Pomodori

 

by Regina La Barre

 

My nonna’s breasts were like tomatoes—juicy and round at ninety-six so many many years after eight children had sucked them out. In this miraculous longevity, as in all things about my grandmother, I took great comfort in her example for I am the only one of her grand­children to be named Adele after her, something she in turn took com­fort in—although she called me Regina as my mother cannot for that is the name of Mamm’ Adele’s second daughter, my mother’s most beloved dead sister. My names gave me permission to touch my grandmother’s body so that when my mother, exhausted by the bur­den of her own mother’s exhaustion, would leave (I can’t say to rest) I would come with the only other hands licensed to touch.

At first she wept. Che vergogna, that I should know that the dia­betes had taken her sense of touch and she could no longer be sure that she was cleaning herself. Oh yes, my hands could pet her. We were all allowed to pet her—in fact required to pet this woman whose own hands had always been too busy with scalding chickens or attacking dough or quelling rebellious hair into braids or stabbing the vast linen canvasses on which she embroidered her epics in Sulmonese cutwork to have any tender touches, any petting for us.

My Zia Vera, skin barren of maternal tendernesses, was tri­umphant that her mother’s hands no longer worked. “It’s disgusting,” she said. “She takes these stingy little shreds of toilet paper and wads them around her finger then misses. The shit’s all over her hand and under her nails.” My aunt spoke in English. I glowered silent state zi’ at her. “Oh she doesn’t understand,” continued Vera. The next day Mamm’ Adele said she’d rather it were me who came to care for her.

Care for her? Care for the body too holy for even my blacksmith grandfather to break? “Adele, Adele,” he petted after her softly in his wine-sodden self-pity, terrified that the terrors that he wreaked every day on the house, his children, and grandchildren might drive her for one minute out of his sight.

“Don’t touch don’t touch,” she would say in the voice of an oracle, but grinning. Later I would try to press against her laced corsets. She didn’t grin for me.

From this I learned that tendernesses are to be meted out like pun­ishment, the due only of those who have earned them and perhaps not even then. After my nonno died, Mamm’ Adele was spirited away to my Zia Cecilia, only 16 years younger than herself. Maybe it was there that my nonna found herself at fifteen again. As her eyesight deteriorated she remembered the poetry she’d learned in school and recited Leopardi by heart without my nonno interrupting to deliver himself of a more grandiloquent version. The masterpieces in thread continued under fingers that had eyes of their own. She dispensed the embroidered epics to all the nipoti who, struggling with the language for thanks, would pet her instead.

My mother and her other sisters watched their mother hold court at her favorite eldest daughter’s and were relieved they need be no more than ladies-in-waiting. My uncles discharged their duties as ministers of finance and could afford to be wistful. Then Zia Cecilia died. It was my Zia Vera’s spitefully dutiful turn. Mamm’ Adele in­veighed unceasingly against her daughter, the puttana, and her smoking and drinking and her toreador pants from thirty years before. I visited more often and on each visit listened to recitations from Vera of the indignities old flesh could heap on a daughter.

It was my father who in the end told my mother that their turn had come. Pop flattered his mother-in-law with serious conversation and indulged her swooning over records of Vittorio Gassman reading Shakespeare’s soliloquies. My mother bullied her mother back to a semblance of strength forcing her down to the kitchen to knead bread she couldn’t see and out to the garden to pinch vines she could no longer smell. Mamma listened with her to tapes in Italian of Judith Krantz’s bodice-ripper romances and shook her head along with Mamm’ Adele who proclaimed each evening, “che porcheria”—nev­ertheless listening to each book to the end because the rental should not be wasted. Such unmentionable subjects seemed to crop up in the advice columns in the Italian papers my mother read out loud to my nonna’s outraged glee. Sometimes Mamm’ Adele would shyly ask questions about the schifosi acts shameless persons visited on each other’s bodies. Only then did I notice her own ancient body, and I was ashamed.

Okay. Flesh is like bread dough that has risen too far and de­flated. Don’t get sentimental over it. If she groaned with the pain of forcing turds out her brittle culo I would come behind the commode like my mother and punch at her shoulders and knead them down. Having my hands on her already would make it easier to lift her and lean her against the bed so I could wash her. The canal through which we all passed was now extruded in corrugated swags, little spikes of hair remaining clotted with tiny pieces of toilet paper. Oh the folds to be washed—lifted like sheets from the furniture.

But the linen sheets she wove herself as a girl, worn out down the middle, split, then the edges joined with feather stitches, stay crisp even as the last threads go; the cotton sheets she made from bleached feed sacks, elegantly joined by the same stitches, remain rough even after years through my mother’s dryer. Mamm’ Adele was comforted by their familiar harshness against her rapidly numbing diabetic fingers. I would have been comforted if the wrinkles festooning her slack belly were sharp like creased sheets, but her skin was as soft as a mouse.

And her breasts were like tomatoes. After her rosary she would call to my nonno, “Cherubino, Cherubino,” twenty-five years since last he’d touched her. He must have answered because she’d talk in the dark to somebody in a voice that mixed flirtatious lilt and oracu­lar exasperation.

After Mass when my nonna died, Pop said lightly, “We’ll put her ashes in the garden with the tomatoes. Ashes make good fertilizer; she wouldn’t want to go to waste.” Mammà said nothing. I looked at her trying to gauge whether this was my father’s sardonic joke and, if it were, did she think it was funny or whether, in the tradition of my nonno, my father was thumbing his nose at the church and the pious hypocrisy of the Mass for the Dead and, if he were, would she rush to join his infidel’s nonchalance. My mother said, “You know how she loved the garden. You know how she loved my tomatoes.”

Well Mamm’ Adele didn’t love that garden. She never saw it be­cause she had gone blind before she moved in with my mother, and when she was forcibly led into it for some fresh air and distraction she whined the whole time at my mother’s tyranny and at the inade­quacy of her crops and at her failure to be the gardener all my genius uncles found the time to be. Great leafed chard and chicory and their Lucullan tomatoes. . . . To tell the truth, my nonna was right. Mammà is a grudging gardener—parsimonious with seed and with manure and with planning—stingy with affection for the earth though dutiful to it. Eventually duty took my nonna’s ashes and patted them into the faraway earth of my nonno’s grave. Nothing special according to my father. My mother has never talked about it.

The garden was neglected more than usual the last year of my grandmother’s life, then neglected more still as my father almost im­mediately passed into his heart’s last clutches. Pop followed after Mammà seldom leaving her alone though soon he would leave alto­gether. My mother, her hands as occupied as her mother’s and as un­accustomed to petting, sent up more clouds of flour for too much pasta, dug more furrows than she planted, and made more dresses than her granddaughters could wear so that my father wouldn’t see her fear as he followed her feebly from room to room touching her arm and deliv­ering himself of learned lectures on obscure subjects too recondite for my mother to understand—though she often mangled them later on and represented them as her own.

“Oh just plant me under the tomatoes,” said Pop to stave off the terror. “I owe my ancestors.” The August before, he’d gone down to Salem for the Great Tomato Festival where each year they commem­orate some remote progenitor of my father who had stepped out on the courthouse steps and before all the astonished colonial yokels con­sumed the fatal flesh of the fox apple thereby dooming his family ever after to mixing their blood with the true and faithful gardeners and eaters of pomodori.

The March day my father died, my mother came back from the hospital and grimly set to work breaking up the frozen earth in the garden. She worked until dark. My youngest brother, Paul, had flown 8 hours hopscotching from Albuquerque to be with my father but ar­rived 20 minutes too late. At the hospital they allowed him to sit in the morgue. He was cold and starved. He came in and foraged in the freezer for some tomato sauce from last summer. When he found it he heated it and poured it over leftovers which, Ken, my next younger brother, and I ate from the same plate.

By the next morning my sister, Christina, had arrived and soon af­ter my Zia Vera with my Uncle Dick (who is also my father’s brother) with our double first cousins. Thicker blood. When we were little kids, we thought that meant our blood was like tomato paste while all the rest of the cugini had thin sauce in their veins. Then came all my mother’s parenti. Our own children milled about embar­rassed by our grief and bored and hungry. Container after container of sauce was taken out of the freezer and defrosted. Who knows what was cooked to go under it.

“This is from last year’s crop?” Zia Vera asked to distract Mammà.

“I didn’t get them in until late, but still I had too many.”

“Don’t I remember. I told you that you shouldn’t bother, that I’d start the seedlings for you, but you had to plant anyway, stupid wop. First spring gust blows in from the east and we think we can smell the Adriatic. Then every guinea who can find room for a number 10 tincan on his fire escape or knows how to knot a handkerchief on four corners for his head is out there setting tomato flats like a contadino.

“Oh come on, Vera,” said my mother glad to be angry at her sister’s usual drunken diatribes of ethnic self-loathing.

“It’s true. It’s true,” crowed my Zia giving my mother a punch in the arm. “Early last summer you had so many seedlings you told me you were bringing me a carful of flats. I told you I had already set out my tomatoes, but no—you said you couldn’t let them go to waste and that you were bringing them anyway. I had a picture of great squirm­ing vines heaving through the windshield, strangling you until the leader of “The Revenge of the Killer Tomatoes” took over the driver’s seat, but you arrived with an empty car and not a tomato in sight.

“Vera, you always have to exaggerate.”

“So what did happen to all the tomato plants,” asked my brother.

“Well, Vera said she didn’t want them, so one night I took them down the hill to Marzullo’s Nursery, squeezed through the fence, and mixed my flats in with theirs.”

“Why didn’t you just throw them out?”

“Throw them out?” My mother was deeply offended. “Throw them out? That would be wasteful. I figured they’d blend in and somebody would adopt them.”

My brother guffawed, choking on a spoonful of polenta. He looked down to see if he had sputtered any sauce on his shirt. “Aren’t you worried that twenty years from now some orphan tomato will have gotten into Marzullo’s locked files and will show up at your door ask­ing: are you my real mother?”

For a moment we thought Mammà might cry. But she didn’t. She said she had to go out to the garden for something—probably to see how many of last summer’s stakes could be used for this year’s tomato vines.