1. Long Island: The Monopoly Board Years

                                               

The Long Island of my 1950s and 60s childhood years spreads out like a vast Monopoly board in my mind: the streets lined up in perfect grids leading to the edges of the Atlantic Ocean, the squat square houses laid out on green fenceless networks of lawn. Pink plastic flamingos sheltered under the pink powder-puff flowers of American mimosa trees.

                       

We lived on McKinley Street, somewhere near the middle of a network grid of roads named chronologically after American Presidents. Down one end, across a busy road, was a harbour inlet fed by the Atlantic Ocean. During the hurricane season, the harbour would swell and run down our street. One year I watched in open-mouthed wonder as a motor boat came gliding past our door.

                       

Down the other end of the street, across another busy road, was the aptly named Harbor School. The American flag dominates my memory of that school from the way it towered over the low brick school building, to daily rituals of pledging allegiance to the flag with hands held over hearts, to the lessons of how to fold the flag into a neat triangle, to the weekly elections of the student most worthy of carrying it home overnight.
 

It seemed the sun shone all day and all night when I was five. And it was always summer. The lawns and yards were crammed with playing children, all of us tumbling in and out of each other's open-doored houses. The names of my playmates echo through my mind like a distant mantra: Joey DiNapoli, Loretta Porter, Cheryl Nelson, Diana Curatola and Missy Howell. Joey, Loretta and Cheryl all lived across the street, Diana next door and Missy behind, over a low wooden fence. Joey and I were married for a while. I remember loyally and bravely seeing him off on space exploration missions launched from a side alley that sometimes was full of poison ivy.

 

Loretta was the envy of us all - her mother allowed her to eat ‘Wonderbread’, a soppy white ‘loaf  wrapped up in coloured balloon plastic that could easily be rolled into moist projectiles - a true wonder.

                       

Cheryl was big, blonde and mean. She was a year older than me and I adored her. Her bedroom window faced an abandoned ‘haunted’ house. We delighted in scaring each other with red crayon messages from the resident witch, accentuated with real pinpricks of blood. Cheryl once warned me not to go home when she didn't want me to. She threatened that the witch would make my trousers fall down if I did. I ran home crying, holding my trousers up all the way.

                       

I took great pleasure in telling my mother that Missy Howell had the 'loveliest mother in the world'. She always wore shirt waist dresses just like the mother on The Donna Reed Show, and never raised her voice (unlike some mothers I knew).

Being the eldest of four siblings in six years, I could feel a bit overlooked. I asserted my individuality by periodically packing my doll suitcase, solemnly announcing I was running away to North Carolina (the place of my birth) and walking away down the street towards the harbour. However, I was trained not to cross busy roads by myself. I therefore had no choice but to round two corners and head down Missy Howell's street. My mother, tied down with two children in diapers, would let me go, wait awhile and then nonchalantly call over the fence to Missy's mother, asking her to look for me coming down the road. In my mind I was going to North Carolina. My whole being said 'North Carolina or bust', but somehow I'd always end up in Missy's front yard being kindly but firmly ushered over the fence. 

                       

My confidence in those days knew no limits. Anything was possible, anything. I was nearly convinced I could fly and many times woke with the feeling that I had flown the day before. It felt more real than a dream, almost like seeing something out of the corner of my eye.

 

Then there were grand schemes and visions. I had a dream of creating a swimming pool. It occurred to me somehow that Missy's bedroom would be a good place to start. I managed to convince a few play mates that this was a good idea and supervised patiently as they relayed back and forth from the bathroom to bedroom for hours with cups and buckets of water. I watched and waited for the water level to rise and was beginning to picture a diving board suspended off Missy's bed when flooding onto adult heads below put an end to this visionary project.

                       

But my fondest, fondest dream was that one day all the people in the neighbourhood would communicate in song and dance just like in the great American musicals. I would imagine choruses of neighbours singing in answer to my mother's solo, awaiting my tap dance debut from between the sheets hanging on the clothesline. On the headiest, sweetest days of summer I could feel it almost, almost begin to happen.     

                 

2. Italy in the Bronx

                       

Every Sunday, as far back as I can remember, I was immersed in a very different world to the Long Island suburbs. On those days we would pile into the Chevrolet station wagon, drive over the soaring Whitestone Bridge that spanned the water separating Long Island from the mainland, and descend into the Bronx neighbourhood of my Italian grandparents. 

 

Here on Mace Avenue, which bordered the vast Boston Post Road, smaller houses were dominated by towering apartment buildings more ornate and elaborate than anything I had ever seen. The neighbourhood was intersected by an elevated subway line that curved into the station at Pelham Parkway. The sound of that curve, the clacking, screeching noise of the subway cars as they rattled through the buildings thrilled us children, as did driving under the latticework of tracks when a train was rolling overhead.

                       

In warmer weather, the sidewalk in front of the building on Mace street would be presided over by old Jewish ladies who sunned themselves on plastic strip folding chairs. They were the building's 'yentas' (Yiddish for 'busybody'). They clocked everyone coming in and out. They tended to winter in Florida. I have vivid memories of dangling gold jewellery against leathery brown skin.

                       

Washing lines criss-crossed the once-grand, u-shaped entryway and my grandmother could sometimes be seen leaning out of her kitchen window pulling on the line.

 

Upon crossing into the black and white tiled lobby, smells completely foreign to the suburbs emanated from every direction. They were pungent but not unpleasant, a buildup of the aromas of years of cooking that had seeped out of individual apartments, mingled in the communal hallways and now lived on, ghostlike, in the walls. These would always be overlaid by the seductive fragrance of my grandmother's freshly made tomato sauce that came wafting down the stairwell from her second floor apartment.   

 

My mother’s parents, Concettina and Nicola, had immigrated from Southern Italy in the 1920s. They moved to the one-bedroom Bronx apartment we visited every Sunday shortly after my mother, their first child, was born. Concettina never overcame her homesickness for Italy, and family left behind. Although highly educated, she never learned to speak English well. Nicola, on the other hand, loved New York City and embraced speaking English, albeit with many Neapolitan dialect eccentricities.

           

My grandparents’ building boasted the first elevator I had ever seen. One of its marvels was a brass plated control panel with protruding chocolate black buttons that were just out of reach. If we were lucky, an adult would lift us to press the button for the second floor. Once there, we raced to my grandparents' door where we would be lifted to its brass peephole showing wonderfully distorted images of the house beyond as the doorbell rang.

                       

When the door opened, we entered a world more exotic still. Swept into the ample bosom of my ‘Nonna’, from American ‘kids’ we became ‘bambini’. My mother transformed from the very American ‘Lee Clark’ to ‘Angelina’, sometimes shortened to ‘Lina’.

                       

My grandfather, having adapted readily to the USA, was always known as Grandpa. He fasted before the Sunday meal and would predictably be pacing impatiently up and down the corridor in his three piece suit and highly polished shoes. Immediately upon arrival, there would be earnest debate as to how much pasta to throw into the already boiling water. My sister and I tested the pasta from a cooled off spoon proffered by our Nonna, learning how to tell when it was perfectly al dente. Once the right texture was attained, the ritual words "a tavola!" would trigger a stampede to the table for a feast that would last for hours.

                       

In the early years, we would all sit crowded around the kitchen table. This would leave only a couple of inches for my Nonna to manoeuvre around the stove. As the family expanded, folding chairs and a long folding table were set out in the front room my Nonna called ‘the parlour’. My grandparents had raised three children in that one bedroom apartment, and were therefore masters of organising space. Their closets defied the laws of physics and were tightly arranged along the lines of Chinese sliding block puzzles. Tables, folding chairs and even folding beds materialised seemingly out of nowhere.