***

The benefit of being an immigrant’s child, as I understand it, is never having to relive your forebears’ hard-scrabble lives. That is why my mother’s family risked a move to America: to save their future progeny from following in their muddy boot prints back home. To be clear, they still prided their nation of origin—spit on Italy and they’d pummel you with their meaty fists—however, given the threat of being banished to the Old Country for misbehaving, one might equate it with dismal tenements, shabby rags of clothing and emaciated roosters gargling pitiful crows before becoming that night’s watery ragù. It was capitalized the way they mouthed it—Old Country—like a curse. I later learned that, while theirs were hard lives of physical labor, it was not the dramatic gulag my grandparents made Italy out to be.

The promise of a prosperous future is why the Ellena clan from Turin and the Merlo clan from Milan emigrated to the United States around the turn of the 20th Century, passing through Ellis Island before dispersing into New Mexico, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan. One cluster from each family settled under the gray skies of snowy, flat Detroit where they held little in common. After all, Italy had only unified as a nation-state in 1861; its provinces varied to such a degree that their home regions of Lombardy and Piedmont were more like stranieri than cuggiono—except in America where they were all lumped together as dagos, WOPs and Eye-talians.

In America, my uneducated immigrant relatives scraped by as they did in the Old Country, their businesses the trade of life: the men were miners, farmers and bartenders while the women stayed home to bear children, sew and cook. Why was it better to do these things in the United States? I asked Grandma Rose once.

“For your sake,” she said, thumping me on the breastbone. She narrated an epic journey: a perilous ocean voyage, foreign languages, strange customs, alienation—the daily pains of resettlement. The seedlings of these two northern Italian families purchased two cracker box houses next door to each other (who else wanted to live by garlic eaters but other garlic eaters?) and between the families, two brothers married two sisters and, from that, fate’s hand was advanced far enough to ensure that my grandmother, my mother and, later, I would be born. In exchange for this sacrifice, I was expected to make my ancestors proud by living a more prosperous and educated life than any of them had ever dreamed.

***

Though my parents were born into a slightly higher caste, we never had much money growing up. Their working-class salaries held scant power in the material world and, unfortunately for them, I came of age during the greedy ‘80s. Generation X, as my peers and I came to be known, was an extension of the endless striving perpetrated by our Boomer parents. Bigger, better, faster, more expensive—we based our identities on social status, grueling work, cynicism and possessions.

In May 1980, my parents and I moved from our quaint brick cottage in Detroit to Phoenix, Arizona, where Mom took a part-time job as a school registrar and Dad toiled as a mechanic in the sweltering heat. The origin story my parents told our new neighbors sounded similar to that of Grandma Rose—we uprooted ourselves in search of a better life—although I perceived our move as unnecessary disruption. We gave up our open, grassy lawn for a bland ranch-style home with a gravel-strewn yard in a cookie-cutter master-planned development ironically called Bellair where each home was surrounded by six-foot-high cinderblock walls. No more leafy trees, no vegetable garden, no sprinkler to run through in the summer, no casual conversations with neighbors over the airy chain link fence.

Living wages were scarce in Detroit, my parents explained. My father no longer wanted to scrape by as a long-haul truck driver, so we followed his parents and brother to Phoenix where they operated a garage called Thunderbird Automotive. There, Dad was assured a steady job where he wouldn’t have to be away so much, Mom explained to our neighbors when we first moved in, though all three of us secretly preferred when he was away.

From the first cactus needle my mother extracted from my heel, I hated the hostile physical climate of Phoenix. Most kids stayed in their air-conditioned homes during the day and watched TV or played with voluminous amounts of stuff: Cabbage Patch Kids, Pound Puppies, Nintendo game sets, Polaroid cameras, Sony Walkmen, board games, boom boxes. My wealthy classmates had everything.

That fall, my parents sat me down for The Talk. “We’re not going to be able to buy you what you want,” Mom explained as Dad paced the dining room.

“But—” I protested.

Dad’s neck flushed as he grabbed me by the shirt, drawing me nose-to-nose with his fire ant-red face. “There are no buts, missy. You’ll be happy with what you get, if you get anything. In my book, you haven’t earned a goddamned thing since we moved here with that attitude.” He tossed me back into the chair as I gulped and wiped his spit from my face.

“I know it’s been hard,” Mom soothed, laying her hands on my knees as I darted a glance up at my father who crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes, daring me to argue. “We’re all making sacrifices,” she said, “but we don’t have money right now for anything except necessities. It’ll get better, if you can sit tight. Just please don’t ask us for anything for a while.”

It was the first instance that my parents’ limitations, and my own, crystallized so clearly. At school, the popular kids showed up every day with something new: clothes, backpacks, school supplies, shoes, toys, sports equipment, or Guess jeans with the little triangle on the butt. When faced with what everyone else seemed to have, I didn’t know how to quit wanting these things. The cool kids’ fathers wore suits and worked in offices, unlike mine who wore a dark gray uniform with his name on it. Their dads had attended college; they didn’t have calloused, grease-stained hands like my dad did.