Musings on being Italian

Imagine bearing a last name that should belong to a small yappy dog. Pepe: It’s cute for a Chihuahua, but not ideal for a young girl who at the start of every new class, was getting ready to slide under the desk on the first day of school as the teacher, a combination of confused and embarrassed, asked: “Is Cathy Pep—?, err, — Peep?, ah,—Pee-Pee, present?” Even now Spell Check humiliates me by suggesting: Peep, Pipe, Pope, and Peet.

That’s the reason I haven’t changed my generic “married” name, even though he’s 20 years down the road and I want to pretend I was never that stupid as to marry him. For business and work reasons though, and for everyone who butchers “Pepe”, I decided to hang on to Peterson, but I insist friends and family call me Pepe.

My mother hated that I didn’t go back to Pepe. She used to ask, “Where does that leave you? You’re nobody now! Go back to Pepe.” “Nope”, I told her years ago. “It’s still Peterson.” Inside though, I yawned. Cathy Peterson bores the shit out of me.

I picture a vanilla person sitting behind a desk, with a cute bob and a bow in her hair, chatty. Basically, Chatty Cathy, the famous doll from the 1960s. You pulled a string on her back and she talked. I don’t really want to take on that persona.

In my personal and creative life, I still am Pepe. I make it a point to tell everyone, whether they are interested or not that I am a thoroughbred. I came into this world from a long line of ancestors, my maternal and paternal grandparents on both sides were born in the Naples area of Italy.

I’ve been thinking about going back to an Italian surname in the legal sense, but Pepe still gives me PTSD. Do I want my mother’s maiden name? Buonanno? Maybe people will assume I’m related to the infamous Bonanno family. All the Mafia intonations? Although it would be cool to intimidate people in a mysterious kind of way. Damn that missing “u”.

I once asked my mother, “What was Gram’s maiden name?”

It was not for sentimental reasons. I was afraid of my grandmother. She lived downstairs from us and unlike my grandfather, who was able to master English, she never learned a word of it. She wore calico aprons and had gray hair and no teeth. Her whiskers stung my face and her moles left indentations on my skin when she kissed me. Her house was kind of depressing. It was decorated with a “Christ Suffering” motif. Christ hanging from the cross. Christ donning a crown of thorns. Christ dying in Mary’s arms. She wasn’t a great Italian cook either.

My grandmother made us eat dandelion weeds that she picked out of the neighbor’s lawn, which was above a toxic landfill. She tossed them into every salad in the summer months.

However, her maiden name, Maffei, is exotic. I don’t know anyone named Maffei. My grandmother was rumored to have lived in the hills of Naples and my grandfather told stories of having to walk up a steep hill, past herds of goats, to ask for my grandmother’s hand in marriage.

Even though I am 3rd generation, and have taken on a boring last name, I’m still Italian. Italy is swimming happily in my cellular makeup. I have traceable roots. Part of my DNA passed through Ellis Island. Unfortunately, the language was never passed down to my cousins and me. We were convinced it was so our mothers could talk about us in the same room and we wouldn’t be able to understand them. We were to be Americans in this “new country”.

My entire neighborhood was once populated by Italians. In fact, the entire South End of Woburn was considered an Italian ghetto, except for our token Irish family next door, Arthur Flaherty, fresh off the boat from Ireland. He was the anomaly.

I’m 13 years old

lying in bed

on a warm summer night

dreaming of being

the tall, blond, leggy

Peggy Lipton

from the “Mod Squad”.

I hear my grandparents

and our neighbors

speak a calliope of lively words The Italians are sitting

in folding chairs, in a line along the driveway, below my window,

some snapping beans stripping corn husks.

all in the familiar language from “The Old Country”.

Now, fifty years later, the neighborhood is populated with people of all persuasions. A lot of them are transients, living in Section 8 apartments that my cousins and I were once so comfortable knocking on their doors. They don’t gather to reminisce about where they came from. Most likely, they don’t even know each other’s first names. There’s a wariness as people move in and out of the apartments of houses that aren’t owner-occupied anymore.

When I was a child, I thought everyone was Italian and we were nothing special. However, when I moved to California, some people would refer to me as the “Pretty Italian Girl”. I didn’t know Italian girls could be pretty. My cousins didn’t help. They would always give me that sideways look and say, “Uggh, you just look so Italian”.

My cousins tended to date L. L. Bean girls. Nice waspy girls with pale skin that turned green on Christmas Eve, the Feast of the Seven Fishes, at the sight of smelts and eels. I could never do the eel, but I could eat smelts and Calamari, even the spidery tentacles, just to watch those white girls squirm. To prove what I thought was my Italian superiority, I didn’t bother to pull the vertebrae out of my fried smelts before I popped them into my mouth. My esophagus would feel prickly through New Year’s Eve. Some girls did not return the following year for the feast. Only the hardiest ones, like Carl’s wife, June, stuck it out. I secretly think she was forced to convert to Italianism by my Auntie Annie.

I miss being part of a clan. I tried to make up for it by painting the walls of my kitchen the colors of Tuscany and Sienna. “Gatzi’s”, from Italy adorn my house. Sometimes I think I hear a familiar accent in the neighborhood, but it turns out to be one of the other romance languages, like Spanish or Portuguese. I appreciate a smattering of culture wherever I can get it.

Changing my name back to an Italian one is now on my bucket list. I just need to decide on a meaningful, exotic name.

I did consider changing it to Corleone, but I hear it’s already taken.