The
mother and father
who brought me into this life on the cusp of the Crab and the Lion
now forget
to eat. They
line up their dozens of pills on the formica
counter
and swallow them
with over-diluted orange juice concentrate. When we visit, I find nothing
for dinner but three frozen chicken
pot pies. I take my two children grocery-shopping and cook for all of us
my own bastard version of Sizzling
Happy Family, the ancient Chinese meal of pork, chicken, beef, and seafood
grilled together
with vegetables. My wife and I eat no meat, so I sauté tiger shrimp and garlic,
scallops, squid,
summer squash, red peppers, asparagus, snow peas, and Maine
mussels with bunches
of cilantro and purple basil chopped. I season it with coarse sea salt
and fresh
ground
pepper, and serve it with a pyramid of corn on the cob picked
that day. My mother
and father stare at this steaming platter of smells and colors
harvested from the earth
and ocean, cooked for them in desperation and hunger
by one of their two
middle-aged sons. Slowly, tentatively, they help
themselves
to
this strange food. My mother picks up a mussel in its shell
steamed open
like an iris in late
April to reveal its blue-and-white-enameled
inner
petals.
She
teases out the plump sexual meat and chews its tender
saltiness.
My father
reaches
for the corn, then spears asparagus and shrimp together
on the tines
of his trembling
fork. “Remember,” he turns to my mother, “Napoli,
the little tratoria
where we ate linguini with artichoke hearts, and how we saw
octopi hung on clotheslines
with the day’s wash?” My mother holds up a sunburst of squid
like a wild wedding ring
and stuffs it whole into her mouth. “Yes,” she replies, “and the red table wine
cheap as water
and us on Pegasus, our Harley, cruising down the Costa Brava
after the war
past the entire Third Army on maneuvers, all those catcalls!” They laugh
together and have forgotten
us. Sixty years slip like an avalanche from their shoulders. It is
another country.
They live on kisses and calamari, tasting everything
the waiter puts
before them—seviche, its raw scallops, onions, and green peppers
over which my father squeezes
lime juice bright and astringent as sunlight, then fritto misto. Keep eating,
I want to tell them. Remember
how hungry you are for all of this. Belch. Throw down the napkins
stained with the prints
of your lips. Order coffee and the pears with rum. Have them flame it.
Don’t leave the table. Not yet.
-from My Father Says Grace
