"One time, your Nanny and Poppa came to pick me up and he reached back and slapped her across the face."
"Why?" I asked my mother's cousin who I call Aunt Marie.
"She didn't answer him quick enough," Aunt Marie explained matter-of-factly.
My Aunt Marie told me this Thanksgiving night, the evening before I turned thirty-two years old, when Nanny and Poppa had been gone for three years. Cancer had ushered them to their graves, eight months apart--Nanny first and then Poppa. She knew he had bought the grave next to her and during her demise she lamented, "I don't want to be dead next to him." Though I never witnessed Poppa's violence, rarely told stories like the one my mom's cousin shared helped me to understand Nanny's deadpan comment.
Today, when I recall hearing this story I picture Nanny and Poppa in a 1950s ice-blue Thunderbird convertible with the top down. I envision Nanny, alone in the car; no one else is with her. She has a gossamer silk scarf around her set hair and because I was told Poppa reached back, I imagine her in the back seat. I want to take my pretty, quick-witted Nanny away to someplace safe. In my fantasy, she wears bright red lipstick and looks like an Italian-American version of one of the Andrews Sisters and I dream of getting her to a safe place where she will be her relaxed self after she undoes her scarf and sits down next to me in a field with soft, green grass. But I cannot re-write this moment.
When Aunt Marie shared her memory of my grandparents, I was sitting in her kitchen in Rome, New York alongside one of my older brothers in a railroad house that had an attic apartment, which was home to one of Nanny's older sisters, and since the tiny house was filled with company, my mom and dad stayed at a nearby hotel. Because my parents weren't present, Aunt Marie felt at ease sharing this story with me. She knew I was trying to understand my family better and why my mother rarely spoke of her upbringing.
Now, seven years later, two days before Thanksgiving, three days before my thirty-ninth birthday, I have been taking stock of my life's journey and was reminded of this night and what Aunt Marie shared. What triggered this recollection? A professional development session at my job in Bucamaranga, Colombia. I teach English, one of four teachers to ninth- and tenth-grade students who possess varying levels of bilingual fluency in Spanish and English. I was the only female other than the conference presenter, a textbook company representative whose native tongue was Spanish and second language English.
On a projection screen our facilitator shared a pedagogical activity called "fishing," and in response a male colleague, our department chair, said, "It's not how deep you fish, it's how you wiggle your worm. Isn't that right, Doug?" he added as he moved his right elbow back and forth like a vaudevillian comedian, intimating a yuckity-yuck. Although this moment is not comparable to the violence that I now know Nanny endured throughout her life, I thought later that day when I reflected on it, because I was certain that this joke was meant to make me, the woman with three master's degrees in the room feel uncomfortable. And I decided my response to this action was apt. What I did following this incident was done for Nanny and my mom to pay tribute to the fact that I am the first woman on my mother's side of the family to go away, to travel far beyond New York State, and to attend a four-year college, though these accomplishments pale in comparison to the wherewithal I imagine Nanny needed to endure life with an explosive spouse.
Since this joke struck me as distasteful, to pay tribute to my own hard work and the generations before me, I responded by standing up and saying, "I don't have to listen to that." Our presenter didn't get the intended innuendo and looked surprised when I stood up.
As I walked toward the door to leave, the joke-teller ridiculed me saying, "Lighten-up," with disgust in his voice and the erect posture of a cobra about to strike.
"I will be sure to include that in my writing," I said before I left, and on my way out I bumped into my principal who was at the door just at that moment, and so I told him why I was leaving.
When I left for South America four months ago, I was warned about the machismo of Latino men, but so far the men who are native to my new home have been cordial towards me. The men in this meeting were all North American, and maybe a woman from a different culture or family may have laughed but I didn't.
The comment, "Lighten up," hit me like a verbal slap. Now I don't suggest that because I am a woman I am immune to anger and violent reactions. There are two men I can think of that I have slapped when I felt disrespected, and I apologized and knew my actions were not okay. I don't know how Nanny felt and I cannot appropriate her experience, but I felt that my gender was disrespected in the meeting room at my job for no reason in particular. I wish I could say this was the first time I had heard such commentary in the workplace or among co-ed groups and supposed equals, but it is not. I was mocked for daring to speak up, and Nanny was hit for not speaking soon enough.
Carrie Anne Tocci is a writer whose poems have appeared in Women's Studies Quarterly, First Intensity, and Barrow Street. Her prose (fiction and nonfiction) has been accepted for publication in journals such as Bravado and The Journal of Italian Americana.
