Hacked up, boiled, drowned in olive oil, lemon, and an abusive amount of garlic. The flesh as multi-colored as a Mediterranean sunset, tentacles curling delicately, suckers erect. Every Italian youngster eats her first bite on a dare, and is forever lost to the joys of the thing. Converted to savagery.
Octopus is a notoriously beautiful creature. It is notoriously difficult to clean and cook.
I know I will never make a decent polpo myself. I tried it once. There are a few things more disgusting than a freshly dead cephalopod, but I've never had any of them in my kitchen. In water, the octopus is a muscular miracle of grace. In my sink, it is a viscous, membranous mess. In my pot it puffs up, goes purple, boils down and turns into a tire.
My Sicilian ancestors would tenderize an octopus by hurling it against a stone until it was exhausted.
No amount of lemon and garlic can make this edible. No amount of verbal gymnastics here can convey to you the taste and texture of my grandmother's octopus. The sort of jockeying at table that I and my brother employ, inflicting fork wounds on one another's knuckles as we dive for our fair share.
I am seven, eight, nine, ten, mute as a mollusk and shocked every year when Dad suggests I speak a prayer before dinner.
We only get octopus at Christmas. I am only ever called upon to pray on Christmas Eve.
We are not a pious family, aside from Grandma, who is easily the meanest of us, so I am always unprepared.
My father asks for a prayer, and inevitably, although I know the request is coming, I have no prayer for him.
I go to Catholic Sunday School just long enough to develop the requisite fascination with torture and to draw idle pictures of Pontius Pilate in a bi-plane, and then my mother yanks me out with as little explanation as I had going into the thing. I respect her decision, primarily because I can now go back to watching Mighty Mouse cartoons of a Sunday morning, but as a result, I have no easy canned prayers available, in the event of food, or death, or any of the less compelling chapters in between.
For now, I consider an extemporaneous communication with the greatest Italian of them all. (At this point I imagine Christ lives in the Vatican.)
God?
Signore…?
I wish I were an octopus, right now.
Not the one on the table.
One of those poisonous little blue ones from Australia; they're itty-bitty and they're lethal. They sting you and you're paralyzed, right, and you're absolutely aware of everything going on around you and inside you, but you're unable to move as you
slowly slowly slowly
slowly slowly slowly
die.
Like the blue in my mom's middle distance gaze.
But I reject this prayer. It would require explanation, which would be time consuming and inappropriate.
I go instead with something I heard on Romper Room - godisgreatgodisgoodletusthankhimforourfoodamen.
Mom is thin and my dad is good lookin' "So hush little baby, don't you cry."
God my mom is skinny! Dad procured her fresh from an Idaho diary farm, a non-Italian ectomorph in the extreme; freckled, fair, nervous as a guppy.
I know he got her in his car and proposed to her while he was driving 90 miles an hour down a late night highway. Mom told him; no she would not marry him, and he threatened to drive faster until she said yes.
Under the threat of vehicular manslaughter, marriage took on a new glow.
He presented her to his mother, who sighed and said "Sam, you used to date such pretty girls!" She then went about teaching my mom how to make a sauce.
I know I will never taste a spaghetti sauce like my grandmother's again. She put hardboiled eggs and neck bones in her sauce, which gave it a carnal meaty heft. She tried to teach her daughter in law, the shit kicker, how to accomplish it.
But no two cooks, even if they're both Sicilian, can make the same sauce.
Even if they were to use the same ingredients in the same measurements (which they never do, it is always a "pinch" of sugar to cut the acidity of the tomatoes, a "splash" of olive oil to bind it, and, hilariously, "some" garlic) even so, the two pots will always be different, will always reflect the personality of the creator.
Mom's sauce turned out thin, but intriguing and autumnal, with a kick not of shit, but of nutmeg.
I make a sauce too. It is not my mother's sauce. It is not my grandmother's sauce. Neither lady ever taught me how to make a sauce. I got mine from a book.
Dad gets his ideas about how to be Italian from books, as well.
Dad wishes to be a Wiseguy.
Dad has a close relationship with Mario Puzo, but Mario doesn't know it.
Dad doesn't wear his wedding ring. He has a diamond pinkie ring, and a gold nugget ring with diamond chips, and a gold wristwatch. His gold Italian horn necklace is decorated with an engraving of a woman's face, like a mermaid on the prow of a ship; all of it is Italian gold, which we are given to understand is better quality than any other sort of gold. We keep a jar of hot giardanara in the fridge for him, and every Sunday and Wednesday he anoints his pasta with it as though baptizing an infidel, and the heat from the peppers makes him sweat over his supper. He wears VO5 in his black hair and he keeps two guns in a shoe box on the high shelf of his walk in closet, next to a pile of Penthouse magazines. His restaurant is called Villa D'Oro and his mistress is a red head, and both of them are in Des Plaines.
He wants glamour, you know, and money. Drama at no cost.
(Of course, I don't know anything about that.)
He settles for Villa D'Oro, which means Village of Gold, but it's not Italian gold, you know, it's just really Des Plaines.
Maybe when he urges me to pray, he means I should pray I never end up in Des Plaines.
Presiding over a minefield of white tablecloths and a morbidly obese cook named (of course) Tiny. My mom works an office job all day and waits on the tables at night. My dad arranges for fashion shows featuring lingerie models during the businessmen's lunches. Behind the bar, he switches the Makers Mark out of its bottle and replaces it with cheap whiskey, and when the electric is cut off because he hasn't paid the bill, he lights the candles on the tables and tells the customers that there is a power outage, even though the customers and my father can plainly see the rest of Des Plaines sparkling like a fairy tale through the big windows. As bold a liar as any elected official, Dad sticks to his story in spite of the facts, and continues to present rapidly cooling plates of spaghetti drowned in Tiny's signature marinara. Tiny makes this really wretched marinara sauce which I refuse to eat, recognizing at an early age that my Grandmother's cooking is superior and wondering why my father runs a restaurant where the food can't hope to compare to his mother's kitchen. In the afternoons, when there are no customers, I sit under a table in a tablecloth tent, and color. Dad lets me wash the glasses in the bar. There is a rubber mat on the floor, in case I drop one.
Sometimes when the phone rings, at Villa D'Oro, Dad answers, listens a moment, and says, "Yes, we have meatballs."
My mother knows that this is code for "My wife is here. You can't come sit in the bar."
I know Mom was once arrested for loitering suspiciously around the bushes of a Des Plaines motel while trying to catch Dad and his Putana in the act.
I know how to make a puttanesca. I learned it from a book.
It is so named because it's the sort of meal a whore could whip up in no time, between clients or perhaps with a favorite. Olive oil and anchovies are the basis. It is a sauce for grown-ups; for sexual encounters, aphrodisiac and appalling, clotted with barely dissolved tomatoes, sweating salt from our Greek friends the Kalamatas, and shot through with brine from the capers. It is not meant to be served over spaghetti. You eat it with penne, the tube shaped pasta so handy for scooping up your sweatier sauces. Lots of bread. A lover, because the anchovies have demonstrated how to dissolve in heat and the oil leaves your mouth slick and since you've both eaten it, the garlic will offend no one.
It is after hours at Villa D'Oro, the chairs up on the tables, the lights dim, when mom's chronic hot humiliation finally boils over into a classic rage and she goes suddenly Italian. Her rage is operatic. She howls and hammers, she tears white cloths from the tables, she breaks the dishes, she smashes the cheap whiskey.
He slaps her to the floor, kicks her in the ribs, and opens the side of her head.
It does not hurt a lick, until the next day, of course.
It is a decade later when I think to I ask her if it was worth it. She smiles with all the dirt farmer glee of her Tennessee tobacco ancestors, yes; but there are also some hardboiled eggs and neckbones in that sauce.
Meanwhile the octopus, as we know, shoots ink in order to confuse its enemies.
Interesting fact: if it is trapped in an enclosed space such as an underwater cave, or a tank, the ink will fail to disperse, turn toxic, and kill it.
I am so pregnant when I come flying into the hospital on that frozen February 3 a.m., the security officer in the lobby springs up and cries, "Okay then!" and hustles to get me a wheelchair.
I don't stop for him.
I would have to explain to him that I am not in labor; that I am on my way up to intensive care, to see my father, who'd suffered cardiac arrest.
I would have to explain to him that I didn't know what cardiac arrest meant when the nurse called me an hour before, and I told her, stupidly, that I would come by in the morning.
I would have to explain to him how my husband urged me not to go to this deathwatch.
How romantic bedside father/daughter reconciliations do not take place when the husband must first shovel the car out of two feet of snow and place his exhausted, ambivalent, pregnant wife behind the wheel, unable to accompany her because they are both unwilling to wake their toddler daughter so that she may be a witness to it all. He stays home with the sleeping child. I am here, kind security officer, because I don't want to be yelled at by my Grandmother. I don't want to have to face my grandmother at the funeral home the next day with the confession that I'd been waiting for this a long time and have no stake in seeing the old man's evacuated body at the hospital at 3 in the morning. I am here because I feel like I have to be.
I do not explain all this to the helpful security officer in the lobby.
I can't tell him some of it, without admitting to all of it, and that would be time consuming and inappropriate.
Can't stop, not having baby, just visiting! Godisgreatgodisgoodletusthankhimforourfoodamen!
And I make my way through the byzantine disorder of corridors known as Resurrection Hospital.
Resurrection. God Forbid.
"Can't stop, not having baby, just visiting!"
Moron.
Why is it so important to me to pretend everything is all right? It's a fucking hospital. At fucking three o'clock in the morning. Who is going to suspect anything is other than terribly not all right? Why should I care? Someone just died. People are dying all over this hospital. I trundle through it, carrying two sons within me.
Life and Death and my concern is that any passing intern will assume my shit is sufficiently together.
He is a mess, a bag of soft tissue hurled against a rock to exhaustion. Skin laid sloppy over bone. As multi-colored as a Mediterranean sunset. Eyelids caving in, mouth open and so strange when not in use.
Lifeless, wifeless, purple-tinged, boiled dry, and I am the only family here in the ICU, and as usual I have no prayer for him.
At his funeral I stand next to his coffin, holding my daughter in my arms.
"So long, Sam."
Not many people will attend his funeral, and those who do will go to an Italian restaurant afterwards for pretty bad spaghetti and a chance to see my daughter throw her fuselli the length of the table. She will never know her grandfather.
A year before his death, I took her to visit him. He was ill with radiation (prostrate cancer) and weak. She was twelve months old and a sharp, quizzical bird of a thing, hard where you expect her to be soft and vice versa. She played with his hooked nose. He said, quietly, "She makes me laugh." I felt like he had finally looked at someone other than himself and really seen her. His granddaughter; not a soft cooing ornamental baby, but an inquisitive force of nature, and a humorous one.
Likewise I came to see him in intensive care, a week before he died. Bulging and uncomfortable (there is no place to sit in ICU) I told him I was expecting twins.
Again, he smiled, but not for show. His smiles used to be one of two things - disingenuous or shark-like. From his hospital bed, beneath the oxygen tubes, his smile was directed inward, as was his comment.
"You always have to do things differently, don't you?"
I was shocked. And uncharacteristically gratified.
I don't know the name of the graveyard where he is buried. I found my way there four months after he died, with my sister, from whom he'd been estranged. She wanted to see his grave and hash a few things out with him. I gave her her privacy. My daughter and I wandered the cemetery and I explained the dead people to her.
When my sister had finished, I had my turn.
I stood by Dad's grave and searched around for something to say.
As usual, the whole scenario embarrassed me.
As usual, we didn't have much in common to talk about.
As usual, I didn't have a prayer.
My daughter plays among the graves; rearranging the various floral displays left by loved ones there and stealing a small Virgin Mary.
