Three
RITUALS. THEY COME and they go, but the ritual of having to see my grandmother every afternoon drives me absolutely insane. So I dawdle, because I know it gets on her nerves and my main objective in life at the moment is to get on my grandmother’s nerves. I swear to God that if there is something I am going to escape in this life of rules and regulations it will be my dreaded rituals.
It’s almost the end of February and instead of getting cooler the weather gets more humid as the days go by. Because of the heat, the only thing I was looking forward to at Nonna’s place was the swimming pool. I crossed the road as soon as I reached her street to try to avoid old Mr. Catanzaro who lives on the corner. As much as I love him, he has this habit of grabbing me by the skin under my chin and pinching me affectionately. It’s very hard to smile when tears of pain are welling up in my eyes.
He tends to live in his garden. I’ve never seen him anywhere else.
Whenever we go to Nonna’s place, whether it’s seven in the morning or seven in the evening, Mr. Catanzaro is in his garden. His lawn is usually covered with bread because he loves to feed the birds.
That day, though, I managed to escape with a wave and raced into Nonna’s house. I was force-fed when I arrived. Force-fed like every afternoon of my life.
“Eat, Jozzie, eat. Oh, Jozzie, Jozzie. Look at your hair. Why, Jozzie?
Why can you not look tidy?”
My grandmother says that to me every afternoon. She says it with a painful cry in her voice as if she is dying. I’m not sure if anyone has ever died of the fact that their granddaughter looks untidy, but I’m sure my grandmother will one day because she’ll strain her voice so much she’ll choke.
“It’s the fashion.”
I say that to her every afternoon because I know it gets on her nerves.
On Wednesday, she was wearing a woolen jumper. It was eighty-six degrees outside and the woman was wearing wool on her skin.
Nonna tends to believe that the more you suffer on earth, the better the reward is in heaven. Wearing wool in summer must be one of the suffering requisites. It gets on my nerves that she won’t let me sit in the good living room where the air conditioner is. That room is reserved for visitors she hates but wants to impress with her good Italian furniture. The granddaughter she supposedly loves gets to sit in the boiling hot TV room on a torn sofa.
I walked into the kitchen to see if she had any junk food, trying to block out her rambling about how she wants us to live with her.
Nonna has tried, unsuccessfully, to convince us to move in with her. She can’t understand why my mother says no every single time. She tends to forget that all she does to Mama when they’re together is nag her about the way she’s bringing me up or how she’s disrespectful by not visiting our relatives. She tends to forget that most of her relatives gave my mother a bad time when she had me.
My mother had been estranged from her family for years after my birth.
It was only after my grandfather died that we were welcomed back into the fold.
I remember on one occasion playing hide-and-seek with my cousin Robert, who’s the same age as me. We were both huddled behind the laundry door when my grandmother’s cousin and her daughter walked into the room. They spat out my mother’s name in disgust repeatedly and all I remember hearing was “They don’t even know who he is” in Italian, over and over again.
I didn’t understand what it all meant at the time. Until a bully called Greg Sims, who lived next door to us when I was ten, called me a bastard. When I asked him what it meant, he told me that it was when you didn’t know
who your father was. I remembered what I had heard in the laundry that day and how they had mentioned the word “bastarda.”
Illegitimacy isn’t a big deal anymore. But it was back then and I remember the lies my grandmother would tell me. That I did have a father who had died. My mother never lied to me that way. Maybe that’s what I dislike about Nonna. That she couldn’t accept things the way they were.
That she probably would have been spitting out some girl’s name and saying “They don’t even know who he is” if it wasn’t her daughter.
Sometimes I feel really sorry for her. I think that my birth must have cut her like a knife and I feel as if she’s never forgiven Mama. But she loves us, even if it is in a suffocating way, and that makes me feel very guilty.
“What were you talking about with Giovanni Gilberti’s boy at the baptism the other night?” she asked, trying to pin back my hair with a comb.
“We were discussing his perm, Nonna. He was contemplating blond streaks and I was advising him against it.”
“Did I tell you that he was a mechanic and owned his own house?”
“About one million times,” I said, escaping her clutches.
“He asks me about you all the time, Jozzie. ‘How is Jozzie, Signora?’ he asks. ‘Is she good?’ ”
“ ‘No, she’s bad,’ you answer,” I said, eating some Nutella out of the jar.
“He is a very well-manner boy.”
“Mannered,” I corrected, knowing that it irritated her, although I’m pretty proud of the way she speaks English.
“He is like your cousin Roberto. He loves his nonna, Roberto does.”
“Meaning I don’t love you, right?”
“I did not say that, Jozzie,” she said angrily. “You always try to put the words into my mouth.”
“You mean it,” I sighed, throwing myself on the couch in front of her.
“You misintrepid everyting, Jozzie.”
“It’s ‘misinterpret everything,’” I corrected, rolling my eyes.
“You are without respect, Jozzie. Just like your mother. Always wit no respect.”
“Mama is good to you, Nonna,” I shouted angrily. “If she is ever rude to you, it’s because you pester her about every single thing possible.”
“Don’t you talk to me like that, Jozzie.”
“Why? You sit there and pick a fight deliberately and then you wonder why I argue back?”
“I did not pick a fight, Jozzie. I just said that you and Christina are rude and should treat me better. I am an old woman now and I deserve respect.”
“Yes, Nonna,” I muttered, bored.
“Now see if you can find my pills. I have a migraine now,” she said, touching her forehead dramatically.
She drives me crazy. Sometimes I have to grit my teeth to control myself.
She wants to know why other Italian girls have Italian boyfriends and I don’t. If I want to go out with Australians, she objects. “What do they know about culture?” she asks. “Do they understand the way we live?”
The way we live?
You would think we had a totally different lifestyle, like the Amish or something.
Then she tells me about Eleanora Castano, who married Bob Jones and now they’re divorced.
Why? Because he’s Australian and she’s Italian, of course. Not because she’s a flibbertigibbet and he’s an idiot.
“No manners, Jozzie,” I heard her say. “That is Christina’s fault because if she was a good mother, you would be a good daughter and granddaughter and respect me. But there is no respect left wit the youth of today.”
I gave her a glass of water and pills and picked up my bag.
“It’s not the youth of today, Nonna,” I said angrily. “It’s you and people like you. Always worrying about what other people think. Always talking about other people. Well, we get spoken about as well, Nonna, and that’s your fault because you have no respect for other people’s privacy, including your daughter’s and granddaughter’s.”
“It is Christina’s fault that you are speaking to me like this. A daughter’s behavior always reflects on how good a mother is.”
“Well, I guess that means you did a pretty hopeless job as a mother because look at the life your daughter ended up with.”
We looked at each other coldly for a long time. I knew I had gone too far.
Maybe, by the look on her face, she knew that I had hit the truth.
It scared me looking at her so close. I don’t do that too often and I realized that she was getting old. Because of her vanity and the fact that she constantly dyes her hair black she can get away with looking like a woman ten years younger. But today she looked like a woman in her sixties. She looked tired and I realized that I loved her as much as I disliked her.
“Go home, Jozzie,” she said icily. “I do not want you here.”
The doorbell rang and we both ignored it for a few seconds. I tried hard not to think of the trouble I would be in with my mother. Nonna went to answer it and I stayed in the TV room, wondering whether I should go
home. I heard her call my name, so picking up my bag I walked into the corridor where she was standing with a man.
“This is my granddaughter Jozzie, Michael.”
Michael! My heart began to pound at one hundred miles per hour and I could feel the hairs at the back of my head standing on end.
“I will just go and get that address, Michael,” she said, walking up the stairs. “Jozzie, show Michael to the living room and turn on the air- conditioning. It is boiling hot.”
I looked at him and at that moment every image I had of my father flew out the window.
I had thought he’d be tall.
He wasn’t.
I thought he’d be good-looking.
He wasn’t.
I thought he’d look like a weakling.
He didn’t.
He had a sense of strength about him. A kind of tilt to his head when he looked at me. He looked like an intellectual and so sure of himself.
Somehow I figured that women would really go for him. He was very solid, and when I looked into his eyes I saw an obvious resemblance.
“You’re Christina’s daughter?”
He had a deep articulate voice, which was cool and very impersonal.
“Yes.” I watched him tilt his head even more and I slowly began to enjoy his oncoming discomfort.
“I didn’t expect you to be so old.”
I picked up my schoolbag and walked past him, opening the door.
“My mother had me young,” I said, turning around to face him.
His face kind of fell. It went pale. I had never seen anything like it before. He looked at me in absolute shock, and if I had it in me I would have said more to make him feel even worse.
“Goodbye, Mr. Andretti.”
I walked down the steps of the house and along the pathway and only when I reached the road did I turn around. He was still watching.
Before I could even walk through the door, my grandmother had rung my mother recounting every single word of our conversation. I was ordered to apologize. Wouldn’t you love to receive an apology from someone because they were ordered to?
I was so stressed out about the whole affair. I couldn’t believe that I had stood so close to this man who I have spent all of my life slotting into the furthest part of my mind. I wanted to go to Mama and tell her how I felt. I wanted to ring up Sera or Lee or Anna. Anyone. Just to tell them how I felt.
Except I knew that if I walked into Mama’s room or rang up one of my friends I would open my mouth and nothing would come out. Nothing right, anyway.
I had a one-hour “hating Nonna” session. I hated her because she never had anything nice to say about Mama. I hated her because she’d never let my mother forget the past. I hated her because I had to go to her place in the afternoons. I hated her because she tried to act like my mother. I hated her because she was being friendly to Michael Andretti. I hated her because she rang up Mama to keep her up-to-date on everything I said and did wrong so she could say, “You’re a bad mother, Christina.”
I vowed like I do every time we have a fight that when I turn eighteen I’ll leave and never have anything to do with my family again. Not with my
grandmother or meddling great-aunts or cousins or gossiping family friends.
I want to run from all of them.
They stifle me with ridiculous rules and regulations they have brought with them from Europe, but they haven’t changed with the times like the Europeans have. There’s always something that shouldn’t be said or done.
There are always jobs I have to learn because all good Italian girls know how to do them and one day I’ll need them to look after my chauvinistic husband. There’s always someone I have to respect.
I hate the word “respect.” It makes me sick to my stomach. I’ll run one day. Run for my life. To be free and think for myself. Not as an Australian and not as an Italian and not as an in-between. I’ll run to be emancipated.
If my society will let me.
