Creative Nonfiction

Pasta

The smell is the first thing you notice in Sophia’s house. No matter the day of the week or the time of the day, there is always a huge pot of spaghetti or macaroni shells on the big white stove. Sophia uses her living room at the front of the house for the long tables and the sewing machine on which she makes the draperies her husband Nico sells door-to-door, so you can’t go in the front way. Daddy walks me up the three cement steps and through the backdoor with the window in it and into the kitchen smell of tomato sauce with onions, garlic, ground beef and always, always, always the pasta. Sophia smells of garlic. Her dark hair is drawn back from her face and the rolls of fat bulge out of her sleeves and over the stockings and the garters that her cotton dress doesn’t hide when she sits down. Sophia greets me with a hug and scoops the pasta into a bowl with a blue print in its bottom and gives me a big spoon. I sit at the table with the plastic tablecloth and I eat, and eat, and eat, until my three-year old belly sticks out. Nick, who never sells many draperies though he is on the road a lot, watches sports on TV when he’s home. I never watch TV with Nick. Instead, I ask permission and Sophia lets me go into the big Front Room, where I crawl around on my hands and knees to pick up the long drapery pins that look like tiny telephone poles with sharp silver steel points. They dig into the green and red flowered carpet, over and under and over again, sticking tight, and Sophia can’t pick them up herself because she can’t bend down that far and that long. I am proud that I get to pry them loose and collect them for her. When I am done, there is never a pin or needle on the carpet in the Front Room, and Sophia scoops me up and kisses me, her eyes young and smiling in her round unhappy face. Then she sends me out of the room and goes back to work and I sit and wait, and squirm, and visit Ginny the dog outside where she’s chained, and wonder when mommy and daddy will come for me this time—today? Tomorrow? The next day after? How many nights this time? I wait, and I eat pasta. When Sophia’s daughter, Gabriela, comes home from school, she will sometimes not ignore me and she’ll tell Ginny to shake my hand, because Gabriela, even at fourteen, understands dogs in a way no one else does. Ginny will shake my hand and Gabriela will go into the house to yell at her mother and sulk. Ginny and I will sit in the shade under the car port behind the fence in the heat and the dust until I get tired and go into the house to see if another pin has dropped.