Only in Naples Read Free

still talking about her whereabouts on that Tuesday at the end of June. I realized that this was just family business as usual.
    Finally Raffaella placed the first slice of pizza on a plate and passed it over her husband’s head to me. Salvatore’s eyes, for the first time since we had arrived at his apartment, had settled on me.
    What kind of a girl is she? How will she eat this pizza?
    I understood immediately that it was important to everyone at the table that evening what I thought of the pizza. The pizza was hot, gooey, and thick—impossible to eat with my hands. So I picked up my knife and fork and tasted it. Objectively speaking, it was the best pizza I’d ever had. But my language skills were not yet sufficient to communicate that. So I said something like, “Pizza great yes thank you very much Salvatore family tomato pizza.”
    And then there was that laugh again.
    I laughed too; it was a laughingly delicious pizza.
    This was the first of many times that year that my eating would be a performance. The cacophony of voices would stop, silence would reign, and all eyes would focus on me as I dug in. I would feel enormous pressure as I twisted the spaghetti or cut into a pizza. (Will I flick a piece? Will I miss my mouth? Do I need to finish chewing before I begin the praise?) The question on everyone’s mind would be, “What does the chick from the world’s superpower think of
this
?” And I would satisfy them.
Mamma mia!
Phenomenal!
Buonissimo!
Never tasted anything like it!
    And then I made a big faux pas, a
brutta figura,
as they say in Italian. I started eating the crust before the rest of my pizza was finished. Salvatore got up, came around to where I was wedged between Nino and Benedetta, leaned over me, and cut the rest for me in little pieces. He held my fork and knife in his beautiful manicured hands and I could smell his aftershave, his eyes keeping contact with me the whole time. He was so close!
    “These pieces you must eat first,” he told me, “not the crust! Always the crust last!” More words were coming at me so fast that it was difficult to understand. What I did get was just how invested he was in how my pizza was going to be consumed. I had potential. He just had to show me the ropes.
    I managed to finish the pizza without dropping anything or further embarrassing myself. But some crumbs had fallen on my lap (my paper napkin was crumpled up in my tense, sweaty hand). Raffaella had spun around from the sink and was standing over me. She was silent, and still…and eyeing my lap. Before I knew it, she had plunged her hands—emerald ring, manicured nails—into my crotch. What the fuck is happening? I thought.
    “Briciole, briciole,”
she explained. I will never as long as I live forget the Italian word for crumbs,
bree-cho-lay.
There was no annoyance, just a job to be done before the crumbs got all over the apartment. Why would it constitute a problem that they were located in my private parts?
    Raffaella started singing a song about a pizza with tomato. It had a “Funiculì, Funiculà” rhythm about it, and she twitched her hips as she sang it.
Conosci questa?
Do you know this one? she asked. Her voice was deep, rich, belting. Everyone else kept talking, mostly about practical matters. So many logistics tied the daily life of this family together, parents and kids in their midtwenties connected by the traffic ticket and when’s the plumber coming to fix the leaking toilet? It seemed so strange to me that in the next room there were priceless artworks and vases. It felt like we were in an Italian American kitchen in Jersey City.
    I didn’t even know if I liked this guy Salvatore, I couldn’t understand most of what was being said around me, but I felt that, without any ceremony, rites of passage, or coherent verbal communication, I fit in with this family. Without my fully understanding why, this felt like home.

T he U.S. Consulate in Naples is a big white square building on the