Darling? (2 page)

She set down her little palette of rouge and looked at me aghast. “I love him,” she said, with some anxious belligerence. Of course—he would take her away from us, what more attractive quality is there? And here I—
I,
pursuer of mangy owls and lonesome cowgirls and God only knew what else—arrived with a lecture on practicality!

My mother passed by, letting the word
Italia
escape from her mouth like some garish paper bird. A child, with visions of sugarplums dancing … in fact she herself hoped to marry again, a feat that would be much easier with Etta flown off on a magic prosciutto than sulkily researching spinsterhood in a corner of the living room.

“Gucci, Armani, Versace…” she repeated the day Etta returned, as if these were the names of Etta’s lovers instead of the labels on Gino’s gifts. (All available at any airport duty-free shop, noticed a certain shrew.)

“Ignorance and mystery are
not
the same,” I decreed, from my lofty, married perch. “You love him, then visit him, live with him, even, but don’t rush into anything. You have all the time in the world.” Though I’d never seen her willing to do anything for love before; if it only happened once every thirty years she might be right to grab the chance.

“A husband and wife—they change each other, bend each other in strange ways, finally they’re alone with each other, alone in the world. Or worse, Etta—alone in Italy!” Here I stood, at the confluence of a great subject and an impressionable mind: I was moved to a grandiloquence unusual even for myself.

“This is not love, it’s infatuation,” I explained. “It’s like—it
is,
something out of a dream, one of those dreams where everything feels so wonderful you never want to wake up … but you
do
wake up, you
will
wake up, Etta, and…”

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

“My God! What are you going to do about it?”

“
Have a baby,
Francine,” she said. “That’s what I’m going to do about it. And we’re getting married,” she added, nearly stamping her foot the way she used to when she was tiny and I was trying to get her shirt on over her head. “And I’m going to Italy to live with him. And I’m
happy
about it.”

“This is not
Masterpiece Theatre,
I hate to tell you,” I said, but was drowned out by my mother’s effusion: “I always knew
my
children would live wonderful, exotic lives!”

*   *   *

The Stazione Centrale: buses pulled into their spaces on a broad tarmac, scattering pigeons and passengers alike. I went to the ticket line while Garrett stayed with the bags.

“Due biglietti a Villa Padesi.”
There, had anyone seen it, how competent I was? The maps, the schedules, the phrase books, and presto, here were two tickets, the lire back in the billfold.
“E … scusi … scusi?”
I paged through Berlitz. “When does the—?
Quando parte il prossimo autobus a Villa Padesi?
”

“There is a strike at Villa Padesi,” the vendor said, unwilling to humor my Italian any longer.

“But—?” I held up the tickets. He shrugged. Hardly his fault,
he
was working, selling people (a species for which Venetians feel only contempt) just what they asked for. “Refunds in the supervisor’s office.” And he gestured magisterially in the direction of the longest line in the room.

As I came back to Garrett, an old woman was pressing two coins into his hand.

“Alms,” he explained, looking pained, and—reminded we had money enough—said, “Let’s just take a cab.”

“Oh, why not a coach and four?” I said. “Why not fly the Concorde? Etta despises me already, for God’s sake.” No, there was a train that went nearly as close, though it stopped half an hour in Mestre. Time enough, I thought, for Garrett to take everything back, tell me he lived by the light of my beauty and his sacred instinct was only a hallucination.

“Garrett, we have to talk,” I said as soon as we left the station, though I know men fear the words
We have to talk
more than any other sentence on earth. And my voice was just dripping with estrogen—even I found it repellent.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” he said. “It’s terrible, yes, but talking won’t make it any less so. We’ll get used to it, that’s all.” He wasn’t born into this era: if indeed there’s some lost continent submerged beneath conscious life, he believes that’s where it should stay. He fell asleep, with his mouth open, while I looked out at the flat landscape, the factories and green canals …
Italia,
indeed.

No one sees anything but through his own prism. I’d painted Etta’s portrait for a wedding gift, from a photograph she’d sent home—I thought it captured something regal about her, but it made her cry. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “You do it so easily; you’re such a good artist, Francine. It’s just … I can’t bear it, that I look that way.”

Different, that is, from me. Cowardly—not, as I saw her, aloof. She’d crept along behind me all this time, full of jealousy and veneration, too loyal to properly hate me, too angry to do anything else, ready to defend me from my most pernicious enemy, though as it happened that person was herself.

“Isn’t it wonderful Etta’s so
happy?
” Mother kept saying.

“Happy?” To me she seemed lost, a disembodied voice on the transatlantic phone, repeating her few grains of news—Franco’s Christmas pageant, Giorgio’s first steps.

“My God, she lives in Italy! Who wouldn’t be happy?”

“It’s hard for her there,” said my father, “though she’s
very happy.
He’s a nice fellow, even-tempered.… They don’t have a lot to talk about, but I guess everyone looks for something different from marriage.…” (His voice was swelling here as usual when he feels he’s teaching me something.) “She needs to get to know some people, find some outlet beside the kids.”

“What became of the flute?”

“Oh, she doesn’t have time for music. But I was thinking you could get her started as an artist, introduce her to some of your people … no end of picturesque scenes over there … main thing is she’s happy, that’s all.”

I called her up: “I’m glad to hear you’re so happy!”

“Who said
that?
” she asked, in an astringent tone I hadn’t heard her use in years. “The last time I talked to Ma I couldn’t stop crying, and she said I don’t know how lucky I am to live here.” She sighed. “She’s right, I suppose.”

“Why would you suppose that?” I asked, laughing—it felt like our old conversations, where the parents were objects of hilarity and we’d sing a phrase from the radio in the middle of a sentence to underscore a point.

But now her voice went cold: “I know it wouldn’t be
your
choice, Francine, but I don’t always have to feel just what you do, you know. I’m
happy
here, whether you thought I would be or not.”

All of which is to say I had to take the train. A sister who refuses to help her poor (but happy) sibling get a foothold as an artist (a job that can hardly be very difficult if I’m doing it, after all) must be ever conscious of the magic of Italy, and willing if necessary to travel by mule. By the time we arrived in Villa Padesi it was late afternoon, and we shouldered our packs and stepped into the street only to see a horde of Vespas coming at us like winged chain saws. We jumped back, Garrett glaring at me as if he couldn’t believe all the trouble marrying me had got him into. I set off doggedly down the narrow street; he can’t read a map, he has no choice but to follow.

It was hardly a town, really, just a random postwar sprawl creeping outward into the farmlands through a valley laced over by power lines. At the main crossroad a tobacconist faced a newsstand where huge headlines proclaimed N
ICO
S
ERA
E M
ORTE
! L
A
N
AZIONE
L
AMENTA
. “Who’s Nico Sera?” Garrett asked, but I’d never heard of him. “He must have been important here.” I heard his name pass like a foreboding among the old men at the
caffè
tables next door. It was October—immense rosemaries bushed out between the iron fences along Via Ponte de Soto, and persimmons glowed in the trees. Women leaning from their windows, airing bed linens, watched us with frank suspicion. We might have been the first tourists Villa Padesi had ever seen.

Every yard was fenced, though, against the threat of intruders. The Basso compound, Gino’s parents’ house and the block of stuccoed flats for the three brothers, was enclosed by a high brick wall. Inside it was quiet except for the cooing in the dovecote and the
scritch
of a hoe, though I couldn’t see through the gate who was working. I rang the bell and after a long time Etta came out with the baby on her hip. Her dark dress blew back against her bones, and she brushed her hair out of her face and looked at me hard, to decide whether I was friend or foe.

“I thought you’d be here an hour ago,” she said.

“There’s a strike…,” I explained, but she didn’t accept it—after all, we have the money; if we’d really wanted to see her we could have taken a cab. “I’ve got to pick Franco up at school, right now or the sisters … Would you mind—?” and she handed me the baby, who started to wail immediately as she stalked away down the road.

“We should have stayed in Venice. We could have slept there and come here to visit just as easily,” Garrett said.

“Are you kidding? She’d be furious. She’s been cooking for us for a week.”

“How do we get out of here?” he asked as the gate latch clicked behind us, with the baby still crying, reaching for Etta over my shoulder.

“Bus, I guess,” I said, feeling pretty well trapped myself. When my parents visit they hardly leave the compound. “I go to see
Etta,
” my mother said, when I asked if she’d seen the Giottos in Padua, fifteen minutes away.

*   *   *

“A pretty sister,” Gino said that evening, toasting me. Latin flattery, of course; he was the exact Italian my mother imagined, his magnificent hair springing from a magnificent head, a head full of good humor and hospitable impulses, including a lordly consideration for women and a Talmudic knowledge of cuisine. Beyond that he was inscrutable, and I wondered whether, if Freud had been born here a few hundred miles south of Vienna, we’d study our souls as we do or reflect only on the olive and the grape. I was grateful to be called pretty, though, whatever the reason, and looked over to see if Garrett had taken it in.

“To Italy,” he was saying, raising his glass high, even gladder of the compliment than I.

Franco came to the kitchen door, a small serious child with his father’s face and his mother’s resigned expression—he flung his arms out and announced:
“Entrata la pasta!”
and Etta came behind, flushed and smiling, carrying a huge steaming bowl.

“Con funghi,”
Gino said.
“Bellissima!”

“I picked them!” Franco said, taking a mushroom off the top for himself and twisting his finger at his cheek as he ate.
“Buono!”
he said.

I supposed that if Etta intended to poison me she wouldn’t feed her kids from the same bowl. She’d tried to be warm, thanking me for the skirt, though it had a ruffle and I could see she’d never wear anything like that now. My own coolness I’d hoped to cover with confessions, telling her all about Garrett’s and my troubles, while she looked embarrassed and changed the subject to tomato sauce, of which she had put up forty jars with and without oregano. Now her mood had acidified: she bustled in and out of the kitchen on mysterious but apparently very important errands, looking away from us so we grew nervous and guilty. What had we done? What were we supposed to do? Finally something dropped or slammed in the kitchen, and she yelled, “Gino,
where
is the pasta fork?”

“I don’t know,” Gino called with humor, as if the question were metaphysical.

“Well, it’s got to be somewhere,” she responded angrily.

Gino picked up his fork and mine and began to serve. “Imagine,” he said, “there was a time before pasta forks…”

“It
goes
in the drawer next to the stove,” she replied, coming to sit down, and we began piling up compliments like sandbags against a flood: How beautiful was the house, the dinner, how charming the children … And the flowers—Etta was so creative, she could make something beautiful out of whatever fell to hand! A dahlia on a dry, gnarled stem, with two fat buds like eyeballs on either side, lolled out of a vase on the mantel; her old music stand cast its scrolled shadow into the corner; and the dinner—the pasta, roast chicken stuffed with whole lemons, fresh rough bread and green olive oil—surely anyone who ate would be changed …

“This cookbook,
you
sent it,” Gino said to me, “It is our … Bible! Etta, she cook like she’s lived all her life in Italy.”

She fed Giorgio a spoonful of pasta
in brodo.
“Which is lucky,” she said finally, “because otherwise they’d
really
despise me.”

Franco had rooted through the toy box to find a doll with the red pout and bouffant hair of a Hollywood starlet, and the body—the uncircumsized penis, that is—of a little boy.

“Etta, what
is
that?”

“A baby transvestite!” Garrett said with a wicked gleam.

“It’s their favorite toy,” Etta said sheepishly, and Giorgio reached out of his high chair and grabbed it by the hair, with Franco snatching it back so the
brodo
went over and he slipped in it and hit his head on the tile floor. Etta jumped up, crying, “For heaven’s sake, Franco, let the baby have it. You’re old enough to share. Look what comes when you don’t!” And threw her napkin at Gino: “And you, you couldn’t watch them even though you
see
I’ve got my hands full.…”

Gino’s shrug was almost imperceptible but all of history was in it. Should a man turn his attention from the civilized consideration of the mushroom harvest toward a speculative endeavor such as the divination of the sources of a woman’s fury? No. A man resigns himself to the indecipherability of things. He shrugs, he swings the baby up onto his shoulders. Giorgio bubbled over with joy, and Etta turned to me, undeciphered, hands open in some kind of appeal, but burst into tears before she could speak—
why
wouldn’t I save her?