Authors: Sara Benincasa
“Hey hey, watch your mouth!” Mr. D’Angelo said sharply to one of the girls. “On this bus we say
bullcrap,
not that thing you just said. Or else we say
garbage
.”
“Fine,” the girl said. “Bullcrap. It’s friggin’ bullcrap that we can’t go to the beach ’til Wednesday. This whole place is an island, right?”
I’ve always over-identified with authority figures. Maybe it’s because I desperately seek their approval. It is a fact that when I was getting laid off from a radio station, I spent half the meeting assuring my boss that he’d done a really wonderful job and that I totally understood why my show was being canceled. I added that he was handling the layoff quite nicely and that I was sure the New York State Department of Labor would provide helpful answers about unemployment insurance. And even though he’d decided to shit-can me, I genuinely liked the guy.
I didn’t particularly like Mr. D’Angelo, but he was in charge and I’d long ago developed a disdain for students who flouted rules of hierarchy and procedure. I played by the rules because rules were the only thing that kept everything from descending into anarchy and chaos and violence. Why couldn’t everybody else understand this? Amber’s open defiance was so frustrating.
That’s probably why, when one of Amber’s friends opened her mouth to complain again, I found myself saying aloud, “Jesus, if you wanted a tan you could’ve gone to friggin’ Florida. We’re in Europe, for Chrissakes. Just enjoy it for what it is.” I heard a sharp intake of breath around the bus. Even Mr. D’Angelo looked surprised.
I rarely use the terms
friggin’
or
for Chrissakes
in my adult life (unless I’m drunk or hanging out for an extended length of time with my family in our native homeland). However, at the moment, I was immersed in the curious pidgin jibber-jabber of New Jersey, and was not averse to occasionally groaning,
“Madonna mia!”
in public when irked. I didn’t get that far, though, because I was stopped by the icy-cold stare of hatred that shot from Amber’s eyes to my face like frigid poison. I had committed the highly unusual transgression of crossing a popular girl in public. This would have been normal for a person who genuinely didn’t give a flying fuck what people thought of her. I, on the other hand, gave a desperate, needy flying fuck.
“Well, maybe if you could fit in a bikini you’d want to go to the beach, too,” Amber shot back. Her friends giggled uproariously. In retrospect, I think Amber’s primal instinct was simply to call any adversary fat, regardless of actual size. At the time, though, it was like a flaming-hot arrow had struck deep in my chest. I worked very hard to hide my pudgy little belly under my clothes, and was extremely self-conscious about the fact that I weighed nearly (gasp!) 120 pounds. Many years and several pounds later, I’d like to smack my younger self in the face, immediately after kicking Amber in the teeth.
“Everybody calm down!” Mr. D’Angelo boomed. “We don’t want no attitude from any of youse on this trip.” Mr. D’Angelo didn’t usually speak like that, but the reality of his choice to spend a vacation with forty whining teenagers seemed to have hit him. It was enough to loosen anyone’s grip on standard American English.
“She’s the one being a fuckin’ bitch,” Amber said, just loud enough for me to hear. Mr. D’Angelo had already turned his back on the lot of us and ambled to the front of the bus to chat with our Sicilian bus driver in loud smatterings of messy Italian. I don’t know if he had missed her words or if he simply didn’t want to deal with the situation any longer. I leaned against the window and felt my stomach lurch within me. This wasn’t good. This wasn’t good at all.
The trip to the hotel took about two hours and saw us stuck in a tiny village that was probably far too accustomed to large tour buses full of Americans. Our driver had a bit of trouble with a particularly gnarly turn and nearly ran into someone’s charming five-hundred-year-old cottage, which appeared to be part of the most recent wave of development. The entire town turned out to help, coaching the driver by shouting directions and offering the kind of wild gesticulations for which Italians and Sicilians are known the world over. When we finally inched past the cottage and straightened out on the road, the kindly townsfolk waved good-bye. I imagine that, as we sped away from the miraculously unscathed fifteenth-century home, the butcher leaned over to the cheese monger and said, “At least it wasn’t one of the nice
old
places.”
This was my first trip to Europe, where everything is old. Everything is particularly old in Italy, and even older in Sicily. I guess that’s one of the bonuses of being rather close to the continent where human life began. After unpacking at the sixteenth-century hotel, where I shared a room with Leann, a shy girl who kindly assured me that it was okay to be nervous and that it was nice to hear somebody stand up to Amber for once, we were off to see our first batch of ruins. We were joined by a jumpy, painfully sweet English tour guide, Mr. Brixton, who actually wore a tweed jacket in eighty-degree Sicilian heat.
Mr. Brixton said, “Over here you’ll see the remnants of an Arab settlement. The Moors had a distinctive architectural—Amber, your cell phone likely won’t receive reception here, I’m afraid. Would you like to use mine instead? Oh, it’s no trouble at all, Mr. D’Angelo, I assure you. Now, where were we? Ah yes, Moorish architecture . . .” Amber spent the next thirty minutes screaming at her boyfriend back home about a variety of perceived slights, including but not limited to not reserving a
white
stretch limousine (“With a fuckin’ sunroof so we can take cute photos, dammit!”) for the impending junior prom.
The trip continued on like this for a few days, and while I couldn’t sleep a wink at any hour, I found solace in writing. I dutifully took photos of all the historical sites we visited and then recorded my impressions of them at night in my little journal. There were the casual little slights from Amber: the loudly annoyed exhalation of breath whenever I made a comment, the rolling of eyes whenever I asked a question, the little whispers when I walked past.
In retrospect, maybe Amber was my first passive-aggressive heckler. Every comedian has to deal with the occasional rowdy audience member, but the passive-aggressive hecklers are the worst of all. They sit and sneer at you in disgust and whisper loudly to their friends while you’re onstage. You either barrel through your set and ignore them, or you call them out on their bullshit. I didn’t know I wanted to be a comedian until I was in graduate school, but it turns out I received my earliest exposure to shitty audience members way back in high school.
But Amber’s little demonstrations of disgust were all endurable compared to the ever-increasing dread that sat with me on the bus and walked with me through battlefields, gravesites, and churches.
Anxiety is a strange traveling companion. If you stop and consider the grisly stories you’ve heard since you were small, there are many terrible possibilities on any trip. The tired, overworked pilot could fall asleep and crash the plane (this was before 9/11, so I didn’t really pay terrorists much heed). The bus could plunge off a cliff. The hotel could collapse in an earthquake. All these things have really happened to real humans at various points in time, so why wouldn’t they happen to you? One can argue statistics and probability, but an unquiet mind predisposed to irrational terror is unlikely to be swayed by facts and figures.
Talking about one’s fears can alleviate the tension to a small extent, but who wants to air these concerns in the presence of thirty-nine of one’s adolescent peers? Teenagers are fully consumed with playing the roles they’ve so carefully crafted. They are unlikely to break character to speak gently to the crazy girl. Many teens need someone else to demonstrate cowardice so that they can know for sure that they are not the weakest member of the group. Display that kind of vulnerability and the Ambers of the world might pounce. Better to keep it locked inside, to pretend to have a headache instead of admitting you are afraid of the museum because there’s nowhere to lie down in case you actually do get a headache. Fear built on fear begets all kinds of little falsehoods.
Wednesday arrived, and with it a particularly harsh sun. This one was going to be extra hot, and we had a flat, dusty field of pottery shards to explore. On the upside for the popular girls, it was Beach Day. Amber would finally get to reveal the bikini she’d bought especially for the trip and smile coquettishly at the Sicilian men who would undoubtedly approach her. She would say cruel things in English that most of them wouldn’t understand, and her best friends would howl with laughter, doubled over in their own, slightly-less-adorable bikinis. I had been advised that bathrooms would be few and far between, and thus had resolved to take off my cover-up only to covertly pee in the ocean.
The field was as dull as expected, despite Mr. Brixton’s attempt to enliven the morning with discussions of drinking containers throughout the ages. I felt really hot, tired, and thirsty. I hate feeling any of those things, and feeling them in combination is about as desirable as a bout of constipation. The only part I didn’t mind was the sweat, because it cooled me down a little on the rare but lovely occasion that someone walked past me swiftly and created a tiny breeze. It became hard to focus on what Mr. Brixton was saying. Something was tugging at the edge of my consciousness, gnawing at me with increasingly pointy teeth.
I felt strangely light as we trudged back to the bus, as if my body were trying to detach from the earth but was held down by my sneakers. I was like a balloon attached to one of those little Baggies filled with sand. It sounds vaguely pleasurable, but there was no joy in the wholly unfamiliar sensation. It wasn’t until I sank into my dark blue–upholstered seat that I realized a voice inside my head was growling at me.
I couldn’t make out the words, exactly, but I didn’t need to. When a fierce dog with gnashing fangs and a foaming jaw growls at you, do you pause and ask it to enunciate? Something very dangerous and unfriendly had a message for me, and it wasn’t verbal so much as it was tactile. I could
feel
it. The feeling was the frightening evolution of the grinding travel anxiety with which I’d long been familiar. This was not my first panic attack (I’d had them since I was ten, though I’d only gotten the official diagnosis and the attendant pills at sixteen), but it very swiftly announced itself as the worst one I’d ever experienced. All of a sudden, I felt true, real, unabridged, non-condensed, fully realized terror. And as one might imagine, I found the sensation
slightly
disconcerting.
I was lucky. I’d grown up in a very safe environment with all the benefits and advantages any person could want: nice family, nice food, nice home, nice education, nice prospects. I’d never been mugged or assaulted. I’d never starved or fallen desperately ill. I’d never faced war or poverty. When I copped an attitude and my father yelled at me for being spoiled, I even agreed with him. Of course, I usually followed it up with a shout of
“You made me this way!”
but that just better served to illustrate his point. I had a job at a bookstore that allowed me 15 percent off whatever I wanted to read (and I wanted to read
everything
). I was headed for college in the fall, and I’d just gotten a secret, totally cool Celtic tattoo on my lower back, a very original place that no other girl I knew had yet decorated. Besides the wrath of Amber, the lack of a boyfriend, and the dead camp friend thing, I didn’t have a single problem.
And yet there I was, choking on my own fright. I felt as if my lungs were constricted, as if I’d never be able to breathe properly again. I wondered what that would be like. What if I could never take a deep breath? What if this was always how it was going to be, this dry, squeezed gasp for scraps of oxygen? My fingers began to tingle and my palms began to sweat. And then the bus began to move.
Dying on a bus had never seemed like a good option to me. I’d considered it several times, simply because every panic attack felt like the prelude to a little death (and not the sexy French version of the phrase). I’d had a kajillion panic attacks on buses. It was why I sometimes “missed” the bus on purpose in the morning throughout middle school and high school, forcing one grumpy parent or another (usually my dad) to deviate from his or her own schedule and risk being late to work. I knew it inconvenienced them, but after a while it became such a habit of mine that I didn’t even stop to think about what I was doing. It was an automatic impulse. Once I got older, friends had cars and were more than willing to shepherd me to and from school in exchange for a sympathetic ear during a pregnancy scare or a weekly free dinner at the Flemington Family Diner (a wondrous Jersey-Greek institution that we all nicknamed “Flem Fam”). I didn’t have a car, myself; my parents opined that a car was something you earned on your own, through hard work and careful savings. I’d done none of the latter, preferring to spend my earnings from the bookstore on—well, more books.
While avoiding the school bus had gotten easier as I’d gotten older, avoiding the bus in Sicily was an impossibility. I had signed up for a “journey into history via air-conditioned luxury motor coach,” which, as it turned out, was tourism-speak for
regular old bus tour.
And as our bus lurched into action, I knew once and for all that this journey would be my last.
We had all worn our bathing suits underneath our clothes that day, and I had donned a turquoise bikini top with matching boy-shorts that I hoped would de-emphasize my stubbornly protruding belly. The J. Crew bathing suit, like my Delia’s T-shirt and Express denim shorts, was soaked with sweat from the trudge through the field. As I gripped my seat, willing myself not to writhe in terror, my body went cold. The sweat, formerly such a comfort, now felt like a thin layer of ice coating every inch of my body. I began to shiver. I realized with a start that my bowels were about to evacuate. This made sense, as I’d heard people sometimes crapped themselves upon dying, but I was tormented by the thought that I might not actually expire for a few minutes post pants-pooping. Propelled by the desire to
not
spend my last few moments writhing in my own shit while thirty-eight human teenagers and an adolescent monster named Amber looked on, I called out, “Mr. D’Angelo?”