In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TheStrongmanandtheClown C offee spits at me from a small paper cup as I walk down the gangway in the airport. “Why does coffee spit?” I ask. My dad, who for as long as I can remember has been jotting down quotes in a thin beige notebook, says, “Coffee spitting, now that’s a good opener.” “Yeah, and I’m going to use it.” My mom laughs. My father feigns disappointment . We are at the end of a layover in Ohio, on our seventh trip to Italy as a family. During the layover my mom asks me to put some Icy Hot on her back, so we march to the nearest restroom. She waits for me to pee, standing near the sink where she has uncapped the Icy Hot. It looks like a stick of deodorant. A woman who has just washed her hands looks lost and my mom smiles sweetly, pointing to the paper towel dispenser with her trusty stick of Icy Hot. The woman makes it clear that she doesn’t know what my mother is doing. My mom looks at me, puts the Icy Hot on the counter then says “I’m going to pee, watch this,” and I entertain the thought that perhaps this woman thinks my mom is crazy, as I look unrelated to her—a black woman across the bathroom from a small white lady, who is constantly motioning to people with deodorant. When she gets back from using the bathroom , she bends her neck forward and I apply the salve. “You know what I’m looking forward to?” She asks as we walk back to the gate. “Dinners. Are you writing down everything I’m saying?” I know what she means because I too was there that night in Assisi when we ate pasta with truffles. I remember the way the food tasted, how we had a sense of discovery in our blood, as though we were scouting out new territory to settle for the strange nation we as a family composed. We visited a friend and I ran through her property, 38 The Strongman and the Clown picking young, green apples from her trees. She was black, a dancer, and I want to say that house was full of hardwood floors, draping fabric, and mirrors. She was deeply artistic, living in what felt to be a forest. It was as though we’d made contact with a resident of a little known, distant moon. Once we board the plane, it gets dark. We are surrounded, for a moment, by multiple screens of a glowing yellow topographical map of Ohio and Kentucky and Indiana. Light glances off my parents’ held hands. The cartoon of a plane taking off into a blue and white sky plays as our own plane ascends into night. One of the great tragedies of our early vacations to Italy was the loss of the Pinocchio dolls. My mother fell in love with the smooth red and green figures, and several were stolen from our suitcases. So for me, the Italian fairy tale is imbued into the memory of our vacations . As the story goes, a newly carved Pinocchio leaves home one day, waving sweetly to his father. Neither of them realize how far he must journey before he can come home again. Pinocchio is the story of a puppet, yes. But it is also the story of a child who turned out differently from what his father had intended. My mother was disowned by her father around the time she started dating my dad. As she tells it, he disowned her because she moved out of the family home to live with some friends at a time when Italian girls, even in Detroit, weren’t allowed to leave the house without a husband. He died not long after this silence settled between them. The greatest surge of Italians to move to the United States occurred during the period from 1870 until 1920. Four million Italians immigrated during this time. The poor economy after unification sent many young men away to forge out a new life for their families. My mother was not the only daughter of this migration who fell in love with a black man. In Jungle Fever, Italian-American Angie Tucci gets punched and kicked by her father as punishment for her relationship with a black architect named Flipper Purify. He shouts after her not to come home with any “nigger babies.” The verb whale means...

Share