SOFIA GRADY

In my earliest memory, I am curled into my mother’s lap on an overnight flight, we are draped in a flimsy JetBlue blanket, and she is drinking tomato juice. I grew up in California, though my mother is from New York, so many of our holidays were spent in transit. Twice a year, we would pack our favorite things into a brimming suitcase and board a red-eye to her family home. On every flight we took, my mother ordered tomato juice.

In the summers, when the humidity threatened to smother you if you breathed too deeply, we spent our time in New York learning to fish in the lake behind my uncle’s house and flinging ourselves from the railings of the back porch into the above-ground pool below. In the winters, when the wind gnawed your cheeks pink and snow snuck into the waistband of your pants, we spent our time in the kitchen.

My grandmother was an amazing cook. A robust, Italian woman with a dark shadow over her upper lip and perfectly permed hair, she layered lasagna in blankets of ricotta cheese, dipped broccoli in hollandaise sauce, finished alfredo with egg yolk and heavy cream, and wrapped cheese-stuffed hot dogs in bacon. “I’m making the gravy!” she’d holler into the living room, letting the beloved family spaghetti sauce splatter onto her apron.

The sauce recipe, a matriarchal rite of passage in my family, is my great-grandmother Mary’s. At seventeen, she married great-grandfather Frank, whose first wife died during an underground abortion, leaving him with four children and a house to tend to. Mary and Frank grew up in the same neighborhood—she swore that she loved him since she was five. During their first dance as husband and wife, Frank whispered to Mary that he would never love her, he just needed a mother to his children.

For years, she did just that. She raised his children, cooked his meals, and tended to his home while Frank had rampant affairs and beat her until her eyes were blue and she lost her hearing in her left ear. When she became pregnant, Frank told her he did not want her bearing his children and brought home herbs for her to abort it. That night, once Frank fell asleep, my great-grandmother went into the kitchen, grabbed the same knife she had used to cook supper that night, climbed onto his snore-heaving chest, pressed the sharpest edge of the knife to his throat and whispered, “If you ever lay a hand on me again, I will kill you in your sleep.” The following summer, Mary gave birth to her only child, Margaret Francis.

The secret to our sauce recipe is simple. A spoonful of sugar, to cut the acidity, and a single bay leaf for flavor, which if ingested in full can be deadly. 

My grandmother’s kitchen was the center of the house. On one side it connected to the foyer and the stairwell. On the other, the living room and the patio, and behind a door parallel to the fridge, the stairs to my grandfather’s basement and workshop. So, if you wanted to get anywhere in the house, you had to walk past my grandmother and through her kitchen. When I was young, my grandmother would sit me on the counter, and place black olives on the tips of each of my fingers so I would not eat the cheese out of the bowl as she grated it. From here, I could watch the smoke plume off the end of my grandfather’s cigarette on the couch, see the old western on the television, and wave to my mother at the dining room table. My grandmother’s kitchen was perpetually damp—the Formica cabinets, dented from a sailing pair of pliers, waned with moisture and the drawers crackled when her hip knocked them shut. My mother’s hairline is adorned with a scar from slipping after coming in from the snow and opening her head on the island’s edge. There’s a faint stain on the floor beneath the sink that my grandmother always pulls the mat over when it strays from its place.

On November 22, 1963, while cooking dinner and listening to the news that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, my grandmother, nearly five months pregnant, started to have terrible pain in her lower back and abdomen. Unable to make it up the stairs, my grandfather brought over a bucket and placed it right on the kitchen floor. She quickly began gushing blood and crying. Unsure what was happening, she became hysterical. In an attempt to soothe her, my grandfather started to sift through the blood that had splashed into the bucket. Eventually, he found a clump the size of his palm. It would have been a boy. Two springs later, my grandmother gave birth to her only daughter, Theresa Mary.

My mother was wild growing up. She fell in love with Jeff in the seventh grade, but it wasn’t until their junior year of high school that he considered paying her any attention. From then on, Jeff was my mother’s partner in chaos. After losing her virginity to Jeff, my mother found out she was pregnant. She was certain she couldn’t be, because they had only done it “halfway” so she must still be a virgin, though Jeff didn’t pull out because there was a new comforter on my mother’s bed, and they didn’t want to make a mess. After asking Lisa, her most reliable friend, for money, Jeff drove my mother to have an abortion. When she came to after the procedure, the doctor was sitting with her, holding her hand. He was an Indian man with a soft face and said she had been screaming in her sleep. By the time Jeff picked her up, she was hysterical.

My mother and I do not travel together anymore; though my holidays are still spent in transit—traveling home to California from the opposite coast, curled into my solo window seat. During my time home, my mother and I share her bathroom mirror for our morning routine. We take turns sipping coffee from our cups, she tells me I am wearing too much blush, and I smudge her eyeshadow into place with the corner of my thumb. We feel close. I begin to miss her even while she is standing beside me.

I moved to Washington D.C. to finish my bachelor’s degree in the summer of 2018. The following October in my college dorm room, I woke to the sound of my own weeping. I remember being wet. The same thick wetness covered my sheets—I was bleeding. I made it to the bathroom floor before losing consciousness.

When I opened my eyes again, I was in an unfamiliar white room, dressed in an oversized paper gown that chafed at my skin and a hospital bracelet with gray lettering, Sofia Margaret. When the nurse finally came in through the drawstring curtain, she brought me a carton of tomato juice with a green straw. She called me “sweetie” and told me that I hemorrhaged during a miscarriage. I didn’t know that I was pregnant.

The following Christmas in California, my mother curled my grown-up body into her lap and stroked my hair while I cried. She told me that once, decades ago, she’d written a letter to the little one that could have been.

I imagined it would have been a she—sage eyes muddled with the deep brown of her Italian roots, a prominent nose and two dark eyebrows that threatened to join like her mother’s. So, I wrote to her.

I would have liked to be your mother. I think I might have made a good mother. But I’m glad you don’t have to hear your father and I yell over your Barney tapes at bedtime. I would have dug up those Barney tapes if you’d come. My father would have bought us a yellow cassette player that I’d place on the nightstand beside your changing table—close enough for you to hear over the whirring of your mobile, but not so close that the clicking of its end woke you, like it did me when I was little.

I was a child when you were supposed to come. I wonder now if I would have made it work if you had. I’m afraid I wouldn’t have.

I wonder if you’ll come back to me someday, in a body that is ready to survive with me, when my body is ready to care for you.

I hope so.

SOFIA GRADY shoots tequila, likes to dance, and perpetually has somewhere she should have been twenty minutes ago. She graduated from Emerson College with a Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction Writing in the winter of 2023. In her work, Sofia strives for uncomfortable vulnerability—to place emotions on the page not often expressed, in hopes of inspiring audiences to do the same. Currently, she works as a fitness instructor in Boston, Massachusetts.