The knife that my grandmother uses to cut the bread is not a bread knife, not a serrated knife like every well-equipped American kitchen now has. No. The knife that my grandmother uses to cut the bread is a butcher knife, the kind of knife that figures in nightmares, in movies like Psycho. The same knife, incidentally, that my father will use when I am a teenager, when he threatens to kill me. (Years later, I bring up the subject of how he grabbed the knife, came at me, how I got away because my grandmother put her body between us. "I never meant to hurt you," he said. "I was just trying to make myself clear.")
My grandmother would take a gigantic loaf of the bread she had made, and she would pull the knife through the bread towards the center of her chest where her heart was located, as if she were trying to commit an Italian form of hara-kiri.
"Stop that," my mother would shout, half fearing, half hoping, I think, that this woman, this stepmother who didn't love her, would pull the knife towards her breast just a fraction of an inch too far, so that after all the screaming, all the threats of "If I get my hands on you I'll kill you," we would finally have bloodshed in our own kitchen, finally have a real mess on our hands that would take my mother a very long time to clean.
"Stop that, for Christ's sake!" my mother would shout. She would pull the bread away from my grandmother and often she would cut herself in the process, not much, but just enough to bleed onto the bread. And my mother would throw the bread down onto the counter, where it would land upside down (a grave sin, my grandmother said, for bread should only be placed right side up; to do otherwise was to disrespect the bread; to do otherwise was to invite the forces of evil into your house). And she would say, "Why can't you cut that goddamned bread like a normal human being?"
My grandmother would bend over the bread that she had made, turn it right side up, and make the sign of the cross over it and kiss her fingertips, weeping. My grandmother would weep because to her the bread was sacred and to her the only way to cut the bread was to pull the knife through the bread toward your heart. And perhaps she was weeping, too, for all that she had lost, for all that she never had, and for all that she didn't have. For the insufferable life she was forced to live.
My mother was afraid of knives, and if she could avoid using one, she did. She'd tear the lettuce instead of slicing it, and not because she didn't want to destroy the tenderness of the leaves. She'd use kitchen shears to dismember a chicken. She'd put blunt knives at our places instead of steak knives, even if what we were eating was fibrous and tough.
Some things, though, she couldn't avoid cutting, like onions, like carrots. So when she cut them, she ordered everyone out of the kitchen.
"Knives are dangerous," she'd say. "You have to stay far away from someone who is using a knife."
Before she went to bed at night, my mother would gather up all the knives in our kitchen, and she would put them away in a drawer. "This way," she said, "if burglars come into the house in the middle of the night, they'll have to look for them and we'll hear them. This way," my mother said, "we'll have a fighting chance."
I never believed this burglar bullshit. I always thought the reason my mother put away all the knives was because she was afraid that one of us might creep down to the kitchen in the middle of the night, take the butcher knife my grandmother used to cut the bread, climb back up the stairs, and kill the rest of us.