Absolute Zero: Misadventures From A Broad (Val & Pals Book 1)

by Margaret Lashley

  “You are Val, no?”

  I nearly fainted with relief. The weather-beaten old guy had to be the cab driver hired to pick me up.

  When I was in Italy with Clarice last fall, we’d done a bunch of touristy things. This time around, I wanted to experience Italy like a local. There’d only been two problems with my plan. First, I didn’t know a single soul in the whole country. Second, I didn’t speak four words of Italian. Other than that, I was all set.

  I’d googled around on the internet for what they called immersion vacations and found a budget, two-week program with an organization called World of Wow. Their brochure had promised the opportunity to “get a real taste of Italian culture.” That had sounded good. The WOW trip also required a few hours of teaching English each week. That had sounded okay, too.

  With WOW, I’d be on vacation, but I’d also have stuff to do. So I wouldn’t get the DTs from having too much free time on my hands. Hopefully, the next two weeks would prepare me for the second phase of my adventure in living irresponsibly – a week-long Mediterranean cruise. It sailed out of Civitavecchia, Italy the same day that the WOW volunteer vacation ended. Clarice said she was coming on that trip with me – if she hadn’t found that man with a good job and a full set of choppers by then. She’d turned her nose up at the volunteer work vacation, but she’d been chomping at the bit to meet me in Rome for that luxury cruise.

  I’d booked both trips just three weeks ago on Cheaper Beeper, a last-minute closeout travel website. I wasn’t broke by any means, but I’d earned every dime of my money myself, and didn’t want to waste a penny. The cab driver was here to take me to Brindisi. The WOW brochure described it as “a small, seaside village about an hour’s drive south of convenient Bari airport.”

  “Hello, sir. I mean…ciao! Yes…I mean si. I’m Val.”

  A gap-toothed grin cracked the seriousness of the old man’s sun-hardened face. He grabbed my hand and nearly shook my arm out of the socket.

  “Bene! Sono Vittorio! Bene!”

  He let go of my mangled hand and spewed a torrent of Italian at me. I listened politely, then shot back with English. Sometime during this incomprehensible exchange, our smiling faces sagged. We’d both used up our entire second-language skills with our first words to each other. Thankfully, I’d already learned that in Italy – as in most parts of the world – a smile could get a person a long way.

  Vittorio knew this trick, too. He grinned and went to work putting his entire body to use as a human translator. I watched intently as he acted out holding an invisible handle in his right fist, then turning it upside down and moving it to almost touch an imaginary thing he held between the pinch of his left thumb and index finger. After that, he moved his pinched-together fingers to his lips, which had formed an O, as if he were going to blow a kiss.

  I hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours and had the attention span of a Georgia gnat. I didn’t have any idea what the old man was up to, so I shrugged apologetically. Vittorio raised his eyebrow and he sniffed the air like a hound dog after a possum. I smiled weakly. He repeated the entire performance again, as I stood there dumbfounded. Frustrated, Vittorio twisted his mouth sideways, then pointed a thumb toward the airport entrance. He wafted his hands toward his face and sniffed again.

  Finally, a lightbulb went off in my dimly lit wits. Vittorio wanted to get a coffee at the airport coffee shop. Duh!

  “Coffee? Si!” I nodded enthusiastically.

  The old man showed me the gap in his teeth again.

  “Bene!”

  I followed the old codger back inside the airport and up to the coffee shop counter. I stood, tongue out like a hungry waif, and watched as Vittorio held up one mummified-looking thumb and matching index finger and said, “Doo-ay.”

  The tired-looking barista gave a quick nod and began pulling and pushing weird gears and gizmos on a machine filched from Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. A minute later, two tiny white cups full of steaming, black mud landed on the counter in front of us.

  “Benvenuta, Signora,” Vittorio said. He raised his tiny cup at me, then slammed back the sludge in one gulp.

  I followed his lead. The thick black brew burned like lava as it slid down my throat. The high-octane caffeine jolted my sleep-deprived brain like a mule kick to the noggin. Whoa! I set the cup down, closed my eyes and shook my head to clear it. When I opened my eyes again, the barista was staring at me.

  “Quattro euro,” he muttered.

  I looked over at Vittorio for help. The old cabbie took my purse from the counter, opened my wallet with his long, mummy fingers, and gave the barista two big silver coins from the change compartment.

  “Less go-go,” Vittorio said. He mimed holding a steering wheel, then turned and walked toward the airport exit.

  I followed him hesitantly, suddenly unsure of myself. Had I just been scammed? Was Vittorio a scam artist? What if this whole World of Wow thing was just one big scam, too? Aunt Patsy had warned me about this!

  As Vittorio led me through the nearly empty airport parking lot, I scrutinized him for tell-tale signs of being a serial killer. Do they drink espresso over here? The old man stopped at a dusty, dented black car that appeared to have been manufactured the same year I was born. What did a European axe murderer look like, anyway?

  I pondered this question, along with whether or not to run for the Appian hills, but decided I was way too jetlagged and out of shape to make any credible effort at escaping. I resigned myself to my fate. I reached for the door handle, then jumped back with a start. There was a woman sitting in the back seat!

  My eyebrows shot up an inch. Vittorio hadn’t seemed in a rush at all, even though this other woman must have been waiting for us the whole time. I was shocked by his rudeness. Then I remembered something I’d learned during my visit with Clarice last fall. Italians were genetically incapable of being in a hurry.

  I’d noticed only one exception to this rule, and that was when they got behind the wheel of a car. Italians in possession of a steering wheel instantly transformed into voracious demons, each with an insatiable need for speed. Traffic lights became suggestions. Sidewalks became open lanes. Horns became mechanical obscenities! This phenomenon was made doubly odd by the fact that, in every other aspect of their lives, time appeared to be of no significance to Italians whatsoever.

  “WOW,” said Vittorio, gesturing toward the woman in the backseat.

  I took another glance at her. WOW was right. I didn’t know how long she’d been waiting, but it had been at least one minute over her limit. She looked ready to gnaw the upholstery. Her presence should have brought me relief. After all, it meant that I was no longer alone with Vittorio, the Vivisector of Venice. But it didn’t. Somehow, she managed to seem even scarier than him.

  I chose the devil I came with and climbed into the passenger seat next to Vittorio. When I turned to greet the woman, her spray-tanned skin and injection-swollen lips told me instantly that she was American.

  “Hi, I’m Val,” I said, trying to sound both cheerful and apologetic for making her wait.

  “That’s my name,” she hissed, as if I had taken hers without her permission.

  Her crinkled nose and pinched expression reminded me of that snotty lady who worked at J.J’s Bar’B’Que. She always looked as if she smelled shit.

  I turned back to face the windshield, my eyebrows an inch higher. I guess I wasn’t the only one who could use a do-over life.

  ***

  On the way to the hotel, Vittorio’s deranged driving garnered grunts and grumbles from the woman in the backseat. The awkwardness of the situation made me antsy. To pass the time, I decided to secretly amuse myself by coming up with a pet name for the uptight woman in the rearview mirror. After conjuring up a few rather ungracious monikers – “shit-sniffer” and “panty-waddles” – I settled on Val II. I figured the Roman numerals were apropos, given our current locality.

  After settling that matter in my mind, I turned my attention to
practicing Italian with the maniac at the wheel. I fished through my purse for my pocket-sized Rick Steves Italian Phrase Book & Dictionary. At least I still had it. I thumbed through it and came up with some gems for Vittorio.

  “Do you believe in Santa Claus?” I asked with an innocent face.

  Vittorio eyed me curiously, then tooted his horn at some unknown assailant.

  “Want to hear me burp?”

  I heard Val II snort derisively. I ignored her and tried to swallow air to make a fake burp. But my throat was scalded from the espresso. Vittorio shrugged, unimpressed.

  “Got any candy?”

  Vittorio ignored this comment completely and followed behind a motorcycle as it tried to squeeze into an imaginary lane between two cars. I decided to up the ante.

  “I’m a lesbian.”

  That one got his attention. Vittorio shot me a look of horror and nearly lost control of the cab. His thin face contorted in pain. He clasped his hands together as if in prayer and moved them back and forth underneath his chin like a poodle begging for table scraps.

  “No, no, no!”

  He followed his monosyllable plea with a stream of Italian so passionate and imploring that I got worried he might lose hope and drive us off a cliff.

  “Hey! Watch it up there!” Val II groused.

  I pried Vittorio’s locked hands apart and put them back on the steering wheel. He kept glancing at me wistfully until I laughed and shook my head no. I fumbled through my phrase book to find the right word to explain.

  “Scherzo,” I said. “Joke.”

  Vittorio’s head jerked sideways to face me. His expression brightened, as if he’d stepped out of cold, dark shadow into warm sunlight.

  “Scherzo!” he echoed. He smiled and nodded his grey head. Then, with both eyes on the road, he reached over and gave my left thigh a quick squeeze with his boney fingers. A second later, the hand flew back to the wheel and pounded on the horn. “Stupido!” he yelled at the car ahead of us. He shook his head, shot a nasty-looking hand signal at the windshield and mashed the gas pedal to the floor.

  “Why don’t you can it, lady?” Val II griped. “Just let the guy drive, already, before he kills us all.”

  She sounded a lot like the woman I’d boxed up and ditched in Clarice’s garage. That was someone I definitely didn’t want to have along on my trip. I ignored Val II and let her words go unchallenged. Besides, I was too tired for a pissing match. My eyelids were growing heavier by the second.

  I set my phrase book in my lap and watched the Italian countryside fly by. The gentle, rolling hills were blanketed in endless groves of ancient olive trees. Their thick, gnarled trunks were as distinctive as faces, giving each tree its own sort of personality. It was late afternoon, and the fading sun emphasized the pinkish hue of the red clay soil that clung to their twisted roots.

  Every so often, an ancient, falling-down farmhouse of beige fieldstones broke the beautiful monotony of the silver-leaved olive trees. The grassy, abandoned yards that surrounded the tumbledown homesteads stood out like emerald oases, freckled with clusters of bright-red poppies.

  The pastoral scenery was hypnotic. My eyes began to droop and I started to nod off every few minutes, only to be awoken by my own, pig-like grunts. After a particularly loud snort, I took a bleary glance over at Vittorio. His eyes were on the road, and there was no ax in his hand. I looked in the rearview mirror. Val II was fast asleep. Drool had collected at the base of her over-filled bottom lip and was dripping out like a leaky tap.

  I shifted in my seat and glanced through my phrase book again. I’d been joking with Vittorio about the lesbian thing. But after searching the booklet for the right words, I told the old man something I was convinced was true.

  “Vittorio. No potere amore,” I said. “I’m no good at love.”

  Vittorio scoffed. “Scherzo, no?”

  “No. No scherzo.”

  Vittorio’s eyes grew wide. He crossed himself and shot a strange hand signal up toward the roof of the car.

  “No. Impossible, bella, Signora.” He slammed on the brakes, skidded to a stop and jammed the cab into park.

  I flinched out of fear. Why had he stopped? Was he was going to throw me out of the cab! Or…oh no! Maybe he was reaching for his ax! I tried to read his expression, but Vittorio wasn’t looking at me. He was staring straight ahead, motionless, as if he’d turned the meter off on himself, as well. I started to speak, but a rusty voice from the backseat beat me to it.

  “Are we finally here? It’s about time.”

  I looked out the window. It was nearly dusk, but I could still make out the cheerful, peachy-pink color of the Hotel Bella Vista, just as the brochure had advertised. I smiled, relieved, and opened the cab door.

  Val II climbed out of the backseat and stretched her legs. I studied her for a moment and realized that besides our first names, we didn’t have a lick in common. Sure, she was about five feet four inches tall, same as me. She also looked to be in her early forties. But there the resemblance ended.

  Val II was a silicone-boobed, makeup-troweling, high-maintenance, Botox bitch. A lipo surgeon had run amok on her skinny, hard-looking body. She’d had all the fat sucked out of the wrong places and injected into the right ones. As a result, she looked as real as a three-dollar bill printed in red ink. She and her kind were the arch enemies of every woman who’d ever had the lack of foresight to want to age gracefully. Just looking at her made me want to spit nails.

  To top it off, even though her hair was cut in a shoulder-length bob like mine, it was a tacky, pinkish-orange color that could only come from a bottle. My hair was medium brown, and though it came from a bottle, too, I liked to think it was a shade within the range of human possibility.

  “So tell me,” Val II asked, eyeing me like I was a turd in a punchbowl, “why did you sign up for a volunteer vacation in Italy?”

  I eyed her cautiously, then decided to make a joke. “Oh. Easy,” I said. “Because it beat the alternative – sleeping on a filthy mattress in Botswana.”

  A wry grin forced its way across Val II’s rubber-duck lips.

  “You and I are gonna get along just fine,” she said, and patted me on the shoulder like I was her minion.

  I forced a fake smile. Well, we’ll just see about that.

  Chapter Three

  Most normal people would probably consider a “volunteer vacation” an oxymoron. In other words, someone would have to be either an ox or a moron to pay for the privilege of working during precious time off from a regular job. But I didn’t have a regular job. And, truth be told, I probably wasn’t normal, either.

  I mean, who else would ditch their life the way I had? I’d been president of my own small ad agency, and had made a pretty penny hawking udder balm and hoof-rot salve for Alberts Agro International. And my ex Jimmy hadn’t been a bad guy. He just wasn’t good at keeping his temper – or a job. Jimmy was, as my Grandma Violet used to say, “Unaffected by ambition.”

  I could’ve maybe lived with that. But about three or four years ago, the chemistry Jimmy and I once shared had fizzled out like a wet firecracker. He’d become a dud in bed, and wouldn’t help out around the house, either. Jimmy’s “underperformance” both at work and in the bedroom wasn’t due to lack of brains or some physical ailment. I’d have cut him more slack if that had been the case. But it wasn’t. The only thing Jimmy suffered from was pure, honest-to-goodness laziness. I got tired of taking care of him, and even more tired of him not taking care of me. I figured if I was going to live like a nun, I might as well fly the coop.

  Past disappointments buzzed around my head like a swarm of angry bees from the second I woke up in my little room at the Hotel Bella Vista. I reminded myself I wasn’t in Italy to reminisce about the casualties of love and war. I was here to remember who I was, to reinvent myself, and, if possible, to finally get my pipes cleaned for the first time in like, forever. I snickered at the idea, and made myself blush.

  Even though my lug
gage was missing in action, I still had all my travel documents. I’d carried them in my purse, thank goodness. I crawled out of bed to check for the thirteenth time that my pocketbook and passport were still on the nightstand. I pulled the cruise brochure out of a side pocket and studied the happy people on the front cover. Their smiles made me homesick for something I couldn’t name. I stuffed the brochure back in my purse and sighed.

  I checked the clock on the nightstand. It was almost 7 a.m. I was supposed to meet the other volunteers at 7:30. Without luggage, I’d been forced to sleep in the nude last night. It had been weird and unfamiliar, and I knew Grandma Violet would have disapproved. But I’d found it kind of thrilling, in a new, exotic kind of way. Maybe that’s how the Italians did it.

  I snuck, butt-naked, outside onto the balcony to retrieve my only set of panties. I’d rinsed them out in the bathroom sink last night. They were still damp. I had no choice. I pulled them on anyway, then slipped into my bra, wrinkled brown skirt, and coffee-stained white blouse. I fluffed my hair with my fingers and sighed. Stop sighing!

  The full-length mirror in the corner taunted me like a piece of Eleanor White’s chocolate cheesecake delight. I fought off the temptation to take a peek. I was better off not knowing. I stepped out into the hallway and clicked the door shut behind me. The smell of fresh-brewed coffee urged me on as I ambled toward the elevator.

  ***

  After an unsettling, jerky ride down three stories in an elevator the size and shape of an apartment refrigerator, the door opened begrudgingly and I stared into the Hotel Bella Vista’s odd lobby. It was sparkling clean. But it most certainly wasn’t what I’d call fancy. A mish-mash of contradicting styles gave it an eclectic, cobbled-together feeling. The traditional, coffered ceilings were high – maybe twelve feet. On the east wall, gloriously tall wooden windows afforded a fabulous view of the pool area and the sea beyond.