We finished dinner, with Carrie responding to her parents’ attempts at bringing her into the conversation with a series of “uh-huhs.” Gracious, she was not. Just as my parents had suggested, Phil and Nicole were very nice people, and if I was going to spend six weeks with another family, it might as well be this one. Phil was pretty relaxed, but I bet that he’d hold the line when he needed to. Nicole was more the “just let it flow,” kind of person, but she was nice enough. Carrie, though, was a different deal.
After asking us if there was anything else he could bring us—“limoncello?” he inquired with a grin—Giovanni brought us the bill. Signor LoPresti visited with us briefly, welcoming us again and asking if there was anything further we needed in the apartment.
“What nice people,” Nicole said, putting her glasses away in her purse.
“Alessandra’s mother found us a nice situation,” Phil agreed. Through friends of friends, Mom had found the apartment for the Cowans. See? I reminded myself. The LoPrestis were friends of friends of my parents. They couldn’t be involved in organized crime.
Phil put his credit card on the bill as Giovanni appeared at our table. He smiled first at me and then at the Cowans. Carrie frowned.
“Scusi,” Giovanni began. “Some of my friends from the town and from the university are coming here tomorrow evening alle dieci, at ten, to meet and visit. May Alessandra…scusi”—here, he looked at me—“may Alex join us? It would be a nice time for her to meet other young people. She speaks Italian very well.” He smiled at me and my heart skipped a beat. “My father and I will walk her home. Or you can come and fetch her at the appointed hour,” he added, looking at Phil.
“Oh, grazie mille, but I’m not sure,” I said quickly. Actually, I was sure; I was sure I wanted to get to know him better—as long as we didn’t talk about wineries, but I wasn’t sure that I should jump right in so quickly. “I’ll probably be jet-lagged. I’m feeling pretty tired right now.”
Nicole and Phil looked at each other. Nicole raised her eyebrows.
“It’s up to you, Alessandra,” Phil said, “but it sounds like a good opportunity. You’ll be here for six weeks, after all. It might be nice to make some friends.”
“But she’s supposed to be with me!” Carrie complained. We all looked at her.
“Of course,” Nicole said, soothingly. “She will be, most of the time. But you’ll be in bed by ten.”
Carrie’s face turned bright red and she glared at her parents. Then she gave me a furious look.
Wonderful. Just what I needed. I could just imagine what these six weeks were going to be like.
Chapter Four
The night was balmy and beautiful, and people were making their passeggiata,—the promenade after dinner through the streets of the town—visiting with each other, laughing and talking.
“Giuseppe! Comé stai!”
“Ho veduto molte scarpe belle!”
“Dov’é la tua amica?”
The musical lilt of their Italian made me nostalgic for my old life in Italy. But, I reminded myself sternly, it was also that same life that had made it harder to blend in with everyone else back in Sonoma.
I was exhausted. As Nicole had suggested, our grocery shopping trip had been the right idea to try to adjust our biological clocks, but the strain of the last twenty-four hours was telling on me. I’d had to become accustomed to more than just a nine-hour time change.
Phil and Nicole had slowed down, too, and were no longer walking at their usual brisk pace. Actually, everyone in Italy moved slower, except when they were behind the wheel of a car or scooter. Carrie’s lack of sleep only made her less-than-winning characteristics even more obvious, so I hoped we were going to go straight to bed.
We took turns taking showers in the miniature bathroom shower stall.
“What are these?” Carrie yelled from the bathroom when it was her turn. “How can I dry myself off with this?”
Nicole smiled at me. “She must have found the towels,” she said. Italian bath towels were about the size of face towels in the U.S., and thin—hardly the plush, fluffy ones we were used to.
“Good night, Carrie,” I said politely, snuggling into my pillow as she came into our room, still huffing over the towels. Thank goodness Phil and Nicole had thought to bring plug converters for Carrie’s hair dryer, or I would have been treated to another hour of complaining.
“Night,” Carrie said curtly.
The moonlight cast a soft glow into our room. Outside, people were still enjoying the evening, and bursts of laughter and the lilt of musical Italian drifted up through our open window. Every sound I heard made me feel at home, a feeling I tried to push out of my mind.
“Can’t they shut up already?” Carrie complained, burrowing her face into her pillow.
I sighed and closed my eyes. Tomorrow, we would explore Positano, and I’d meet Giovanni and his friends at Café LoPresti. I wasn’t sure that hanging out with a lot of Italian students was a good idea, but it was probably too late to back out now without seeming really rude. I slipped into a deep sleep before I had a chance to think anything else.
“Time to get up, girls!” Nicole’s voice called from the other side of the door. It seemed as if I had only just closed my eyes a few minutes ago.
“Nooooo!” Carrie exclaimed, pulling the covers over her head.
I looked at the alarm clock. Nine o’clock—back in the U.S. it was midnight, the day before.
We got dressed, Carrie in jeans and a t-shirt, and I in a skirt and a nice top. Nicole had probably told Carrie not to pack any of her short shorts, because they would definitely just serve as bait on an Italian street.
“Caffé latte?” Phil asked, grinning, holding up the Bialetti coffee maker—the “little man,” as it was called. “I haven’t used one of these in a long time, but Nicole got the right espresso coffee yesterday.”
“What’s that?” Carrie asked, staring at the little, funny pot.
“Sure! Thanks!” I said. What a great way to start my first Italian day, I thought. Then I stopped. How was I going to balance all this? Was I becoming Alessandra again?
We breakfasted on oranges and hard, crusty rolls and yogurt, sitting at the square table under the window, the Italian sunlight streaming in through the gauze curtains. Through the open window, we could hear the sounds of Positano waking up, people calling to each other, the cars braking and accelerating, and the high-pitched zoom of scooters.
“Is there any peanut butter for my roll?” Carrie asked.
“I forgot,” Nicole said. “Sorry, Carrie. There was just so much else to think about. We’ll get some today.”
Uh-oh. “Um, I don’t think you’ll find any,” I admitted. “Peanut butter isn’t anyone’s favorite in Italy, and I don’t remember ever having any, except when we could get it from a military base. Unless things have really changed in the last few months, we probably can’t buy it anywhere. There’s always Nutella.”
“You’re kidding me!” Carrie exclaimed. “I don’t believe it. What kind of a country is this, anyway?”
Biting my tongue, I let Nicole and Phil deal with this little problem.
“Carrie!” Phil spoke up first. “You would think you’d never been in a foreign country in your life. You’ve been all over the world and you should know by now that things are different everywhere.”
“But no peanut butter?” Carrie wailed.
“You can live without peanut butter for six weeks, I’m sure,” Nicole said. “There will be lots of other good foods for you to try. You can have a culinary adventure!”
“Like limoncello?” Carrie asked, mischievously.
“No, not like limoncello,” Phil said quickly.
“I think she’s overtired,” Nicole said to Phil.
“Would you quit talking about me as if I wasn’t here?” Carrie compla
ined. But, I thought, her parents were right. She looked tired and acted even crabbier than normal. I suppressed a sigh. Was this what I had to look forward to today?
Nicole ignored Carrie’s last comment. “Why don’t you enter that little ‘no peanut butter problem’ in your journal?”
“You keep a journal?” I asked Carrie, trying not to sound like I was in total disbelief, which I was.
“Yeah,” Carrie muttered. “My parents make me do one everywhere we go. They tell me I’ll be glad when I get older—if I survive all the trips my parents make me take, that is.” She slurped her latte.
“We got one for you too, Alessandra,” Nicole said, smiling. She got up and went into her bedroom, returning with a bright blue book. “We didn’t want you to feel left out, and we know you probably have a lot of thoughts to write about, now that you’re back here. You could even write it in Italian,” she added.
Not likely, I wanted to answer, but smiled instead. “That’s very thoughtful of you,” I said. “Thanks so much for thinking of me.” I took the journal and riffled the pages. The new paper smell did make me want to write in it. A sudden thought struck me. What if I wrote in my journal—but as an American would if she didn’t know everything I knew and had no Italian memories? Would that help me keep my head on straight? Maybe this journal could be my answer to keeping my American identity and not sliding back into my Italian one, so I could fit right back into Sonoma. Genius!
“Carrie, will you do the breakfast dishes, please?” Nicole asked after we’d finished breakfast. “And, by the way—”
Carrie frowned. “I know, I know, there’s no dishwasher,” she grumbled. She sighed heavily and got up. I followed her to the tiny sink with some of the dishes. She washed and I dried the heavy china plates and put them away in the cupboard.
“Well,” Phil announced, closing his laptop, “I think we should get the lay of the land, so to speak, for our first few days here. Shall we check out the beaches and see what restaurants are around? We have the list from Signor Crudele. There is a limoncello factory and there are craft stores and—”
“Can I lie out on the beach?” Carrie interrupted. “You guys can go on without me.” She had the guts to smile a sweet smile. I would no more have left her on the beach by herself on her first day in Italy than fed her to a tiger shark, although that didn’t seem like such a bad idea either.
“I think there’s plenty of time for that,” Nicole said, quickly. “I’m sure Alessandra would be happy to go to the beach with you another day. We’ve got six weeks. It’ll be nice to look at the town and see what there is around—sort of get our bearings before we start working on our books.”
Carrie sighed and flounced into the bathroom. Nicole and Phil looked at me with identical expressions of helplessness.
Phil shrugged and smiled. “She’s really a good kid,” he said. “She’s just a bit headstrong.”
“If she becomes a problem, just let us know, and we’ll take care of it,” Nicole assured me. Oh, sure, I wanted to say. I could see how well they’d taken care of it so far! At least Phil had a prayer of getting some control if he needed to, since he seemed to be a little more observant, but I thought some of the fluff from her textiles had gotten into Nicole’s brain.
Armed with a map and Signor Crudele’s list, we locked up the apartment and began walking. Nicole put on her sunglasses and began reading the map, holding the list in her hand. “I checked all of Mr. Crudele’s suggestions and circled their locations on the map,” she said. “So, we can start here,” she paused to show Phil what she had pinpointed, “and go all the way there.”
“Looks like the limoncello factory is up on the other side of Positano,” Phil noted, looking at the map over Nicole’s shoulder. “It would be fun to tour that one of these days, if we could.”
“We should ask Giovanni if Carlo’s family gives tours,” Carrie said, suddenly interested in the conversation.
Phil looked over the top of his sunglasses at his daughter. “And why, pray tell, would you be so very interested in touring a limoncello factory?” he asked with a lop-sided grin. “It wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that that young man is, in your vernacular, ‘hot’?”
Carrie had the grace to blush. “Dad!” she protested, giving him a playful shove.
Four hours and a long lunch later, we trudged back up the street toward our apartment. My head was swimming from all the places we’d visited—craft shops manufacturing the Amalfi Coast pottery with the signature lemon designs, gift shops where everything had a lemon motif, and clothing boutiques with floaty summer dresses. We trekked to the main beach of La Spiaggia Grande, and from there on to Le Tre Sorrelle, the restaurant of the three sisters, where we had appetizers. Then, finally, we finished off at Chez Black, where we had a seaside lunch next to La Spiaggia Grande. Everything was pretty much a blur.
“Nap time,” Nicole announced, as we struggled up the steps to the apartment.
“Maybe I’ll go down to the beach,” Carrie said. She held out an arm and examined it. “I’m starting to get white. I could use a tan.”
At La Spiaggia Grande, I noted the number of Italian guys hovering around the female tourists stretched out on beach towels on the flat, gray sand. Carrie would last about fifteen minutes, I guessed.
“You should take a nap too, young lady,” Phil said, in a tone that suggested he’d also made note of the loitering Italian guys at La Spiaggia. I gave him a grateful glance, and he winked conspiratorially at me.
“I’ll take you to the beach tomorrow, Carrie,” I promised. “I’m sure your parents have work to do tomorrow, and you and I can give them a break.”
Carrie made a face. “Okay, fine,” she said theatrically, and stomped into our bedroom.
Nicole locked the front door behind us and smiled at me. “Thanks,” she said.
“It’s nice to know we can trust you with our daughter,” Phil said. “There were some real characters out there today.”
“Well, thank you,” I said quickly. “I’ll do my best, for sure.”
In our room, I lay down and tried to relax. Carrie was already asleep. I was getting nervous about tonight and Giovanni’s little party at the restaurant. Would my Italian stand up to the stress and strain of conversation without English? Who else would be there? I was sure to be the only American, I guessed. It was too late for me to back out now, so I would just have to go. I asked Phil to pick me up at midnight, figuring two hours of Italian immersion would probably be enough.
I drifted off to sleep for an hour or so, but woke to the sound of loud honking in the street below. Carrie was already at the window, staring down at the street. I could hear people yelling in Italian, and the honking got crazier.
“Look, Alessandra!” Carrie said, loudly. “Come here! You need to see this!”
After groggily sliding from bed, I joined her at the window. In the street below, a young man on a Vespa was yelling at a guy who stood in front of a Fiat Topolino, a little “mouse car.” The Vespa rider, it seemed, had tried to pass the Fiat in the tiny street, but the driver had cut him off. The two men gestured furiously, howling curses. A little crowd of curious onlookers had gathered around them.
“What happened?” Carrie asked. “Can you understand what they’re saying?”
“Um, well, think of what the guys were saying in the last really gross movie you saw, and that’ll pretty much cover it,” I said, not wanting to translate Italian gutter language into English for Phil and Nicole’s oh-so-not-impressionable young daughter.
“What did they do?” Carrie asked, leaning over the windowsill.
I pulled her back in. “You do not want to be leaning out of windows,” I warned her. “You never know who is watching down there and will want to come and meet you. Wouldn’t Phil and Nicole love that?”
Carrie’s mouth opened. “Come on! Someone off the street
would come up here?”
“They might just hang around outside till you came down,” I said, with a sigh. “If you were ugly, I wouldn’t worry so much, but you’re not.” Maybe that little bit of flattery would help soften my warning.
“Oh, my God!” Carrie exclaimed. “Are you making this stuff up?”
“No, I’m not,” I said, quickly drawing the gauzy curtains across the window. “Now, why don’t you write in your journal? I think I’ll start mine.”
Opening my journal to the first page, I grabbed a pen and pretended to be deep in thought. Actually, I was still thinking about something the guy on the Vespa had yelled to the Fiat driver—something about how ‘The System’ would take care of the Fiat guy, that he would be sorry. What system? The carabinieri? The polizia, or—I swallowed hard—the Camorra?
When Vespa guy had mentioned The System, the Fiat driver had suddenly looked scared; he’d jumped back in his car, revved it up, and careened down the street. Even the rowdy little crowd gathered around had fallen silent. Whatever The System was, it seemed to have serious power. I could ask Giovanni about it later, but I felt—with a growing dread in my bones—that I already knew. The fact that all this had happened right below my window didn’t make me too happy.
The System. I wrote in my journal. What is it?
I didn’t dare write about what Dad was doing, but I wondered if this System might have anything to do with organized crime taking over wineries. If it did, I could let Dad know. Maybe, once I had told Dad all about it, my parents would yank me back across the Atlantic and I could still make Tahoe! I clicked the pen up and down with my thumb and then continued writing…
Ugh! I’m nervous about tonight, but I can just think about how it’ll all be over at midnight. Will Giovanni spend time with me? Or does he have a girlfriend? Of course, in Italy, it doesn’t much matter—the guys are such flirts, anyway. They’re much bigger flirts than most American guys. But they’re definitely hot. I smiled and tapped my pen on the page and then continued. Today, we toured Positano, but I’m not sure how much Carrie really looked at anything except the guys.
Secrets in Translation Page 5
