In need of a break from the noise, I remember standing against the side of the house in my pink floral dress, looking back and forth between the strangers scattered across the green summer lawn and the road map of names lining the house, trying to figure out how these people belonged on this map, and how they were my family.
I had escaped the legions of aunts, big lumbering women, all of whom looked exactly like Nona, slightly hunched and limping with ulcers here and there, the flaps of fat on their upper arms waving as they charged towards me. The aunts always wore pantyhose, even then, in the middle of a New England July, but they never hesitated to take off their shoes. Their brown, toughened fingers, knotted like the bark of Papa’s apple trees, tangled in my thick blonde hair and laced around my wrist in amazement at how much of the bone they could see. I was dragged to the banquet table of fat, round meatballs and tiny chicken and pork tortellini three times after I ate of my own will, with stops along the way for the aunts, their red dresses billowing out like tents, to show the uncles how my mother had not been feeding me.
Tomato sauce splattered lightly across the cream collar of my dress, I retreated behind the corner of the tidy house. The lawn rolled out easily into the neighbors’ lawn, with no fences to separate them other than Papa’s rows of tomato plants and grapevines and apple trees. The neighboring houses were owned by cousins, children, old friends who shared ocean voyages, Saturdays at the salon, childbirth and child-rearing, grape crushing, garden planting, and wide, stretched-out knee-high stockings. I was young and pale and blonde, distanced from their bulging bodies and thick accents by generations and my suburban American culture. My mother and sisters fit; their appearances matched the second- and third-generation women in that backyard, and so did their personalities. Meaghan and Caitlin happily danced in the attentions of these distant relatives, while I retreated.
My parents had a videotape of the day, just an hour or so of panning footage. I don’t remember who was filming or who narrated—probably my mother’s brother, Paul, the aspiring artist of the family. But I do remember watching the video once as a family, many years later, laughing and pointing at our younger selves, at how much we’d changed. Since I’d hidden for most of the day from the loud, brash voices of my extended family, I only made one appearance on the tape. The cameraman was speaking to Papa, who sat on a folding chair in the backyard, his banjo slung across his lap. I crept into the right corner of the camera’s frame, my hair-sprayed bangs framing big glasses. I looked deeply concerned, my eyes wide and mouth pinched. I glanced at Papa, opened my mouth as if to speak, then darted my head up and to the sides, sharply, like a chicken, and wandered offscreen.
NO ONE WHO meets me in person, who sees my auburn hair, lily-white skin, ice-blue eyes, and rampant freckles, believes that I am at all Italian. When I was six years old, waiting with my mother in the lobby of the studio where my sisters took tap-jazz class, I heard for the first time what would be the defining joke of my childhood. My mother introduced me to another mom, who commented that she couldn’t believe how different we looked from each other. My mother smiled, put her arm around my shoulder, waist-high to her and said, “Yup, that’s Marissa—the milkman’s daughter.” Although I was puzzled at the time—we didn’t even have a milkman—I understood pretty quickly that I did not fit into this crowd of authentic Italian women.
Italian women cook. This is what we do.
In my earliest kitchen memories, I’m peering out from beneath the small round oak table in Nona’s kitchen in Dedham. Nona’s kitchen was even smaller than ours, and was always full—with the women of my family, but also with the Italian friends and neighbors. The kitchen steamed with the humid scents of boiling water and aging cheese, the stinging pinch of garlic and tomatoes sticking in their tousled hair. These women always sounded like they were yelling—mostly in English, with the occasional ingredient named in Italian—but this was just their natural volume. Thick hands dug deep into bowls of ground beef. Dots and smudges of white flour stuck against sweaty olive forearms and in strong black eyebrows. A unit. A pack. Because this is what we’ve always done.
Nona, limping and white-haired, could barely manage a flight of stairs, but she could command a room with the clang of a ladle against a pot. My mother managed to work a full-time job, raise three children within three years of each other in age, get her master’s in education part time in the evenings, and have a hot meal on the table every night. You better believe we sat still, bowed our heads, and gave thanks. Nobody was allowed to skip family dinner. This was the power of food. And it was always women, with the occasional exception of a communal cooking fest or a summer evening cookout, who made the food.
But not me. Worse than my bookish, quiet nature, worse than my skinny hips, the thing that most distinguished me from the loud, vibrant, powerful women of my family was my complete lack of abilities in the kitchen. I was a terrible cook. My mind was too everywhere-all-the-time, too chaotic and stormy to focus on any one thing, whether walking in a straight line or following a recipe. I bumped into doors and walls, smacked myself in the face with dancing, expressive hands, dropped and tripped over things constantly. And this clumsiness escalated to dangerous levels within the confines of the kitchen.
I’m the one who, while carrying a fresh batch of pasta across the kitchen, tripped over an untied shoelace and dropped a whole wet pile to the floor. When I was a teenager, my mother left me alone to reheat leftovers for my own dinner because everyone else had basketball practice or parent-teacher conferences, and I ended the night standing on a kitchen stool, crying, scrubbing mashed potatoes off the ceiling. One high school afternoon, a friend invited me to her house for lunch and asked me, while she ran to the bathroom, to watch the hot dogs she had set to sizzle in a skillet. She returned to find me, mouth twisted in worry, staring intently at the charred, black meat. At age ten, I made cookie dough so rubbery that when my six-year-old sister tried a bite from the bowl, the tough sugary mass stuck so hard against her baby canine it pulled clear of the gum. She ran crying from the kitchen to my mother, while I stood, guiltily, holding a bloody, unbaked cookie in my hand.
I don’t remember any single moment of humiliation, any one action that caused my mother to point, furious, and ban me from the kitchen. I just know I was never really invited—nor did I ever really want to be. I preferred to stand just outside, to hide beneath the table, to watch, sensing there was something that set me apart. Food was the bedrock of my family, the means of expression, and the solid foundation on which all of our connection was built. But I wasn’t an Italian goddess in the kitchen, so I had to be something else.
WHEN I WAS young, I attributed most of the difference between my mother and sisters and me to body type. Both my sisters have been taller than me since adolescence, and both had round, full bodies, the bodies of women, bodies described as curvy or generous or soft. I always assumed it was the self-possession that came with an adult female body that made them boisterous, more playful and extroverted than me. They knew something about being a woman, something that made them want to curl their hair and wear makeup, something I was missing. I aligned my failures in the kitchen with a general disdain for anything I deemed too girly.
Once every few months, to indulge their taste for the spicy, my mother and sisters would have what they called “girls’ night out.” They would dress up, taking the excuse to use their curling irons, to wear heels and eyeliner, and head out on the town for a more international approach to fine dining, and to catch a romantic comedy at the theater by the mall.
I stayed home with my father, relieved to have narrowly avoided getting roped into