Chapter twenty-two: A Good Pot of Red Sauce

Days seemed like years as I waited out the end of the school year. It was the same old, same old every day. I’d sit at my desk just staring at the clock that hung above the black board that was the same feature in every single classroom. I swear the nuns did it on purpose, placing the clock right in front of you, making you wait out your boring algebra class or listening to the monotone drawl of your English teacher lecturing about how it is essential to learn how to diagram a sentence. By God, if I had to dissect one more sentence, I was going to go insane!
And to top it off, my mother was threatening to send me to summer school. She said if I didn’t pass my French class with at least a C, I’d be taking a repeat of it during the summer. Like I was ever going to use my French! “Where in the real world was I going to speak French?” I’d complain to her and my father. When and where was I ever going to use algebra, for that matter? All father said was that it expanded the mind and made you a worldlier person. “If you just stopped complaining and try to have fun with your studying,” he’d say over his Sunday paper, “You’d really do much better in your classes.” Plus, he liked to add ever so smugly, “If you knew anything about your history, Chicago was settled by the French.”
“No, father,” adapting his professorial tone, “I thought it was the Canadians.”
“Hmm, you are paying attention in school?” he said, returning to reading his newspaper.
My complaints were ignored by Nanna. When I tried complaining to her she just started in on how when she was my age she had to walk twenty miles in freezing, pouring rain with no boots or gloves, and that I should consider myself lucky to have parents like mine who have the money to send me to a private school.
I’d been hearing about her walking twenty miles to school ever since I was in kindergarten! It seemed each year, as I got older, she embellished the story more. The miles she walked to school got longer (she was up to 40 now), and sometimes she didn’t even have any shoes to wear to school, and she only had one school outfit that she’d wash out every night in the kitchen sink. “Seems to me, Nanna,” I’d say every time she told me the story now, “that to walk forty miles at a rate of five miles an hour you’d never make it on time by 8 o’clock in the morning. You’d have to get up at 3 o’clock in the morning! I guess you were a pretty fast walker?”
‘Well miss smarty pants,” she’d reply, “seems to me that fancy private school is paying off.”
“Oh, give me a break,” I’d say, rolling my eyes and stuffing more pasta in my fat face.
*****
The restaurant had been closed for three months now. Papa didn’t come home for Easter, said he couldn’t stomach it. He was pissed at my aunt. “What she going to do now?” I’d hear him scream over the phone at Nanna. I was stirring the red sauce at Nanna’s stove, and Nanna was sitting at her kitchen table drinking her fourth cup of coffee. No wonder she has a problem sleeping at night.
“Who knows, I haven’t seen her in weeks, she went off to visit her friend in Florida”. “The same girl,” I hear my Papa shout.
Then Nanna began to whisper again, as if I didn’t know about my aunt going to visit her girlfriend.
I missed the restaurant. I missed the times when the whole family made food together. How many special events did we have there? I continued stirring the red sauce listening to my Nanna tell my Papa about the family. So and so was pregnant again. We were all going to Aunt Stella’s sixtieth birthday party next week. And Anna was going to be in her Spring play. Oh, and Gianna got her hair cut again, this time even shorter. I heard Papa scream, “What?! Is she turning into a goddamn lesbian too?”
“Hush, John,” Nanna said, “She is just trying to find herself.”
“It’s a shame that she didn’t get her mother’s looks,” I heard him grunt.
And the family wonders why I can’t stand the man. Nanna was eyeing me and mouthed at me that I was letting the red sauce boil; I ignored her and let the sauce run over the sides of the pot. She could have defended me. She could have said something in my defense when the bastard implied I was ugly.
Nanna pulled the cord of the phone toward the stove and nudged me away with her hip.
“Just tell him you have to go,” I yelled as I threw the wooden spoon on the stove top and stomped out the back door.
“Gianna, what has gotten into you?” was all I heard as I took the back stairs two at a time. I hated everyone at that very moment.