Only in Naples Read Online Free PDF

she smeared the casserole dish with butter.
    Salvatore emerged from his room smiling just as I was helping his mother pour the heavy mass into the pan. He came over and pinched my cheek. “Pagnottella! Did you learn how to make the
sartù
? There’s going to be a test later.
Esame, esame!
Princeton!” He found himself delightful. I wasn’t laughing. I was hot and hungry. And I really wanted to taste that
sartù
.

    My mother first put me on a diet when I was in kindergarten. I was never called fat: the words that were thrown around our household in reference to my weight were
chunky
,
heavy
, and
plump.
As a child, I was probably never more than eight pounds overweight. But for my mother, that was enough to call for drastic measures.
    Bonnie Salango Wilson was born in Princeton, West Virginia, during the Second World War. Her father was a Presbyterian minister who was the son of Italian immigrants; they had come from Calabria at the beginning of the century. Although my great-grandparents were devout Catholics, they allowed a Presbyterian Sunday school to use their basement when my grandfather was a little boy. He thought the Sunday school was fun: Protestants were so child friendly! After college my grandfather enrolled in a Presbyterian seminary. His parents never worried about his conversion from Catholicism. It was enough that one of their eight children was a man of the cloth.
    So my mother was born to an Italian American preacher in the South. Things weren’t easy for a preacher’s daughter in the 1950s—Bonnie was expected to be well behaved, accomplished, and, most of all, beautiful. And the definition of beautiful for my mother, a naturally curvy Italian-looking woman, did not leave any room at the seams. Beautiful meant skinny.
    Bonnie Salango stopped eating breakfast and lunch in the early 1960s, and hasn’t partaken in those daytime meals since. She has never weighed more than 120 pounds, and looks, still, like Elizabeth Taylor in her prime. My mother showed my sister and me the photo of her in a West Virginia local paper when she graduated as valedictorian from Georgetown’s foreign service school. When I saw the picture, I didn’t feel proud of her achievement. I felt proud of her thinness underneath that robe.
    A “chunky” daughter was simply not going to cut it.
    So it doesn’t surprise me to hear that when I was reprimanded by my mother at the age of three for picking my nose and eating the boogers, my response was, “Why, Mommy, do they have too many calories?” In elementary school, my lunchtime “treat” was a Flintstones chewable vitamin. The teachers at Saint Patrick’s were told that when cartons of milk were distributed to the class, Katherine should be given skim rather than whole. “Sweetheaaaaart,” my mother would tell me in her Appalachian twang, “remember to always git the
blue
!”
    “Mommy, why am I the only one that gets blue and everybody else gets red?”
    She explained rationally and I understood rationally. So many extra calories, and for what? I trusted. I felt fine when the box appeared and I saw my blue carton buried in a sea of reds. And then one day in first grade my best friend, Robin, skinny and blond and a whole-milk drinker until high school, insisted that I take a swig from her red carton. At once my world was shattered and new horizons appeared.
    That first crunchy, steaming bite of
sartù
did the same thing to my twenty-one-year-old body that a swig of cold whole milk had done at Saint Patrick’s Episcopal Day School in the fall of 1981. My carnal transformation was under way, and there was no going back.

I t was a morning at the end of September when I arrived at the Consulate with a great big Santa Claus sack of laundry slung over my back. I waved to the soldiers with Uzis, nodded to Clinton, and looked frantically for Cynthia.
    My laundry had become an all-consuming preoccupation. I had no washing machine, there were no Laundromats in Naples, and