Happy Housewife
Yesterday I was on the phone with my mom. As she walked around her bedroom in Miami I was sitting on a wooden chair in mine, with my feet propped up on the windowsill, looking at the beige-brick balcony of the house across the narrow street. Unassuming little flowers curled their way around the wrought iron, and I could hear an Italian television playing from an open window. I was five thousand miles away from Miami and yet I thought, I'm home. It was nice.
My bedroom is also the school's office, which sits between the front door and the rest of the house, so that anyone who wants to leave either has to either sneak through my sleep or climb out a window(Sly: "Good thing I'm a foreigner.") I sleep on a mattress in the corner by a bookcase filled with the books I used to sneak into Barnes & Noble to ferret through (MFK Fisher, Elizabeth David, Jeffrey Steingarten)—all now absorbed into my nightly ablutions). Opening the shutters for air lets in the sounds of cicadas shrieking all night and occasional echoing footsteps.
This palazzo has history. The old woman who owns the floors above lives in a veritable citadel of fresco and marble. Our landlord is an Italian soap opera star (really!) with a lion's-mane mullet who hasn't stepped foot in the house in fifteen years because he hates the old woman, who is his aunt and spits at him every time they meet out of old family spite. Both are descendants of the family who built this palazzo a few generations ago. Next door live Homegirl, who just turned 94, and her son, Homeboy, or Luigi. I have yet to see either of them, but I know they're there, dancing furiously to the Barenaked Ladies and Maroon 5 and Morissey music we blast while we cook (I hate Morissey, but the choices are slim; my mom is mailing some of my CDs over). Sly gives them a good cut of our surplus food, and in return gets advice about how to make it taste even more Leccese.
People must think it's funny when we bring over covered plates of homemade sausage and ciambella; I guess we're the equivalent of an off-the-boat Vietnamese family going around asking "You wanna some chili and chicken pot pie?" They love it, though: the man who tendsthe bar-gelateria at the corner with the bitchin' lemon granita was so touched when we brought over biscotti that he blubbered, "Non ho parole." (I have no words.)
Now it's the next day and I'm sitting in the dark with the
Marxist,again with my feet up on the windowsill as he supposedly checks
the corporate email account. Ah, the joys of being a bachelor's wife.
Essentially that's what I am here, having made the small step over from
Mail-Order Bride to Happy Housewife. I help with the laundry, the
dishes, clean our house, cook our meals, organize, etc. And generally I
hate doing that, I really hate it. But here I put on my apron merrily
and scrub away. Not kidding—it's great. In the span of a week he has
gone from total stranger to weird boss to best friend forever. He's
well-read and sharp, an impressive source and a patient teacher, and he
likes having me here, having offered to keep me on for September and
October and hinted at the future. We spend literally our entire day
together, starting with coffee-in-pyjamas in the morning to watching
Sex-and-the-City or Monty Python projected on the office wall at night,
and maintain pleasant level of conversation the whole time. It's gotten
to the point where we finish each other's sentences. "Are the bakeries
closed right now?" I ask.
"Oh yeah. Tighter than—" and he points at me
and so I finish:
"—the pope's asshole."
"You got it, pudding butt."
Here is my day.
In the morning as my espresso fires up I water the
garden's hundred-odd flowerpots: the pear tree, the olive tree, the
pomegranate tree, the chili peppers and the three kinds of basil
(gigante, Greek, and nostrono).
It's already hot enough to sweat, and stays that way till nightfall.
Then I scrub last night's dishes, scouring pots caked with crusted meat
and polishing red-wine rings off our glass tumblers. When we're
done we make a list of the day's work and set off to market.
I've never heard a people talk about food as constantly and as reflexively as they do here. In supermarkets, the cashier, as she rings up the purchases: "Oh, you've bought the mussels today. What for, pasta?" "No, for taeddha." "With or without rice?" "Without—we're doing it Leccese." "Good, good. See you tomorrow." We approach the grocer. "Simone, we want to make salad with lunch." "Well, you can't leave without some chicory. It's magnificent rightnow." "With the favas?" "Just blanch it and then sauté with some olive oil." "We'll take a kilo, then."
We walk home laden with sacks and start cooking, which we'll do all day. We roll out pasta, we stuff sausages, we bake cakes and cookies and crackers, we can vegetables, we bottle liqueurs—you name it, we cook it frmo scratch. Most days we schedule a "Serious Nap" into our schedule, and I nod off over John Thorne or Clifford Wright or Nancy Jenkins as the curtains by my big windows play with the warm air blowing in. For dinner we set a table outside and eat the day's labor, washing it down with primitivo salentino, which costs one euro a liter. Our table companions are brass candlesticks and glass tumblers and salt in little bowls and crusty, firm bread, and eating feels elemental. The closest analogy I can come to the way I eat here in comparison to the way I was eating is that before I ate like the R&B they play on Power 96, and now I'm eating minuets, clean and linear and harmonic.
Afterwards M and I play chess or argue over "authenticity" or he goes on about butt sex. We discuss what made the second batch of biscotti better than the first and whether the rosemary wouldn't be doing better were it stationed in the shade and which fruit will develop flavor fastest when we bottle liqueurs. He makes fun of my calling him "Dude" and I make fun back until he pretends to cry and bleats "Don't, I'm a fragile flower." And then the next day when I wake up the kitchen's full of cold and greasy pots to scour but I crank up the Stereophonics and we do it all over again.
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