Epilogue Hic Jacet
Epilogue:
Hic Jacet
IT IS THE SATURDAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS and I have a cooking date with Auntie Tina.
I park my car strategically in Stella’s driveway and visit with her first so she won’t give me the silent treatment.
She is watching Turner Classic Movies in bed; I lie down on the white duvet next to her and she holds my wrist between her silky fingers.
For forty-five minutes we watch The Bad Seed together—for some reason it’s always on when I visit.
Stella is not feeling talkative today; from the way she keeps wriggling her jaw I can tell she’s not wearing her teeth.
But periodically she turns to give me her squashed close-lipped smile and stroke my arm.
I’m not sure she knows who I am, but she loves me anyway.
I kiss her good-bye when I notice her eyes are spending more time closed than open.
As I cross the street I can still feel the spongy pads of her fingertips pressing gently on my arm.
I think of how much love she has to give and feel that familiar tiny heartbreak that even now, in their dying years, she cannot give any of it to her sister.
Auntie Tina is in the basement kitchen when I arrive.
She is already kitted out in her once-yellow apron and her hair kerchief—I assume she has been cooking since dawn, judging by the hundreds of hockey-puck-esque totò cookies lined up on the three prep tables.
She is clammy with sweat when I kiss her cheek.
Last year she went to a new doctor for her general physical and he was so alarmed by how much she sweats that he made her do a whole battery of lymphoma tests.
No ninety-seven-year-old woman should sweat like that, he said. Yeah, well. Joke was on him.
“You go see you grandma?” is the first thing Auntie Tina asks me.
“Yup.”
“You no wanna make her mad,” she warns.
“I sat with her for almost an hour.” I know she already knows this—I am sure she has been checking for my car.
“Maybe you go see her again when we finish?” she suggests. “She lonely all day.”
“All right,” I say sadly. “Come on, let’s get cooking.”
I’m here to “study” Auntie Tina’s recipes, which is tricky.
I’ve been over to “study” cooking many times before, have endured hours of chastisement and sabotage, and the unspoken truth of the matter is that although Auntie Tina doesn’t want her recipes to die with her, she doesn’t really want anybody else to be able to replicate them, either.
O! the inner turmoil of cooking with your niece!
The terrorizing balance of instruction and mysticism you must strike to keep her from getting uppity! No wonder Auntie Tina is so sweaty.
The totò are already baked and cooled, so next we have the frosting.
You have to frost the cookies all around to seal in their moisture.
Naturally I am not to be trusted with this sacred task; Tina will handle the cookie-dipping and delegates to me the less critical application of sprinkles.
I am only a few cookies in before I reveal my insurmountable inadequacies and Tina snatches away my sprinkle shaker.
She finishes the job alone, dipping the cookies with her left hand and sprinkling with her right.
I just want to say, I make my own totò at home and they come out perfectly fine. Not that I’d ever be able to hold my head up with them around here. But my non-Italian friends like them.
I exile myself to the sink, where I wash the morning’s accumulated dishes, including Auntie Tina’s Tupperware batter bowl.
It is the biggest individual piece of Tupperware I’ve ever seen, a mealy weatherbeaten sea-green color.
It has cracked along the bottom and been repaired with duct tape.
About ten years ago my mother, who has characterized the Tupperware bowl as “disgusting,” bought Auntie Tina a new one as a replacement; Tina promptly regifted it.
When the cookies are frosted and drying, we troop upstairs for a lunch break.
Auntie Tina pops nervously up out of her chair every few minutes and rummages through the fridge again to see if she’s forgotten anything she might be able to put out for me.
She offers to make me some pastina and I decline four times.
There are seven dishes already on the table—lupini, homemade suppressata, pickled mushrooms, chicken cutlets, pizzelle, someone’s leftover sausage and peppers from a couple nights ago, mustazzoli that my Aunt Queenie made.
“Not so good,” Auntie Tina confides as she unwraps the plate.
I dutifully break off a piece, chew, and pronounce that Auntie Tina’s are better.
It is after lunch, as we are rolling little meatballs for little meatball soup, that I broach the subject of my project. “It’s almost done,” I tell her. “Thanks to you, and all your help.”
“You finish you story about you grandma?” Tina puts down a grape-size meatball on the full tray of perfectly uniform grape-size meatballs. “What you say about me?”
“You want to read it?” I tease.
But Tina doesn’t laugh. She hesitates, then says, “Maybe you can write that it’s no her fault, that she no right in the head.”
“What’s not her fault?”
But she doesn’t tell me what she means. Instead, she says, “Maybe you can write that it’s no true that I was jealous for her.”
“Oh, Auntie Tina.” The jealousy, again—of all the things that shouldn’t matter anymore.
And yet neither Stella nor Tina will ever recover from their own remorse—they will suffer for the rest of their lives for the way the world came between them, each blaming the other for her weakness, each secretly blaming herself for her own.
But there is nothing for me to say that will make that better.
I see she is crying, voicelessly, like Assunta would have cried, her tears tipping off her ancient cheeks and adding their umbrae to the already mottled apron. “You can write that I love her and I only want to take care of her.”
“Auntie Tina.” I feel a prickle of my own tears, but that would not be helpful.
Tina cannot heal the rift with Stella, and now she is putting all her hopes in me, as if I can somehow save the story, find the happy ending.
“Everyone knows you love her,” I say, as I always do. “Everyone knows how hard you try.”
“I love her,” she says again, swiping her runny nose with a paper towel. “I always love her. Maybe you can write that.”
“Yes. I will write that.” I grab her hand across the table and squeeze to cement my promise. My fingers are covered in gummy raw beef; hers are as clean as if she hasn’t just rolled two hundred meatballs.
“You was using too much water, makes the meat sticky,” she chides me, shaking off my hand. Her nostrils are pink but her tears are gone.
She pushes herself up out of her seat and comes around to my side of the table, where my tray of little meatballs is only halfway full. “Too big,” she says, picking up an offender and rerolling it between her fingers. “Oh no, this one too small.”
“Here, let me—” I try. But it is no good. In her most subtle way, which is to say not very subtly, she slides the tray out of my reach so I can’t interfere and rerolls each of my meatballs, one by one.
“Oh well,” I say, getting up to wash my hands. “Guess that’s the end of that.”
Auntie Tina, who is already setting up her frying pan, pauses to give me a rueful smile. “You no worry,” she consoles me. “When they in the soup, nobody gonna know which meatballs you make.”