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pronounced peas-an’-pas’ , mashing three words together in a hurried exhalation. Chicken had its designated night; so did steak.
    Holiday meals were also set in stone. Grandma always hosted her brothers and their wives and children for Christmas Eve, when she hewed without exception to the tradition of seven fishes. She put canned tuna on an antipasti platter; mixed clams into a sauce for spaghetti; folded anchovies into a calzone ; boiled octopus; and fried salt cod, squid and scallops. Sometimes she expanded the meal to include more than seven fishes, but she never contracted it to include fewer. There were things in this world a person should be able to depend on. Eating the right meals on the right occasions was foremost among them.
    She told her children that they should never, ever leave anyone with the impression that they wanted for food, drilling into them that when someone offered them something to eat, they should refuse it. Period. If the offer was repeated, they might consider accepting it, but it was probably best to wait for a third or even fourth offer. Otherwise, she said, “the people” might get the wrong idea.
    She spoke of “the people” constantly, usually in the form of a question that was basically her life’s refrain: “What will the people think?” She asked her children this whenever one of them was about to head out in a shirt that was torn or pants with the barest of stains. She asked Grandpa this whenever he dawdled in attending to some home repair whose necessity might be apparent to a neighbor or passerby. Her children—and, later, their wives and the rest of us—liked to tease her by asking, “Who are the people ? Do they have names?” But we knew. They were anyone and everyone who might get a glimpse of, and draw a conclusion about, you. They were the jury, seen and unseen, before whom you maintained a “bella figura,” a bedrock Italian expression that literally translates into “beautiful figure” but really means “good impression” and refers to your image and standing in the world.
    The house on Fifth Street wasn’t fancy, but Adele made sure it had fancy flourishes. In a magazine she once saw garage doors painted in the manner of a black-and-white chessboard, and realized that her garage doors, formed by a grid of squares, could yield to a similar decorative treatment. So she and Jim, her middle son, went to work, improvising somewhat by replacing the black paint with turquoise, which matched the metal patio furniture. The results thrilled her, in no small part because they were visible to the neighbors, who had boring garage doors, monochromatic garage doors, garage doors that looked like, well, garage doors. Hers looked like a mosaic.
    Before long, Domenica’s did as well. Domenica owned the house next door, and seemed always to be sitting at the window with the best view of the goings-on at the Brunis, her unblinking eyes staring out. She watched the garage makeover, then decided to mimic it. She painted her own chessboard, only in pink and white, and it was fewer than twenty feet away from Adele’s. To Adele this was an outrage. Had the phrase “copyright infringement” been in her vocabulary, she would have muttered it, or muttered whatever words in her southern Italian dialect came closest, along with references to plagiarism and theft of intellectual property. She wasn’t about to sit still for this. She and Jim plotted, and then made a stencil, and then went back to painting, at the end of which the grid on her garage doors comprised turquoise squares with inscribed white circles: a sort of chessboard with plump polka dots. Game, set, match.
    She wanted to feel rich, and to her thinking a rich person would speak on a gold telephone. When she couldn’t find one in a store, she applied glittering gold paint to the glossy black surface of a normal phone. But the surface wasn’t right for paint, which didn’t fully dry on it, not after several hours, not