The Talk

Puberty didn’t hit me until I was seventeen years old. Or at least that’s what my dad must’ve thought when he sat down next to me in the living room and adjusted his glasses in a vaguely academic manner. It was Thanksgiving week, and I was back home from boarding school, where I had been living amongst a thousand post-pubescent teenagers for the past three years. That fact didn’t seem to cross his mind as he began to cough and clear his throat, a thirty-second process that always precedes his longer, more painfully awkward discourses. Neither did the fact that I was now six feet tall and sporting regal tufts of armpit hair, which I’d been proudly growing out and slipping into conversation since the age of ten.

I stared at my dad as he dislodged the last bit of phlegm in his throat and began to speak:

“So, how are your friends?”

“I don’t know, dad, pretty good,” I responded.

After a four-second-long, squinty-eyed staring contest, he readjusted his glasses and tried again, “Do you, eh, know any girls?”

Apart from being generally indirect in his verbal communication, which is true of his speech in any language, my dad is also a native Italian speaker. He only learned English after he married my mom and moved to the United States. (She enrolled him in a few high school English classes at the tender age of twenty-eight.) Despite these classes, he never really acquired the anatomic vocabulary and syntactic dexterity necessary for broaching the topic of puberty. The result was something straight out of the Old Testament.

“Dad, what do you mean? Of course I know girls.”

My dad’s face turned a bright shade of red that was equal parts embarrassment and anger. He thought that I knew what he meant by all the strange biblical talk. And to be fair, I thought I knew too. I figured he wanted to take this lovely Thanksgiving moment, when my mom and sister were in the kitchen making stuffing, to have the sex talk. Because I was seventeen, and it was already late for the sex talk. I was wrong.

“Matchew, don’t be an ass.”

This might sound overly aggressive, but it wasn’t. As he clarified for me when I was in fifth grade, by ass he meant “donkey”, not “asshole”. Because a donkey in Italian is called an asino. See, when my dad doesn’t know a word, or isn’t sure how to pronounce it, he always opts for the Italian cognate, whether or not it’s actually a word in the English language. Hence the word “fascinating” becomes “affascinating” and lips comes out as “labials”.

“Pa, what are you talking about?”

I call my dad “Pa” when I’m trying to cut through his bullshit. It’s what Italian people call their dads, and for me it’s a way of saying, Hey dad, you’re being really Italian right now. Cut to the chase. It makes his blood boil, but it also makes him say what he means.

“Matchew. Stop. Let me talk.”

Go ahead, Pa, talk. Realizing he was off to one of the worst starts in the history of bad starts, my dad took a few seconds to compose himself: he took a deep breath, readjusted his glasses, and coughed. Then he said this,

“Matchew, do you know what puberty is?”

I blacked out for a second. Ummmmmm what. We squinted at each other again, then he repeated it,

“Do you know what, eh, puberty is?”

I was relieved that he didn’t want to talk about sex, but I was still shocked and responded curtly,

“Pa, I’m seventeen years old. I know what puberty is.”

If there’s one thing my dad hates most in this world, it’s when his children respond to something he’s said very quickly and directly, without any sort of inflection or hand gesturing. It offends his special breed of mediterranean politeness. And when that happens, he responds as any Italian under question does: he raises his voice.

“YES, Matchew, but do you REALLY know.”

“Yes, Pa, I really know.

“Okay, then TELL me what is the dictionary definition.”

Not the dictionary. Whenever there’s a dispute in the family, linguistic or otherwise, my dad insists on breaking out the dictionary. But not the Oxford English Dictionary or Merriam Webster Dictionary — you know, dictionaries that people actually reference. He insists on using the grossly out-dated Italian-English dictionary that he bought for his high-school English class. And he doesn’t stop insisting until it’s brought out.

“Pa, I’m pretty sure we don’t need to do this.”

“YES, Matchew, we do. GO get the dictionary.”

“Pa, it’s not necessary. I’m seventeen. I know what puberty is.”

“MATCHEW, GO get the dictionary. GO.”

I got up from the couch and walked over to the bookcase in the other room. I grabbed the first dictionary I saw — the Merriam Webster Dictionary that my sister and I used for school work — walked back into the living room, flipped to the entry for “puberty” and started reading.

“Stop. Get the Italian one. STOP, Matchew.”

“Pa, this one’s better.”

“No, get the other one. For comparison.”

My dad likes to cross-reference the English definition of a word with the Italian definition, as if one day he’ll uncover a glaring disparity in definitions that proves some Big Brother-esque conspiracy to tamper with language.

“Pa, it’s the same dictionary. The definitions will be the same.”

“Yes, but I like to see. Go get the Italian one.”

I went back to the bookcase and pulled out his trusty Italian-English dictionary. When I sat back down on the couch, he cozied up next to me so he could read over my shoulder. I flipped to P’s in the English half of the dictionary, which he took issue with.

“I want to see the Italian definition. Oh!”

Oh! is a common Italian expression of frustration, which in this case meant: I want to read the Italian definition because I’m Italian and my first language is Italian is that so hard to understand.

“Okay, Pa, fine.” I flipped to the Italian P’s and found the entry for pubertà.

I looked up at him, expecting to see him reading and mouthing the definition in his native tongue. Instead, he was looking directly at me.

“Matchew. What are you doing? READ it.”

“The Italian definition?”

“No, the Russian definition. YES, the Italian definition.”

As if the situation weren’t already awkward enough, now my dad wanted me to read the unofficial dictionary definition of puberty in a language that I didn’t speak fluently and inevitably made pronunciation errors in, which he always corrected. Always. La pubertà è il periodo di cambiamenti fisici attraverso i quali il corpo di un bambino diviene…

“Matchew, it’s di-viene with an “i”, not de-viene.”

He hovered over my shoulder and casually hand-gestured for me to keep reading. I continued, … diviene un corpo adulto capace di riprodursi. Con questo processo inizia l’attività delle ghiandole… He interrupted me again.

“GHEE-AHN-DOH-LEH. G-H-I-A, ghia-ghia.” He sounded it out with a hard “g”.

What started off as an ill-timed, father-son puberty talk was now devolving into a full-blown Italian lesson, which naturally positioned him as the teacher and me the student. Though I highly doubt my dad knew the exact Italian-English dictionary definition of puberty either, he was the adult now because he was correcting my soft g’s. He hand-gestured and I continued, trying to get this over with as quickly as possible … ghiandole sessuali, che si manifesta nella donna con la prima mestruazione (menarca), nell’uomo con la produzione di sperma.

If you can’t tell from the italics, this is where the unofficial Italian definition gets spicy, with words like “sexual organs”, “menstruation”, and “sperm”. These are the words that probably caught my mother and sister’s attention, because they proceeded to run out of the kitchen laughing.

“What are you guys talking about?” My sister spoke for both of them.

“He’s teaching me what puberty is,” I said, making a face that said “help me”.

My dad got defensive and started raising his voice.

“He has to learn SOMETIMES.”

My mother, the commonsensical one in the family, stated the obvious.

“Francesco, he’s seventeen years old. I think he knows what puberty is.”

“You THINK so. But he doesn’t.”

This statement triggered a rapid-fire barrage of verbal arrows.

“Pa, I know what puberty is.”

“Pa, he knows what puberty is.”

“Francesco, what are you talking about?”

“Pa, he knows what puberty is.”

“Pa, I know what puberty is.”

“WHY DIDN’T YOU SAY THAT BEFORE THEN!!!!! Oh!”

My dad could gracefully fend off the attacks of one or two family members, but not three at once. Whenever that happened, which was almost daily, he spoke in ALL CAPS. UNTIL EVERYONE STOPPED TALKING AND RETREATED TO THEIR CORNERS. When he was done yelling, he always claimed that he was just speaking loudly, because “I’m Italian and that’s how we speak.” It was a script that played out the same way every time, as consistently as a the Godfather-themed music-box that he and my mom received as a wedding gift so many years ago.

“That’s how we speak” was our cue to scatter off-stage and go about our lives as if nothing had happened. My mom and sister rolled their eyes and went back to the kitchen, where their stuffing was still baking. I got up from the couch and slunk back to my room, where I watched internet porn until dinner was ready. And my dad stayed on the couch, where he continued to read his Italian-English dictionary and search for disparities between the two languages.