Mom's Spitzioli
Humming along like a violent boil; willing it better.
Her spitzioli was my all time favorite– a near flavorless spaghetti dish she hand-made just for my picky ass self. She hovered over the pot catering to my need for sweet, pasty beige foods.
I was uniquely particular compared to the other children in the home– foods must be white. And never touching. The only color I allowed at the kitchen table was found in pouring colorful glue onto paper, folding it half and pulling it apart again, revealing a perfectly saturated, symmetrical butterfly. I was entranced watching the colors swirl together– not unlike the spaghetti noodles becoming entangled as they slid from the box into a pot of humming, boiling water.
It always surprises me, remembering her smiling and humming along as she poured the milk into the pot of bland, bare noodles. Sometimes she would even sing to me while she did it, “Madison, bo-badison, go-gladison, fe-fi-fo-fadison, MADISON!!” I loved when she would sing– one of the only times she would let herself be untamed, revealing much of the muchness she so often contained like an emotional corset.
Although she was never known to be a great cook, there was something so natural about being in there together. Her, cooking. Me, creating. In a perfect chemistry. Me, lost in my art, giving off an air of ambivalence, living in my own world. (I knew even at 7 that I could stay close to the adult conversations– close to her– without being detected if I seemed as scrambled as her).
It’s hard to tell what is a memory and what's a fantasy. They say each time you recall a memory, you rewrite it in your own mind. I do wonder how much of my own narrative I’ve constructed; perhaps even lacquered over for the sake of keeping it pristine, subdued and polished. We remember what we want to remember.
No matter how much re-writing of a narrative on the cognitive level, they say your body always remembers the truth of it. The truth of how you really experienced it, that is. Despite what glistening memories linger.
My body still wakes in the night, terrified, but my mind remembers her smiling. Laughing. Cracking an egg into the pot secretly, thinking she was hiding it from me with a hefty dousing of parmesan cheese just so I’d get in my protein. I remember the truth of glitter stuck to the gooey glue on the vinyl tablecloth. I’d peel it off and collect the little chips like prized coins while half-heartedly eating my spitzioli with the other hand. I’d watch the rest of the family eat their spaghetti with a meaty red sauce.
I would never.
Mom catered to me in a way she didn’t with the other kids. There were lots of reasons for this— all justifiable in my 7 year old brain. I was “different than the other kids,” she said. Although family members often balked at how she talked to me like a little adult, spouting advice at her like “You shouldn’t answer all her questions” and “Maddie shouldn’t be allowed to eat spitzioli, or ramen, or cream cheese sandwiches for every meal.”
Mom didn’t listen.
She would whip me up an all white buttery-parmesan plate of tangled pasta. Lucky for her the foods I loved most were cheap, she could feed me using only the budget-friendly essentials she could buy from WIC.
She was scrappy like that, and they weren’t around when this was the only option— when it was just the two of us tangled together.
She was the kind of resourceful only a single mother who cleans houses would be. Putting all her budgeted cash in organized envelopes alongside her checkbook. Each one labeled with the category on the front. On Sundays she balanced her checkbook at that same kitchen table, and on Fridays she would take herself out for a treat; a rarity for someone who spent nothing on her joy. She was simple that way.
Sometimes she’d treat herself to lunch and a candy from the dollar store. The same place she’d take us before we’d catch a matinee at the discount Palace Theater, stock-piling her purse to the brim with $1 candies, getting high on sneaking them in. I always got Junior Mints. I often found the evidence of one of her solo excursions on the way to dance class, when I’d spot a crumpled up Charleston Chew wrapper in the side compartment of the car door, next to the cigarettes she only smoked when we weren’t around. (She swore they weren’t hers). Other times she’d treat herself by splurging at a thrift store where we had family credit. Every now and then she’d find something really special, like that blue summertime jumper she wore into the ground– the one with the white daisies. It looked like a skirt, but was actually shorts. It made her red hair and freckles pop.
If I was lucky she’d pull me out of school in secret and treat me. A simple $8 spend on an orange chicken lunch in the mall and a stroll around Limited Too. She never did that for the others. “Don’t tell dad where you got those jeans.” I became her prized secret keeper. A role I took seriously even at 7, relishing in my maturity.
Her favorite Friday splurge were the all white sneakers she’d only buy every few years. When money was abundant, or if she’d tucked enough tips from her clients aside in her lingerie drawer, she’d buy herself crisp white New Balances without it showing up in the checking account. Like secrets, shoes were a thing in our house– mom wanted us to keep them looking nice, often buying ours 2 sizes too big and stuffing cotton balls into the toes of ‘em, for us “to grow into.”
She kept her sneakers pristine for years after purchase, washing them in the kitchen sink using a concoction of sudzy dawn, powdered toilet bowl cleaner and an old bristly toothbrush. When she was done, she’d lay them on the porch for that Missouri country sun to dry out completely. She then would stamp them bright white with what can only be described as white-out for shoes– a hand-held bingo stamp with shoe paint inside. If you cleaned them well enough, you could prevent the white paint crusting off in layers in the months to come.
Mom grew up in a shoe-box of a house full of foster children coming and going. Her dad, gratefully dead before I was born, was a foster child himself and apparently had an obsession with keeping little ones in the house. She’d often tell stories of her parents giving her clothes and toys and sometimes her bed to the kids who revolved through their open door. Mom knew how to hold things close and keep them pristine. “No matter how poor you are, you’re never too poor for a bar of soap,” she’d say, as if to pass some secret wisdom down from her own mother.
Her approach to mothering us was similar.
Perhaps she thought if she took this kind of active approach to polishing everything the same way she polished those damn shoes, maybe she could make our family shine?Maybe, with enough scrubbing and painting, she could lacquer over what was happening at home. Maybe if she just stirred in the right ingredients we’d gobble the story down. Maybe we wouldn’t notice the distance in her eyes— the distance I only now see when I watch family videos back.
That was the year my step-sister Brittany came to live with us, the year after my half-sister Shayna was born, the year after Phil, my step-dad, had convinced Mom to move to the country, far away from her family. Mom must have had it hard because on top of it all, Shayna screamed through the night for over a year.
Phil, or “Buddy” as I called him, was mom’s charismatic new husband– Brittany and Shayna’s real dad. I called him Buddy, because I already had a Daddy, even if he didn’t live with us anymore.
Buddy was on a one way track of upward mobility, coming from an immigrant father and inheriting the family HVAC business. He was a rebel child, an x-gang member who only stopped selling cocaine right before he met mom... or maybe it was right after. I was 9 months old then. At a whopping 5 foot 5, he walked like he was 10 feet tall, never once concealing his own muchness— perhaps even exaggerating and embellishing it a bit. Based on my observations, mom had a tendency to hide behind the muchness of others, downplaying her own as if she was lucky to be noticed by someone charismatic at all. Once, on our secret dates she told me he was the best she could do cuz “no one would ever love her like he does.”
Buddy had a gang tattoo on his left hand; one he had to cover with gloves when he went to St. Louis for work no matter the weather. I asked many times but he never tell me what it meant. I know he had to earn it, and it was the reason he still brought a gun into the city. I’d remember this fact any time I saw his gun in the knife drawer… it made my stomach feel like an empty, dark pit. I’m still the only family member to never shoot a gun.
Soon after Brittany moved in, they had to pull at least 12 of her baby teeth due to her mother letting sweet tea drip from her bottle into her mouth night after night. It was cute, actually. The gummiest of smiles. Brittany liked spitzioli night too, because the noodles could be smooshed between her gummy smile.
Within a year and a half, it went from just mom and I, woven together in our little blue house on 3436 Airway– the one she bought herself, where you could hear gunshots at night, to sharing this wood-paneled, shag carpeted, hornets buzzing in the walls 1800’s farmhouse with the rest of them. The House On Cotton Road that Buddy bought was 45 minutes from anywhere worth talking about, and although it was heaps more spacious than our small St. Louis home, I felt more cramped than ever.
The house he bought her was right up the street from his Italian parents, Phillip and Mary Greco. Mom was never good enough for their prized son, having married into his family with a child from someone else. (It didn’t matter that he also had a child). They had known me since I was just a little baby, but to this day don’t consider me a true grandchild, “because blood.” It became all the more apparent how they favored their real relatives when Shayna and Brittany arrived, his actual children. I’d see mom quietly wipe away tears while walking our way up the gravel road between our houses. She’d confide in me about this in private; I swore I wouldn’t tell. Sometimes I’d hear them fighting about it, but it only once, when Shayna was an infant, did she actually pack our bags up and threaten to leave. All this chaos made me relieved to be the good one, the one she could talk to.
As an adult she told me she actually considered taking me away, leaving him with his kids all alone out there. A fantasy I shared when I was small, but never once spoke of.
I don’t remember why, but she unpacked our bags and never left.
That was the year my muchness grew a bit beyond mom’s— the year his kids showed up. That was the year I wore only dresses. Or leggings with stirrups at the feet to tuck neatly into the shoes because jeans hurt too bad, and were ugly. I went exclusively by Katie and stopped responding to “Maddie” at all.
“K A T I E” -- I carved right into the antique headboard. The one Buddy’s dad let us borrow. As if he needed reasons to hate me.
Unlike the consistently bland and pasty spitzioli, each character in this home had a potent flavor. Where mom’s sneakers had not a tinge of divergence from their stark white appearance, our family was plentiful in difference that couldn’t be polished out no matter what sudzy soap was used.
Dysfunctional? Blended? Tangled?
They settled on, “his, hers and ours,” as they pointed to each of us, laughing. People at church loved guessing who was whose “real child.”
No matter how you cut it, everything became too much for her, even though I don’t remember exactly when she snapped, or how. Although I clearly wasn’t the only one with muchness in this household, I was the only one with a muchness able to be half-ass masked by an ability to merge with her. I always knew what she needed and how to give it to her. When she wasn’t well, I was convinced I was the much too much one, and the one who could fix it. And when I wasn’t well, my muchness could tip her right over the edge. I concluded it was better when I was not around. Buddy agreed. It was more peaceful when I spent the weekend with my dad, he said.
Mom had a pulse on me, unlike the others. Tracking me. Watching my every move. She loved me and she hated everything she loved with a kind distain. She needed me, and the special attention felt good for a while. By the time I became a teenager it started felt like she wanted to be zipped inside my skin— to see the world through my eyes, to dance with life like I could. I was special, unlike the others, meant to do great things. It must be a certain kind of curse to mother a “special” child.
I look back, a little less confused than before. What I know is this: When I was smiling, she was smiling. When I was coloring, she was cooking. When I was giggling, she was singing. We hummed along together, tangling ourselves like a pot full of boiling noodles reaching cavitation. But when I was buzzing & started coming undone… she was already there.
Or was it the other way around? I for the life of me can’t remember which goes first.
I wonder how long Kathy had been cleaning it all up for us while steaming inside. Polishing old sneakers while smiling. Singing while stirring spitzioli. Scrubbing the grime away from thrifted decor. Rocking Shayna to sleep, brushing what was left of Brittany’s baby teeth, carrying me back from her bed to mine, night after night. Everything and everyone in their proper place. Humming along like a violent boil; willing it better.
