Three Reasons I Can’t Quit Carmela Soprano

In anticipation of The Saints of Newark and because I freakin’ love this show (said in a Jersey accent), this is the first in a series of essays on The Sopranos.

On January 10, 1999, I was 24 and living in Russia. Working hard as a teacher in a public school in northeastern Moscow, I also played hard with my friends on the weekends, clubbing until 4 am.

On January 10th, 1999, the world met someone on a very different life track, or so it seemed. Carmela Soprano entered living rooms in her cropped pants, mules, and armor of gold necklaces. She spent every morning making breakfast for her ungrateful family, maintained a refrigerator with an endless supply of deli meats, and disregarded her husband’s illegal business dealings and extramarital affairs for her McMansion and Mercedes.

The first two times I watched The Sopranos, Carmela was background to me. I was more interested in Tony, Dr. Melfi, and Adriana. But this summer, as I watched the series for the third time, and now that I am as old as Carmela, it was as if I’d stopped in front of a mirror.

This surprised the manitcot’ outta me. Carmela Soprano is one of the last fictional characters I thought I’d find affinity with.

My husband is not a mafioso, he is not violent, and he is faithful to our vows, and I still understand the feeling when Carmela looks at Tony and wants to scream so her Lladro shatters. Long-term cohabitation is HARD. I felt for Carm as she glared at Tony shuffling through the house in his bathrobe, swigging out of the orange juice carton day after day. It’s the same contained exhaustion and disbelief I feel after 20 years of closing cabinets and picking up socks after my spouse. No one warns you during your engagement that those “cute personality quirks” just might become the bane of your married existence.

If you have seen The Sopranos, you might remember Carmela has a thing for her priest and then a hitman. There are all kinds of Freudian reasons for this, but what I’m interested in is more mundane: Carmela Soprano is a perfect example of the invisibility many women experience as part of middle age. I, too, know what’s it’s like when a man who is not your husband pays you a little attention, who makes you feel visible again. I can relate to why Carm watches movies with Father Intintola or helps Furio decorate the apartment he’s building for his parents: these men, they see you with fresh eyes. They inhale life into you when they look at you. It doesn’t change my commitment to my partner, but wow, it makes me feel more vibrant.

In this third visit to Satriale’s with my favorite connoisseurs of gabagool, I also felt a kinship to Carmela’s absolute rage. Carmela gives Tony the heave-ho in the Season 4 finale. Edie Falco’s performance takes my breath away every single time I watch this scene:

Like Carmela, I was raised to push my anger down in services of others’ needs. To be The Good Girl. But good girls always explode, eventually. Life has forced me to befriend anger, to be curious about her, to welcome her. Sometimes the anger stays too long, but I’m healthier for acknowledging her. Watching this scene during my summertime late-night quarantine cocoon was balm to my 45-year-old heart.

Preach, Carmela.

Let it out. Let it all out.

Do it for you, do it for me, do it for recovering Good Girls everywhere.

Spoiler alert: Carmela reunites with Tony, setting a predictable course for her future. He will continue to dress her in fur coats and agrees to back her real estate business; Carmela will continue to maintain the home and ignore his indiscretions. It’s a pitch-perfect quid pro quo. There is no wondering what happens to Carm and the family after the screen goes dark in the finale: it will be the same as it ever was.

And that’s what scares me about middle-age:

What am I quid-pro-quoing?

Will I settle for “same as it ever was” for security and stability?

I am far too restless to measure my life out in real estate like Carmela, but I am also not that 24-year-old dancing to a techno version of the national anthem of the USSR at a sleazy Russian bar. The older I get, the less I know, but I do know this: I love my restless heart. Even though my friend circle doesn’t include anyone like Carmela, it’s nice to sit down with her for some predictable dysfunction that has nothing to do with me.

Well, now that I’m older, almost nothing to do with me.