Women in Sunlight

by Frances Mayes

  I run my fingers through his matted hair. He imitates a tech client who wants an upper-class British club atmosphere in his flat. “Can you tell me,” the client said, “what is considered good taste?” Colin, to his credit, liked the client and they spent two mornings looking at books and shelter magazines, with Colin putting tabs on good-taste pages and X-marked ones on the worst-taste pages.

  He dozes for a few minutes and I ease the cup onto my bedside table. Wind cutting around the edges of the house screeches like lost souls at large. In the distance, Leo’s two horses neigh, long whinnyings that blend into the wind and carry it onward. When he sleeps, something in Colin that’s wound up relaxes and he looks like he must have at fourteen when the openness of childhood still graces the face with innocence but the coming changes into manhood already are forming. His beautiful lips slightly parted, fringe of eyelashes fluttering once, balled fist unfurling those long fingers drawn by da Vinci.

  In the shower, I wash my hair and slather myself with body wash. I sing “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” My breasts feel tender. I stand under the hot water uncomprehending, then comprehending.

  I’m not myself. I’m not right.

  I’m not pregnant. I couldn’t be.

  * * *

  —

  Working across the morning while Colin heads out to the olive grove, I run through my Margaret papers. Her book World Mafia World gathers dust on my desk. I take it down to the living room, where Fitzy has commandeered my favorite chair. He accommodates me and insinuates himself across the pages. This is risky Margaret, getting to know the young wives of Mafia dons, functionaries, sons, and those affected by them. She set herself up as an English teacher in Catania, stronghold of crime fiefdoms. Through the children, she’s invited to celebrations, ceremonies, Sunday dinners. A whole year teaching six-to-twelve-year-olds. I’m sure a good teacher. She’s popular. The dons, store owners, even one priest have to be fought off politely. She overhears, she subtly questions, she teaches Winnie the Pooh to the youngest, Charlotte’s Web to the middle group, and Romeo and Juliet, other victims of warring clans, to the oldest. She is said to have lost her husband in the Vietnam War. She’s chaste, living under the name of Mary Merritt. Dark skirt and white blouse. Only the pearls to show her class. Writing furiously at night, hiding her notebook in a locked suitcase under the bed. Brava, Margaret. Here’s where I envy her. The crusader giving over a chunk of life for a cause. (Not the only one either. The Taste of Terror, an analysis of the tense Red Brigades years, serves as a preview for the terrorism we’re now having to accept as the new normal.)

  The Mafia book, scathing and incriminating, placed “Mary Merritt” on a watch list so dangerous that she had to return to the U.S. for two years. A lucky return, as that’s when she wrote her classic Sun Raining on Blue Flowers. The crusading books give me insight into her trap-mind, her toughness; the novels reveal lyric tenderness, love of the natural world, her sadness and rapier humor.

  Hands to my breasts, yes, definitely tender.

  * * *

  —

  After lunch at Stefano’s (I pushed around my pasta), I tell Colin I need to pick up a couple of things in the pharmacy. He joins Leo for a coffee in the piazza. Two other guys sit down and out come the cards.

  * * *

  —

  I am stunned. Hit with a Taser. The swab is a live firecracker in my hand. Pink. Pretty in pink. Stripes. Pink bubble gum. As my mind shuts down, I rub my hand over my flat middle. A someone in there, kick-starting. Impossible. Twenty-four years of sex and now, now…So, when? I know. After Sunday lunch that mellow September afternoon, we took our green blanket to our hidden lair under the ilex tree, that sweet grassy dip that hides us from the world. Colin had recovered from one of his London weeks and was joyous and loving and wild. A brown leaf stuck to his back.

  Pregnant! Never an option. When I was twenty and went in for birth control advice, my doctor told me that I could not get pregnant with such a tipped uterus. “At such an angle,” he said, “no determined sperm could cascade over that ledge.” I pictured an openmouthed salmon trying to leap upstream and forever falling back. Not having to deal with pills and implants and foams and goo was fine with me.

  I will keep this to myself until I can think. Never say never. This changes everything. The X plus Y, or X now in flux. A small boy with a toy sailboat. And Colin…He likes our friends’ children and even has offered for us to keep them so the parents can have a getaway weekend. But he has always maintained that he doesn’t want his own. He adored his younger sister when they were small, but she became a social-climbing, shallow, manipulative jerk. (Kittens become cats.) Our work would be sliced to bits. We’d be tied down.

  A slender girl in plaid skipping rope, a willful girl she is. She flashes my mother’s smile. My childless friends have much easier lives and more fun. How late am I? I didn’t even notice but it must be ten days. No period. (Now a comma.) No “falling off the roof,” as my mother used to say. Where did that come from?

  A quiet abortion in Rome? That would be hideous. Like the moles Fitzy mutilates, tangled bloody rags. Emerging from some desperate room into winter light. Scraped clean. No one to know. D & C, dusting and cleaning, my mother called the procedure. Colin is forty, a mighty age; I am forty-four. Last gasp, aging eggs. (How unappetizing the sulfur smell when the dipped pastel Easter eggs were found weeks later in the bushes.) Remember Margaret saying Italian babies are born old? And children don’t always turn out well, no matter what you do. The jeweler’s son—porky little kid. He looks like a sausage about to burst out of its casing. I’ve seen him trip his sister, blame her, and get away with it. What if you had Grazia? Always stuffing tissues in her pockets, and her obnoxious laugh. That’s not nice. Grazia is…Oh, why the hell am I thinking negatively? Our child. A slice of me, a slice of Colin. Oh, babycakes. The needle on the gauge keeps falling to empty. I’m stalled. Lose a tooth with every child, my mother said. Annunciation? No way. This late miracle—as though this being always floated out there, holding a sparkler in the sky, waiting for her moment. Her?

  Susan looks down from her upstairs window. Why is Grazia banging on the door at seven a.m.? It’s barely light. Four men behind her unload nets and ladders from a three-wheeled truck. “Buon giorno, Grazia.”

  “So sorry. I am forgetting to tell you that today we start la raccolta, how do you say it in English, for the olives?”

  “Oh—the harvest. How exciting! May we help?”

  “Of course. And Zia Maria and I will be back at one with the pasta. The table is over near Leo’s. If you want, join in for pranzo.” The men spread a net around a tree on the upper terrace and lean two ladders into the limbs.

  By midmorning, they’ve picked an entire terrace. The crates brim with shiny black and green olives. They pause against the hillside for their break—robust panini of mortadella stacked between thick hunks of bread. Julia climbs a ladder; Susan picks from the ground, while Camille draws in ink on blue paper from the terrace above. She’s walked the groves marveling at the character of the twisty trees and the ambiguous leaves shifting silver to sage in the slightest wind. Up close, she’s not sure she likes them. Some look like tortured blackened skeletons writhing out of the earth and trying to turn into trees. Some resemble crazed headless dancers. She wonders why what symbolizes peace looks so tortured. The oldest man, Pierino, must be eighty-five. He leans over her shoulder and as if reading her mind says, “A thousand years in the wind and rain.” Only he speaks in Italian and she has no idea what he’s said. “It is good,” he says in English. It’s not good, Camille knows, but maybe inking in a million lancet leaves will make it so. Thin as an olive limb himself, he blends with the tree as he straps his picking basket around his waist. If she could capture that. His whole life present at the yearly harvest, his body at one with the ritual of harvest. Probably the same gray sweater and rough pants for a half a century. At least I ca
n know this bond, even if I can’t experience it as he does. What in my life is as primordial? Only Charles, that early sense when we were together that we were one person halved. Cleft for me, the hymn goes, let me halve myself in thee. Though the right word was hide, not halve. Charles would be all over this. But no, he is not because he is powder in a resin urn in the back of the hall closet where I stored clothes I left behind. Old windbreaker. What I can do, she realizes, is help with lunch. She folds her materials into her bag and calls out, “Back in a bit.”

  Susan likes the rhythm, the string nets studded with fallen olives, a piercingly blue sky with scudding clouds. Archie gets his paws caught in the netting and is shooed away by Paolo, a jolly giant who doesn’t need a ladder. One of the other men, Lucio, sings songs she’s never heard. His high, plaintive falsetto voice comes from another era. This has been going on forever, and without our help at all, Susan thinks. “Hey, Julia, is this what we came for? Did you ever imagine? Aren’t our arms going to be sore!” A flush of happiness suffuses her body. Here I am at the beginning of Mediterranean life. We join this stylized dance. Adrenaline? Whatever the rush, this wash of certainty is real. I’m on the verge, she thought, of finding fresh fields. I’m catapulting toward them.

  Julia leans onto the ladder, hoping the scraggly branches hold. “Grazia says it will take four or five days. There are lots of olives! I want to pick every one, then I want to make the most gorgeous salad on earth with new oil.” Chris is meeting her in town after the pause. Last night when he dropped her off, he said he had a good idea he’d like to talk about. “Do you think Grazia would mind if we brought Chris and his group to the harvest? I think they would be fascinated.”

  “Let’s ask at lunch. We could pour some wine late in the day. That would be fun.”

  Reaching for a high branch, Julia suddenly remembers Lizzie roaring back into her dream, wearing the chenille bathrobe Julia took to the suicide attempt. Soft yellow, supposed to be comforting. Pitiful. She banged on the door of Villa Assunta shouting, Let me in. I’m back. Of course you’d appear after yesterday, when I was so happy, Julia thought. That must have been when Grazia knocked early this morning. She climbed down the ladder and emptied her basket in the crate. What do they taste like raw? she wondered. She bit into a ripe one. Wretched, bitter.

  When everyone gathers at one, Camille brings a tray of cheeses and fruit from the house, plus a lettuce, cucumber, and radish salad and a plate of cookies. Grazia and her aunt haul out salumi, lasagne, bread, wine, and more fruit. Everyone draws up benches to the weathered table laden with food. The women let the Italian stream over them. Next year, Julia thinks, next year I will be joking with them. Camille thinks, I’ll never understand Italian. Susan pieces together snatches.

  * * *

  —

  After every morsel of pasta is scraped from the dish, the men rest under a tree. They pass around grappa and swig from the bottle. A few sips, some talk, and then they’re quiet. Julia hears a snort from Pierino. Camille, Grazia, and her aunt Maria stack the dishes. Maria brews espresso in a Moka pot over a butane burner. She takes small plastic cups over to the men as Susan and Julia, ever ardent, begin picking again.

  * * *

  —

  As they drive to town late in the afternoon, they realize, like a light switched on, that every man, woman, and child is in the groves. In the piazza, the conversation revolves around olives. The usually bella figura Italians wear rubber boots and shapeless wool that smells of closed trunks and mothballs. Men are two deep at every bar, nipping back espresso or red wine. This phenomenon lasts three weeks, until everyone is sick of hearing about yields and even sick of themselves bragging over their own oil, which is, of course, the best. Already, new unfiltered oil is for sale at several shops. Julia buys half-liter bottles at three places.

  Chris is waiting for her at Bar San Anselmo, which is rowdy with olive pickers. She spots him in a corner and waves her bottles of new oil. “Let’s get some bread. I can’t wait to taste.” Chris admires the brilliant green color. He admires, too, the excited flush on Julia’s face and her exuberance over the olive oil. From the counter, Violetta sees what they have and brings over a basket of bread. They linger for two hours with a bottle of the house red, slightly sour. Each oil tastes a little different. All over-the-top excellent. Neither of them can choose a favorite. Chris tried some of his fanciful descriptions—fresh grass and spring wind, a melting emerald at the bottom of a well (Julia laughs at that), Irish moss. They give up trying. He tells Julia about the group’s trip to Montalcino this morning. “The monks at this ancient abbey still sing the hours, what, eight times a day—lauds, compline, all the times you’re supposed to pray. There was no one there but us, and they do this every day.” He covered her hand with his. “The abbey is just spectacular. Pure, austere, and holy.” They both look down at their hands. Something shifts. He lifts her fingers and turns them around. “You have nice paws. We should go there sometime, the abbey of Sant’Antimo.”

  Julia tips her head and looks at him. His eyes, ever so subtly different colors. “What is your idea that you wanted to talk about?” Move this back on track; I can’t fall for him. Wade could walk in right now and say let’s go home and would I go? Chris’s cool hand over hers is the first touch she’s felt in months.

  He pours more wine. “I’d like to see if you’d be at all interested in helping me expand the tours I bring here. Tuscany is second nature to me. I’ll always come here but I’m thinking of moving into Friuli as well.”

  “Is that near Venice?”

  “Right. A great area. Great. I know the wines and some of the makers but I need a man on the ground, that would be you, to search out the best places to stay and eat. Then I might add Sicily, if I can get it together to leave my home business for that much time. I like the travel.”

  “Mamma mia—or do they really say that? I’m flabbergasted. It sounds fantastically interesting to me. A dream. You know, I’m all about reinventing my life here, but this moves beyond anything I’ve imagined.” They talk details and times.

  “Can I just get this out of the way? I divorced five years ago. I have a son, Carter, who’s studying enology at UC Davis. My former wife kept the house and I live in a remodeled bunkhouse for workers in the vineyard.”

  Julia says, “Oh, okay, you don’t have to…”

  “It’s all cool. Just one of those growing-in-different-directions things. Italy became more and more important to me, and she always wanted to go to Hawaii. Of course, that’s not it by a long shot. I was across the room from her at a party one night, and I looked at her as though she were a stranger. Buffed, tan, big smile. Big hair. I had this wave of sadness smack me because I thought, I don’t love her the way she deserves. It was odd. I’d felt politely blank for a long time, kind of neutralized.” He doesn’t say that sex with her depressed him; she felt like an inflatable doll. “I didn’t want to feel that way; I wanted to throw myself into my life again. That’s when I expanded my business and started these wine-in-context trips. I got a tutor and worked like a dog learning Italian. I missed Carter, my boy, when I traveled, but I didn’t miss Megan. We split when he went to college. I guess I was as lost to her as she was to me. Yoga, cardio, tennis. She keeps busy. Fit. Oh, yes, fit. Met some pilot online. Carter’s okay. He’s with me a lot. I even have dinner with Megan now and then. California civilized.”

  “I wish my divorce—it’s still pending—were that way. I won’t even email with Wade—that’s my former husband. I’m okay now.” She tells him in bare outline about Lizzie’s addiction, how it wrecked them inside and out. “Our good life upheaved and fell apart.” What has consumed her for years, for this moment anyway, seems to take place as through the far view in a telescope. Speaking of her family, she is, if not relaxed, then at least calm. She feels a small burst of sympathy for Wade, a highway flare at the scene of an accident. “Work saved me. I’ve learned everything at
Mulberry Press. The books are solid and aesthetic. I’ll show you some I brought with me. They’re not just here it is, recipe and anecdote, but cultural links, too, or history or why the recipe exists. Now I am thinking of doing a project with Mulberry myself. The work with you would be such a bonus.” She smiles. “It would be exhilarating! I’m really excited.”

  Chris loves the idea of her Learning Italian. “I can be your wine consultant.” Funny she chose those words—solid and aesthetic. That’s what she seems to him.

  * * *

  —

  Julia arrives at home late, just as Susan and Camille sit down for dinner. She serves herself a bowl of risotto that Susan made with lemon and pistachios. Camille, salad queen, washed extra lettuces this morning when she prepared lunch in the grove. “We eat unbelievably well,” Julia says. “Even the simplest thing is incredibly tasty. Why is everything good?”

  “I think they leave it alone.” Susan dribbles fresh olive oil over the salad.

  Julia immediately shares her news about possibly researching Friuli for Chris. “Can we go on trips? Susan, you could visit gardens; Camille could search out the museums and architecture and ruins. I’ll find the great places to eat. It will all be good adventure.”

  Camille proposes starting in Venice before Friuli. “Venice out of season. Snow—does it snow?—in Piazza San Marco? Imagine. Hot chocolate at that caffè where they play the schmaltzy music, gondolas…”