Black Turtlenecks, Hoop Earrings
I WOULD NEVER HAVE AGREED with Robert Lowell’s comment about the “tranquillized Fifties.” Maybe that’s because I grew up in New York City, which always seemed to pulse with unruly energy. Or maybe it’s because I went to a special high school—Hunter College High School for “gifted” girls, where a clear majority of the students were as unruly, as restless and aspirational, as I was. And maybe, too, because I came from an immigrant family (Niçoise, Sicilian, Russian), I never felt like a regular rule-abiding American. And that was a problem in the supposedly placid (though witch-hunting) McCarthyite ’50s.
Most of my friends were like me. I didn’t know anybody who had grandparents without accents. A grandparent, by definition, was a person from the “old country.” Which old country? Any old country, so far as I could see, from which they had traveled—restless and aspirational, but speaking broken English. Some of my friends’ parents even had accents. But that was New York for you. Hardly anybody was a regular American, the kind you saw in the movies.
To be honest, for much of my childhood I didn’t appreciate New York. I didn’t like being Niçoise-Sicilian-Russian. I wanted to look like Doris Day or June Allyson or, more realistically, Margaret O’Brien, and live in a small town with shady streets, porch swings, and lemonade stands. Not in a six-story brick apartment house in Queens, not in a two-bedroom flat with a dinette and a kitchenette and a fire escape blocking one of the windows.
Still, even as I fruitlessly yearned for leafy streets in some strange American place like, for instance, Ohio, I sensed that I was lucky about food. Though my mother never really learned to cook like the Sicilian she was, my mongrel culinary inheritance offered me endless delicacies. Basta (pasta) enfornata—actually lasagna—at my Sicilian aunt’s Brooklyn brownstone, where my uncle nurtured tomatoes and basilico in a small back-yard garden. A whole tray of hors d’oeuvres at my grandparents’ Kew Gardens apartment, including stuffed mushrooms, eggplant caviar, marinated artichokes, and on and on. Even my father, who did most of the serious cooking for my mother and me, could turn out a mean boeuf en daube. And when Russian Easter came around, my (paternal) Russian grandmother proffered pashka and kulich, the traditional pairing of sweet molded cheese and tall round equally sweet bread with which the Orthodox Church celebrates the risen Christ.
I shouldn’t overemphasize food, though, because my Sicilian mother and my Niçoise-Russian father were left-leaning intellectuals, and thus more focused on politics than pasta. In the fall of 1948, I was sent to elementary school sporting a Henry Wallace button on my winter coat—remember Wallace, who ran as a third-party ultraliberal candidate against Truman and Dewey?—and my parents regularly read the now long-defunct lefty paper along with and . As we nibbled those transcendent hors d’oeuvres at my grandparents’ table, my mother would enter into heated arguments with my father’s sister—my churchgoing Catholic “maiden aunt”—about Picasso, Braque, and so forth. for my 14th birthday.
