Chapter One from a Good Pot of Red Sauce

A Good Pot of Red Sauce
It was a cruel joke my mother played on me, sending me to an all-girls high school. Like I was some juvenile delinquent with a drinking problem! Nope, not me that was my cousin Jody, who got drunk in 8th grade and found herself in the back seat of a car with a man that could have been her father. But she wasn’t sent to an all-girls parochial school, like me.
I over- heard my mother saying to my father that it was for the best due to the fact that I was not the most academically disciplined child. And going to an all girls’ high- school should help me focus on my studies. This coming from a woman whose idea of improving herself is soaking in the tub for hours while reading the latest Harlequin romance novel and smoking a joint.
“It’s a jail sentence!” I shouted at them.
Plus, we weren’t even Catholic, we were Lutheran! I had gone to Bethesda Lutheran grammar school for the past 8 years, and all my friends were either going to Luther North or Lane Tech for high school.
“Too many boys there, and the classes are too large.” She said.
There was no reasoning with my mother. It was her way or no way. I was going, and I had better accept it because they were paying a lot of money to save me from becoming an academic degenerate.
Mother thought it was so cute to take me shopping for my school uniform; which turned out to be a maroon/gray plaid polyester skirt and a mandatory white polo. Oh, and let’s not forget the brown penny loafers. I felt like I was three.
My mother acted like this was some kind of coming of age ceremony as she pressed the white shirts up against my chest.
“Oh, we need bras,” she said as she scooted over to the rack. I drew backwards as she came toward me with a padded one.
‘This will help with your little problem that you have,” she said with a giggle.
“Real funny, Mother.”
The little problem, she was referring to was the fact that I had one breast that was smaller than the other. This had been a running joke all through the 8th grade. Especially with the boys, who had gotten into the most annoying habit of running their sweating hands down the back of the girls’ shirts to see who was wearing a bra. When they came to me, they would laugh and run away, calling me the one boob wonder.
I really resented my mother now, as we got into the car with all the bags that were going to miraculously transform me into a good studious Catholic girl. My sister sat in the back giggling away. I turned around and said with a sneer, “Don’t think this is not going to happen to you.” That shut her up really quick.
Anna is three years younger than me, but only two behind me grade- wise. I was held back in first grade due to being transferred from a public school to a private school and because of my second grade teacher at Bethesda, Ms. Stone. She felt I needed to start off again as a 1st grader. Apparently I didn’t understand my ABC’s. Her decision to hold me back into 1st grade ruined my life. Because I am now always a year older than everyone in my class, and everyone always asks the same question: “Were you held back?” I lie, of course, and explain that it has nothing to do with being held back, but the fact that my birthday is in November. This seems to work because after people ask they always respond with an “O.” Like, now I have revealed the big dark secret of why I am older than everyone else in my class. And now we can all go about our day as if it’s no big deal that I am a head taller than everyone else, and a year older.
It’s not that I don’t like my sister. I do, in a way, but she bugs me, and my revenge is to tease her until she cries. I love it when she runs to our mother and tells on me—“Gianna took my comb or Gianna pinched me”; only to get in trouble for being a tattle-tell. I was perfectly content being an only child. But, then along came Anna, and I was given the duty of being an older sister. I never asked for the job!
“O.K., we need to get you a hair cut,” says my mother all matter of fact, as we head west on Devon Ave., or Bombay Rd. as it is called by locals because of the Indian and Pakistani restaurants that line the street all the way up till you hit California Ave. where it then becomes “Jewish Land” due to all the Jewish delicatessen and Jewish specialty shops that line Devon Ave up until you hit McCormick Ave. I am neither a Jew nor an Indian. But I do like eating, and I have tried with my family on occasion, several of the restaurants of both ethnicities. I love a good Matzo ball soup on a cold Chicago Sunday afternoon, and I love a good hot curry on a hot summer Chicago day!
We have a family tradition of trying a different Indian restaurant every Sunday evening. This is one of my Mother’s many weird and unique quirks—something I have grown to accept about her even though we are of Italian descent and no one else in our family would be caught dead eating anything other than Italian cuisine, (well, I have seen a couple of my cousins eating Greek food) we, or I should say my mother, likes to explore other cuisines that don’t always have to use tomatoes in their dishes.
I tell my Ma and sister to wait in the car. I don’t want them coming in. The last time I got a haircut Ma came in and stood behind Sally telling her things about me that I didn’t want anybody to know, about my breast problem and how I had gotten my period. Stuff that really is no ones business but mine, Sally would just smile and continue cutting, nodding every once in awhile as my mother continued to gab away.
Sally is a nice enough lady; she reminds me of my second cousin, Carla, with her olive skin and her dark black eyes and hair. She isn’t really a talker which is surprising due to the fact that she is Italian: My experience with my mother’s family is that they are all talkers. And they talk so much that they can’t remember what they say half the time, and they also talk so loud that you’d think they are fighting with each other all the time!
This was a real shocker for my friend Marie, my one and only friend for the last eight years, who is a very quiet soft-spoken girl from a Swedish family. Her mother talks so softly that I have to sit right next to her to hear her. Marie and I have been friends since the 1st grade at Bethesda, I would never have met her if I had been put in the 2nd grade when I transferred there like I should have been, but everything happens for a reason, --anyway Marie and I have been best friends ever since. I don’t really know why because we don’t have anything in common but we have stuck together for the last eight years of our lives, so it must mean something.
When we first met she came over to play. We were in my room and my mother and Aunt Connie were in the kitchen talking. Marie got up to use the wash room, and then came running back all scared, panting that my mother and Aunt were having a fight. I got up to check it out.
“No, Marie they’re just talking.”
“But they are yelling at each other.”
“It’s just the way they talk.”
“Are they deaf?” She asked.
“No, Italian!”
It is kind of nice to sit there in absolute quiet while Sally cuts my hair.
As she snips away I sit looking at my reflection. I have not been blessed with my mother’s beauty; instead of getting her thick, wavy red hair and small face with a nose that compliments her looks, I got the round Polish-German face with a nose that sticks out, and drab, stringy dish water brown hair that just hangs without any memorable qualities around my fat face. I try to curl it, but due to the humidity of Chicago summers it loses its body as soon as I step outside. And in the winter time, don’t even get me started, let’s just say whenever I step outside without a hat on, it looks as if I stuck my finger in an electric socket.
There is no doubt I am my father’s child. The only features I’m complimented on are my eyes. They are blue/gray. My Nanna likes to say they are movie star eyes due to the way they sparkle when the sun hits them just right. I like to remind her that most of the time I am squinting.
Everyone on my mother’s side of the family says that I am just going through an awkward stage, that I am a slow bloomer, and that with some girls it just takes time. My Nanna likes to say that I am a good pot of red sauce in the making, simmering slowly on the stove: “You just gotta be patient with the process”, she says every time I ask her if I am cursed. “Cursed, how can you be cursed? You have Italian blood running through your veins.” I find this funny coming from a woman who is of German descent and just married into an Italian family. She has no Italian blood in her veins. I don’t say this to her but we aren’t really Italian, we are just Italian Americans something my “German descent” father likes to correct me about whenever he hears me declaring my heritage to Marie. “We are all Americans” he likes to say, but then corrects himself and says actually we are Chicagoans.
“You look sweet,” my mother says, as I get in the car. “I hope you stay sweet.”
As I look in the rear view mirror I see absolutely no difference with my hair.
**
Boarding the 155 Devon bus going east on Devon I felt like a geek. And it didn’t help that mother insisted that I use the purple backpack that my Nanna had bought me for this special first day.
“It’s a new beginning,” my mother announced the night before as she handed me my bus fare.
It was the first time in eight years that I was taking the bus by myself. Usually, my sister was right alongside me as we waited for the bus, but since she didn’t start school until 8:30, she was still sitting in front of the TV eating her bowl of Honey Grahams. Mother was still in bed, and probably wouldn’t get up until 10:00. God forbid she’d drive me to school on my first day of high school. It wasn’t her way. No, she felt that making me take public transportation made me more independent.
Mother bestowed this ‘gift’ of independence on me when I turned nine. She felt I was ready to play the big sister and that meant no more rides in the heated family car when it was below zero, or on humid 95 degree summer mornings like the one that was I was feeling at that very moment. Nope, no matter the weather: rain or sun, my sister and I were riding the CTA.
“Just sit behind the bus driver and don’t talk to strangers,” were her words of wisdom on that fateful first day I took the bus alone with my sister; Anna screaming her head off, as I held her hand tighter trying to shut her up but which only made her scream louder.
“It’s only a 25 minute ride down Western Ave to Pratt,” my mother said using her most reassuring voice.
I had to admit I was scared too, thinking of how children were abducted on their way to school and never found again. But this never occurred to my mother. She felt that no matter what, the neighborhood would take care of us, and sitting behind a bus driver was like having our own personal body guard. Plus, who was going to hurt us: the old Jewish lady or the Indian women in their saris? Our neighborhood is not considered dangerous by fellow Chicagoans.
“Just think of it as an adventure,” she said over my sister’s screaming.
My mother liked to say that everything was an adventure when my sister started to scream, thinking it would shut her up. Going to the dentist was an adventure; going to our pediatrician was an adventure, learning how to swim by being tossed from the pier into Lake Michigan on one of our family picnics was an adventure; even though I almost drowned and was only saved in the nick of time by some smarmy looking teenage boy who I believe was stoned out of his mind as he grabbed hold of my neck and dragged me to shore. My mother had to file a report. When asked what happened she mumbled that I slipped and fell. I so wanted to say: ‘I was pushed by the crazy red head disguised as a loving caring mother!’ O.K I wasn’t really pushed—I had slipped because I was goofing off with my sister, and I had pushed her and then she pushed me, and my mother was screaming at us to be careful, and of course I wasn’t listening, and then I fell, and my mother ran over screaming at me to grab her hand and then this guy jumps out of no where and saves me. My mother started crying, but I like to blame my mother for the incident because if she hadn’t had my sister and I was an only child then I wouldn’t have been fighting with my sister and then I wouldn’t have slipped and almost died. See my reasoning? But when I tell this to my mother she tells me to Hush-up—because what I was saying was completely insane! And I should be thankful for having a sister because only children have more mental problems and are selfish because they never learn to share. The thing is Anna never shares with me. I always have to steal stuff from out of her room. Because if I ask her to borrow, her favorite hair brush, she throws a fit. I really don’t get my mother’s logic because if I was an only child then I would not have to deal with my sisters tantrums.
***
Taking the CTA might have started off as an adventure but as the years went by I realized that it had nothing to do with my mother wanting us to have an adventure, she just wanted to sleep in. And teaching us to take the CTA and transfer buses meant she didn’t have to wake up and drive us to school, she could sleep instead. My mother was not a morning person, and wanted those extra two hours in the morning.
Being late for everything is a chronic habit for the whole family. No matter how hard we try, we are always late for every thing. It goes without saying that our family will be late for a wedding—walking in at the last minute, the bride and groom making their way down the aisle as we are opening the church doors. We will be late to a family funeral arriving when the coffin is being lifted down the steps of the church as we are starting our way up them. And we will be late to every possible birthday party showing up right as the cake is being cut.
My father blames it on my mother claiming that when he was a bachelor he was always on time to every function He likes to cite that being on time is a virtue, and being late a federal offense. Despite his good intentions he isn’t a morning person either. I hear him pushing the snooze button every morning and the word “shit” muttered as he bolts out of bed, dressing in the nick of time, gulping down his cup of coffee all in about ten minutes, and then running to catch the bus by 7:00. But even with his best efforts he is always late to work.
In his defense and mine, it isn’t as if the CTA is always on time, either. It’s a myth to think that the buses come every 15 minutes; it is more like every hour. But he couldn’t explain this to his boss at the Department of Labor where he works for the city of Chicago. His repeated offenses got him suspended for a week one time. I guess that is why he has given up trying to wake us up in the morning. He lets my mother handle it her way, which is to scream at the top of her lungs from her bedroom to “Wake-up!”
To me it is just a dull background noise that I am able to ignore and sleep through, like a fly buzzing around my face, until she stomps into my room, rips the covers off me and screams right in my face to get up. She then moves on to my sister’s bed and does the same. Anna, not being as strong willed as I am, gets up first, whimpering on her way to the bathroom trying to get some sympathy from my mother with her crocodile tears. I being the smarter one, stay in bed just long enough until I hear the second set of stomps coming from my mother’s room and then I jump out of bed pretending the whole time I was getting dressed.
The screaming has gotten worse and worse as Anna and I get older. And it is not just my mother screaming at us, we have started screaming back. There are some days Anna and I just run down the stairs, screaming at the top of our lungs how much we hate our mother. But, as with all families, there is a little bit of craziness in every household, and even though at these moments of complete insanity, where all parties are screaming things that later on will be regretted, our family has an unspoken rule. Nobody leaves without saying they love each other and giving Mother a kiss goodbye. No matter the curse words that were used in a fit of rage, no matter the threats, no matter how much we all despised each other at that moment, if we leave the apartment without seeking forgiveness, even if it wasn’t our fault (mother is always to blame), we have to turn right back, run up the porch stairs, and tell her we love her, or bear the consequences when we get home.
It is an unspoken rule; you cannot leave the house with hatred in your heart, and to make sure we abide by this unspoken rule, Mother has a way of scaring us with thoughts of her possible demise, telling us that if anything should happen to her we would be left to fend for ourselves, and when we were younger she told us that we would be sent to the orphanage down on the corner of Ridge and Devon.
But sometimes, I wonder if I am not deserving of all the idle threats my mother screams at me. Take the time my mother was half asleep, and the morning had gone relatively quietly. I snuck into her room and shouted that the apartment was on fire and she better make a run for it. I think I was around ten. My mother, who sleeps only in her underwear, got up and ran to the back door. She realized, when she saw me standing in the kitchen laughing that there was no fire. And I realized when I saw her face that I was in for it. So I made a dash to the back door, she grabbed me by the hair, but I managed to get free. She chased me most of the way down the back stairs before remembering she was half naked and then ran back up and stood at the door shouting expletives that only a drunken sailor would know. She was screaming, so all the neighbors could hear that when I got home after school, I was going to get a beating that I would remember for the rest of my life. And I knew I was going to get it when I got home, but I couldn’t part with Ma in a bad way, so I ran back up the stairs, quickly before she could realize what was happening and get a swing in with the wooden spoon that she had grabbed to beat me with. I planted a kiss on her cheek and told her I loved her.
First thing the next morning there’s a social worker at our door. One of our neighbors had taken my mother’s threats seriously, and had called family services on us.
I could have really made my mother pay for all her threats, all of her screaming, all of her cute little remarks she says to people about me, but I didn’t because despite my growing differences with my mother, I knew never to betray her.
Before my mother opened the door for the social worker, she whispered with clenched teeth, “If you say one word to embarrass me I’ll make your life unbearable.” How much more unbearable, I thought. But I didn’t want to risk asking. I knew she would find new ways to humiliate me in front of my friends, and I also knew that getting back at her at this point would not really accomplish much.
I didn’t like the social worker the minute she walked through the door. She was one of those hippy types: her hair was all over the place, she was wearing a short sleeve shirt and it was clear she didn’t shave her armpits cause you could see all the fuzz under her arm every time she moved to scribble down what I was saying. What really bugged me was that she wore banana colored high-tops. I hate the color yellow even more than purple. She sat there staring at me in a way that suggested that at any moment I was going to crack and give up my mother. As if my mother was some runaway fugitive and I was going to spill the beans and solve the twenty-year-old mystery. It would have been nice to think that the reason that my mother was so uptight and obnoxious was mysterious instead of so ordinary.
She asked us a series of questions, if either parent hits us; did my mother drink or do drugs? (Does marijuana count?) Were we happy? She then asked us about the screaming the day before. Ma and I were sitting at the dining room table with the social worker; Anna was in the living room on the couch crying thinking that her worst fear was going to be realized—we were both going to be sent to Guardian Angel, the orphanage on the corner!
“Look, Ma’s half Italian that’s just the way she talks. She screams--talks. The whole family does it on account that they’re all a little deaf.”
I had to give myself credit, I had just made that one up on the spot, and in my mind I was basking in my own glory with the brilliance of the whole scream-talk thing, but when I looked over at Ma, she was not smiling.
She was giving me one of her dinner table looks where she is going to lean in real slow, and give me a slap across the side of my head for saying something stupid, or for slurping my soup, or eating with my mouth open.
I hoped the social worker wasn’t looking. I so wanted to stick my tongue out at my mother right then and there, but if I did that might push her off the edge. The last time I stuck my tongue out at her, she got the kitchen scissors and said, “Do it again and I’ll cut it off,” as she waved the scissors in my face.
Sure, I wanted to say, we sure were beaten, sure she threatened us all the time about sending us to the old orphanage on the corner of Devon and Ridge. Even though I knew it had been closed for the last twenty years, but she didn’t know I knew, as she continued threatening to send us away, and Anna was crying up a storm and I was having thoughts that I would wind-up sharing a room with some weirdo that talked in her sleep and then tried to suffocate me.
But, nah, Ma never really beat us, she threatened us but they were idle threats. She never did any bodily harm, and for the most part the slaps across the rear ends were justly deserved. I had a mouth on me and I learned to use it at a very young age.
“Hmm, well what about her running around half naked?” the social worker asked as she looked at her notes.
Mother’s face was turning red as her hair. I was kind of feeling bad about the whole situation and I just wanted this lady to go away. I didn’t want to but I had to fess-up about my practical joke so this lady would understand, so she would leave.
“OK, I was playing a joke on my mother, I told her the apartment was on fire, and she jumped out of bed thinking the place was on fire. She sleeps in her underwear, she wasn’t naked”.
She also does the housework in her underwear as well, I wanted to say, especially when she is scrubbing the kitchen floor, but I didn’t think the social worker really needed to know this about my mother. That would really get us sent away.
The social worker seemed to believe this; but she had one more question.
“Well what about the wooden spoon?”
Mother sat motionless. Anna had stopped crying.
The infamous spoon; the spoon that seemed to come out of nowhere when Ma needed to get our attention when Anna and I were smacking the crap out of each other: Whack, whack, whack was all we felt across our butts..
“Spoon? I don’t remember any spoon.”
After the incident with the social worker mother just resorted to throwing a cup of cold water on my face to wake me up in the morning. No screaming, no yelling on her part just splash. She would tell me if I didn’t get out of bed at that moment the next one would be a pot full of dirty water from the sink, where last nights leftover dishes were soaking, which could be anything from meat loaf or greasy chicken remains, and then she would stomp right back to her bed. I had to hand it to her that did the trick because that is how I was awaken on the first day of my high-school experience with a cold glass of water to the face.
**
I headed right to the back of the bus. I reached into my bag and took out my Walkman, snapping on my tape of Duran Duran. Yes, I was obsessed with this boy band, who isn’t in 1983? I like sitting in the back, having a full view of all the people boarding the bus, and listening to my Walkman, feeling as if I am in a music video of my life. The 155 bus always smells like stale beer and urine, but I kind of like the smell, it gives the bus character and adds to my music video that is going on inside my head.
I was already sweating in my polyester uniform. It was sticking to the back of my thighs. My feet were beginning to ache from the pressure of my new shoes, which I had scuffed up by dragging the toes across the sidewalk as I walked to the bus stop, in the hopes of making them a little less new looking. As Duran Duran played “Rio,” I watched to see if anyone interesting was boarding the bus. Nope, just the regulars, the old people, the crazy man who speaks to himself and scratches himself all over every time someone else gets on the bus, and the businessmen in their blue suits and pink or striped ties, heading downtown.
The bus passes by my Aunt’s restaurant as it turns onto Sheridan Ave. It is a simple storefront restaurant in-between the Granada Theater and a Kinko’s. I’ve been bussing tables there for the last 3 years. The D’Arco motto is: everybody works in the restaurant. That’s all my mother’s side of the family knows, working in a restaurant.
My grandfather owned Italian restaurants his whole adult life. He had one on Clark and Belmont, and one on Foster and Austin. I have also been told that he owned the first gay bar on Clark Street in the fifties right across from where the Century Mall stands now. He likes to tell the story that with the success of his restaurants, he had enough money to buy some property and set up a piano bar. But, one of his friends said there would be more money in opening an underground gay bar and it was literally underground. You had to walk down a set of stairs to the basement of the building it was in.
There was no way my grandfather, the first generation Italian stallion homophobic right off the boat, was going to advertise he owned a gay bar. Even though my grandfather dresses like a pimp with his bright color silk shirts, and white pants, and always with the gold chains around his hairy neck. It is not like my grandfather dresses in a conservative fashion with pin- stripped double breasted suits with a fresh handkerchief in his front breast pocket. No, my grandfather would have fitted right in at his gay bar with his loud and flamboyant style of dress.
But, my grandfather never set foot in the place. He made my uncle run it. The place made my grandfather a small fortune, more than he ever made with his restaurants. The rest of the family never saw the money. It was spent on other things; whores, gambling, and the occasional peace offering of jewelry to my grandmother.
My grandfather had to get out of town by the early 70’s. He owed too much money to the local hoods in so called protection money. Papa refused to pay anymore and the guys said, “Well, we will just have to burn down your restaurants. Hopefully, your wife won’t be in any of them. We know she won’t be at the bar.”
Papa had no choice but to sell all the restaurants and the bar, and with that money he bought himself a nice big house in Palm Springs, Ca. Of course without telling my Nanna, who when she found out refused to move. She said, “I was born in Chicago, and will die in Chicago.” Plus, when she saw the pictures of the house, she said it reminded her of an old fashioned brothel. She spit on the pictures and told him to get out and have fun with his whores!
So, for the past ten years, Papa comes home for the holidays, and for the remainder of the year my grandparents live apart. Papa likes to say it’s the perfect marriage for him; and it does seem that my grandmother doesn’t mind either. Most of the year, she doesn’t have to pick up after him and watch him all day sleeping on the couch wearing only his boxer shorts. Only during the holidays she has to deal with his snoring on the couch with his false teeth out on the coffee table next to him, and the T.V set blaring! Yet, my Nanna still gets up every morning at 5:00, and starts her pot of red sauce. I can smell the sweet aroma of it simmering away on the stove, as I walk up the six flights of stairs to her apartment, which is only a block away from mine.
My aunt decided to break with tradition and instead of opening a small Ma and Pop Italian restaurant, she opened a Spanish restaurant. We’re not Spanish. We don’t eat Spanish food. We never have. But Aunt Connie wanted to do something different. She claims that my great-grandmother was a Spanish Jew. The rest of the D’Arco’s had never heard about this before Connie started talking about it after returning from a trip to Spain, a year before she opened her restaurant. Where, she brought home a weird and expensive Churro machine. A Churro is a long finger style Spanish donut that is eaten with a cup of Hot Chocolate. At first, she wanted just to open a donut shop with this machine, but then realized that nobody in Chicago, I would think no one in the State of Illinois had ever heard of such a donut. So, she decided to open up a restaurant to go along with the donut idea.
Papa thought the whole story was a bunch of bullshit, and liked to yell the word bullshit real loud whenever he saw Connie, and make a gesture as if he was flicking dirt from under his chin as he was yelling at her. But, he helped her buy that expensive donut machine that has never been used and which t cost him $3,000 to buy and have shipped over from Spain. A constant reminder of wasted money as it sits in the front window being admired by our customers who ask what it is. I like to say, whenever anyone asks me; it is a machine that pays homage to our Spanish heritage.
Connie thought she was paying homage to her grandmother by opening a Spanish restaurant and naming it after her. Everybody in the family knows that Carla is an Italian name. In fact, half my cousins are named Carla for God-sakes!
My grandfather said he never heard of his mother being Jewish nor fleeing to Italy from Spain for the sake of her religion. My aunt, who likes to argue about nothing, insisted that Grandma Carla told her the story right before she died. “That’s impossible!” my grandfather liked to yell, because my aunt was only three when her grandmother died, and how could she remember such a story.
But Connie insists it is true and that’s why it’s a Spanish restaurant and that’s how it’s advertised. My grandfather says that the whole story is crap because Mama Carla made the best red sauce in the whole family, and her own pasta. And every one of her five daughters knows the secret recipe for the sauce. They even shared it with my grandmother, who’s not even Italian, she’s German! And that’s a big deal because nobody outside the family knows the recipe despite how much a family friend will beg and cry or promise never to tell, but my five great aunts kept their lips sealed which is a big deal because nobody in my family can keep a secret to save their lives.
They only told my Nanna because she became one of them when she married their good for nothing brother. However, they soon realized that she was a better cook than any of them put together, but that doesn’t stop them for taking credit for my Nanna’s cooking abilities. At family gatherings they like to tell everybody who will listen to them that they taught my Nanna everything she knows. Nanna just smiles and agrees. She says there is no point in arguing with them. They only hear themselves talk.
“Grandma Carla”, Papa would scream, “only cooked Italian. She only spoke Italian, and I never heard her speak Hebrew or Spanish!” And besides he doesn’t remember eating any Spanish food not to be confused with Mexican because there is no question about it we are not Mexican. If anything we will admit to having Spanish blood, but no Mexican because Spain at least shares the same continent as Italy!
The funny thing is my Aunt Connie is also a horrible cook just like my great-aunts. She likes to blame it on her poor eye-sight, but in reality she doesn’t have the patience. Nanna says cooking is like any other form of art, “it all about the process.” Aunt Connie pleaded with Nanna like my grandfather did years before to cook in her restaurant. But since my Nanna doesn’t cook Spanish, only Italian, my grandmother cooked only from her Italian recipes that Grandma Carla left her. The same ones used in all of my grandfather’s restaurants. I later asked my Nanna if there were any Spanish recipes hidden somewhere between the pages. She looked at me in her ever-serious way, and said in a whisper, “Gianna you know your Aunt is a little touched in the head. Why would you believe all her talk?”
“But, I kind of liked the idea of having Jewish blood mixed with a little Spanish,” I’d say.
It makes me feel a little different—I like to believe we had some mystery to our family history, a little romance. I like to conjure up images of my great-grandmother hiding in a back of a horse-drawn carriage during the turn of the century, gun fire in the background - soldiers yelling-“Stop Jew” as she fled for her life across borders and finally finding her true love in Southern Italy. Some true love, my great –grandfather turned out to be a boot maker and a womanizer! Most of her teenage life and well into her adult hood was spent pregnant.
Of course I tried to use the whole Jewish heritage to my advantage with my mother when she informed me that I would to be attending an all girl’s Catholic high school.
“It is shameful Mother,” I yelled. What would Grandma Carla think if she knew a Jew was going to a Catholic high-school?”
“Are you stoned?” my mother yelled back, “We are no more Jewish than we are Catholic!”
The best part about working in the restaurant is watching the befuddled looks on the customer’s faces as they scan the menu for something Spanish to eat. Often they’d stop my Aunt as she walked around the tables checking to make sure everyone is happy, completely oblivious to the bewildered looks, as they ask, “This is a Spanish restaurant right?” My aunt would always respond, “Of course, this is Carla’s, named after my grandmother who was a Spanish Jew.” Still confused because they still can’t find anything Spanish on the menu, they would continue to question my aunt. “But what is Spanish on the menu?” My aunt annoyed as if anyone would question her menu, responded, dismissively, breezing off to the next table, “the salads.” And sometimes I whisper, “The unused $3,000 donut machine in the window.”
I got off at the stop right under Loyola El station. I headed up the stairs. I felt like everybody was staring at me, especially with my purple backpack. I stood waiting for the train, wishing I were invisible. I clicked off my walkman, and looking down from the EL Platform, I took in the neighborhood sounds. Buses honked, I heard shouts from the college students who were heading off to class, and in the background I heard The Clash’s song “should I stay or should I go.” It was a sign or something because that is how I was feeling. I wanted to be somewhere else other than heading to St. Scholastica.
Walking down Howard St to Ridge Ave, I passed Marie’s house, my one and only friend who was also attending St. Scholastica with me. She wasn’t going there because of any reason due to her lack of academic abilities. She was going because it was right across the street from her house. Marie was notorious for being late to school. Her mom felt that because St. Scholastica was only two feet from her front door; Marie should be able to get to school on time. As my father likes to say: wishful thinking is good for the soul. **