American English, Italian Chocolate

by Rick Bailey

  I flip-flopped into the theater twice this summer and saw movies that took me back to early adolescence in all of its fullness—the ease and freedom, but also the confusion, self-doubt, and fear. In Mud I saw myself and a couple of friends at the county park in Lake City. We were lords of the lake. We patrolled the park on bikes. We sauntered on the beach in flip-flops. We had girlfriends. They looked at us, when they looked at all, in an irresistibly alluring way. Chase us, their looks said. But don’t catch us . . . because you are gross. We were ten years old. We were gross.

  One friend, Shawn Dryer, wore his hair in a crewcut. He was thin and sinewy, a natural leader, ready for anything. When we came upon a bubbling mud puddle in the pavilion parking lot one afternoon, it was Shawn who reached into the water and pulled out a chunk of dry ice. He tossed it from hand to hand, blowing on it. Then he took his investigation to the next logical step. He popped it in his mouth and swallowed it.

  He smiled and tilted his head, thinking with his stomach.

  “Well?” we said.

  “It makes you burp,” he said.

  In The Way, Way Back I saw myself again, this time in the way back of one of those giant station wagons popular at the time, gazing out the rear window, no idea where we were going. I had something on my stomach my mother thought was ringworm. I’d walked around all that morning with my fly down. No one had told me until it was a joke. Now, worst of all, I was sickened by the unmistakable scent of dog poop. Sitting next to me was Don Booth, whose nickname was Foot (rhymed with “boot”).

  “Leaping lizards!” he said.

  It smelled awful. And it was coming from my direction.

  “Is that you?” he said. “Criminy, is that you?”

  I looked at my foot. Fortunately I was wearing shoes that day, light canvas tennies with a curving blue line on each toe, an upside-down smile. There it was on the sole of one shoe, a smear of poop.

  “Stop the car,” Donnie yelled.

  I was mortified, thinking, as any kid would, Why does everything happen to me?

  Most mornings that summer we went to the park store for penny candy—straws full of colored sugar, miniature wax coke bottles with amber liquid sugar inside, ropes of red and black licorice. It was in that store, in August, we heard news that Marilyn Monroe was dead. It was a hot, sunny day. I didn’t know much about death. I’d seen a few ancient relatives, stiff as manikins in their caskets, hands peacefully folded. I didn’t know much about Marilyn Monroe either. She had not yet become an icon. If there were movies and photographs, other people saw them. To me she was mostly just a name. Found dead.

  We walked down to the lake and looked across the water.

  “She killed herself,” Shawn said. “She took pills and killed herself.”

  How could she do that? I wondered.

  “And did you hear?” he said. “She was nude.”

  This detail somehow made her death more terrifying. To be dead was unthinkable. To be dead and nude was even worse. We looked at each other and ate our candy. Nothing made sense. From a radio in the parking lot came the Beach Boys singing “Surfin’ Safari.” How many weeks of summer left? We tore off our shirts, kicked off our flip-flops, and crashed into the water.

  Clogs and I were not made for each other. I kept falling off of them.

  “I can’t walk on these things,” I said to my wife. We were in Nuovo Fiore, an ice cream shop in Riccione. “It’s like they roll or something.”

  “You don’t know how to walk,” she said.

  I had just picked myself up off the sidewalk outside. I was a danger to myself. Now I watched fashionable people clogging up and down the streets. What did they know that I didn’t?

  “You’ll catch on,” she said.

  I kept trying. But I didn’t.

  The previous summer, another cousin, Vincenzo, had visited us in the United States. I had taken him fishing one day on the Saginaw Bay, where we caught half a dozen perch. It was more leisure fishing than sport fishing. He was determined to return the favor. He knew a little English; I knew a little Italian. With my wife’s help, he explained he wanted to take me to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. My wife rolled her eyes. (No Italian I’ve met since was remotely interested in the Leaning Tower of Pisa.) I said sure, I’d go.

  The next day he picked me up in a red Fiat convertible.

  There are stretches of autostrada between Bologna and Florence that call to mind the Pennsylvania Turnpike, lots of hills, lots of curves. Only these were European drivers. Vincenzo drove like a madman, determined, I think, to wow me with his car. While he drove, we tried to talk.

  He said, “I like a good Coca-Cola.”

  “What’s the speed limit?”

  He said, “My Aunt Tita is ninety years old.”

  “It would be all right to slow down.”

  He said, “Today we will ask for our spaghetti molto al dente.”

  “Are we almost there?”

  He said, “Later I will take you to a town where only ugly people live.”

  At that time, it was still possible to climb to the top of the Leaning Tower. Vincenzo said he would pass on the climb. To me, it seemed like a good idea. From the ground I counted seven levels. A narrow spiral staircase corkscrewed around the perimeter inside the tower, all the way to the top. As you ascended, you leaned with the tower, into the interior wall, then against the outer wall. Back and forth, lean in, lean out. At each level, you could step outside onto a loggia. By the third level, I was feeling dizzy. I poked my head out in the direction of the loggia, then kept going. Lean in, lean out. By the fifth level, I was stricken with vertigo. And I was teetering on my clogs. I skipped the fifth and sixth loggias. Finally I gained the top level. Terrified I would fall, I pulled off my clogs and walked in bare feet to a bench and sat down. Vertigo, I now knew, made you sick to your stomach.

  What hadn’t occurred to me was the Leaning Tower of Pisa is a bell tower. As soon as I sat down the bells began to ring. Seven deafening bells. There were vertigo-free children everywhere, darting from the high side of the tower to the low side, and there were traumatized parents calling to them. “Maura,” one father kept saying, “be careful. Please, Maura.” Good heavens, I thought, the little shit is wearing clogs. I knew my Galileo. If Maura and I fell from the tower at the same time, we would hit the ground below at the same time. I also sensed, given my track record over the last week, I was fully capable of falling from the middle of the tower, whereas Maura was going to be just fine.

  I’d had enough. I picked up my clogs and slowly took the stairway down in bare feet, hoping I would corkscrew myself back to equilibrium. Later that night, when Vincenzo deposited me safely at home, I flung the clogs in the back of a closet, retrieved my flip-flops, and never looked back.

  Dana Stevens, writing for Slate this summer, lodges this complaint against flip-flops: “[Their] use seems to transport people across some sort of etiquette Rubicon where the distinction between public and private, inside and outside, shod and barefoot, breaks down entirely.” Dana Stevens is right. And I think that’s my wife’s beef. Dude, get some decent shoes (a very Italian point of view). I get it, totally. And yet, to jailbreak your feet, to give them good, clean air to breathe, and to slow down to flip-flop pace, the fwap fwap fwap of your footfall saying take your time, that’s living. That’s summertime. How many weeks of summer left? How many summers? However many there are, I’ll take mine in flip-flops.

  35

  Ravioli, Richard III, and a Dead Bird

  The entry was not what I expected to find: “Last night I dreamed I killed someone.” I was checking a journal I keep to see where we ate those ravioli one year, the ones with the poppy sauce.

  A friend of mine wakes up every morning and writes down his dreams. An otherwise right-handed person, he writes about them with his left hand. He’s that serious about his dreams. I’m that serious about ravioli.

  The dinner came back to me. A Sunday, flower day in the little town, it was warm enoug
h to eat outdoors. Outside the restaurant, along a line of tables and umbrellas, the street was closed to traffic. It was crowded with strolling couples and families out to enjoy flowers in the square, flowers spilling from balconies, flowers in clay pots on stoops and stairways.

  We were finishing an appetizer when my wife said, “Oh no.”

  I thought something was wrong with the food.

  She motioned to the table next to us. A woman was holding a bird, cradling it in her hands. It was a swallow, obviously in critical condition. I hunted chickadees with a Daisy BB gun when I was a kid. When the birds hit the ground, mortally wounded, they did that same yawning thing, as if gasping for air.

  I refilled our wine glasses. “Don’t look.”

  We both took a sip. We both looked.

  Our waiter came and set down two dishes and a platter of ravioli in front of us. Over the next twenty minutes or so, the woman used one of the restaurant’s linen napkins to keep the bird warm. She rocked it. She squeezed drops of water from the napkin in the direction of the bird’s beak, which was no longer yawning. We ate our ravioli and drank our wine, casting mildly disapproving looks in her direction. She had to notice. When she held the bird close to her face and blew in the direction of its beak, I thought, What’s next, chest compressions?

  Pigeons, Woody Allen observes in Stardust Memories, are rats with wings.

  And little birds? Ornate bats.

  “Disgusting,” my wife said.

  The next morning, beneath the note I made on the ravioli, was that single sentence. Last night I dreamed I killed someone.

  I auditioned to be a murderer when I was in college. That fall I had a course in literature of the English Renaissance. The Faerie Queen was on the syllabus along with a lot of poetry, including Shakespeare’s sonnets. The previous semester I’d had one of the Shakespeare courses. Elizabethan English sort of felt like my language. One day the prof announced the theater department was putting on Richard III. Maybe some of us would like to read for a part, see Shakespeare produced as theater. I’d never been in a play, but I had a cool hat. I decided to give it a try.

  Over in Quirk Hall, I went to the designated office to inquire. “Sign up on the board outside to schedule a reading,” the girl said. She handed me four mimeographed pages, passages to choose from. There was some Richard, some Buckingham, some Hastings, and Catesby. I was no fool. I knew I didn’t stand a chance getting a lead or main character of any stature. But maybe something small and pithy. I could be happy with a distant secondary role. I skimmed some lines spoken by an assassin. They looked like something I might want to say.

  “Wish me luck,” I said to the girl.

  “Great hat,” she said with a smile.

  Yes, maybe I could do this.

  Then again, maybe not.

  The problem wasn’t reading the words. It was saying them out loud and not sounding like a complete idiot. In act 4, scene 4, the assassin, named Tyrrel, says:

  The most arch deed of piteous massacre

  That ever yet this land was guilty of.

  Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn

  To do this ruthless piece of butchery,

  Although they were flesh’d villains, bloody dogs,

  Melting with tenderness and kind compassion

  Wept like two children in their deaths’ sad stories.

  There was more. The soliloquy was about the slaughter of children. For a few days I practiced reciting these lines, mostly in my car (I didn’t want anyone to hear me), trying to find the proper tone of horror and remorse. “The tyrannous and bloody deed is done,” I’d say and then look at myself in the rearview mirror. It didn’t sound right. I didn’t look like a killer. When I delivered this line, I might as well have been saying, “The mayonnaise and mustard sauce is gone.”

  The director was on loan from Reading University in England. He was tall and thin, with short dark hair and sideburns, and spoke, not surprisingly, with an English accent. He reminded me of the British character from Hogan’s Heroes, only moodier, darker. For the audition, he and his wife and the assistant director sat at tables they had pushed together in the front of a classroom. There was a dish of chocolate chip cookies on the table. I said my name when I came in, and the director found me on his list. While I read my lines, they looked on. The assistant helped himself to a cookie. How many times had they heard the assassin that day? If it was difficult for me, it must have been torture for them. Somehow, I got through it.

  “Right,” the director said. “It’s a wonderful speech, isn’t it?” His wife and the assistant both nodded. “Thanks very much then,” he said. “Check the board on Monday.”

  It turned out I got two speaking parts. One of my characters had no name, the other a title, Page. Over the next couple of months, I learned that Shakespeare produced as theater meant a lot of waiting, coming to the theater four hours a night to say this line once: “Towards Chertsy, noble lord?” It was my first time hanging around theater people, who all seemed to have emigrated from a strange foreign country where everyone is in character all the time. Even when they weren’t in their Richard III characters, they were in character. Sitting around waiting, I began to have doubts about myself. I was just sitting there. I wasn’t, you know, sitting there, in a meaningful, intentional kind of way. What was my character?

  For about two weeks, near the end of rehearsals, we worked on a carefully choreographed battle scene. We would fight to the death in slow motion, with a strobe light to enhance the effect. I’m pretty sure I got to kill someone. I’m also pretty sure I was one of the first ones to die, a directorial decision I completely respected.

  My biggest moment came in act 4, scene 3, when Richard III motions for the Page (hey, that’s me!) to approach him. He says:

  Know’st thou not any whom corrupting gold

  Would tempt unto a close exploit of death?

  Down stage, right at the edge of the orchestra pit, Richard said these lines to me every night. And every night, when he did, he reached out, grabbed me by the throat, and scared the living crap out of me. He was a real actor (whom I have seen on TV for years since). If I didn’t respond, he tightened his grip on my throat.

  The casting, it turned out, was pure genius. Leave it to the British guy to know these things. I was supposed to stutter and croak in the presence of this malevolent force.

  I know a discontented gentleman.

  Gold were as good as twenty orators,

  And will, no doubt, tempt him to any thing.

  His name, my lord, is Tyrrel.

  That said, I was dismissed to seek out the assassin, who would commit a tyrannous and bloody deed. And I waited, hiking up my tights, getting ready to kill and be killed.

  When I ask my friend if he thinks dreams mean anything, he looks startled. Then lights go on inside him. It’s precisely the way I would react if someone asked me how I feel about risotto with truffles. “Yes,” he says, “dreams most definitely mean something.”

  We talk for a few minutes about my dream, or the trace of it left scrawled in my food journal. He’s read Jung. We have all these potential selves inside us, Jung says. They speak to us in our dreams.

  “So I could have a killer inside me?”

  “Sure.” He nods and begins to smile, pleased with the thought. “A little one,” he says. “Why not?”

  Killers inside us. I wonder what the woman dreamed that night, if she dreamed of giving life. Maybe she dreamed she revived the swallow, that it soared from her hands and became a brilliant flower in the cloudless sky above that town. Or maybe she dreamed it awakened, yawned, and flew into my face, clutching at my eyebrows with its claws.

  Or maybe she dreamed that it swooped down on our table, snatching ravioli with poppy sauce from my plate, and flew away. That would have killed me.

  36

  Apri la Porta

  It’s a Tuesday night, and we’re locked out of our apartment in San Marino. It could be worse. We speak the language. We�
�re sitting in the bar up in the main piazza; for three euro I can buy a glass of red wine and eat all the free food I want. Except it’s 10:00 p.m., and I’ve already eaten. I just want to go home and go to bed. Our rental car is parked down below the condominium. The car keys I have. So if worse comes to worst, we can drive up the hill and book into a hotel.

  “Ask Aeneas for a locksmith’s number,” my wife says. Aeneas, our bartender friend, is pouring drinks for fifty or so people at the moment.

  “What’s the word for locksmith?”

  “Just explain. The door is locked. The key is inside.”

  What’s the worst? There’s no local locksmith. Or there is a local locksmith, but he’s on vacation in Yugoslavia. And when he finally gets back a couple of days from now, he can’t just pick the lock; he has to drill it and replace it, which will take hours and cost us who knows what.

  I’ve been waiting for this disaster to happen. Usually you know how to burgle your house. You know its soft spot, a window you left unlatched and can slide open, a back door with a lock you can jimmy. Or you keep a key outside somewhere. Our apartment has no back door. The side windows are two stories up, in back, three. I don’t know where I would leave a key outside. There’s so much outside outside.

  “Don’t you have someone you can ask for a key?” Aeneas shouts over the soccer game everyone is watching. “When this happens to me, I go upstairs and ask my parents.”

  I show him the set of keys my niece has brought us. Our key, I tell him, on our set, which I should be holding, is in the lock—inside the apartment, where I leave it so I don’t forget it when I walk out the door. That’s my system, obviously a failure.

  Aeneas smiles, gives me a knowing look. “One of those,” he says. The lock, he means. When there’s a key inserted in the lock on the inside, a spare key inserted in the lock on the outside doesn’t work. It just turns and turns in the lock, in neutral. It’s a terrible feeling.