Read Online Only in Naples by Katherine Wilson - Free Book Online Page B

scrumptious
scaloppine,
little carafe of wine, and
Buon appetito, signorina:
I’d be left to my own devices at mealtimes.
    Most of the time, I ended up at the Avallones’. “What have you planned for your dinner?” Raffaella or Salva would ask me on the weekends, when lunch was over and I suggested that it was time for me to go back to my apartment. If I didn’t answer, with conviction,
“Pasta e fagioli!”
or
“Zuppa di ceci!”
—if I hesitated in any way, they would look at each other knowingly. Six hours later I would be sitting next to Benedetta with her teddy bear pajamas devouring Raffaella’s lasagna.
    It would have been unheard of for a Neapolitan girl to sleep in her boyfriend’s room at his parents’ house at the age of twenty-two. But the rules seemed to be different for an
americana.
The American women that Italians saw on TV may not have jiggled their stuff on prime-time game shows, but they certainly were promiscuous. In addition, I was from a culture where parents would send their daughter to live and work alone, on another continent, right after college! The Avallones would never have had the presumption to tell me what I was allowed and not allowed to do.
    On holidays and weekends, I would find a cot prepared by Raffaella in Salva’s room. I accepted the plan: If the Avallones weren’t hung up on propriety, why should I be? (“
Non si fa così,
” I heard the housekeeper, a middle-aged woman from central Naples, mumble as she remade my cot one morning. Nunzia Gatti echoed the priest at the boarding school: that’s not the way it’s done. Apparently, my sleeping in Salva’s room didn’t bother the Avallones, but it certainly bothered their maid.)
    “I’m renting a new place,” I told Cynthia and my other co-workers at the Consulate. I was grown-up and independent, I wanted them to know. There were two months left of my internship and I didn’t want to publicize the fact that I’d basically moved in with my new boyfriend’s parents. Or that, when left alone, I didn’t know how to eat.
    I can do this,
I would tell myself on the rare occasions that I cooked in my new apartment. The kitchen was tiny and attracted fruit flies. Hungry, I would open the refrigerator to find nothing. So I’d boil water for some spaghetti, open a can of tomatoes, and then open the refrigerator again, to find that there was still nothing. I learned that it wasn’t a great idea to start cooking when I was starved, because that’s when my mind embraced dubious mathematical calculations like: If Raffaella’s
ragù
simmers over a very low flame for eight hours, it stands to reason that I can let my tomato sauce boil over an extremely
hot
flame for twenty minutes.
    As a recovering binger, I had another problem: After years of all-or-nothing eating, it was really hard to know what a “normal” amount of food was when I cooked for myself. I would stare at the pack of spaghetti and wonder if I should boil two noodles or the whole thing. Any amount seemed too much or too little. I needed an Italian woman to sit me down, slow me down, keep me company, and show me what and how much to eat.
    I felt that it was important for me to say
no, grazie
every once in a while to the baked gnocchi or
pizza fritta
that Raffaella was making at the Avallones’. I needed to affirm my independence, after all. But as I tasted the spaghetti that I prepared for myself, soupy and insipid, I had to wonder, who was I kidding?

I was in a flannel robe on the Avallones’ living room sofa one evening watching a horrendously dubbed version of
Diff’rent Strokes
when I heard,
“Egoista! Sei un egoista!”
    Benedetta was screaming. Nino was booming. Salvatore and his mother were trying to make peace. All four of them were in Nino and Raffaella’s bedroom with the door closed.
Egoista,
Benedetta was calling her father, and though I didn’t know exactly what that word meant, I knew that it had to be something pretty bad.
    The suffix