Death of an Italian Chef

From the moment I first tasted spaghetti carbonara when I was a young girl, I quickly became convinced that I had to be born with deep roots in Italian heritage. My brother had a spinning globe in his bedroom, and I would spend hours studying all the cities in Italy where my ancestors might have hailed from, perhaps in the hustle and bustle of a major city like Rome or Milan, or a quiet fishing village like Portofino, or a Renaissance city such as Venice or Florence. Okay, maybe I didn’t have the smooth olive skin of a true Mediterranean native, since my lily-white skin always burned something awful at the beach during the summer, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t a fiery Italian woman!

Actually, it did when I sent in a DNA sample to one of those genealogy sites and they dashed my hopes by sending me a report that clearly stated my ancestors were nearly 100 percent from England, Wales, and northwestern Europe, with a tiny smattering of Irish and Scottish. So much for me being the next Sophia Loren! Still, I was not about to ignore my connection to my favorite country, and so I embraced everything and anything Italian, especially the food.

Oh, the food . . .

I had decided at the age of sixteen that I was mature enough to travel abroad on my own and visit my adopted homeland for a whole summer. I wanted to live among the locals, learn the language and customs, and especially take a cooking class so I could improve my skills at making a wide array of scrumptious Italian dishes. Ever since that first bite of spaghetti carbonara in New York’s Little Italy, I had been experimenting in our kitchen to decidedly mixed results. My dishes certainly wouldn’t pass muster on the menu at a five-star restaurant, but my mother and brother liked them well enough, so I knew at least I didn’t completely stink as an Italian chef.

Our high school did not have a summer student exchange program and the only foreign language classes they offered were French and German, so I knew I had to go big or go home. I had to go on a trip to Italy!

When I told my mother of my exciting plans, her first question was, “How are you going to pay for it?”

I had assumed my mother would jump at the chance to finance this once-in-a-lifetime educational opportunity to expand my horizons, but when I quietly suggested that, she didn’t stop laughing for a full ten minutes.

I knew I probably had to come up with another solution.

That’s where my BFFs, Liddy and Mona, came in.

It was Christmastime, mid-December, a full seven months before summer vacation, so I still had time to formulate a plan. After listening to me rant and rave about my mother so cruelly crushing my dreams of becoming a worldly, interesting person, a light bulb seemed to pop on over Liddy’s head. Her latest beef with living in Bar Harbor during the winter was that there was no decent place to go to dinner on a date. Every restaurant in Bar Harbor was boarded up during the off-season, and if you drove twenty minutes off the island to Ellsworth . . . well, your best option was the takeout at Pizza Hut or the drive-through at McDonald’s. How could a girl enjoy a romantic dinner with her boyfriend over a double cheeseburger and fries? That’s when Mona came up with a perfect solution.

Since I was already practicing to be an Italian chef, Mona suggested we host a dinner and charge money just like the churches did almost every week with their baked bean suppers. We could invite high school couples to come and pay for a romantic, mouthwatering three-course Italian meal. Each course could be something I had been practicing on—simple Italian minestrone soup, antipasto tortellini salad, baked rigatoni with red sauce. All very filling and best of all, easy on the pocketbook.

The three of us were suddenly very excited about this new, exciting, out-of-the-box, moneymaking venture. If we limited our dinner to fifteen couples, thirty kids in all, and charged twenty dollars per couple, we could haul in an astronomical (for us, anyway) three hundred dollars! Almost the price of a coach fare abroad!

Liddy was assigned the task of selling tickets to prospective couples at school. Once a reservation was made and the money was paid, she would give them the instructions on what time to show up, and most importantly, she would swear them to total secrecy. Liddy devoured a lot of romance novels so she knew keeping everything top secret would make the lucky couples feel extra-special. Mona then brought up the one stumbling block none of us had thought about. Where would we host the event?

I should have kept my mouth shut, but of course when has that ever happened? I immediately volunteered my house. I knew my mother was going out of town the following weekend with Liddy’s mom, Celeste, and Mona’s mom, Jane. Every last week in December, they headed to the Portland Mall to do some after Christmas-sale shopping. They always left on a Friday and came back on Sunday morning. So Saturday was perfect for our Italian dinner! We jumped up and down excitedly. I was already picturing myself in a gondola, kissing a cute Italian boy I met while wandering around a museum, taking in the Renaissance paintings or that big, sexy statue of David.

The next week flew by. Liddy sold out in her first study hall. There were dozens more kids clamoring for tickets, but she was forced to shut it down once she reached capacity. There were a lot of disappointed kids, but Liddy promised that if the night was a success, we would do it again the next time our parents left town!

After our mothers thankfully drove out of town early Friday morning and my brother Randy left for his friend Jerry’s house for the weekend, Liddy and Mona got to work setting up extra card tables in the dining room and living room. I was busy in the kitchen, pulling out of the oven pan after pan of my cheesy, saucy baked rigatoni, along with foil-wrapped loaves of warmed garlic bread. By the time I finished preparing the soup and salad, the clock struck six, the appointed time Liddy had told our guests to arrive. We planned to have everyone out the door by eight so we could clean up and watch a movie on the VCR to celebrate a job well done.

Unfortunately, we had forgotten one inescapable fact about teenagers. When you tell one to keep a secret, by the end of the day, the whole school knows.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Kids poured into my house, not thirty, but forty, fifty, sixty kids! Cars jammed the streets. I was terrified the neighbors would call the police to report an out-of-control party. Liddy had carelessly not written down the names of the kids who paid for dinner, so we had no idea who belonged and who was crashing. It was an unmitigated disaster! All the food was gone before we even finished serving the soup course, because kids didn’t wait and just helped themselves. Somebody found paper plates in the cupboard and they formed a buffet line that started in the kitchen and stretched out the front door and down the street. Some kids plopped down on the floor and ate because there were no seats left. Others chowed down outside in the cold on the front lawn.

We had no control over the situation, and I thought to myself, Could this get any worse?

Well, as life has taught me, it can always get worse.

It was right about that time when I heard someone behind me say, “Reservation for three, please.”

We froze in place because we all recognized that stern voice.

It was my mother.

And she wasn’t alone.

She was flanked by Celeste and Jane.

Liddy and Mona both ran out the door in a panic, leaving me to deal with the aftermath.

I had nowhere to go.

I was already home.

The only thing I could think to do was slap a silly smile on my face and say in a bright, cheery voice, “Oh, you’re home early! Would you like some rigatoni with red sauce?”

My mother quietly explained that a snowstorm was in the forecast, and so they had cut their trip short to get home safely.

It didn’t take long for the crowd to clear out. Everybody could see my mother’s face reddening, ready to explode. Celeste and Jane set off to track down their own delinquent daughters and I was left to explain myself.

Suffice it to say, we were ordered to return all the money, which left us in the hole for a hundred bucks for all the food we bought, which we were told we would pay back with hard labor over the next few months, starting with me helping my uncle insulate our attic on the night of our winter formal.

There was somewhat of a happy ending.

After everyone left that night and my mother ordered me to my room, I snuck out later to go to the bathroom and could hear my mother downstairs talking on the phone with Jane. She had stumbled across a little tortellini pasta salad and some rigatoni that had not been devoured by the starving kids and ate it as a late-night snack. She was raving about how delicious it tasted, what an impressive cook I was, and how I might have a promising future as a real Italian chef. I knew it wasn’t just her favorite brandy coffee she was washing it down with—I knew she really meant it. My mother was proud of me.

But that still didn’t get me out of helping my uncle insulate the attic.