and conversation. I, too, have just been through a long and difficult plane ride, am also sleep deprived, have exerted myself strenuously in the few days just before leaving in order to ready the family for our vacation, and I, too, long for my vacation to start with a fat plate of Alda’s zucchini and a glass of cold white wine from the Alto Adige and a boisterous catch-up session with my family around the table. That is my image of vacation in Italy. It is my image of being married to an Italian Italian. It is my fantasy of recovering that fireside night, snug in a sleeping bag surrounded by my brilliant siblings and speaking our own, made-up language. But I am reliably alone for the first few days babysitting on the terrace while my glass of wine warms on the dining room table where my seat remains empty. My hunger feeds my exhaustion. My exhaustion fuels my sadness. Five thousand dollars’ worth of plane tickets to wind up alone on the terrace, feeling like the nanny.
Later in the afternoon, with the kids zombied out in front of Italian cartoons on the television, I get a chance to speak with Manuela in the kitchen.
“Michele has told me that you aren’t coming with us to Leuca?” I ask, disappointed.
“I will stay here, if you don’t mind,” she says, always this polite with me. As if she were asking my permission to stay in Rome during the hot weeks of July while we go down to the house in Leuca with the whole family, including Alda, who has waited eagerly for our arrival so that we can head south together.
“Of course I don’t mind but I will miss you. Can’t I persuade you with the promise of mojitos?”
I know that Manuela likes my cooking and she has liked some of the little cocktails I make during the summer for aperitivo. When I have been able to get my hands on mint and limes—not easy in that small town in Puglia—I have made mojitos and she has loved them. She shows genuine delight at the idea but she must stay in Rome she says. “Ando must take summer classes and I must stay here to be with him.”
“So would it be good if I cook for the family this year, is that okay?” I ask. I had tried to discuss this with Michele before we left New York. I had insisted that we could not possibly arrive as a family of four and expect his mother to cook for us as usual, even with the help of Rosaria. But I was afraid of cooking for his mother and especially tentative about cooking so much pasta, which the family requires, a skill at which I am not very accomplished. Michele understood and agreed but answered only with his vague grunt and had not come up with a plan. So I had decided, maybe even on the plane ride over, that I would just take on the responsibility. But still I needed to check with Manuela. To assume that I might, for a few measly weeks of the summer, take over the kitchen of an Italian family who has lived under the matriarchy of their beloved and revered Alda Fuortes de Nitto, “Mamma,” for eighty-four years, seemed extremely delicate to me.
“But do you think it will be okay with Alda?” I ask Manuela. “I will need to rearrange some of the furniture in that kitchen.”
“Yes, I think she will love it. She will want to do some but not all. She wants to cook but can’t cook all of those meals. It’s too much: breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for the whole family and then again all over the next day. It’s too much for her. She has stopped, even, cooking Sunday lunch.”
“Okay, I understand. I will cook then. But what about Giulio?”
Manuela assures me that he will find the new things to eat exciting and interesting.
“Alda has stopped cooking Sunday lunch?” I repeat, having missed a few sentences of our conversation.
“When will you drive to Leuca?” Manuela asks.
“Wait! There’s no more Sunday lunch?”
Manuela nods sadly. “It’s too much for her now.”
For seven years there has been Sunday lunch. For something more like sixty-five years there has been Sunday lunch, but I mean for me there has been Sunday lunch for seven years. In spite of my isolation, my sadness, my long horrible winters with Michele, I live for Sunday lunch. It’s four-fifths