The Sicilian Inheritance

by Jo Piazza

Who’s my best mamma?” “Me?” “You!” The part that both killed me and kept me getting out of bed every morning was that she meant it. This gorgeous, brilliant child of mine truly thought I was the best despite all recent evidence to the contrary.

“A real woman makes a good drink and lights her own fires, Sara,” she always reminded me. She told me lots of brilliant things over the years. I wish I’d written them all down. As Rosie and I had sipped our drinks, she said, “This is how I want you to remember me. A sexy, well-seasoned dame drinking her whiskey and getting ready to tell you a filthy joke.” “That’s how I want to remember you too,”

Buck up. Get your ass out of bed and seize the goddamn day.

I was her funny girl, her silly baby. Never beautiful, never brilliant. With those off-the-cuff compliments my mom turned me into a goofy, overthinking perfectionist who was too often aggressively helpful. Funny, silly, helpful. I liked helpful the best. It made me feel needed and when I felt needed I felt loved.

The island of Sicily is “God’s kitchen,” she insisted, but I should only eat in the restaurants that write their menus on the chalkboard on the wall each day. A printed menu meant they were buying frozen food from the supermarket to cut costs.

Since becoming a mother, I barely had time to remember all the things I once wanted, all the lives I hoped to lead, but sometimes the desire all flooded back and I felt a small death.

An overfed man zipped past us on a motor scooter with a broken muffler and smacked Giusy squarely on the ass so hard it had to have left a mark. Giusy didn’t cry out, merely bit her thumb and mumbled, “Faccia da culo.” Face of the ass. He called out over his shoulder, “Puttana a buon mercato.” Cheap whore. “What the hell, Giusy?” I said, enraged on her behalf. She shook her head. “Many men here think they can treat me like shit because they know I live alone.”

Grrrr. Rage.

couldn’t stop until I reached the end. As Aunt Rosie used to say, When you’ve stepped in the shit you’ve got no choice but to keep walking until you get home to clean yourself up. I kept reading.

“Welcome to Sicily. Holding and maintaining grudges is our national pastime. It’s our golf.”

The Sicilian part of me laughs.

He nodded, pleased to be given a task. I had learned this about men. As headstrong as they could be, they also liked to be told what to do as long as it didn’t question their own intelligence. Men needed to feel useful in a situation they could not control.

“And we need the tourists. We will never get the kinds of tourist money the mainland gets. Sicily is still the sad forgotten stepbrother of Italian tourism. Americans all want to see the canals in Venice even though I have heard they smell like a pig’s ass. They want the Colosseum and that stupid tower that is not straight.”

There were other rumors about me, about the work I did. Rosalia had warned me that practicing medicine in the public eye would bring both gratitude and scrutiny. “They will be thankful for your work but afraid of your power. Choose who you heal and how.”

I remembered something Aunt Rose said to me when I started dating in high school. “Men are easy to manipulate. You just have to know when to play the Madonna, when to play the whore, and when to play the broken bird.

He once told me that he had gotten to see the entire world and that there were many places that were beautiful and broken, many people who were beautiful and broken. But that his home was the only place where he could be both of those things.”

Astarte was an African goddess, probably predating the Greeks. She was Canaanite or Phoenician in the beginning. Goddess of love, sex, war, and hunting. The worship of her traveled along the trade routes. She was a goddess of self-defense and also of female conquest.

Astarte remains alive in all of us Sicilian women.”

“It is more a way of life, a spirit, a story we pass down, a way of reminding ourselves that the only way for a woman to survive in this world is to help other women.

grief is never rational.

My heart ached for the losses, none of which were fair or expected, but my sympathy meant very little to those left behind.

She told me she never regretted not having children until she met me. She never wanted them and she was lucky enough to avoid the unchosen fate of many of the women in our village. But when we met, she understood what it meant to pass knowledge and learning down to someone. That was what gave her peace in the end.

Despite the crowds and the poverty, the intensity of everyone and everything, I loved being a stranger in a strange place.

Same, girl. Same.

Kill them with kindness was another of Aunt Rose’s favorite sayings, though she often added the caveat, and then cut wind as you walk away.

Maybe permanency was not the only metric of success. My marriage didn’t work out, but I got a wonderful daughter out of it. My restaurant was a great success, just not forever because forever is hard. Maybe I couldn’t do it all and be everything to everyone and that had to be OK.

“I’ve fucking got this.”