Free Crazy in the Kitchen by Louise DeSalvo Page A

showed he did not write his name often.
    The pass was useless. By the time this perquisite was issued to him, he was too sick to travel. And by the end of 1949, he
     was dead.

SLINGSHOT
    I am sitting at my grandparents' kitchen table in Hoboken. My grandfather and I are drinking our wine (mine diluted with water)
     and eating lupini beans for a snack. I love peeling the covering from the bean, love popping the bean into my mouth. I love
     its salty softness. Love that my grandfather lets me eat as many as I want, as messily as I want; love that he lets me pile
     my lupini beans in front of me on the oilcloth-covered table without telling me to put them on my plate.
    The time is during World War II. My father is in the Pacific. My grandparents take care of me often. They live right next
     door to my mother and me, our apartments connected by a toilet.
    Whenever my grandfather takes care of me, he gives me wine mixed with water. He drinks his wine; I drink mine. (In high school,
     I will be the girl who drinks too much at parties. The girl who drinks so much that I can't remember who took me home. The
     girl who drinks so much that I often pass out on the way home— once, in the middle of a four-lane highway.)
    My grandfather tells me stories, in dialect. Sometimes he tells me what I think are stories about where he used to live. Sometimes
     he tells me stories about my mother when she was a child. Sometimes he tells me about what is happening in the world right
     now. Some of what he says, I understand. Some I don't. Words, phrases, sentences get through to me; then, suddenly, and always
     when the story gets interesting, I'm lost. But because I can't speak dialect, and he can't understand English, I can't tell
     him to repeat what he says, to slow down. So I can't be sure, now, if my memories of what he told me are pure, or if they
     are riddled with my own interpolations, and so part fabrication. I nod to keep him talking, nod as if I understand. I am sleepy
     from the wine, but not yet sleeping, and I fill in the blanks in my grandfather's stories. Soon, I will want to sleep. And
     will sleep, until my mother comes back. In the middle of my grandparents' feather bed. Under a giant cross with Jesus bleeding.
    During the war, my mother welcomes my grandparents' help raising me. Whatever my stepgrandmother wasn't— warm, tender, congenial—
     she made up for by her brusque competence in caring for children.
    I remember my grandmother's no-nonsense way of washing me, remember how she sang Italian songs as she cared for me, though
     she was not singing to me. I remember wandering into my grandparents' apartment, where I would be given small treats— a few
     almonds to nibble, a crust of homemade bread with honey, a hard biscuit. When my grandmother watched me, she sometimes played
     with me, though never when my mother was around. A game of patty-cake, cat's cradle, peekaboo.
    While my father was away, I don't remember my grandmother and my mother fighting. My mother was happy to be near her father,
     whom she adored. And with my father gone, my mother had less to do, so she tolerated my grandmother's ways— how she ate cockles
     with a safety pin; how she rarely changed her clothes or washed; how she never combed her hair; how she didn't love my mother
     (though she seemed to love me).
    If my mother came home, and found me drunk, she'd be angry. But my grandfather never stopped giving me watered-down wine.
     And my mother never stopped leaving me with him.
    On this day, my grandfather tells me that I will go to school when I'm older. And that, when I go to school, I should be a
     good girl.
    He looks out the window as he talks. Stops talking. Gestures for me to be quiet. Takes the slingshot he keeps on the windowsill,
     a stone from the assortment he keeps in a small dish. Slowly, carefully, he leans out the window.
    There is a pigeon perched on our neighbor's clothesline, not far from the open window. Many of our