Big Stone Gap

by Adriana Trigiani

  Iva Lou can’t let it go. “How do you feel about him?”

  I shake my head. I don’t want to get into all of this. How do I feel about him? All I know is that when I kind of liked him, he didn’t like me. And then when he liked me, I didn’t want him. I do think of the kiss sometimes—well, let’s be honest, it’s the last thing I think about when I’m in that weakened state right before sleep. I go right back to the trailer park, to the book, to the pools of light coming out of the windows, to the way he smelled, to the way my face fit into his chest like a puzzle piece, to his eyes that looked at me with such tenderness and with just a little humor, too. I re-create the whole picture, and then he kisses me. It’s my good-night kiss, I guess, and the last thing I remember before breakfast. But this is my little ritual, and I’m certainly not going to share it with Iva Lou.

  “Are you afraid of him?”

  “God, no.”

  “I don’t mean of him per se.” Iva Lou struggles to find the words for the right way to invade my privacy.

  “Are you afraid of having sex with him?”

  “Iva Lou.” My tone says, Stop this, please.

  “Look, I’m just your friend. And you know all about me. But I’ll be damned, I don’t know how you feel about certain things. You never talk about how you feel about men. As a woman. The most fun in life for a woman is to talk about men. Look at me. It’s my favorite topic in and out of the bedroom.”

  “I don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Well, try. I’m a girl. You’re a girl. We got our own little club; and men have no idea what we talk about. Your secrets are safe with me.” From the doorway Lyle holds up a chili dog toward Iva Lou. She shakes her head and waves him off. He goes back to talking with his buddies.

  “Come on. Tell me what makes you tick. Before you leave town and I never see you again.” Iva Lou looks so pitiful, I almost want to explain myself to her.

  “I think he’s attractive. I do.” I hope this will be enough to get her off the subject of Jack Mac forever.

  “That’s a start. Now, don’t leave me hanging. Go on.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen Iva Lou this excited.

  “When I saw him at the end of my walk the day my family arrived, I thought he was the most beautiful person I had ever seen.”

  “And you didn’t throw yourself into his arms, right there and then?”

  “Because he . . .”

  “Follow your impulses for once! Girl, you’re how old? Thirty-six? When do you think you’re gonna have sex? When you’re sixty? Ninety? Honey-o, get in there and have you some while you’re still limber. What are you waiting for? How could you let somebody like Jack Mac slip through your fingers? I bet the sex with him is primo. I can just tell.”

  I wish Iva Lou would stop talking, but she can’t. She is trying very hard to make me understand. I have never seen her on such a tear.

  She continues, “Do you deprive yourself of a ripe strawberry or a spritz of nice perfume or a good book because you don’t think you deserve them? Hell, no. Sex is no different. It is a delightful gift from God that makes life pleasant. Now, what could be wrong with that? You’ll find out a helluva lot more about yourself in bed with a good man than you will traipsing off to some foreign country with a camera and a guidebook. You need to get honest with yourself. You’re afraid. But you want sex. You ought to have you some sex.”

  On the dance floor Otto and Worley are teaching my grandmother how to clog. A supportive crowd has gathered to cheer her on. Iva Lou and I join in. Nonna’s body is a small barrel, her legs thin but well shaped. Her eyes gleam as she dances. She segues from an Appalachian two-step into a folk dance we don’t do in these parts—must be Alpine Italian. Otto and Worley follow her lead, and soon everyone is spinning and smiling.

  Iva Lou and I run out of breath first and sit down to watch. I look off in the grass, a bit beyond the door, and see my father talking to Jack MacChesney. My father’s hands are expressive as usual. Jack Mac leans into my father’s ear and says something. They laugh and shake hands. Sarah joins them—does she ever leave him alone for five minutes? Jack Mac introduces her to my father. Jack Mac and Sarah leave. My father looks around for us and cuts across the dance floor to join me.

  “What were you talking about?” I ask Mario, indicating the conversation he just had with Jack Mac.

  “His Italian is pretty good,” my father says.

  “He doesn’t speak Italian.”

  “He just did.” Mario shrugs. How do you like that? Maybe Sarah Dunleavy taught Jack a few key phrases she picked up from the Godfather movies. How continental of her.

  “Jack Mac is a very kind man. Don’t you think?” Mario looks off. Sure, Jack is a very kind man, and I’m very grateful. But he won’t accept my gratitude, which makes a jackass out of me. I would love to tell my father all about Jack MacChesney and Sweet Sue and the proposal and Sarah Dunleavy and everything, but I think better of it. He would just smile and say something breezy in colloquial Italian about the salt in the cupboard or the eyes of a fish or some other image that doesn’t make any sense or apply. Doesn’t anybody see how hard all of this is for me?

  Gala corrals us all into a group—she is first and foremost a travel director—and we head off for the van. On the drive home, everyone laughs as Nonna recounts how Otto and Worley tried to teach her how to clog. I don’t feel much like laughing. I am filling up with sadness and regret. My family just got here, and already they’re leaving. I don’t want them to go! I wish this black road would never end and we could stay inside this van forever talking and laughing with Theodore behind the wheel and my father at my side.

  When we get back to the house, Nonna gives Gala the dry soup beans and seasonings she bought at the Piggly Wiggly to take back to Italy.

  “I’m gonna break it off for good with Frank tomorrow night. After I get Nonna’s soup beans through Customs. Hey, he used me, now I use him.”

  Nonna kisses me good night and goes off to bed.

  I watch Gala stuff soup beans in socks. She looks at me.

  “Are you okay?” I nod. “You look sad. You’re going to miss them.”

  “It’s gone by so fast. But I don’t want to complain, I sound so ungrateful.”

  “Believe me. It was a project getting these folks over here. What a logistical nightmare. Could they live any farther up in the Alps? They’re a pack of goats, your family.”

  “Gala, who contacted you about getting my family over here?”

  “Iva Lou.”

  “Iva Lou?”

  “She called first. But it was just an inquiry. You know, to find out how this sort of tour would work. So I gave her a breakdown and took notes. Of course, I wasn’t sure how it would work, but then I thought of it as a reverse tour and I was fine. Iva Lou didn’t talk money or anything, though. That was entirely Jack MacChesney’s department. He’s a cute one, don’t you think?”

  “When did he call you to make the arrangements?”

  She shrugs. “A couple of months ago. I could look it up.”

  “Was my trip planned before or after theirs?” I wave my hand to indicate my houseguests.

  “After.” Gala looks guilty for a moment and then continues. “I was expecting your call. Iva Lou tipped me off. I’m sorry. I lied to you, I trumped up a fake trip to make you think it was happening. But we had already planned the relatives coming over, so I saw no harm in it. Frank arranged the fake airline tickets I sent you. I’m sorry.”

  How could I be angry with Gala? My family is in my house, and we have had the best time.

  “Don’t apologize,” I say to Gala. “I owe you so much more than you will ever owe me.” I really mean this.

  That sneaky Iva Lou. That day on the Bookmobile, long ago, when Jack Mac was there with a newspaper, that’s when they found Gala. So, when I needed an international travel agent, Iva Lou steered me right to Gala. Jack Mac said he started planning this back when he proposed. And those Mormons; Iva Lou set that up to buy more t
ime for Jack Mac’s plan. Is the whole town in on my business?

  Everyone has gone to bed. We set three alarms so we would not oversleep. The Piedmont plane out of Tri-Cities for John F. Kennedy Airport in New York leaves at 7:00 A.M., and there isn’t another connection, so they must make it. (I remember that Piedmont means “foot of the mountains.” What a poor name for an airline!) I can’t sleep, so I’m wandering around the house trying not to make noise. I tiptoe outside and sit on the porch. I’m anticipating how sad I will be tomorrow after everyone leaves. Yes, I am going to Italy to visit them in a few weeks; Gala took care of everything without penalty, and she invited me to stay with her in New Jersey for a week and see New York before I go overseas! But after that, what? Where will I go? Maybe I’ll like Schilpario and stay there. I ponder that for a moment. How I wish Mama were here. Imagine how happy she would have been to see me with her family, knowing that I would never be alone in the world again. Even that I could not give her. Why did my mother’s life have to be so hard? I breathe deeply. I will never answer that question.

  Zia Meoli stands at the screen door.

  “I can’t sleep,” she says. This makes me laugh. She sounds just like my mother. And even though you would never say my mother was a comical person, sometimes she could say one sentence in such a way that it made you laugh. Zia Meoli comes outside.

  “I wanted to talk to you alone.” She pulls up a chair next to me.

  “Please.”

  “How do you like him?” She indicates the window behind which my father sleeps.

  “I like him.” She shrugs. “Don’t you?”

  Zia Meoli thinks for a moment. “He’s a politician,” she decides.

  I figure in Italy that’s not a compliment. “Zia . . .” I begin, but from the look on her face, I can see that she knows what I am going to ask her. “Do you remember when Mama left Bergamo?”

  She nods as though it were yesterday. “Your mother left us in the middle of the night. She did not tell us where she was going. She left a letter for me, telling me that I should not worry about her, that she would write to me.”

  I can tell from Zia’s expression that she has replayed these events over in her mind many times. She is still bothered by them.

  “Did you want to go after her to find her?” I ask.

  “Yes! Of course, yes! I thought of every place she might go. Cousins. Other towns. But no one had seen her. And she left no clue as to where she went or why. I was suspicious, because she spoke of Mario Barbari often, but I said nothing because I wasn’t sure. My mother, your grandmother, was destroyed. After Fiametta left, she could never be consoled.”

  “What about your father?”

  “I think he knew what happened. See, he knew Mario Barbari. He knew his family, not well, but in business. When Papa figured out that Fiametta liked Mario, he felt she was too young to court. So he forbade her to see him. She was devastated. But our father was very strict. If anything improper had occurred, he would have made Fiametta leave our home. My sister knew this. Though it broke my heart that she did what she did, I understood. She had no choice. I would have done the same thing.”

  “But she was only seventeen. Just a girl.”

  “At that time, many Italians were leaving the country. Some to Canada, some to South America, some to Australia. All over. Many, of course, went to New York. America. I knew that if she could, she would leave Italy altogether, so as not to bring shame upon us. I also knew that when she made a decision, she would never turn back.”

  “Did you know she was pregnant with me?”

  Zia Meoli shakes her head; she did not know of her sister’s condition.

  “If you knew about Mario Barbari, why didn’t you go to him?”

  She nods vehemently. “I went to him. I did.”

  “Did you know he was married?”

  “I knew a family up the mountain, in a town about fifteen kilometers from Schilpario. They knew of him, where I could find him. They told me he was married. I was sure he had married my sister. But it wasn’t Fiametta, it was another girl. I was told it was a match, and it did not work. The girl went back with her parents after a short time.”

  “How do they make a match?”

  “The families come together and decide who their children will marry. Pietro and I were a match. He was one of five children, four of them sons. His father came to my father, and they discussed which daughter would be suitable for his sons. Antonietta loved a boy in Sestri Levante, near Genoa, and Fiametta was gone, so that left me. I met Pietro, I liked him very well. We courted for one year, and then we got married.” She folds her arms, indicating that making matches is the most natural way to make a marriage in the whole world.

  “So, what happened when you went to find Mario Barbari?”

  “Oh, yes!” She remembers as she goes back to her story. I notice that Italians do digress—I am guilty of it too. In the middle of a story, one element of it grabs their attention, and then they’re off the subject entirely, never to return. I am reminded of how alike we are, even though I was not influenced by them when I was growing up. These similarities, though, are deep and in our bones.

  “Mario da Schilpario was very suave. The black, black hair. The black eyes. Very striking man. I figured out a way to get up the mountain without my father finding out the real reason for my trip. I was hoping that Fiametta would be there with him, and I could talk sense to her and have her come home. When I got to Schilpario, I found Mario working in the church. His family are glass and metal workers. They make stained-glass windows.” Another fact about my father I didn’t know!

  “I knew it was him right away, because I remembered him from town; he drove a carriage down for supplies sometimes, and all the girls in Bergamo took note of him. I asked to speak with him alone. He was very pleasant, but he knew nothing of my sister’s whereabouts. He had not heard from her. He asked me to understand his position; he had a wife, and they were trying to make their marriage work, even though they did not live under one roof. He thought my sister was beautiful and sweet, but theirs was a romance that could never be. Would I tell her that when I found her? I told him that was something he needed to discuss with Fiametta himself. I remember that, at the mention of her name, his eyes had great pain in them. I believe he loved her.”

  Zia Meoli has obviously given this a great deal of thought. But she is a woman, too, and she knows what happens to unsuspecting girls who fall for the town Lothario. At first, they accept that they are one of many, but they hope they can tame him, win his heart, and make him faithful and true. At seventeen, my mother didn’t know that she would never win this battle. But she was so in love, she gave him her heart anyway. It is so ironic that I am Mario’s only child. All those women, all that romance, and I am the only child that grew from it.

  “So, I went back down the mountain, with no more information than when I left. I gathered my mother and my sister in a room, away from my father, and told them what I had learned. My mother was devastated; she was certain I would find Fiametta and bring her home. My mother’s health turned at that time. She cried all the time, she took to her bed. The Italians would say that her blood turned. Her sadness had made her ill.”

  “What about your father?”

  “My mother never discussed it with my father. She knew where he stood on the matter. If Fiametta had done wrong, she had to live with the consequences. One time he and I had an argument about it. He told me he knew that my sister was alive and well. He knew how strong-willed she was. Papa thought that she could protect herself. I thought he was cold and indifferent, and I was very angry with him for not setting out to find her. But he and Fiametta had always had a sense about each other; I never had that with him.”

  “A sense?”

  “Papa knew what she was thinking. He always did. He could tell before she did something what she was going to do. It was mystical.”

  “When did Mama write her first letter to you?”

  “It was almo
st a year after she left. How happy Mama was when that letter came from America.”

  “I didn’t find any letters from your mother to my mother.”

  Zia Meoli shakes her finger back and forth. “Never. My mother would never go against my father! Never!”

  “Did your mother know about me?”

  “She was so happy. But you were only a year or so old when she died. But my mother knew your name and all of the details Fiametta sent to me.”

  “Did you ever tell your father?”

  My aunt shakes her head sadly. “If he knew, we never talked about it. Don’t judge him for it, Ave Maria. It was a different time. A girl could not leave the family home without being married, nor could she—”

  “Dishonor the family name.”

  Zia Meoli shakes her head again. “I knew there was no dishonor. She was young. She was in love.” Zia sits back in the chair, rocking a bit.

  Mama in love. I wish I could have seen it.

  Theodore and I see everyone off at the airport, but it is in no way a sad parting. We promise to call and write to one another, and we’re all looking forward to the long summer in Schilpario.

  My father tries to give me a wad of money, which I stuff right back into his pocket.

  “Papa, I don’t need it.”

  “Please take it.”

  “Papa, you keep it. Take care of Nonna.” He smiles, and we hug for a long time. We will see each other very soon, and we’re happy about that.

  Theodore and I watch the plane take off. After it disappears beyond the mountains, we go to Shoney’s for a leisurely lunch and relive every moment of the Eye-talian visit.

  I load up the Jeep to return all the pans to the ladies in town who dropped off food while my family was visiting. One of my favorite things about Big Stone Gap is the stream of covered dishes that flows from house to house in times of joy or sadness. The ladies make it easy to get their pans back: On the bottom of each, in indelible ink on heavy tape, they print their names: N. Goodloe, E. and L. Tuckett, I. Makin, J. Hendrick, and N. MacChesney. It will take me the better part of the day to shuttle these back to their owners.