This page contains two entries about New Years. The first is an excerpt from my first book, Fitting In. The second was written twenty-five years later and from a slightly different perspective.
Excerpt from
FITTING IN
chapter 1
Written in 1977 in Glassboro, NJ
I thought it would be fun to include some old family photos to help visualize this story, since it was somewhat autobiographical.
CHAPTER 1
10:30 P.M.
Huddled in the dark with a bag of Hershey bars I sat on the cellar stairs trying to get four or more eaten before I heard my name again. It was New Year's eve. Accordion music, tambourines, and slurred Italian lyrics staggered out from my home one flight up, through Grandma's two flights up, toward Aunt Helena and Uncle Guiseppe's three flights up, reaching Aunt Bertha and Uncle Rollo's four flights up, and finally spun out into the Hudson County sky, zig-zagging it's way toward the heavens.
"Gina,
come slice the pepperoni!"
I
stuffed the remaining candy bars inside my old toy box on a nearby shelf. I giggled. Not even mice could find them. I went back upstairs to search for a sharp knife. I hoped the pepperoni was short. I hoped they wanted the skin left
on. I hoped somebody with sense
was making a pizza to go under it.
Trying
to get to the kitchen was not easy.
"Gina,
the pepperoni!"
My
sister, Maria, was walking around with a platter of cut vegetables. Relatives were everywhere. There were pinches to dodge. There were drinks to refill. There were pastries to bite into. Beautiful chocolate éclairs lay
sweating and abandoned on paper doilies.
Cheese bread slices still warm from the oven were left ignored on lamp
tables. But the pepperoni waited.
I
could see my father's face scanning the room for me.
"Gina,
hurry, there's only an hour till the bells," he said, panicked.
"Gina,
the bells," said my five year old twin brothers, who understood nothing of
the pressure we were under but liked to contribute their two cents worth of
noise.
Tradition dictated a full meal at midnight. Pepperoni had to be out by eleven fifteen with the rest of the appetizers. My father could forgive anything but a breach of tradition. I grabbed the nearest housecoat and started cutting.
There was an order to the seating. Everyone due any amount of respect had the privilege of being stuffed into the kitchen. Respectful cousins and friends of the family usually stayed in the living room unless they were asked to come in and eat. The area around the kitchen table was reserved for aunts and uncles, grandparents, and godparents. It was a very loud place to be. Besides the guitars, accordions, and voices, everything bangable was going at once. Aunt Bertha had gotten hold of a wooden spoon and two pot lids. Uncle Rollo had mismatched maracas. Aunt Helena, who never let go of her fork, clinked it against empty beer bottles.
I read lips. I sliced pepperoni.
I dumped ashtrays. I volunteered
to get another gallon of red wine from the cellar. No one seemed to hear.
My father and mother kept handing me food. I arranged the cheese and salami in the antipasto. One slice on the platter, one
slice in my mouth. I tossed the
salad with vinegar and oil, salting generously as my father directed. I scooped the meatballs out of the
gravy pot; one found its way onto a fork and predictably ended up between my
overworked molars.
I
filled clam shells. I grated
cheese onto stuffed shells. I
sugared cannoli shells. And where
was my sister Maria through all of this?
In her petite stretch pants watching Guy Lombardo with the guests in the
living room.
11:00 P.M.
If
some holidays were uncomfortable for me, New Year's Eve was unbearable. Everyone decided it would be a perfect
time for me to start my diet. I
had other plans. Sometime before
midnight I was going to eat the rest of my hidden candy bars, and anything else
I managed to sneak from the kitchen into the cellar. And if I did eat so much that I gained even more weight,
what of it? I wasn't the only cow
in the family. I was no match for
Aunt Helena. Every time the diet
pressure got to be too much on me, I'd put a cake out in front of Aunt
Helena. Then the family saw some
eating!
"Helena,
leave some for the kids!" Uncle Rollo would yell.
"There's
plenty," my mother would lie.
"Oofah!"
an uncle would contribute, which was the Italian word for enough already.
"Some
for the kids!" one of the twins would add, just to have something to say.
"And
Gina shouldn't eat any," my evil sister would grin, passing her slice very
close to my nose. Seconds would
pass before I would take a slice.
Aunt Helena would take another.
Then me. Then her. Then me. Then her. There
was no underestimating the intensity of this game. We played to win.
We played to the end. We
ate unbelievably fast. And for our
gluttonous finale, we'd both hang around through the conversation until the
nuts or crumbs were gone.
I hated Aunt Helena sometimes for getting the last slice. And her contempt for me could be felt through her Christmas presents--size twenty pajamas, girdles, and the ultimate insult--nun dolls.
11:30 P.M.
This
holiday, Aunt Helena was into fish.
I could see a pile of empty clam shells beside her, an end to a fish-bread,
and a few last strands of scungili.
I was sticking with the high fat category, cheeses, breads, butter, and
pastries. My eating fish in the
past had given the family false hope--they all thought I was dieting. My eating a single celery stalk could
make the family evening news broadcasts, right up through the fourth floor to
my cousin Carlo. He'd come down
immediately to see if there was any truth to the rumor, to judge for himself if
I had lost any weight.
I
didn't think it was entirely my fault.
Sure, I was a pig. But I
was always in the kitchen and there was never a shortage of great food. It didn't matter that if I had my
choice I'd be alone somewhere in a quiet place, in the country, at the library,
or in my own room if I had one.
Privacy and Italians didn't mix. But I did have the cellar stairs. It was there I'd run to escape the task
of grating cheese whenever the banana boat dumped a new shipment of hungry
Italians at my door. The tales
about Italians kissing endlessly are not true--my fainting would quickly stop
the flow of affection. With
practice, I learned to pass out five times daily.
My
toilet training suffered a three year delay because of long bathroom
lines. I'm not complaining. The extra weight I carried convinced
relatives to hug my sister. Maria
always received warm expressions from the family; her manners were
instinctive. She would help our
visitors drink their wine when no one was looking. While I cleaned the kitchen, she sang "Santa Lucia"
to Uncle Anthony. Maria was thin
enough to walk through a room without asking the company to brace
themselves. My mother bragged
because she folded her underwear.
Maria
was asked to perform in a tap dancing recital the same day I was asked to turn
in my cleats. I locked myself in
the bathroom so I wouldn't have to look at her thin legs. First I draped a towel over my head and
pretended to be a nun. I looked
good without hair.
"Ma,
get her out of the bathroom. She's
only in there because she has to set the table."
Viciously,
I wished the horror of horrors upon her.
I wanted her to split her pants when she didn't have a sweater to tie on
her hips. The thought of her going
through life without ever walking backwards disturbed me.
Food was my number one priority. I was four-foot ten, one hundred and ninety pounds; Maria was prettier by comparison. No matter what my family tried to do to scare me into losing weight, I couldn't stop myself from eating. So there was Maria, the oldest girl, me, Gina, or more often called, "the fat one," and finally the adorable, twin boys, Mario and Marco.
My
brothers were probably considered saints already, since they were boys and got
to pass on the Pioricci name.
Their genders excused them from any kind of work whatsoever. They didn't make their own beds. They didn't pick up their own
toys. They hardly ever flushed the toilet.
Michael, Dad, Kathy, Me, Mom, and Larry
11:56 P.M.
Three
cannolis and half a grain pie was all I could nonchalantly carry out of the
kitchen, but passing through the living room got me an arm load. I ate a quarter loaf of Aunt Marietta's
sausage bread standing with my ear to the cellar door, waiting for the
countdown. I could hear dancing
feet above my head, and as long as there was room to dance in the living room,
I knew no one was ready to take the New Year seriously. I finished my cannolis and wondered why
some girls got to be dancers and some girls got to be blimps. I devoured the rest of my Hershey bars
waiting to figure that one out.
"Gina,
it's time!" I could hear my
father yell to me.
I
moved as close as I could get to the living room.
12:00 A.M.
Everything
became a blur of lips and arms, kisses and hugs, shrieking and crying, pinching
and praying--until I saw Maria.
"Lose
some weight this year," she scowled.
But luckily my father had heard.
"Maria
it's a holiday. Be nice to your
sister," he ordered.
Maria
always grinned when she was in trouble. She
was proof that our family had no bad genetics, nothing that doctors could blame
on my parents as a root cause of my fat.
"You
help me with the coffee," my father said to me, depositing kisses on my
head. And then when we were out of
earshot, he tried his best to comfort me.
"It's
baby fat, Gina. It goes
away."
When I combined my father's optimism with my knowledge of Catholic miracles, I was certain I'd wake up one day, a perfect size seven, with hair the color of creamed-corn, and skin as smooth as his bowling ball.
2:00 A.M.
From my bed I could hear the sounds of my aunts, uncles, and cousins traveling the long staircase home. I was grateful they lived upstairs. They were faithful. And I was relieved they didn't drive. That home-made wine could make Uncle Rollo cry over his dead Italian donkey; I was sure it would cause a few crashes.
"Gina,
when you become a nun, you'll have to drink wine," my mother told me every
time I refused the designated lunch beverage for the under-sixteen crowd, half
red wine, half Seven-Up.
Although my family was very quick to admit to a complete lack of academic understanding, they never once questioned their ability or right to predict a completely dismal future for me. I was fat and suspicious of our Italian culture. I could cook. I could clean. But my heart wasn't in it. And while my cousins were busy trying to sneak more sips of alcohol from their parents I was trying not to make faces while the wine was ruining the taste of my breadsticks...
New Years Eve Essay
Written in the mid 90s
My lack of enthusiasm for New Year’s Eve had been blamed on my James Taylor albums, my dates, my lack of dates, and my general inability to stay awake past eleven on a weeknight. My problem was not genetic. It was generational.
My parents’ New Year’s Eve parties were legendary. They lasted a minimum of forty-eight hours, and stretched over every square foot of our six-room home to contain the extended family. From our doorway, you could barely see across the clump of folding chairs to the paper tablecloth that held obscene amounts of appetizers: trays of pepperoni and nitrified meats, cheese, breads, cookies, and the big coffee urn. Cigarette smoke as thick as melted mozzarella cast a soft-focus fog on the kitchen, which made it nearly impossible to discern one relative from the other—such was the similarity of our appearances.
A skilled domestic bred into this environment, I grated cheese, rolled meatballs, pressed cookies, filled ice buckets, emptied ashtrays and couldn’t squeeze out of the kitchen even if I hadn’t been shackled by my gender to the stove. I listened to stories through the six or seven conversations being verbally spiked from wall to wall, some monologue, some dialogue, each with its own lot, passion, and moral. Quiet gatherings were cultural anathema, and what was loud for others was standard dinner chatter for us. It was evident these chosen inheritors of Italy’s great operatic vocal chords exercised them without inhibition, without taking turns, and without any orchestrally polite dips in volume. It was a melodious chaos of highs, peaks, and laughter blasts generated by at least a dozen women in housecoats, men yelling directions at the women in housecoats, cousins raising the volume on the television to drown out the yelling and the periodic pounding on the only bathroom door, the ceaseless ringing of the phone and doorbell—all of this a grand prelude to the accordions, guitars, tambourines, noisemakers, and bilingual sing along yet to begin.
Sure, the police came. They were unaccustomed to this degree of noise generated by happiness, for such thunderings were infinitely more common to domestic disputes, hockey games, or heavy metal concerts. One meal, and we knew they’d be back next year. The cuisine was unsurpassed at inducing gluttony in even the most conscientious dieter. My father, a mathematician by nature, took a normal Sunday dinner for six, multiplied it by the number of guests we were expecting, and factored in the sale price of lasagna pans to arrive at an amount ten times over what we would need to feed the entire population of New Jersey. If the surplus pleased my parents, the geometric array of bubbling disposable pans and trays upon our beat-up holiday table thrilled them. So what if the tomato sauce aroma was enough to kill the last remaining scent of the Christmas tree, and the pots were so large and so full you practically needed a jack to raise them from the stove? This was the way you threw a party.
The joyous atmosphere perplexed me. I could see celebrating Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter. I understood the importance of birthdays, First Communions, Confirmations, name days, First Fridays, Holy Days of Obligation, Halloween, and the political correctness of attending the last annual birthday parties of our ageing great aunts and uncles. I could not grasp how the turn of a calendar page could inspire such merriment.
Even as I conceived of these cynical wonderings, I had to weave them through the bending choruses of “Volare,” “Happy Days Are Here Again,” “Santa Lucia,” and “Take Me Back to Hoboken.” It was inevitable that one day I see a less exaggerated perspective of the New Year beyond the reverberating walls of my home. This was the commitment I fashioned as Guy Lombardo and his tasseled-hatted audience fox-trotted across the white television screen, and dissolved into live video from Times Square.
When the ball had descended, and my hearing once again been reduced by the merciless bangings, blowings, and shakings, I had to kiss my way through the room. So much drinking had occurred, no one remembered who they had kissed, so usually, another round or two was distributed for luck. One by one, they hugged and kissed even the unfamiliar faces still entering. No one bothered with the doorbell after eleven. Acquaintances, neighbors, and friends of friends simply poured in.
After years of these celebrations, my expectations for a modern, American New Year’s party were high. I could only imagine how wonderful it would be to embrace the culture of my own age group.
A fugitive from Little Italy, I at last began to experience quieter celebrations, like the year I went to Times Square. I attended formal parties, dance parties, money’s-no-object parties, parties for people who had no party to attend, non-parties of people in denial of the New Year, other people’s favorite parties, Hippie parties, Yuppie parties, and movie marathon parties. There was mostly unabashed complaining about marriage, money, politicians, and corporate calamities, which climaxed with a diary of depressing events. It was worse than reading a newspaper.
If you could ignore the whining commentary about the unpalatable food, watered-down drinks, off-key entertainment, parking fees, lack of service and general disgust with the human race as a whole, perhaps a good time could have been had by some. Not by me. I had grown up in the center of an ethnic civilization, where first-generation Italians were still stunned by their good fortune at having made a life in America. I knew what was going on at home. While I spent my dismal holiday with acquaintances who bemoaned their lack of possessions, my parents were dancing the tarantella, splashing champagne on the ceiling, and feeding people they had never met. Had they gone out to celebrate, they never would have overheard the complaints on the dance floor, or noticed the shredded glass on the city streets near Times Square. They would only have seen things as they could one day be. They were in America where all things were possible.
As I grew older, the family New Years’ parties diminished, and my parents’ lives ended. But the beauty of their optimism stayed with me, like the family recipes, and the guitar they put in my hands. Life was worth celebrating, each calendar day to be treasured. And through my hazy recollection of the thunderous midnight cheering, amid the fading strains of “Auld Lang Syne,” I can almost hear them shouting, “This year we’ll win the million. Then we’ll have a real party.”
