“Actually, Aunt Gina—” I felt the need to defend my pinched roomie “—Diana has a lot of boyfriends, and she’s been proposed to three different times. She’s not married because she doesn’t want to be married.”
“Bullshit.” Aunt Gina pinched her again. “Look at this. You see this, Andrea?” She motioned to one of my other aunts. “You see this? Both of them. Really, Theresa Marie, you, too. You think you’re all fancy living off in that city, but when your uncle Rocky proposed to me, I was the babe of Brooklyn.”
I stared at Aunt Gina and glimpsed, beneath the pile of big hair, the perfumed face powder and the sixteen gold-and-diamond necklaces she wore stacked around her neck like a snake’s coils, the beautiful neighborhood girl she once was. I still love looking at old pictures of them, just as I loved looking at them as a little girl. I laugh when I see pictures of them all from back then, the girls in eyeliner and Pucci dresses—the first time Pucci was in—the boys in zoot suits too big for them. They all have highball glasses in one hand, cigarettes in the other. You can see the smoke swirled around their faces and can almost smell it, as well as hear the giggles and tough talk, mixing together as they lived “the life” then.
“I’m sure you were, Aunt Gina.”
“I was. Ask your mother, Theresa. Ask her.”
Lady Di humored her. “So come on, Mrs. Gallo, were you girls ‘it’ back then? The bomb?”
My mother usually waves off such talk with a flick of her spoon and a roll of her eyes. But her sisters wouldn’t let it rest. “Come on…” Aunt Marie snuck up behind my mother and pinched her on the arm. “Tell the girls about when we used to go out in the city.”
“Honey…” Aunt Gina gestured with her thumb toward the living room where we could hear screams and cheers erupting after various plays in the game. “They may not look like much now, those balding bastards, but way back when they were all catches, every last one of them.”
My mother twirled around. “Theresa…every girl was in love with your father. But his family was considered trouble. He was a bad boy, you know. But underneath it, I could tell he was a real softie. Now, all of you—” she glared at the room full of us, packed tight around the table “—get outta my kitchen!”
We scattered—not before Aunt Connie reiterated for the twentieth time that the gravy needed both garlic and oregano. In the living room, my male cousins, three of whom are named Tony, clustered around Lady Di. She chose to sit next to the “hunky” Tony, who had staked out our apartment not three days before. His massive biceps belied the fact that I knew he liked nothing better than to cook pastry. He sometimes came up to our apartment and I taught him recipes. He was a fast learner. I know he liked being up there with Diana and me. Whenever he was around her, he stood a little taller, and he never cursed. He was an amateur chef in the making, but he’d never let the family know that. Pizza was one thing—maybe—pastry was another.
A half hour, and one Giants touchdown and an interception later, it was halftime and that meant we would shovel food in as fast as possible before the game resumed.
The first course was eggplant parmigiana, as well as a heaping bowl of homemade ravioli stuffed with ricotta that Ma got special from the Italian deli. Then she brought out huge bowls of gravy, teeming with large sausages, meatballs and whole lamb chops on the bone. This was served on pasta, also homemade. Garlic bread, a large salad, bowls of olives and plates of sliced pepperoni and fresh mozzarella, which, if you’ve never had it, has the consistency of congealed I-don’t-know-what. It’s beyond gross, wet and rather tasteless, but the Italian deli carries that, too.
And we were just warming up.
Later, a huge ham came out. Followed by a seafood course, including an Italian version of octopus, legs flopping over the side of the bowl, looking like they were trying to make a run for it. Through it all, as bowl and pan, and plate and platter made their way from the kitchen to the table and everyone started fanning himself or herself as the temperature in the house rose from the oven opening so often and boiling pots on the stove, my mother never sat down. She moved from kitchen to the dining room, back and forth, back and forth. She sat down occasionally, but watched over the table like General Patton, waiting for a movement of the troops that might signal we needed something, then she’d leap up and fetch it. Bottle after bottle of good red wine was opened. Forget letting it breathe. Around our house, a bottle of wine never sits still long enough to breathe.
I loved watching the insanity of it all. Sundays were sacred when I was growing up. I think that’s why I ended up being a chef. I didn’t go to culinary school. I was raised in culinary school, standing on a stool with a makeshift apron on—a towel tied in the back. I learned, as a little girl, that the way to my father’s heart was through his stomach, and by the time the whole stereotype of the “little woman in the kitchen” was something to resent, I was hooked. The kitchen was where I felt content and happy; cooking was a way to relax, a way to create.
The men ate huge mouthfuls of food, occasionally grunting their approval. Poppy Marcello was especially happy with the sausage. Lady Di consumed five glasses of red wine and got giddy enough to ask Uncle Rocky to sing a Louis Prima song, then some Frank Sinatra. Call it the Marcello version of karaoke. We laughed and ate, but I noticed my mother wore a pair of house slippers and, not for the first time, I could see how Sundays wore her out, even when she wasn’t hosting. But if I offered to help her she would turn me down flat. This was her show, just like, I guess, at my restaurant, the kitchen was my show. I hated when Quinn came back, lifting lids to pots and looking over my shoulder. “Go back to chasing the waitresses,” I’d yell at him.
The women all rose and began clearing as soon as the game came back on. The men would take plates in front of the television for further eating while my mother readied dessert. At one point, Ma and I were alone in the kitchen.
“I wish one of these Sundays you’d bring home a man, Theresa Marie. None of us are gettin’ any younger.”
“I know, Ma.” I rolled my eyes and tried to find room in the overstuffed fridge to put leftover eggplant. It didn’t look like I’d fit a single black olive in there.
“I don’t understand what’s so hard. There are what, forty million men in Manhattan? At this point, I give up on you even finding someone from Brooklyn. Manhattan would be fine. Non-Italian would be fine. You can marry an Irishman. Hell, a nice Jewish boy. Just someone. A warm body, for God’s sake. Though Catholic would be good. Your father would like that.”
“First of all, Ma, there aren’t forty million men in Manhattan. Second, however many there are…forty percent of them are gay.”
“Very funny.”
“I’m not kidding.”
She slammed down a pan. “You should move back home.”
“I’d rather eat fifty pounds of scungilli and explode.”
“Outta my kitchen!” She slapped my arm.
Moving back into the living room, I saw five of my cousins and my father on their cell phones. Placing bets, checking on the book they’d taken. The women were martyrs. The men were criminals. Me? I was just certain that I’d never find someone who would understand the dance of it all.
My father stood up to stretch. Sometimes he liked to go outside on the front steps of our house and smoke a cigarette. I saw him go out the front door, and I followed him.
“Hey Dad.”
“Teddi Bear, come ’ere.” He stretched out an arm and wrapped it around me and kissed the top of my head. “I come out here for a little quiet. Those women are like a gaggle of friggin’ geese.”
“I know…. Ma’s giving me the ‘hurry up and get married’ speech again.” I looked up at my father. He slicked back his hair in a pompadour and favored polyester shirts in ugly colors like lime green. He wasn’t Manhattan stylish, but he was still handsome, his jaw square with a dimple in the middle, and