OF TIME AND CHANGE

OF TIME AND CHANGE

“Bobby, what did you do?”

     “Nothin.  Nothin.  It ain’t my fault.”

     “Why’s he crying?  You did too do something.”

     “I ain’t done nothin.  He was on my steps playin, and I shooed him away, that’s all.”

     “You did more than shoo him.  C’mere, Joey.  What did Bobby do?”

     “I told you.  I didn’t do nothin.”

     “He’s crying too hard.  You did too do something, Bobby, you nogoodnik.”

     “Don’t call me a no good mick, wop bitch!”

     “I didn’t.  I called you a nogoodnik.  Don’t you know what that is?  Dummy!”

     “Screw you, wop bitch!”

Bobby ran up the steps of his house.  In Brooklyn in those years, the neighborhood was mixed Irish and Italian, with a Jewish and a German family here and there.  Bobby’s last name was Sheridan, ours Croce.  He ripped his key from his pocket in obvious anger and opened the door.  When he went in, he slammed that door so hard it made me stop crying.  Our houses on that street were fourplexes, consisting of two upper and lower single-family homes with dividing wall, and an alleyway on either side of the building leading to the yards behind. 

     Bobby lived in the downstairs home on the one side and we in the downstairs on the other.  Upstairs over the Sheridans lived a quiet elderly Jewish couple, and upstairs above us lived my mother’s father and her three sisters, the younger of whom, Josie, was supposed to be watching me but wasn’t when Bobby kicked me to get me off his side of the front stoop.

     Many things about this incident caused it to become engraved in my mind, and now, many years later, with our living in South Dakota, it has become relevant as a kind of template against which to measure time and distance and change, and those sometimes ephemeral almost imperceptible transformations that alter the nature of the self.

     The kids in that neighborhood were segregated by age and sex, not by ethnicity, so that we five- and six-year-old boys pretty much all played together on the sidewalks and the street and the various backyards.  Bobby’s slur against my aunt, who was at that time fifteen or sixteen, was not only vehement but unintelligible to me, nothing of that sort making up our sense of who we were. 

     “Wop bitch” stayed in my head, both because my aunt reacted to it strangely and because Bobby meant to lacerate her with those words.  I had no problem understanding, at the age of five, the word “bitch.”  It represented an attitude pretty much engrained in our psyches, though not a one of us thought of our mothers and sisters that way.  It was the “wop” part that went over my head and that stuck in my memory.  I am not altogether certain, even now, I can grasp the intensity of insult it represented.  My aunt was silenced by those words, and that, too, makes up part of what I remember about the incident.

     Aunt Josephine used to hang out with the Reilly girl in the downstairs home across the alley from us.  They walked to school together, sat on the front steps on summer evenings, and listened to the radio in each other’s living rooms.  Polio had visited our neighborhood when Aunt Josephine was still a child and touched her, thankfully, only mildly, so that with the aid of a leg brace she managed to live pretty much a normal life.  By the time she became a teen, she was able to get along without the brace, though she retained the characteristic limp of the afflicted. 

     Christine Reilly, much the better looking of the two friends and untouched by the Polio, became a nun, and my aunt at about the same time married a Portugese, a small man who painted his 1939 two-door Ford coup with a powder puff and a can of lampblack to take her away on their honeymoon.  Bobby Sheridan, who was the same age as my aunt, left home, too, about that time and disappeared forever from my life.  I am unaware that he and my aunt ever exchanged words again after that day. 

     I stayed clear of him, frightened by the scowl he wore.  I used to say silently to myself when I’d see him coming and going, “No good mick!”  And I’d hear his angry voice in reply, “wop bitch!”  I was still very young when these “elders” faded from my everyday life, and although “mick” and “wop” also faded from my lived experience, they remained hauntingly embedded in my mind.

Of all my siblings, I am the only one who married an Italian, a girl I met in college.  My older brother married a Pole, my younger a Swiss.  My first sister married a German, my second an Irish, and my third a Bohemian.  I should, by this circumstance, have been the one among my brothers and sisters to have most retained our family heritage.  But I began to drift from that heritage when I went to college, and since in our engineering program there were no other Italians, Emilia and I never associated with anyone who shared our ethnicity.  Then we had moved early in our careers to technical positions in South Dakota and lived among its mostly Nordic population for a quarter century.  The vast farmlands, the Heckenlibles, Nielsens, and Van Epps were far removed from those Brooklyn days.  I lived and felt the least Italian of all my siblings, since they remained close to home and kept to family traditions. 

     When Emilia and I had guests for dinner, we never introduced our friends to Italian cuisine, which was the only remaining connection we had to our families’ traditions.  Knowing their tastes, we cooked American for them, preparing a variety of meat and potato dishes with boiled vegetables.  On one early December weekend, though, as we approached the holiday season, Emilia decided to labor over a complex three-course Italian meal for some new  friends.  Beginning with soup, moving to pasta, and ending with a meat dish, she had also labored over a tiramisu for desert.  The meal was varied, long in preparation, and expected to take a long time to serve, which is why we invited our guests to come in mid-afternoon on a Sunday.  This was to be a traditional-style Sunday or holiday meal.  The table was sumptuously laid out, with candles at either end, as our mothers used to do at Christmas. 

     Much to our chagrin and infinite embarrassment, our guests, Jeremy Hanson and his wife Carol, would have none of it.  I had known Jeremy for about five months and liked him, often mentoring him at the office.  We played poker together on Wednesday nights and often on Fridays the four of us went out to dinner and a show.  It was not their first time at our house.  Because he liked good wine, I had splurged on a couple bottles of French Bordeaux.  I had these opened and on the table when they arrived.  I knew when they came in from the cold and hung up their coats that something was wrong.  I tried to get by whatever it was by pouring them each a glass of wine.  Carol wouldn’t go into the kitchen where Emilia was preparing the serving dishes, so I invited them to sit at the table. 

     There was a plate of typical Italian-style oeur-d’erves—cubes of hard salami, rolled anchovies, olives, several cheeses, roasted red peppers seasoned with olive oil and garlic.  They sat at table, however, looking grim, and tasted nothing.  It was apparent that the aromas wafting from the kitchen offended them.  When they refused to touch course after course, we didn’t know what to say or do.  The two of them sat with stony faces, unresponsive even to attempts at conversation. 

     Emilia was mortified, having labored for hours preparing the meal and the table, and, before their arrival, preparing herself.  She had a cordial relationship with Carol and was looking forward to spending the evening with her.  But Carol’s stiffness at the table and her and Jeremy’s refusal to even sample the food compromised the evening and made all four of us extremely uncomfortable.   How to end it, then, and save some remnant of cordiality and personal dignity became the ordeal Emilia and I had to rise to meet.  We did not accomplish the task. 

     The next day at work I overheard Jeremy describing the dinner debacle to another colleague.  They both snickered.  “That’s a wop for you,” the colleague said to my friend.  “Wop food,” Jeremy responded, “stay away from the Croce’s.” 

     Bobby Sheridan’s “wop bitch” and Aunt Josephine’s silence came flooding back at that moment, and as I ducked back into my office, Jeremy happened to look over at my door and caught my eye.  He knew I had heard.  Strange how situations can become so inverted.  It was I who felt the embarrassment instead of him, who was actually so boorishly guilty of insulting his host.  I felt embarrassed!  Over what?  The misjudgment involved by that dinner?  The Hanson’s rudeness?  No.  I felt embarrassed at being Italian—something I have not thought about or even felt over the last two decades!  As I sat ill at ease at my desk, I had to laugh at the ridiculousness of it.  I immediately plotted revenge.  Something, I said to myself, I have to think of something to get even, but it must be subtle, nothing so boorish as open insult.  It took me a few days, but it came to me at last. 

     Our office provides business, industry, and governments all over the world with data from a network of earth resources satellites.  Ours is a high-tech environment, and like most such environments, we tend to be casual and informal in our work routines.  Since I am the senior member of our team, it falls to me to take the initiative regarding our office’s holiday festivities.  Many of us take some vacation time at Christmas, so in order to have all of us together, I usually reserve the second Friday of December for our office Christmas party.  This year I emailed a memo instructing everyone in the office to come on Friday with a covered dish of something good to eat.  I told them we would begin our festivities with this “pot luck” and spend the rest of the afternoon partying—they should have their spouses and significant others arrive at noon, etc. 

     We are an office of twenty-two people, and I needed consequently a number of tables set end to end to accommodate the dishes and all the other necessaries, like boxes of plastic spoons and forks, glasses, cups, napkins, and the bottles of Champaign and other beverages.  I reserved a large space in the center of the table for my contribution to the food.  I brought it covered on a very large silver tray Emilia had got from her mother.  I made much of mystery about it, telling people I would unveil it exactly at twelve-thirty.  I had talked it up quite a bit, and thus people were curious.  I said that they would all know it, since it is one of our region’s traditional holiday dishes.  This item left them vibrating with curiosity. 

     Exactly at half-past twelve, people gathered round the table, and I lifted the cover.  Everyone started to scream and laugh, handkerchiefs came up to noses, shrieks of “ugh” and “oh, no” and “what’s that?” filled the room.  It was a great jest.  I made a speech about Norwegian cooking, since Jeremy and Carol Hanson were Norwegian, and said that we needed to all taste and celebrate our region’s heritage.  People were willing—they were all more gracious than the Hansons at my house—but the napkins that afternoon were filled with spat-out lutefisk.  It was a great revenge. 

     I noticed that Jeremy and Carol didn’t regurgitate their mouthfuls, and Emilia did get elbow to elbow with Carol when she tried to nibble a piece of the lye-soaked cod, spitting it out and choking half to death.  I felt vindicated—especially since two of our people brought rather tasty versions of lasagna, and one tried a very worthy manicotti dish.  The Hansons, however, left before the opening of the Champaign, and as far as I could tell, neither of them sampled much of anything on the table but the lutefisk.