The pictures flashed in her mind as clear and colorful as those in a high-gloss magazine spread. Her hand could barely keep up with the pencil careening over her notebooks. It raced across the page, trying to manifest those visions, with the frantic energy of a child leaping to catch the swinging string of a beloved balloon before it floats up into the clouds, forever out of reach.
Carmela looked back down into the pan, lifted out the full mold, and squeezed out the excess liquid. Then she placed it upon the stone ledge by the back wall and topped it with a circular piece of sanded wood and a slab of granite to press the ricotta down into shape.
“Love a man with appetite, Mari’!” Lucia boomed, breaking into laughter. The fat of her arms jiggled. “I could feed half the town with this left tit. Given up on the right, the little devil almost bit her off, I told him straight—you bite me one more time and I’ll bite you like the wickedest donkey on the farm and you’ll know it, all right.”
“He’s two months old, Lucia. . . .” Maria said, reaching back down into the warm pan.
“You got to be strong to a man, Mari’, or he’ll walk all over you. Mark my words, Carmela—you fill a shirt and have a waist as narrow as a new olive—best listen to your Zia Lucia before your fiancé fills you with ideas!”
To Carmela, Maria was strength personified. Her mother never tired but devoted herself to the work of providing for her family with a very private, near religious ardor. There was not a minute in the day when her mother’s hands lay idle. Even in the deep quiet of the afternoon, her fingers would be racing over some skirt or shirt to be mended. From the time the sun rose, her mother glided from one task to the next with a grace that Carmela could not even begin to imagine imitating. When Tomas exploded over the hot topic of any particular day, Maria listened, unswerving, letting his rancor wash over her like water, suffusing his steam with wordless patience, neither intimidated nor defiant. If that was not strength, then what was?
Lucia threw her head back when she laughed, sung like no one was listening, cared little for what anyone thought of her. She would jump up and twirl at the first sound of music; life danced through her. She told Peppe what she thought and could scream into a fight at the slightest provocation. She drove her truck to and from the local markets, unafraid of the rough roads, happy to roll up her sleeves and fiddle with the engine as needed. She appeared to be her husband’s equal. Her childhood began in the orphanage, but Lucia refused to let life swallow her up. She was a survivor.
But was all this passion, this vociferous philosophizing over the battle to be won, a testimony to strength? Wasn’t finding the beauty in the everyday rhythms of life, committing with an open heart to one man and the children he helped a woman bear without jostling for control, true strength? Wasn’t this the faith that everything was built on? After all, Carmela thought, how ridiculous it was for humans to fight off God’s plan, succumbing to the illusion of control. Why then, in that very union of marriage, made under God’s eyes, was control so important? Was not this grappling ungodly? Sinful, even? How far could love take you if, in the end, it was a battleground? Few years had passed since everyone agreed that the futility and horror of war was not to be forgotten or repeated. Why, then, invite it into your own home?
It seemed to Carmela that striving to put a man in his place was a refusal to acknowledge that different members of a household had different roles. Although Tomas would scream and shout over the tiniest detail, it was Maria who held the domestic reins. It was she who saw that everything ran like the well-fitting cogs of a flour mill. A church was not built with two steeples. Was the tiny gold crucifix upon the altar any less important than the tall spire? A family, like a church, is built over time, each new member drawing and feeding strength to those who came before, like the construction of Simius’s gold-tipped cathedral, which rose up toward the stars, brick by brick, over decades.
Carmela did not want to think she’d ever stand up to her fiancé, Franco. The playful anarchy of Lucia’s home was entertaining and joyous, from afar, but Carmela longed for the delicate treasure of a home and a marriage honed with care, gentleness, and devotion. How could she stand beside Franco at the altar if she believed the reality of their life together would be a constant wrangling of wills? Lucia lived for this, fought hard for the thrill of winning every little argument with her husband.
Carmela had never played like this with Franco. Their love began in a blush. A sideways look from beneath the mottled shade of a cherry tree. Carmela and her siblings were helping her father with the harvest, along with several aunts and uncles. That June’s heat had lacked the oppressive beams of August or the scorch of July. A breeze blew. The children and adults sang, making the plentiful work light. Against the cloudless blue of early summer, Franco caught her eye. Of course they had known each other since they crawled the dirt of their farms, but that day it felt as if they had met each other for the first time. His face had creased into a mischievous grin. It was as if he could read the playfulness inside her, which she denied herself. The firstborn, studious apprentice to her godmother had little time for distractions. And yet.
Later that afternoon, as they waddled the weight of the luscious red berries in their heaving baskets, he’d spoken to her about his dreams. He had ambition. His eyes lit up when he talked about his soon-to-be burgeoning empire. He spoke like a prince, not a whisper of doubt in his voice about his trajectory toward wealth and responsibility. That’s how it had felt that day, when his eyes lingered on hers past the end of sentences, between thoughts, in the silences percussed only with the crunch of their feet on the hot earth. To a sixteen-year-old Carmela, it was all she could do not to think that he had just met the most beautiful woman in the world. In his eyes she saw the future. It was bright. Filled with possibility. And freedom—an intoxicating promise of something beyond her own world.
Floating through these memories now felt like a half-remembered dream. Her thoughts hovered in the narrow space between sleep and waking. It was nearly impossible to know if any of them had happened at all. Perhaps Franco had only been that sixteen-year-old for one day. Perhaps it had taken all these seasons since for Carmela to realize that he might never have been that boy at all. Like her aunts always said, “Sun and fruit remove sight.”
She had felt as if he once had the power to offer her something different from the certainty of small-town life. But as the days passed, it became harder to ignore the little voice in her head whispering that this was little more than her own brittle illusion, stitching made in haste without a knot at the end of the thread. Over time, his ambition had begun to curdle into a stubbornness of someone beyond his years. His excitement about the future ebbed into a subtle paranoia that he may not have the responsibility and riches gifted to him. There were other siblings whom his father adored more. In place of his breezy swagger germinated the near imperceptible seeds of bitterness and jealousy. He was a slightly bruised cherry—altered but little, yet marred nonetheless. Carmela wiped a tiny wisp of hair from her face with the back of her hand, and with that these fruitless shoots of thoughts.
Lucia rolled the last squeeze of dough into a final gnocchetto. Her impatient hands rested for a moment, till the one that wasn’t cradling the baby swirled through the air to punctuate her speech. “One good thing about milking—I don’t have to put up with the curse every month.”
Maria looked up from the pan. Her cheeks had returned to their vanilla white.
“Tit’s out again!” Peppe exclaimed, striding in to fill a glass with water from a terra-cotta jug.
“Just jealous it’s not for you,” Lucia answered, without missing a beat.
“They’re the mismatched mountains of the North.”
“You and me, more like!”
Carmela watched her aunt and uncle chuckle, wondering if she too would dance around her husband like this after six
