The Women Who Made Me

The nineteen-eighties. Two Catholic septuagenarians, sisters, lived together in Clarksburg, WV's own Little Italy, the Glen Elk neighborhood adjacent to the city's once-thriving downtown. Theirs was an average white-sided two-story house, skinny in structure yet stuffed to the brim with love and language. As a child, I spent many Saturday nights with Nanni and Aunt Philomena, aka Phyl, watching their rituals of Italian tradition, like baking fat galette cookies at Christmas or braiding loaves of Easter bread called moo-cha-lah-ta, and learning the dialect handed down from their first-generation parents fresh from San Giovanni in Fiore, Cosenza province, Calabria, Italy. 

Ben-a-dee-kuh! Tu sei bella! Nanni would exclaim while cupping my soft, pale face surrounded by tar-black curls. Ohh zen-yoo-dah! Aunt Phyl would utter in a low rasp when something was awry, which was often, although the degree of emergency varied widely. It could be a newly discovered speck of dirt in their home whose cleanliness was a testament to the "immaculate" in Immaculate Conception Church, which they attended each Sunday, my dutiful father playing taxi driver. Or it was the clamor of the beer garden next door, built like a dachshund, long and low to the ground and just as yappy.

Next door to their left was another average white-sided two-story, its wide structure diametrically opposed to its slight occupant called Wild Fee, a bearded biker who went from feral to familial when it came to his teetotalling old-lady neighbors. Across the street was a defunct Coca-Cola factory that allowed enough room on the block for just one other building. Coca Cola's neighbor stood with its back to the soda plant and its face to the main thoroughfare where customers would enter the Italian version of a general store, dominated by garlic, capicola, and a squat, gap-toothed, wiry-haired grandmother: Miss Oliverio, whose bottom half on the stool beneath her resembled a mushroom cap overshadowing its stem.

Until the skinny house between Wild Fee and the beer garden burned down, it was one of few domiciles dominating my early childhood. Another being my grandfather Dante's apartment just a few blocks away. Dante Costello was a small man with a big temper who excelled at grandfathering—he taught me to dunk anise-flavored biscotti in sugary, extra-creamy coffee; produced quarters from behind my ears and magically removed and replaced his own thumb; kept me and my brother in line with his invisible accomplice called Foosh Navus who, like Santa, kept a log of our behavior. Nanni lived with her hot-to-the-touch husband until she could live no more. By most measures, Mary Margaret (Oliveto) Costello was not a bold woman, yet she left her husband who did not respect her, an extraordinary act in those days. 

I don't know how long Nanni had lived with Aunt Phyl before their home caught fire. It started in the bar next door and spread sideways, stopping short of Wild Fee's because even fire knew better than to mess with him. Nanni and Aunt Phyl never returned to the narrow house where I first learned that rosaries should hang from bed posts and that chamomile is pronounced ga-ga-mee-la if you're a proper West Virginia Italian.

Glen Elk, as well as the entire city of Clarksburg and neighboring cities of Bridgeport and Fairmont, is saturated with families of Italian lineage nearly universally traced to the same province in southern Italy. Most outsiders wouldn't know that, because a far more prominent narrative dominates the state, one that focuses not on our rich heritage but instead on the low-hanging fruit: grammatically challenged, overweight, under-educated, and easily manipulated, West Virginians have nothing to add to the national dialogue. While I lament the lack of progress and the tribalism in my home state, I also know another West Virginia: a place of moody hemlock forests and stout waterfalls, a homeland to heritage chefs, grassroots arts, and the kind of friends who will carry you through. 

Back in 2006, Governor Joe Manchin tried to lure newcomers to the state with new signage. "West Virginia: Open for Business" had about as much success as the horny hippie who tried to pick me up in a Memphis bar by telling me he had a snake in his pants, to which I replied, I don't go out with pentecostals. Both were cases of poor marketing. A catchy tagline will only get you so far. West Virginia consistently ranks as one of the top worst places for business. Great marketing doesn't create illusions; it makes connections. An impossible feat when people believe you don't have anything to offer. What's the fix? People who care, people with vision, people with collateral. I'm two of those three. There are others who are just like me. Show us the money. 

A stone's throw from Glen Elk where my dad grew up, my mom's family occupied an old two-story farmhouse just outside city limits, on the wrong side of the tracks, aka East View. Mom was one of 20-some children born to my grandfather and 17 born to my grandmother. My granddad, Aubrey, was at least 20 years older than Grandma. He died when I was three; all I know of him comes from family recollections and photographs. Tall, lanky, stern, and hard-working, he owned a welding shop where his sons and then their sons tamed fire-breathing sticks to pay the bills. When Pap came home from a long day at work, his children were not permitted to bother him even though his wife had her own long day at home. His daughters weren't allowed to go to town without a brother as chaperone.  All of his children inherited his pale blue eyes, and most of them the puffy bags beneath. 

My grandmother Helen was a small woman rounded off by a widow's hump and sharpened by an unfiltered tongue. She spent her life caring for and being cared for by various children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who called her farmhouse, dubbed "the green house," home for some period in their life, for over three decades. It wasn't easy to get close to Grandma Helen. She was a woman of few words; plus there were just so many people vying for her time. In her absence and in my own overstimulated-mom presence, I have questions: Gram, did you want that many kids? Did you and Pap ever have fun together? Did you have dreams? I can't fathom her answers. I doubt she'd have any. Neither Grandma nor Nanni was the confessional type. I think it's a generational thing, one that skipped even my parents' generation and then landed soundly on mine. 

When I think about my grandmothers' lives, it's hard to see past their circumstance to reveal the person. Who were they before they became somebody's wife? Before they became smaller under the dominance of men who couldn't do better because they didn't know better. Did their lives allow the luxury of self-reflection? Although I remember my Nanoo Dante very fondly, I'm still proud that Nanni Mary left him. I suspect it was more pragmatic than purpose driven, and that had to be enough for her. Grandma Helen was a study in the ties that bind. She took care of her husband in their home until he died, and her children took care of her, never leaving her side until she left them forever. 

Both of my grandmothers lived 92 years. Both stopped living in late winter, about five years apart. I don't know what they'd think of a woman like me, who has been dominated by purpose, not pragmatism; who is still learning how to tie a knot. Now an eternity apart from my grandmothers, I keep them close by telling their stories and mine.