Chapter Five: A Good Pot of Red Sauce.

Chapter Five:
I asked my dad the following night if I could stop working at the restaurant after school. I hadn’t asked my mother because when we started talking about the Vietnam War she looked pretty upset about it. I knew due to her mood that she would have said no. I explained to my Dad that I was scared of my Aunt and her sudden outbursts. He seemed to buy this because he knew of my aunt’s temper and really didn’t care for her much.
I casually mentioned I was not getting any of my homework done at the restaurant because of my Aunt’s constant fighting with my grandmother. I really felt that coming straight home would benefit me more academically. It’s not that I really believed this, but I was not taking any chances and I knew that if I played the academic card on them I would get a response. I was at least trying to appear studious.
It was true that my aunt was starting to weird me out by her excessive drinking binges and tantrums she was having with my Nanna over closing the restaurant for lunch and only being open for dinner. My grandmother said that the lunch hour is our busiest time because of our regular customers who are the local professors and faculty from the university, which was just a block away. Dinner was our slowest due to the fact that the college students could not afford our prices. This was meaningless to my Aunt, who argued that it did not matter. She was no longer going to open the restaurant for lunch. She had decided that because it was her restaurant, she was going to do what she wanted to do.
My grandmother’s response to my aunt’s behavior was to throw a pot at my aunt, which missed her head by inches. She then gave her the finger, and stormed out of the restaurant. I ran after her because there was no way I was staying alone with my Aunt after that incident.
So, for the last two weeks I’ve been working alone with my aunt until my mother arrives at 6:00pm. She is supposed to get there at 5:30 but she is always late—blaming it on traffic. What traffic? The restaurant is ten minutes away—tops twenty minutes! I screamed this at her—yelling that I could not handle the stress anymore. She told me to stop acting like “Sarah Bernhardt, and that maybe I should make a profession as a stage actress.
I even tried to con my sister into coming over and keeping me company by telling her that I would give her five bucks a night. That lasted one night, and not even for an hour because my sister got scared when Connie started waving the big cutting knife and telling us we were a pair of spoiled brats and she was going to cut our fingers off for stealing from the cash register. Not that we had ever stolen from the cash register because our mother had already threaten us with cutting out fingers off if she ever caught us stealing. Anna took one look at the knife and ran out to take the bus home.
My Aunt Connie is troubled, not in a textbook way, but in a way that when at family gatherings you just stay away from her. I have watched other family members interact with her and it is always as if they are walking on eggshells. They just make casual chitchat. How’s the restaurant kind of talk, “yeah we really are getting a lot of rain this summer” kind of talk. Most times I feel sorry for my aunt and recently I really feel bad for her. She just broke up with her girl friend. Yeah, I have known for years that my aunt is a lesbian. It is not a real family secret except from my Nanna who believes that the reason why at thirty-six my Aunt is not married is because she hasn’t found the right man.
I will admit that it was a real shocker to me when I found out last Christmas from my cousin, who I call the fat cow. She is two years older than me and attends Regina High-school, the one in Wilmette. She is a snob if I have ever met one. Anyway, we were sitting in my room, and I am showing her my latest Duran Duran album and she says out of the blue—“Your Aunt is gay”. Anna, who is also in the room even though I told her to get out several times, says “I don’t think our Aunt is very happy-“No, dummy,” our cousin says, not gay as happy, but gay as liking girls”, and then Anna says, “Well I like girls.” And our cousin says, “Not like how your aunt likes girls.”
My Aunt and her girlfriend went in as partners with the restaurant. Everyone in the family thought it was a bad idea, but for the 1st year all was well, it was even fun. We had all our family events at the restaurant especially birthdays and anniversaries. But, recently, it has not been fun. Connie just drinks too much every since her lover Jane moved back to Florida. And, I don’t know if it’s from a broken heart or plain boredom, but my Aunt is drinking even more, and it is not just sherry, it is everything and anything she can get her hands on.
After two weeks of working at the restaurant without my Nanna I called her. I tried to give my best performance ever, pleading with her to come back. I did the whole fake crying, little sobs at the right moments, coughing and gasping for air. But she didn’t fall for it. “Gianna,” she says in sing song voice, “are you sick, you sound sick.”
“No, Nanna, I’m crying.”
“For what?”
Yeah, I wasn’t getting anywhere. Nanna was through and when she was through with a situation, she was through. Just how she threw my grandfather out she was done—done! She also said she was through with making the red sauce and that in fact, she preferred to eat her pasta with just butter on it. I knew my Nanna was just saying this out of anger, because everyone in our family knows that eating pasta with just butter is gross. It is like drinking milk out of the carton.
“Gianna she whispers over the phone, “your aunt is sick, and there is nothing I can do for her.”
“Sick from what?” I ask pressing the receiver closer to my ear because I can hardly hear her, and I think I am going to get some juicy information.
“Drink,” she says in a high squeal causing me to jerk the receiver from my ear.
“Drink!” I repeat utterly confused. “What sort of sickness is that?”
“A bad one,” She says smacking her lips with a goodbye kiss, and hanging up.
Nanna always sends kisses through the phone, she never says good bye. The sound of the kiss is her way of ending to the conversation.