“Really? You think the family won’t be able to handle our garden-variety marital shit? Can’t we just do one of the very few things we do well together and take the lousy trip to Italy this summer?”
“No.”
And that’s how we’ve been here together only five, and not six, times.
I am sure he was right. We would have fought and I am prone to fighting big and cathartic. The marriage counselors in their tidy offices tried to teach us the therapeutic tune of the moment, a horrible song of constant restraint in which you may speak only of your own feelings—which I experienced as having a constantly full bladder but never being allowed to let it out, but for a tablespoon at a time—with nil relief. We tried it, the concessions, the conscientiously held tongues, the supposedly edifying reiteration of those catch-phrases that all ill-suited couples resort to, mantralike: Marriage is hard work. Marriage is a compromise. But I like to break the furniture, throttle the bastard’s neck, hurl epithets across the room and narrate the exaggerated story with myself as the innocent. All of which I will cheerfully apologize for in the morning, but not until I have drained all the poisons, every last drop. In hindsight, I can see how it’s good that we skipped that year’s annual July visit. Michele, by contrast, was raised to see anger as vulgar and unintelligent, so his, unexpressed, steadily seeped into our life like lead leeching into the public drinking water, which, I’ve heard, is what brought down Rome.
I have no way, it occurs to me looking over at Alda while we shell peas, to canvass her to know how she would have felt if we’d come anyway, in spite of our marital discord. Over the years, I’ve picked up some Italian, but with her it doesn’t work. To her I remain incomprehensible. Michele says that he thinks the reason I have become relatively able to communicate with almost everyone else over the years but not with her is that she has become more and more deaf. So just as I’ve become vaguely conversational, she’s tuned me out. But I sense from the way she is about everything—so extremely patient, so good-natured, the way she addresses all of her children as “amore mio” when they enter the room or call on the telephone—that she would be able to metabolize anything we would have brought with us, no matter how flulike.
We shell the rest of the peas and start tipping the beans. Alda offers me something to eat from a platter of something unidentifiable she’s had stowed away for two full July days in the dish cabinet. I was seduced that first year by her boiled vegetables. And totally enamored with her dish cabinet with corks and espresso plates and leftover fried eggplant all jumbled in with the mosquito coils and the bottle caps and the fifteen-year-old dried dead herbs in jars.
But as she’s proferring that plate of something I believe to be fried béchamel that has sat, uncovered, next to and on top of the mismatched espresso cups, the bags of dried pasta, among the moth-infested polenta meal, and the jars full of soda bottle screw caps. I start to unravel a bit, without letting on. A little spider of disappointment crawls down my back as she’s handing me the plate of undercooked béchamel still tasting of raw flour, rolled in bread crumbs and fried. It’s her great-grandmother’s recipe. But I need a meal, a full meal, a hot meal. I need fresh food that hasn’t sat in the propane oven and then in the dish cabinet all day. I need a steak. I need something I can’t name. I need to take all of the shit off this table—this beautiful old granite-topped table—and put it where it belongs. I need to be a wicked American, a total Italian failure and put the ironing in the laundry room and the cookies in the cookie tin and the scrap paper in the scrap paper drawer and the diaper cream in the diaper bag and the keys in her key pouch in her purse and the batteries for the camera into the camera so that here on the kitchen table we can just shell black-eyed peas.
“No, grazie,” I say, and continue tipping the beans. She returns the béchamel balls to the cabinet for day three.
Of course it’s not her; she still holds my hand sometimes and cuts open sea urchins for lunch and fills