I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti Read online

  That office was in the basement of our house. In the lower left-hand drawer of his big mahogany desk, my father kept a supply of Tootsie Pops, which he offered to the many children whose tonsils he removed. “Would you like strawberry, cherry, grape, or chocolate?” I heard him asking one of them, as I happened past the door to his consulting room, in a soothing tone not often heard by his own children. I envied those kids.

  By the time he saw us at the end of the day, my father was usually worn out by the demands of his work and patients. When my brothers and sisters and I were growing up, family dinners could be tense affairs. On the odd evening when a Scotch on the rocks loosened him up, he liked to indulge in the activity that most relaxed him besides golf: the Reader’s Digest Word Power game. Though Italian was his first language, my father had an English vocabulary that rivaled those of most English literature professors. He never spoke Italian at home, and subsequently we never learned it. (I’m still annoyed about this.) The only time we heard him speak his native language was when dinner was interrupted by a call from an Italian patient whose child had a fish bone caught in his throat or some such dire malady. If we made it through uninterrupted, my father would quiz us afterward with the help of the Reader’s Digest game, making sure our word skills were up to par. While my mother took care of the dishes, he would sip an espresso or eat a peach cut up and dropped into a glass of red wine, while we ate whatever dessert my mother was offering. I’m sure he appreciated the care she took with our meals, but he never said so, at least not in front of us. He was serious, and there was little light banter between them. He was profoundly interested in our education, and dinner conversations often prompted him to send one of us for the encyclopedia whenever a subject came up that warranted further exploration. He bought us all manner of analog teaching tools. It kills me that he missed the Internet completely; how he would have loved it, especially Wikipedia, which would have saved my brothers and sisters and me countless trips from the kitchen to the library with heavy books in our arms.

  If my father revealed affection for us, it was in the smallest ways. On summer evenings after dinner, he took us for walks around the neighborhood to check out the local clothing boutiques; a naturalized American through and through, he was particularly fond of a vintage clothing store, called Lulu’s Back in Town, that sold antique Levi’s jeans. He enjoyed buying clothes for us and was especially fond of those old jeans with patches made of colorful bandannas stitched onto the knees. When he needed to go to the hospital for evening rounds, he would con one of us into accompanying him with the promise of a stop for ice cream at Carvel, his favorite.

  My mother and father went out for dinner by themselves every Wednesday night—his penance for playing golf three days a week. They would go to one of the excellent local Italian restaurants: Tommaso’s or Ponte Vecchio. I always wondered what my family-focused parents would have to say to each other at a table without us kids around. My mother always remarked that they were one of the few couples that were always talking, unlike those many sullen ones who just sat across from each other chewing and staring into space, but I never believed her. On Saturdays, they’d go someplace smarter with other couples, usually in “the city.” On those nights, my father would spend a longer time than my mother primping in front of the mirror on the door to his closet. He’d try on one tie, then take it off and try another, then he’d decide maybe he should go with a bow tie. My mother would stand by watching, ready to tear out her curly brown hair that had been coiffed hours before.

  “I must be the only wife in the world who waits for her husband to finish dressing before they go out,” she would nag.

  Because my father grew up in Europe during World War II, when food was scarce, he hated to see anything in our house go to waste. He cooked one thing: minestrone that was born out of his deep fear of food spoilage. Any Saturday that was too wet or cold for golf would find him riffling through the refrigerator, pulling out anything that seemed in peril to put in his soup. No matter what the base, his creation consistently had the same wonderful flavor of tomato, smoky bacon, and vegetables. He always added barley to give it a lovely richness. The most remarkable thing about my father’s minestrone was that all the elements were cut with the precision of the surgeon that he was. This I cannot duplicate no matter how I try, but maybe you can.

  My Father’s Minestrone

  2 slices bacon, cut into ¼-inch pieces (optional)

  3 tablespoons olive oil

  1 medium onion, chopped

  1 shallot, chopped (optional)

  3 Yukon gold potatoes (or any white waxy potato), cubed

  2 small carrots, thinly sliced

  2 stalks celery, chopped

  1 teaspoon salt, plus extra salt to taste

  1 yellow squash, cut into ¼-inch slices and then quartered

  1 green squash, cut into ¼-inch slices and then quartered

  6 ounces string beans, cut into ¾-inch pieces

  ½ pound button mushrooms, quartered

  4 plum tomatoes, seeded and chopped (or 1 cup canned whole tomatoes, drained of juices and chopped)

  ½ cup corn kernels (drained, if canned)

  1 cup fresh or frozen green peas

  1 cup canned chickpeas, drained

  1 small head savoy cabbage, outer leaves removed, chopped

  2 tablespoons butter

  ¼ cup barley (or farro) (optional), uncooked

  ¼ cup torn basil leaves

  ¼ cup chopped parsley

  Freshly ground pepper

  Freshly grated parmigiano

  In a small skillet over medium heat, cook bacon until it takes on a little color and gives off some of its fat. (Whether to add the fat to the soup base or drain it is between you and your Weight Watchers leader. I keep about half of it.) Heat the oil in a large stockpot (8 quarts or more) over heat that is just a notch over medium, then sauté the onion and shallot until they are translucent, about 2 minutes. Add the potatoes, carrots, celery, and 1 teaspoon salt; let the vegetables get a little soft, stirring regularly so they don’t stick to the bottom of the pot, about 5 minutes (if it gets too sticky, add a little water). Add squashes, string beans, and mushrooms and continue to stir regularly.

  When all the vegetables have softened and the squashes are translucent, add the tomatoes, corn, green peas, and chickpeas, enough water to cover and salt to taste, and cook another 10 minutes, continuing to stir. Then add cabbage and 2 quarts of water, salt to taste, and 2 tablespoons butter. Bring to a simmer, add the barley (if using), then lower heat and cook partially covered for 45 to 50 minutes.

  When all the flavors are melded and you’re ready to serve, test for salt, add herbs, and serve with ground pepper and freshly grated parmigiano.

  Yield: 8 to 10 servings.

  During my father’s last years, when I was away at school, he and my mother cultivated a new Saturday night ritual. My father made his soup, my mother made a simple pizza from dough bought at a local bakery, then they would rent a 1960s Italian comedy (Divorce, Italian Style, starring Marcello Mastroianni, was a particular favorite) and sit in the living room, eating and laughing their heads off. Whenever I spent a weekend at home, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Where the heck did my parents go? This couple was having fun together. I didn’t know them.

  At college I studied Italian language and art history; because of this, my relationship with my father grew closer. He was delighted with the interest I took in his native culture and tongue; in the summer between my sophomore and junior years, we traveled to Italy together so I could get to know my aunts, uncles, and cousins in Salerno. On that trip, my father had a hard time walking up the hills of his hometown or up the big marble staircase at the Uffizi Gallery. He had a heart condition; there were tests and medications, but he didn’t say much about it, and we didn’t ask.

  I spent the first semester of my senior year studying in Florence, Italy. The night before I went away, my father and I stayed up late together, ordering
sale items from the L.L.Bean catalog (another one of his favorite things). I wanted blue-and-white boxers that were going for $5, but they were available only in size forty-six. “That’s fat!” my father said. But never mind, I wanted them and he got them for me. (I used to wear those shorts with a belt. I thought it looked punk.) My father seemed reluctant to part with me that night. I got the feeling that he thought it might be the last time he would ever see me.

  From Florence, I wrote my parents long letters describing all the enchanted experiences I was having—more often having to do with a bottle of Brunello and a bowl of ribollita than with Brunelleschi’s dome and the sonnets of Petrarch. When I was in Florence, I was sent the most beautiful love note I have yet received. My father wrote it on the back of an envelope containing a card from my mother. Here is what he wrote:

  Dearest Giulia,

  Mother had already sealed this letter before I had a chance to write anything so I write outside. In fact I am glad to do so, and let everybody see that I think about you and love you very much.

  Dad

  My father’s exacting print was unmistakable, but the sentiment was utterly foreign. I had to read it a few times to make sure it was real.

  I had the option to stay in Florence for another semester. I was having the time of my life; I had even developed a crush on a history professor who was engaged but seemed to have real admiration for my thoughts on the hierarchical divisions within the Medici court. I returned to New York because I feared my father would die before the term was up.

  It was Christmas when I got back, and our house was filled, as it always was at the holiday, with Bolla wine gift sets and boxes of panettone—gifts from my father’s many Italian-American patients. Panettone is a cross between bread and cake, dotted with dried fruits and laced with the scent of sweet liqueur. I never touched it as a child, but in January, when I returned to campus for my last semester, my father sent me off with a couple of bottles of Barbaresco and an enormous panettone in a modernist black-and-red tin. Students with late night munchies will eat just about anything, so my friends and I cut into the panettone one night. Accompanied by the red wine and enhanced by other exotic substances, it wasn’t bad. Maybe it was the container, maybe it was the chemicals, but that panettone stayed soft and palatable the entire winter. We had some every night, and we never seemed to make a dent in it. We ate it well into Lent.

  The morning after I finished writing my last paper, my father underwent emergency heart surgery. He did not survive the operation. He died three days before my graduation. I still have the envelope with the note he sent me when I was in Florence. It has a permanent place on top of my box of letters. I pick it up and read it every now and then to remind myself of love’s many surprises.

  I do not have a recipe for panettone. For the past few years, I have scoured the bakeries of Little Italy and the upscale patisseries of the Upper East Side to find a cake as delicious as the one my father sent me to school with that year. I pick up a few each holiday season and eat a piece every morning (and occasionally evening) of the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Sometimes I’m disappointed with what I’ve brought home, other times I’m quite pleased. I still haven’t found one that’s perfect. It’s possible that I never will.

  The Victory

  Breakfast

  Iwas cocky when I broke up with Kit. For no good reason, I imagined that the long dateless slog I had endured from birth to the age of twenty-three was well behind me. Kit, on the other hand, was quick to get into a new relationship, though from what I gathered it had a sort of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? dynamic. It took longer for me to find the George to my Martha. In those lonely years, whenever I felt sad and uninterested in food, I made myself pastina. Pastina, tiny pasta stars, is Italian baby food, or “baby’s first solid food,” as the Ronzoni box says. My mother used to make this for me when I was a baby or whenever I was sick as a little girl. I always keep a box of pastina in the house for whenever I’m not feeling quite right or not up to cooking. It is fast, simple, and terribly comforting.

  Pastina

  ¼ cup pastina

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  1 egg, lightly beaten

  1 teaspoon butter

  1 tablespoon freshly grated parmigiano

  Freshly ground pepper

  Bring 1 cup of water to a boil in a small saucepan, add pastina and salt, and cook until most of the water is absorbed, 3 to 4 minutes. Turn off heat and add the egg, letting it cook on the hot pasta, then add the butter, cheese, and a little pepper.

  Serves 1.

  When you’re single, the highs are high and the lows are low. You have opportunities for more excitement and pleasure than any person in a committed relationship is ever going to have, and you may as well enjoy them as much as you can because the rug gets pulled out from under you while you still think you’re riding high. And before all the married people start slamming this book shut, I will concede that marriage might very well be as much of a blast, I just haven’t had the opportunity to find out. What I do know is that the vicissitudes of dating get boring, or you get too old to partake of them, as I have, or both, and you crave the stability of a permanent partnership. I’ve been craving it for a while now; it just hasn’t craved me.

  The four years that came between Kit and my next stable relationship included a lot of false starts—exciting beginnings, uncertain middles, and crushing ends, all occurring in the span of a week or two. I took the abrupt endings hard, but I adored the initial rush. I didn’t cook much in those years—on the rare occasions that I did make something for myself, my friends, or a date, I’d think, Oh, I remember when I used to do this, I’m good at this—but mostly I dined out.

  I got sad about Kit on a regular basis.

  Ginia bore the brunt of it. She was the friend of a friend of a not-very-close college friend. We got to know each other at a party in a Brooklyn backyard on a summer night in 1989. Ginia, an aspiring journalist, was working at a now defunct environmental magazine called Garbageat a time when recycling was just a glimmer in Al Gore’s eye. We didn’t bond until a few years later when Ginia was at Time magazine writing the “People” page and I was a publicist at Penguin, desperate to get press for a party celebrating the publication of Robin Leach’s The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Cookbook,a culinary atrocity featuring recipes by Kenny Rogers and Vanna White that I, by some stroke of bad fortune, had been assigned to promote. In the days beforehand, my boss and I panicked over how to deal with the arrivals of the recently separated Ivana and Donald Trump. Our worries were unwarranted, for neither showed up, but getting a Time writer there was a feather in my cap. As lovely as the flowing Taittinger champagne was, I couldn’t wait to get out. I grabbed Ginia and we beat it over to Trader Vic’s, a Polynesian theme bar in the Plaza Hotel, where I imagined prep school boys plied their dates with sweet drinks in the 1950s and that sadly no longer exists. Amid the tikis and lei-adorned waiters, Ginia and I drank mai tais and talked for hours. I was still living with Kit, and I opened up to her about his possible alcohol problem as I drank an impressive quantity of rum punch. She confessed to me her crush on Brad Meyerson, a friend who didn’t say much—not about his soon-to-be-revealed devotion to her or, for that matter, anything at all.

  Since that night, Ginia’s been my best friend. We have a lot in common: Her father was from Italy and was a sharp dresser like my own. Her mother was born in the States of parents from Sicily, again, just like mine. People even say we look alike. We can share conversation on the New York media world as well as memories of Christmas cassatas. But most of all, we like to talk about dating. Ginia’s married now, so she has less to offer on that front. I manage to keep up the flow of stories. She, too, is a brilliant cook who has served me a plethora of delicious meals while listening to tales of my many romantic peaks and valleys.

  The first one she had to live through was Serge, a Croatian translator I met on a book tour. As I sat in her Park Slope living room an
d she served me polenta with mushrooms and Gorgonzola, I explained to her how he was my passione grande. I had convinced myself of this. I had to; he started talking about marriage instantly, and those were words I was dying to hear, especially because Kit never mentioned them. I wanted Kit to want to marry me, even though I was pretty sure marrying him was a bad idea. But after two months with Serge, I realized I couldn’t bear the sight of him, partially because he found fault with the mildew on my shower curtain while he himself was squatting in a mouse-infested apartment on the Upper East Side, but mostly because I was still in love with Kit. I cried most of the time I was with Serge; I cried when we were in bed, I cried at Barneys when Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” came on while we were shirt shopping (Kit and I used to listen to that album on drives up to Connecticut). I lost it, ran out of the store, and went home alone.

  On the heels of that, I got into a long-distance relationship with a friend of a friend from Chicago. It began with a snappy phone rapport established while I was still with Kit. When Tim visited New York, we discovered a sexual rapport as good as the one we had on the phone. I was hesitant to get into a relationship that involved plane travel, but Tim pushed for it, leaving me phone messages with convincing pleas like “To kiss you again would be my privilege.” That got me, but things went south as soon as I began to fly west, which I did most of the time, because Tim was afraid of flying.