Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  Occasionally, Jim and I slept over when I baby-sat for Max. At first I thought he was not simply tolerant of but shared my pleasure in my nephew. If the sensible section of my brain knew that Jim and I shouldn’t even live together, the longing part occasionally fantasized about marrying him and having babies. A good lover, a low-keyed but physically affectionate human being who routinely placed an arm around my shoulders when we walked, necked with me in the movies, and held me in bed even when neither of us was interested in sex, surely he would be a good, steady father, if not a maniacally devoted one.

  “Do you ever wish you had your own kids?” I asked one night when he’d brought my thrilled nephew an inoperative keyboard and was showing him the keys while I cooked dinner.

  “Nope,” he said with a short laugh. “I only want ’em if I can leave when I feel like it.”

  “You’d feel different if they were your own,” I assured him. “Anyway, men can usually get out of the house when they want to.”

  Silence.

  “If I ever remarried,” I said, “I’d want two or three kids.”

  “In that case,” Jim drawled, chucking me under the chin with his free hand, “we better make sure we don’t get married.”

  “I can understand,” I said later that night, when Max was asleep, and we’d made love on the sofa with particular satisfaction, “not wanting kids right away. But . . .”

  He drew me back down on the sofa, covered us with the afghan we kept close in case anyone should walk in before they were expected. He had another erection in what was an unusually short time since the first.

  “No buts about it,” he said.

  End of conversation.

  Beginning of period when Jim ceases always to show up at my place when he’s told me he’d be there and, finally, disappears altogether.

  I would have been devastated had not something more important been going on in my life.

  I’d continued writing to Livvy and a few weeks earlier, I’d sent her a thirteenth-birthday present, a gold heart-shaped locket. She’d written me back for the first time, thanking me, telling me she wore it all the time. I’d answered and soon had another letter in which she apologized for not having written earlier, said she would like to correspond with me now—in English, which she’d been studying in school. Her teacher said she had a talent for it. But she didn’t just have a talent, she wrote, she had the books Nonno and Nanna had given her years ago, and she studied them all the time. She would appreciate my correcting her errors. I said I would be happy to do this and asked her to tell me what was going on in her life. She wrote that school was pretty much the same as ever, she got the best grades in everything, Benedetta said hello. She, Livvy, had become friendly with an American girl named Sally who lived in Boston, did I know where that was? There was no mention of her father or of Mirella. I wondered whether she felt uncomfortable about referring to them and assured her, in my next letter, that it would be fine to talk about anyone who was a part of her life, including Mirella. I asked whether she would like me to try to visit her sometime, or whether, since her English was getting so good, she might like to come to New York. In her response, she spoke a great deal about her English class, asked me various questions about New York, including how far it was from Boston, and, in a postscript, wrote, “We do not know Mirella anymore.” She didn’t answer my query about visiting, but asked increasingly pointed questions about my apartment, my parents, and New York, which we were now calling Manhattan. The next time I asked if she would like to visit, she said she would love to.

  It took me a full day to calm down to a point where I didn’t fear putting her off, another day to get over my apprehension that my apartment, my whole neighborhood, weren’t nice enough for a young girl who lived in the middle of Rome. Then I called.

  She answered the phone. Her voice was exactly the same.

  I told her, the tremble in my voice so slight I thought she might not hear it long distance, how happy I was that I was going to see her, asked if she’d like to come at Easter.

  She said she couldn’t because of the wedding (Il matrimonio. No previous or further reference.) She would come when school ended, if I wanted her to.

  If I wanted her to! Having to wait two additional months was more than made up for by the fact that she could be with me for much longer. If she wanted to be. And if her father didn’t toss in some last-minute monkey wrench.

  I asked if she’d discussed this with her father. She said she hadn’t, and requested that I talk to him. Anticipating difficulty, I wrote to Angelo, advising him of our plans and reminding him of the agreement we had that he would pay for her transportation. When I wrote to Livvy again I asked whether Angelo was remarrying.

  “The answer to your question regarding my father,” she wrote in her next letter, “is yes.”

  When Beatrice, with one of her knowing looks, said there was likely some relation between Angelo’s marriage and Livvy’s desire to come to the States, I shrugged and said, “Who cares?” A couple of times I got angry when Beatrice tried to tell me something about adolescents I didn’t want to hear. The line I often thought of later was “Fourteen-year-olds are difficult even when they don’t have a lot of things going on in their lives.”

  I replied, huffily, that a lot was going on in Livvy’s father’s life, but not necessarily in hers. I felt that most of me had been in suspension since the day I left Rome; why should I not believe that after I’d left, Livvy had felt the same way? Maybe my sister was annoyed because my devotion to Max was a little less overwhelming than it had once been.

  “You’re not listening!” Max had shouted at me one day. “I’m telling you about my truck, and you’re not listening!”

  When I confessed that I’d been thinking about something I had to do before my daughter’s visit, he got even angrier, said he wasn’t going to let her visit if I didn’t listen to him.

  I was considering asking my landlord to let me make two bedrooms at the opposite end of the loft from the kitchen, where only my (open-space) bedroom had been. Having gotten the feeling that Livvy might want to stay for longer than a week or two, and having received a polite note from Angelo saying she could stay as long as she liked, I finally asked for and received the landlord’s permission. Now I had to figure out how to achieve the greatest possible degree of privacy for the smallest amount of money.

  With the help of two friends and a few hundred dollars from my bank account (my parents offered to chip in but I wanted to pay for it myself), I put up eight-foot-high plasterboard walls (the ceilings were around sixteen feet high) that left us with adjacent, reasonably private rooms, each with a door opening on what could now be called the living room. I furnished hers with a double bed like mine so we could use the same linens, as well as a chest, a night table, and an ancient but bright cloth rug, all bought at Connecticut tag sales, then decorated the walls with posters I found around the city. When it was finished, I told myself that if Livvy liked it as much as I, she might not want to leave. Then I cautioned myself about getting my hopes up and being miserable later. After her father’s wedding, Livvy had a new address, in the fanciest residential neighborhood in Rome, although she never mentioned having moved. I looked at my apartment with sadder, wiser eyes, told myself to enjoy what I could have of my daughter and not long for the impossible.

  She would arrive at the close of her school year in Rome, when my spring classes would also be finished. I would conduct summer sessions in Westport, but aside from those, we’d be free to be in either place, as the weather and our wishes dictated. I could think about nothing else. I slept much less than usual but I was never tired. We continued to correspond, but I started a series of parallel letters to her in a notebook; I was flooded by so many intense memories that I was afraid she would think I’d gone crazy if I sent them to her. There would be plenty of time when she arrived, if she wanted to hear such things, to tell her about the Turtle Fountain and the time she and Delfina’s second son tried to
make a house for themselves under the fig tree in Delfina’s backyard.

  The waiting area outside Customs, at Kennedy. I stood in the crowd behind the thick rope, straining to scan each face as though the person inside that six-foot-tall redheaded model or the old Italian farmer in black might turn out to be my daughter. My parents had driven me to the airport, but we’d agreed they should wait in the parking lot so Livvy and I could have a few minutes alone. When she finally appeared, I stopped breathing altogether.

  She was utterly recognizable and entirely different. The girl coming toward me, wearing a backpack and pulling a suitcase on wheels, had Livvy’s huge, dark eyes and silky-curly, pitch-black hair, but her face had bones, most particularly, strong cheekbones and a sharp little chin, that hadn’t been so visible when I left. She was close to my height and her body was no longer a child’s. She wore a cotton-print dress that didn’t conceal full breasts, a small waist, strong legs. She hadn’t seen me yet, and I tried to call out to her, but my voice choked in my throat as I remembered how I’d cleared a shelf for her in the wicker cabinet that held shampoo and Tampax, wondering whether she had her period yet. The girl walking toward me might almost have had her first child. She would be fourteen in October.

  In the absence of a voice, I’d been waving to her. Now she saw me and came around the rope barrier in my direction. She smiled at me in a shy, tentative manner. I felt a nearly unbearable excitement as she moved along one side of the rope toward the exit, and I moved along the other. At the end, I threw my arms around her and burst into tears. She hugged me, waited patiently, and, when I didn’t move or stop crying, took my hand as though I were the child and led me through the first corridor. When she refused my offer to pull her suitcase, I placed my hand on top of hers on the handle.

  “I just want to hug you and kiss you.” I’d said it, without thinking, in Italian.

  She smiled patiently. “Please let us use only English, Mother.”

  I smiled back. “I speak it all the time here, of course, but when I saw you . . . All right. Mama’s the same in English, by the way. Mother is sort of formal.”

  (She continued to call me Mother, even during those early good months. I see it now as a signal that no matter how loving she might sometimes have seemed, she didn’t mean to trust me with the name of Mama.)

  Finally we reached the outside.

  “Are Nonno and Nanna here?”

  My parents. Their names hadn’t changed. Jealousy clutched at me. I wished I’d taken the bus.

  “They waited in the car so we could have a little time alone.”

  She looked around us. “Alone?”

  I laughed. “Solo. With nobody we know around.”

  “They are where?”

  “Come. I’ll show you.” I mustn’t be ridiculous. There would be enough of my precious daughter to go around.

  But I forgot the row where they’d parked, though I was fairly certain I had the right lot. And before I saw my parents, who were standing outside their car, a joyful voice exclaimed, “Nonno! Nanna!” and Livvy let go of her suitcase and made a beeline toward them.

  As the three happily hugged and kissed, I began to cry again. They didn’t notice, but a woman passing by called to me that I shouldn’t leave my luggage like that, anyone could grab it. I picked up the handle, walked to a few feet from where the three of them were hugging and kissing, and stood silent as they babbled in a joyful mix of English and Italian, nobody worrying about who used which. Finally we put her baggage in the trunk and got into the car, Livvy in the front with my father, my mother and I in the back. I sat on the left-hand side because that way I could at least see part of Livvy’s profile, more when she turned to watch my father. They quickly figured out without her telling them that she wanted everyone to speak English. They couldn’t believe how good hers already was. (I’ll make no attempt to duplicate errors and uncertainties; everything she said was comprehensible, from the beginning.) She giggled when my father told her this, claimed he was just saying it to make her feel good.

  Finally, I had my daughter back, and I didn’t have her at all, my parents had her. It was just as it had been the first time they came to Rome, only then they were the ones I’d wanted more of. Now Livvy begged them to come to the apartment with us, rather than drop us there, as they’d planned. Of course I said they would be welcome to stay with us for dinner.

  They’d already moved to Westport for the summer but had come in to meet Livvy with me. They intended to drive back later in the evening. We’d be welcome to go with them, but they assumed Livvy would want to see the city first. I tried to figure out what might convince her that she wanted to remain with me in Manhattan for a few days. But then, as soon as I did that, my brain began to compare their lovely white-frame house with my loft. How could the loft, as bright and pretty as I’d tried to make it, compare with that house, never mind Angelo’s elegant new home? How would Livvy react to the gray and grungy street where I lived? I’d be lucky if she wanted to stay long enough to have dinner!

  As I sank into self-loathing misery, each small event—or non-event—solidified my despair. If Livvy, as we parked the car a block away and walked to my loft, appeared oblivious to the filthy street, that was because she was too absorbed in my parents to see anything else and would notice the garbage in the street only when they left us. (If she let them leave. She might insist on going to Westport with them immediately.) If she barely looked around before settling between my parents on one of the two navy-blue Bon Marché sofas, telling them they really had to correct her English, that wasn’t because I was already fussing in the kitchen, but because she wasn’t even certain my English was good enough to help!

  On the ancient wood-and-Formica counter that divided me from the main room (from my daughter! from the world!) I set out a bottle of Chianti, glasses, and an antipasto that would hold—or would it?—anyone who was hungry until dinner. Changed my mind. Brought everything over to the coffee table. Asked if there were any special requests for dinner.

  I’d been prepared to give them a list of possibilities. They looked at me blankly. Then both my parents consulted their watches. It was about twenty minutes past five and nobody in the room was accustomed to eating before eight.

  I felt myself blush.

  My father laughed. “I think your mother can’t wait to get us out of here, Livvy.”

  “No, no!” Livvy protested. “That cannot be true.”

  “Sure it could,” my father said. “And it would be perfectly natural. She wants you to herself.”

  Livvy looked puzzled, whether because she hadn’t understood the phrase or didn’t believe the sentiment, I couldn’t tell.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said brusquely, “I was just confused by time. Her time, our time. I thought she might be hungry, I didn’t know—”

  “I am not hungry,” Livvy said. “They feed you all the time on the plane.”

  “Fine,” I said, “then I’ll forget about dinner. There’s plenty to eat right here, anyway.”

  I poured myself a glass of Chianti, sat alone (Always alone! Always the extra person!) on the second sofa, listened to the conversation for a moment before my mind wandered off. Was the whole summer going to be like this? Me wanting to be with Livvy, look at Livvy, listen to Livvy, and Livvy wanting only to be with my parents?

  They were telling her about the house in Westport, how they remained there once the school term ended. My father said that he and I had become gardeners, had a real vegetable garden this year for the first time. And we were only a few blocks from the beach. My mother explained that my classes had actually begun up in Westport, and I spent as much time as I could up there, since summer was not a wonderful time in Manhattan. It got really hot. Livvy, thoroughly absorbed in this joint narrative, stopped them only to ask that they slow down a bit or define a word.

  My father said that they’d begun to think about adding on a couple of rooms, now that the family was growing.

  Livvy smiled
, thinking, I suppose, that they were talking about her.

  “Do you realize,” my father asked my mother, “that Livvy and Max don’t know each other yet?”

  My mother was momentarily bewildered. “Good heavens,” she finally exclaimed. “It’s true.”

  Livvy looked bewildered.

  “Well,” my father said, “you both have a treat in store for you.”

  “Both?” she asked.

  “You and Max,” he replied solemnly.

  “Max?” Livvy asked. “What is Max? Who is Max?”

  “Max is your cousin,” my father said. “Your mother must have told you that you have a cousin. Soon you’ll have two.”

  Livvy still looked puzzled. No lights flashing yet.

  “Cousin.”

  My father nodded. “Your mother’s sister, Beatrice, whom you don’t know, but they’ll be in Westport, so when you come up. . . .” He smiled. “It’s hard to realize you’ve never even met Beatrice and Larry. They’ve never been to Italy, and of course you haven’t . . . Anyway, we now have two wonderful grandchildren and a third on the way! We’ve told Max about Nonno and Nanna in honor of your coming.”

  (Never mind that Max normally refused to use either.)

  My father stood, clapped his hands exuberantly, picked up the bottle to pour some wine.

  Livvy looked as though something had been dropped on her head. She had no questions about Max’s age (he was six now) or anything else. She was off someplace. My mother went to the bathroom. My mother, I remembered for the first time since my return, had the world’s most suggestible bladder; the hint of trouble had always been enough to send it to the bathroom. Livvy still looked stunned, but I wasn’t sure what it was that had affected her—or even how. I’d referred to Beatrice and Larry once or twice in my letters, but I hadn’t discussed them. I wasn’t sure whether I’d mentioned Max. Maybe not. Max hadn’t had any place in the long and complex list of subjects we might write each other about. Anyway, it was hard to see why the news that two people she didn’t know had a child should affect her. I’d heard about sibling rivalry from Beatrice; was there such a thing as grandsibling rivalry?