“How is she?” I asked. I already knew the answer.
“Shitty.” Olivia eyed the bathroom door and dropped her voice. “Did you ever meet that girl Jessica?”
Jessica? I remembered thick black eye-liner, husky voice, hippy shirts, and cigarettes. One of many faces I’d been introduced to. “Yeah.”
“He was cheating with her. Jessica had her friend Deb tell Suzie. He didn’t even deny it. It turns out everyone knew. The fucking assholes.”
“Did you know?” I asked.
“I wish I did.”
“It’s better that you didn’t,” I said. I heard the shower stop in the bathroom. I whispered. “What could you have done? What would you have?”
“I know, but we always thought, you know–” She didn’t finish because Suzie opened the bathroom door. She smiled at me. If you weren’t looking for anything, you might not have noticed her red eyes and she would be as pretty as ever.
“Hey, Gabriella, sorry I’m taking so long. I’m a spaz today. I’ve still got to blow dry my hair.”
“No problem, take your time.” Suzie shut the door again. We heard the low hum of the blow dryer. Olivia looked at me and shook her head.
“Anyway, I’m sorry about last night,” Olivia said, getting up to turn on the stereo. It was some San Remo mix with all the songs we heard the Italians singing in the bars. “I didn’t mean to dis you.”
“No problem. I wished I had a phone.”
“I thought about calling Gaetano, but I figured he was already with you, his tesoro.” I nodded and sort of smiled. Olivia wrinkled her brows. “What?”
“What?” I asked.
“Your face. You’re making a weird face.”
“Nothing, it’s just, I was just thinking.” I realized I was not going to get out of explaining this. “I felt kind of strange last night.”
“Oh, my God, you didn’t! Did you and Gaetano hook up?”
“No, no, no nothing like that. Shh,” I looked toward the bathroom door. “I just felt kind of strange. He slept in Lisa’s room. I guess I was just feeling kind of–”
“What?’
“But I didn’t do anything.” I protested.
“What?” Olivia was getting angry now.
“I felt kind of ... I don’t know. I believe the word is horny.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Listen, I didn’t do anything.” But it was too late. Olivia was thrilled by this. She was dancing around the room. She pointed a little finger in the air and shook it at me. I picked up one of her pillows and swatted it at her. I yelled. “Nothing happened! Niente.”
Then Suzie opened the door and we stopped laughing. For some reason, we didn’t want to be too happy. It might have hurt her. She looked good. She blew her curly hair out straight, which was quite a feat with the cheap, low power blow dryers we all bought at Upim department stores.
“So are we ready or what?” Her voice sounded different, deeper. Olivia and I jumped up and put on the lightweight denim jackets we bought at the mercato.
We stopped at an alimentari on the way to the garden to pick up bread, cheese and pesto for a picnic. I knew parts of Firenze; I had a general sense of direction even though I was usually following Olivia around. That afternoon, I knew enough to see that Olivia chose the long route to the garden. Her path was farthest away from where Kurt lived.
After we got back from the gardens and some shopping, Suzie decided that she didn’t want to come out with us that night. We tried like hell to get her to come, but she wouldn’t. And she yelled at us when we offered to stay with her.
“Look, I just want to be alone, okay. I don’t need a babysitter. I’m just going to go to bed. I didn’t sleep that well last night, you know.”
And so Olivia and I reluctantly went back to the Mexican restaurant where we ate tacos with fontina cheese and listened to obnoxious Americans screaming over the music. Then we went to an Irish bar where we cursed all men over beer after beer.
I really wasn’t supposed to stay on the floor of their tiny room, but Olivia snuck me in. We were quiet when we went into the room. We didn’t turn on any lights. We slipped off our clothes in the darkness, and I wrapped Olivia’s extra blanket around myself on the floor.
When I heard Suzie’s uneven breath, I knew that we made the right choice not turning the lights on. In the darkness, Suzie was crying.
17.
Finally, winter completely broke in Siena. It was spring, not just a random warm day here and there. Primavera. I felt my body open a bit. I no longer had to brace myself and hunch over in the cold on the way to school. The first morning I felt this, I was surprised by it. Like a flower I thought, then translating, come un fiore. My posture improved; my shoulders became less stiff.
“You are taller,” Gaetano said as we walked in giro.
With the new warmth, the town became full. Everywhere I turned there were groups of tourists filling the streets from every nation. Usually a woman holding an umbrella high above her head led them around.
“You’re kind of like one of those umbrella women,” I said to Olivia one afternoon as she led me around Firenze. I had blown off classes once again. The tourists had shown up in force there, too. I suspected spring was the time they were all over the country.
English was the common language spoken by all of these people. I felt cursed to speak such a cheap language. The most amazing part of the influx was that all of the shopkeepers in Siena, who looked at me with such awful puzzled expressions when I first arrived, now seemed to be able to communicate in English with the deep-pocketed tourists. Where was this knowledge when I stumbled over ordering bread?
I was offended when I went into a bar by the church of Santa Caterina one day and the man said “may I help you?” instead of “dimmi.” Granted, it wasn’t a place I frequented, but I expected to be spoken to in Italian. I answered in the most formal Italian, enunciating everything I could as I ordered a cappuccino.
“If I wanted people to speak English to me, I would still be wearing my sneakers,” I complained to Olivia who was, as usual, three paces ahead.
“Now you know what it’s like here in Florence,” Olivia said without much sympathy. “You’re lucky they spoke Italian to you for this long.”
The warm weather was coming just in time for Kaitlin on her spring break. She wanted to see Tuscany the way I saw Paris. I was hoping to introduce her to Olivia, but Olivia was also going on her spring break. Olivia and Suzie would travel down the east coast of Italy and catch a ferry to some Greek islands. It sounded like fun to me, and I almost wished that Kaitlin and I could go with them, but I also wanted to show Kaitlin Siena.
Olivia wasn’t sure she wanted to go with Suzie. She helped Suzie plan this trip a couple of months earlier. And even though she researched all the hostels and locations, she felt like what she was–a replacement.
“You could stay here and meet Kaitlin. I think you’d like her,” I said. I wasn’t sure if this was true one way or the other, but I wanted it to be.
“Or you guys could come with us. It would be better for me to have women who weren’t depressive around.” I smiled, happy to not be considered the depressive one for once.
“I’d love to go, but I promised to show Kaitlin Siena and besides, we’re going to take a couple of days to go to the coastal towns, Cinque Terre. I’m not actually on my spring break, remember?”
Olivia nodded. It was half-hearted. We all sort of believed that school was important, but the traveling was even more educational. Even Arturo turned a blind eye to absences from his culture class when we could prove we had been exploring other cities and not just behaving like hungover Americans.
“Have you talked to Kaitlin yet?” Olivia asked. “About the summer?”
“No, but I will,” I said. “I’ll talk to her this week when she comes down.”
From the time that Kaitlin decided she was going to Paris, she wanted to railroad and backpack around Europe after classes were done. When
I chose Siena, we agreed that we would do it together. Suzie and Olivia developed a similar plan early in their roommate history, but since then Olivia feared that it wasn’t going to happen. First she thought that Suzie would throw her over to travel with Kurt. Now she was pretty certain that Suzie was going to go home as soon as classes were done. I didn’t want to leave her in a bind and was hoping that three of us could travel together. While Kaitlin and I hadn’t made any concrete plans other than buying our Eurail pass, Olivia had specific ideas about what she wanted to see.
“You sure?” she asked, meeting my eye. “I don’t want to create any drama.”
“No drama,” I said, trying to sound emphatic. I didn’t expect there to be any, but the weird thing was the way my world was opening up. Once it had been as simple as making a loose plan with Kaitlin and now there were train schedules to other cities and friends I had made and probably some she had made who would want to meet up with us or travel with us. The summer still seemed far away, but it lay ahead and full of possibilities.
Janine’s old boyfriend Adam came to see her. They lay around in her room because she didn’t want to take him outside in case her Italian boyfriend, Andrea, was around. Somehow, she made excuses not to see Andrea for the week that Adam was there.
Adam planned his trip back when Janine needed him, but now she had Andrea. Now she had someone to pay her all the attention she craved. She looked at Adam with disgust; he was a pathetic reminder of her past.
He was good-looking in the way of the frat boy that likes alternative music, but Janine was afraid of what the rest of the roommates would think. He represented her somehow, and she didn’t want to make us think that she overplayed something. She whispered to us when he was not exactly out of earshot, “He used to be much cuter.”
I felt bad for him, stuck in the apartment. He was not getting to see much of Italy at all.
“Maybe you guys should go south or to Cinque Terre or something. They have great hiking over there and it’s not too far,” I suggested as I was eating lunch after my class one day.
“Now she’s the travel agent,” Janine said to Adam. Janine was never at ease with two other people. She always had to gang up with one against the other to prevent them from ganging up on her.
“It was just a suggestion,” I said, looking at Adam. He seemed like he wanted to get out of there, too.
“You’re the one that’s always traipsing here and there with all your friends,” Janine said. She turned back to Adam. “This one gets more mail than anyone. You should have written me more.”
Janine disguised all her digs as complements unless she was certain that you were weaker than she was. I got up from the table they were commandeering, washed my dishes and went to meet Lucy.
“Ciao,” Janine called to me on the way out. She wanted to prove her Italian savvy to Adam.
One afternoon, Janine didn’t come home from class. She left Adam sleeping in her room and never returned. He looked up expectantly when I opened the apartment door. I gathered he had been pacing in the kitchen for hours. His face was disappointed. I apologized.
“No, I just thought you’d be Janine.”
“Do you want to go out? I could give you my key. I have a paper to work on.” I doubted Janine actually went to class.
“No, I should wait for her.”
“You could wait all day.” I regretted saying that as soon as I did. I felt bad for him. He came here expecting something and wasn’t getting it. I listened to the mixtape he made Janine. She tossed it at me when I asked if she had any music to lend. I imagined it was a tape someone made for me. I held up my bag of groceries. “I went to Crai, the grocery store. Want some bread and cheese?”
“No, if Janine wants to eat…” he said, shrugging.
“Right.”
I put my groceries away and brought my lunch into my room. I opened the window to let the breeze come through and distract me as I read about the Medicis. I bought this book about them in the English bookstore, but now I had to translate my facts into Italian. It seemed that pretty much everything in Tuscany from art to architecture had something to do with the rich fourteenth-century family and their patronage. After a couple of hours of trying to make sense of it all, I checked on Adam. He was lying on Janine’s bed, staring up at the ceiling. He sat up when I knocked.
“You sure you don’t want my key?” I asked. He was trapped.
He was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, his feet in their socks. He didn’t realize how foreign he looked in this country. He looked nothing like the American I left behind, yet there was something so similar. They would never have recognized it in each other, but they were a part of the same crew. Countrymen. His T-shirt fit his shoulders in that same angry way.
Somewhere, back home, there was probably some poor girl wishing that Adam wasn’t so preoccupied with someone else.
That might be the secret to the American boy. Maybe it was the way they chose to be miserable when they didn’t have to be, swinging between choices, refusing to make them. They made you want to save them. They made you their mother. They brought out the nurturer the way the Italians brought out the other stuff. Maybe it was the challenge, thinking you could gentle them and love them and make them turn out okay.
Adam shook his head and looked at the palms of his hands. I felt bad for him. I reached out to touch his shoulder when the front door opened, surprising us. I pulled my innocent hand away. It was Janine. She finally returned to find us in her room together, doing nothing, but still undeniably alone.
That night, Janine and Adam went to Venice.
18.
Kaitlin arrived on a Saturday morning. I offered to meet her in Florence, but she took the train straight into the Siena station, where I met her. I helped her with her giant backpack, and we rode together on the bus back to town. It was surreal to have her there. She marveled at the skinny streets as I had and asked me tons of questions that I mostly knew the answers to, thanks to all the walks Arturo took us on with the culture class.
After her giving her the initial tour of Siena and lunch of the hearty bread soup, ribollita at La Chiacchiera, Kaitlin and I sat in the campo. Olivia had rubbed off on me, and I had planned out pretty much every minute of Kaitlin’s first day. Then I realized that what she really wanted to do was chill. The Piazza del Campo was filled to capacity and the place to get the best look at Sienese life. The sun shown down on the light pink brick of the piazza and, for once, the ground was warm beneath my butt.
“This is awesome,” Kaitlin said, smiling and people watching. I was happy that this was enough to impress her. “I love the buildings here.”
“Cool. Let me know when you want to move on,” I said.
“I will,” she said. She pulled her feet out of her sneakers and socks and lay back onto her sweatshirt and that was that.
I looked across the piazza and saw Michelle walking quickly, eating a giant cone of gelato. I called to her, anxious to introduce her to Kaitlin. She came over and offered us each a bite of her ice cream. Kaitlin loved it.
“I’m definitely getting one of those every day I’m here,” she declared.
“Are you kidding? I eat like five of these a day,” Michelle said. I laughed and looked at her. She wasn’t acting like she was making a joke. In fact, she didn’t seem herself at all. She was hyper.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Yeah, you guys can still have our room, but I’m probably going to stay in yours, G.” With Janine gone and Michelle splitting her time with Duccio, I planned on Kaitlin and me staying in their room with the better bathroom.
“I thought you were going to stay with Duccio.” He lived in his parents’ house, but snuck Michelle in all the time.
“Yeah, he’s pissing me off.” She looked at Kaitlin to explain. “Italian boys–assholes.”
“Really,” Kaitlin smiled. She didn’t notice that anything was wrong with Michelle. She gestured around the piazza. “They seem pretty cute to me.�
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“That’s the problem. They’re so cute, you forget yourself, and then it’s like you try to fight with them and you don’t even understand the language you’re fighting in. Don’t bother.” Beneath her smiling warning to Kaitlin, Michelle was agitated about something.
“What happened?” I asked. “You guys always understood each other, I thought.”
“Who knows? I couldn’t even figure out what he was trying to say at lunch. They’re so dramatic about everything. You know how it is.” She shrugged as if it wasn’t bothering her. She looked at Kaitlin. “Wait until you meet Gaetano.”
“Do you want to sit down with us?” Kaitlin asked.
“No, I’m starving. I think I’m going to go get a panino or something. I’ll see you guys later. Ciao.”
“Okay, ciao!” I said.
“Nice to meet you,” Kaitlin said.
When she was gone, Kaitlin motioned over to a group of good-looking men. “I don’t know about Michelle, but I think I could forgive those guys anything.”
“Yeah, it’s weird, she’s not usually like that. I didn’t think they fought ever. I wonder what it was about.”
“She seemed pretty cool.”
“Yeah, she’s my favorite roommate,” I said. I was glad that Kaitlin liked her, but something wasn’t sitting right with me about our meeting.
“This one’s really hot,” Kaitlin said, looking past me. I turned to see Gaetano, smiling as he came closer.
“The American beauties are in town, at last,” he said in Italian. I stood up to greet him with two kisses on the cheek. Kaitlin was at her feet, too.
“K, this is Gaetano. Gaetano, ti presento, Kaitlin.” I introduced them.
“Bella, come va?” Gaetano said.
“Hey there,” Kaitlin said. “Can he understand me?”
“Piacere,” he said. He took her extended hand and pulled her in to kiss both her cheeks.
“Oh, okay,” Kaitlin said, giggling. She looked over his shoulder at me. “I like this.”
A Semester Abroad Page 18
