And We're Off

by Dana Schwartz

  Xo,

  Lenny

  PS I’m so proud of you for staking out on your own. You need some space from Alice, and I’m sure she’ll understand. I bet Callum will understand too.

  PPS Get some gelato for me.

  Refreshing, refreshing, refreshing, and . . . nothing. No new e-mails, except a coupon from Bed Bath and Beyond. Radio silence from my best friend in the world, to whom I just poured my heart out and who’s probably going to hate me forever and abandon me to go off and join a clique with Nick’s friends.

  “Hard getting here?” the girl asks from behind the front desk.

  “Kinda hard,” I say back.

  “Yeah, those trains can be rough,” she replies. “Jelly Baby?” She hands me a bag of candies so strange that for the moment I forget all about Lena and my mom and Callum because, as it turns out, Jelly Babies are like giant gummy bears shaped like naked toddlers. And biting the head off a naked toddler right now feels better than I want to admit.

  25

  ONE OF THE benefits of being on my own is that no one can judge me for having an enormous cone of one-scoop-raspberry-I-mean-lampone-and-one-scoop-hazelnut-please gelato at eleven fifteen in the morning. It’s practically yogurt, I tell myself: dairy, fruit, nuts. It’s part of a healthy breakfast—every food group represented. I try not to let it drip on the paper from Grandpa, partly because I need to see the address but mostly because I don’t want a single ounce of the most delicious thing I have ever eaten to go to waste.

  Every part of Florence looks like it should be on a postcard. Even the cheap corner shops with crumbling bricks and primary-colored awnings that are literally selling postcards are picturesque. I could spend hours walking these streets, weaving between people and dipping into churches that look unassuming from the outside and then take your breath away the moment you’re past the threshold: dark, ornate, baroque caverns with ceilings painted so beautifully it makes you want to cry; gilded altarpieces that seem like they shouldn’t be allowed to have been hidden in this church that I might have just walked by without a second thought.

  According to my travel guide, there’s a “moderately priced classic Italian spot for lunch” just around the corner from the last church I dipped into. Once I spot the restaurant, the tiny AIR CONDITIONING! sign in the window is all I need to convince me that I’ve chosen the right place. My dress is sticking to the back of my thighs, and I can feel beads of sweat rolling down my sports bra. It’s not just that Florence is hot; it’s as if the sun has decided to be a tourist here too, weaving among the impossibly dense crowds with its heat and light, trying to be unobtrusive but failing. Pardon me, excuse me, four-hundred-thirty-thousand-mile dwarf star here trying to get through to the Uffizi Gallery.

  I see the words “mushroom” and “prosciutto” and “pizza” together, and my mind is made up. “Funghi e prosciutto pizza, please,” I say, realizing too late that I definitely cannot speak Italian and I’m just embarrassing myself in trying. The waiter nods and leaves me at the table, alone, in Florence, at two P.M. on a Monday afternoon.

  Look at me! I’m in a foreign city, eating lunch at a restaurant by myself. This is the sort of Eat Pray Love magic that most people dream of. And I’m achieving it! With my sunglasses perched on my head, I probably look like Audrey Hepburn. I bet everyone else in the restaurant is whispering to one another:

  “Who is that girl? So young!”

  “Is she traveling alone?”

  “Must be American.”

  “So glamorous!”

  The pizza is taking a little while to make it to my table, and I forgot to bring a book, so I just sort of thumb through my travel guide, rereading passages I already memorized.

  When my pizza still hasn’t arrived, the imaginary conversations in my head change a bit:

  “Is she eating all alone?”

  “So sad!”

  “I bet even if a boy liked her, she’d abandon him and basically force him into the arms of his redheaded ex.”

  “Or maybe a hot blonde Australian girl who was also at an artists’ colony with her! I bet this boy would have been pretty flirty with a hot blonde Australian girl.”

  “What prescient strangers we are!”

  Rather than listen to these imaginary strangers, who seem to have turned against me, I open the envelope from Grandpa. To my surprise, only a small scrap of paper falls out this time, a square neatly cut from a notebook.

  JUST ONE GALLERY: VIA DEL MORO 24

  Before I can consider it fully, the pizza comes out hot, with bubbling cheese and mushrooms so flavorful and earthy that I make a pact with myself never to eat anything but pizza in Florence again. Food is ruined for me. I will eat nothing but pizza here until I die. This isn’t American pizza, the Domino’s stuff with a doughy crust that tastes a bit too much like a dried dish sponge and cheese like salty plastic. This is a revelation. Maybe that’s why Grandpa didn’t give me an assignment in Florence: He knew nothing I painted could hope to compete with the pizza here.

  “Wait,” I shout at a waiter, who seems surprisingly okay with having a strange American yelling at him. “Do you have WiFi here?”

  Without a word, the waiter disappears and reemerges from the back with a tiny slip of paper with a string of numbers: a password.

  Sweet, merciful god. I click the network name and type the random letters of a password and then watch the swirling loading sign until—YES—full WiFi strength.

  I click on my e-mail. Still nothing from Lena. She couldn’t even reply with a “Sorry” or a “Sucks to be you” or a succinct “THIS FRIENDSHIP IS OVER.”

  And the pizza is gone. All I can do is scroll impotently through my phone and try to waste a few more minutes before I go back out into the Florentine heat.

  And then I see it: the tiny red exclamation point in the outbox of my Gmail account. My e-mail to Lena didn’t send! And why did I think it would? I was in a taxi in rural Ireland with no data! My heart catches in my chest, and I’m not sure whether it’s relief or disappointment or something in between. I feel like I made a suicide jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and got caught in a filament-thin net.

  I look around as if there’s going to be a sign somewhere in the restaurant that says: SEND IT NOW THAT YOU HAVE WIFI! or one that says: DELETE IT, YOU FOOL! Instead, all I get is a plain brick wall and a waitstaff getting bored near the kitchen.

  I take a deep breath. And then another.

  I don’t send the e-mail.

  This trip is about me and my art and my assignments for Grandpa. I don’t want to relive the past twenty-four hours of refreshing my e-mail every time I have access to WiFi.

  And then a text pops up from Lena. And then another. And then another, accumulated in the time my phone wasn’t taking messages.

  NORA

  NORA

  FUCK THIS

  FUCK EVERYTHING

  HE’S BEEN CHEATING ON ME

  NICK

  I KNOW YOU’RE OFF IN EUROPE, BUT HE HAS HOOKED UP WITH HALF OF THE VARSITY SOCCER TEAM SINCE WE STARTED DATING

  OBVIOUSLY BROKE UP

  UFDJDFFDJDFJDJDJK

  The text I write back comes so easily compared to the tortured letter I almost sent: Lenny—he was an asshole. Trust me, I know. You can do so much better. I can’t give you all the love you need while I’m away, but I’m coming home soon, and I’ll bring the funfetti cake mix for our I Hate Nick DiBasilio Party.

  It wasn’t karma. Friends never deserve that. But what Lena and I did need were these reasons to fall back into each other’s arms, these mutual understandings about the boys who broke our hearts and whose tiny betrayals will grow tinier and tinier in the rearview mirror.

  I pay the bill with leftover euros from Ireland (how amazing and weird that a plane ride and countries away, the money is still the same), and I begin walking toward the gallery, following the map
in the back of the guidebook.

  * * *

  The gallery is small, a white building with big glass windows. It took me a few times walking up and down the street to actually spot it, since the gallery name was covered with creeping ivy. It looks more like a schoolhouse than an art gallery, or maybe an alternative-style church, the type where the priest plays acoustic guitar.

  Stepping inside the building, a whoosh of air conditioning descends over me. Coming from the hot street, it’s like entering a cold pool. I’m instantly embarrassed about what I’m wearing: leggings that I haven’t washed in two weeks and a T-shirt that may or may not have a chocolate stain near the shoulder. I’m sweaty from walking, and my mouth is sticky with pizza residue; I don’t even want to think about what my hair must look like after the plane-bus-bunk-bed day I had yesterday.

  But then I see a pamphlet on the counter by the door, and I forget all of that: It’s a Robert Parker show, and the pamphlet shows a picture of Grandpa in black and white, his head slightly tilted, caught mid-laugh.

  I haven’t seen any of these paintings before. I’ve been so busy worrying about college applications and boys and my mom that I haven’t painted with Grandpa in months. The paintings are gorgeous—confident brushstrokes and scenes that stay in your mind even after your eyes leave the canvas, after you go about your day. I recognize one landscape as the view out of his kitchen window; another scene depicts a young girl who looks like she might once have been my mom, smiling from the floor where she’s watching TV on her stomach.

  There are so many people crowding around one work in the back of the gallery that even though it seems to take up half the wall, I can’t actually make out what it is. I wait while a few people shuffle past, and then I elbow my way toward the front of the group. I can only see the title of the work, on a small burnished bronze placard.

  THE NEW READER AND THE WATCHER

  ROBERT PARKER AND NORA PARKER-HOLMES

  MIXED MEDIA

  It’s a reproduction of his most famous painting, The Reader and the Watcher. The living room is the same: the sagging vintage sofa, the suggestion of light coming from the kitchen, the wide window on the right side of the room.

  But the figures are different. They’re versions of the figures in his original painting—the girl reading, the man looking out the window with a cigarette in his hand—but the drawings are mine. They’re the cartoon versions I created and posted on my Tumblr. Grandpa painted the background in a realistic style and then interposed my two-dimensional characters in the scene.

  It looks incredible. It’s my favorite painting in the world.

  “. . . more whimsical than we’ve seen in Parker’s career,” I hear someone say.

  “. . . new artistic voice . . .”

  “. . . a statement on the merging of commerce and art . . . Internet culture . . . youth.”

  “I think it’s the best thing he’s ever done.”

  I recognize the last voice. I turn and see my mom, Alice Parker, standing in a gallery in Florence with tears in her eyes. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” she says.

  I forget about the painting, I forget about Lena, I forget about Callum.

  “Mom?”

  She takes one step forward, hesitant, not sure what terms we left on. I don’t think I really know what terms we left on either. I was furious with her when I got into the cab to go to the airport, ready to legally emancipate myself from the Parker side of my hyphenated last name. But seeing her, here, in Florence, after two days of wandering alone, all I want to do is hug her. But I don’t. Instead I ask, “How did you get here?”

  She laughs a little. “Your grandfather told me that if I didn’t come to this gallery in Florence, I would—what was the phrase he used?—ah, yes. ‘Regret it for as long as I was your mother.’”

  I don’t know what to say. And so I just stand next to her and look back at the painting, the figures I drew, on a canvas, in a real gallery. We stand there together for a while.

  “It’s wonderful,” she says finally.

  “Grandpa painted it,” I say, not making eye contact. Grandpa was the one who got me into the Deece, and he’s the one who got me into this gallery. A small part of me, a part gnawing away at me, knows that.

  “Nora,” my mom says, “look at me.” I do. And I see that she’s almost crying, the corners of her eyes going blurry. She’s not wearing lipstick, and she looks younger than she has in years. “Your grandfather is wonderful. And he has been a tremendous help. But it’s what you’ve done with it that makes me proud of you.”

  “He got me into the Deece,” I say, my eyes beginning to tear.

  The corners of her mouth tighten, and she puts a hand on my shoulder. “Okay,” she says. “He wrote a letter. Do you know how much guts it took for you to apply to this artists’ colony in the first place? To seek it out? To want to go? To make a decision to travel around the world by yourself? You could get into every prestigious artists’ colony in the country and do you know what I’d be proud of?”

  I shake my head.

  “I would be proud,” my mom says, “of who you are. And,” she adds, “of who you want to be. And all the mistakes you’re going to make. And all the wonderful successes you’re going to have.”

  And with that, I am hugging my mom, and I’m so grateful that she’s here to share this with me—my first piece in an art gallery.

  “I’m sorry,” I say into her shoulder. “I should have been better. I mean, more understanding. With the job stuff . . . I’m sorry.”

  “Nora,” my mom says, pulling away with one hand on each shoulder. I’m three inches taller than her, but she seems bigger than she ever has. “Listen to me. My job and my life are not your concern. All you need to worry about is picking a college you love and figuring out what makes you happy. Do you hear me?”

  I nod.

  “I’m going to find a new job,” she says. “I’m going to be just fine.” She holds my hand and turns to look at the painting again. “I just love that style. I’m so glad the artist has an entire blog where she posts things she’s done.”

  “You’ve seen my Tumblr?”

  She laughs a little. “Yes, Miss Ophelia in Paradise. Your mother figured out how to find a blog. Although I have to say, I’m not sure I understand the most recent post?” She pulls out her phone and scrolls to a page that she has bookmarked. “It’s a superhero, right? ‘The Silmarillionaire’? I’ve never heard of him.”

  Now I’m laughing, and everyone else in the gallery is looking over at us, not because we’re being loud, obnoxious Americans, but because we’re having more fun than anyone else. “It’s a superhero I made up,” I say. “His powers are all Lord of the Rings–themed.”

  “He looks familiar,” my mom says, zooming in on the face. “He’s not from anything else?”

  “Well,” I say, looking at the floor and trying to suppress a smile, “his secret identity is Callum Cassidy.”

  “Ah,” she says. And we just stay holding hands, walking through the gallery, spending an equal amount of time looking at Grandpa’s new paintings and looking at the faces of other people looking.

  “You should go back,” my mom says finally, when we’ve made our way out of the gallery. “To Ireland, I mean. Be with Callum and your friends. Spend more time at the Deece. Finish out your program.”

  I think about it. I imagine going back to the DCYA and seeing Callum again, the way he’d pick me up and spin me around the minute I arrived, like I weighed nothing and he just wanted his arms around as much of me as possible. I imagine the two of us going to the Cliffs of Moher. And making out there. I imagine painting with Maeve and asking her to teach me how she’s so good at carving plates. I want to ask Rodger to bring me to the lighthouse so I can actually see what’s inside.

  “I don’t think I’m going to go back,” I say. My mom looks taken aback; h
er mouth hangs open slightly, as if she’s tempted to say something, but she doesn’t. “At least not now. The last stop on Grandpa’s trip for me was London. I’ve never been, and I want to see it while I have the chance. Even if it means being on my own for a little bit.”

  My mom hugs me. She smells like detergent and airplane seats and Evelyn’s bread. “I’m so proud of you,” she says into my ear. “Not because of your paintings, or your blog, or because of what you do, but because of who you are.”

  “I love you too.”

  In a few days, I’ll be leaving Florence with a carry-on suitcase that’s exactly twenty inches long and filled with dirty clothes and half-used art supplies, a sketch of a waitress in a Parisian café and a drawing of the uneven Brussels town hall to bring back to Grandpa, a bent Irish license plate, and a tattered copy of The Silmarillion. But while I’m in Florence, I’m going to see as much as I possibly can.

  My mom squeezes my hand. “How about you and I get some gelato?”

  I absolutely do not tell her that I ate gelato an hour and a half ago. “I know a great place.”

  “Already? You’ve been here half a day!”

  “I’m an experienced traveler.”

  Before we leave the gallery, I grab one of the pamphlets by the door: just one more thing to add to my suitcase.

  My mother and I head out into the heat of Florence, buoyed by everything that happened to us and the possibilities of what there’s still left to do.

  EPILOGUE

  GRANDPA’S ASSIGNMENT PACKET for London is heavier than any of the others. I hadn’t really noticed how much it weighed when it had been at the bottom of my carry-on the entire trip. But now, on the plane to London, I feel as though it’s as good a time as any to finally open it: my last assignment from Grandpa. A slim leather-bound notebook falls out of the envelope, along with a letter.

  CONGRATULATIONS. YOU ARE OFFICIALLY A GALLERY-EXHIBITED PROFESSIONAL ARTIST. OF COURSE, PROPER DECORUM USUALLY INVOLVES INFORMING THE ARTIST BEFORE THE WORK IS HUNG, BUT I FELT IN THIS CASE A SURPRISE MIGHT BE WORTHY OF AN EXCEPTION.