Italian for Beginners (30 page)

He used to yell at her that she had ruined his life, and she would shout back that she should have married someone, anyone,
but him. He would tell her that before her, he’d had all sorts of dreams and that she had taken them all away. She would tell
him that he had his head in the clouds, anyhow, and would never have made good on his dreams regardless. One of them would
end the argument with a top-of-the-lungs “I hate you,” and my father would usually storm out for a few hours. I’d always hear
him come home in the middle of the night, long after I should have been asleep. He’d tiptoe into the living room, sometimes
knocking into the coffee table in the dark, and I’d hear him open the door to the bedroom he shared with my mom. I’d hear
them murmur softly to each other, and I knew everything was okay. Then and only then would I be able to fall asleep.

Sometimes, when we were young, one of them would casually ask Becky and me whether we’d heard anything strange the night before.
Becky, who always slept through it all, would shake her head and say no. I would force my own face into a blank expression
and tell them I didn’t know what they were talking about. They would always exchange relieved glances and go back to pretending
things were okay.

So to know that there was discord between my parents before my mother left was no major revelation. But to know that my father
had cheated, and that he had hurt my mother in those final months of normalcy, somehow shifted things in my mind. The shift
was slight— not enough to make me blame my father or feel furious that I hadn’t known before. But it was enough that, for
the first time in years, I was able to see my mother as someone wounded, not just as someone heartless. It didn’t change what
she had done, and I didn’t think I would ever be able to understand how a mother could leave her children. But it did provide
another piece to the puzzle. And it made me realize that as much as I thought I knew the situation inside and out, maybe there
were still a lot of pieces missing.

Maybe it was time I went about putting the puzzle back together instead of turning my back on it.

I showered, threw on a casual cream-colored sundress, and left with my camera slung over my shoulder before Karina could come
talk to me. I had the feeling that she’d come knocking on my door to talk about Michael as soon as she got a break at the
restaurant. But I still wasn’t ready to talk about him. I didn’t even want to think about him.

Instead, I set off toward Piazza Colonna, a square off the Via del Corso that I’d never been to before. In fact, I’d deliberately
avoided it, although it housed an impressive monument, the Column of Marcus Aurelius, an intricately detailed, 135-foot marble
column that had been completed just before the end of the second century. But it wasn’t the column I was interested in seeing
today. It was the tiny scarf store on a side street off the main plaza.

I’d known about it for years. I didn’t even need to consult a map to get there. I’d traced the path there on paper so many
times that it was burned into my mind. And yet I’d never gone. I’d never wanted to. Until today.

The streets were quiet, so grabbing a cab near the Pantheon wasn’t a problem, and we didn’t have to fight much traffic to
get to our destination. I had the driver drop me off on the east side of the piazza, and I crossed it quickly, barely looking
at the column and its beautifully carved scenes as I hurried by.

I wound through the side streets like I’d been doing it all my life until I ended up on Via della Guglia. I saw the shop right
away, up ahead on the right. It was small and unassuming with a big picture window in front displaying an array of brightly
colored, beautiful scarves. Big, cursive letters on the window identified it:
Sciarpe dalla Famiglia Verdicchio
. Scarves by the Verdicchio Family. Scarves by
my
family.

I stared for a long time, transfixed by the sight of something I had always imagined but had never seen. I’d met my mother’s
family only once, when I was a toddler. I remembered almost nothing about them, other than that my grandfather had smelled
like smoke and my grandmother had smelled like licorice. In family albums I had flipped through before my mother left, my
mother and her sister Gina, just eighteen months younger than her, looked so similar that my mother always said they were
mistaken for twins. I had committed the faces of my grandparents and aunt to memory from those albums, and from the Christmas
cards they would send each year. But the cards stopped coming the year that my mother died, so the most recent images I had
of these people were seventeen years old. I didn’t know if I’d recognize them. In fact, I didn’t even know if they were still
alive.

It was early still, and the street was nearly deserted. The lights were off inside the store, and there was no one inside.
I stopped to peer in, pressing my nose to the glass.

The dark store seemed to throb with muted colors. Neatly folded silk scarves hung from racks, separated by colors. Scarves
in brilliant blues and purples sat in the center of the store, while there were pinks, oranges, and reds off to the left,
yellows and greens to the right, and blacks, beiges, and whites toward the front. The whole right wall was lined with wooden
shelves, on which sat folded pashminas in every color of the rainbow. Through the darkness of the interior, I could just make
out the glass-enclosed case on which the cash register sat. The case, too, was filled with small scarves in all colors of
the rainbow.

I stood there for a while, simply looking. I knew it was just a store, of course, but there was something that moved me about
knowing that my family’s hands had touched every scarf, that they had decided where the racks would go, that they had laid
out the colors and the patterns, that they had probably handpicked all of the merchandise. Hands that had touched my mother,
held her hand, pinched her cheeks, stroked her hair, had also touched everything in this store. And in a strange way, that
took my breath away.

After a while, I checked my watch. It wasn’t quite nine thirty yet. The store likely didn’t open until ten or eleven, and
I wasn’t sure what I’d do when it did. I needed time to think.

I backed away from the window and crossed the small street. Two doors down was a building with a small stoop out front, five
wide stairs running up to a big front door. I sat down two steps up and waited.

After a while, I pulled out my camera and absentmindedly began flipping through pictures on the screen. I’d deleted most of
them from the SD card after uploading them to my computer, but I had saved a few, and as I looked through several shots of
my neighborhood in New York, taken just a month ago, I felt a wave of profound disconnect.

I didn’t belong here in Rome, on this dusty side street thousands of miles from the world I lived in. This place wasn’t my
home, as much as I wanted to feel like it was, as much as I wanted to feel like I was meant to be here. Home was the brownstone
I saw on my LCD screen, the street teeming with people, the coffee shop on the corner. Home was the pair of pigeons perched
expectantly on a Central Park bench, the man who sold bagels from a cart on the corner, the glistening arches of the Chrysler
Building. Home was the view of Ellis Island from Battery Park, the gaudy green, white, and red of Little Italy, the dilapidated
charm of Chinatown. Home was Becky and Dad.

But what if part of me belonged here, too? It was almost as if a piece of me had been here all along. From the moment I had
arrived in Rome thirteen years ago, it had all felt so familiar, as if I had been here before. What if Rome had been passed
down to me through my mother’s blood, a map of the city written as a sort of genetic blueprint that composed who I was to
become? It sounded crazy, but what if the ghosts were more real than I’d given them credit for? Something had drawn me back
here. And perhaps I needed to put that something to rest before I could rejoin my own life.

I turned off the review screen on my camera and lifted it slowly. I looked through the lens and zoomed in on the scarf shop
across the street. From this angle, I could just see the bright silk glistening in the window, beneath the bold lettering
of the sign that declared the place to be, like me, a piece of the Verdicchio family.

I snapped a single shot. I looked at it on the screen. The composition of the photo was all wrong. I looked through the viewfinder
again and zoomed farther. The colors jumped into the forefront of the screen, and I snapped again. I looked at the screen,
and again, I didn’t feel that the shot worked. I took a deep breath and stood up from the stoop. I walked a couple doors down
until I faced the shop directly, and, still standing across the street, I began shooting.

As sometimes happened when I was able to hide behind my camera’s lens, I became lost in the images as I worked, snapping from
every angle. I moved left and right, squatted, perched, moved to catch the best angles as the sun crested the stout buildings
and began to pour its rays over the street. People were beginning to emerge from the buildings around us, some dressed for
work in an office, some dressed casually to take children to school or run errands. But I barely noticed them. I was lost
in the world that existed for me inside the twelve-inch cylinder protruding from my camera. It was like a kaleidoscope that
isolated everything else and brought its own images into sharp, unignorable focus.

After a while, I settled back onto the stoop to wait. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for, exactly. I knew I wanted to catch
a glimpse of my aunt or my grandparents, but then what would I do? What would I say?

Would I even recognize them after so many years had passed? Would they even still be here? What if the store had been passed
on to cousins, or to strangers who had decided to keep the name the same? Suddenly, I felt paralyzed by fear and uncertainty.
What if I’d mustered the courage to come here this morning for nothing?

Thirty minutes later, I saw the lights go on in the scarf shop. I blinked a few times. I hadn’t seen anyone come in the front
door. Perhaps my mother’s family lived above the store, or perhaps there was a back entrance. Suddenly, my heart was pounding
double-time.

A moment later, a woman in her midsixties with shoulder length glossy black hair streaked with a few ribbons of gray stepped
out the front door with a rag and a spray bottle of blue liquid in her hand. I recognized her immediately as my aunt Gina,
a woman I knew only from pictures. She began spritzing the window and wiping it off. I stared, mesmerized as she worked quickly.
She looked so much like my mother, so much like what my mother would have looked like had she lived another two decades. Although
I’d been stockpiling resentment toward her since I was twelve, holding on to it like currency, it sent a powerful wave of
sadness through me to see someone who so strongly embodied what could have been.

As I watched her work, I raised my camera and focused on her through the viewfinder. I zoomed in and studied the familiar
contours of her face, the way she held her shoulders just like my mother, the way she was smiling to herself absently as she
wiped, an expression that reminded me so much of my mother that it hurt.

I began snapping photos, almost without thinking. I was hitting the shutter rapid-fire, not wanting to miss a single second
of this woman’s expressions and motions. It was suddenly desperately important to me to capture it all.

She was just about to finish the window when she turned around and looked straight at me. I snapped a quick shot of her before
I could think, and then I guiltily lowered the camera and tried to act as though I was looking somewhere else. My heart hammering,
I feigned calm and turned around to photograph a trash can to the right of the stoop. I didn’t know if she was still looking
at me, so I also pretended to be incredibly absorbed in the red bicycle tied to a lamppost two doors down. I shot several
frames of it, too.

By the time I glanced back to the storefront, she was gone. I breathed a sigh of relief, but I felt a surprising tinge of
sadness, too. There had been something about looking at her, even through my lens, even from afar, that made me feel closer
to my mother than I had in years. And to my surprise, I liked the feeling. Perhaps the walls I’d built around my heart weren’t
as high as I’d thought.

I sat on the stoop for a while catching my breath, trying to gather myself. I felt like an emotional wreck. Slowly, I turned
the camera back on and began flipping through the images, studying my aunt’s face, her posture, her expressions in each one.

Suddenly, I heard footsteps approaching. I shook myself out of my trance and looked up. My eyes widened in horror as I realized
that my aunt Gina had come back outside and was not only staring at me but was now just a few yards away, charging toward
me with determination. I stood up quickly, fumbling with my camera and almost dropping it.

She was saying something in rapid, sharp Italian, waving her arms around dramatically, but I was too stricken by the familiarity
of her voice to muster any kind of logical response. She sounded so much like my mother, whose voice I had been sure I’d forgotten.
I knew she was berating me for taking her photo without asking; I was sure she was probably wondering why I had done so. But
all I could do was stare.

Finally, she stopped talking and seemed to be waiting for a response. I swallowed hard a few times, trying to dislodge the
lump in my throat. “
Non parlo italiano
,” I managed to choke out. I added weakly, “I’m sorry.”

She opened her mouth right away to say something else, but then she stopped. She looked at me for a moment and took a step
closer. Something in her eyes changed. And just like that, I knew that she knew.

“Catarina?” she asked softly. My heart jumped into my throat. “Cat?” She paused and shook her head, like she couldn’t quite
believe it. “You are Cat, aren’t you?” she asked. But this time, although it had been phrased like a question, I knew she
meant it more as a statement.