CHAPTER ONE
The Handshake (Grandma)
As I crossed the threshold, I had the strange feeling that I was not entering the room. It was entering me. The air smelled dusty, even though there was no sign of dust on the wooden pieces in the room. I was inhaling the molecules of the past. The only things that had changed since the Meccas moved into this house in 1917 were the cracks in the pale blue walls and the colors that had drained from the floral rug.
When Aunt Carmella had asked me if I wanted to sleep in Grandma and Grandpa’s room, it was as if the president had offered me the Lincoln bedroom. My excitement was not because of what was in the room, but because of the momentousness of what had happened here. In this room, in this bed, maybe even on this mattress, Grandma had conceived and given birth to my father and his siblings. It is the room where Grandpa got up at 4:30 am to work in the garden before getting to work at the rail yard by seven. It is where he recovered after his legs were amputated, first one, then the other.
I was single, in my late twenties, and had come home to the family homestead for the holidays. Mom and Dad’s apartment upstairs, where I had grown up, was overflowing with my visiting brother, Tommy, and his new family. Downstairs, Aunt Carmella lived alone. Grandma had died about ten years earlier, and
Grandpa about ten years before that. But Aunt Carmella hadn’t moved into their master bedroom, preferring to stay in the room she had lived in her whole life.
As I stood in the middle of the stark space, a shiver passed through my neck and down my arms, even though steam heat was pouring out of the cast iron radiator in the corner of the room. This space held a certain mystery for me. I had slept in every other bedroom in this house: my own room on the third floor, Tommy’s room across the hall when a storm woke me in the night, my parent’s room on the second floor when I was sick, in a bunk bed in the room that is now our TV room, on a couch in our living room which was once a bedroom, and Aunt Carmella’s room downstairs for much-loved sleepovers. But this room felt untouched and untouchable, much like Grandma herself.
But here I was, about to spend the night in this room, on this
bed.
I dropped my suitcase on the floor. As I sat on the edge of
the bed, the ancient metal springs creaked under my weight, pitching me forward. I had to brace myself with my hands to keep my balance as I looked around the room. Like all the rooms in our house, the doors and trim of Grandma and Grandpa’s room were made of dark wood, varnished many times over. The floor was hardwood. Not the gleaming polished hardwood that realtor’s love to highlight, but dark and worn, almost to the point of splintering. The threadbare rug and faded blue chenille bedspread were the only textiles in the room. The rug was so worn I couldn’t make out what colors it must once have been, and the pattern had blurred into a jumble of muted tones. The walls were bare except for a thin metal cross over the bed.
Across from the foot of the bed were two dressers. Grandpa’s dresser was long and low, covered with an ecru crocheted doily. On top was his pipe collection. The pipes stood
bowl side up in slots surrounding a square box. Inside was a red tin of Prince Albert cherry tobacco.
Grandma’s dresser was tall and narrow. On the top there was a scalloped half oval compartment about two inches deep with a hinged lid. I had never peeked inside; it felt wrong to invade one of the few private places Grandma had. A mirror, brush, and comb were laid out at precise angles on the starched white lace- trimmed doily. This vanity set was not decorated with gold and mother of pearl like the one my parents bought me for my thirteenth birthday, but was carved out of plain wood with no embellishments, just exquisitely smooth beveled edges. I lifted the brush and searched for evidence of Grandma’s hair. By the time she died, her hair was a yellowed gray that matched the brush’s dry bristles. I was not surprised when I didn’t find any. I could not imagine Grandma using this vanity set. She never paid much attention to her appearance. She dressed plainly in cotton dresses and wore only black from the day Grandpa died. She never wore make-up, and her hair was always pinned back in a low bun. Her only adornment was the tiny silver and turquoise earrings she wore. I had wanted these after Grandma died. Those pinpoints of color, her one small nod to vanity, seemed to hold some secret about her that I wanted to discover. But Aunt Carmella insisted on burying them with her.
The room’s two windows were bare except for the cracked
and yellowed plastic shades rolled up almost to the top. Beneath the driveway-side window was a large trunk covered in rugged black leather showing multiple scars. The lid was reinforced with horizontal hardwood slats and metal hardware. The corners were protected by rounded metal fixtures that were cold and smooth to the touch. I lifted the flap of the metal lock on the front of the trunk. It made a funny boinging noise as it fell back and bounced
against the fixed portion of the lock. As I ran my hand over the gentle curve of the domed lid, I felt a long-forgotten pain.
It was Christmas 1965, the first Christmas after Grandpa had died. I was seven years old. Mom and I were downstairs sitting at the kitchen table with Grandma and Aunt Carmella. Suddenly, the three women got up and my mother motioned for me to come with her and Grandma. We went into Grandma and Grandpa’s room, and Grandma and my mother opened the heavy domed lid of the trunk. A moment later, Aunt Carmella appeared at the door with a small tray of miniature glasses. Grandma pulled a bottle out of the trunk, closed the lid, and then poured the golden liquid into the four glasses. My portion barely covered the bottom of the glass. This was Grandpa’s whiskey which he brought out on holidays and special occasions. Only Grandpa touched this bottle. That’s why the women were feeling a bit devilish. Grandma even had a sparkle in her eyes, a glimmer I had never seen before, shiny as the silver of her earrings. The women raised their glasses and toasted “To Grandpa.” Then they brought the glasses to their lips and tipped their heads back to drink. My mother nodded to me, a sign that it was OK for me to do the same. I was amazed by how such a tiny drop could warm my insides from my throat to my belly. The women stood sipping from their glasses, looking out the window.
That’s when I decided it would be fun to climb up on the
trunk where I could get a better view of whatever it was they were looking at. When my mother saw what I was doing, she quickly reached for my hand. I already had my feet on the rounded lid and was pushing up from my knees to stand. As I turned to execute a ta-da move of triumph, my foot slipped on a hardwood slat and I fell, landing hard with my legs splayed on either side of the trunk. I hurt in places I didn’t know I had. A wail and then tears of fear and pain. My mother scooped me up and took me
upstairs to her room and lay me in her bed. There was blood, and pain for a few days. Years later, on the day I got my first period, my mother told me I had broken my hymen that day and, technically, was not a virgin. She was worried about what my husband would think on our wedding night.
“You need to make sure he knows it was an accident,” she pleaded, her voice choking.
“I will, Mom,” I said, comforting her now. “I will. It will be OK.”
A wedding night, sex, or even a boyfriend, seemed light years away. But I knew my mother was feeling a pain she had held for a long time, and I would do whatever I could to make it go away.
Aunt Carmella’s knock on the doorframe brought me back to the present. She came into the room and handed me some towels. They were pink, faded to near white, thin and stiff. “I’m going to bed, Debbie. Do you drink coffee in the morning?”
“Yes, that would be great,” I said, even though I knew the strong coffee she made in her aluminum percolator would be bitter and the last sip would be full of grounds. I gave her a long hug. “Thanks again, Aunt Carmella.”
“Oh, Debbie, you’re such a doll. I’m so happy to have you here.”
After she left, I closed the door and searched in my suitcase for my nightgown and book. To read, I had to keep the overhead light on as there was no bedside lamp. I lay on my back, the chenille bedspread pulled up to my armpits and the book resting unopened on my stomach. I didn’t feel like reading—no characters on paper could rival the ones in this room. I stared at the light fixture at the center of the cracked ceiling. The fixture consisted of a dark metal rod that dropped about a foot from the ceiling. It was fitted with a smaller pipe that curved up to support a tapered nozzle with a brass valve for turning the gas on and off.
Grandpa had wired the pipe for a single bare bulb when they converted to electricity. It was turned on by a pull chain that dangled over the bed. As I lay on the sagging mattress under scratchy floral sheets, I imagined Grandma lying here, focusing on the flame flickering at the tip of the nozzle to stare down her pain as she labored with the birth of my father. My phantom pain returned, merging with her own, though I knew mine was a mere hint of the pangs she felt in childbirth.
I took a deep breath and repeated in a slow cadence as I drifted off to sleep, “Who were you, Grandma?”
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I want to have warm, fuzzy memories of Grandma, but I can’t say that I do. I lived in the same house with Grandma until she died when I was eighteen. While I saw her as shy and meek, I also saw a mean and bitter side to her. She did not allow Aunt Carmella’s closest friends to enter our house because they were Jewish. She disapproved of my mother because she was German, even though my mother had converted from Lutheran to Catholic to marry my father. She was outraged when my mother’s Black friend visited us.
Whenever Tommy and I were playing in the yard, Grandma sat in her corner of the back porch glider like a vigilant overseer, just waiting for us to do something wrong.
“Get off of that grass. You’re going to ruin it.” “Oh, let them be,” Aunt Carmella scolded her.
“Don’t bounce that ball against the house. It’s too loud.” “But we’re only bouncing it against the wall to the bathroom.
There’s no window and no one inside to hear,” Tommy shot back.
“It’s my house and I said not to bounce that ball there.”
And often we heard, “Don’t you have anything better to do?”
One day my best friend Nancy and I were playing hopscotch on the driveway near the back porch. Nancy lived two blocks away and came over often. Grandma was sitting on the glider watching us, and out of the blue she growled to Nancy, “Why don’t you go to your own house?” Nancy ran home crying and I ran upstairs. When my mother asked me “What’s the matter, Debbie?” I dissolved into tears. I think my mother was as upset as I was, maybe more, but she kept reassuring me, “It will be alright. We’ll figure it out.” I’m guessing she talked to my dad about it when he came home, but I don’t know if he ever said anything to Grandma. I just know that I tried to avoid Grandma for a long time after that.
It seemed to me that Grandma just didn’t want anyone to
have fun. She was miserable and thought everyone else should be miserable as well.
After my stay in Grandma’s room, in Grandma’s bed, something in me shifted. I had put myself, quite literally, in her place. It was the beginning of trying to see her world through her eyes. I started listening more intently when my father, aunts, uncles, and older cousins talked about Grandma, trying to understand who she had been to them. I don’t know why I didn’t just ask them. It wasn’t until I formally interviewed Aunt Carmella when she was 100 years old that I asked her about her mother. I saw Aunt Carmella’s face soften, remembering, “Oh, she was sweet. Gentle and kind.” Then her face changed, “Not like my father. Oh, he was mean.” She shook off the bitterness and softened again, “But my mother, oh, she was sweet.”
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Grandma was born Anna Sileo in 1890 in Avigliano, a small mountainous village in southern Italy. When she was two years old, her parents, Vito and Maria Sileo, immigrated to America, and settled in Dunmore. Maria gave birth to eight more
children—two boys and six girls, making Anna and her sisters the “seven sisters.”
Anna was sixteen years old when Domenico Mecca brought his family over from Italy. Domenico had known Vito Sileo in Avigliano. While still in Italy, Domenico and Vito pledged their children, two-year-old Antonio Mecca and newborn Anna Sileo, to one another with a handshake. Antonio and Anna’s courtship started sixteen years later in Dunmore. The courtship consisted of Antonio visiting the Sileo house on Sunday afternoons and sitting on the narrow front porch with Anna, and a chaperone, to get acquainted.
There is a picture of Grandma from about this time. It is a school picture, probably her last year of school. She is standing near the end of a row, the tallest and presumably the oldest student in the picture. Her dress is a dark plaid, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. She looks sad, resigned, her eyes flat, as if they are unable to see beyond the moment when the shutter clicked.
In 1909, Antonio and Anna were married at St. Anthony of Padua Italian Catholic church which stood at the top of Dunmore’s highest hill. Anna’s first child, named Caterina after her mother-in-law, was born on August, 10, 1910. She died the same day. Her death certificate lists her age as five hours. Anna gave birth to four more children in the next few years: Domenic in 1912, Charles in 1914, Catherine (“Katy”) in 1915, and Vito in 1917. While Antonio, along with his father and brothers, worked long hours at the Erie Railroad Shops, Anna cared for her four young children in a two-bedroom apartment in Dunmore’s Hill Section.
Dunmore was made up largely of European immigrants. I
have jokingly said that it was one third Italian, one third Polish, one third Irish, and the rest Anglo. That was how it felt to me growing up there. The groups lived in different parts of town—
the Italians in the Hill Section, the Irish in the Patch, the Polish in an area on the north end of town, the Anglos and some Irish in the area surrounding Dunmore Corners, and the very wealthy Anglos in what was called the Hollywood Section because of the size and elegance of the homes. The three immigrant groups were all Catholic, and each had their own church: St. Anthony of Padua for the Italians, St. Mary’s for the Irish, and All Saints for the Polish. The Anglos went to the towering limestone Episcopal Church in the Hollywood Section or the simple white wooden Presbyterian Church near the Corners where my Girl Scout troop met.
Anna’s father-in-law, Domenico Mecca, was determined to bring his family together in one large homestead, including Anna, Antonio and their children. Unable to find a property in the Hill Section large enough for the house he envisioned, Domenico put down our family’s Italian roots in the Anglo/Irish neighborhood near Dunmore Corners. The property was located at the intersection of Drinker Street, the town’s main thoroughfare, and Reilly Street, a one-block-long street that sloped uphill to All Saints, the Polish Catholic Church, and the beginning of the Polish section. We lived at Dunmore’s ethnic epicenter. I’ve been told that it was a scandal when my great-grandfather built the house there. Other Italians warned him that he would face backlash from his new neighbors by moving to that area. Despite the warnings, Domenico, together with his four sons, built the house at 401 East Drinker Street.
Anna was twenty-seven when she moved into 401 with her husband, mother- and father-in-law, four children, and Antonio’s three brothers and two sisters. Even though she was probably happy to move from the cramped apartment, it must have been daunting to suddenly be surrounded by a hoard of in-laws. During their second year in the house, both Anna and her mother-in-law,
Catarina, fell ill with the Spanish Flu, a worldwide pandemic that killed 50 million people worldwide and 675,000 in the United States. Anna was pregnant when she contracted the flu. Despite her delicate frame and the ravages of the flu, she was able to survive the exertions of labor and gave birth on October 14, 1918, to a baby girl whom she named Maria, after her own mother. Her previous child, Vito, had been named after her father. Perhaps she was hoping to keep herself from disappearing into her husband’s clan in the one small way she could.
Five days later, little Maria died. Her death certificate states the cause of death as “influenza contracted in utero.” She was buried the same day. It is unlikely that Anna was well enough to attend the burial. I imagine her feverish and alone in the big house after the family left to put her baby girl in the ground. As the swaddled body of the infant was lowered into the dirt, perhaps Anna cradled her own still-swollen stomach, imagining Maria safe in her womb. Maybe she felt herself melting into the emptiness of the house—in her fever dreams, the emptiness came inside her and stole her child, leaving her hollow. She probably wanted to stay in bed until the house consumed her as well, but as the fever and aches of the flu subsided, she knew she had to rouse herself to care for her young children.
Eight days after the baby’s death, Anna’s mother-in-law, Catarina Mecca, older and weaker than Anna, succumbed to the flu. Upon her death, the primary responsibility for caring for the household, and the entire Mecca clan, fell to Anna. It was a responsibility she shouldered grudgingly for decades to come.
Over the next six years, Anna would bear and bury more children. In September 1919, a year after Maria’s death, Aunt Carmella was born. In March 1920, three-year-old Vito died. His death certificate states the primary cause of death as meningitis and the secondary cause of death as “La Grippe,” another name
for the Spanish Flu. In October 1921, my father, Thomas, was born. Three years later, in 1924, Anna gave birth to her last child. He was named Vito, like his brother before him. It was common for Italian families to give children the same name as a deceased sibling. Anna again had a child who bore her father’s name. The second Vito was known as “Little Willie.” He was born with Erb’s palsy, a condition which causes paralysis, loss of sensation, and atrophy in the arms. It is often caused when an infant’s neck is stretched to the side during a difficult delivery. Little Willie died in 1927 of meningitis, like his brother and namesake before him, at the age of two-and-and-half.
So much life and so much death. I think of the grim face of the schoolgirl in the photo. Maybe she was staring into her own future, a future that had been sealed the moment she was born. Maybe she knew that the joys would be fleeting. That there would be so little she could control. Not whom she would marry. Not how many children would grow in her womb, not how many would die.
While Antonio went out into the world to work and spent countless hours in his cellar workshop or outside in the yard, Anna spent most of her time in the kitchen. The kitchen was the central room on the first floor and all the other rooms spoked out from there: bathroom, pantry, living room, cellar, master bedroom, and a second bedroom. Each room had a dark paneled wooden door set into a dark wood frame. Every inch was coated with layer upon layer of varnish. Bead board wainscoting of the same dark wood extended halfway up the walls. I wonder if the vertical stripes of the bead board felt like prison bars to young Anna.
Even with all the dark wood, the kitchen seemed spacious. Black-and-white asphalt tiles in a checkerboard pattern on the floor accentuated the open space, which was furnished only with
an icebox, a wooden table and chairs, and a coal stove. Storage and workspace for the kitchen were in a narrow pantry. One wall was lined with painted wood cabinets above a long counter. Under the counter were bins for flour, sugar, pasta, potatoes, and other staples. On the opposite wall was a double porcelain sink surrounded by more cabinets.
There was one other item in the kitchen: a low chair with wooden legs and arms, its seat and back cushions covered in maroon vinyl trying to look like leather. The chair was tucked into the small space between the bathroom door and the outside wall, pushed up against the low radiator under the window. Antonio had topped the radiator with a wide wood plank to make a shelf. I remember seeing Grandma many times sitting in that chair, her elbow resting on the wooden shelf as she stared out the window. This was also the chair where Grandma said her rosary. She would clutch the string of black beads with both hands, leaving one bead exposed between her thumbs. Her lips moved, but no sound came out. At regular intervals, one thumb reached for the center bead and deftly shifted the string to the right. At the beginning and end of her prayers, she used both hands to raise the cross to her lips. Tommy and I knew not to disturb Grandma when she was saying the rosary. We could talk with Aunt Carmella, maybe even play Steal the Deck, but there was no singing or dancing, two of the things we most enjoyed doing with Aunt Carmella, during this time. I didn’t want to stare, but I liked to watch Grandma when she was saying the rosary. Her face was relaxed, even serene, with no trace of the scowl she often wore. It was like she pulled a curtain around herself and disappeared into a world of her own. She seemed happier when she escaped
the here-and-now of her life.
I wonder how many times, when the children were young and she bore on her shoulders the responsibility for the care of
her husband’s large family, Anna had been able to sit, even for a moment, in the chair by the window. I wonder if she ever had time to say the rosary in peace, if she was ever able to escape the life she had never chosen for herself. After Grandma died, Aunt Carmella, who was widowed young and had no children, took up this same post, her dime store romance novels, books of crossword puzzles, and an array of pens arranged neatly on the worn shelf. She did not need a string of beads for her escape.
Anna’s chores were many. She had to stoke the stove with coal, cook breakfast and dinner, and pack lunches for the men before they left for the Erie Shops. She washed clothes and linens by hand, swept floors with a straw broom, and periodically dragged the carpets out to the clothesline and beat them with a paddle. Antonio’s sisters, who were ten and fifteen when the family moved into 401, helped with some of the chores after school. Later, Anna’s daughter, Katy, helped out as well. Katy loved to clean and rejected her baby sister Carmella’s help because she clearly had no interest in housework and didn’t do it right. Anna probably had no interest in housework either, but she had no choice.
Several of Anna’s chores had to be done in the cellar. In a back corner of the low-ceilinged cellar, she filled the black soapstone utility sink with hot water and used a wooden washboard to scrub the family’s dirty clothes and linens. She scraped a rough rectangle of whitish soap back and forth against the fabric to create a lather, then with both hands rubbed each piece against the ridges of galvanized steel as she leaned her full body into the sink. It is no wonder so many sheets and towels in Grandma’s house were worn and threadbare.
Later, in the 1940s, Antonio was able to purchase a Maytag automatic ringer washer. The gleaming white cylinder that held the wash tub stood several inches off the ground on metal legs.
The round lid looked like a garbage can lid, but it too was gleaming white. Grandma was still using this washer thirty years later. I loved to help Grandma and Aunt Carmella with their laundry because the equipment was so much more interesting than the automatic washer and dryer my mother used. When the washer in the cellar was in operation Grandma and Aunt Carmella never let me to get too close. They seemed a bit afraid of the loud noises and rhythmic vibrations created by the machine, and I got the sense that they feared this porcelain monster could attack us at any time. At the top, along the back of the tub, was the wringer: two brown rubber rollers encased in a porcelain frame.
Once the machine stopped agitating and the lid was removed, Grandma pulled out one article of clothing at a time and carefully held them up to the rollers while Aunt Carmella pushed the red button that jolted the wringer into action. The spinning rollers seized the cloth in their grip, squeezing out the excess water and spitting out a flatter, dryer version into Aunt Carmella’s waiting hands. When I got a bit older, Aunt Carmella let me do the catching, though she grabbed the first tail of cloth to come through so I would not get my fingers anywhere near the rollers. The flattened garments always reminded me of poor Wylie
E. Coyote after he had been run over by the Road Runner.
When the oval wicker laundry basket was filled with pancaked clothing, Aunt Carmella hauled the basket over to the clothes lines which hung between the furnace and the coal bin. A cloth pouch full of wooden clothes pins hung from the line and Aunt Carmella put a few in her mouth before grabbing the first piece to hang. My job was to keep feeding her the clothes pins as she worked her way along the line, prodding the basket in front of her with her foot. When the sun was shining, the basket was carried outside, and the laundry hung on the clothes lines Grandpa had strung between two sturdy poles. Many days in the
winter, we had to pull frozen towels and sheets, stiff as boards, off the line and fold them until they cracked to get them into the basket.
My favorite story about Grandma begins at the cellar clothesline. It is known in the family as “The Rag Story.” When Carmella and Katy were young teens in the 1930s, they and their mother used layers of absorbent cloth to create “rags” thick enough to absorb their monthly menstrual flow. This is where the phrase “on the rag” comes from. They used pins to attach the rags to their undergarments. After each use, they had to wash the rags so they could be used again. These were hung on the cellar clothes lines to dry, even in good weather. Antonio’s younger brother Andrew, a bachelor, was one of the extended Mecca family members living in the house at the time. He was known to be mean, selfish, and ungrateful. One day, having just about had it with Andrew, Anna warned him to leave the rags drying in the cellar alone, knowing that he would, out of pure spite, do just the opposite. When Andrew came prancing back upstairs to the kitchen, smothering his face defiantly in a stiff rag, Anna and her daughters doubled over with laughter. Anna had had her revenge. It was small but sweet.
Unlike many Italians at the time, the Meccas did not have
their kitchen in the basement. But at the end of Grandpa’s workbench, next to the anvil, was an old gas stove. It was a beautiful object, its white surface decorated with painted roses and green leaves, chrome trim on the oven door and the long curvy handles of the burner controls, and a back panel with a scalloped shelf edged in red for keeping things warm.
Anna used this stove for canning the vegetables and fruits Antonio grew in his garden. Domenico had purchased two lots when he bought the property; one entire lot was used for gardening. This meant bushels of tomatoes, peppers, onions,
eggplant, peaches, apples, and more. The food was stored in a narrow space along the front of the house we called “the little cellar.” The air inside the little cellar was cool and the dirt floor gave off a smell of wet soil. Along the walls on either side of a narrow walk space were wooden bins of various sizes. The bins were stocked with dirt-covered potatoes, garlic bulbs, and a variety of onions. Above the bins were shelves lined with green- tinted Ball jars filled the tomatoes, peaches, applesauce, jelly, peppers, eggplant, and pickles that Anna had peeled, sliced, cooked, and canned.
It was also on the cellar stove that Anna made sauce from the canned tomatoes. The family could not afford to eat meat very often, but pasta was daily fare, sometimes augmented with beans for added protein. This dish, called pasta fagioli, remained one of my father’s favorites his whole life. Bread was another staple and Anna made several loaves every day.
The work never stopped, not even when Anna’s belly swelled with one baby after another. She did what she had to do to feed the extended family living at 401, usually numbering ten or more. Often she worked alone.
Grandpa never came up behind Grandma while she was at the stove to give her a hug, as I had seen my dad do many times to my mother. He never took her to a restaurant. He never surprised her with flowers or gifts. He didn’t lavish praise on her cooking or notice the small changes she made in the house. Not that she would have expected these things. Their worlds and lives were separate as she knew they would be. She had no girlhood dreams of romance. She may have hoped for tenderness from her husband, but in her brief courtship with Antonio, this hope probably faded. He was a good man, she knew, but he seemed as hard and gruff as his stocky body, rough hands, and the harsh
stubble on his face. Whatever softness Anna once had eroded over their years together.
There is a picture of Grandma and Grandpa from their fiftieth wedding anniversary taken at the party the family held in Uncle Dom and Aunt Florence’s painted basement. They stand stiffly next to one another, not touching. Neither are smiling. The Italian version of “American Gothic.”
By the time I knew her, Grandma seemed to hate everything, especially cooking. She was the only Italian grandmother I knew who didn’t cook. Her sisters were the typical Italian grandmothers, their kitchens always steamy with pots of simmering sauce. I don’t remember ever having a large family meal in Grandma and Grandpa’s kitchen. My mother learned how to cook Italian food from Grandma’s youngest sister, Aunt Ang, and our own kitchen upstairs often swelled with relatives for holiday meals.
When it was just Grandma and Aunt Carmella living downstairs, they sometimes invited me to stay for dinner after an afternoon playing with Aunt Carmella. My mother made me politely decline two times before I was allowed to accept on the third offer. The meals were simple, with barely enough food for the two of them. The first time they served me spaghetti, I was shocked when Grandma opened a jar of Ragu, something neither my mother nor any of our Italian relatives would be caught dead doing. I imagine that when her family and the garden shrank, Grandma was only too happy to retire the cellar stove and buy sauce and peaches in jars at the grocery store. She had done enough canning and cooking for a lifetime.
Though I rarely appreciated it while she was alive, I think
there was an oft-hidden essence in Grandma, a sweetness, a tenderness, even a sassiness, that may have dissipated over the years but did not disappear. I see it in the Rag Story, in the beauty
of the turquoise earrings, in the glint in her eye when she poured Grandpa’s whiskey, and especially in the joy she found in the Seven Sisters.
I first learned about the Seven Sisters on a summer day when Tommy was pushing me on the wooden chair swing Grandpa had built in the side yard. Grandma suddenly appeared with an empty bushel basket in one hand and garden shears in the other. Grandma rarely ventured any further outside the house than the back porch glider, so I jumped off the swing to see what she was doing. Grandma dropped the basket in front of the wall of roses at the edge of the yard. Grandpa had forged a makeshift trellis out of plumbing pipe and planted the roses years before. As the vines grew, the trellis disappeared behind the meandering branches and spreading leaves. I stood quietly at Grandma’s elbow as she began clipping away at the branches. She would scan a section of vines, then remove those that were bare and withered and drop them into the basket.
“What are you doing, Grandma?” I finally dared to ask. I was
a little afraid of Grandma. She turned quickly, startled.
“Oh, Debbie,” she said sweetly, smiling. “I didn’t know you were there.” I rarely saw Grandma smile. “I’m taking care of my roses. These are the Seven Sisters,” she said proudly. “Just like me and my sisters. The Seven Sisters.” She reached out to put her arm around my shoulder and pull me closer. “Look!” she said, bending a branch with a cluster of delicate pink flowers towards us. Then pointing one by one at the tiny buds, she counted, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. “See!” she proclaimed triumphantly, “Seven!”
After that, I paid more attention to the rose wall, often counting the clusters to confirm that, indeed, they each had seven roses. I watched whenever Grandma lovingly pruned the bushes back to healthy branches. Sometimes she let me help her look for
the places that needed pruning or pick out the most beautiful clusters to cut for a bouquet. I loved how Grandma loved those roses.
I wonder now if Grandpa chose the Seven Sisters roses to please Grandma. Perhaps this was his small way to show he cared for her. Was Grandma surprised the first year they bloomed? What memories of her childhood and her younger sisters overcame her as she nursed the roses year after year?
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I picture Grandma as I knew her – her yellow-gray hair pulled back in a bun, wearing a black cotton dress, heavy cotton stockings, and black lace-up old lady shoes, gazing out the window from her maroon chair by the radiator, sipping black coffee with plenty of sugar, the only color the two dots of turquoise on her ears. But now, superimposed on that image, is one of a young woman thrust into the middle of her husband’s large family and into a role she neither desired nor felt prepared for. My heart aches for the young wife drowning in household chores and the young mother burying child after child, for the oldest rose of the seven sisters.
I remember that first night in her bed, and realize that once I listened, Grandma tried to tell me who she was.
Rambling Rose 