The Kitty Committee

by Kathryn Berla

  Nathan and I had been unable to occupy the same space, even for the few weeks before my trip, so Carlos kindly took me in, allowing me the use of his sofa. Several days before I left, I received a letter from my parents. It went to Nathan’s apartment, but since I was no longer living there, Carlos said Nathan marched into the coffee shop and slapped it on the counter, almost triumphantly.

  “It’s from Grace’s parents,” he said, somewhat sullenly according to Carlos, who suspected he was being blamed for harboring me.

  I imagine Nathan thought it was the letter from my parents that would shake sense into me, tell me what a fool I was being, and create enough self-doubt that I’d abandon my plans. But of course my parents knew nothing of my plans. Coward that I was, I’d only just sent that letter a day earlier, after having extracted a promise from Luke to let me break the news to them myself. By the time they received my letter, I knew I’d be gone.

  Instead, their letter was filled with news of their lives, questions about mine, their hopes and love for me. At the end, Mom mentioned that Dad had been having recurring bouts of the malaria he’d picked up many years ago. Or perhaps it was a new strain, she said—one of the suppressant-resistant variety. In any case, they were seeing a doctor, and Dad would be fine. They were both happier than they’d been in years, although they missed us greatly. It was good to be doing something meaningful again. Making a difference in people’s lives.

  The night before I left, Carlos stayed over with his girlfriend. The next morning, I woke while it was still dark, folded my bedsheets, tidied up the kitchen, and left a note on the table thanking Carlos for the gift of his friendship and all the laughter and understanding he had granted so freely and unconditionally. The building was quiet, but residents of the other apartments were beginning to stir. I heard the telltale sounds of water rushing through the pipes in the walls and the creaking of hardwood floors that were already old long before I was born. I took one last look around to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. I thought of my first day of work, how Carlos had evolved from co-worker to trusted friend. The first day Nathan walked into the coffee shop, goofy-eyed and awed by the very thought of me. I placed the extra key on the small table beside the front door. I wrapped a scarf around my neck and quietly closed the door behind me.

  The trip itself is only a smudge in my memory, but the full-out sensory assault when I arrived in Istanbul is something I’ll never forget. Not having a clue how to navigate the public transportation, I decided to splurge and spend some of my meager resources on a taxi. I would have been an easy and obvious target for any unscrupulous driver, but fate was with me that day and my driver was an older man. Kind, with steely-gray hair, he spoke a little English from his brief stay as a young man in New York City. Mehmet fretted about me, a young woman on her own. As I had landed smack in the middle of rush hour, he had a long time to fret, and we had almost an hour to trade personal histories. By the time he pulled up to the youth hostel that my research indicated was the safest and most modestly priced option, we had become friends.

  Fortunately, Mehmet waited to make sure I got in safely because once I’d walked through the narrow passageway to the entrance, I was stopped by a metal gate, chained and padlocked. The padlock was rusted as though it hadn’t been used for a while. My heart stirred in my chest, but I took a deep breath and stepped quickly to the street where I broke into a wide smile at the sight of Mehmet’s idling cab.

  “No good?” He raised bushy, questioning eyebrows.

  “No good,” I said. My spirits sank. There was no Plan B, and I didn’t have the funds to pay Mehmet to drive me around the city looking for lodging.

  He stepped out of the car and opened the passenger side. “Come,” he said. “Hungry?” I was famished.

  Mehmet explained that his workday was almost over, having started well before dawn. He invited me to his home and, being of an age where instincts and stupidity weigh equally on the decision scale, I took him up on his offer. Another story might have had me never being heard from again, but my story that day took me into the home of a lovely couple. Mehmet and his wife—silver-haired and elegant, gracious and beautiful, warm and nurturing—Azra took to me as though I was a long-lost daughter. I ate food, prepared by her hands, that I couldn’t identify, but the smell and taste were sublime. Azra couldn’t speak English so Mehmet translated for us, and somehow we were able to read each other’s eyes.

  I must have done something good in my life, I thought, to have been presented with this gift.

  After dinner, I was exhausted beyond anything in my previous experience. Azra prepared a small, hard cot for me. Piled with soft blankets, it felt like a cloud. It was where their son slept when he visited from Germany, where he lived and worked, they explained. He would be honored to have me use it in his absence. Mehmet and Azra said they were glad to have my company, and they wouldn’t hear of me staying anywhere but with them for as long as I was in Istanbul. They knew, in Germany, someone was showing their son the same kindness they were showing me. It was the way of the world.

  Mehmet and Azra gave me the confidence and security to explore every corner of the old city and beyond. They launched me into my new life on a new continent. It had been a gentle transition, but it had to come to an end. After more than three weeks, it was time to plan my next step. I sat in a café sipping the coffee I knew I’d soon be missing. Pen in my hand, paper on the table in front of me, I’d been working on the promised weekly letter to Luke. Soon he could breathe the sigh of relief he’d been waiting for, knowing I was beyond the reach of that Hollywood version of the modern medieval dungeon. I didn’t want to go to the place of missing Mehmet and Azra, but it was always there, lurking in the back of my mind along with the anxiety of setting off for the unknown. Turkey had become the known. The familiar. How quickly that had happened.

  But the urge to move on was stronger than my anxiety and, thanks to my hosts, I was ready to do so. Mehmet and Azra had given me my traveling feet, reminding me what it meant to understand people beyond just the words they spoke; to respect differences instead of being suspicious of them; to think of myself, once again, as a citizen of an entire world, and not just a member of a tiny group in a tiny school in a tiny town. No one knew where I was, and that was liberating. Exploring a new culture and immersing myself seamlessly in it was challenging but redeeming. Each ordinary life experience was a learning experience when I didn’t speak the language or know the names of the streets or even know where to find a public restroom to relieve myself. It was like being born again. My mind was fully occupied with just living, which meant little or no time for worrying. For regrets. For reflection.

  A young woman pulled a chair up to an adjacent table and, from the clumsy way she ordered and the English language version of Atlas Shrugged clutched in her hand, I pegged her as an American. When she grinned at me, my suspicion was confirmed. Not only had her smile enriched some orthodontist by thousands of dollars (a peculiar American obsession), but no one smiles quite so trustingly, so naively, so openly, and so without an obvious purpose as an American.

  “Hi,” she tested the waters, probably also having pegged me despite having spent my orthodontic years overseas. “Are you American?”

  I nodded, surprising myself with the happiness it brought me to be included in this club after nearly a month of being a stranger in a strange land.

  “My name’s Rachel.” She dragged her chair over to my table. “You mind?”

  “No, not at all.” I folded the letter to Luke in two and stuffed it in my bag. “I was just writing my brother,” I explained. “I’ve been in Istanbul for three weeks. I’ll be heading to Rome in a few days.”

  “Ooh, Rome.” Rachel had long, bright red frizzy hair. Pale green eyes and high pink spots in her cheeks. She wore a sun hat with a wide brim. “I’ve been traveling with two guys from England that I met on the coast. But they’re going to Greece, and I
’m trying to make my way to Spain eventually, so we’re splitting up. Where’re you from?”

  I had to think for a minute because that was a question without a true answer.

  “San Francisco. You?”

  “Seattle.”

  “Why Spain?” I asked. “I’m going there too. Eventually.”

  The waiter brought Rachel a cold drink that looked like some kind of an iced coffee or a dark soda. She siphoned off half the glass through a straw before stopping to answer.

  “Sorry,” she said, gulping for a breath of air. The pink spots in her cheeks faded. “I’ve been walking for the past two hours, and I’m so thirsty.” She bent her head to the straw and bled the glass dry, making a few noisy sounds toward the bottom. “Anyway, to answer your question, my boyfriend’s in Spain teaching English for a year. I’m taking a year off after graduation, so I’ve been traveling and eventually I’ll meet up with him. And then who knows? Probably back to the real world and jobs. Why Rome?”

  “It’s just a plan I made before I left,” I said almost apologetically. I thought that maybe I should be more spontaneous like Rachel and the English boys she was traveling with. “I bought my ticket before I left, so now I’m kind of committed. But I think it’s time.”

  “Cool.” Rachel pondered my response. “I wouldn’t mind going to Rome—all over Italy for that matter. You traveling with anyone?”

  “Nope.”

  “You want some company?”

  Now it was my turn to ponder. I didn’t have a great track record with friends. As a young girl, I never got too attached overseas, knowing my relationships couldn’t be permanent. My family were my friends. Tramp. And then there was Alice, whom I hadn’t been so nice to. Carly. My stomach pitched. Maggie. Jane. I felt a gray sheet descend over the sun streaming through the window. There was Carlos—he was a true friend, but we didn’t spend significant time together.

  “I have a plane ticket already,” I said. “So unfortunately, I have to leave on that flight.”

  Rachel pushed the brim of her hat up, leaned back in her chair, and eyed me. “Are you just saying that to be polite because you don’t want my company?”

  “No,” I said, although I knew I was. I was trying to protect myself from Rachel. And to protect her from me. “It’s just that I made the reservation a long time ago so it would probably be pretty hard to get on that flight. And, I mean . . . I know it’s expensive to fly.”

  “I’ve got lots of money,” Rachel said cheerfully. “What’s your flight info? There’s a travel agency right down the street, and I know they speak English because I’ve used them before. If your flight is booked, I could take another one. It’s always more fun to travel with someone, don’t you think?”

  There was only one way to answer that without coming across as mean-spirited. And I did like Rachel’s open and trusting nature. Her sparkle and unselfconscious manner. In that moment, I calculated Rachel might be someone who would show me the way—a different way—to approach life.

  “Yes,” I said, this time without hesitation. “It is more fun when you’re not traveling alone. Let’s go to the travel agent and check on the flight.”

  With Rachel as my new ally, my step felt a little lighter. I approached the prospect of leaving Mehmet and Azra with a little less melancholy. I remembered this feeling—the confidence and optimism I had felt when I’d been accepted by Carly as one of her own. Maybe I wasn’t a person who functioned well, or even at all, on her own. Maybe I was meant to be part of a pack. But that prospect was so depressing that I shook it off and reminded myself that traveling through foreign countries was nothing like the Kitty Committee. Rachel was nothing like Carly or Maggie. I was a wanderer now. An explorer. I was like Marco Polo, Nellie Bly, and Jack Kerouac. Whatever experiences might come, let them come. I wouldn’t ever abide by rules again—at least not the self-imposed kind.

  But when the time came to say goodbye to Mehmet and Azra, my newly acquired bravado dissolved into a flood of tears. How could I face never seeing these people again? They’d come to mean so much to me in such a short period of time. They had accepted me unconditionally, and I’d battled dark thoughts at night, wondering if I held them dearer than my own parents, who were loving and well-meaning but somehow never reached this deep into my heart.

  “God will protect you always,” Mehmet translated for Azra, but I could already read it in her eyes, which glistened with tears.

  But they didn’t know what God knew, if there was a God. They didn’t know what I knew.

  A final embrace with Rachel standing behind me. I felt invisible hands on my shoulders pulling me away from Azra, from a place I otherwise would never have had the strength to leave behind. The hands felt so real that, for a moment, I thought it was Rachel pulling me away, but it wasn’t.

  Mehmet took us to the airport in his taxi—free of charge, of course. He insisted even when Rachel pulled a wad of paper money out of her backpack once we’d gotten to the airport.

  “Your money no good for me,” he shook his head fiercely, blocking the transfer of cash with his raised palm. “Put away.” And he waited to make sure she put it away safely under his protective watch. “Careful,” he admonished her. “Keep . . . inside,” he pointed to her backpack, mildly irritated at the cavalier way she waved money around without regard for who might be watching.

  “I . . .” I began, recognizing immediately the emptiness of what I was about to say. What could possibly measure up to the moment that wouldn’t cheapen all the things left unsaid?

  He flicked his fingers backward toward the airport entrance. “Go now,” he interrupted, sparing us both from the futility of my words. “Have fun. Good life,” he said emphatically with a firm nod of his head.

  As he pulled away from the curb, he took one last look over his shoulder. His cheeks were silvered that morning with a twenty-four-hour growth of beard. Not wanting to take a chance on missing our plane, he’d left the house without shaving, and I knew that was meaningful, being the fastidious man that he was. I caught my final glimpse of his eyes as I stood smiling and waving goodbye. They were dark and soft, the loose skin underneath draping his cheekbones. He’d been quiet during the ride to the airport. He seemed sad. I thought of Dad during the days right after Luke left for college, days when pain was still his most real and most constant companion.

  Mehmet must be thinking of his son, I thought. So far away. Another stranger in a strange land.

  Hours later, we were in Rome, facing a day so hot it sucked the water out of the Tiber and spewed it into the air we breathed. We located our lodgings and stashed our gear. Thanks to Rachel’s generosity, it was a step up from what I’d planned for myself while still maintaining the minimal standards necessary for our bohemian credentials. With what daylight remained, we traipsed around the city, hopping on and off buses along the way, marveling at how easily two-thousand-year-old relics of antiquity coexisted with modern thoroughfares and trendy boutiques. Rome was an enigma, and the more Rachel and I explored, peering into its every nook and cranny, the more puzzling it became. To see so many layers of civilization blotted out, smoothed over, and transformed into something new—Rome was a city that had mastered the art of disguise.

  At the end of our third day, we decided it was time to head north. That night, at a bus stop, we met three girls from Canada. Rachel, being the genuine extrovert she was, struck up a conversation, and the next thing I knew, we were all sitting at the sidewalk table of a rundown restaurant, sharing heaping plates of pasta. Vespas buzzed past like mosquitos, mingling their scent of exhaust with Rome’s pervading cigarette smoke. Two of the new girls were flying home the next day, but Margaret was staying. She had another month before she had to go home, so naturally, Rachel invited her to join us. Who could resist Rachel? We were a threesome by the following day.

  Everything about Margaret was perky. With her short, brown cap
of hair, large round eyes, and slightly overgrown front teeth, she was what the expression “breath of fresh air” had been invented to describe. She was just familiar enough to remind me of home, and yet just exotic enough, with her occasional odd pronunciations, to be interesting. On her backpack was an image of the Canadian flag, a leaf which stood on its own stem, every bit as perky as Margaret.

  We gathered together the following morning at our prearranged meeting place and mapped out the next few weeks. Having been part of a girl-group before, I didn’t expect the easy cooperation, equal voice, and attention paid to all. Those words had only been paid lip service by the Kitty Committee, but Rachel and Margaret lived it.

  Margaret and I had rail passes good for nearly everywhere in Europe. Rachel was pay-as-you-go, but she didn’t seem to have any monetary constraints. We stopped at the American Express office just before leaving Rome to pick up a fresh supply of cash for Rachel. She offered to pay for almost everything, although we didn’t usually accept.

  “My dad’s rich,” she explained. “He’s happy for me to have traveling companions.”

  But I wasn’t quite ready to be put on the payroll as a traveling companion. I never wanted to forfeit my options, and leaving anytime I wanted was an option that I kept in reserve but hadn’t been tempted to use. Margaret, like me, had finished two years of college; unlike me, she was two years older. Rachel was two years older than Margaret so, once again, I was the youngest, although I was never made to feel that way.

  We took the bus to Orvieto, where a French couple offered us a ride to Civita di Bagnoregio, a walled city that was ancient the day Christ was born, built on the side of an extinct volcano. A long, steep climb up a walkway to the town that claims less than ten fulltime residents, it had earned the nickname of “the dying city” as the edges of its plateau were slowly crumbling away. As we traipsed through the narrow streets, my nose buried in the pamphlet recounting the town’s history, I knew that had I been five years younger, more naïve, and untouched by life, had I been traveling with my parents, I would have complained loudly and energetically if I’d been forced to make that journey. I wondered if I was finally growing up. Finally becoming equal to the stage of life I was passing through.