Elizabeth Street - Laurie Fabiano [58]
Cedar Grove, New Jersey, 1966
When my parents moved to the suburbs, my grandfather Nonno planted a gigantic garden and surrounded it with a six-foot fence. Every day, he would drive from Hoboken to garden with me at lunchtime. I was happiest within the big green fence with my grandfather. The neighbors complained because they thought it was going to be a chicken coop, but Nonno painted it green so it wouldn’t be so noticeable among the manicured shrubs and sloping lawns.
“Nonno, she did it again,” I complained, throwing a weed over the fence.
“Shake the dirt off the weeds before you throw them. Itsa good dirt.”
“One of my friends came over to play, and she started screaming, ‘She’s not blood. Get her out of here! Tell her to go home.’ No one wants to come to my house. They’re afraid. Why can’t Nanny be like you, or Thea’s Yia-Yia?”
Nonno realized that he couldn’t change the subject. He walked over to the two peach trees in the garden. “See this,” he said, pointing to a gnarled spot on the trunk of one tree. “This is from the early frost a few years ago. It made the tree grow different. There are reasons for the way we are. Have patience with your grandmother. And remember, itsa been hard for her since your Big Nanny died.”
“I don’t like her, Nonno, she’s mean.”
“Anna, thatsa bad to say.”
“You don’t like her either. You fight all the time.”
“Shesa tough, but I love your grandmother.”
“Well, I don’t.”
Nonno put the small white Formica table in the middle of the garden and unwrapped two sandwiches. We sat in the dirt. I always tried to be quiet because Nonno didn’t say much, but invariably I failed. I would chatter about the families who lived around our dead-end circle. Three Greek, two Italian, one Hungarian, one Polish, and one not anything. I always felt sorry for the kids who weren’t anything. When people asked, “What are you?” they had to say, “Not anything” or, “I don’t know.” My grandmother had taught me how to figure out what people were by their last names. Nanny was real concerned with what people were.
The sandwich looked small in Nonno’s hands, which were big and attached to even bigger forearms, one with a tattoo of a mermaid, the other with an anchor. The rest of Nonno wasn’t so big. But he was tall enough, with brown eyes that sparkled.
“Nonno, tell me about the mermaids,” I said.
“Again? Only if you promise no more questions.”
“Deal.”
“Okay, in the firsta World War I was in the blu marinos—you say ‘navy’ in English. The mermaids, they saved my life. After the torpedo hit, I wasa hanging onto a piece of wood. I think it wasa door from the submarine. I had no water, no food, so my head wasa no good. So I keep slipping off the wood, and every time that I sink into the sea, the mermaids push me back on the wood.”
“How did you know it was mermaids?”
“Who else could ita be out there in the ocean?”
“Maybe Scylla.”
“Scylla ate the sailors, no saved them.”
“But maybe she saved you because you were from her town. It makes sense because the other men died. Maybe she wanted you to come back to Scilla.”
“Ah, then I did a bad thing, because thatsa when I went to America to visit my aunt.”
“Big Nanny?”
“Yes, Big Nanny.”
“I still don’t get how your mother-in-law is your aunt.”
“For such a smarta girl I have to explain this again! My Uncle Nunzio wasa married to your great-grandmother.”
“But how are you and Nanny cousins?”
“Because Nunzio and your great-grandmother wasa cousins.”
I couldn’t understand the family stuff no matter how hard I tried. So I went back to a topic I could understand. “Nonno, what are we going to plant there?”
“Strawberries. But we going to mix the sand ina the dirt.”
Nonno nodded to the gate. “The basanogol needs caviar.” Caviar is what Nonno called cow manure.
I unwrapped the dried figs Nonno had packed for dessert. In November, we would wrap the huge