The Way Life Should Be by Kline Christina Baker

Author:Kline, Christina Baker [Kline, Christina Baker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-06-01T05:00:00+00:00

“Yes.” Long silence. “What about you? Will you be staying year-round?”

Now I’m the reticent one. “Umm, well, I don’t know. Basically my life fell apart, and here I am.”

“Yeah, that’s my story, too,” she says, smiling. She seems relieved by my frankness.

Another knock on the door, and soon the little house is full of people: Tom-the-woodworker and Lance-the-ex and Eileen-the-gray-braided-librarian. Tom and Eileen clutch bottles of wine, and Lance holds a six-pack of Mug root beer.

“Nice place,” Tom says, eyeing the room.

“Why, thank you,” says Lance.

“Are you being sarcastic?” I ask. “It’s a wreck.”

Tom grins. “I like wrecks. I like—potential.”

Once everyone has settled in, I usher them to my rickety table. Earlier in the day, Flynn brought over three discarded metal chairs to add to my three flea-market finds, and we crowd around the table as Flynn opens Eileen’s red zinfandel and doles it out in wineglasses I bought at Marden’s. “I can’t pretend to be a real chef,” I say by way of welcome. Flynn gives me a what the fuck?! look, and I amend my approach. “But I think I might be able to show you a few things.”

I talk about how I grew up peeling potatoes and kneading dough in my grandmother’s kitchen while she told stories from her past, from Italy. My grandparents’ village of Matera, in a region now known as Basilicata, was a place of cucina povera, the cuisine of poverty. They lived in houses with wood-burning hearths where the women baked their own bread, grew tomatoes in the backyard, made mozzarella from goat’s milk, picked olives off the trees to marinate in oils and spices. But the land was parched and rocky. Wine was cheaper than water. Flour was so scarce that even the bread was poor. My grandparents were called terrone—of the land, a term Italians from the north used to describe the other Italy, southern Italians, whom they considered crude, uncultured, ignorant.

In hard times my grandparents learned to live with hunger; they made soup from root vegetables, salads from bitter herbs. They ate stale bread soaked in water and olive oil. Each family had one pig a year, which they rationed carefully, using every scrap to make the spicy sausage of the region called lucania, the garlicky pressed salami called soppressata, the pezzente, or beggars’ salami made of the least desirable parts. They made lard from the pig and flavored it with peperoncino, small pickled peppers, then stored it in jars to use for cooking or to spread on bread.

As I talk, I rub garlic between my palms to remove the stubborn papery husk. I pass around an ordinary plum tomato, explaining, as my grandmother explained to me, that while it might be as waxy and tasteless as a raw potato, its dense heft makes it the best kind for sauce. Though the tomato is familiar to everyone, my guests handle it as if they’ve never seen one before, examining its eggy shape and weight, nestling it in their hands. With

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