A Semester Abroad

by Papa, Ariella

  On the train back to her apartment, Kaitlin told me that she hated Paris, hated the French people, but she liked it better when I was there. She was having trouble with the language. Most of the Parisians pretended not to understand her. I told Kaitlin all about Siena, my roommates, school and Gaetano. With one night left together, we kept talking when we got back and into her bed. We whispered late into the darkness three months’ worth of gossip until we were talking in our sleep.

  My last day. We went to the Eiffel Tower. Kaitlin waited for me to do this. She didn’t go when she had other opportunities. We were speaking with a kind of urgency. We were trying to update each other on everything we have been up to. It was so unusual for us not to have all the same references. We wouldn’t be apart for much longer, in four weeks Kaitlin was coming to Italy for her spring break.

  Then I did it, I could see Kaitlin measuring my face, but I did it. I would have regretted not doing it. I asked about Jonas. I kept my face still. If you took my pulse, you would see no change. I had to stay composed so she wouldn’t worry.

  Kaitlin took a minute before she answered me. No one mentioned him to me anymore, but I knew she still got letters from friends in the know. She took a deep breath, and I told myself that no matter what she said, I would stay stoic.

  “I don’t know, Gabriella. I hear they still fight about you,” she said hesitantly. “But it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  “No, of course not. I was just wondering.”

  I was happy she believed I was getting better, that I shut the door on Crazy. Maybe that was why she didn’t recognize me at first. Maybe I was getting a little of myself back, standing taller. I was not so openly shaky and unsure. She wouldn’t have indulged me with news of Jonas if she didn’t think I could take it. I wondered if I was getter stronger or just faking it better.

  I turned my attention back to the city. I didn’t want Kaitlin to see the painful sick bit of hope she had given me. I didn’t want her to regret it. We had walked around the city below together, Jonas and me. Paris was our city. I imagined that he still thought of me and that Kaitlin thought I was better. This was a victory. I knew that I couldn’t react to it until later when I was on the train alone in my couchette. Instead, I pointed down to Paris and told her again how much I enjoyed the city and my time with her.

  I swallowed Crazy down.

  We went back to the Jewish section. I wanted another delicious falafel for the train trip. Kaitlin brought me to the train. We tried not to spend too much time saying goodbye. We hugged and I pressed my forehead against Kaitlin. Then I got on the train.

  In the couchette, I ate the falafel quickly. Eggplant, chickpea, potato and pita blended together in my mouth. Oil dripped onto my jeans. The stain would never come out. When I got home to the states, it would be the souvenir of the long lonely trip away from Paris, away from Kaitlin. For as long as I kept those jeans, that oil stain made me think of making my way from the freedom of walking around with Jonas in my mind, the sick possibility that if he was fighting about me, if I was still an issue, that he missed me too.

  But I didn’t have much of a chance to revel in that because on this train there were no friendly conductors. I was alone in my couchette. I couldn’t sleep. There were no other sweet tourists in my cabin. There were scary Italian militario passing by in fifteen-minute intervals, looking in at me, circling for an attack.

  They shouted things in their rough dialects. I considered lugging my backpack to the bathroom and locking myself in for the entire ride, but I was scared to pass them in the corridor.

  Everything changed so certainly from hugging my closest female friend goodbye to feeling like prey. I thought of Olivia and how she had sat on the train as we headed back from Switzerland, making a list of things that we needed for our next trip. How then I had seen traveling as full of promise and fun. It had been an adventure. Now I was alone and cornered. This was another side. I would have given anything to have a companion in my couchette, a friendly face to assuage my fears of the imposing men. But I remained alone.

  And so I didn’t shut the light. I didn’t even feign sleep. I sat upright in my cabin alone. I undid the top bunk and waited. Threatened. Vulnerable. A woman. I kept my dull Swiss Army knife in my hand.

  I traveled this way, learning there was always something to be afraid of. It was another one of the ways a woman travels. I was reminded of my breasts, reminded of the appealing dangerous parts between my legs all the way into the ferrovia of Firenze.

  Then I caught the bus back to Siena. And then only when I saw Santa Caterina’s church, the duomo in the distance, and the Torre del Mangia, I exhaled and let my shoulders widen, let my thighs loosen a bit. Only then, I relaxed. The city opened its arms without reproach for having left and having been slightly inebriated by someplace else.

  And only then, inside the protection of the city’s walls, when I sighed and appreciated my city’s beauty, did Siena welcome me home.

  APRILE

  15.

  The house smelled of sex when I got home. Someone was calling my name. I opened the door to Michelle and Janine’s room and found Janine on her bed. She sat up and ran to me.

  “I’m so glad you’re back,” she said hugging me. “Now you’re my best friend.”

  “Really?” I asked. “Can I put my bag down first?”

  “Let me help.” Janine said. She was wearing a tank top and short shorts, her robe was tied around her waist, but she had pulled her arms out of it. Her hair was fastened back and her skin was glistening.

  “I’m fine, Janine. I got it. I need to do some laundry.”

  “Let me come with you. Let me do it for you.” Janine was scary with this intense desperation. There was a scratch in her veneer, a thumbprint through her foundation. “I’ve just been so lonely. Everyone left me.”

  “Didn’t you and Gaetano have a picnic?”

  “No, I spent my birthday by myself.” I felt a wave of relief. I’d rather believe he was trying to hurt me than that I was so easily replaceable.

  “Well, we’ll take you out when everyone gets back. What did you do all week?”

  “Not much. I wasn’t going to go calling up any of those hos.” All of the other girls on the program hated Janine with a smiling bitterness that never fully rose to the surface.

  “Oh, and I brought a guy back here,” she said, making a mock embarrassed face. That explained the smell.

  “Where’d you find him?”

  “The campo. He was older. Gave him the business all kinds of ways. He was in town for the weekend. From Rome.”

  “How fun.” I said, willing to let it drop there.

  “It was pretty crazy. We were all over the apartment. Stayed out of your room, though.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I wasn’t sure I wanted to venture into my room and speculate on whether she was telling the truth.

  “I also did something stupid.” Janine said this, too, like she didn’t really believe she had a choice and was not responsible for the consequences.

  “What’s that?” I asked, because it was my cue.

  “I called my old boyfriend from high school. I told him to come here, and he’s coming later in the month.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “I don’t know,” Janine said, shaking her head at her own unpreventable mistakes. “Let me just get dressed and I’ll go to the Laundromat with you.”

  Janine suffocated me, sticking by as I pressed too many clothes into the washing machine. An episode of Santa Barbara was on the television in the Laundromat. It was a soap opera I watched as a kid. I wanted to watch it alone and try to translate the dub, but instead Janine just kept talking, trying to get me to commit to plans and comment on whether or not what she did made her a slut.

  I hated this invasion. I wanted to be away from Janine, but I was scared for her. So I listened to her chatter on and on about the Italian she slept with. I wondered if she slept with him only for the story, and then I wondered if she sl
ept with him at all or was telling me what she somehow thought I wanted to hear.

  Janine was a demanding “new best friend.” She wanted my opinion on every aspect of her life. She would drain all of my strength until the next best better friend came along. Eventually, she turned the conversation to Michelle, gossiping openly about her for the first time. She thought Michelle deserved these insults for abandoning her, for not keeping her company over spring break.

  “You know it was her stealing the food, don’t you? I caught her one time. And, I mean, why bother to steal it if you are just going to puke it all up later.” She laughed at her joke. I kind of smiled. It was so wrong to joke about this. It might be true that Michelle was the food thief, but I knew that Janine was lying. Janine never caught her. She just wanted me on her side. She would have said anything.

  “Really,” I asked, not joining in but not defending Michelle. Part of me wanted to see how far she would take it, just let her go, let her spiral off into the sky.

  “Yeah, and she’s so selfish, you know. I knew she didn’t speak Italian when we got here, that she was going to have to learn, but I thought she was going to, you know, be there for me. And she totally isn’t.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “And I don’t think she is coming back. I mean, she’s much happier at home.”

  “You think so?’

  “Of course, I do. I mean, what does she have here?”

  “Well,” I began, knowing it wasn’t the answer Janine wanted, knowing Janine wanted her and their friendship to be the reason, but it wasn’t. “There’s Duccio.”

  Janine didn’t say anything. She’d been jealous all along of this relationship, this special thing that Michelle had that she hadn’t found. We all were.

  When my laundry was dry, I snagged my exit. “Janine, I’m totally wiped out. I think I’m going to have to take a nap. I didn’t sleep at all on the train.”

  “Okay,” said Janine, considering the options, planning a new course of attack. “Maybe I’ll go to Crai market and get some ingredients for a little pranzo for us.”

  She pronounced pranzo purposely wrong, dragging the a out in almost a Texas drawl.

  “Let me get some sleep, and then we’ll talk. Don’t wait around on me for lunch.”

  “Okay,” Janine said, relenting, looking defeated. “Okay.”

  It was true that I was tired, exhausted after a night worrying about the militario. But most of me just wanted to be free of Janine. In my bed, in a freshly cleaned tank top I thought that the worst and the best came out so far from home. The true you. Maybe we would have all been different if someone was keeping tabs on us. But no one was. We were free in a way we never had been in college. We could be anyone. It was liberating but also scary. I wondered if anyone could still recognize who they had become.

  The apartment got quiet. While Janine was sleeping I snuck out across the street to the café that had a phone. I called the monastery. Another one of the faceless students answered the phone. I asked for Gaetano and heard the student calling down the hall. Gaetano’s name echoed, but there was no answer.

  “Gaetano, non c’è,” said the student.

  “Okay, grazie.” I bought a ricciarelli and ate the cookie standing at the counter. Then I went back to my room, back to bed. I thought of Gaetano’s gray eyes in the dance club and wondered if I was ever going to see him again.

  I woke up in the late afternoon to a knock. It was Michelle. “Wake up, sleepy G-dog.”

  “Cazzo,” I said, running a hand through my hair. “You’re back.”

  “Of course you believed the rumors. Brought some new clothes, too.” Michelle jumped on my bed and hugged me.

  “What’s this? A new jacket?” I asked, rubbing the material. I could feel her bones through it. “Very bella.”

  “There’s more where that came from.” Michelle said, charged up, reenergized by her voyage.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, wanting to know about her grandmother but not wanting to bust up the mood.

  “Yeah, my grandmother passed right after I got there. I just made it, and I’m really glad I did. I got to say goodbye. It was good to be home. But also hard and weird.” She looked out my window for a second. I held on to her arm. “You wanna get drunk tonight?””

  “Yeah, did you see Janine?”

  “No, she’s not in our room.”

  “She’s not,” I said. So much for catering to my every need. “Did you call Duccio?”

  “First thing I did when I got off the plane. Talked to Mama Duccio. She loves me.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Not really. Anyway, he is in Rome till tomorrow, the fucker. And I wanted to get me some sweet Italian cazzo.”

  “Girl, you dirty.”

  “Girl, you better sveglia or we ain’t never gonna get all ubriaca,” she said, grabbing my arm and pulling me out of bed.

  We left Janine a note and went to the bar behind the campo, near Piazza del Mercato. The drinks were pricey, but Michelle got a whole bunch of cash from her relatives for leather goods. Now she was blowing the wad on Bloody Marys. With her new jacket off, I could see that she was skinnier than ever. I couldn’t understand how her organs fit inside that slight frame. I almost asked her about it, but as usual, I stopped myself. I still didn’t know her well enough to go there. And I wanted to keep up the mood.

  “I’m glad you’re back, Michelle,” I kept saying instead, again and again.

  “I had to finish it. And I missed you guys. I missed Duccio.”

  “Was it so weird to be home?”

  “It’s hard to explain. For a while, you’re just kind of in awe. I mean, first everyone is really super excited to see you, asking all these questions, then you get a sec by yourself and you feel kind of out of it and then–,” she looked around the bar “–you think of Italy and you try to remember and it’s like you lose it all so fast, you know. I had to come back. I wasn’t ready to lose it yet.”

  “Yeah,” I nodded, looking around. I wanted to take it all. I was almost halfway done. I would be home in three months. How quick would I lose it?

  “I don’t know, I’m just glad to be back.”

  “I’m glad you’re back, too,” I said, surprised at how true it was.

  We didn’t stay out too late; we both had language class in the morning. When we got back to the apartment, Janine was waiting for us. She had a hug for Michelle and a little bit of an attitude for me. I had eluded her desperate grasp.

  “We left you a note,” I offered, shrugging.

  “I’m just kidding, G,” Janine said, using Michelle’s nickname and flashing a toothy smile.

  Michelle was oblivious to any tension or at least acted oblivious. She pulled out three boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese, like she smuggled some precious jewels. “Not only this, ragazze, I got bagels through customs.”

  We made a big pot of mac and cheese, put the pot in the center of the dining room table and went at it with our forks. We ate much fresher, better foods on a daily basis, but we devoured this as if it were the finest plate of truffles. It was a taste of home far away.

  Lucy was in my language class once again. She went hiking in Cinque Terre for the break. I respected that she went on her own. She was what I aspired to be. I wanted to ask her if she was ever scared to be a woman traveling on her own, but I was ashamed that I was.

  “It was lonely at times,” Lucy said. “It would have been nice to have someone to talk to, to share it all with, you know, but this way I got to do my own thing.”

  Our new language teacher was a spicy number, a far cry from Signora Laza. She waltzed into the class twenty minutes late in a green leather jacket and sunglasses, saying allora. She told us that she was into the culture part in many ways as much as the language. She believed in watching a lot of movies and taking field trips. Great, a slacker, I thought. But then she announced that we would also have to give a speech at some point throughout the class. I began to dread this immediatel
y.

  This new professoressa, Signora Filmona lectured the class for about a half hour, punctuating her sentences with a nasally questioning bene. After that, she released the class. I, who thought I was following along quite well for not having spoken Italian in a week and a half, was confused. I turned to Lucy.

  “Is it time for pausa?” I asked.

  “No, we’re done for the day. That’s it. I think this one is going to be very different from Laza.”

  I couldn’t get in touch with Gaetano. He was never waiting for me outside the università on his vespa. I missed him. I didn’t blame him. But I had grown used to him and now he was gone.

  For the first week, my days in the second semester were busier. I not only had my language class and the second part of Arturo’s class, but I also had to audit two classes in Italian, I picked a film class and a class on Italian cultural studies. There was no attendance taken in these classes; we were mixed with all the other stranieri. The general consensus of the group was that these classes weren’t that important, and soon we all began cutting.

  Finding me less than enthusiastic about becoming her best friend, Janine abruptly stopped following me around. Instead, she took up with the son of a Sienese restaurant owner named Andrea. He was even more attractive than she was, and together they were in constant competition for who could appear more posed.

  “They look like a perfume ad,” Michelle said to me.

  Maybe Janine hoped that she could get her friendship with Michelle back somehow if they both had boyfriends. But unfortunately she didn’t take into consideration that Andrea’s neighborhood, La Contrada della Torre was an archrival of Duccio’s Onda, so double dates weren’t exactly in the plan.