Chapter 7
“Che cacchio!”
It’s nine p.m. and I’m giving up. I’m standing at the kitchen counter which is littered with failed recipe attempts.
So far I’ve used up all my swears in English and have moved on to the Italian ones I learned from Nonna.
All evening I’ve been trying and failing to resurrect personal family recipes with no luck.
I spent years cooking with Nonna and now I can’t manage to make one half-decent replica of a dish from my childhood.
I simply cannot recall any of the recipes.
It’s like I’ve blocked everything out subconsciously, my mind a blank white sheet of paper.
Try as I might, I cannot pull up even a single simple pasta recipe Nonna taught me.
And now I’ve wasted an evening and a lot of ingredients for nothing. How frustrating!
“Che palle,” I mutter. I started with the mild swears and am gradually working my way up.
To make matters worse, Solomon and Sandra agreed to sublet the apartment after their tour today, which is not helping my mood any. So now I’m watching an episode of Pasta Grannies on YouTube and making myself comfort food.
“You take the flour like this and make a little hill and then a hole,” adorably wrinkled ninety-six-year-old Isolina instructs in Italian.
The narrator on the video translates her instructions into English, but I can follow Isolina’s Italian if I concentrate.
Tonight we are making homemade gnocchi with basil pesto.
Pasta Grannies is my guilty pleasure. I love watching the elderly Italian women give tutorials on how to make their favorite pasta dishes from scratch.
The grannies remind me of Italy, of Nonna, of everything I’ve missed so much in the past fifteen years.
For a few moments I can capture a fleeting echo of what I felt with Nonna in her kitchen every summer—the grounded happiness, the sense of history and place.
Just as I am poking a hole in my flour hill, my phone rings. I swipe to answer before I fully register who it is.
“Juliana!” My mother, Lisa, peers at me through the screen of the video call.
Instantly I regret my hasty pickup and look around to find an excuse to get off the phone.
But there is no one to save me. I’m alone in the apartment tonight.
Drew is out at a bar in Georgetown with his teacher buddies.
They’re throwing him a teachers-only send-off before he leaves super early in the morning for LA.
He and I already had our own little bittersweet send-off last night on the rooftop deck, sharing a bottle of soju in a light drizzle. I cried. So did he.
“Lisa.” I sigh in resignation. I haven’t called her Mom since high school. She’s been Lisa to me for years now for good reason. Tonight she is in a dimly lit, packed room with a swing band playing behind her.
“You look tired, sweetie!” she tells me. She’s holding a martini glass with a toothpick skewering three olives and is sporting a jet beaded headband around her smoothly immobile, Botoxed forehead. Also, what on earth is she wearing?
“Is that a silver sequined leotard?” I ask, poking a hole in the mound of flour and pouring in a healthy glug of olive oil and some tepid water.
I don’t really need to watch Isolina’s video to make the recipe.
I’ve seen it enough times to know it by heart.
Behind me on the stove, half a dozen potatoes are bubbling away in a pot of boiling water.
I mix the flour/oil/water by hand a little.
Talking to my mother always makes me anxious.
She’s a vortex that swirls everything and everyone into her orbit whether you are willing or not, and she has an uncanny ability to get things her way.
I wonder what she’s calling about. She never calls for no reason. Lisa always has an angle.
“Ted and I are at a benefit cocktail party. It’s circus themed. We’re fighting children with diabetes,” she says airily, taking a sip of her martini.
“You mean helping children fight diabetes?” I observe dryly.
She pulls a face, missing my point entirely. “Or maybe it’s children with scoliosis? What’s the one where they’re in a wheelchair and have trouble controlling their arms and legs?”
“Cerebral palsy?” I hazard a guess, removing the potatoes from the boiling water and dropping them in the sink.
“Whatever it is, we’re being very generous.
It’s a very serious condition. The poor children.
” She waves a hand dismissively. She and Ted attend a lot of charity events.
The details don’t seem to really matter as much as being seen attending.
“Ted is bidding on a hunting lodge trip to Sweden in the auction right now, but since I already bought a spa package for Telluride, I stepped out.”
I try to imagine my oral and maxillofacial surgeon stepfather Ted dressed in hunting attire.
Ted is an okay enough human, although he has about as much personality as a boiled potato.
I can’t picture him on a hunting trip. Ted is benign, very pliable, and very affluent.
My parents divorced when I was ten, and Ted and my mother married suspiciously soon afterward.
They are, in many ways, a perfect pair. Ted makes a lot of money and does whatever my mother tells him to do.
She spends the money and makes their lives comfortable and their social circle exclusive.
They live in New York City with my fifteen-year-old half sister Alessandra.
After Dad died, I lived with them for my junior and senior years of high school, but hightailed it back to Seattle as soon after graduation as I could.
I haven’t been back to visit in almost five years.
Lisa glances around cautiously and lowers her voice a notch.
“I just can’t enjoy anything right now. I’m so concerned about Alessandra.
” She pauses significantly. I’m supposed to ask her what she is concerned about.
I know the script. I stall peeling the warm skin from a potato, deciding if I’m going to play along.
“What’s going on with Alessandra?” I ask finally, reluctantly, reaching for another potato. I’m not close to my half sister, but I do want to know if something is wrong. Often, Lisa gets dramatic about things, though. She catastrophizes.
“My incompetent personal assistant forgot to register her for camp!” Lisa announces indignantly. I think she’s trying to look outraged, but her face is frozen in a fixed expression of mild surprise. “So now your sister has nowhere to go for the summer. And school is out next week!”
“Half sister,” I reply automatically. Camp is a huge deal with Lisa and Ted’s crowd.
Not getting a kid a spot at the favored handful of exorbitantly expensive summer camps in the Adirondacks would be disastrous for any parent who tries hard to make sure that having offspring doesn’t unduly impact their own social schedules.
Every kid in Alex’s orbit is packed off to summer camp on the East Coast as soon as school lets out.
Some of them stay at camp for the whole summer.
Alex is one of those. She has spent every summer at Camp Champlain since she was old enough to button her own camp uniform shorts.
I don’t envy her. I was sent there for one awful summer between my junior and senior years of high school.
I don’t wish anyone a summer of snobbery, tennis elbow, and bug bites.
“Can’t she just go to the Hamptons with you?” I ask, grabbing my hefty vintage metal ricer and plopping a peeled potato into it.
“Of course not.” Lisa looks scandalized. “Ted is working in the city. And I need time to focus on my art. I can’t get inspired creatively if I have to take care of your sister.”
All of a sudden I feel an unexpected stab of sympathy for my half sister. Poor Alex. I know how awful it is to be seen as an inconvenience. There is a reason my older sister Aurora was like a surrogate mother to me all growing up. Lisa sees parenting as a lot of inconvenient work.
“Plus,” Lisa adds, “Alessandra is having…issues at school. She needs to be around other teenagers her own age this summer. She needs to make some friends.” She pulls the phone close and glances around, then murmurs conspiratorially, “The school counselor says she’s ‘self-isolating.’ She says she’s been bullied this year. ”
“She’s been bullied?” That doesn’t sound good. I squeeze the handles of the ricer, and long, hot ribbons of potato fall onto the flour mixture.
Lisa waves her hand. “When I was in school, it was just teenagers being mean. It’s a hard age.
We all survived. Now everyone is so dramatic about it.
All this talk about mental health. It’s so stressful.
” She takes a gulp of her martini. Behind her, catering staff in tails glide by with appetizers, weaving among the guests who are dressed like ringmasters with top hats and circus performers in glittering leotards.
I think I see someone in a tiger costume. This is a weird fundraiser.
A server pauses and offers Lisa a tray of canapés, which she refuses.
She prefers to drink her calories. I can hear the auction faintly in the background.
It sounds like they are now auctioning off a unicorn-themed birthday party where live ponies dyed pastel colors and sporting glittering horns come to your home.
“Alessandra is miserable at school,” Lisa continues.
“I told her she should try out for cheerleading. That would put her in the same circles as the popular kids who she says are bullying her, but she said she’d rather drink lye.
” Lisa frowns. At least I think she’s trying to frown.
Her forehead doesn’t really move under the beaded headband.
“I don’t know where she gets these disturbing ideas.
Maybe all those Japanese comics she reads.
So depressing. And they all have such big creepy eyes. ” Lisa shudders.
I rice the rest of my potatoes over the well of flour and knead the ingredients together with long, slow motions until they form a soft dough. “Wow, drink lye, huh?”
What exactly is lye? Aurora would know. She probably makes it by hand. But whatever it is, why is Alex threatening to drink it? That sounds concerning. I wonder if she really is in some sort of trouble.
I have very little relationship with my half sister.
She was still a toddler when I graduated high school and headed back to Seattle.
Since then I’ve seen her only a handful of times.
She’s always struck me as a smart, sober child who generally looks like she’s enduring rather than enjoying life.
Given that she’s grown up living with Lisa and Ted, I imagine that’s not far from the truth.
I haven’t seen her since I was last in New York.
She was about nine or ten. I remember her huge gray eyes peering at me over the rim of a book.
She seemed so serious, observant, and a little standoffish.
I tried to befriend her each time I saw her, but she never warmed up.
Last time I don’t think she said two words to me the entire visit.
“So what are you going to do with Alex this summer if she’s not at camp?
” I cut the soft potato dough into chunks and form the first chunk into a thick rope.
I am still trying to figure out where this call is going, what it is that Lisa wants.
I start cutting the rope into small bite-sized pieces and then roll each piece down the tines of a fork to create the signature gnocchi ridges.
“Well…” Lisa pauses. “That’s why I called you. We think you can help Alessandra.”
I pause and brace myself. And here it is, ladies and gentlemen, the real reason for this call.