If there's one thing I've learned from having celiac disease, it's that food is always home. At least to me. Which is a little strange -- or possibly just right -- considering how often I write about having a sense of myself as someone always in exile from something mostly unremembered.
The Whole Foods did not have my Mediterranean chicken. But they did have gluten-free almond horns and pignolis (that is, pignoli nut cookies), which were a staple of my childhood. We bought them at Cafe Roma -- Ferrara's was too touristy, and my mother had once been hit on by Robert Redford in Roma when I was about 8, so she liked it and we always went back.
I liked it too. It was dark, full of marble and European cafe tables, a chandelier that I realize now was probably an original fixture from the 1920s, an unused bar in the back, and a door to a flourescent-lit room where old, fat men played cards and smoked. People pinched my cheeks and frowned at how much I liked sour things. Wednesday's child, don't you know.
We'd always get a box of cookies to take home, two pounds worth, anisettes and pignolis and cat's tongues. We'd eat through them in a week, and return the following weekend for another, taking a cab to the garage to get the car, driving the car down to Little Italy, parking in Chinatown and stopping at the grocery, the name of which I've now forgotten, to buy slabs of proper hanging from the ceiling Italian provolone before dining at Luna's (the eggplant parmesan was always burnt) and then going to Cafe Roma.
We'd done it since I was a baby. The waiters at Luna's all remembered me sleeping in the booth when I was tiny, or eating gravy (that's red sauce to non-Italians, I guess, not like what you put on meat) off a spoon. I never cried, my mother always said. I never cried.
"You were probably afraid to," an ex of mine once remarked.
The place had old women who washed the dishes by hand, and you had to check your glasses carefully for the dregs of someone else's wine. Food arrived on metal dishes that had been right in the oven. Garlic bread came in a pool of oil on tin and the walls were robin's egg blue with a horrible diorama thing of Mt. Etna on the wall that lit up from time to time to show the volcano going. It was filthy dirty, and we were pretty sure people were scared to clean it. In the summers there was no air-conditioning, and my parents would tell me to take off my shirt. I was ashamed that I could pass for a boy.
"Be grateful," they'd say and only got ashamed later.
We sold the car when I was 12 after a lose wire had caught under the fan belt while we were on the Jersey Turnpike and had filled the car up with smoke. We pulled over onto the side, got out and ran. But there were never any flames, and no explosion came, but my father never stopped being afraid of the car like it was a thief after that.
No car and we went downtown less often. By the time I was in college, I had the cookies of Cafe Roma once or twice a year, although I found similar (to everything but the cat's tongues) in other Italian bakeries in various cities, and I was happy enough. That was a long time before I knew I was sick and that I shouldn't be eating any of that stuff.
The thing that makes these foods matter to me is also the thing that makes me unable to eat them. That's what having this particular genetic disease is like, and in a certain way, it's what having any illness at all is like: whether it's true or not, it will always seem to follow you home to all your exiles.
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