this is my body

My Nonno bought gasses and sprays to protect the few, sad pieces of misshapen fruit that survived the weather. The pears and plums clung, deformed, to the branches in the heavy heat of the summer.  My father wondered why he bothered with them at all, why Bruno tried so hard to keep the fruit from giving up, from throwing itself to the ground in surrender. Fruit was not for growing here, not in this god-forsaken place. “Bruno, this is America, you go to the supermarket and buy a bag of apples,” my father chided him.

They were both immigrants, each from a different place, related not by blood, but only by my mother. They sat in the sun with the metal cellar doors flung open, drinking the bad wine my Nonno made every year, arguing and laughing. I thought they hated each other when I was a boy. Why else would they shout and curse and carry on the way they did? My Nonno’s English was hard to understand, but my father understood it better than anyone.

There was one plum left on the tree, one last hope. The rest had fallen. My father pumped the BB gun quietly, building pressure. He took his time, aimed and fired, the gas releasing in a pop, from across the yard. The pellet pierced the small plum, all knots and thick skin, and the fruit fell to the ground. My Nonno looked at my father. Ma che fai? his always-wet eyes asked in bewilderment. They drank some more wine at the picnic table with the peeling paint, before my father walked up the road, back to our house, for dinner.

[Painting: Plum Blossom Awakening by Lauren Thompson]

I opened the dryer door and it smelled of something burned, like the charred edges of parchment paper left too long in a hot oven. When I reached in to pull the pile of clothes out, I burned a blister into the tip of my middle finger. The pain made the skin tighten under the hairs at the base of my skull.

The Laundromat was empty. Things were wrong and broken all day and I did the washing just to be out of the house and moving around in the cold air. I shouted a volley of obscenities for the orange plastic chairs, all bolted together along the wall, and the change-making machines by the window. I kicked the dryer, one in a long line of see-through circle-eyes, and it gave a low rattle and shake in the humming room.

I cursed as I pulled jeans out and burned myself on rivets and zippers, invisible fires buried in the soft fabric of faded underpants and old tee-shirts with holes in the armpits. Prickly sweat rose and pooled on my chest. My anger grew. Finally I got the load out and threw the heavy bag into the car, the smell not of fresh, clean laundry, but something from the kitchen, prepared improperly, and spreading.

[Photo Knox Laundromat by Kay Westhues, 1995]

“The fare in McSorley’s is plain, cheap, and well cooked. Mike’s specialties are goulash, frankfurters, and sauerkraut, and hamburgers blanketed with fried onions. He scribbles his menus in chalk on a slate which hangs in the bar-room and constantly misspells four dishes out of five. There is no waiter. During the lunch hour, if Mike is too busy to wait on the customers, they grab plates and help themselves out of the pots on the range.”

Joseph Mitchell describes the menu at McSorely’s in his essay The Old House at Home (1940). The place is still dark, bars on the windows make you wonder if it’s open or closed. It smells like an old book, and beer. Continually operated since 1854, there is sawdust on the floors, no stools at the bar.

I killed time there on a recent trip to New York City. I ordered a beer and the barman handed me two. I asked him if this was normal and he said it was. They were small beers. I didn’t eat any of the food, but a fat man standing at the bar next to me wolfed a burger with onions in record time, and left without paying.

Four beers later I was rushing through the streets to meet up with Nina and I spotted the vertical neon sign hanging off Katz’s Deli. It was late in the afternoon and we had a long drive ahead, out of the city. I ran in, got on line and ordered pastrami and corned beef on rye. The man doing the slicing piled meat on a plate in front of me - lean corned beef and fatty, peppery pastrami - and he assembled the huge thing. I made noises and licked my fingers and ran to the car with my bag. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and I was late.

Nina, who had her portrait painted while I drank in McSorely’s, threw her power bar in the back seat. I fed her mini piles of meat and bread and mustard from the passenger seat as she drove out of the city, along the river on the FDR, in traffic, trying to find the right bridge, I-95 North, something not totally confusing and swirling. It was the best sandwich I ever shared, and it was a mess.

There is always at least one burn scar on my hands. Right now I have one across the large knuckle of the ring finger of my right hand. It was nothing. I pulled a pan of beans from the burner and caught the knuckle on the bottom of the pan as I turned off the flame. There was a sharp blast, a noise clang in my brain, and I pulled away. Fuck. An oily, wet stripe that would become a dark scar.

It matches the one two fingers over on my pointer, between the two large knuckles, whose origins I can’t remember. It’s no comparison to the one on my calf, from when I walked into a red-hot charcoal chimney while grilling. I smelled burnt hair and flesh then, last summer. It was so bad there was no pain, just melted skin. It healed, darker than the skin around it in a perfect triangle of stretches and wrinkles. Thinner skin now.

Kitchen burns are melancholy. A burn in your mouth caused by hunger and eagerness, or a burn suffered by someone preparing a meal to share. They whisper of sacrifices and of love’s pains. My mother tells of her mother, and how she always, forever, had a dark scar in the middle of her forearm from pulling things out and pushing things into the oven. It never went away, she said. It was always there. My mother has the same burn sometimes, and so do I.

The sauce wasn’t sauce. It was chunks of tomatoes, onions, and water. I was in New York City and there was a birthday party, a dinner for 18 guests, three hours away. It required a simple tomato sauce and I volunteered the night before, in a bar, with a belly full of beer. I may have boasted. I may have even told stories of my family history and my food blog.  

I stood staring into the metal pot. I was nervous. I remembered the late summer days when my mother came home with huge bushels of ripe plum tomatoes from a nearby farm. She steamed them, peeled off the skins, made the simplest of sauces, with only onion, tomato paste and those delicious soft tomatoes, which sat to cool on every possible surface of the house. They were everywhere.  

The thought of having to give up, to run down to the bodega and buy a jar of ready-made tomato sauce was too much to handle. I snapped at perfectly reasonable concerns and suggestions from well-meaning friends in the house. I felt helpless.

Since it was a special occasion, I bought the fancy San Marzano tomatoes from the cavernous Whole Foods in Manhattan. When I opened the can, the tomatoes were hard, so god damned hard, like little balls of wood. I squeezed them through my fingers, but they wouldn’t break apart. The liquid in the can was thin, like water - The solid and the liquid had a long way to go to come together.

I heated the onions in oil until translucent, then added the squeezed tomatoes and their liquid, then some water. I brought it all to a boil, lowered the heat and waited. Hours passed, nothing happened. There was no coming together. I spooned the solid onions and tomato pieces out of the liquid and they were green from the fluorescent light above the stove.

The fucking tomato paste, I forgot to add the fucking tomato paste while the onions were cooking. Jesus Christ! I squeezed it in the pot from a metal tube in the fridge. I was improvising, and I was panicking. There was no more time.

I found a blender and did something I’ve never done. I scooped the tomatoes and onions, not all, but most, from the pot and blended them into a thick liquid. I added it back to the pot and the consistency was right. The color was right. It became a sauce. A little sugar at the end and it was ready, and it was delicious.

Every time I go to visit my parents in New Haven, my mother sends me back with a few frozen bags of that fresh late summer sauce she makes. I realize now that I haven’t made a simple tomato sauce in many, many years. When I pull sauce from the freezer, it’s hers. I was out of practice.

“I can’t get the damn thing off,” Pete huffed after half an hour of panting and groaning behind the bathroom door. “This is why I’m a cook,” he added in defeat, a large pipe wrench dangling by his knee.

Pete is not a very good handyman. When something breaks, which is often in this very old, very crooked house, I write a note to his mother and Pete comes by, usually on Sunday, his only day off from the job he has somewhere far away as a cook. He is a large man. He moves slowly and in a shuffling way. He smokes Marlboro Reds.

The drain was clogged in the bathroom sink. He left and came back with Manny, his brother-in-law. Manny is calm. He hums while he works and cuts the sleeves off his t-shirts. He’s short, but wider than any man I’ve ever seen. When they were in the bathroom together it sounded like two monsters fighting.

They finally figured it out. Pete looked at me and laughed his wheezy laugh. “Next time it clogs, don’t call me,” he said with a smile, walking out the door. I like Pete. I like his jokes, the way he points out the obvious and just looks at me. I like the way he yells my last name – hey Fontela – down the hallway.

Pete’s dad, Lou, took care of the house before he died. The last job he did was snake the shower drain from a catch in the basement on the hottest day of two summers ago. Lou always had hair dye on his shirt collar and he reminded me of my grandfather, who died that same summer.

Pete had to come back again a few days later. He and Manny had torn holy shit out of the old cabinet under the sink. A simple job, replace the cabinet, but Pete kept forgetting something or assuming something wrong.

The pipe doesn’t fit. “It’s too long,” he’d say, and run down the street to hacksaw it. He’d come back and it would be too short. It went on all day like that and he despaired with a smile. “If Daddy was here he’d know what to do,” Pete said, trying to get his giant hands around some small piece. “He kept all the parts and knew what they were, where they were, and how to fix them. If I was smart I would have paid attention.”

I knew Pete was in the house a few Sundays ago because I could smell his cigarette smoke. I found him in the basement hacking away at the ancient furnace, covered in shadows. A cloud of asbestos filled the room. “How you doing, Pete?” I asked. “Terrible,” he said.