Body Lessons

 

by Fred Misurella

 

“Go to a doctor, a psychologist then,” I tell him. “You want help from this world, not the other.”

“I want help from you, Joey. In the name of our mother and father, you’re all I have!”

My brother crosses the room, falling on his  knees before me, and kisses my ring. I stare down at the crown of his head, the embarrass­ingly thinning hair, and no, I am not clairvoyant, but I see the whole torturous course of his future life in front of him: the loss of strength and weight, the diminution of breath and movement, the debilitating freeze. This from a man whose very boyhood personality was defined by strength: the shock of dark black hair, the wiry bursts of move­ment, and the emotional heat that radiated through the family walls to the world outside. You have seen him and heard him, I am sure. What’s more, you have applauded him on his journey from the poor, working-class walkways of this neighborhood (a slum I now call my parish) to the small nightclubs and glamorous stages of New York and then, because of a comic imitation of Elvis, to the luminous screens and highways of Los Angeles: a swimming pool, a garage full of sports cars, and a million dollar house!

“Please, Ton-Ton. Stand up. I’m embarrassed.”

“I’m sorry, Joey. I know this is a lot to expect from  you. But this is my life.”

He rises slowly, brushing away the tears. I have seen my brother blond, I have seen him shaved to look completely bald, I have seen him bloated and overweight so that, on screen at any rate, the family resemblance between us is made clear. I have seen him naked, as a corpse on a morgue table. But I have also seen him looking most dis­turbingly like his younger self, his thick hair black and down around his ears, his voice quick and caustic, and his behavior violent and ag­gressive as he played a man none of us ever wanted to be: a criminal, former Vietnam veteran, a murderer, and rapist too involved with power and self to feel regret. There is one scene where my brother, to win a bet, walks up to a young girl standing on a street corner, pulls out a gun and, with a friendly smile and an ironic “thank you,” shoots her in the head. Although I assure you his real sins are mild and passive by comparison, I cannot see him apart from that role. 

He won an acting award for it, wrote me an awful, gloating letter from Europe telling how, later that month, he went to bed with the beautiful woman who presented the award to him and that next morning, while she slept, he swam nude in the Mediterranean with her sixteen-year-old daughter: “I f—-ed her” [he spelled out the word fully] on the rubber raft in the middle of that large round baby blue,” he wrote, “and she blew me (you remember that term, Joey? does it bring back any memories?) in the shade of the cabana just a few minutes later. Oh, it’s great to be young, to love, to have it all!”

And to lose it, too.

 

***

“Hey, Joey. Come over here. I want your opinion.”

My mother and I stood in the basement; a white tablecloth covered the huge plywood board (on saw horses) around which we would gather that afternoon for family dinner. The coconut my father had painted and decorated to carry the likeness of a cannibal had been dusted; drawings of Jesus, along with those of movie stars, hung on the walls. A small white Christmas tree lit up the bookshelves in the corner, and the big tree, a fir surrounded with gifts, stood in the living room by the fireplace. Meanwhile, a console phonograph piped out the recorded voice of my idol, Mario Lanza, singing “Ave Maria.”

“Get away from those sweets, Joey. Come taste this for me.”

Assorted pastries covered the table: tollhouse cookies, banana cake in the shape of Our Virgin Mother’s head (aqua-tinted dye in the icing colored her robe and eyes), a large, three-layered chocolate cake, and three or four fruit pies. My mother stood apart from them, in a coal bin my father had hammered, plumbed, and stretched into a second kitchen several years before. With guests expected in addition to family, she had decided to cook down here to keep the upstairs apartment clean. A large pot of tomato sauce simmered on the stove, the heat slowly floating and revolving sausage, meatballs, and bra­gioli in the liquid. On the table and stove lay the materials of the main dish for the day: My mother’s meat lasagna.

“Here, Joey. I want your opinion. Tell me if this needs anything more.”

My mother motioned to a huge bowl of ricotta, mixed with eggs, parsley, basil (in our dialect we called it vasnigol) and, of course, ro­mano cheese.

“Mmmm. Delicious. Maybe it needs a little more salt.”

My mother added some cheese from a jarful I had grated earlier. Then she urged me to try the sauce. The fumes were aromatic, almost like incense. After I winked, giving the sauce my okay while suggest­ing a little more pepper and romano, she drained the boiled noodles and began to lay out two panfuls of dinner.

“Are Maria and Vinnie coming on time this year?” I asked.

She smiled. “I told them around two o’clock. But you know, with traffic through New York, that could mean three or four.”

I giggled. My sister and her husband lived in Brooklyn and per­haps because of distance, more likely because of Vinnie’s tendency to sleep late on holidays, they always arrived late for family meals. “We’ll all be hungry by the time they come,” I said, “especially me.”

My mother smiled again, and began to pile up lasagna noodles. I always saw her as a mason at these moments: First a layer of lasagna on the bottom, a ladleful of odoriferous tomato sauce, then a big help­ing of the ricotta cheese mix and chopped meat, followed by another layer of noodles. She had stout arms. Although she carried a spatula instead of a trowel, she proceeded with such care and deliberation that I frequently imagined a wide brick wall going up instead of pasta.

“I’m almost ready for the chickens,” she  said. “Do you want to clean them?”

I nodded, but reluctantly. Despite their rich, buttery flavor, I had little stomach for chickens in those days. The morning before I had driven to the market with my father and as usual he bought the chickens freshly killed. He had held my hand as we entered and led me to the cages of birds so that I could pick the ones I fancied. The smell and sound of the place offended me, but nothing like my anxious feeling when I pointed to a chicken, saying, “That one!” and in a split second, it seemed, the proprietor yanked it from the cage, twisted its neck with a gap-toothed smile, and tossed it lifeless onto the counter to be plucked and cleaned.

“Life comes out of death,” my father had whispered after one of those visits, and I always remembered that whenever we went to the market. I didn’t like the idea in those days (although, with my eat­ing, I live by it now), and neither did the chickens: they fought back  frequently. I remember once or twice seeing talons imbedded in the back of the proprietor’s hand or finger. I felt sickened, and I never could eat fowl until later, when I was older, and we picked it cut up from a supermarket counter.

But I could not retreat from such basic revulsion that Christmas morning. Three huge birds lay on a table near the sink, and, after turn­ing on the faucet, I began to wash them, one by one. Mercifully, the proprietor had cut their heads off, so I turned each one upside down, letting the water run into the pelvic cavity until it gushed out the neck end. This was alive just yesterday, I knew, until I pointed to it. Gingerly, as if reaching into a hornets’ nest of revenge, I stuck my hand into the body and raked out the organs with my fingers. Heart, lungs, kidneys: a miniature biology lesson; and, ten or eleven as I was, it fed my growing curiosity about the body. Is this the way I am in­side? I wondered. Or my mother? And the soul: If the bird had one, would I pull it out with the gizzard? I’d already asked my mother these questions in more guarded phrasing of course, but with no satis­factory answers. “You’ll learn later,” she told me once, “when you grow up. You’re too young to think about it now.”

My father, having already whispered that sentence about life feeding on death, agreed with her.

I  accepted their answers, despite my growing sensitivity to differ­ences between my mother’s body and my own, our bodies and the chickens’, despite thoughts I was beginning to have about character, morality, and soul. I really believed my parents, that as I grew older I would learn. From the way they, especially my father, talked, life was a kind of puzzling magic show that I had to accept on faith, like religion. I assumed my moment of illumination would occur one day in the future, in a sudden, but strictly measured, glow. Shall I add the obvious?—Despite my age, my priestly clothes, and my confessional experience, I still feel I am standing in the dark.

“You want these cut up now, Ma?” I asked.

“Of course, you know we eat them that way. We’re having caccia­tore.”

“Ych-ch-ch.”

My mother frowned. “If you don’t want to cut them, I’ll do it my­self, Joey. As soon as I finish the lasagna—and cut the potatoes, and peel the onions; and  then make the mushroom sauce you love.”

She looked severe for a moment. With red-faced effort, she lifted the large pan of lasagna and struggled with it to the stove. This was a wall of bricks, remember, not a pan of noodles. A well-intentioned son, I reacted accordingly.

“Ma, Ma, I’ll do that! It’s too heavy for you.” But she had it at the stove already, and watched, contemptuously, while I carried the sec­ond, lighter one from the table.

“I’m not eating cacciatore today,” I told her, despite her conde­scending look. “I’ll clean this stuff, but I refuse to eat any.”

My mother grabbed a knife from the stove, used her  hip to shove me away from the sink, and laughing while calling me a sissy, started to hack at one of the birds herself.

“Ma, come on, stop. Let me do it.”

“You can’t!” She stuck the knife into the joint of the thigh and, leaning all her body weight into it, severed the leg. “I want you to try to eat chicken this afternoon,” she said. “It’s good for you. You have to understand blood. And accept it. Now peel the potatoes.”

“I never eat chicken, Ma, whether I cut it or not. It makes me sick!”

“Joey, it’s not the chicken, it’s your head. Go peel the potatoes. Your father’s doing the mushrooms upstairs, and I’ll do the onions when I finish these.”

“But I want to do the chickens!” I cried. She had a broad back, a sturdy, mason’s shoulders, yet my mother was my mother, and there was something that made me think of her as delicate. It wasn’t proper for her to be cutting into all that bone and flesh.

“Peel the potatoes,” she said, leaning into another joint. “You can do the chickens when you get older; it won’t turn an adult person’s stomach.”

“All right,” I said, “but I still won’t touch any today.”

I brought the bag of potatoes to the table, started trimming them. A few minutes later my father came down with a bowl of cleaned mushrooms. After placing them in a pot on the stove, he began help­ing me. It amazes me to think about those mornings now; my father relished everything about chicken—necks, organs, even the “Pope’s Nose,” as he called the anus—but apparently he too had no stomach for cutting into one uncooked. “Anna,” he would say to my mother, “if I do the vegetables, will you take care of the fowl?” She said she would, but always with a hint of scorn in her voice, as if it were some­thing a father of boys should never refuse. That day he said, “After the potatoes, Anna, is there anything else?”

“Is the antipasto set?”

He nodded. “Are you sure you can manage the rest?”

She shrugged and smiled. “Carmine and Anthony will be here. They can help if I need it. Go ahead.”

My father winked at me and grinned. By this time we had peeled nearly twenty potatoes; with about five more we would be finished. “You want to go with me?” he asked. “Carmine thinks he’s too grown up to visit family this year.”

“I don’t know, Dad. Maybe not.”

I shrugged and turned away, hoping I could soften his disappoint­ment. Christmas morning visits to his family were my father’s fa­vorite holiday tradition; he looked forward to them every year while his sons got increasingly less interested. He would visit most of my aunts and uncles, drink a glass of wine or whisky with each, and  then visit several cousins. He normally took my brother Carmine and me along (my younger brother Ton-Ton stayed home to practice his guitar), but at sixteen Carmine evidently had had enough.

“You’ll get some gifts. Your Aunt Sarah and Uncle Ralph always have something under the tree. And my cousin Eddie is always good for a couple of bucks.”

“I don’t know, Dad.”

“It’s Christmas. Come on.”

But my fear of being shown off, especially alone, was very strong. I was bashful and, unlike Carmine, spoke Italian poorly; what’s more, I was self-conscious among the Grassos and never felt I belonged. Be­sides, the real main event of the day was home, with my mother, the pasta, and the birds. I wanted to be with them.

“You don’t need me, Ma?” I asked, hoping she did. But when my mother shook her head, and my father genuinely pleaded with his eyes, I really had no choice.

“Alright, alright,” I said, “if you want me to.”

“If I want you to!” My father pounded my back. “Good boy, Joey!”

We finished the potatoes quickly and set them on the stove. Then we put on our coats—new ones that my father, a tailor, had made for the season—and left a short time later. The morning was cold, crisp, sunny, perfect for the holiday. We drove across town, visiting rela­tives one by one, and, since several cousins were spending the day to­gether, didn’t take much time. Traditionally, the last two visits were to my Grandmother Grasso’s house and then to my father’s cousin Ed­die. As usual the visit to my grandmother’s took an hour, and just as we were about to leave that day, she turned to me, pulled a roll of bills from a refrigerator drawer, and gave me two dollars, then two more each for Carmine and Ton-Ton. “Merry Christmas, happy new year, to you and your brothers,” she said. Barely pronouncing the words in English, she caressed my cheek.

“Grazia, Nonna. Buon natale.”

She rubbed my head and smiled at my Italian. My father had re­hearsed it with me in the car on the way here from my Aunt Sarah’s, and when I looked now, I saw him red-faced and beaming. I stood to kiss her, but my grandmother pulled her head away abruptly.  “Cold, a cold,” she said, placing two fingers to her mouth. “One kiss enough. Buon natale.”

I thanked her again, in English this time, and after a brief, smil­ing exchange with her in dialect, my father finished his whisky and led me out the door.

We arrived at Eddie Grasso’s between noon and one o’clock. A little drunk by this time, my father insisted that we stay an hour or two, until it was time for dinner. I minded, hungry, jealous of Carmine and Ton-Ton, wondering if we would be later than even Maria and Vinnie. But it did no good to argue. For my father, the visits to Eddie were the most interesting part of the Christmas journeys because they reminded him of his youth. For me they were the most troubling because they reminded me of my future. Eddie Grasso was a sweet, gentle man, but fat, grandly fat, a seemingly contented person who, my father said, weighed over four hundred pounds. There were nasty rumors about him in the family: that he lacked sexual parts, that he liked boys, worse, that there was something strange going on between him and his sister. The rumors made my father angry, but until years later I never understood why. Eddie had a bald head, bulbous, hanging dewlaps for jowls, a fat neck that I’ve seen as thick only on statues of Popes or Cardinals in Rome, and a drape of chins that hung from his mouth and chest as if they were chiseled. He smiled easily, however, especially at my father, and said, “Hiya, Anthony, Buon Natale,” with such a high voice and joyous grin on his face that you would have thought he was an angel. And when he saw me slide from be­hind my father’s legs, Eddie reached out like an old compare to grasp my hand. My fingers sank into the bottomless softness  of his palms.

“Madonna, Anthony, he’s even bigger than last year. Still has the skinny arms though.” He studied me carefully, as if I were a mirror, and ran his fingers over his bulging, womanly chest. I smiled and, silent, pulled away.

“He’s going to be like you, Eddie. Another four hundred pounder—at least. You know he wears a size thirty-eight coat already?”

“Yeah?” And, as on every other Christmas morning, when he learned my weight or suit size, Eddie Grasso laughed, took out a roll of bills, and, peeling off three or four as if they were leaves of a mag­nificently buttered artichoke, handed them to me with hardy sea­son’s greetings. By that time his sister Margaret, a slim, kindly woman who, it was said, had wasted her youth taking care of her brother, entered the kitchen with a platter of dadals—honey-cov­ered pastries I adored—and sat me down to them with a glass of milk and a pile of napkins.

At that point, my father and Eddie began to drink. My father chose scotch; Eddie, as always, had beer. They talked about old times, and as I dreamily fingered and chewed a dozen or so dadals, a part of me receded into the background—not to listen to language or dialect, as at my grandmother’s house, but to study Eddie Grasso him­self: his body, its folds, the huge chunks of flesh dangling from his limbs. I remember looking at his thighs and wondering, as if he were a capon to be cleaned, how he looked between them. Was what they said about him true? Could he function normally, as a man? Beyond that, could a soul find room inside that copious belly? Finally, and most importantly,  on Judgment Day, when the good were supposed to receive their bodies in perfect condition, as Monsignor Cavallo often told us, would he be our Eddie still—overweight, hobbling, holding on to tables and chairs just to make a visit to the toilet? Like his sis­ter, he never socialized, hardly went out of the house except for church and work; and as far as I knew his only entertainment was what he saw before him as food. I rarely saw him eat a meal though; the only thing he consumed during Christmas visits were a few of those dadals and a couple of quarts of beer. In fact, my father, who had grown up with him, used to tell me that Eddie didn’t eat much at all.

“Not eat much! Why doesn’t he lose weight then?” I asked.

“He can’t,” my father said, as if the answer were obvious.

I looked at him, cringing, feeling something ominous in the words, as well as the pit of my stomach—and soul. “Can’t lose weight? Re­ally?”

“Glands,” my father said. “He was born that way.”

He lowered his eyes and stared at my own burgeoning belly and hips. Corpulent himself, he was nowhere near his cousin’s size nor the one I would eventually become. My father went on to say, sadly, that Eddie’s weight was due to inherited glandular problems about which doctors had told the family there was nothing they could do.

“Nothing? Eddie has to look and move that way?”

My father smiled. “You think he wants to be that big, Joey? It’s good for his voice, maybe, but nothing else. Not his health—and es­pecially not his love life.”

I looked at him and said nothing. Yes, Eddie was a professional singer, as I wanted to be in those days, not a castrato, but a tenor with a note so youthful it was abnormal, so high and light that it would put Pavoratti or Domingo, and some contraltos, to shame. Still, my fa­ther’s comment brought a considerable charge of despair into my aching, spiritual heart. Ambitious as I was, longing for a sign that I was chosen, I secretly hoped my weight—or the increase of it—would turn out to be a glandular problem too, God’s biological method of test­ing the strength of my soul, even as He augmented my voice. I never seemed to consume more than anyone else, yet I was the only one in the family grossly out of proportion. My older brother Carmine was broad but tall; my younger brother, Ton-Ton, was muscular but short; my sis­ter Maria was slim, although admittedly she watched how much she ate. And my parents, stomachs blossoming, cheeks bulging, shoulders and arms spreading, always seemed, miraculously, majestically, just right, at least in relation to Eddie. Unfortunately it was I, just learn­ing about saints, girls, filthy jokes, and operatic music in our parish’s Catholic school, who for some reason never looked quite normal. I, that is, and Eddie. For a reason always understood but never dis­cussed, we were, by individual paths, different from the others, on a special mission that included food, drink, music, and, perhaps, God, but never women. And I would learn the reason, if my parents were right, as I passed through a magical period—that is, as I “grew up,” as my mother put it, and became a man.

“Does he ever go out, Dad?” I asked, wondering about the occasions of sin and adolescence, when, as the nuns told me, my voice would crack and  other flaws would assert themselves beneath my clothes. “Does he always sit in that same chair in the kitchen?”

“You know, Joey. He goes out sometimes, to work or church, to sing and stuff. But they make him pay double fare in movies and on buses.”

“Double fare?”

My father grinned. “He takes up two seats, Joey. If you become a priest or a famous singer, maybe they’ll let you get away for free.”

My father looked at me, smiling. Then he responded to the concern I must have betrayed on my face. “Don’t worry, Joey. You’re growing, but not that big. Your mother and I won’t let you.”

“But maybe you can’t stop me—or maybe I don’t want to stop my­self!”

“Don’t want to! Why? Are you crazy?”

“Because sometimes I do want to get fatter! I don’t know why. If it would make me sing better, or have a better life, I’d do it. I do do it! That’s why I’m so big.” I looked down at my stomach, poking a roll of flesh on my side. “Maybe fat is who I am!”

He shook his head, grinning. “Baby fat is who you are, Joey. As you grow up, you’ll lose the weight; it’s a matter of time.”

“Time? But I always eat too much, Dad! How will time change that?”

My father shrugged, more serious. “You’ll see. It’s nature. As you grow up, you’ll see it happen.”

My father thought that girls, or my boyish interest in them, would gradually occupy my mind more than food. My mother agreed. Girls would lead me to exercise, diet, maybe abandon my religious ambi­tions and take up popular, possibly lucrative, American music like Ton-Ton. Yet even in the context of this man-to-man talk my father wouldn’t directly mention sex or money that day. He looked at me blankly, shrugged again and muttered, “Your appetite will change. Don’t worry.”

In those terms, I still haven’t grown up, I think, and I wish, God rest their souls, I could tell both my parents that today. I haven’t grown up in the sense of crossing a certain line and being there. As my parents conceived of it, I think, there would be a break-in, or initia­tion, period of some kind. Maturity was simply a matter of waiting my turn, passing through years, maybe attending a certain number of classes, parties, and masses. Or even singing certain songs. As my fa­ther put it that Christmas morning, “Eddie is just a voice, a biological mistake that never developed or changed. We love him, but he is not your future or fate.”

Except for his singing, I might have answered but only wished, whose silver, expressive quality sounded purer to me every day.

When Eddie died some years later, around 1960, and I saw him filling, almost over-filling his coffin, I could not help placing myself and my ambitions in there with him. He had died of a heart attack while singing in the shower one morning, then had lain for hours on the bathroom floor until his sister Margaret came home and found him, finally, breathless. Yet, despite the awful circumstances of his  death, his voice had been lighter, purer, and conversely stronger in the last few minutes, his neighbors told us, than it had ever been. By then I knew I could never equal him, so when his sister asked me to sing for him at the funeral mass a few days later, I chose something simple and obvious, pieces he had performed often on Sundays, with­out even trying: “Pater Noster” and “Ave Maria.”

However, as I stood beside the open coffin and tried to equal him, I couldn’t control myself or my singing. I cried and the words of the song tumbled out off key as I looked to find some trace of change in Eddie’s face, the slightest sign that the sweet final moments of music had brought him understanding. But his mouth and eyes were shut, his jowls hung stiffly down his neck, his wrinkled brow and naked head gave him the look of a wayward, defrocked monk—a quiet, innocent one who had never got beyond faith to comprehension.

He died just before Christmas, and when my father and I drove home from the visit with Eddie that year, my mother and brothers rode with us, and we all felt uncomfortably close to the coffin. My fa­ther steered badly, veering close to cars, blundering through red lights as he muttered comments and prayed or whispered constantly to himself. In the back seat Carmine stared at his feet and strummed an imaginary guitar, while the irrepressible Ton-Ton lip-synced a popular song in silence. My mother stared grimly at the road and I, worried about size and voice and what they would both mean for the quality of my life, especially now that Eddie was gone, did nothing but fold and unfold my hands.

We did not soon get over it. For days I could not look at food or the scene of the creche under the family Christmas tree. Carmine went out frequently, and Ton-Ton, unhappy with the quiet mood of the house, stayed in his room and played Elvis Presley records over and over. As usual, I stayed with my mother. She helped to free me, talking about Eddie and eating as she tried to cook her self and her family back to assimilation. By contrast, my father sat near the fireplace, reading newspapers and brooding over the headlines for weeks.

To my mother I said, “Dad’s taking it pretty hard. I didn’t know he would be bothered so much.”

She waved her hand. “Eddie’s close, family.” Then, frowning, she shook her head, and for a moment I saw something light her eyes. 

“Your dad’s just not used to these things,” she said, handing me a home-made cookie from the stove. Then oddly, as if she were talking about cutting chickens: “He’s just not seen enough yet.”

She had lost her mother, father, and two older brothers to a flu epidemic when she was young. And another brother, Joseph Affamati, whose namesake I am, had died, a few years before I was born, fighting on the beaches of Normandy. Used to loss, she continued about her work, possessing an admirable, almost cheerful, resolve about bereavement and the loss of loved ones. My father, with both parents and a full family surrounding him, acted more troubled, con­fusing me because he let my mother express the stoic attitudes.

She is the one, in fact, who taught me: “Go about your business, Joey: clean, cook, eat. Above all, practice singing. Beauty overcomes death. It’s the little, daily things that help you see that.”

 

***

There are several photographs from those Christmas mornings, a few of my father and me after our visits to Eddie and the rest of the Grasso family. It is interesting to see the differences between my fa­ther and me. The picture I remember most was taken by Ton-Ton, who had received a camera with a flash attachment that morning. He snapped it just as we returned from Eddie Grasso’s. Standing in front of our family car, my father and I wear our new wool coats: his a two-toned brown and tan, mine a green and gray oatmeal tweed. My fa­ther’s arm rests on my shoulders, and he smiles exuberantly, with con­tented cheer, because as yet death has not struck our holiday. His hair is brushed back from his forehead, his mustache is full and trim, his cheeks are pink and fleshy with the optimism of a long and happy morning. The picture has been hand-tinted, I believe, and we both look a little too healthy, a little too briskly painted by the weather.

My mouth is open, in mock song I remember, with the breath just bubbling from my lips. I wear a cap as well as the coat, earmuffs lifted off my ears, the peak scrupulously pointing skyward (along with my breath), as if it were a black biretta and I already a laugh­able singing priest. I do not smile or laugh as I sing, however, much as I might today. Instead, like Ton-Ton in countless motion pictures, I greet the camera with a scowl, I thrust my left foot forward and, a ready fighter, hold my hands above my rounded belly, clenched into fists.

I was my mother’s son in that. Looking at the picture now with my poor sick brother (and, finally, giving him absolution), I perceive my­self defending against the camera’s eye.

“Smile, Joey, you’re on Candid Camera,” Ton-Ton said, pointing a finger at me.

I saw appetite, not fire or ice, as dangerous. Despite my song, I heard something unknown and watchful advancing toward us; for the moment of the flash, I prepared to beat it off with all my strength.