“This is my room?”
“Yeah! Isn’t it nice?”
Julia throws open the huge windows, letting a gust of crystal-clean air in. There’s no bed, and the room is filled with their stuff, but she is quick to explain that the stuff is on its way out and that they’re buying their friend Barbara’s gorgeous, handmade, family heirloom bed frame. We can build a desk wherever I want. I feel so much gratitude I want to hug her and cry.
She tells me to hang out and get settled in as she closes the door behind her. I watch the handle twist as she pulls it shut, then listen to the sounds of her bare feet padding away down the hall.
I sit on a wooden stool and look around.
I feel like a pair of cymbals, one side freaked out and uncomfortable, the other explosively excited, my ears ringing from the collision.
My first instinct is to unpack. I place my shoes in a straight line by one wall and make neat piles of my new Old Navy gear, organized by type, on the clean wooden floor next to them. When I finish, I fold my duffels and sit back, looking at everything I own in the whole world, lined up in one little row like that. It makes me feel small, but fresh, like everything is new. The table is wiped clean, and now I get to start living the life I’ve always dreamed of, here, in this utopia, with my beloved poppa. I did it.
Chapter 30
Fork and Knife
Ronciglione, Italy, August 1998
THE GIRL IN THE POOL IS NAKED AND CHOKING. THIRTY minutes ago my father was commenting on how beautiful she was as she dipped in and out of the turquoise water in the dusk light. Now there’s a chicken bone lodged in her throat.
Her boyfriend, bronzed, lanky, and goateed, who I was just thinking looked a lot like Jesus, lunges toward her. Arturo’s handsome face struggles through a stoned haze to arrange itself into the grimace of panic and determination its owner feels is expected of him. To no avail. He is shirtless and helpless, and I stare at his body as he lifts hers into his arms, arguing in English with his friend while at the same time soothing her with an Italian that runs like caramel through her coughs and gags. Raised in New York, he knows how not to freak out, but he has no idea what to do.
He and his cohort lay the girl, his lover, on the bright blue tile that circles the Olympic-size swimming pool. His best friend runs to call an ambulance as the girl, Flavia, starts to chameleon to the tiles. Arturo is whispering to her in Italian as she chokes and convulses. His long fingertips, tender on her ribs, are tensed with fear.
My godfather pulls his sunglasses up onto his silver pompadour and props himself up on one big arm on his lounge chair. He is annoyed at the disturbance. Kun, his dainty Japanese boyfriend, lifts his eye mask, and both watch the couple with curiosity. Fear hasn’t wafted to that side of the pool yet.
Arturo lifts his girlfriend’s naked body into his arms and carries her out to the pebbled driveway flanked by tall cypresses. I clamber after him to see. The fainted girl and the saintly boy make a beautiful pair among the green trees and the dusty Italian clay earth.
Flavia spends the night in the hospital and the dinner table is aflutter with gossip. “She was once pregnant with Arturo’s baby.” “She loves him, but he’ll cheat on her.” “His mother wants her gone.” “He is a self-indulgent martyr, staying there all night.” At the end of the table, sitting in the center of a beautiful watercolor, I spot a green-brown lump the size of a fist, enshrined like a meteorite. My godfather or Kun occasionally saunters over to chip off a piece. When I finally figure out what is going on I decide I need to talk to my pop, as seriously as I ever have in my life. I take him by the hand into the dark garden and walk in a circle around the fountain.
“Poppa, I want you to know that I will never do any kind of drugs . . .”
It is our first night on the property.
The next day, at lunch, Flavia and Arturo make a triumphant return. The table is laid outside, under an olive tree, with a giant bowl of salad, several bottles of wine, jugs of water, and fresh bread. My godfather grunts with annoyance through Arturo’s dramatic retelling of the story of her rescue, while Flavia smokes a cigarette and giggles, her nipples barely covered by a sundress.
Mariangela, the cook of the house, comes out carrying a bowl of pasta three times the size of her head. Five foot one in platform flip-flops, in her mid-seventies, she’s wearing a red apron and a cigarette dangles from her wrinkled lips. Mariangela blasts techno all day while she cooks, chain-smoking in the downstairs kitchen. She doesn’t speak a word of English, so she yells at Arturo to clear a space for the bowl, which he jumps up to take from her. She frowns and waves him away with her head, nodding at the table, commanding in Italian.
Mariangela uses a clawed ladle to serve out massive portions of spaghetti carbonara. I whisper to my pop that I only want a little, so he hands her my salad plate. She questions him sharply, to which he responds with something charming in Italian, nodding in my direction. She swings her head of white curls toward me and wrinkles her face further. She plants a dollop of pasta on the salad plate but is clearly upset about it.
Embarrassed by the attention, I keep my head down as I shovel up my pasta with my fork, which I hold in a balled fist. At the first bite, I know it’s the best thing I have ever tasted.
Mariangela returns with a platter of breaded veal cutlets, which blows my mind, because how could anyone eat more than this pasta? She serves them, trading jokes with Arturo and my god-father, nodding with pleasure at the sight of everyone enjoying her food. She pats my portly godfather on the back and moves around the table.
I’m too busy concentrating on getting the delicious noodles into my mouth to notice what’s coming until I feel her hands on my shoulders. She grips tight, like a bird, and shrieks something in Italian. Everyone at the table looks at me. She waves them off, makes a joke I can’t understand, and they laugh and go back to their meal. But to my father, she directs a serious question. He looks at me, to my fork, then back to my eyes.
He says a few words to Mariangela in a tone that sounds like he’s at a loss. I stare at him.
“She wants to know who taught you to hold a fork like that.”
My hand feels foreign, hot with embarrassment. It drops the offending fork. What have I done wrong with this familiar object?
I look up at Mariangela’s face, but grandmothers are no fools. She looks into my eyes and tells my father something in a quieter tone.
“She wants you to visit her in the kitchen.”
“Okay . . . why?”
“You do know how to hold a fork, don’t you?”
“Dad . . . of course I do! Jeez!”
THAT WEEK, Mariangela teaches me how to use a fork and knife properly for the first time. Every day I go to her for a lesson and come out covered in flour, stomach full of olives and fresh tomatoes, veal, pork chops, and chicken with fresh rosemary. She gathers basil from the garden and rubs hot toast with garlic. Truthfully, she is teaching me to eat.
She speaks to me in Italian and I gesticulate and smile a lot and run out to play in the sun and jump in the pool. Making her laugh is a personal victory. Mariangela quickly becomes my favorite person on the property.
She serves me a bowl of pasta on the third day, but when I can’t finish it she goes off. She teaches me to pace myself, not to crouch over my bowl and inhale. Through her gestures I understand that she thinks I eat like I’m in prison. She tells me it’s okay and shows me the gigantic vat of noodles and sauce, as if to say I don’t have to stress, there’s plenty more where that came from.
Each day, at mealtime, I sneak my bowl or plate into the kitchen and show her the evidence of my triumph. She claps and says something congratulatory that I can’t understand, to which I pull up my shirt and pat my distended belly with glee. She makes an unintelligible crack, pulls on her Marlboro, and bounces on her two-inch-thick electric-pink flip-flops.
At the end of our five days, it’s not the beautiful couple I will miss the most, nor my moody godfather who I barely know
or the majestic landscape. The most important piece of that life-changing summer will forever be Mariangela, who taught me that food was something to be savored, enjoyed, and loved, not stabbed.
Chapter 31
Karlsruhe
Karlsruhe, Germany, September 1998 through Christmas 1999
KARLSRUHE IS A BITTERSWEET EXPERIENCE. THE TOWN IS quaint. It smells of concrete after a spring rain. Fresh, the smell of earth rising from unexpected places. But I miss my city. I’m an alien here. I wear my headphones at all times, bringing the beats that conjure home into this strange, pristine environment that is supposed to be my new world. Rap is the only thing that makes me feel grounded, like I come from somewhere with grit and fucked-up personality. The anger and rawness of it brings my ma to me in this distant place.
Everyone rides bikes along manicured cobblestone streets, with babies on board. I sit next to the crystal mountain river that runs through the town, sketching graffiti pieces, and watch them go by.
Pop has been amazing since I got here, exactly the best friend I wanted him to be, except that his job at the theater keeps him super busy all the time. We bike everywhere together, him on his sleek black racer, pointing out cool facts about the historic buildings in town. There’s a cathedral here that took us an hour to walk to the top of, where he showed me graffiti from the fourteenth century—WILLIAM THE BOLD, 1392—chiseled into the stone. We went camping in the mountains of the Black Forest just outside of town, and he cooks for me a lot. If I could, I’d only eat food he cooks, partly because it’s delicious, but mostly because he made it.
Julia is genuinely nice. She took me with her to rehearsal and introduced me to the dancers in her company. They’re from all over the world, which makes talking to them an adventure in accents. They rehearse in a giant room at the top of the state theater with a wall of windows that looks out over the train tracks and the city.
Julia creates modern dance pieces that confound the audiences. She plucked my pop out of New York and asked him to travel with her and create the visual components of her work, and gave his boundless brain complete freedom and access within the well-funded theater. He made a stage set that consisted of a thirty-foot man made of wire that dancers moved in and around as it was slowly unfolded from the ground and pulled into the rafters.
The Germans stand around after performances trying to solve the riddle of “what the piece means,” not getting the fact that it’s not meant to mean anything, it’s meant to be visually extraordinary and make you feel.
I only knew how to count to ten in German when I got here, which was just enough to buy candy at these things called kiosks, which I did as much as I could, simply because I’m free to.
I enrolled in a school that has a class for Ausländer (foreigners), that’s specifically designed to teach us the language. The teacher is a serious guy with a potbelly and olive skin, who speaks to us only in German. I like him. At first I thought he wasn’t that smart, but it turns out he’s a brilliant teacher. He draws objects out in colored chalk and has us copy them in colored pencils. He says the colors are essential to remembering the vocabulary. He says this is the only class we’ll ever take where we will walk straight outside and use what we’re learning. He’s right, on both counts, and I’ve picked up a lot in my first three weeks already.
The class is filled with kids from Turkey and Albania, rugged teenagers who’ve seen awful things. There are two Russian girls, Evita and Olga; a Greek girl and her brother; a French kid; and a beautiful boy from Brazil who makes me think of my own brother. His mom took him back to Brazil when she got divorced when I was eight and I haven’t seen him since.
I don’t get picked on by the Albanians who run the yard because they’re impressed that I’m from New York. They want to know if I’m friends with Jay Z and Puff Daddy. Sure, I say, we hang. They flip out and ask me to translate lyrics for them. I tell them I will once I don’t have to use sign language to explain myself.
This is all well and fun, but I know how brutal kids are, how quickly admiration turns to resentment, so I keep my interactions with them swift and minimal, ducking out to my bike the second school ends.
Pop has an art studio a few blocks away from our house, in a huge concrete room that was once a car repair shop. His friend Barbara, whose heirloom bed I sleep on, lives in a converted bunker next door with her six-year-old son, Leo.
Barbara is a deep hippie, the type who only eats vegetarian and organic, wears clothes made out of weird plants, and consults crystals about her health woes, which are abundant. She has a condition that makes her skin itchy and powdery, like leather that’s been left out in the rain. This tortures and embarrasses her. She spends a lot of time concocting creams in her place, which is a makeshift house covered in colorful cloths, Hula-Hoops, beanbag chairs, exercise balls, and kids’ toys.
Leo’s father is way out of the picture, “a bastard” long gone. Leo is a blond dynamo with crystal-blue eyes and endless energy. Poppa says he will grow into a dictator and enslave the whole world, and often asks him to his face to think of him when he’s the Führer and to spare him.
POPPA AND I HAVE TO GO BACK TO New York twice in the fall for meetings with a counselor from the government. They want to check on how I’m doing. I’m scared of seeing my ma.
I’ve been calling her a ton to check in and let her know how awesome everything is, but she’s hard to reach. Every time I get her, she tries to trick me into coming home. She tells me there are several incredible auditions for big movies that I can’t miss, and then that she has a friend who’s going to buy me a ticket to come home for them. When I find out that it’s a one-way ticket I feel betrayed, like she doesn’t hear me, or care, when I tell her how happy I am.
One day she tells me that something is wrong with her shoulder. She doesn’t know what it is, some kind of growth. Could it be cancer? Nah, she says, probably not, it’ll probably go away. Worried, I tell her that things don’t just go away on their own, she should go see a doctor. She reminds me that she hates doctors and has no intention of finding one who would know what the fuck this thing is. I plead with her, to which she retorts that she’ll only go see a doctor if I come home and take her.
That night there’s a dinner with the entire dance company at a restaurant in town. I am so wracked with concern about my ma having cancer that I sob through the entire evening.
I use my poppa’s reassurances as a crutch until we go back to New York in October. I meet my ma in the presence of a counselor, which is a humiliation to her. She shows up in her trench coat with a scarf wrapped around her head like a peasant woman, barely concealing a black eye. I’m already raw from weeks of fearing for her health, and now it’s like I got punched in the eye, too. Seeing her like that, her proud back stooped, pulling envelopes covered in scribble out of her plastic bag purses, makes me want to throw up. It’s all outside of me, but my body is trying to eject it from within.
The counselor can sense that I can’t handle her, so he lets us go early.
I spend a month in Karlsruhe haunted by visions of Ma being hit by this character Gus. I imagine killing him in a multitude of ways. I try to call extra often to check on her, but she is even harder to get ahold of.
When we go back to New York in November, she is bleeding from the face like a religious icon. She shows up late, cupping a paper towel filled with ice over the other side of her face, blood streaming from her eye. She is carrying her head scarf and coat in the same hand as her plastic bags, trying to hold it together, but I’ve never seen her in so much pain. This time my stomach tries to claw its way out of my mouth.
I’m not supposed to talk to her, but I can’t handle this. With a broken heart I run to her.
“Maaaa. What happened to your face?!”
“Nothing, my bud.”
“What do you mean nothing? You’re bleeding!”
She winces, taking a deep gulp of air. I realize she is trying not to throw up, too.
“Ma. Did Gus
do this to you? Did he hit you in the face again?”
She turns sharply to me and in a pointedly loud whisper sternly says, “No! Nobody did shit to me.”
Then, with a glance toward the counselor, who is nervously consulting someone out in the hall, she says, “You don’t give these people any added reasons to go poking around in your shit, you hear me?”
She whispers something about Gus having thrown a belt across the room and the buckle having skewered her eyeball. I start to cry and my pop whisks me out of there. I scream in the hallway that I won’t go unless they take her to a hospital. She comes out of the room, crying because I’m crying, and says she’s going to go. I make her swear on everything we’ve ever held sacred, and will only get in the elevator once she does.
People are staring. My pop rubs my back and buys me a pack of M&M’s while I sob on the steps of the court building, snot running out of my nose.
INSTEAD OF GOING BACK TO KARLSRUHE, we head south to São Paulo, to visit Elio, my little brother, a treacherous and exciting voyage. I’m thirteen and my brother is nine, but we’ve only ever met when he was a baby. I see photos of him all the time, but he doesn’t speak English, so we can’t talk on the phone.
São Paulo is massive and terrifying, which is bizarre, seeing as I’m from New York. But São Paulo is like five New Yorks, scrambled together with endless horizon after horizon of city. We pretend to belong at fancy hotels; my dad just waltzes in with us and asks for three towels, “two for my sons.” We hit the roof pool and stay all day, laughing and swimming and scarfing down grilled meats and fresh fruit juices.
I’m starting to wear a T-shirt with my swimming trunks because something is beginning to sprout on my chest. Pools are a hazard now. The changing rooms are a minefield and my whole body just makes me uncomfortable. My shaved head signals a clear gender delineation for the rest of the world; the turmoil is inside me, and I’m increasingly afraid someone will figure me out.
Darling Days Page 19
