Nonfiction from RT Villa

Photo: Kwon Junho

In My Father’s Kitchen

When I was twelve years old, my father summoned me into the kitchen. Dad stood bent over the counter, his large hands dredged in flour and egg. “Wash your hands,” he told me. “We’re making eggplant parmesan.”

It’s snowing just past my crooked window. There’s a hole in the screen and frost collects in the window’s wooden frame. The snow is benevolent, hugging the contours of the trees’ lonely branches.

I am writing this from the tiny kitchen of the one-bedroom cottage I rent. It’s a Sunday, sacred Sunday, safe from obligation and hurried footsteps.

Olive oil sizzles on the stovetop, crackling and popping in anticipatory fizz.

In my father’s kitchen, we wiped our hands on wrinkled dish towels and transferred eggplant between bowl and frying pan. The aubergine disks bobbed, a ring of buoys floating in oil. Bubbles roiled in the free spaces between them, seeking escape. Dad and I formed an assembly line: transfer, cook, flip, cook, transfer. No words, only motions. Our plate grew high with golden brown eggplant stacked on paper towels rendered translucent by excess oil. Just as Dad removed a slice, a wayward pop of oil arced out of the pan, finding purchase on my thigh. It branded my skin, a loud red slash below the hem of my pajama shorts.

Sunday is meal-prep day, my one chance to get my ducks in a row. By Friday, I run out of food and search my cabinets for a forgotten soup can to carry me through the weekend. But on Sundays I steep myself in the kitchen, constructing a family-sized meal for one.

Eggplant parmesan is warm; it is filling; it is a tether to a lineage from which I often feel disconnected.

When I was a child, I’d go back for seconds every time. Grandpop would scoop a heaping serving onto my sauce-stained plate, give me a wink, and get himself some more as well. He’d grate extra parmesan on top. We’d sit at the table and listen to Grandma’s stories and let ourselves be filled up.

First, I dredge and fry the eggplant, keeping distant from the crackling oil. When the frying is done, I stack the eggplant slices in haphazard layers with mozzarella and ricotta and tomato sauce, then bake the dish until the layers fuse together.

My great-grandfather came to the United States in 1910. He got a job and some land and built a house, then went back to Italy to get his wife and grow their family on new soil. I never knew my great-grandparents. But I imagine them during the Great Depression, buying eggplants and garlic to feed their many children. I imagine my grandfather as a child with sauce stains around his mouth. I imagine him hungry for seconds.

I stand alone in the rented kitchen, basking in the oven’s warmth and the scent of garlic. I mindlessly touch the top of my thigh, where, below a layer of worn cotton, the ghost of an oil burn haunts my skin. I used to text my dad every time I made this dish.

When Dad was in the hospital, l had a dream about him. He was barefoot and scared and he didn’t know who I was. In desperation, I told him about the eggplant parmesan I had made, a reason for him to come home. He listened. He followed.

Even in dreams, food was the only thing we could talk about.

The snow has thickened; it cloaks the window.

Before the timer dings, before the sauce thickens and the cheese crusts, I will go outside. I will lay in the whitened grass. I will let the winter hold me.
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RT Villa is a multidisciplinary artist and writing educator from the middle-of-nowhere mid-Atlantic. Their writing has previously appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Believer, Grub Street, and Memoir Mixtapes. They’re currently an MFA candidate in nonfiction at Oregon State University, where they spend entirely too much time gazing at trees.