She asks why Nini didn’t come with me. I explain that he is teaching four classes this semester on top of tutoring. He’s also working on an article about Renaissance art, about Giotto’s crosses. I say he’s sorry he couldn’t come, that he really wants to meet her. But buying one ticket at the last minute was expensive enough.
An airport cop taps the hood of my mother’s car, an old blue Camry she’s had since I was in high school. We’ve lingered too long. She shifts the gear into drive, and we pull away from the airport.
In the rearview mirror I watch friends and family greet one another with the kind of warmth my mother reserves for strangers. She wasn’t always this way. I’d often hear my grandmother say to anyone who would listen, “That boy took my happy child and left me this sad one.”
“Well, at least he still has a teaching job, after what you two pulled.” A few short minutes into our reunion and we are back in familiar territory.
“They don’t fire you for marrying a student, Mother. The Italians are more progressive about things like that. They’re not as puritanical as Americans.”
This is not exactly true. It had been a minor scandal when I moved into Nini’s flat on Via dei Neri two weeks after the program ended and the other girls had either returned to America or left for vacations in Greece or Paris. There had been threats of termination, but then, to everyone’s surprise, Nini proposed, and there was nothing left to question. When I told Anna Rita, my Florentine host mother, of my intention to stay and marry, as she had so often suggested during the year I lived in her spare bedroom, she offered the only advice she thought I needed. She gave a slight tug at the lower lid of her right eye with the pad of her index finger and said, “Stai attenta, cara—è Sienese. Sono furbi.” Watch out, dear—he’s from Siena. They’re cunning.
“I don’t understand why I had to come back for this,” I say, looking out at the scenery of Route 76, as if I’d had no part in the decision.
“Reggie,” my mother says, softening her tone. She’s the only one who calls me Reggie, to everyone else I’m Regina, la signora Casadei, or, worse, among Nini’s university friends, la fanciulla americana, the American girl.
“So what am I supposed to do?” I say. “Who’s going to be there?”
“I suppose his family. His mother—your other grandmother. He knew a lot of people, and it’s not like he ever forgot his friends. He always did have a lot of friends.”
“They don’t want me to say anything, do they? I don’t have anything to say. I barely remember him.”
“All you have to do is go. Make some peace.” She doesn’t say anything else for a long time.
I keep looking at her expectantly, and her grip on the steering wheel tightens.
“Are you happy there? With him?” She doesn’t take her eyes off the road.
“Being in a marriage is hard, of course, but it’s fine,” I say. A year ago I might have said yes. But her question has come too late.
“We’re both so busy these days,” I continue. “The article he’s writing, I keep track of his notes. And then I work a few nights in a bar and take classes at the university. I’m finishing my degree. There’s not much time for anything else.”
There is nothing else to tell but the stresses, the struggles over money, my never-ending search for employment, the inconsistency with which I contribute to the household, my part-time work in student bars where I had once been a frequent customer. I could tell her about the girls I hear about, new students from places like Oklahoma or Kansas or wherever girls like that come from, the ones who are just a few years younger but new enough that they’re still enchanted by the accent, girls who still sound out their newly acquired language, substituting the swollen Italian vowels and consonants for flat English ones. I could tell her about the baby I thought I didn’t want but still took offense at when it rejected me. These are the things my mother has been waiting to hear.
“How long you planning to stay?”
“The ticket’s open-ended. Maybe a week. Maybe two.”
“That’s a big bag for a week, maybe two.”
“Is it? We don’t travel much anymore. It’s very expensive in Florence now.”
The remains of a snowstorm have left a thin, slushy film of gray on the Philadelphia streets, and I remember that I have left my boots behind. This time of year Florence is cold, and the air is so damp that the chill penetrates all the way to my bones. No matter how many layers I put on, I’m always cold in the winter, always sick. Nini says it’s because I’m not Italian, because I wasn’t born to breathe their oxygen for longer than a vacation. He likes to say it will take a lifetime before my lungs and body get used to the air there. But after four winters of trying and not trying, I know that a lifetime is no longer something I am willing to give.
“Your grandmother will be happy to see you,” my mother says, breaking the silence. “She’s moving a little slower, but her mind is still sharp. She’s in your old room, so I put you in the spare room. There’s not much in there, but I can move a TV in if you want.”
“Don’t worry about it, Mommy. I’ll be fine.”
She takes her hand from the steering wheel and gives my knee a slight squeeze. “Mommy” gets her every time.
She turns off at the exit for City Avenue and then again onto Lincoln Drive. We slowly follow the winding road that leads us into Germantown, just barely keeping up with the pace of traffic. My body moves along with the car as it takes curve after curve. I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to be on these roads, and for a second I feel like I’m home.
“It’s good to have you here, Reggie.” My mother takes her eyes off the road for a moment and looks at me. “I couldn’t do this without you.”
My swollen belly had been unexpected but welcome. I’d thought that it might be the event that would bring my mother back into my life, and it would confirm that I was not just a passing phase for Nini.
The night I woke up to sharp pains and a warm wetness running down my leg, Nini wasn’t home. Anna Rita arrived at the same time as the medics and came along with me in the ambulance, where I lost consciousness, and the life inside of me. In the hospital, after Nini arrived with excuses for his absence, they told us it had been a boy. Nini reached for my hand as he began to weep for something I hadn’t known he wanted, but I pulled away from him, feeling he deserved to go through this as alone as I had.
When I came home from the hospital, Nini asked if he should call my mother, ask her to come. “E perché?” I’d snapped. There would have been nothing to say. I hadn’t yet told her I was pregnant. For four long months I’d kept the secret, waiting for the right moment. So there was no reason to tell her that something had been lost. I retreated to our bedroom and locked the door, wondering if the miscarriage was a punishment. Nini took up residence in the small living room of our flat, knocking at the bedroom door two or three times a day and receiving no response.
When I eventually emerged, we started living in silence, moving through the five rooms of our home while trying to avoid each other, speaking only when necessary, about bills and schedules—conversations that often started quietly but ended in screams and tears. Two months later, when my shape had nearly returned, I got my mother’s call in the middle of the night.
Now, here in the house I grew up in, my school portraits line the walls next to photos of deceased relatives, events I have missed taking part in, and reproductions of paintings my mother loves. The living room looks cluttered, so different from the minimalist aesthetic Nini insists on. The walls of our apartment are mostly bare, even though he spends hours in churches across Italy studying the country’s history through art.
I set my suitcase by the door and look around as if I’m new to this place. My grandmother is sitting in front of the television in a recliner, the sound of her snores rising above the episode of Murder, She Wrote she was watching. She wakes immediately when the door closes and my mother slides the locks into place.
“Well, w
ell. It’s been a minute or two since I last set eyes on you.” Nan opens her arms wide, “Come here and give this old lady some sugar.”
I cross the room quickly and find myself in her small, thin arms. She’s frail, frailer than I remember her being, but that’s what time does to us. She releases me and leans back into the chair. Then she beckons me forward and takes my face in her hands, which are dry and cracked from the winter air.
She pulls my face closer to hers, like she wants to inspect me.
“Well, don’t you look the same! I thought you’d come back looking, I don’t know, more Eye—” She looks over at my mother. “E-talian.” She stresses the e like she’s been practicing.
“Nan, it’s not like I was on another planet. The only difference is the language. And the wine. They drink a lot of wine.”
She picks up the remote control and lifts it over my head to turn down the volume. “They got an Italian version of Jessica Fletcher over there? They should!”
“I think so, Nan—I missed you so much.” I grab her into another hug, and she laughs.
“Of course you did. Your own fault too. Running around the world like the white girls do. I told your mother—”
“Nan, I brought you a couple of gifts.”
Her eyes light up, and I know she’s forgotten one of her favorite topics of conversation. In the days before I’d left for Italy the first time around, she’d talked about my going away with a mixture of pride and apprehension. The world she knew was still very black and white, and though she was excited for me, Europe was definitely white.
“Good. Good. Then you can tell me all about Italy.” She pronounces “Italy” as if the a is silent. “And Nino.”
“Nini,” I remind her.
She lifts the remote control high in the air again and turns the volume back up. “What’s for dinner?” Nan says.
My mother gives her a look as she hangs her coat in the closet by the front door.
I walk over to my suitcase, and with all my strength, I start to make my way up the stairs. “Just let me get unpacked and I’ll help.”
“You not tired?” my mother asks me. She’s already lying down on the couch. Her eyes are closed.
“I slept on the plane.”
“Nino, Nini, Ninny. Whatever floats your boat,” I hear Nan mutter under her breath.
“What kind of name is Nini?” my mother had asked in the first phone conversation after I got married.
I told her it was a nickname, though I agreed that maybe he should have long ago settled on something more appropriate for a man his age. Gio, Vanni, or Gianni would all be better, but at nearly forty years old, he’s still called by his baby name, and it fits.
At our wedding, his sister told me that I’d made a fine choice. “Brava,” she’d said. “You’ve chosen an Italian man who could put all others to shame with the way he chases women. You’ll have to be the one to adapt. He never will.”
I laughed nervously, as if she’d told an inappropriate joke. Besides, I thought, what could change a man more than marriage.
For the better part of a year, I was right, and then again, when I was first pregnant. He would come home every night, prepare meals, cater to my needs and wants. He used to go down a list of names for the baby, always boy names: Gianluca, Pietro, Alessio. But eventually he fell back into comfortable behaviors, leaving me home alone more often than not.
From the spare room, I hear the phone ring. A few moments later, my mother calls my name. When I come down to the living room, she is holding the handset out to me.
“It’s your husband,” she says with a look of skepticism, as if until this moment she had doubted his existence. I hesitate, but I take the phone.
“Pronto. Regina?”
“Pronto. I just got in. I would have called.”
“Pensavo . . . beh . . . e com’é? Come ti senti?” I was thinking . . . well . . . how is it? How do you feel?
“It’s fine. I don’t know. It’s been a while,” I speak to him in Italian because I feel my mother and grandmother’s eyes watching my uneasiness with a man I’m supposed to be comfortable with. The less they understand, the better.
“La sepoltura?”
“The burial? It’s tomorrow. Listen, I’m tired. It was a long flight. I’ll call later.”
“We’ll talk when you come back? There are things we should talk about.”
“I know. But now, well, now is not the time. When I get back.”
“Ti voglio bene, tesoro.”
“Ti voglio bene.”
I intend to unpack, but there’s no dresser in the spare room. I empty the contents of my suitcase onto the bed and look at the pathetic jumble of books, clothing, and trinkets I’ve brought with me. My entire world in one bag and there isn’t much of value to it. I shove everything onto the floor and stretch out on the bed. A catnap. A quiet moment to assess the state of affairs that have brought me all the way back to Philadelphia. I tell myself I’m not tired, but when I hear my mother call my name, two hours have passed and dinner is ready.
Over the dinner she cooked while I was asleep, she says it was a heart attack. That he’d been ill for a long time. She says that he called for me a few months ago, looking to make amends for the life he’d given up with us. She told him I was gone and reminded him that he had no right to me even if I had been there. She didn’t know he was sick when he called. I ask her if it would have changed things.
“I don’t think so, Reggie. A few months ago I wasn’t ready to stop being angry. Now he’s not here. What’s the sense in being angry at a memory?”
I don’t disagree with her.
“Is that why you asked me to come back?”
“I thought it was time we get stuff straightened out between us. Between all of us. I know you don’t have the same memories I have, but I guess I want you to make peace with whatever memories you do have inside that head of yours.” She starts to clear the table and walks over to the sink. I sit there wondering if it’s even possible to make things right.
“I had to cross an ocean to do that? What if I already made peace? What if I stopped being angry at him a long time ago?”
“Well then, sometimes a mother just needs her child. One day you’ll understand that.”
Here is the moment I’ve spent six months waiting for, when I could explain to my mother that I finally understood the bond between mother and child, and that now I know what my leaving had done to her—broken her just a little bit, made her feel empty. I want to tell her that I understand that emptiness, to tell her that I, too, have felt the strangely happy burden of carrying life inside of me only to one day have nothing to show for it. I think about opening my mouth and telling her about the baby and the infidelities and the silence. I want to say that I longed to have her get on a plane just to rub my back and tell me that things would never be the same but they might be okay one day.
“And what about us?” I say.
She puts the dishes she has been holding in the sink and turns to me, water dripping from the tips of her fingers, landing silently on the floor.
“I had so many plans for you, Reggie, and you threw it all away. And for what? So you could marry some man nearly twice your age and work in a bar? That place won’t ever be your home. I don’t care how hard you pretend you aren’t from here.”
“This isn’t my fault. It’s not my fault he left you—us. What happened with me is different. I fell in love with someone and started a new life.” I get up from my chair and walk the small distance to the kitchen door. “I did it for me. I never shut you out, but you were just so angry. You were always welcome in our home.”
“Now? Am I still welcome?”
“You’re always welcome wherever I am. Just like this will always be my home, right?”
She nods and turns back to the sink, and as I walk out of the room, I hear nothing but the running water and the clanging of metal pots against ceramic dishes. But underneath it all, I know she is humming.
> In the morning we drink coffee and eat dry toast and hard-boiled eggs with my grandmother before getting back in the car and driving clear across the city for the funeral. I am wearing the only black dress I own, a flimsy piece of silk fabric that I wear when I need to show up somewhere and be the wife of a professor. In it I feel even less like a daughter in mourning and more like a vagabond, dusty and rank from the weariness of travel.
The church is little more than a storefront, nothing like the ancient cathedrals and basilicas of Florence. I start to pull the door open, but my mother grabs my shoulder.
“Wait,” she says. She is breathing heavily, and she puts her hand over her heart as she exhales. “I think I need a cigarette. Something to calm my nerves.”
I reach into my shoulder bag and pull out the smashed pack of cigarettes that has been languishing at the bottom of the bag for who knows how long. She raises an eyebrow and takes one.
“Since when do you smoke?”
“Everyone smokes.” I reach back in and fish for a lighter. I come up with one of Nini’s, a sleek Zippo I bought him on vacation in Amsterdam.
My mother takes a cigarette, and I hold out the lighter, which she also accepts. “I quit, you know. This is my first one in months.”
“Are you alright? Do you want me to go find you some water or something?” She shakes her head and lights the cigarette before returning the lighter to my care. I light one for myself. “I quit too. I mean, I stopped smoking. I don’t even remember buying this pack.”
She looks at me and exhales a cloud of smoke. “I should say so. You don’t have any business smoking.”
“I stopped smoking when I found out I was pregnant.”
“Reggie—”
“I had a miscarriage. They don’t know why. I mean, they couldn’t find a reason.”
“You should have called me. I would have come to you. I would have.” She tosses the cigarette into the street. “You should have said something.”
“I kept waiting and waiting for the right time to tell you I was pregnant, and then it was too late. It was all over, and I was all by myself. I wanted you there, but I didn’t know what to say. And then I didn’t have the words for it.” Now the words fall from my lips, quickly and freely.
Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014 Page 17
