the cabinets, and it continues as I move up and down each aisle in the grocery store, and interferes still while I am chopping each onion at the newly created cooking island in front of the kitchen stove. By the time I check out at the grocery store and I’ve put this grocery bill on my personal card, sautéed the onions with the potatoes, and wiped down the counter, I feel precariously poised exactly between totally perfect, as if I am exactly where I should be, and totally fucked-up, as if I were bankrolling my own martyrdom. If he had ever once finished one of those started sentences as I had always yearned for them to be finished, we may have had a different vacation, a different ending. But at the time, all I could think was, Dottore, you don’t get a new iPhone if I don’t get a dinner party.
I prepare the octopus as Alda prepares it. With potatoes and onions and a few hot chilis. But when I put it in the serving dish, one of her large old Salentino pottery pieces, she doesn’t recognize it.
“Gabrielle, che c’è dentro?” What’s in there?
“Polpo, Alda. E tua recette. Con cipolle, patatas, e peperoncini pauci. Polpo.” It’s octopus, Alda. It’s your recipe. I learned it from you. With onions and potatoes and a few chilis. It’s your octopus!
“Con cipolle?” she asks, her brow knit up tight. Her black eyes not comprehending.
“Si!” I say.
“E che altro?” she asks. And what else?
I repeat, as if saying it for the first time. “Patatas.” “Cipolle.” “Peperoncini.”
This is Italian I can actually speak. Menu Italian.
Leone comes running into the kitchen, nearly impaling his head on the corner of the newly situated heavy granite cooking island. Everyone is back from the pool.
“E … E.… E, Gabrielle?” she finally manages. “Come e chiama questo piccolo?” What is this little one’s name?
“Questo e Leone,” I say.
“Leone!” she cries, her face now flush and bright with recognition and relief. She remembers Leone.
“Si! Leone. Ciao, Leone! Tesoro mio! Ciao, piccolo!” Yes! Leone. Hi, Leone. My treasure. Hi, little one!
And then she asks me, “Quanti figli ci sono?” How many kids are there?
“Due, Alda. Ci sono due. Marco e Leone.”
This is new this year, this kind of memory loss. She gets a storm across her face, her brow knit so tight I would like to press my thumbs into the creases and massage them away.
“Due figli??” she exclaims. “Due??!!”
“Si, si,” I reply. “Marco e Leone.”
And she falls silent and brooding for a couple of minutes, sitting at the kitchen table with the telephone in front of her. I wash the puntarelle and tip the green beans standing at the sink with my back to her, affording her, I hope, the privacy in which to experience her frustration and befuddlement and disorientation. Leone runs back out to the driveway to pee in what’s left of the gravel.
The stove needs to be replaced, but after rearranging the kitchen so that the heavy granite topped table is now a cooking island and the low kitchen table with all the crap on it is pushed against the wall so that people can convene and eat there without getting in the way of the cooking, I feel there is strong and immovable resistance from Giovanni. There is only so much change this family can stand. Throw away the mealy-moths and move the kitchen table and call it quits for this year because this is at the threshold of what they can handle. The Fuortes brothers are practically sweating with nerves. I realize I have already gotten away with as much as I can for this year and will let go of the new stove. But it does not make me comfortable. The grids that rest over the burners have corroded away these past fifty years—and where there used to be four solid prongs over each burner atop which your pot could sit securely, there are now little stumps and missing legs altogether so that sometimes you must balance the pot to boil water or fry French fries on two little prongs.
The pots themselves, aluminum pieces of crap—as dented and buckled and mangled as little car wrecks—wobble on a perfectly flat surface, let alone on the stump of a burner grid. One ten-quart pasta pot full of boiling water at every meal and I’m tense, ultra-edgy when my kids come blasting into the kitchen clutching my thighs, shrieking, hugging me right where I stand, between the stove and