Gravy with a Side of Italian Horns

Tomato Sauce; guilt; Mother Teresa

Teresa knows this recipe by heart. She’s been making it or a derivative of it for the last forty years or so. She gleaned it when she was a child watching her Grandma cook every Saturday morning. She loved watching Grandma for two reasons. First, Grandma loved her and paid special attention to her. She had six siblings and was right smack in the middle—three older, three younger. She was rarely alone with either of her parents, but she was alone on Saturday mornings with Grandma, who talked to her about her life long ago and life as it was unfolding each day. Grandma made “the gravy” (most people call it tomato sauce, but not Brooklyn Italians) with a large beige dishtowel folded into a triangle and tied around her very short white-not gray-hair. The second reason Teresa sat and watched each Saturday was because as her reward, she got to eat one meatball right from the frying pan, no gravy. Grandma would put it on a saucer and tell her, “Be careful, it’s hot.”

Grandma died in 1990. It’s 2022 and Teresa wears a white dishtowel with a blue border folded into a triangle tied around her shoulder-length grayish-white hair. Unlike Grandma, she grudgingly makes the gravy. She takes three cans of Italian peeled tomatoes, blends them in a blender, puts them in a pot on high heat—which reduces the liquid in the tomatoes and boils away the foam. Meanwhile, she puts the hot (again, many people would say ‘spicy,’ but not Greenpoint Italians) sausage in a frying pan with a splash of olive oil. Next she places sliced, seasoned with salt and pepper, baby back ribs into another frying pan with some olive oil. While the meat fries, she prepares the meatballs. She’s listens to 70s classics on Spotify and tries not to think about the fact that the task is going to take all day, and she’s sick of doing this same thing every six weeks, and why did she ever take on this job, and when is it going to end? She’s done it for the last six years because every Sunday her family eats some type of macaroni (never called pasta in her family) at her elderly father’s house. She pays for and shops for all the ingredients and she stores the six containers in her small freezer. She can’t bring the containers to the larger freezer in her father’s house. He hates having things in his freezer and tries to get rid of them any way he can (but never, ever throwing them away). Her father probably thinks she makes the gravy every Saturday like his wife and his mother and his wife’s mother did. As she mixes the ingredients in her large plastic bowl, one pound of chopped beef, one pound of chopped pork, one teaspoon mustard, salt, pepper, three eggs, Italian bread crumbs, some garlic, Romano cheese, and chopped fresh parsley, she thinks about how much she hates putting her hands in the cold meat mixture. She shapes each meatball, keeping count so that there will be enough for the six weeks of Sunday meals with her father and sister. When the sausage is done, she replaces it with some of the meatballs.

“I can’t believe what both my brother and sister said to me on the phone. They both told me in separate conversations that our family isn’t the same anymore. That it’s not good. They both talked about how great it used to be and how much fun we used to have. I’m reminded of the song “The Way We Were” by Barbara Streisand. More specifically the lines:

 “Can it be that it was all so simple then?
 Or has time rewritten every line?.”

Do they really believe that it was so great back then? How do they not remember that those times, like these times, were sometimes good, sometimes great, sometimes not so good, sometimes bad, and sometimes truly terrible? Are they using this as an excuse to cut ties with the family that’s left, specifically our ninety-six-year-old, ornery, grumpy, unforgiving father?”

Teresa stares at the sizzling meatballs. “Why can’t I be like Mother Teresa? Saint Teresa took care of the poor and needy tirelessly in Calcutta, India. She won a Nobel Peace Prize. I don’t think she spent her time complaining about the people in her life. I don’t think she judged the people around her or criticized them constantly. Why can’t I quiet this evil voice inside my head? It even complains about my own thoughts and words. Why can’t I be like my namesake?”

Traditionally in Teresa’s family and religion, a child needed to be named after a Catholic saint in order to be baptized. Teresa’s family was very religious. They recited the traditional mealtime blessing in unison every night at family dinner:

Bless us, Oh Lord 
and these thy gifts, 
which we are about to receive 
from thy bounty through Christ our Lord, Amen.  

They went to church on Sundays. In fact, her mother went to church every morning. Since her parents thought that public schools were unsafe, Teresa spent most of her education in the Catholic school system with Catholic school nuns. In second grade, she was chosen to dress in a nun’s outfit and march in the All Saints Day Parade. When she was sixteen, she was chosen to crown the Blessed Mother with flowers at the beginning of the month of May. At twenty-two, after college, Teresa actually taught in a Catholic school for six years. Emulating the Catholic saints was deeply ingrained in her thoughts and in her words. As a child, she learned about the lives of the saints, and the reasons they were canonized. Even today, in her daily prayer book, she saw a quote from Saint Jerome:

“Martyrdom does not consist only in dying for one’s faith, martyrdom also consists in serving God with love and purity of heart every day of one’s life.”

Teresa wonders if this is possible. Were the saints really like this—pure in thoughts, words, and deeds? Is my mother, who was the holiest person I ever knew, a saint in heaven? (What am I thinking? My mother is definitely a saint. No one who survived a seventy-plus-year marriage to my father did not achieve sainthood.) Whether she’s a saint or not, she’s definitely giving me the “Italian horns” from wherever she is. So what are these Italian horns? The internet says Italian horns protect you from the evil eye?” Not so if you grew up in Greenpoint in 1970. The evil eye was called the ‘Italian horns’ in our homes and our streets. Old Italian ladies used to walk by us with their index finger and pinky extended toward us giving us the the Italian horns—especially when we were sitting on the stoop of their six or three-family apartment building.

Believe it or not, Teresa met a true Mother Teresa last Friday while having dinner with a group of friends at a restaurant in Farmingdale. A friend of one of her friends was sitting across from her. The woman lives with her mentally challenged brother and is his sole caretaker. Again, believe it or not, she brought her brother, a full-grown mentally challenged man, to a restaurant where there was dinner and dancing. Teresa was baffled by this. “Who would do this?” They sat across from Teresa. As she watched the woman put food in front of her pale, obese brother, wipe his mouth, blow his nose, place a napkin around his throat, and scoop up the drool dripping from the corner of his mouth, feelings of disgust and disbelief permeated in Teresa’s black heart. Who would think it was a good idea to bring this man to this restaurant, seat him at a table with twelve other people, and cater to his every whim? Here she was sitting with a true Mother Teresa, and all she could do was judge the woman, thinking of herself and how his presence was putting a damper on her good mood and her appetite. Teresa could barely look at him. And she was hungry and had to eat her dinner before the drinks she was drinking would inebriate her. She tried to keep her eyes on her plate, but he was morbidly obese and drooling and rocking back and forth. All of a sudden in the pit of Teresa’s stomach, guilt and shame made their familiar appearance. How could she be thinking these wicked thoughts about a woman who clearly loves her brother so much that she gives up her life and freedom to take care of him? Although she felt compassion, the pair horrified her. The man certainly didn’t look very happy. All he wanted was food, and when the sister placed an oversized ‘Big Gulp’ cup of Coca Cola in front of him, Teresa just sighed and judged some more about the amount of sugar that the boy/man was ingesting. She couldn’t believe how much the man was devouring, and how much the sister was providing for him. After a few feeble attempts at conversation with Mother Teresa, despite her guilt and unspeakable opinions, Teresa danced and had a good time. She tried to ignore the woman sitting across from her, and of course, she said nothing to the brother. Every now and then, she would feel the selfish hidden leviathan growing inside of her, pushing away any compassion she might feel and betraying her revulsion.

Teresa’s daughter says, “What the Catholics get wrong is that they make you feel guilty for your evil thoughts. The Bible myth isn’t saying that—it’s pointing out that you can’t escape your evil thoughts. They’re part of what makes you human. Just like there will always be good and evil in the world, there will always be good and evil inside of you.” You’d surmise that at sixty-five Teresa would have this all figured out, but being retired can really bring out the worst in a person. Too much time to think, maybe, to ruminate and regret. She was a divorced, working mother who fought two ex-husbands for child support in the courts of NYC. She spent the better part of her life in a school of some sort: Catholic school, city university, private university, NYC public school. Before she retired, there was no time to think about being perfect. She was too busy whining about failed marriages, unreliable exes, nasty court battles, relying on parents for child-care, worrying about bills. Teresa retired at sixty. This retirement had been her biggest dream. A dream she dreamt about every time she left her son at her brother’s, (screaming and crying “Mommy don’t go!”) or twelve years later when she left her daughter at her mom and dad’s (thankfully, her daughter went happily) to go to work. Sending your child to daycare—or worse, having a stranger babysit—was taboo in her family. Actually, it was taboo for a mother to work. She often was reminded of this when her mother would say things like, “Children need their mothers. Mothers should stay home with their kids.” Teresa longed for the days of retirement, days when she wouldn’t be such a burden on the family. Most of all, she longed for the days when she wouldn’t be reminded that she was a terrible mother because she was a single working parent. By the time she retired, Teresa didn’t need childcare because there were no young kids to be a good mother to. Her children were grown and she was looking forward to travel, relaxation, maybe finally meeting someone to share her senior years with. Maybe now she would stop hating herself. Maybe she would use this time to be less stressed and somehow accept her mistakes and shortcomings.

As fate would have it, five days after she retired, her ninety-year-old mother fell, and she needed to spend four days every week caring for her under the ever-watchful, micromanaging supervision of her father, who, even after her mother passed four years ago, retains the resiliency of an ox.

Teresa spends two days a week caring for Al at his house, which is deteriorating each day in tandem with his physical condition. She arrives at 9:45 on Thursdays to dust, vacuum, disinfect the bathroom, and mop the floors. At twelvish, they eat lunch together. He’s too proud to accept her help so she scrambles around him trying to help unobtrusively—really for her own benefit, because watching him struggle to reach things in the cabinets and in the refrigerator leaves her nerves rattling. She finds herself losing patience with his insistence on doing everything himself. Although lunch is mostly silent since she has no idea how to make conversation with Al, every week without fail, he complains about the jelly on his sandwich, and how jelly is not the same as it used to be. He cannot keep the jelly on the sandwich. It drips all over the paper towel he insists on using in lieu of a plate. Teresa: “Da, maybe if you put the jelly on the toast instead of in the middle of the peanut butter and cream cheese it might soak into the bread.” Al gives her the “mind your business look” as he stubbornly puts cream cheese on one slice of toast, peanut butter on the other slice and the jelly in the middle. As usual, by the time lunch is over, the paper towel and Al’s hands are soaked with jelly. Teresa: “Daddy, do you want a plate.” Al: “NO, I NEVER used a plate at lunch and I’m not going to use one NOW!” After lunch, they watch Gunsmoke together. Really they watch commercials, because he flips back and forth between two different Gunsmoke episodes that are playing on two different channels in an effort to not watch the long TV ads, only to accomplish watching the commercials on both channels. His channel-changing is made even more irritating when the TV remote goes to channel 333 when he’s trying to plug in the number 33, and then 885 when he’s switching back to channel 85. Teresa’s eyes are glued to the analog clock that is right next to the TV in the wall unit. She watches the second hand go around which seems to take an hour for each rotation. The analog clock tricks her every time as she watches it creep toward two o’clock, the time she can can bolt out of there. Inevitably, too late, she realizes the clock is set twenty minutes ahead.

The meatballs have finished frying so Teresa puts about a cup of red wine in one frying pan and a can of tomato paste in the other pan. The wine mixes with the oil and she reduces the mixture by about half. She adds water to the tomato paste and watches it as it bubbles for about fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, she adds salt, pepper, parsley, fresh basil and the fried meats to the tomato sauce that has been cooking for the last hour. Her body is tense. Every joint hurts, her neck, her knees, her hips, her ankles, her fingers, her wrists. She hates her new ‘job.’ It’s been five years now since she retired. She finds herself complaining about Al constantly, to her siblings, her son, her daughter, her friends, her physical therapist, her doctor, people in the park, strangers at the supermarket. She can’t even stop herself. She harbors so much resentment for him and her situation.

She asks God daily to help her become Mother Teresa, the saint who she thinks she must aspire to. As Teresa adds the frying tomato paste and reduced wine to the tomato sauce, she thinks, “What is wrong with me? My father has done so many good things for me. Why aren’t the good things enough to overshadow the bad? Why do I feel inadequate in his presence and unable to act like Mother Teresa? Why do I obsess over the events at his house even when I’m home in my own house? I want to be a loving, caring daughter spending the last months, years with my father. Some people think I’m lucky to still have him. But instead of feeling fulfilled by the experience I’m resentful, bitter, complaining and waiting for it to be over!!!”

But what will that mean? She can’t even stand to think it. It won’t be over until he passes, and that is unthinkable to her. How could she wish her father dead? What kind of horrible person could want that? Certainly not Mother Teresa.