by Ann Hood
“When exactly did you know about the avalanche?” I asked.
“Why, it was all over the news,” Ava said. “I think the whole country held their collective breath, waiting to hear if there were survivors.” She busied herself with the coffee-pot. “Like when that little girl fell in the well. You probably don’t remember that. Some little girl fell in a well in Texas and it took days to rescue her and everyone was waiting to hear if she was alive or whatever.”
Ava glanced up at me.
“That was a close one,” she said.
Carmela from downstairs smelled good, like the fresh rosemary that my mother cooked with. She had strange bumps on her face, smooth hills of flesh scattered everywhere, and one large brown spot on her cheek. Her face was like a village: The bumps were all the little houses, the brown spot an irregular-shaped lake, and the deep lines on her cheeks the roads and tributaries that led to other, more exotic and mysterious places. I wanted nothing more than to crawl into that face and explore it.
Carmela had come to watch Zoe so that everyone else could “have a meal in peace.”
She called me Magdalena. But she did not know what to make of Zoe or Cody’s names. Whenever she heard them, she clucked her tongue and shook her head. She didn’t even try to pronounce them in her broken English. I liked to stare at Carmela. Her hair was stark white and long, pulled back in a complicated twist, held in place by long dark bobby pins. But I liked to imagine it free, billowing around her head in its snowy grandeur. The blue color of her eyes reminded me of ice, and she had a way of turning them onto something or someone as if they could bore through the surface and discover something important.
Reluctantly, I left Carmela behind, rocking Zoe easily to sleep so we could go eat dinner together.
“Amazing,” Ava said as we started to leave, “she’s been so fussy.”
Carmela gave Ava a penetrating stare. “Yes,” she said. She continued humming her seemingly random song, rocking and pressing her fingertips on the center of Zoe’s forehead.
At the restaurant Ava said, “That woman gives me the creeps. It was like she put a spell on Zoe. Did you see her?”
“Who cares?” my father said, leaning back in his chair, drinking his red wine. “It’s the first time she’s slept in weeks.”
At this restaurant, a small crowded place with picnic-type tables, there were no menus. Instead, the waiter delivered whatever food the chef was cooking. He watched everyone who came in, made sure they were eating, shouted to them in Italian.
But when we came in he shouted, “Hey! Americanos? Want some Coca-Cola? Want some Pizza Hut?”
Even though he smiled when he said it, showing two shiny gold teeth, I felt embarrassed. Other families looked at us and laughed. “Americano,” someone at the next table whispered. I wished I looked interesting, like Carmela. I played with my hair, pulling it back and twisting it this way and that.
“Scott,” Ava said, “tell her not to do that at the dinner table.”
“Madeline?” Dad said obediently.
I didn’t stop. I twisted my hair and thought about how Ava always did that. Scott, she’d say, tell Madeline we have to leave. Scott, ask Madeline if she likes oysters.
The waiter brought us two large, thin-crusted pizza margheritas.
“Scott,” Ava said. “Her hair.”
“Daddy,” I said to my father, “tell Ava I’m done fixing my hair.”
Cody sighed. “I love Italy,” he said. “I want to live here forever.” He leaned forward. “Have you ever noticed the cars here don’t have airbags?” He leaned back again and took a big bite of pizza. “Yup,” he said dreamily, “I could live here forever.”
“It takes some getting used to,” Ava said carefully to Dad. She saw me watching her and forced a smile. “Of course, I traveled through Asia a few years ago and loved it. Now, that was difficult. No roads to speak of, and you had to be so careful about what you ate. Not like Rome, where you can even drink the water from the tap.”
The waiter brought the next course, spaghetti carbonara.
“Hey!” the chef called. “Americanos! Some Chef Boyardee, eh?”
“If only they made pasta this good,” Dad answered him cheerfully.
“What is this?” Cody asked, leaning over his plate to sniff the spaghetti.
“Remember Mom made it once?” I said, breaking an unspoken rule to not speak of my mother in front of Dad and Ava. I didn’t care. “It was a Friday night dinner and she called it bacon and egg spaghetti.”
That same feeling of longing swept over me. If I could just hug my mother, I might feel better.
“Maybe we could call Mom tonight?” I asked my father.
“Sure,” he said, keeping his attention on the spaghetti he was twirling around his fork. He kept twirling, absently, even after the strands were tightly wound.
“It’s good,” Cody said. “Better than Mom’s.”
“She probably didn’t use pancetta,” Ava said.
I looked at Ava sharply. “By the way,” I said, “I was thinking about something.”
“Shoot,” Dad said.
“I was thinking about how I don’t know the story of how you guys met. You know how I love romantic stories.”
“Not so romantic,” he said. “We met at a bar.”
“It was romantic,” Ava said, hurt.
“Well.”
“But when?” I said, thinking about what Ava had said that morning: We just didn’t know then.
“Well,” he said again, “I had a meeting with an editor that ran late, so I was staying overnight and, luckily for me, I decided to have a drink.”
Pleased with the “luckily for me” part, Ava smiled. “Lucky for both of us,” she said.
“So this is a love story?” Cody said as he sucked spaghetti into his mouth.
“Of course it is, Cody,” Ava said. “Now how would they say it in Italian? La grande passione?”
“I mean,” I said, “when was this?”
“Let me see,” my father said.
“I mean, it had to be after the avalanche. Because remember right before you left for Idaho, you and Mom and Cody came to see me in The Nutcracker and then we had dinner in Chinatown and you made a toast. You said, ‘To the most wonderful family in the world. My funny son. My dancing daughter. And my wife, the woman I love.’”
My father cleared his throat.
“Then,” I continued, “you went to Idaho and when you came home, you and Mom got a divorce.”
“And you disappeared,” Cody added softly.
“But later, Ava and I got married and we had Zoe and everything turned out fine.”
Cody and I both stared at him.
“And now,” our father said, “we have a different, wonderful family.”
“I remember Boston,” Cody said. “How we all used to stay in bed together on Sunday mornings and I could watch cartoons and I would squeeze in right between you and Mommy. You used to call it a Cody sandwich, remember?”
Dad nodded, but he looked kind of nervous.
“I liked the bottom,” I said. “I liked to lay longways across the foot of the bed.”
The waiter appeared again, with a platter of veal.
“Look at this,” Ava said with more cheerfulness than anybody felt. “Now would this be a piccata?”
Under the table, I felt my brother’s hand reach for mine. I took it. Sometimes I forgot Cody was really just a little kid. His hands felt so small and smooth.
Instead of eating the veal, which you weren’t supposed to eat, anyway, because it was a baby calf who had been killed in some very horrible way, I stared at Ava. My stepmother. The more they didn’t say, the clearer it became: My father had supposedly loved my mother. All of that was fake. I watched as Ava put a piece of veal in her mouth and pronounced it delicioso. Our mother would have cut some for Cody first, into bite-sized pieces. Our mother would have asked me why I wasn’t eating any. She would have respected my knowledge about the whole veal thing.
“It’s a baby, you know,” I said. “A calf. And they chained it up and everything.”
“Not here,” Ava said. “They do everything differently here.”
I didn’t think that was true. Ava was smooth, the way she came up with the answers so easily. She had an answer for everything. I just kept watching her. I was, maybe, starting to hate Ava a little.
Carmela poured hot water in a bowl, added a few drops of olive oil, then waited, peering into the bowl.
“I think you maybe got the mal occhio, no? The Evil Eye?” Carmela said to Ava.
“No, really, it’s just a headache. Too much wine, perhaps,” Ava said.
“No,” Carmela said, pointing to the bowl. “You got the mal occhio. I fix. No problem.”
She took Ava’s hand—which Ava gave her reluctantly—and made circles on the palm with her fingers, muttering to herself.
“Really,” Ava said nervously. “It’s just a headache. I have some ibuprofen.”
“Someone maybe no like you?” Carmela said. “Or maybe you cross somebody?”
“Cross somebody?” Ava said, laughing. She rubbed her palm where Carmela had held it. “I don’t think so. Of course, people are always offending others without meaning to.”
“Offending?” Carmela asked.
Ava looked around for my father to come in the kitchen and rescue her, but he was on the telephone in the bedroom, with the door closed. When she caught my eye, I glared, trying to make an evil eye.
“You know, hurting someone’s feelings,” Ava explained.
“Ah. You do this?”
“I don’t know,” Ava said. “Maybe. Without meaning to.”
“And now your headache, it’s all gone?”
Ava’s hand touched her temple lightly. “It is. Yes.”
Carmela stood. She was a large woman, and she got to her feet slowly. She put on her handkerchief, a black silk one with red poppies on it, and picked up her black purse, its gold clasp gleaming in the light.
“So. You maybe be careful, eh? About who you offend?”
Ava laughed the same nervous laugh. “Really. It was more likely the cheap wine we had with dinner.”
“Hmmm,” Carmela said. “Good night, Magdalena.” She pressed my cheeks with her fingers. “You a smart girl, eh? A good girl?”
I looked at Carmela’s ice blue eyes. I thought of mountain tops, cool lakes.
Carmela nodded. Muttering, she walked out.
“God,” Ava said, emptying the water and olive oil from the bowl and running hot water into it. “She gives me the creeps.”
But she didn’t give me the creeps at all. You know who was starting to give me the creeps? Ava Pomme.
Chapter Ten
HOME
A postcard arrived for me from my mother: a picture of Saint Catherine of Siena’s head in its reliquary at the church of Saint Dominic in Siena.
“How ghoulish,” Ava said, leaning over my shoulder to peek.
I slapped my hand over the postcard, hiding it from Ava. “Excuse me?” I said.
Ava came around to sit across from me.
“A head?” Ava said. “Not only is it positively ghoulish, but for a mother to send a postcard of such a thing to her daughter. Well.”
I narrowed my eyes at Ava. What did this woman know about mothers and daughters, anyway? Now that her own daughter was turning into someone, Ava grew more baffled every day. Zoe screamed, “No!” at just about everything Ava gave to her: small perfect tortellini, plump purple figs, focaccia smeared with olive oil and salt. To all of it Zoe screamed, “No!,” often sweeping it off the table with a grand gesture. Whenever she ate pasta in red sauce, Zoe dropped her face right into the bowl and gobbled it like a dog. Ava could only look on, horrified. It was my father who carried Zoe over to the sink and washed the sauce out of her hair and face and from in between her fingers. One of Ava’s favorite things to say lately was, “Scott, do something.”
I turned over the postcard and began to read the message. It was full of details of the churches in Siena, the monastery at La Verna, all the things she knew I would like.
“How is your mother?” Ava asked, trying to sound casual and uninterested.
I pretended I didn’t hear her. My emotions, about Ava and my mother and everything, were all mixed up inside of me. I could feel them bubbling up like one of my mother’s stews.
“Madeline?” Ava said.
I dropped the postcard into my lap. “I thought you weren’t supposed to ask,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Ava said.
“I mean,” I said dramatically, “I thought you weren’t supposed to ask about my mother. She’s off limits, right?”
Ava made a nervous little sound in her throat. Back in New York she seemed confident and in charge. Here, she was a mess. She even looked shorter here.
“No one ever said that,” Ava said.
“Fine,” I said. “Then here’s how she is. She has managed to take care of us and keep writing and run a house that is practically falling on our heads while Daddy ran off with you.” My heart was beating fast. I was saying things that hadn’t seemed to take shape yet in my head, but once I opened my mouth and the words began to spill out they made perfect sense. “Because that’s what happened, isn’t it? Daddy met you before the avalanche and left all of us for you. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
Ava opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. Footsteps came from down the long hallway that led to the bedrooms. My father was taking Zoe and Cody to the little park up the street, where there was a playground and ponies to ride.
“Madeline,” Ava managed to say, but that was all. And really, what more could she say?
The kitchen door flew open and Cody ran in, followed by our father with Zoe on his shoulders.
“Everyone coming?” he asked.
It was as if I was seeing him for the very first time, someone who had been reckless with my heart, with all of our hearts, my mother’s most importantly. I gulped and shook my head. Downstairs, I knew, old Carmela would be sitting by the window watching Rome go by. She would be sipping one of those terrible drinks she had for her indigestion, and eating stale bread.
“I’m going downstairs,” I said, already moving away from them.
“Honestly, Scott,” Ava said, “I don’t know how she can stand that old woman.”
I swung around to face Ava. “Well, then, you don’t know anything about me, I guess.”
I saw my father’s look of surprise, and the way Ava’s hand with its perfectly painted oval nails went to her mouth. But I turned my back on them and went downstairs.
Carmela toasted yesterday’s bread and drizzled it with olive oil and salt. None of her plates matched, and her cups were chipped. But I didn’t care. I loved her and her things and the way she looked suspiciously at Ava Pomme.
“She’s not my real mother,” I whispered as we watched Ava leave the house alone, a big black leather bag swung carelessly over her shoulder. Without any of us around she regained her New York self. Her hair looked shinier, and she walked with a certainty that she lost under the weight of family life.
“Your father marry younger woman, throw your mother away, eh?” Carmela said, nodding as if she’d known it all along.
“Yes,” I said, realizing that was exactly what he had done. One of my vocabulary words came back to me. “He jettisoned us,” I said.
Ava Pomme walked along the street, pausing to stare into the shop windows, until she finally disappeared from sight. I wished it really was that easy, that by just staring at her she would vanish.
“I hate her,” I sighed. What I knew was that Ava Pomme was not going to vanish anytime soon, no matter how hard I stared.
“Me, too,” Carmela agreed. “She bossy and she stupid.”
We looked at each other and laughed like conspirators.
“Well,” I said, “ my mother comes tomorr
ow to get us and take us home.” I added, “I can’t wait to see her.”
Suddenly, I felt an ache for my mother that was so enormous I almost fell over. I pictured her in our backyard, working in the sunless garden there. I saw her at the stove, sprinkling herbs, tasting, and correcting. If I closed my eyes, I could almost feel the shape of her that night in Naples, her strong shoulders, her hair that smelled of generic-brand strawberry shampoo.
Ava went to a fancy drugstore in Greenwich Village and bought tubes and bottles of expensive toiletries. I liked to go into Ava’s bathroom and take all of the lids off everything and inhale their exotic smells. But now I longed for my mother’s simple smell of Ivory soap or no-name toothpaste. I remembered complaining not too long ago about the cheap stuff, holding up a bottle of fancy shampoo, and the way my mother had taken the other kind and read off the ingredients, making me compare. “How embarrassing!” I had shouted. “How cheap!” And then I’d buried my face in the racks of magazines, leaving her to do all of the shopping herself.
“I miss my mother,” I said, and that ache grew so great that the only way to relieve it was to cry.
“Oh,” Carmela said, patting her ample lap, “come here, cara mia. Come here.”
I climbed onto the old woman’s lap and let her wrap her arms around me. They did not feel like my mother’s arms, knowing and familiar, but they held the comfort of someone who understood a broken heart.
That night, my father told me to dress up fancy—the two of us were going on a date.
“I don’t want to,” I said miserably. All I wanted was to go to bed and sleep until my mother came for us. Then I would hug her and not let go. I would tell her how sorry I was for every bad thought I’d had, every cross word, all of it. I would tell her she was a good mother, the best mother ever.
“But you have to,” my father was saying. “You and I need a proper celebration for your acceptance to the Boston Ballet School. We’re going to dinner at a restaurant near Piazza Navona, and then we’ll get ice cream later.”
I loved ice cream in Rome, with all the flavors I had never tasted before, chestnut and hazelnut and zabaglione. I loved the Piazza Navona, too, with its fountain lined with statues hiding their eyes. My mother had said that the sculptor for the fountain, angry that he had not been commissioned to build the church as well, made the statues cover their eyes from the church’s ugliness. My father said that story was not true; the dates when each had been built proved the falseness of that tale. But I didn’t care. I chose to believe my mother’s version.
