The woman asked, “Why would you say that?” and Lisa mistook her stunned expression for admiration of her cutting-edge humor. (Lisa has had this happen a few times before.) Lisa took a fake pull on her borrowed cigarette and said, “Obviously, the creepy longish nails, but mainly it’s the stink of his cologne, Ode de Candy and Lost Puppy.” The woman stomped out her cigarette, and before she stormed off, she said, “I will let my father know you don’t like his cologne.”
As our taxi cruised along and Lisa attempted to make conversation in her broken Italian, I had to admit that Lisa’s blunders did not nearly outweigh her victories. The longer we drove, the harder my heart pounded in my chest, like a blip on the radar getting closer. I believed we might actually find Erica, and realized I hadn’t believed it before right now.
Vince squeezed my hand, and when I looked at him he was wearing his most confident face. But better than that, I could see he really wanted me to find her. I took a deep breath and he nodded at me, smiling. I wondered if Vince knew exactly what that smile meant to me. It meant that even if I couldn’t find her, at the very least I could still love her without hurting my brother. Maybe that would have to be enough.
It was late afternoon by the time Dominic, our taxi driver, deposited us in the center of the beautiful little village. We had no specific address, so we’d asked him just to leave us on the first corner in the center of town. He refused, deciding it was best instead to deposit us at a busy café, where we hoped to find a local who could lead us to Frederica’s home. Dominic was hesitant to do even this but finally relented after he’d had long talks with several of the café staff. He did not know them, but Dominic spoke with the familiar way of a bossy relative. (He spoke like Lisa, in fact.)
When we got out of the car, Lisa said to Vince, “Damn, it’s humid. Good day to be a girl, cuz I’m betting you’ve got a severe case of batwing.”
Vince had the afraid-to-ask look that we grew up seeing on each other’s faces. He asked, “You’re a girl?” but then his curiosity finally won out and he had to ask. “All right, what the hell is batwing?”
Lisa said, “It’s when your balls stick to the inside of your thigh.”
“Aaah. Of course.”
“Want to hear the song? It’s to the tune of ‘That’s Amore.’”
“Um. No. But thanks.”
“Well, I’d love to hear a song,” I said, and Lisa belted it out, complete with a softer high-pitched echo on the last line.
“Wheeeeeen yooooour ball hits your thigh, like a big pizza pie, that’s a baaaaatwing! Thaaaat’s a batwing.”
Then she spanked him on the back, indicating he should sing it with her a second time, and I felt obligated to join in as a backup singer, for fear of risking the same slap that was probably still ringing in Vince’s ears. I took a second to look around, fearing we looked like loud Americans in Europe (this had happened before), but the patrons were smiling and some raised their glasses to us in salute. I loved Italy. It was the only place on the planet our family could not stick out like a sore thumb.
Once we’d said our goodbyes to Dominic and we were settled in at the café, it became clear it would be a waste of time to continue questioning the staff without eating first, since Dominic had left them strict instructions, and nothing was going to happen until after the raven-haired waitress sailed over to our table with a large mustard-colored ceramic platter dotted with the most beautiful olive, cheese, and meat assortment in the free world. After bite one, we realized Dominic might not know what a batwing was, but he may have been the smartest man on the planet. In heaven from first bite, the three of us sang out at the exact moment, “That’s Amore!”
Thirty-Five
Pasta, Pot, Pee & Me
After we had eaten our fill of the antipasti, with hunks of crusty bread that made Lisa downright weepy, the owner of the café came over to tell us our taxi was waiting outside.
“But we don’t know where we’re going,” I said.
The café owner said something in Italian and Lisa rose to gather our things. I repeated myself as I grabbed her arm, and she said to me, “We don’t have to know where we’re going, the taxi driver knows.”
“How did that happen?” I asked.
Lisa said, “For fuck’s sake, Mare, I honestly don’t know how you are able to even drive a car.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because you get distracted looking in your bag.” Lisa demonstrated an impression of me looking in my bag, in case I wasn’t clear. “Oooo. What’s that? It’s sooooo shiiiiiiiny.”
All this because, one time, about six years ago, I forgotten I’d bought a fancy chrome pen that had settled to the bottom of my bag. I made the mistake of gasping when I rediscovered it in front of Lisa.
I had to be so careful around her. One false move and I would hear about it for years. Like the time I decided to smoke my first joint. A friend in high school had borrowed my jacket and left a joint in the pocket. (Really, it happened, though it’s exactly what I would have told my mother had she found it.) I’d wrongly assumed Lisa was being very self-righteous when she refused to try smoking pot with Vince and me. Now I realized she wanted to remain alert for any material she could throw back in my face when I got stoned off my ass. And oh, there would be material.
Vince and I each took several puffs. When I said I didn’t feel anything, Lisa convinced me I should take several more hits. I then made the mistake of saying: “Doesn’t it feel like we’ve been doing this so much longer than this?” Then, a few seconds later, “Why don’t people do this all the time?” Then, in a fit of paranoia, “Wait, are you judging me for this? Wait—what did I just ask?”
This was only the beginning. Lisa was in for some pure gold, literally.
We had come home from the beach, and my shoes were still wet. Apparently, I started talking a blue streak about how wearing wet shoes was making me have to pee very badly. After much debate about the cause and effect of wet shoes and urinating, Lisa finally convinced me to go to the bathroom. Lisa also convinced Vince they should follow me, since her stupid-sister sensors were flying off the charts. (Lisa is never wrong in cases like this.) We were still in high school, so I had to navigate the living room carefully so I would not wake my parents, and move past the coffee table and television as if they were booby traps. (I had convinced myself they were planted by Lisa.) I could vaguely hear Vince and Lisa giggling behind me, but was much more concerned about the suspicious-looking furniture.
Lisa says that when I reached the bathroom, assuming I was out of earshot, I started mumbling to myself that the first order of business, regardless of what anyone else in the room thought (I was in the bathroom alone), was to take my take my shoes off. I did this with much effort, since it didn’t occur to me to untie the laces and the shoes had shrunk from being soaked. Once they were off, I thought it might be best to dry them on the baseboard heater, but then I went into another series of paranoid ramblings about how they could cause a fire, if not placed correctly. I kept turning the shoes to lean on the heat from the front, then from the back, and Lisa said it was like I was roasting meat on a grill, debating in a whisper which way was less flammable.
Finally, after trying several more configurations, laces out, laces tucked, rubber sole heel up, rubber sole heel down, I blurted “Oh!” as I realized I didn’t have to lay the shoes directly on the heater, but instead, placed them out of harm’s way in the middle of the bathroom floor. Lisa says I stared at them, like a timid dog waiting for a bird to stop nesting in his supper dish. Then I said in a loud whisper: “Whew. That’s safe, I can finally pee!” Which would have been a fine conclusion, if the thought had occurred to me to go over to the toilet, instead of peeing right then, though my shorts onto the bathroom floor. At that point, Lisa and Vince yelled, which freaked me out, and sent me into an athletic dive onto my shoes, totally bare ass, convinced they’d yelled because my shoes caught on fire. (Of course, they hadn’t.)
This commoti
on woke up my parents, with my mother screaming a more shrill echo version of my “Fire!”, and the whole night resulted in all three of us getting grounded. This was totally worth it from Lisa’s perspective, since the ammunition she had would be good for years, and my mother had Dad hold a two-day long inquisition to find out where Vince got the pot, but Vince never served me up. (Later, when Mom was not around, my father’s cross-examination morphed into an investigation about how available the pot was at school, and could Vince score some for Dad without Mom finding out.)
Such was life with Vince and Lisa. One day I was feeding from their strength, the next day I’d say or do something that would give them ammunition for years to come. However difficult they could be, I was so grateful to have them with me—though I would never admit such a weakness to my sister. We were pretending this was a road trip they wanted to take, and all the while Vince was sweetly pretending to be our male escort to keep us safe, while we all knew this was Lisa’s job.
Our new taxi driver wasn’t talkative like Dominic. I could see that his constant warm smile made Lisa fear he was not very bright. As we drove through rural streets surrounded by beautiful fields, even Lisa seemed worried if we would get to Frederica’s home. As history has shown, when Lisa is concerned, it’s often too late for the rest of us to start worrying.
The taxi slowed in front of a tiny stone villa, with thick laces of ivy tracing it like a coloring book. The small wood-slatted door swung open and out stepped a woman who could only be our cousin, Frederica. At first she looked concerned and I guessed this quaint village didn’t see taxis very often, and I wondered how often it signaled bad news. She shouted something to the driver in Italian and he shouted back a long explanation, which included him reading each of our names off a scrap of paper, while her face brightened to a wide smile as she clasped her hands together.
She left her door wide open and bounced toward the taxi. Her mound of wavy brown hair was tousled, and it whipped back and forth as she trotted up the driveway. She kept her elbows bent and tight to her ample sides, using the top of her forearms to cradle the underside of her breasts to lessen the bouncing, which looked like a pair of puppies fighting under a floral sheet. (I knew that move; I had done that move a thousand times, minus the floral housecoat.) When she got closer, we recognized her face was a gleaming, younger, feminine version of Uncle Freddie’s. We laughed with relief, knowing that this woman was family, just as much as any family we had known our entire lives.
Since he was the first to emerge from the taxi, Frederica grabbed Vince in a giant bear hug that nearly knocked the wind out of him, since when he tried to say her name, no sound came out. Lisa and I laughed again. She was rattling off Italian in a blue streak singsong voice that made it hard to pick out even one recognizable word. I got my bear hug next, and I saw from Lisa’s raised eyebrows and shaking head that, except for our parent’s names, she couldn’t understand a single word either.
Lisa pulled the suitcases from the taxi, set them down, and was nearly knocked over by Frederica’s hug. Lisa tried to speak a few Italian words, but Frederica’s expression of wide-eyed wonder didn’t change. We understood that we could have said, “Hello, how are you” and got the same understanding as “Ravioli are running on trees.”
Vince attempted to speak to her, asking about Uncle Freddie, but Frederica thought he was attempting her name and she said, “Si, si, si!” She grabbed Vince’s cheek in a death-grip pinch that reminded me of Aunt Aggie. Then, she easily hoisted up the largest of our suitcases and carried it up the walkway. Clearly we would be staying with her.
Lisa reached for the rest of our bags and followed our exultant cousin down the long walkway. The walkway was ten times the length of the house, the warm orange stones turning to cool blue under the quickly fading light. It was early evening and the country road didn’t have a single streetlight, so the darkness had come quickly. As we approached her home, Frederica had left her front door open as wide as possible, and it seemed a sign of how she welcomed us. If she could have taken the door off its hinges to make it more hospitable, I felt in my heart she would have done so.
The villa’s inside reminded me of a Hobbit’s residence, or Yoda’s more tastefully decorated summer home. There was not a stick of furniture, piece of wall décor, or artifact that didn’t look hand-crafted from a natural material, and, like my log cabin back in New England, the inside of the home exactly resembled the outside, missing only the ivy crawling on the fieldstones. If it hadn’t looked centuries old, I would have wondered if my Uncle Freddie had built the place, but it was more likely his father before he had been tragically taken from his family at such a young age. Despite its obvious age, the walls were still flawlessly sealed, and the floors beautifully broken in, like distressed leather.
Frederica’s singsong voice trailed off to her kitchen, and before we’d even set our things down, she had magically appeared with a tray of fresh-squeezed lemonade. The beverage was served in jelly jar glasses that may have been hand-me-down relics to her, but would have fetched a nice price at an antique show. She sang more Italian at us and we could tell from her hand movements that she wanted us to sit down.
Frederick knew, like Dominic the taxi driver, that making time for refreshment was always a wise choice. She watched our faces as we drank, her thick eyebrows raising to her hairline with expectancy, then lowering notch by notch as we each nodded our heads in agreement. That lemonade, which Lisa said was spiked with bits of sugared ginger, was the finest drink I had ever tasted.
When our drinks had been drained, she scampered off to pour us more and I signaled to Vince to try communicating with her again. She came back with the pitcher and he said, “Frederick, our uncle?” Then he winced when she put the thick ceramic pitcher down with a heavy thud so she could accost his cheek once again. Through gritted teeth and a painful smile, Vince said to me, “I’m not asking again.”
Frederica filled our glasses to the brim before disappearing into the kitchen. Within moments we heard the crackle of a cooking fire and smelled simmering garlic. Lisa sprang up like she’d received an urgent call from the mother ship that complimentary authentic Italian cooking lessons were to begin around Yoda’s antique stove. We heard Frederica’s singing protest, but Lisa didn’t return to the living area. We heard the sounds of two chefs chopping, stirring, and scraping, all attempts at language abandoned. The kitchen was one place Lisa needed no words, unless it was to call everyone to the table.
Vince and I stepped outside to watch the stars come out over the surrounding fields. “She may not even be here,” I said to him.
He shook his head with more confidence than he had. “She’s here. Who else could boss Uncle Freddie around besides Aunt Aggie?”
I wanted to believe, but there was an ache deep in the pit of my stomach warning me otherwise. Or, maybe I was starving from the intoxicating smells coming from Frederica’s kitchen window. Vince had his hand on his stomach too, and in a few minutes we almost forgot our mission here. Wasn’t our mission to eat?
I asked Vince, “Ever wish you could cook?”
He gestured over at Lisa and answered, “Thank God, no. It would be like wanting to be an actor and being Meryl Streep’s brother.”
Back inside, the unmistakable smell of Lisa’s roasted red pepper boats with goat cheese filling mingled with the smell of spicy sausage searing on a cured pan. We gathered in the kitchen, making a chorus of “mmm” sounds, well understood in any language. For now, we wouldn’t worry about communicating beyond the languages of our stomachs.
Later, much later, when we had eaten what Vince and I agreed was the best meal of our lives, Frederica kicked us out of the kitchen with playful shooing motions and demanded with various other hand signals that we settle in for the night into two small guest rooms, Vince in one, and Lisa and I in the other. With our bellies full, we were too tired to protest, and after using the washroom (located outside the house, adjoining a fairly well-kept chicken coop) we c
ollapsed on our guest beds and fell asleep.
Thirty-Six
Bang-Bang-Tap
Despite being in the birthplace of my ancestors, and one of the most beautiful places on earth, my recurring dream took me back to a cabin nestled in a pine-tree-filled wood in Rhode Island. The cabin was near a playful little campground, and on most summer evenings it smelled very much like Frederica’s kitchen. In the dream I’d been searching for Erica, night after night. I always convinced myself she was nearby, but most nights I couldn’t find her. I would find a note she’d left on a bureau I’d purchased for the cabin, a bureau she had never seen.
Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of her in the woods, before she disappeared again. Other times, if I was lucky enough to catch her, she would shake her head no and her voice would grow faint as she explained to me as if I were a child, “You can’t love me, you need to let me go now,” and before I could tell her things were different, that Vince had found love, she would disappear again and I would awake with a hunger that ran so deep for her, I could feel nothing else.
Tonight, the dream was a little different. Instead of being at night, it was the full heat of a summer day, and throughout the dream I could hear the tapping of Erica’s hammer on a distant roof. It started as a sweet sound, a sign that she was near—was she signaling to me? But as the dream went on and I searched from roof to Camptown Ladies roof with no sign of her, the tapping became maddening.
Then a beautiful woman was approaching me, the sun blazing behind her. Was it Erica? No, she was much too large to be Erica, much, much too large, a quite rounded silhouette, so dark I could not see from the bright light around her, and so familiar and beautiful to me. I loved her, though not in that way. Who was this?
When she spoke, there was no mistaking her.
“Marie, what the fuck are you doing in Italy?”
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