MARIANNA DE MARCO TORGOVNICK
459
the only values; it tends towards certain forms of inertia. When my parents
visit me in Durham, they routinely take chairs from the kitchen and sit out on
the lawn in front of the house, not on the chairs on the back deck; then they
complain that the streets are too quiet. When they walk around my neigh–
borhood (these De Marcos who have friends named Travaglianti and Oc–
chipinti), look at the mailboxes and report that my neighbors have strange
names. Prices at my local supermarket are compared, in unbelievable detail,
with prices on 86th Street. Any rearrangement of my kitchen since their last
visit is registered and criticized. Difference is not only unwelcome, it is unac–
ceptable. One of the most characteristic things my mother ever said was in
response to my plans for renovating my house in Durham. When she heard
my plans, she looked around, crossed her arms, and said, "Ifit was me, I
wouldn't change nothing." My father once asked me to level with him about a
Jewish boyfriend who lived in a different part ofthe neighborhood, reacting
to his Jewishness, but even more to the fact that he often wore Bermuda
shorts: "Tell me something, Marianna. Is he a Communist?" Such are the
standards of normality and political thinking in Bensonhurst.
I often think that one important difference between Italian-Americans
in New York neighborhoods like Bensonhurst and Italian-Americans else–
where is that the others moved on - to upstate New York, to Pennsylvania,
to the Midwest. Though they frequently settled in communities of fellow
Italians, they did move on. Bensonhurst Italian-Americans seem to have felt
that one large move , over the ocean, was enough. Future moves could be
only local: from the Lower East Side, for example, to Brooklyn, or from one
part of Brooklyn to another. Bensonhurst was for many of these people the
summa of expectations.
If
their America were to be drawn as a
New Yorker
cover, Manhattan itself would be tiny in proportion to Bensonhurst, and to its
satellites, Staten Island, New Jersey, and Long Island.
"Oh, no," my father says when he hears the news about the shooting.
Though he still refers to blacks as "coloreds," he's not really a racist and is
upset that this innocent youth was shot in his neighborhood. He has no trou–
ble acknowledging the wrongness of the death. But then, like all the news
accounts, he turns to the fact, repeated over and over, that the blacks had
been on their way to look at a used car when they encountered the hostile
mob of whites. The explanation is right before him but, "Yeah," he says, still
shaking his head, "yeah, but what were they
doing
there? They didn't be–
long."
Over the next few days, the television news is even more disturbing.
Rows of screaming Italians, lining the streets, most of them looking like my
relatives. I focus especially on one woman who resembles almost completely
my mother: stocky but not fat, mid-seventies but well-preserved, full face
