Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (33 page)

Her brother was watching her. She could feel the heat of his stare, and she turned to him.
No matter what you answer,
his look told her,
I’m still going to catch it.
Then he turned away.
So save yourself
, his turning away said, and she was free.

“Well, Nadia?”

Uncle Eddie put out his cigarette. Then he reached down and rested one hand on the buckle of the snake skin belt, waiting.

“Sitti isn’t sick,” she found herself saying, and so calmly that her own voice sounded strange to her. “And all Mikhi did, he just looked at her, that’s all. It wasn’t the Evil Eye.”

“Ach!” Sitti was furious, betrayed.

And so, after Mikhi got the belt, Nadia would be next. She knew that. But already, calmly, she was beginning to think about what it would be like for them afterward. It would not be easy; even so, she felt a wordless yet certain anticipation: the two of them luckless, free in Boston and Chicago and Holy Toledo, the rest of their lives lost in the American homesickness. What should they take with them?

Next to her, Mikhi released a nervous sound, almost a laugh.

Then it was over, her brother’s voice cut off in the suck of breath as Uncle Eddie reached out to grasp him by the arm. The belt flashed, and Mikhi shrieked with each sharp flick and slap, again and again and again.

Nadia would be next. Calmly, she closed her eyes and tried to imagine America, how it will be, and what they should take with them when they go.

MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN

On the counter the battered black radio hummed with advice to the housewife, the dieter, the car owner, the consumer, the bargain hunter, the average American. Carlton Fredericks proclaimed that vitamins could cure anything. Bernard Meltzer warned of stingy insurance companies waiting to cheat their customers. Joan Hamburg tipped single women on the best places to meet men. They alternately bellowed and soothed as their disgruntled or dissatisfied callers pleaded, fumed, and ranted, their duets complementing the clanking pots and sizzling garlic perpetually boiling and browning on my mother’s stove. My mother always listened to the radio in the kitchen while she worked, her small hands, efficient and quick, cleaning the counter, washing the dishes, cutting vegetables. If she could, she would have listened all day to these radio voices—Carlton Fredericks and his array of vitamins meant to cure everything from hammertoes to cancer or Bernard Meltzer with his practical advice on buying a home or saving money. The advice competed in the kitchen with the popping sounds of frying peppers and the whistling of the steam blowing out of the spout of the tin espresso pot. As she performed her daily food preparations, she was enveloped all the while in the comforting advice that for my mother had an almost olfactory presence, an elusive aroma of Americanness. It was as if Hamburg’s or Fredericks’s advice saturated her clothes with the essence of that intangible something that made an
American. Those voices crackling from their various AM frequencies comforted her, because through the democracy of radio, they treated her as American—something the rest of the world certainly never did.

Often, my mother acted as if those radio shows were lectures of a great professor and gave us oral reports on such topics as vitamin C as a cure for hair loss. She informed us of the dangers of the scheming con artist who might pretend to be a roofer who happened to be passing by your house and notice that the roof was severely damaged; he might then offer you a special “one-time-only” roof repair with only $200 down, payable immediately in cash, of course. She treated me to one of these minilectures every time I sat at the kitchen table to sip espresso or taste the meatballs before dinner. In a way, those radio shows were her university education, teaching her how to be more American or at least revealing to her the fears and foibles of a typical American. When she learned something from the radio, she seemed amazed as if something that had eluded her for many years was finally within her reach.

My mother was twenty-three when she came to America from San Mauro, a little Italian village in southern Italy where she attended school through the third grade, when public education ended. Even fifty years later, she talked about her days in school as exciting. Her voice took on a lilt when she described the classroom, the teacher, the books. She even recited poems she had memorized in first grade and still remembered the exact words the teacher used to describe them. She hung on to these memories because she desperately desired more knowledge.

Sometimes she seemed wistful when she told us stories about her past. Although she left the Old World behind, she had no intention of losing us too. She believed in keeping us all close to her. In a way, those radio shows allowed her to do
that by giving her something to talk about she thought we’d understand. More important, she wanted to convince us that she, too, was learning to be an American. This language of radio seemed to provide her with the questions to ask that would open the door between us, the door that was slowly slamming shut, even while she tried to keep us safe in her warm kitchen.

Once on one of those radio programs she heard someone mention “petting.” I was about eleven years old, and she asked, “So, what is petting?” I, who was still lost in a world of books, explained, “Why it’s like when you touch a cat, you are petting the cat.” To illustrate, I made smooth motions as if I were petting the cat’s fur. My mother giggled and averted her eyes so I knew that the answer I had given her was not the one she was looking for. It was a couple of years before I realized what she wanted to know.

My mother was the hub of our lives. We all revolved around her. Yet as we grew older, it became harder and harder for her to give advice we didn’t mock. I remember my brother teasing her. When we were in the car, he’d point to her head and say, “Hey Ma, what’s that little bump on your shoulders?” Ignoring him, she’d sit in the front seat of the car, her head barely reaching the top of the seat back, her purse securely tucked under her arm, her hand clutching the door handle. All the while, her feet made jerking motions as if she could stop the car. Though she’d never driven, she would direct my father, “Too fast.” Or “Watch out. Here comes car.” My brother called her the “little general,” teasing but also serious because she did, after all, want to keep her hands on our lives, kneading us into shape the way she kneaded bread in the big bowl.

She was fiercely protective of us. I was not even allowed to step off the front porch unless my older sister was with me. Mostly, my mother encouraged us to play Monopoly,
dominoes, or checkers at a rickety table that we set up for that purpose on the stoop. The few times we were allowed to go anywhere, my mother paced and worried until we were home again.

I was surprised, therefore, when I told her I was applying to the University of Virginia and she didn’t tell me that I couldn’t go. Instead, her dresser quickly filled up with votive candles that formed a circle of flickering light around the Saint Anthony statue that already presided over her room. The candlewicks glowed ominously in the weeks before the letters from colleges were scheduled to arrive. I am not sure what I imagined the University of Virginia to be like, but I wanted to go there since I was positive that it was a world away from Paterson. I cringe now when I think of the picture of me I attached to the application, a picture in which I looked about as un-American as anybody could. Of course, since I had rarely been out of Paterson in my life, I don’t think my mother would ever have really let me go. The matter was settled when I got a full four-year scholarship to the branch campus of a working-class university, a campus in Paterson a few blocks from the high school I had attended. Her prayers were answered; it didn’t matter what other news the mail held. I would live at home, taking the bus at the corner of our street to the college.

My dreams of ivy-covered buildings receded as my fear about going to college consumed me. On the first day of class, I was terrified because I thought I’d never fit in. Those first weeks were exhilarating and terrifying. I joined everything I could and soon made more friends than I ever had. I even took twenty-one credits a semester because my scholarship paid for as many classes as I wanted to take. I guess I was my mother’s daughter after all. I wanted to learn everything I could, hungry for the world outside the isolated Italian neighborhood and the sometimes overpowering atmosphere
of my mother’s fragrant kitchen. I threw myself into college life, made friends with other working-class kids, and enjoyed it all. Of course, each night I had to ride the bus home.

The world I was constructing for myself was so different from the world my mother had known. From the time she left school, she worked in the fields, cooked the family’s meals, and helped her father in his grocery store. Her life followed the same routine until she married my father. He was an American by virtue of his birth certificate and his one year of life he spent in Philadelphia as a baby. As an adult, he went back to Philadelphia to work and returned to Italy when he decided to find a wife. The first time he saw my mother she was chasing the family pig up the mountain, her face rosy-cheeked, her body strong and sensual. He decided then and there to marry her.

Three months after she caught that reluctant pig, my mother found herself married and living in an Italian neighborhood in Paterson, New Jersey. Maybe she thought that America would be a place where she could break out of the constrictions most women faced when they married and lived the rest of their lives in San Mauro. I know she hoped to go to school, to pick up where she left off in Italy. Although my father went to night school to learn English, he insisted, “Women don’t need to go to school.” My mother cried for days, remembering how much she loved going to school. She knew she needed to learn English and night school was the only way she’d be able to find out about all the things she wanted earnestly to know. She pictured herself reading a book or memorizing poems in English as she had done in Italian. At the very least, she’d be able to read the signs in the grocery store and on the street. But all her pleading and tears would not change my father’s mind. Consequently, she never did learn English correctly. She only knew the words my sister and I taught her and those phrases she learned from the radio.

Perhaps the voices of Meltzer, Hamburg, and Fredericks replaced the elders that my mother might have known in her village of San Mauro. Certainly, she accepted the radio hosts’ advice as sage wisdom, wisdom she believed could improve my life as well. Daily she’d repeat the advice she’d heard, her mind serving up these tidbits on demand. “Oh, yes,” she’d say. “Take vitamin C. Good for your hair,” When we’d argue, I’d scold, “Ma, where did you hear that garbage?” She’d retreat, muttering, “Levermind, levermind,” and go on believing what she chose, not even accepting that the word was “nevermind.” She’d continue to say it as she heard it. Her mind appeared to be a jumble of information, much of it contradictory, picked up from her favorite radio show hosts—advice on love and dating, on how to raise children or where to find the perfect cashmere sweater.

The American world of the radio was so different from the daily Italian world she usually occupied. She worked in the Ferraro Coat Factory on River Street where all the women workers were Italian; while they sewed, they chattered all day in their own language. Then at night, after dinner, we visited our aunts and uncles and my parents’ friends. Since Italian was the only language they knew, my mother did not get much practice in American conversation. Her spoken English remained limited even after she had lived in America for fifty years, though she understood a lot more words than she could say. We’d talk to each other in a mixture of Italian and English so blended together that I couldn’t say where one language ended and the other began. My mother had trouble saying English words, the sounds too hard and clipped for her Italian tongue. She even called Bernard Meltzer “Bohnarulza,” and it took awhile for me to figure out that she was referring to Meltzer, her favorite of all the gurus who kept her company through her days.

Despite her seeming deafness to our correction of her pronunciation, I know she was ashamed of her illiteracy. Once
when I was in college, my father was driving us home from the Farmer’s Market and she saw a store that said “Package Goods” in big letters across its window. “What is that?” she asked. “It says package goods, Ma,” I answered. “We’ll have to go there to buy material one day,” she said, and I laughed. “Ma, package goods doesn’t mean material. It’s a liquor store!” “Oh,” she said, turning her face away from mine, but not before I saw the shame that colored it.

Twenty-five years after I left home to get married, my daughter graduated from the kind of college I would like to have attended—ivy-covered buildings, brick paths, archways, towers. My mother sat with my daughter’s huge yearbook with its brightly colored photographs in her lap. She gazed at the pictures of the beautiful, upper-class young men and women with their vitamin-enriched skin, their straight teeth, their shining hair. Seemingly amazed by the lavish photos spread before her, she kept saying, over and over, “Look how beautiful they are! Can you believe it? Look!” I understood that to my mother these young people represented a world she could not have imagined twenty years ago, a world of lush grass and gracious buildings where the sun seemed to shine only for these privileged people as it had never shone for her. She was amazed that her granddaughter, only two generations from San Mauro, could go to a place like this one and actually look as though she belonged. She rubbed her small hand across the faces in the glossy pages as though she had discovered something miraculous. She kept shaking her head, and proclaiming, “Oh, how beautiful!”

She turned suddenly to me then, and said, “Ah, I was so proud of you when you graduated from college. The first one in our family. I was so proud, I thought I’d burst.” “But Ma,” I stammered, “You never said anything. I didn’t know.” All this time I thought she was angry with me for choosing a different path, for leaving her behind. “Ah,” she declared, “it
wasn’t for me to say. I’m your mother. I didn’t want to bring bad luck on you.”