MARIANNA DE MARCO TORGOVNICK
457
bustle along sidewalks lined with ample, packed fruit stands. Women wheeling
shopping carts or baby strollers check the fruit carefully, piece by piece, and
often bargain with the dealer, cajoling for a better price or letting him know
that the vegetables, this time, aren't up to snuff. A few blocks down the fruit
stands are gone and the streets are lined by clothing and record shops,
mobbed by teenagers. Occasionally, the El rumbles overhead, a few stops
out of Coney Island on its way to the city, a trip of around one hour.
On summer nights, neighbors congregate on stoops which during the
day serve as play yards for children. Air conditioning exists everywhere in
Bensonhurst, but people still sit outside in the summer - to supervise children,
to gossip, to stare at strangers. "Buona sera," I say, or "Buona notte," as I
am ritually presented to Sal and Lily and Louie, the neighbors sitting on the
stoop. "Grazie," I say when they praise my children or my appearance. It's
the only time I use Italian, which I learned at high school, although my par–
ents (both second generation Italian-Americans, my father Sicilian, my
mother Calabrian) speak it at home to each other but never to me or my
brother. My accent is the Tuscan accent taught at school, not the southern
Italian accents of my parents and the neighbors.
It's important to greet and please the neighbors; any break in this
decorum would seriously offend and aggrieve my parents. For the neighbors
are the stern arbiters of conduct in Bensonhurst. Does Mary keep a clean
house? Did Gina wear black long enough after her mother's death? Was the
food good at Tony's wedding? The neighbors know and pass judgement.
Any news of family scandal (my brother's divorce, for example) provokes
from my mother the agonized words: "But what will I
tell
people?" I some–
times collaborate in devising a plausible script.
A large sign on the church I attended as a child sums up for me the
ethos of Bensonhurst. The sign urges contributions to the church building fund
with the message, in huge letters: "EACH YEAR ST. SIMON AND JUDE
SAVES THIS NEIGHBORHOOD ONE MILLION DOLLARS IN
TAXES." Passing the church on the way from largely Jewish and middle–
class Sheepshead Bay (where my in-laws live) to Bensonhurst, year after
year, my husband and I look for the sign and laugh at the crass level of its
pitch, its utter lack of attention to things spiritual. But we also understand
ex–
actly
the values it represents.
In
the summer of 1989, my parents were visiting me at my house in
Durham, North Carolina from the apartment in Bensonhurst where they
have lived since 1942: three small rooms, rent-controlled, floor clean enough
to eat off, every corner and crevice known and organized. My parents'
longevity in a single apartment is unusual even for Bensonhurst, but not that
unusual; many people live for decades in the same place or move within a
