Displaced
Wandering is my best strategy for finding salsa at the Ralphs in Woodland Hills. Most of these supermarkets have straight rows of aisles, front to back. This one’s different. It’s a maze that starts and stops in unexpected ways. Small tables are placed strategically throughout, heaped with wine paraphernalia and picnic accessories. They change location with alarming frequency and make it hard for me to find my bearings. After a year of shopping here, I still haven’t found them.
I keep hoping that one day I’ll memorize where the important stuff is, like crackers and soup. At least I know where the baked goods are, and way over on the other side of the store, the produce. For everything else, including salsa, I wander. That’s how I ended up in the aisle with the boxes of pasta and jars of spaghetti sauce.
When I was a kid, that’s what we called it. Not marinara or Bolognese. Spaghetti sauce. And we ate it with spaghetti, not pasta. I didn’t learn these other words until I got my first job waiting tables at Italian Delight in Security Square Mall.
Every Sunday my family ate the same meal. My mother’s weekly shopping list usually included a tub of marinated green olives, a crusty loaf of bread and fresh pork sausage with fennel from Trinacria’s on Paca Street in Baltimore. Sometimes she’d buy the long strands of dried spaghetti from the wooden bins. The man behind the counter would scoop the noodles into a paper bag and hand them to me with a smile and a look that said he was trusting me with the fragile contents.
The weekly spaghetti dinner was Grace Lucchesi’s tradition. She was my father’s mother, Nana. She lived with her six kids in a row house behind my Uncle Frank’s barbershop on Washington Boulevard. When my Dad was sixteen, he married my sparkly-eyed mother and they moved into an apartment where they carried on the tradition of Sunday spaghetti dinners until they divorced twenty-two years, four houses and six children later.
Sundays changed then. Up to that point, Dad hadn’t cooked much. He was a tool and die maker, more comfortable calibrating precision machines than preparing meals. But he had written the spaghetti sauce recipe on a card and taped it inside the cabinet next to the stove for a reason. He looked forward to spaghetti and homemade sauce, even if he had to make it himself. Which he did, in his own way.
First, he’d cut the yellow onions and chop garlic, while listening to the radio, a stub of cigar in his mouth. He’d whistle between his teeth when the onions and garlic hit the hot olive oil at the bottom of the big spaghetti pot. Next he’d add crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, and water. He’d bend down and eye up the gas flame, adjusting to a simmer. Next, he’d mix raw ground beef with egg and breadcrumbs and roll the mixture between the curves of his palms into balls that were bigger than golf balls but smaller than baseballs. Finally, he’d drop them, one by one, into the bubbling red sauce. The aroma filled the house. All day long in winter, steam fogged the kitchen window.
After a while, I was the last one home. My brothers and sisters would come over occasionally on Sundays, but mostly for birthdays and holidays. Dad still tried to make the trip to Trinacria’s on a regular basis. He liked to buy their fresh oregano and basil. But he didn’t buy the fresh spaghetti. We’d get that from the box, with the rest of the week’s shopping at the A&P. One thing that was never on the list was a jar of spaghetti sauce.
The recipe card stayed inside the cabinet for a decade, until Dad moved out of our house into an apartment in another neighborhood. He taped the card inside the cabinet next to the new stove, though Sunday dinners became a thing of the past.
I really don’t know why I wandered into the aisle with spaghetti sauce while I was looking for salsa. I guess that’s the nature of wandering. You just go and find what you find. What I found was a short, round woman, standing in the middle of the aisle in a long skirt over socks and chunky brown pumps. She seemed bewildered by two boxes of lasagne. As I tried to amble by, she held them up in the air and with a heavy accent said ‘please.’
One box had the kind of noodles that don’t require boiling before baking. The other was a box of Ralph’s regular lasagne noodles. She also held one of the shelf stickers that said that the Ralphs noodles were a buck cheaper. As she showed me the sticker, she shook her head no and raised her eyebrows. She was old enough to be my Nana, but her smooth, luminous skin made her seem new and innocent.
I showed her that the letters RA meant Ralphs, and that the discount was for the store brand noodles. She nodded yes and smiled. I asked her where she was from. “Romania,” she whispered, then quickly added, ‘English, little.”
What could I say? “Romanian, nil?” I didn’t say anything. She was far away from home and seemed so alone in the simple act of buying noodles that, impulsively, I hugged her. She hugged me back and we both smiled. With nothing else to say, I said goodbye.
I continued to wander, but stopped at the end of the aisle, suddenly obsessed with one question: how was she going to read the directions on the lasagne box? Then I thought, it can’t be that hard. Every country in the world must have its own version of putting grains in a pot of boiling water until they’re soft enough to eat.
I imagined how daunting it must have been for her to walk in her heavy, old world shoes through the glaring hot parking lot crammed with impatient drivers, and then inside the store through the maze of bright packages, emblazoned with words she couldn’t read. What took her from the land of vampires and ancient castles and brought her to the home of movie stars and surfboards? Who was she making lasagne for? Do they have lasagne in Romania? Does she have an Italian son-in-law? A grandchild? Is making lasagne something that made her feel more at home, or was she just learning?
As curious as I was, I couldn’t ask. All we had to cross the language barrier were hand signals, facial expressions, and a hug. Two women. One in the last act of life, one somewhere in that blurry place between youth and middle age. Each estranged from family and tradition.
I wondered what traditions she was missing. I knew the one that I was. In a plastic container in a refrigerated case, nowhere near the spaghetti sauce, I found the salsa. I chose a different one this time, then walked into the day.
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