"Cheese."

"Eh?"

"Cheese. I made cheese, Nonna."

"What?" Her voice is so weak, so feeble, that her words trail off at the end, every one. My mind races, what is cheese in Italian? Do they even have one word?

"Mozzarella." I let the 'z' and the 'r' and the 'l' roll richly off my tongue, using all of my meager memory of Italian pronunciation, hoping she will understand so that I do not make her feel foolish. If I pronounced it this way in the country store up here, people would laugh at me, but Nonna does not, the sounds are familiar to her brain. Still, she does not catch the word.

"Muh-?" I can hear the hazy confusion in her voice, with a little edge of frustration. I take a deep breath and try again,

"CHEESE. You know, CHEEEESSSE."

A strangled sound comes from the other end of the telephone, she still does not understand. But I cannot give up now, I have to tell her that I made cheese- mozzarella, from her homeland- I did it, be proud of me, mother of my father!

Finally, it clicks in her mind, after another long drawn out loud word.

"Oh!" She cries, happy now to communicate, "Chiz! You make this?" She laughs at me, the strange granddaughter who writes books and carves jewelry and moves too often and now makes cheese. "You find time to do this, after your work?"

"Yes, somehow, Nonna. Its fun. I made pickles too!"

"Peeguls?"

Oh dear, what have I begun? I should have left it at chiz, but now she must know about the peeguls. "Pickles. Pickles." I repeat, wishing that I had kept my mouth shut.

"Peeguls? Oh! You mean Bugles?"

"No, Nonna, pickles. You know, like with a sandwich? Pickles."

"What is this?" After 53 years in America, she still pronounces her letter 'i' like the Italians do- as a long 'e', also her 's', at the end of a word, is a 'z'. So 'is this' sounds like 'eez theez'. It is forever endearing.

"You know what pickles are, Nonna. Cucumbers, giardineira, pickles!"

Giardiniera is a well-known pickle mix, but it also translates to 'in the garden'.

"You do this in your garden?"

"No," I sigh, ignoring the chuckles of my co-workers. A conversation with my nonna is always plainly evident, as I have to yell slowly. "Pickles. Piccolo." Even as I say that word, I wince, knowing that it was the wrong word. It sounded right to my tongue, but my brain knows piccolo means little. Now the poor woman is even more confused. She continues repeating the sounds while I dash to the computer and pull Babelfish. Pickles. English to Italian, enter. There.

"Sottaceti!" I shout, thinking this will work. But I cannot remember the rule for 'ce'. Is it 'ch', or 's' or just 'ck'? I pronounce it all three ways, but she does not recognize the word. She is northern Italian, part Czech, actually, so the word is just as foreign to her as 'pickle'.

This goes on for a few more minutes before I give up and persuade her to forget it. She is silent for a moment, then asks casually how the children are. My throat tightens, because I know where the next question will go.

"Great!" I shout into the receiver, hoping to divert her next question, "They are enjoying summer! They are good girls!" I mention something about my oldest child, who was named after Nonna's mother. She takes a moment to remember the name. My heart sinks, she is getting so very old, so very, very old...

She takes a breath, her voice frail and weary suddenly. "And your father?" She says it 'fadder'. My stomach clenches.

"I don't know, Nonna. I don't speak to him."

"Oh."

There is silence on the phone. I can picture her, two hundred miles away, her thinning white hair bobbing softly as she nods her head. She nods a lot, ostensibly to make up for the language barrier.

"He is...?" She wants to know more of this renegade son of hers, the son who has broken her heart once and for all. We have almost the same conversation nearly every time we speak, which is why we don't speak more often. "Where is he?"

I tell her. Then, led some more, I tell her the few details of the divorce, how he isn't keeping up his end of the deal, as usual. He owes money, lots of money, to many people, especially my mother. Nonna wants to know what he is going to do about it, if he has sold his store yet, what he plans to do. I know none of this. All that I know is that her son, my father, is a dishonest and broken man who has chosen madness and a young Phillipino Internet bride over his family. I do not want to know about him. I want to forget about him. The memory of him, he who I loved and hated so fiercely, makes me tremble inside.

"It is hard..." she complains to me, "so hard, tesora." Tesora means treasure. All of her granddaughters are tesora and cara (my heart) and mi anima (my soul). The Italians have a neverending supply of beautiful pet names for their loved ones. They also have plenty of curses, many of which I heard as a child in my grandmother's home.

"I know, Nonna." I am in my office now, with the door closed. My co-workers may be amused by the loud repetition, but this is not stuff they need to hear. "Its just as hard for me, he's my dad. I want to have a sane dad, someone I can talk to."

"Who what?" She who was lucid for a few moments is now back to not understanding, not hearing right. I wonder if she does it on purpose, if she deliberately hides from the pain of her profligate son. But maybe this is not a wise deduction, for she asks about him every time.

She asks a few more questions, fishing for any hint that he might be changing his ways, seeing the light, humbling himself. But I truly do not have hope to offer her. Her voice gradually sounds thinner, weaker, and I curse myself for even answering anything. But the curiosity is worse than the knowledge to her. I steer the conversation to other things, wishing that I could grab my father by the shoulders and shake him until the blocks fall out of his head, until he sees how he has wounded his mother and his children and his sisters and his wife and everyone around him. I extricate myself from my conversation with Nonna and go home to cook supper. Pralines and chicken and rice pilaf and steamed vegetables and blueberry glaze from my fresh homemade jam. I cook frantically to drown my anger, burning my tongue to a blister on the hot pralines. The pain feels almost leveling and the salt of the blood starting suddenly in my mouth brings me a bit more to reality.

I look at my children, hovering hungrily near the kitchen counter. I wonder vaguely if any of them will ever break my heart- be it drugs, crime, apathy, or just plain stupidity. Did Nonna ever see it coming? The brave dark-haired woman who came to Detroit so very many years ago with two small children who had taken their Communion early, did she know her grandchildren would attempt unsuccessfully to reassure her one day?

Am I, who is so much like him, going to break my own family's heart some day? I've heard plenty about the sins of the fathers, and I fight off the arrogance and selfishness and paranoia every day. So far, I'm winning, so far I've managed to conquer the demons of my past. If I can keep this up for another forty years, maybe it will be all right.

Maybe then I'll have paid for my father's sins.

Labels: anger, children, curse, family, father, fathers, grandmother, Italian, language barrier, nonna, sin

The year was 1994. Our family lived in Tucson and ran a jewelry store in the Foothills Mall, on La Cholla Blvd. At the time, The Foothills Mall was a beautiful and classy boutique affair, although bereft of the heavy traffic that makes a mall profitable. It has since been turned into a more traditional commercial area, and I've heard the lovely copper fountain and handpainted ceiling are gone, replaced by primary colors and chain stores. Sigh.

Our store was in the old Fox Jewelers location, a beautiful center court walk-through that had gone by the wayside when the huge corporation began to buckle under its own weight. They had left the cases and safes intact, giving our always-on-a-budget family an easy opportunity to just put our inventory in the showroom and open up. My dad did, however, splurge on a beautiful sign. Individual gold and white letters a foot and a half high spelled out the family name: R-O-N-C-A-R-I. We had it installed and opened for business in 1992.

By '94 we had established ourselves somewhat, and we three girls had found a church home across the street. At the time, Casas Adobes Baptist Church occupied that corner of La Cholla and Ina. They have since moved somewhere further northwest in Tucson, having outgrown their property boundaries back in the mid-nineties. I have no idea what the church is like today, but when I went, there were three or four packed services every weekend, and the high school youth group alone counted around 200 kids per Sunday.

Of these 200 kids, I suppose we could estimate that about a quarter of them were freshmen. I am not sure why- possibly because as a homeschooler I didn't have a graduating year- I got stuck with a group of them for some study sessions.

Bored, and daydreaming of the guitarist in our youth band, I had pretty much zoned out on the conversation in our little group. We were preparing for a Spring Break mission trip to Mexicali, and the freshmen seemed to need more instruction than I did in some of the basics. Voices went on softly around my head, until I heard one mention my place of employment,

"The entire Foothills Mall must be a Mafia front." came the young voice from across me. I snapped my head up to stare at the source, and it continued, "I mean, just look at center court- you have Sbarro Pizza, Gelato Classico, and that Roncari Jewelry place..."

I may have cocked an eyebrow at him at this point, I have never been sure. The child speaking was very fair-haired, with big, innocent-looking blue eyes and perfect preppy clothes: penny loafers, belted khaki shorts, tucked in oxford shirt. Who did he think he was, assuming a random placing of ethnic names constituted mob rule?

"There's that European Bakery across from them, too," he went on "I'm not sure yet if they're in on it. But all you have to do is look at that guy who runs the jewelry store to know he's Mafia- I bet he breaks people's kneecaps and everything!"

I felt that now would be a good time to speak up,
"Yeah, that guy... that's my dad."

Preppy kid's mouth dropped open and he blushed so furiously that I could see his scalp through his tow-colored hair.

"Uh," he said.
Some of his friends began to giggle, and I sat there relishing his discomfort, while acutely amused at the thought of my dad busting someones' knees with a baseball bat. Not that he wasn't a violent person- the baseball bat just seemed too planned, too organized for dad's tastes.

Despite this odd beginning, the preppy kid and I became rather good friends. His name was Wesley, (I can't remember the last name,) and I think he was rather in love with my younger sister Emily. We kept a running joke about wooden vs aluminum baseball bats. I taught him that not only were Sbarro and Gelato corporate fronts for American companies, but that persons originating from Northern Italy are rarely involved in what is primarily a Sicilian operation. For some reason, my father never found that amusing, although I always have.

That store closed down in 1995, we moved back to Michigan, and I never saw that church or its members again. The beautiful Roncari letters sat abandoned in boxes until this winter, when we had to let them go to a better home, with memories of Tucson flooding back.

Someday I shall visit, although I am sure most of my old friends have moved on by now.

Wherever you are, Wesley, I hope that you are still a conspiracy theorist, and I hope that you still wear penny loafers without socks. Not everything is what it seems, but sometimes stupid assumptions will surprise you with happy results.

Labels: assume, assumption, Casas Adobes church, church, Foothills Mall, freshman, Italian, Italy, jewelry, kids friends, mafia, mall, preppy, Roncari, teenager, Tucson, work