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impossible for Adele or Lillian to challenge her on this front. Every day Florence swept the floor or vacuumed the carpet of every room, and every week she carried a broom outside and swept the curb in front of her house. She did the windows twice a week.
    Adele prided herself on her three boys: my father; his younger brother, Jim; and the youngest, Mario. Their hair was always cut short and slicked back with Dippity-do. During summer they got a fresh set of clean clothes after dinner, so that anyone who saw them walking through the neighborhood at eight p.m., when it was still light out, beheld perfect children. They did unusually well in school, and Adele made sure Florence and Lillian knew about that. Her bragging was ruthless.
    And Lillian, the only one who grew up in America, prided herself on being the least hidebound, the most flexible, the one whose home you could enter without any sense of ceremony, the one who would greet you in a housedress with the readiest, widest smile. When Adele and Mauro broke down and got their boys a cocker spaniel, it was confined to certain rooms, and it moved cautiously through them, alert to its lesser place in the household and aware that any misstep could trigger their wrath. The dogs owned by Lillian and Gus went wherever they pleased, squirming around the legs of guests even on special holidays and sometimes nipping at people’s ankles.
    Of course the rivalry played itself out in the kitchen, especially between Florence and Adele. Each had dishes she was known for, dishes that, everyone in the extended family agreed, she did better than anyone else. This agreement wasn’t acknowledged when the women were around, but it was made clear to them by how much of something family members ate, by how often family members mentioned it and pined for it when they knew it was scheduled to be served on an upcoming night or holiday.
    Florence’s frittata, an audaciously dense omelet with green and red peppers and locatelli Romano cheese, was mentioned very often, to Adele’s obvious consternation.
    “I could make a frittata like that,” she would sniff, “if I used four dozen eggs.”
    Florence was also famous in the family for her breaded, fried veal cutlets, which had to be drained on, and pressed between, brown paper grocery bags, not paper towels, because paper towels weren’t to her mind as effective. She was famous, too, for her homemade ravioli, filled with ricotta and herbs. They were gorgeous, perfect: each one the same size, because she used the rim of a glass to cut the circles of dough from a long sheet. Each one also had the same cinching around the edges, the same pattern of dimples, made in a meticulous fashion with the tines of a fork.
    Lillian made ravioli, too, but she didn’t have Florence’s patience. So she improvised with the implements she used to trace and cut each raviolo. She traded the kind of glass Florence used for a small bowl, then the small bowl for a bigger bowl, these changes lessening the number of ravioli she needed to make. Over time her ravioli grew so big that one per person was nearly enough, and the filling would seep or poke through the envelope of pasta, because a raviolo this sprawling was a raviolo on borrowed time.
    Adele’s specialty was what most Italian food lovers know as orecchiette , which means “little ears.” Her name for them, strascinat , pronounced something like strah-zshi-NOT, came from her southern Italian dialect. It alluded to the Italian verbs for “to trail” and “to drag” ( strascicare and trascinare ), because to make this pasta, you’d drag a knife along a sheet of dough, repeatedly pressing down and pinching off just enough of the dough to make an ear-shaped nub of pasta. The method was even more tedious than Florence’s process for ravioli.
    Adele used her thumb as the mold for each strascinat. She would sit at a sizable table, an enormous rectangle of dough before her, and pinch and mold and then flick, the