Mafia Chic

Chapter 3

Calling what my family does on Sundays “dinner” is like saying the pope is just another priest with a fancier hat.

Lady Di and I arrived at Sunday dinner to the usual chaos of the Marcello clan with a couple of Gallos thrown in for good measure. In the kitchen my mother was making an immense pot of gravy. Not only was the pot big enough for one of my little cousins to use as a fort when not filled with gravy, but Ma couldn’t even move it from one burner to the next without the help of my cousin Tony.

My aunt Marie, aunt Gina, aunt Connie and assorted other aunts, and wives and fiancées of my male cousins were all crowded into the kitchen as well, supervising my mother. This routine goes on until my mother has had it with the lot of them and chases them all out with a wooden spoon. For every infraction I committed as a child, the wooden spoon was threatened. Not that she ever actually spanked me with it. She just chased my brother and me throughout the house, screaming in Italian.

The women all clustered around the stove. “Add more oregano, Rose.”

“It needs a pinch of…something. Hold on…maybe some more garlic.”

“Can’t have too much garlic.”

For my mother, the red stuff she slaves over is a religion. She has been known to actually break out in a cold sweat at the sight of a jar of Ragú. That’s sacrilege of the highest order.

Lady Di and I always gather in the kitchen because it’s what we do, feminism aside. The men watch football during the season, and with most of them heavy gamblers and bookies, it’s either a joyous occasion or the cause of a lot of screaming. Either way, the language flying through the room would make Sister Mary Catherine of my old grammar school roll over in her grave.

Lady Di is considered an oddity, being as she comes from way across the Atlantic, and she had never even eaten true gravy before meeting my family, nor had she ever teased her hair, or even discovered the wonders of Aqua Net hairspray—the aerosol-can variety. I’m not even sure if the Aqua Net company still makes it, thanks to the ozone layer’s problems. However, my mother and her sisters have enough stockpiled to take them into the next decade.

“Diana, honey, can you stand a little advice?” My aunt Gina cornered us in the kitchen. Diana had no time to answer before Gina, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, was pinching her. I don’t mean like a little pinch on the cheek, either. I mean she was pinching her upper arm for all it was worth—Lady Di showed me a bruise later. “You could stand a little meat on these bones.”

“Well…I—”

“Honey…men don’t like bags of bones. You wonder why you’re not married? This is why.” She stated this with such certainty, oblivious to Di’s beauty.

“Actually, Aunt Gina—” I felt the need to defend my pinched roomie “—Diana has a lot of boyfriends, and she’s been proposed to three different times. She’s not married because she doesn’t want to be married.”

“Bullshit.” Aunt Gina pinched her again. “Look at this. You see this, Andrea?” She motioned to one of my other aunts. “You see this? Both of them. Really, Theresa Marie, you, too. You think you’re all fancy living off in that city, but when your uncle Rocky proposed to me, I was the babe of Brooklyn.”

I stared at Aunt Gina and glimpsed, beneath the pile of big hair, the perfumed face powder and the sixteen gold-and-diamond necklaces she wore stacked around her neck like a snake’s coils, the beautiful neighborhood girl she once was. I still love looking at old pictures of them, just as I loved looking at them as a little girl. I laugh when I see pictures of them all from back then, the girls in eyeliner and Pucci dresses—the first time Pucci was in—the boys in zoot suits too big for them. They all have highball glasses in one hand, cigarettes in the other. You can see the smoke swirled around their faces and can almost smell it, as well as hear the giggles and tough talk, mixing together as they lived “the life” then.

“I’m sure you were, Aunt Gina.”

“I was. Ask your mother, Theresa. Ask her.”

Lady Di humored her. “So come on, Mrs. Gallo, were you girls ‘it’ back then? The bomb?”

My mother usually waves off such talk with a flick of her spoon and a roll of her eyes. But her sisters wouldn’t let it rest. “Come on…” Aunt Marie snuck up behind my mother and pinched her on the arm. “Tell the girls about when we used to go out in the city.”

“Honey…” Aunt Gina gestured with her thumb toward the living room where we could hear screams and cheers erupting after various plays in the game. “They may not look like much now, those balding bastards, but way back when they were all catches, every last one of them.”

My mother twirled around. “Theresa…every girl was in love with your father. But his family was considered trouble. He was a bad boy, you know. But underneath it, I could tell he was a real softie. Now, all of you—” she glared at the room full of us, packed tight around the table “—get outta my kitchen!”

We scattered—not before Aunt Connie reiterated for the twentieth time that the gravy needed both garlic and oregano. In the living room, my male cousins, three of whom are named Tony, clustered around Lady Di. She chose to sit next to the “hunky” Tony, who had staked out our apartment not three days before. His massive biceps belied the fact that I knew he liked nothing better than to cook pastry. He sometimes came up to our apartment and I taught him recipes. He was a fast learner. I know he liked being up there with Diana and me. Whenever he was around her, he stood a little taller, and he never cursed. He was an amateur chef in the making, but he’d never let the family know that. Pizza was one thing—maybe—pastry was another.

A half hour, and one Giants touchdown and an interception later, it was halftime and that meant we would shovel food in as fast as possible before the game resumed.

The first course was eggplant parmigiana, as well as a heaping bowl of homemade ravioli stuffed with ricotta that Ma got special from the Italian deli. Then she brought out huge bowls of gravy, teeming with large sausages, meatballs and whole lamb chops on the bone. This was served on pasta, also homemade. Garlic bread, a large salad, bowls of olives and plates of sliced pepperoni and fresh mozzarella, which, if you’ve never had it, has the consistency of congealed I-don’t-know-what. It’s beyond gross, wet and rather tasteless, but the Italian deli carries that, too.

And we were just warming up.

Later, a huge ham came out. Followed by a seafood course, including an Italian version of octopus, legs flopping over the side of the bowl, looking like they were trying to make a run for it. Through it all, as bowl and pan, and plate and platter made their way from the kitchen to the table and everyone started fanning himself or herself as the temperature in the house rose from the oven opening so often and boiling pots on the stove, my mother never sat down. She moved from kitchen to the dining room, back and forth, back and forth. She sat down occasionally, but watched over the table like General Patton, waiting for a movement of the troops that might signal we needed something, then she’d leap up and fetch it. Bottle after bottle of good red wine was opened. Forget letting it breathe. Around our house, a bottle of wine never sits still long enough to breathe.

I loved watching the insanity of it all. Sundays were sacred when I was growing up. I think that’s why I ended up being a chef. I didn’t go to culinary school. I was raised in culinary school, standing on a stool with a makeshift apron on—a towel tied in the back. I learned, as a little girl, that the way to my father’s heart was through his stomach, and by the time the whole stereotype of the “little woman in the kitchen” was something to resent, I was hooked. The kitchen was where I felt content and happy; cooking was a way to relax, a way to create.

The men ate huge mouthfuls of food, occasionally grunting their approval. Poppy Marcello was especially happy with the sausage. Lady Di consumed five glasses of red wine and got giddy enough to ask Uncle Rocky to sing a Louis Prima song, then some Frank Sinatra. Call it the Marcello version of karaoke. We laughed and ate, but I noticed my mother wore a pair of house slippers and, not for the first time, I could see how Sundays wore her out, even when she wasn’t hosting. But if I offered to help her she would turn me down flat. This was her show, just like, I guess, at my restaurant, the kitchen was my show. I hated when Quinn came back, lifting lids to pots and looking over my shoulder. “Go back to chasing the waitresses,” I’d yell at him.

The women all rose and began clearing as soon as the game came back on. The men would take plates in front of the television for further eating while my mother readied dessert. At one point, Ma and I were alone in the kitchen.

“I wish one of these Sundays you’d bring home a man, Theresa Marie. None of us are gettin’ any younger.”

“I know, Ma.” I rolled my eyes and tried to find room in the overstuffed fridge to put leftover eggplant. It didn’t look like I’d fit a single black olive in there.

“I don’t understand what’s so hard. There are what, forty million men in Manhattan? At this point, I give up on you even finding someone from Brooklyn. Manhattan would be fine. Non-Italian would be fine. You can marry an Irishman. Hell, a nice Jewish boy. Just someone. A warm body, for God’s sake. Though Catholic would be good. Your father would like that.”

“First of all, Ma, there aren’t forty million men in Manhattan. Second, however many there are…forty percent of them are gay.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m not kidding.”

She slammed down a pan. “You should move back home.”

“I’d rather eat fifty pounds of scungilli and explode.”

“Outta my kitchen!” She slapped my arm.

Moving back into the living room, I saw five of my cousins and my father on their cell phones. Placing bets, checking on the book they’d taken. The women were martyrs. The men were criminals. Me? I was just certain that I’d never find someone who would understand the dance of it all.

My father stood up to stretch. Sometimes he liked to go outside on the front steps of our house and smoke a cigarette. I saw him go out the front door, and I followed him.

“Hey Dad.”

“Teddi Bear, come ’ere.” He stretched out an arm and wrapped it around me and kissed the top of my head. “I come out here for a little quiet. Those women are like a gaggle of friggin’ geese.”

“I know…. Ma’s giving me the ‘hurry up and get married’ speech again.” I looked up at my father. He slicked back his hair in a pompadour and favored polyester shirts in ugly colors like lime green. He wasn’t Manhattan stylish, but he was still handsome, his jaw square with a dimple in the middle, and his eyes nearly black and penetrating.

“She’s kind of a broken record with that one.”

“What about you, Dad?”

“What about me?”

“Am I this big disappointment because I haven’t found Mr. Right? Should I marry some Brooklyn boy and live around the corner from you and Ma?”

My father smiled a half-sad, sort of mysterious smile. Then he took my chin in his fingers and tilted my head up so I was looking right into his eyes. “Teddi…when I first set eyes on your mother, believe it or not, I knew she was the one.”

“Struck by the thunderbolt?”

“Not quite. The thunderbolt is like crazy love. We were just high school kids, you know. I was a player. She was the prom queen. But I knew what I wanted. I wanted a nice girl I could have babies with. A good cook. Pretty.”

“And?”

“And don’t tell your mother I said this or nothin’, but that was then. This is now. I don’t want to see you like my brother’s kid—Angela. Divorced with four fuckin’ kids to feed. You take your time. And who knows? You just might get struck by the thunderbolt.”

“I hope not.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Aunt Mariella and Uncle Mario.”

He nodded. After my uncle Mario had been paroled, he married Mariella in Las Vegas two weekends later, and they never left Sin City. They never came to Brooklyn to visit. Too many painful memories, they said. But once, my grandmother and Poppy had gone to see them in Las Vegas, before my grandmother died a few years back. When they returned, my grandmother wouldn’t speak about what they’d seen for the longest time. I found out what happened from my mother, whispering—which in my mother’s case is more like what other people call a normal speaking voice—to my father one night, when they thought I couldn’t hear.

Mariella, crushed by waiting for her true love all those years, had long since gone mad. She was no longer the beautiful woman from the picture in the photo album. Her beauty was still there, but her eyes, so fiery in the photos, were flat. She was extremely childlike—she wouldn’t go to the grocery store by herself, or even cross the street. But my uncle Mario remained true to her, doing all the shopping, even cutting her meat for her and helping her do her hair. I suppose some people might think that’s romantic in a tragic way. I just thought it was tragic. Period.

“You know, Teddi…it doesn’t matter who you marry. I just want you to be happy.”

“I’m happy in my restaurant, Dad.”

“Yeah…but when you’re old and gray, it’s not like you can curl up next to a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, Teddi.”

I didn’t see the point in telling my father that was the stupidest thing I ever heard. I just nodded as if he’d told me the sagest wisdom a father can impart to a daughter.

He lit his cigarette, and I kept him company while he smoked it. Then we both turned to go back inside.

“You know, Teddi,” Dad said as he pulled open the door. “I do just want you to be happy. An’ no pressure or anything, but the reason your mother acts this way is that you’re your mother’s only hope. That brother of yours…he’s dating a girl he met at the Playboy mansion this week.”

“I know,” I said, and rolled my eyes. Where my brother Michael was concerned, forget being struck by the thunderbolt. He was blinded by brainless blondes with boobs.

“I’m so full I could positively vomit.” Lady Di clutched her stomach as she rocked slightly on the couch back in our apartment later that night.

“It’s truly torture. It’s a week’s worth of calories. Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t skip it once in a while.” I was ensconced in our overstuffed living room chair—a descriptor that matched my own swollen belly.

“Oh, please, Teddi, your mum would have your uncle Lou here in ten minutes flat to check on us if we didn’t go. It’s simpler to go along.”

“I don’t know how you can be so blasé about it. Uncle Lou’s like an oversize baby-sitter.”

“Because they’re not my family, Teddi. It’s easier to find them slightly dotty and laugh about it.”

“Well, I’m glad my world exists to amuse you.”

“Don’t be cross, Teddi. They really are sweet in their own way.”

“Sure. You didn’t have to hide the Career Day notices from elementary school. Every kid had his or her parent in to talk to the class for five minutes about their job. There were three cops and a bunch of firemen, a stockbroker, a lawyer or two, a doctor, a teacher…one kid’s father owned a dry-cleaning business. Joey Antonelli, the plumber. There was even an out-of-work actor. Everybody had someone there but me. I mean, what was I supposed to do? We had twenty-two phone lines in the basement for my father’s bookie business. I couldn’t drag him in for Career Day. And then there’s the fact that…well, I’m still not one hundred percent sure what it is he does. Bookie? Loan shark? Well, anyway, not Career Day material.”

“I would have thought it would be very interesting.”

I threw a pillow at her.

“I’m serious,” she protested. “Think of all the little minds who could have been turned on to a life of crime. It’s perfectly charming!”

“All I’m saying, Diana, is it’s charming as long as it’s not happening to you. But these Sunday dinners not only blow my diet, they’re exhausting. I love my family members—each and every one. It’s the constant harping on my lack-of-a-boyfriend status. If I have to hear one more time that we’re both destined for old maid-hood…”

“Ignore them. Ignore them, Teddi. It isn’t worth it. You need to become more like the British. Smile and nod. Smile and nod.” With that, she sat upright, glazed over her eyes and began waving at me like a very stiff Queen Elizabeth, turning her hand just so, smiling and nodding as if greeting me from her gilded coronation carriage.

“Your father at least had a real job.”

“Oh, please. His job is to sit around with a stick up his ass.”

I laughed. “Smile and nod, Lady Di. Smile and nod.”

“Don’t make me laugh, Teddi. I’ll vomit, I swear. How is it you don’t weigh four hundred pounds growing up in a family like that?”

“You learn to pick at your food and make it look as if you ate. I don’t know…it’s like the restaurant, I just taste everything and don’t ever finish any one thing. Plus my family serves things like sheep’s head. Did you try some of that?”

“No. And the sight of your gorgeous cousin Tony gnawing on a sheep’s jaw bone—it still had teeth on it for God’s sake—may have cured me of my infatuation.”

“My father used to stack the heads one on top of the other in the extra freezer we had out in the garage. They’re quite a delicacy, you know.”

Lady Di shuddered. “They make me squeamish. Really horrid things. And that squid stuff…”

“It’s an acquired taste.”

“Still, all that delicious pasta… Even picking and choosing, I would weigh four hundred pounds. As it is I starve myself every Saturday so I can eat at your mum’s on Sunday.”

“Yeah…well, I carried a few extra pounds in high school. I’ve learned to keep it all in balance now.”

I stood up and stretched. “I am so full I’m falling asleep in the chair. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Right, love. Listen, I’m too full to move. Can you put on channel two on the tellie?”

I switched the television to her favorite Sunday night cop show and went to bed. I had heartburn—a deadly combination of my mother plus Sunday dinner. I popped a few Tums and changed into my pajamas. Staring at my reflection in the mirror in the bathroom, I practiced Di’s smile-and-nod pose and mildly amused myself, despite all the aggravation I’d suffered. Then I climbed into bed and was soon fast asleep, dreaming of disembodied sheep’s heads dancing a conga line around the dinner table.

Chapter 4

“Is this Pussy Galore enough?”

On Thursday night, with exactly one hour to go before I had to meet Robert for dinner, I stared at Lady Di. She was dressed in a black cat suit and a pair of black stiletto boots.

“You look like a dominatrix.”

“I was worried about that.” She rummaged in her closet and emerged with a hot pink scarf, which she expertly tied around her neck.

“Now do I look like Pussy Galore?”

“No. You look like a dominatrix with a pink scarf.”

“Hmm.” She turned to her closet again. “That’s not what I’m going for here.”

She pulled out blouses and tops and threw them on her bed. I try not to look in Di’s closet, or in her room for that matter. She lives knee-deep in laundry, and her dresser is just a jumble of cosmetics, most of them half-used and drying out with the tops off.

She pulled out a long black blazer and put it on. “What does this say to you?”

“I don’t know that it says anything.”

“No, it must. It must say I am ready for Mission Impossible. Charlie’s Angels. Scotland Yard. All that.”

“Okay. It says that.”

“But you don’t really think so.”

“Di.” I sighed. “Can we concentrate here? Every time we pull this stunt, it’s a fashion crisis.”

“It helps me get into character, darling.”

“Fine…let’s run through the plan.”

“Check. I call you on my cell phone…earpiece, little thingy here attached to my lapel.”

“Check.”

“At 0800 hours, I take these little pastries down to your cousin Tony—”

“What? Di…no military time. And that would be 2000 hours, anyway. You always screw it up.”

“All right then…at eight o’clock.”

“Right.”

“When you hear on your cell phone that he is sufficiently distracted, you slip out and head ’round the block to catch a cab.”

“Perfect.”

“Then you go off on your date with Mr. Tall, Blond and Handsome, fall madly in lust, make passionate love and live happily ever after.”

“I’ll settle for a second date. Without a contingent of Italians following me.”

We went to the living room where a large white box of fresh cannoli perched on the coffee table, tied up with twine from the bakery.

“I don’t understand—” Lady Di eyed the box “—why these little pastries are such an obsession with your family. It’s a little perverse, if you ask me.”

“They’re an obsession because finding them fresh and really well made with ricotta cheese and chocolate chips isn’t easy. Make them wrong, and they’re soggy. You can’t just get these anywhere. That box there is a thirty-five minute cab ride each way. Even the pastry chef at Teddi’s doesn’t do them this good. Now, Byron, he’s a good pastry chef—”

“I live for his tiramisu.”

“Yes. But he’s not really Italian. His family is from San Francisco…and he says they adopted him from an unwed mother who listed Hungarian as her background. And as good as he is at tiramisu, somehow, some way, his cannoli end up…well, not up to the Marcello-Gallo family standards.”

“But it seems to me that pastry and ricotta cheese shouldn’t have anything to do with each other. It’s downright unnatural, Teddi. Pastry and custard, maybe…pastry and chocolate, pastry and a nice caramel or perhaps some ice cream, but these I do not understand. Ricotta is slimy.”