The Supreme Macaroni Company Read Free

transportation and long for a lift on four wheels and a bucket seat instead of twelve wheels and a plastic one.
    “I rented a car.”
    “In that case—” I actually felt a surge in my sexual desire for this man.
    “So, we drive to Montclair, New Jersey.” Gianluca put his arm around me and turned to go downstairs.
    “Wait.” I grabbed his arm.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “Please, give me one more minute on this roof, alone with you. Because when we walk in Tess’s door, our wedding belongs to my sisters and my father and my mother and my grandmother and your father and Gabriel . . . and the bridal registry departments at Saks Fifth Avenue, Restoration Hardware, Costco, and Lou Filippo’s Discount Crystal and More in Forest Hills. I want you to myself before my sisters lay claim to our wedding and go on crash diets so they can fit in sample-size bridesmaid gowns.”
    “You’re serious.”
    “No worries. They’ll do the cabbage diet and be down to fighting weight in six weeks. They won’t have the muscle strength to lift a fork, but they will be thin. It’s the Roncalli girls’ seesaw. When the teeter goes up, the totter must go down. It’s all about the dress size.”
    “I have a daughter. I know all about it.”
    “Anything important that ever happened in the history of my family required a new outfit and therefore a diet to get into the outfit. You’ll see. The first thing my mom will say is, What will I wear? And the second thing she’ll say is, Have you set the date?
    “For a woman who never worked in corporate America, she runs our family like the Ford Motor Company. This wedding will become her rollout of the new models. Or the old model, as it is.”
    “Do you want a big wedding?”
    “God, no. But here’s the problem: my cousins. I went to all their weddings, and now it’s payback time. If I don’t reciprocate, they’ll stop speaking to me.”
    “Is that a bad thing?”
    “Depends. You’ve got pluses and minuses either way. I really love some of them, but there will be a caravan of three buses from just Youngstown, Ohio, alone.”
    “If you want them to come, then we invite them.”
    “There will be negotiations.”
    “For what?”
    “Who will run the show? Will it be Trish Meiser, the wedding planner, or Vincenza Napoli, the event coordinator? My mom will make a big deal out of choosing the best woman for the job and waste three legal pads making lists of why she should choose one over the other.
    “Then there’s the venue. That’s always a tussle. What borough, do they have valet parking, and what is their version of the Venetian table? For the passed hors d’oeuvres, do we go with the mini cheeseburgers or chicken sate on sticks? What do you do with the sticks? Go with the burgers. Skip the sushi. Italians don’t digest it well. Mini crab cakes? Yes. Eel roll? No.
    “Then there’s the parting gift. The souvenir. In the old days it was an embossed pack of matches with your choice of a cigar or cigarette case loaded with Lucky Strikes, but that was killing people, so we switched to the goody bag.”
    “What’s in this bag?”
    “Something to nosh on the way home. It’s not enough that you just ate a nine-course meal, God forbid you drive three miles and have nothing to eat. Do we give a sack of hot doughnuts on the way out, or is there a sampler box of Godiva chocolate? Or do we get creative and give them the Sunday paper tied with a ribbon and a brioche? Come to think of it, I may get Hillary Clinton to do the negotiations. We need a big gun. My wedding planning committee will be one man short of a hostage situation. Do you have cookie trays in Italy?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Another Italian American institution. Every woman in the family bakes cookies, dozens of them. They box them up and meet at a disclosed location where they stack the cookies on trays lined with gold doilies. They wrap the pyramid of cookies in cellophane and tie it with curling ribbons