Fairy Tale Interrupted by Rosemarie Terenzio

Author:Rosemarie Terenzio
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Bronx (New York, Rich & Famous, N.Y.)
ISBN: 9781439187678
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2012-01-24T05:00:00+00:00

At my parents’ house a day later, I couldn’t wait to share my good fortune. Christmas was one of the only harmonious times in our house. In fact, our home during the holidays was the best place to be—safe and comfortable and full of the scent of an amazing feast cooking in the kitchen.

Christmas preparations started a month in advance, with my mom planning the menu for the twenty or so family members who often showed up for dinner (the only “outsider” ever invited for Christmas Eve dinner was Frank). After my mother had settled on her long list of dishes, she scoured the Italian grocery stores on Morris Park Avenue, smelling each fish suspiciously, tasting each hunk of cheese, squeezing tomatoes, haranguing owners for the freshest ingredients, and then revamping her menu to reflect the best she could buy.

The traditional Italian Christmas Eve meal of seven fish courses was challenging to prepare—even for someone as tough as my mom. Beginning a week beforehand, my mom made every single dish from scratch, with exacting standards that could drive a sous-chef/daughter crazy. But Christmas wasn’t Christmas in the Terenzio household unless we went to mass at 6:00 p.m., followed by a late feast of shrimp and calamari in tomato sauce, baked clams, spaghetti with clam sauce, smelt pie, and so on.

I walked through the door the morning of Christmas Eve and immediately took in the aroma: the entire house smelled of fish. In the kitchen, my mom was hunched over the sink, shucking clams with a special knife. Newspapers covered the floor to soak up the fish juice that splattered during the intense preparations. The briny fragrance of a bowl filled with tiny silver fish—that my mother had spent hours cleaning—mixed with the tang of raw garlic on a cutting board and with the perfume of rich tomato sauce bubbling in a big pot on the stove.

After my mom leaned away from the sink to give me a kiss, I washed my hands and set to work. She shucked the clams and cut up the meat, and I combined the chopped-up clams with oregano, parsley, olive oil, and bread crumbs and stuffed the mixture into the cleaned shells.

“Not too many bread crumbs,” my mom said to me more than once. “You want to taste the clams. Not too much.”

With the clams in the oven, I slipped out of the kitchen. My dad was watching TV in his chair, and my heart squeezed at the big smile that spread across his face when I walked into the room. Life had never been easy for my parents, but the last couple of years were especially difficult. Having no money is hard. Having no money and getting old is harder.

I sat down in the love seat next to his chair, called my mom in from the kitchen, and handed him an envelope. “I want to give you guys my Christmas gift a little early,” I said.

My dad looked up at me questioningly, and then took out the two-thousand-dollar check in his name.

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