women sat at the table in their housedresses, Manuela with her eyeglasses down at the end of her nose, a pile of grains in front of each of them, and quietly, speaking only occasionally, they sat there and separated the husks from the grains. I understood the task immediately—I’d done this in Turkey when I was “politely disappearing”—and so took my coffee and joined them. Quietly, I insinuated myself into their silent “conversation” around wheat—now we all three were sharing an experience. It’s not dramatic or significant. It’s just a way of communicating. But for me it is everything. I’m trying to show them that I am a worker. That I wash dishes. That I can help clean the wheat. That I am not some useless burden of a houseguest. And it stands in amazingly well for language that we just don’t have. Manuela reads and writes and speaks English perfectly, but hesitates, and will do so only when my struggle for a word or to communicate an idea becomes too great, and then she bails me out. And this is how I have come to know Alda, my future mother-in-law, for the first weeks, and then subsequent years of my relationship with her son.
And then we went to a family dinner. As if the motorcycle tours and the villa and the incredible mother weren’t enough, I met strangers who came up to me and hugged me, who gave me kisses on both cheeks—but real kisses with actual cheek-to-lip contact as if they truly meant it. I met sisters and cousins and wives and best friends who smiled at me as warmly as if I were a cherished daughter. I met old medical school friends of Michele’s whose eyes lit up with unmistakable joy and pleasure when meeting me. It was immediately obvious how much these people cared about Michele, and how the Italian idea of hospitality is automatically and unconditionally extended to anyone someone they already love loves. Alberto and Rosie, within twenty minutes of meeting me, said, “We love you as we love Michele.” It’s from Rosie, years later, that I learned to put a peeled potato in the pasta cooking water for extra starch. Meanwhile, the olive trees swayed in the gentle breeze, and handmade orecchiette were passed around, and the wine flowed, and someone handed me my first sgropino—that lively dessert drink of prosecco and vodka and lemon ice cream which is so named because it describes the sneezelike sound a horse makes when she’s shaking the flies from her nostrils. Because it makes you shudder just like that.
And that’s just how it felt to be introduced to Michele’s family.
At some extra-low point, some years after we were married, Michele and I went to a marriage counselor in New York and we sat down on the couch in her nice office on our first visit and we introduced ourselves. As soon as Michele started speaking, as soon as she heard his voice, the therapist lit up and smiled and said: “Oh. You’re Italian! Are you Italian? I LOVE Italians!” And I slouched down on the couch a little—watching the therapist’s face aglow with her own memories of orecchiette and sgropino and olive oil—and I thought: Oh no you don’t honey; you love Italy.
What did I love? The man? The country? I loved folding myself into Michele’s family and loved how much time they could all spend together, happily it seemed, without running out of conversation. We could have been with the cousins and sisters and husbands all day at the pool or the beach, gone home for showers, aperitivi and a costume change, but then at eight forty-five, when we have all reconvened around the dinner table at one or another’s house or the local restaurant dining al fresco, everybody—everybody—is talking a mile a minute and gesticulating animatedly as if we hadn’t just seen each other over the five long, hot languorous afternoon hours in the shade of the umbrella poolside. As if we had just arrived from the airport fifteen minutes before for the first time since last year. At least that is how it appears to me as a non-Italian speaker. It’s possible, even likely, that nobody is saying anything but bullshit, but it can feel very satisfying, like a good sneeze, to be enveloped by it.
IT WAS A FEELING that I wished would continue year-round but that we—Michele and I—never managed to get a long run on once back in New York. There