second, take my eyes off the skinned head of the steer. There was a secret for me there, under the skin. I didn’t yet know what it was—for now, there were only questions. Only one question, really, a constant whirring through my mind, as I stared at the strange dancing skinned head of the steer: How the hell did I get here?
How did this happen? What was this tiny weird girl with the disposable shower cap doing there, on a pleasantly cool early morning in May, in the fuzzy green hills of southwest Wisconsin, standing in a puddle of blood, watching a truck full of cattle get killed?
Chapter Two
Al Dente
IT NEVER OCCURRED to me, growing up, that a wooden folding rack might actually be used for drying clothes—because in my house, we used it to dry pasta. We were an Italian-American home, a ravioli-every-Christmas-Eve home, the kind of home where everyone was present for family dinners on weeknights and kids spent their Saturdays making wine, ankle-deep in the stomping barrels of great-grandparents’ backyards. The kind of home that I now know wasn’t that common in 1980s suburban America.
My great-great-grandparents came by boat from Italy, and even four generations later, although only my mother was Italian and my father was full Irish, at the heart of my childhood home my parents built an Italian kitchen—a heritage-rich enclave—in the middle of suburban New Hampshire, where every couple of months my entire family would converge to make fresh pasta together. Although we tried to make our pasta as authentic as possible, this wasn’t Italy—it was Merrimack, a town with neither a butcher shop nor a farmers market—so, in true suburban fashion, we all piled into our boxy maroon Chrysler minivan and drove to Costco to get flour, butter, and eggs, in bulk.
Although Merrimack did have a slight rural bent, this was more a product of its age than of an actual lingering agricultural industry. By the time we moved there, it was just a typical American suburb, where my mother and I spent most of my childhood Saturdays on cold metal bleachers watching my sisters play soccer, and my father, clipboard in hand, coached from the sidelines. The town’s primary employers were Fidelity Investments financial services provider; BAE Systems defense, security, and aerospace company; Brookstone retail stores; and Anheuser-Busch brewery, whose Budweiser Clydesdales marched every summer in our Fourth of July parade—an all-American gathering, which always smelled of sweet barbequed meat tended to by pot-bellied, white-haired men. There were sparklers and stars, children with tangled hair and sticky fingers.
Run-down, but not decrepit, our town was a mix of under-tended relics of history amid half-empty plazas and strip malls. It was an old village with cemeteries whose graves dated back to the eighteenth century, including one we’d often bike to in the summers to do grave rubbings on pieces of wax paper. There were signs denoting the birthplace of great historical figures, such as Matthew Thornton, Merrimack resident and signer of the Declaration of Independence, but there were also dingy laundromats, neglected discount stores, and overcrowded schools.
As far as meals were concerned, we rarely ordered takeout or went out to dinner as a family in our town, but when we did, we went to a restaurant called the Common Man, a New England franchise built into a house, complete with attic bar and stone fireplaces. On the way there, I remember driving past a dilapidated bowling alley, one small Mexican restaurant, and three greasy Chinese joints.
In my memory, all the places in between rise before me like an overgrown forest, even though much of those swathes of pine trees have disappeared now. There were rolling hills and dense foliage that gave me the distinct impression of always being underneath something. Whenever I looked to the sky, there were leaves in the way. Although the town is larger than a village now, and the population is mostly middle class, those hills and forests, like the historical markers, were a reminder of the logging industry around which New Hampshire was industrialized. The story of Merrimack is told in red flannel and maple syrup, a story of long winters and hard-fought wars.
MY OWN STORY began inside a gray, distinctly New England house on a sleepy corner lot, or, more specifically, in a noisy, crowded kitchen with a peel-and-stick laminate floor painted to look like red brick. From my vantage point, hiding beneath a dark-stained behemoth of a kitchen table, that faux brick floor, always covered in stumbling, busy feet, stretched out like a crowded market in the midst of my family’s own small civilization.
The kitchen was divided in half by an island that protruded from one wall, a heavy wooden arm separating the dining half of the room from an area with three walls stuffed full of dark wood cabinets, white laminate countertops, and dated appliances. I have no idea how all our pots and pans were crammed into such a small space. And it’s an even bigger mystery how my mother, father, sisters, and grandparents all fit, too, but pasta making was group work, daylong work, and it required all hands.
Because I was shy, I’d hide underneath the enormous table my parents had been given as a wedding present whenever the kitchen became too loud. In all of our houses—ours, my grandparents’, my great-grandparents’—there was a table in the kitchen, even when there was a separate formal dining room, even when we couldn’t all fit around it. And I would crawl beneath the table and barricade myself from the racket and the clamor, piling books around me and peering out at the frenzied dance from beneath the hem of the tablecloth. Behind the protective shield of my coke-bottle glasses, I watched these days of my childhood unfold as rituals, a series of elaborate steps constructed to make all the moving parts work as a whole.
In preparation for the pasta-making ceremony, my big Irish dad would wrestle open the drying rack in the corner. With the body of a bear, legs and arms so thick I couldn’t wrap both hands around them and touch my fingertips, pale Irish skin, freckles, and my same ice-blue eyes, he was an intimidating figure, at least according to more than one boyfriend whose hands he gripped perhaps just a little too tightly. In our kitchen, it was his job to create order. He was the dad who brought a Fodor’s guidebook on every family vacation, who made chore charts that rotated weekly based on birth order, but he was not much of a cook. So when we made pasta, it was my father who started early, who laid out all the equipment in stages: drying rack in the corner by the back door, pasta machine on the edge of the counter, rolling pin and flour on the opposite side of the kitchen, waiting for the dough.
When we weren’t eating, I would sit beside my father at that enormous kitchen table, doing my math homework. I was bookish, a word person—still am. I liked flowery language. Math was a constant struggle, the bane of my honor-roll existence. It wasn’t that I didn’t like math, or that I couldn’t see the beauty of geometry and imaginary numbers—it was that beauty didn’t get the equation solved. As a math major in college, my father’s interest in numbers was an obsession. He built himself a lifelong career in Internet technology sales and marketing from the ground up with his intuitive understanding of supply and demand. My father loved helping me with my math homework, took pride in trying to engender in his eldest daughter a fascination with the shape of the world as he saw it. We would spend hours together, huddled over a textbook, his big finger pointing, guiding me across a page: So, if you divide both sides of the equation by (abc) then you can isolate x . . .
This is why it was his job to establish the order of pasta making, and once he did, my mother and Nana, my grandmother, would begin to work the chewy-tough spaghetti dough into long flat ribbons, wide as a palm and a quarter-inch thick. My mother would hunch over the counter, brushing from her eyes the wild, curly hair she could only tame by pinning the sides back with plastic combs in tortoiseshell and black. With brown eyes and olive skin, she looked the part of a Mediterranean matriarch. Her beauty routine, like her cooking, was meticulous. The bathroom closet was always packed full of creams, lotions, powders, and makeup. She still paints her nails every weekend and wears the same pattern of rings every day, on the same fingers: her diamond engagement ring and gold wedding band in the traditional location, plus a thin band of jade on her right-hand ring finger.
Although we learned to make pasta from my great-grandmother, my mother was always