GIOVANNA’S MEATBALLS
I’m four months old, and I don’t sleep. It’s the dead of winter, Vermont winter, a season that dips farther into perpetual dark and cold than the body and psyche can prepare for. Even the toughest of north-country souls grip tight these months, many with near blackened fingertips numb with frostbite leftover from years past. Everything is hardened in the streets, the tree branches stiffen with ice, the road crackles underneath tires as they struggle to navigate tracks atop inches or feet of snow. Vehicles appear heavier from the ice-covered frame of their steel ribcages, house and trailer doors rarely open, and the only sign of life is the smoke that breaks through the air from rooftops and car exhausts. The snow could give the winter integrity if it wasn’t piled in dirty heaps like a prison wall on each side of the road. You’ll never see this reality in a quintessential Vermont scene, only virgin snow sitting like icing draping a naive landscape.
Our Pinto strains to make it up North Hill to my babysitter Joe’s house on mornings like these when the car door lock is sealed with ice, and Mom’s hands, paralyzed by sub-zero wind-chills, try to force the key, and force it, and force it again, until it breaks through. My mother breathes smoke into the air with each heavy breath as she is relieved it won’t be necessary to run the extension cord outside to plug in the hairdryer and unfreeze the locks today. She sighs after setting my bassinet on the backseat as she does each dark morning at five o’clock. And we begin the journey. There is only one bottle, and it lies next to me in the bassinet, as the others are at Joe’s where she cleans them well and fills them for me. The Pinto is blue, darker than baby blue. Our car is worn from these winters.
I kept my mother up all night, compounding her lack of sleep with constant awakenings. My wailing, crying, needing and wanting stretched her tolerance until she couldn’t take it anymore and would throw the bottle against the wall for release. She’d cry, needing and wanting so many things. She was tired already from working hard all-day lugging, racing around the factory floor, doing what they said, then rushing back up North Hill to thank Joe (Josephine) for watching me. The next day would recur, and the calluses on her fingers would become rougher and thicker from work and wind. Her baby girl was difficult with a restless spirit, often seeming as though her baby arms and legs wished to wiggle out of their own skin. They still do.
At this hour the black veil of darkness is still pulled tight over the town of Ludlow. There are no streetlights on North Hill, light pollution doesn’t exist in Vermont, and the sun won’t rise for some time. As the Pinto climbs the hill my bassinet slides up against the back of the seat. It is a cumbersome hand-me-down relic of white wicker, too big for the seat. I fall in and out of sleep with eyelids like a baby doll when she is lifted up and put down. My mother brings her hand to her mouth and yawns. She shivers under her thin polyester jacket, keeping her elbows close to her sides as she holds the wheel with both hands for security. She doesn’t move much, her body held stiff from the uncomfortable cold. A hat might help salvage warmth for her body, but she has no time for hats and never thinks to cover herself much. I am wrapped three layers deep in blankets.
North Hill is steep as a mountain road. It is located within walking distance to Okemo. Some cars make it, some cars don’t. We climb at a slow pace as the transmission whines from strain and cold. Tree branches hang over us in the black air, some breaking off from the weight of heavy ice. She holds her hands over the heating vents as though to will the heat to work. Though she warmed up the car before we left Gram and Gramp’s house, it is only a few degrees warmer then outside, though without the wind-chill, she will be grateful. The first quarter-mile uphill is the hardest. If the car makes it to the plateau after all of the sliding from one side of the road to the other, the tire spinning, and overworking of the transmission, the next half-mile is easy.
Mom’s exhaustion can’t be fought today. Today the sleep deprivation, workload, and pressures shut her down. With the green tree dangling from the rearview mirror symbolizing the normalcy and everydayness of our daily routine, today is different. Her eyes may have closed after mine or I may have been wide awake staring at the ceiling, my nose pink from cold. My mother needed sleep, a rest, to recharge herself and the need attacked her just as we triumphantly reached the top of North Hill. The straightaway leading to Joe’s house should’ve been the easy part of my drop off, but not today.
Head-on she hits a sturdy Vermont pine, hard with icicles and snow. My bassinet is jostled violently to the floor. She is unconscious with blood pouring out of her face. My mother slept, finally, driving North Hill.
“Jessie! Jessie! Where’s Jessie?!”
Mom is hysterical in the hospital this morning, her bottom front teeth gone now. She doesn’t know where her baby is or if her baby is alive. The tree we hit totaled the Pinto and left scars on her face. Her sweater is in the garbage can in the corner of the emergency room, wet with blood. The concussion will last a day, maybe two, stitches are needed, false teeth will be ordered. They tell her I’m okay. She doesn’t believe them. They are lying because I can’t be ok in an unlatched bassinet in the backseat of our car that just crashed. But I am. She cries and cries, then calls Joe from the hospital, and cries less.
In three years, we will have a different car, an Oldsmobile the color of sand. It won’t like North Hill and will become stubborn in the winter. At five o’clock my mother will carry my sleeping body on her hip to the car, lay me in the back seat and start the engine. On a routine day, the snow on the roads will be icy, making the Hill a slippery mess. The Oldsmobile will begin the climb with a nasty grunt, barely covering any ground. It will slide backwards down the Hill until we end up where we began. Determined not to lose her perfect attendance at work, Mom will turn off the ignition, leaving the Oldsmobile temporarily abandoned, throw me on her hip and begin the climb on foot. I’m heavy and she bears my weight with her right hand under my butt and her left hand gripping my thigh. I laid my head on her shoulder to brace myself from wind gusts. My older cousin’s mittens cover my hands which I hang around her neck, holding on tight. Her fingers no longer feel cold as they are “dead”, she says. The tips of her fingers turn a shade between purple and black in the winter. Despite wisps of black hair frozen to her cheek and wind cutting through her thin nylon jacket, she will do what she has to do. Who does she think she is to think it should be any easier than this?
I remember staring up at her, the heavy black mane of hair hanging to meet her waist, black eyes refusing to be understood. My mother appeared as a great tribal warrior to me, instilled with strength and independence. In a picture taken in the late seventies she holds my chubby body on her hip and a wide leather belt spans her waist seeming to hold her together. My mother is alive and confident within the confines of her bell-bottom jeans. She wore a tight polyester top in some seventies color, expanded by the youthful roundness of her breasts. I emerge in the picture as an extension of her, not separate. My hair is lighter than hers, however, in a way that signifies my difference, a foreshadowing of my longing to possess a distinctive spirit. The toddler I am in the worn frame exhibits signs of a restless soul, brooding blue eyes looking beyond what was there for something I wasn’t quite sure of. My mother didn’t see it; she couldn’t, for she was consumed with the job at hand, keeping me clothed and fed as well as managing my unruly hair.
The house smelled of garlic, fried bacon and peppers. Of Macintosh apples and pears steeped in cinnamon and sugar. It smelled like tomatoes and maple syrup. It smelled of food. Gramp worked many jobs including the one at the GE factory. On Saturdays, he would fix a stalled lawn mower or a bicycle suffering from a bent rim brought in by a desperate neighbor. He usually refused pay, taking pride in not taking money. In his oily garage, Gramp’s chubby fingers would contort warmed metal into shapes almost resembling hearts for my mom and aunts to hang off necklace chains. Gramp’s garage work produced thick rings that spoke for him, it seemed; his affections evident in his work, rather than in his words. In addition to his work, Gramp cooked.
He cooked with enthusiasm, banging, slamming, “Jesus Christ!”-enthusiasm. His working hands moved with purpose as he stirred, tasted, threw in some of this or that into a pot and served up supper that night. As a child of “healthy” weight, I ate all of it. I’d acquired a true Italian passion for eating, the more complex the food the more I enjoyed it, sometimes taking hours to complete my meal, not because I didn’t like the taste, but because I took my time savoring it. My appreciation for food later prompted friends to make bets as to how long it would take me to finish, say, a cannoli.
But it was the meatballs that stumped me. Up until the introduction of the meatballs I recall eating every food, familiar or not, that Gramp loaded onto my sturdy plastic plate with its three divisible sections – vegetables, venison, red and white sauces and peppers…lots of peppers red, green, and sometimes orange. At first, the gargantuan spheres of meat seemed harmless. It was only when my baby teeth sank into the mush that the meatballs revealed their true identity. There were raisins in there. Why the heck would you put raisins in meatballs? Gramp did. I hate raisins! I ate around them, dissecting and mutilating my meatballs until the intruding raisins ended pushed up around the sloping perimeter of my plate. Even at four, I knew it wasn’t right. Turns out, it’s just a Sicilian thing.
“C’mon…eat…eat,” Gramp would say with his thick fingers gesturing my fork toward the food. He would cover my plate with homemade pasta, breads, garlicky sauces or one-pan concoctions that could be created by the time each son, daughter and grandkid arrived to eat. Squished elbow to elbow along the eight-foot long benches on each side of the table Gramp constructed from maple, birch or pine trees out-back to accommodate us all, we grabbed, argued, laughed and nourished ourselves with food that began and ended on his land. Gramp’s hands never stopped moving, and it seemed as though everything we ate and touched was made from them.
Amid our daily raucous ‘cousin runs’ through the kitchen, once safely past the China cabinet, I’d stop and stretch my neck up in bewilderment at the worn white fifties counter situated a few inches higher than my head. Perched on top were wooden hangers with strings of dough draped over them to dry throughout the day. “What’s that?” I’d ask curiously, and run along once informed, “It’s supper”. Supper was an adventure to be met which reckless abandon, and I did, except when it came to his mother’s meatballs that Gramp insisted on keeping in the family, only then did I exercise caution with food.
Windmills made from recycled spray-painted soda cans adorning the front yard, colanders crafted into home-made lampshades and pasta, rolled noodle by noodle, are examples of my Gramp’s determination to work with what was available to his hands. An Italian man settled in rural Vermont, Gramp held onto his ethnicity and Giovanna the way he couldn’t while away at war. Using the ingredients his Italian mother had nurtured him with from the Mediterranean to New England and her misunderstood passion, my grandfather held on the best he could. Not until I had a family of my own to feed would I come to understand what the food meant and where the desire to create it originated.
The meatballs were Giovanna’s meatballs.
Bio:
Jessica Guica is an adjunct professor of English Composition. She completed her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Fairleigh Dickinson University and a BA in English/Theatre at NJCU. Her feature interviews have appeared in the Aquarian Weekly, and her short fiction has appeared in anthologies such as Darkness Falls at the Jersey Shore. She is currently working on her memoir-in-progress, Slingin’. Her podcast Memoirs from Asbury Park can be found on Spotify, Amazon Music, and Sound Cloud.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 