The Sicilian Inheritance

by Jo Piazza

Jack surprised me with the statue on opening night. I wondered when I went from being someone he’d design a custom pig statue for to a person he could barely look in the eye. It happened bit by bit, and then all at once.

I hadn’t seen my cousins and the rest of my extended family in a couple of years, but folding myself into their comforting melee felt like sinking into a warm bath.

“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.”

Cu picca parrau mai si pintiu. Those who speak little never have regrets.

The picture had come to represent what can happen when, for once in your life, you thought you actually deserved all the nice things that were happening to you. In the end I had wanted too much. I wanted success and love, a career and a child, a marriage and freedom. I’d wanted it all and I’d ended up with nothing.

I couldn’t think of a better thing to be than someone’s perfect morning.

A girl’s dowry payments ruined families like ours, the ones who made only enough to get by. How many times had I heard the old sayings: “Blessed is the door out of which goes a dead daughter, and the older and uglier she is the greater the comfort” or “I have five children. One boy and four burdens.”

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.

Jack had loved how ambitious I was until it got in the way of our life together. Then, according to him, I was aggressive and selfish when it came to making time for work.

Having Sophie had broken my heart and brain open in ways I appreciated with time. I found new things to love about her every single day. But I had to let things settle, keep easing into the terror and newness of motherhood. Another seismic eruption of our life would have ended me. But that didn’t even make sense to me, so how could I say it to Jack, my ever-optimistic husband who doted on everything our daughter did, who took on much less of the mental load and just assumed that all parental love was exponential.

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

Whenever Carla and I were cranky as kids she always told us, You just need a nap, a crap, and a snack.

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.

When Stefano’s heart expired, his cigar was still lit and his left hand was still tucked into the top of his pants, scratching his testicles. Everyone at the funeral commented that it was exactly how he would have wanted to go.

With the wine flowing we could say it—we were essentially running the town. Because it had happened slowly, over the course of several years, it had at first seemed unremarkable and also temporary. We had spent our entire lives doing work inside the home, work that was rarely acknowledged. Many of the women had also helped their husbands in their trade, but never in a particularly visible way, always far behind the scenes. But now most of the women in the room were doing all the work out in the open. And for the first time we allowed ourselves to express the proper amazement at this development.

And a final toast. It is on friends that one depends to get along in life.

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.”

Persephone, the grain mother, is the reason we have such a fertile growing season followed by such a miserable drought. She was a rebel. She was a queen. She was a Sicilian woman!”

“Trash-eating sheep,” I remarked. “Sheep will eat anything,” Giusy yelled above the wind. “They’re like pigs. I saw one eat a condom last time I was here. A used condom. Filthy beasts.”

He had his blade raised high in the air, blood already spattered across the lemon print apron on his belly. His hazelnut skin glistened with sweat and oil. When he looked up at us, I was nearly undone by his wide, sensuous mouth and eyes the color of a pond after a fresh rainstorm, light brown with a hint of moss at the edges. His facial features could have been chiseled in stone, made all the more delicious by his lazy smile. He met my gaze as his blade sliced clear through the fish’s neck and the severed head fell to the floor.

I crossed in front of Luca, placing myself between his body and the fish. He stepped slightly aside so he could watch and the idea of impressing him spurred me on. I let the blade slide in deep enough that I felt a slight resistance from the ribs and the spine before slicing along the bones. Warm blood spilled over my fingers and I knew this fish came straight from the sea to this table. I bowed my head in a silent prayer and thanks to the animal for sharing its body with us. I’m not a religious person, but you can’t help considering an animal’s soul when you hold its bones and muscles in your hands and tear apart its flesh in order to nourish yourself.

But I wanted more. I wanted to feel him against me and inside me. It had been so long since my body was mine and mine alone to do whatever I wanted with. It had belonged to my husband and my children and my patients, but never to me and never to a man I truly desired as a grown woman.

“Marsala comes from the Arabic, Marsa Ali. During the Arab conquest of Sicily the Muslim rulers landed close to here and renamed many villages, including Marsala.

His body was compact, but he had an exquisite build, like God was showing off his geometry skills.

Few things in life are as fundamentally satisfying as good, quick sex followed by a meal of mostly salty cheese. We kept smiling dopily at one another like a couple of teenagers who’d just evaded curfew. The smell of sex still clung to our bodies despite the swim.

This island is a potential paradise squandered by greed.

Maybe taking money always came with its own baggage, no matter who gave it to you.

“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.

“You should not stay in Sicily. It’s never safe for a woman here, but when people want something from you, they will do whatever it takes to get it. They’ll make it look like an accident.”

These men who once loved me wanted nothing more than my destruction.

It was funny how checking a single thing off your to-do list—in this case, getting my new passport—could make you feel like you could accomplish anything. I hadn’t been so energized in a long time.

I had healed as many people as I could, but many didn’t survive and grief is never rational. The blame for an untimely end in our clinic almost always fell on me.

I spent the next few hours rushing around town, gathering supplies and ingredients for a feast worthy of my husband’s homecoming. I had no doubt I would be hosting my mother-in-law and Gio’s sisters. I knew without being told that I would be relegated to my kitchen for the next week, and I tried not to let resentment overtake me.

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 began writing it six years ago, when I first found out I was going to become a mother. Something about that massive sea change in my identity made this story call to me.