Staying Fit
New Year’s Eve 1983, outside a ranch house in suburban Buffalo, New York. My boyfriend, Frankie, turned and said, “Ready?”
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I was 22, and this was my first time as an I-want-you-to-meet-my-parents girlfriend. If my previous, short-term boyfriends had even had parents, they had been tucked away, only emerging to bark out warnings regarding muddy shoes or reminders to take out the trash. My own parents had recently split. They were younger and wilder than most. I loved them for their outrageousness, their intelligence, their passionate flailings through life, but their divorce created, for me, a vacuum. In my senior year of college, I felt adrift and yearned for an intact family.
Enter Evelyn and Frank Vitello. Bona fide ’50s sitcom parents — the Italian American version.
I plunged my frozen hands into the pockets of my parka and followed the boy who would become my husband into a family room redolent of party food: roast beef, pizza and wings. Along the perimeter of the room, perched upon puffy-seated folding chairs, sat the aunts. So many aunts. And a layer of young cousins. A couple of grandmothers. And a large, balding man — Frank Sr. — who grabbed me by the hand and pulled me into the center of the room. “Frankie,” the man bellowed, “are you kidding me with this one?”
“Frank!” yelled Evelyn from the kitchen. “You’re scaring the poor girl.”