My mother could exude warmth and engender fear in equal parts. My childhood friends knew she would yell at them for breaking house rules, but when a hungry teenage boy showed up to work on a science project or play guitar with me in the backyard, my mother was always there, offering a “snack,” like leftover chicken drumsticks or homemade pepper and onion pizza. She was a force, a presence. As a public school teacher, her voice echoed throughout the house, from one story up and a hallway down, when she yelled for help moving a piece of furniture, or to tell my sisters and me she could hear us fighting. She talked with her mouth full and she interrupted. She had only one speed, and it was go.
I assume her ability to direct a flock of eighth graders to sing and dance on cue for the school’s annual play had something to do with why she didn’t mind the chaos of a crowded kitchen, the clutter and noise that sent me beneath the table. She was in her element there, surrounded by family, shouting over everyone, her palms gripping a wooden rolling pin, her brown arms flexing softly as she bore down on the dough.
While Mom and Nana worked the dough, Meaghan and Caitlin, my all-Italian sisters, with their rich brown hair and liquid eyes, would scatter around the kitchen like chattering monkeys, pretending to help, mischievously throwing handfuls of flour against the counter where it would explode in small dusty clouds. Both dark skinned with glasses and curly hair, my sisters, practically twins, operated as a unit. When the family gathered around old photo albums and flipped through the mid- to late-1980s, even my mother had to pull out a print and look at the year or caption on the back to figure out which of her younger two she was looking at. They were a neat line from my mother, clearly her daughters in both physical appearance and temperament. I was the crooked line.
Although I am the eldest, we are all the same age apart—each just twenty months from the next—so age alone doesn’t explain why they ended up so similar and I so different. Meaghan and Caitlin were tough in body and light in spirit, in contrast to my physical frailty and fascination with darkness. Never much interested in intellectual pursuits, they both loved spicy food, salsa dancing, and shouting. They always shared a unique bond of dance routines and soccer practices and nicknames. While my family was in the early stages of making pasta dough, they never had the patience to stand still long enough to help. They’d hold contests to see who could scramble up the inside of the kitchen doorframe faster, their backs against one side of the frame, their bare monkey feet against the other, powering their tiny bodies up to the ceiling. As for me, I waited. I had only one job, and it came later in the process.
It was Gampi, my grandfather, who manhandled the pasta machine, a clunky metal contraption with rolling plates and munching teeth. The edge of the counter was chipped slightly from the vice grip of the machine, which my grandfather tightened with his gnarled fingers. By the time Mom and Nana had the dough rolled flat enough, Gampi was ready. The two women gingerly carried the dough over to their father, husband, together, palms crossed beneath each other at the sagging center. They lifted it vertically and guided one swaying end gently into the patient metal rollers of the pasta machine. Gampi began turning the hand crank—nothing automated here—and the dough was pulled down into the machine. They ran the floured sheets through the machine three or four times, each pass thinning the dough to nearly tissue-paper consistency, too thin for human hands or clunky rolling pins to achieve. The dough grew even longer in their hands, its excessive thickness stretched and redistributed as length, until Mom called me over to drape the yard-long cool cloth of dough over my pale freckled arms.
Gampi lifted and unfolded the machine from itself, raising the slicing attachment into its place over the edge of the counter. These were the crucial moments that moved so slowly, requiring full cooperation and attention. I had to feed the dough back towards the machine at just the right pace. Too fast and the pasta bunched up on itself, and the entire flattening process had to be repeated. Not fast enough, and the dough pulled apart, a slow yanking pressure until it snapped like popped bubblegum. Mom and Nana guided the dough up and over, down into the machine at the perfect angle, making sure never to let it brush up against the edge of the machine where it would snag and tear. And Gampi turned the crank quickly, more quickly than you would think, pumping it insistently, until magically, out of the bottom of the machine grew dancing sprouts of spaghetti like freshly cut wheat, into my father’s waiting hands.
Dad gathered the pasta like yarn, spread between his two palms so that the damp dough wouldn’t stick back onto itself. He backed slowly, slowly away from the machine, bent at the waist, until the dough was just about to pass clean through. My mother came around to catch the other end, and I watched, having again retreated beneath the table, as my parents took the sweeping strands of pasta, together, towards the drying rack. Meaghan and Caitlin would leap to attention, pretending to carry the pasta too, tiny brown hands reaching up underneath the sagging blanket, inches above their palms. My parents never shooed them away. When the pasta was resting safely against the drying rack, everyone exhaled slightly. One batch down.
In all this work emerged an extended dance, all of us bowing and swaying around each other, backs pressed against walls to avoid collision, sliding from one spot to the next with broken pieces in our hands, the disparate parts that would eventually become a meal. Our cooking was a collective effort that blended the Irish in my father and the freckles on my skin into the Italian of the rest, across centuries and state lines and homelands, our family a single unit in the pursuit of the perfect pasta. There is no such thing as too crowded a kitchen.
LATER, WHEN WE cooked our new creation in steaming copper-bottomed pots, the pasta rolling in the boiling water, Gampi taught his granddaughters how to test its doneness, how to tell when the pasta had reached al dente perfection. He dipped a clawed wooden spoon into the pot and gathered a few wet strands into his callused palms, letting them drip dry over the sink, and then flung them against the kitchen wall. Nana scolded, but Gampi knew my mother would never tell him to stop. From where she stood in the kitchen corner, looking on fondly, I could see how her memory flooded with these lessons from her own childhood. If the pasta sticks, clinging to the white paint, not sliding more than a millimeter down the wall’s smooth surface, then it’s ready to eat.
Hanging on the kitchen wall, above the large table, was a framed print of Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want, wherein an elderly matriarch places a giant turkey onto a crowded white-clothed table. This was the image I saw whenever we ate together, and it seemed perfectly familiar to me: the commotion of elbows knocking into each other, the shouts to pass the mashed potatoes or gravy, the slightly outdated formality of the wallpapered walls and crystal dishes. Dinners, for my family, were a raucous, celebratory affair. Food was tradition. Food was connection. Food was family.
I carried the lessons of this kitchen with me, embedded in memory, even as I grew up and moved away, missed family dinners and, later, skipped the meatballs. I was taught that if you worked hard, and worked together, food was the great reward. Now, years removed from my childhood kitchen, the shape of each family member blurs slightly in my memory, allowing me to see the patterns rather than just the people, the choreography, the larger ritual being enacted. I learned that cooking was our way of communicating with each other, and that in the spinning around and between each other, we were saying, Be careful, I’m right here, I love you.
WHEN I WAS about five years old, there was a giant gathering at my great-grandparents’ house in Dedham, Massachusetts. This was the small city my great-great-grandparents,