he made pasta like an Italian, the fifty-two-year-old doctor who’s lived in America for the past nearly thirty years and who now shops exclusively and with great American enthusiasm for discounts and bargains at Home Depot, The Gap, and Costco, even he wants to weigh in. Through the great din of opinions, without oil or salt or eggs, Carmeluccia produces a soft, pliable, elastic dough. It is simply flour and water.
I have never been able to identify or understand my class. I think we were raised as bourgeoisie but I am not even sure what the term means—shop owners?—and I remember it being spit out in the most derogatory way in the books that I loved most when I was in college. I think it’s considered loathsome. I’m comfortable upstairs and downstairs. I do low-paying manual labor and always have but I’m educated and came to own my own business when I was thirty-four years old. We owned our house growing up but tenuously, so tenuously that we jokingly referred to the bank man who carried my father through a lot of dark valleys as “Uncle” Bill. But we traveled in the summers and drank champagne at holidays. I know which fork to use with which course because I have set and cleared so many tables, not because I have sat at so many. I employ a full-time babysitter in New York but I’m so awkward about it, it’s so new for me, that I get the skillet onto the stovetop and cook the chicken nuggets, and finish