Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (6 page)

The house on Fifth Street wasn’t fancy, but Adele made sure it had fancy flourishes. In a magazine she once saw garage doors painted in the manner of a black-and-white chessboard, and realized that her garage doors, formed by a grid of squares, could yield to a similar decorative treatment. So she and Jim, her middle son, went to work, improvising somewhat by replacing the black paint with turquoise, which matched the metal patio furniture. The results thrilled her, in no small part because they were visible to the neighbors, who had boring garage doors, monochromatic garage doors, garage doors that looked like, well, garage doors. Hers looked like a mosaic.

Before long, Domenica’s did as well. Domenica owned the house next door, and seemed always to be sitting at the window with the best view of the goings-on at the Brunis, her unblinking eyes staring out. She watched the garage makeover, then decided to mimic it. She painted her own chessboard, only in
pink
and white, and it was fewer than twenty feet away from Adele’s. To Adele this was an outrage. Had the phrase “copyright infringement” been in her vocabulary, she would have muttered it, or muttered whatever words in her southern Italian dialect came closest, along with references to plagiarism and theft of intellectual property. She wasn’t about to sit still for this. She and Jim plotted, and then made a stencil, and then went back to painting, at the end of which the grid on her garage doors comprised turquoise squares with inscribed white circles: a sort of chessboard with plump polka dots. Game, set, match.

She wanted to feel rich, and to her thinking a rich person would speak on a gold telephone. When she couldn’t find one in a store, she applied glittering gold paint to the glossy black surface of a normal phone. But the surface wasn’t right for paint, which didn’t fully dry on it, not after several hours, not even after several weeks. To place or answer a call at Adele’s house was to risk a wet, sticky hand and a wet, sticky cheek. And if the telephone conversation was a long one, you might wind up looking like you’d been mauled by Midas.

 

 

 

 

As each of her sons married, the house on Fifth Street became a sort of culinary school for their wives, none of whom were Italian but all of whom were expected—and in fact eager—to master the essential dishes: the eggplant macaroni; the cutlets; the frittata; the
pizza dolce
, a fluffy cheesecake made with ricotta; manicotti stuffed with ricotta; lasagna. Many of these dishes involved gravy, and my uncle Jim’s wife, Vicki, visited the basement kitchen to see how Adele made hers. So did my uncle Mario’s wife, Carolyn, who cooked with her as often as once a week. My aunts observed which meats she put into her gravy and how much of them, which sorts of tomatoes and seasonings she used. They knew that watching the way Adele worked was their best hope of replicating it, because they’d heard the story of my mother’s first attempt to make gravy for my father.

It was 1957; they had just been married, and were living in San Diego, where my father, then a junior officer in the Navy, was stationed. The first time he shipped out for several months, my mother decided she wanted to surprise him when he got home by making pasta with his mother’s style of gravy. So she wrote Adele and asked her for the recipe.

But Adele didn’t have recipes. She had only memories, routines and loose guidelines. If, for example, she was telling you how to make lentils, she’d say that you needed two fingers of water in the bottom of the pot. Then she’d press an index and middle finger together and hold them sideways, illustrating that the water should rise as high as the combined widths of those fingers. She never considered that different people might use pots of different sizes.

When she got my mother’s letter, she turned to her son Jim for help. How could she give my mother a recipe that didn’t exist? Jim said that she should talk him through the gravy process, and he would write it down, and then there would be a recipe, and into the mail it would go. He fetched a piece of paper and a pen.

Adele began. “You get a nice piece of pork,” she said, setting a tone for the specificity of the instructions. “You put it in a pot of olive oil and brown it nice-nice.”

Whatever document she and Jim produced no longer exists, but its limited utility is easy to imagine, as is my mother’s befuddlement when she received it. She apparently believed that with a little extra coaching and coaxing, she could pry something more concrete out of her mother-in-law, so she wrote back, asking: “How many cubic inches is a nice piece of pork?”

Jim read the letter to his mother, and fielded her questions.

“What does she mean,” Adele asked him, “by ‘cubic’?”

My mother confronted complications beyond the nonexistent recipe. She couldn’t find the right ingredients in San Diego, which didn’t have the Italian population or ethnic groceries that White Plains did. So Adele rounded them up and sent them along: cans of imported plum tomatoes, bottles of acceptable olive oil, packages of dried pasta, and, wrapped in several layers of aluminum foil, an enormous hunk of pecorino Romano.

In those days it took a fair amount of time for a package of this size to travel from coast to coast, and when it arrived it was kept in the post office until my mother could be notified to come and get it. She stepped into the post office and was stopped short by a horrible smell. She wondered what could be causing it and why the post office hadn’t done something about it. She presented the slip for her package, noticed the curious expression on the face of the worker who looked at it and, as the package was carried to her, realized that the smell was getting stronger and stronger. Aluminum foil could do many things, but preventing unrefrigerated cheese from spoiling wasn’t among them.

 

 

 

 

The summer house on Oak Avenue, which had its own spit of private beach on Long Island Sound, came later, after Mom and Dad had been married for many years. It was painted white, at Grandma’s insistence, with sky blue shutters and sky blue flower boxes under each of the front windows. And it had a white stone fountain along the bend of a crescent-shaped gravel driveway. To Grandma a fountain was the very definition of elegance.

Mark, Harry and I would spend long July and August afternoons on the beach. With a dragnet we’d walk back and forth through the shallow water to see what we could catch for Grandma. Mostly we caught silver shiners, each no bigger than a pinkie. We would bunch them into a corner of the net and bring the net to Grandma, who sat waiting in a beach chair, ready to perform for us and for the neighborhood kids who’d heard about and learned to enjoy this particular show. She’d pinch a shiner between two fingers and, while it still wriggled, drop it in her mouth and eat it. Sometimes she pinched it hard enough at one end to lop the head off, sometimes not. Either way, those of us watching her would wince, speechless, then carry the net back into the shallows for another sweep through the water.

Long Island Sound wasn’t considered a source of exceptional seafood; most of her neighbors on Oak Avenue didn’t use what the waters yielded. So they brought the bluefish and the clams and the mussels to Grandma’s back door. She could be counted on to turn them into meals, especially the mussels, which she steamed in enormous pots. Years later I’d learn to love mussels, along with squid and octopus, but back then I wouldn’t even try them. I couldn’t get around the way they looked, those squiggles of peachy orange flesh, and their briny aroma unnerved me.

The treat I associated most with the summer house were Grandma’s
frits
. She seemed to make these even more often in Madison than in White Plains, although I suppose she was sometimes serving
frits
she had in fact transported to the summer house up Interstate 95, in a gold-colored Oldsmobile sedan whose cargo of food rivaled any 18-wheeler’s.

She made
frits
two ways. In addition to the plain
frits—
the ones to be eaten with sugar—there were
frits
stuffed with mozzarella and tomato sauce. Stuffed
frits
were like miniature thick-crust pizzas turned inside out, or rather outside in, only better, so much better, than any pizza could be. A pizza wore its soul on the surface, baring all. It didn’t harbor any surprises. The cheese and sauce in Grandma’s stuffed
frits
were secrets you had to eat your way into, and the dough around them was different from a pizza crust, denser and richer and glistening with all of the oil it had sopped up during the frying.

While Mark and Harry preferred plain
frits
, I favored the stuffed ones, and prided myself on my own version of X-ray vision, which allowed me to look at a platter of mixed
frits
from a few feet away and tell which were which, spotting a telltale pinprick of red tomato sauce on the otherwise tawny surface of a stuffed
frit
or recognizing a plain
frit
by its less swollen form. I’d count how many stuffed
frits
were on the platter—there were always fewer, because they were less popular. If there were twenty
frits
in all and only four were stuffed, I’d keep a close eye on my siblings, willing them not to stray from the plain ones.

Apart from my experiment with Atkins, I didn’t try to restrain myself around Grandma’s cooking, on the grounds that it would be selfish, even churlish, to do so. Enjoying her food was a kind of altruistic gluttony, and I embraced it as a rare escape—increasingly rare as I grew older—from watching and fretting over and berating myself for what I ate.

Away from her, I had to question and try to control my appetite, at least if I wanted to avoid the “fat boy” catcalls and the husky section. Away from her, I had to work on this weird psychic muscle Mom kept chattering about, this thing called willpower.

Until, somewhat miraculously, I didn’t. Something other than Atkins came along. Something more effective.

Mom and Dad signed up Mark, Harry and me for swimming lessons because it was the responsible, safe thing to do, given all the time we spent on the shore in Madison. In between our Little League games and our tennis lessons, Mom ferried us to the pool at the White Plains YMCA, where we graduated rapidly from beginner to intermediate to advanced classes, the ascending levels named for ever-bigger fish: guppy, then minnow, then shark. It didn’t take us long to become sharks. We were naturals, all three of us. Even me.

So we joined the YMCA team and started regularly attending practices, at first just a few times a week, then every day. Before long, swimming elbowed out all the other sports in our lives.

“If you’re going to do something, you should do it well,” Mom always said to us, by which she meant we should be the absolute best at it, at least if there was any possibility of that. When it came to her children, she seldom thought there wasn’t the possibility of that.

Besides, she wanted a family of winners, wanted to stand on the pool deck and bask in the compliments from other parents, in the envy she was certain they felt.

“Mrs. Turner couldn’t even look at me after you beat Johnny in the freestyle,” she’d say to me, her expression and voice gleeful. “Next time, you have to beat him in the butterfly, too.”

“You
can
,” she’d continue, less as show of support than as admonition. “You were only a half second behind today, and that’s only because you got off the blocks so slowly. You were klutzy off the blocks. You need to work on your start.”

I was good in the freestyle and the butterfly and even the backstroke. To the astonishment of everyone in the family—and to my astonishment most of all—I was good at more events than Mark or Harry, and I got better all the time. By eleven I had so many trophies and medals that Mom boxed the oldest and smallest of them and toted them up to the attic. Water, it turned out, was my element. All my fumbling, flailing and sluggishness vanished when I entered it.

Dad would have been as happy to have Mark, Harry and me spending our athletic hours on a basketball court or in a hockey ring: those were the sports he watched on TV and knew well. Those were guys’ sports.

But Mom was partial to swimming. It didn’t make her nervous the way some other sports did; there wasn’t any way for us to get scratched, bruised or knocked down. It was easy to follow, each competitor given a lane of his or her own, the goal no more complicated than getting to the wall at the end of the last lap before anyone else did.

Most of all, it didn’t leave me out. She’d found something that Mark, Harry and I could all participate in with some success. She’d found an arena in which I had cause to feel confident among other kids my age, in which I could mingle with them from a position of strength. Good grades in school had never won their respect the way first-place finishes in the pool did.

On top of which, I was getting exercise. I was slimming down. Not as much as I should have been, because I was eating more than I had before all the swimming—I was even hungrier. But the extra exercise outpaced the extra eating; the balance worked in my favor. Mom, I could tell, was relieved.