Different Time, Same Story by Mary Lou Sanelli

It is hard to explain to people today, when it seems like everyone wants to visit Italy, that our neighbors once targeted my family because we are Italian.
We had only lived in rural Connecticut a few weeks.  Once my father saved enough money to leave our city apartment behind, off we moved to the cul-de-sac where people had larger houses but, I soon came to realize, smaller tolerance for people unlike themselves. Just weeks after we had moved in, someone painted “WOPS GO HOME!” on the side of my father’s station wagon.

I think the way in which I perceived myself changed the moment I saw those words.

My mother said it had to be one of the neighbor kids. I remember her saying something like, “Kids do terrible things.”  But I did not believe it was a kid, not on your life. I was only five, but I’d already begun to notice grownup things, like a certain man in the neighborhood who shook his head whenever our family drove by. I could detect his contempt for all of the European struggles he never had to face and for all the Europeans he suddenly had to. Without his consent.

My father has said that imagining the “American dream” was the only thing that got him through the Second World War. Except he did not carry the streets-paved-in-gold illusion. He defined the “dream” as living in a peaceful country. I’ll never forget the look that came over him when he saw the slur splattered on his car, as if part of his dream had been snuffed out like one of his cigars, as if he’d finally witnessed something he’d been afraid of all along.

It was a different time, of course, when lots of us still believed that police always did the right thing, and so my father might have pretended to agree with my mother’s plea to call them, but he never did. He just got out the hose and a scrub brush.  And now I wonder: do we all see what we want to see, or can handle seeing, and sweep the rest under, scrub it away, so we can tell ourselves everything is fine, because “fine” is what we so desperately want?

That night, I heard my father cry. I had never imagined it possible for him to cry. If he needed to cry, nothing felt safe. I buried my head in the pillow.  My mother cried too but I was used to that.

I wet my bed that night and continued to for the next year. Night after night, anxiety seeped through my sheets.
There were other clues that my father was a little less secure in the budding suburbs than he let on. He likes to say that everybody in this country loves to eat, but nobody wants to grow food. He was proud of his vegetable garden. Yet he planted it on the side of our house, not in the sunnier front. I think it was because all of the men around us wore suits to work. My father wore overalls. He still does.

Today, with all of the renewed rhetoric and lack of compassion for immigrants, well, I hope something else my mother said is true: This too shall pass.

I have my reasons for why I did not change my surname once I married. But the memory of my father scrubbing the side of his Ford is one of the strongest.  Years later—and why dreams come to us when they do, I have no idea—I woke with a start after seeing my father scrub at his car again. Only this time he was singing “Ain’t No Sunshine,” a popular song at the time that even today has a strong effect on me. I am sure the song pervaded my subconscious because I was heartbroken at the time. My first boyfriend, Steven, had just broken up with me, and this is what a preadolescent crush can feel like: I thought I would just die without him.

But I must have detected that what my father missed was the sunshine of southern Italy, both literally and in the familiar snug warmth of a true sense of place.

I laid back down, shut my eyes, and I began recreating my life experience, as all artists do, by choreographing the Bill Withers song that I still love to dance to.  The body longs to remember.

 

Mary Lou Sanelli  is the author of fourteen books of nonfiction, fiction, memoir, poetry, and a children’s title. Her newest title, In So Many Words: Three Years, Two Months, One Me, has been nominated for a 2025 Washington State Book Award. She lives with her husband on Bainbridge Island. For more information visit www.marylousanelli.com.